My company ordered back to office, and as I was told, I was the only one to say no.
I generate too much value and have tolerated being underpayed enough that they can't justify firing me.
I'm also not some MIT AI machine learning savant. I come from a business analyst/ QA background, and I have made a SQL/Java/VBA system for virtually free that does the work of a team of 10 every day, but it's just my underpaid ass running it.
When I lose this job, honestly, I'm fucked and it will be a nightmare because I'll probably need to go into an office, and I'm in no shape for that.
Don’t think you should listen to the other guy at face value. The market for your skills is very bad right now. Ensure you don’t lose your job, but definitely feel comfortable looking around for something better. When the market feels better and you’re getting reached out to a lot, then be more assertive at work.
I also left after they ordered us back to the office.
The company (mid sized, a few thousand employees) was stagnant for many years and losing employees faster than employing them because of the bad management. Then they fired all the people (around 50) from a specific location that we were working with, very senior and really great, that i learned a lot from. From a team of 15, we were left 3. Then one of the colleagues got promoted to management, the other left, and I was the only one working on that product.
For context, the company had two very similar products, and wanted to migrate users of one to the other. Instead of providing a technical solution, I suppose they decided to simply make the support customers were paying for really awful, so customers wouldn’t renew.
Other than the lack of manpower to maintain the product, infrastructure and also deal with all the customer escalations, it was fine as a workplace… My direct managers understood the situation and made a lot of effort to shield workers from the shitty upper management. I wasn’t stressed at all, and just doing my job.
Then at the end of the pandemic, the company got bought by another. And things turned to shit… They fired a lot of people, especially management where they kept only the bootlickers of the new executives. I ended up working on 2 understaffed projects instead of 1 - both the product being replaced, and its replacement. And they made us come back to the office.
You give your top talent what they want. The problem is that they hired a consultant to find out what that was. The consultant, knowing on which side his bread was buttered, told the board what they wanted to hear, which is, after all, why they hired a consultant instead of just asking.
That’s exactly what the consultants are for and hiring them is an easy, low-cost (in the grand scheme of things) way of shifting responsibility aka “I don’t want to do any decision making that may and will be detrimental to the company so I will hire an “expert” to do it for me”.
It’s a balancing act though. A lot of top talent is going to leave either way, so over focusing on them hurts everyone else. Mandatory return to office was a lot more costly than most companies hoped for though. It was essentially a lay-off, but it left companies with pretty much only the bad employees compared to a more traditional approach.
Problem is that post-pandemic market is ripe for a layoff. Companies purposely over-hired during the pandemic and then in the past couple years the layoffs achieved 2 things: 1) Thin the staff to show shareholders a higher short term profit in an age where they cant get cheap loans and show they’re undertaking new risky ventures (interest rate is high from the fight against inflation), and 2) They can use the layoffs to undermine the leverage of employees to create a “hard pull” back to office policy. It makes laying off people much easier when they “volunteer”
What happened at my last job. The absolute moron head of HR told the engineers with 5-20 years experience how “we are all lucky to have jobs, and we would be flipping burgers at McDonalds if it were not for him”.
Most of us left, he didn’t even give us counter offer and said how we will all be begging him for our jobs back. He was dismissed by the Japanese management a few months later and told to never return.
We can't claim to know it left them with "bad" employees. I think there's vanishingly little evidence that recruiters actually go after the "good" employees effectively -- I'm pretty skeptical that a pro recruiter actually gets you better employees, they just make the process of getting employees way less stressful. We also have no reason to assume that a good or bad employee is correlated in any way with caring about not returning to office -- it's possible very bad employees are just as likely to quit as very good ones. How do you even tell good from bad, anyway?
What this "return to office" stuff definitely DOES do is preferentially retain the most obedient/desperate employees. Which may be part of the goal, along with low-key downsizing.
Every place I worked there were employees that I’m not sure how they had a job. Those people aren’t being contacted by recruiters, and they aren’t leaving voluntarily. Layoffs are a companies chance to remove some of these people.
Study shows from overview. I quit my job when mandatory RTO in place. Found a new one in a week.
There are more employees can’t afford it like me. They need to keep the paycheck constantly, no room of any risk.
There are more employees won’t find a new job immediately, bc they slack off when it possible. I know a few good ones, they can work, just need someone around to force them. So RTO is better for them too.
Employer usually don’t like employees like me, I am a job hopper seeking career growth. Business don’t grow fast all the time.
Job market is never as good as now. Search for fully remote jobs made it much easier for fast growing companies.
I love MS hr here. We disagree because your data doesn’t match out, you also can’t look at our data. How full of shit is hr here… This just makes you look like a shitty company to work for.
Everyone in this thread is saying that this comes as no surprise, and that is certainly true. But the thing is, a lot of management types do know this already but they simply don’t care for two reasons:
They care more about leverage/control over employees than they do about actual good work being done. You cannot understate at all how important employee control can be for managers and how seriously they’re willing to destroy their own business to keep this kind of power.
RTO is basically a layoff program. As much as I love working remotely, it’s very important to keep in mind that remote workers are the first ones that will get laid off when the business wants to cut back - purely because of how easy it is to do. They can just mandate RTO without actually calling it a layoff and know many workers will outright quit, and the business won’t have to comply with whatever local regulations are in place around layoffs. Still, this shouldn’t sound like comfort for employees that do work in the office - there’s a good chance that once RTO is in place, another round of layoffs will strike when the company doesn’t meet its cut targets. So any time a business announces return to office, it means that there’s a good chance that layoffs will follow too.
tl;dr: Managers knew this would happen all along too - it was just a trade they were very willing to make.
They can just mandate RTO without actually calling it a layoff and know many workers will outright quit, and the business won’t have to comply with whatever local regulations are in place around layoffs.
It depends on where you live. In some countries, if they mandate RTO but your employment contract does not specify that you must work in an office, then that’s a constructive dismissal and you can go on employment benefits like unemployment insurance.
But the reality is managers want to pick who gets laid off. It’s not that they want to just cut heads and reduce costs… upper management. may want that… but the actual managers want to keep their best and brightest. They know who the people are who get shit done, and they want to keep those people. Rto tends to have the opposite effect.
The reality is it is often the best employees, the most experienced employees, and some very high level employees who have the most confidence and are most willing to say " screw you, I know I can find a job somewhere else" And give the middle finger to the employer who’s trying to do an RTO plan.
Don’t be fooled by the headlines. Real businesses want to control who they let go. They want to have all the power in the relationship. They want to cut their lower performers and keep their superstars. RTO is about the worst head cutting program you could dream up.
Sure, fair points. We should distinguish good and bad managers here before we get too specific. The bad managers will do whatever they’re told to do by upper management. Upper management just says “cut down to this number” and they do it because they only care about their own incentives and don’t care about the consequences. The good managers will probably realize the downsides of these decisions and will try their best to blunt the impact of these decisions. But in the end, they still have to report to higher levels of management, so there’s little that they can ultimately do. So they’re probably going to end up doing the same thing anyway.
This is why management is such a hard position, especially in the lower levels. You’re basically at the end of the chain and usually have little power to get what you want. At the same time, you still have to make lots of different groups happy - upper management, your workers and whoever you’re delivering your product for. All the things that you listed are things that I’m sure they would like to have, but probably end up having to get sacrificed anyway. If there’s only one group of people that you’re going to please, chances are that it’s going to be the people you report to.
I want to work from home, at least part time, but the other two developers we have need quite a bit of handholding. They are good people and I want to keep them around, but if left to their own devices they would not work at all.
How can I get to the point where we can all work from home part time, without spending half of my day micromanaging them or keeping them on a WebCam just to be sure they’re working? I definitely don’t want to do that shit.
If people don’t work when you’re not around, then I’m afraid your workplace has a bad culture. And chances are you are part of a dynamic that makes others not work when you’re not there, even though that’s not your intention.
I disagree. If you need to keep your coworkers in front of a webcam for half a day to make sure they work, then I think your workplace’s culture is messed up and you’re part of an unhealthy dynamic. I believe supervision is something different.
I wouldn’t bother with the webcam monitoring, but there are absolutely people who will barely work if they aren’t actively engaged with teammates frequently.
It could be because they don’t understand something or don’t have confidence to do task without some ad-hoc training, and sometimes this is just easier to navigate face to face (someone getting starting may be shy about soliciting help, or may feel intimidated by the prospect of “interrupting” someone important.
It could be that they just lack the discipline to stay on task if too many options open up.
It could be that they need the cover of work as “bad guy” to get them away from family members that don’t take their remote work seriously and impose on them.
I’ll read that, but fuck you. Blaming me, a developer on the same level as them, is not cool. I’m not on my phone all day. I’m not taking 20 breaks. I’m not playing with my dog at home instead of working. It’s not a ME issue. This is literally the most open and supportive company I’ve worked for, and I’ve worked at some shitty places.
I’m a tech manager with a 100% remote team of seven employees. We’re a very high performing team overall, and I give minimal hand-holding while still fostering a collaborative working environment.
First off, you need to make outcomes clear. Assign tasks, and expect them to get done in a reasonable timeframe. But beyond that, there should be no reason to micro-manage actual working hours. If some developer needs some time during the day to run an errand and wants to catch up in the evening, fine by me. I don’t need them to be glued to their desk 9-5/10-6 or for some set part of the day — so long as the tasks are getting done in reasonable time, I let me employees structure their working hours as they see fit.
Three times a week we have regular whole-team checkins (MWF), where everyone can give a status update on their tasks. This helps keep up accountability.
Once a month I reserve an hour for each employee to just have a general sync-up. I allow the employee to guide how this time is used — whether they want to talk about issues with outstanding tasks, problems they’re encountering, their personal lives, or just “shoot the shit”. I generally keep these meetings light and employee-directed, and it gives me a chance to stay connected with them on both a social level and understand what challenges they might be facing.
And that’s it. I’ve actually gone as far as having certain employees who were being threatened with back-to-office mandates to have them converted to “remote employee” in the HR database so they’d have to lay off threatening them — only 2 of my 7 employees are even in the same general area of the globe (my employees are spread in 3 different countries at the moment), and I don’t live somewhere with an office, so having some employees forced to report to an office doesn’t help me in the slightest (I can’t be in 6 places at once — I live far enough away I can’t be in any of those places on a regular basis!).
Your employees may have got used to you micro-managing them. Changing this won’t happen overnight. Change from a micro-manager into a coach, and set them free. And if they fail…then it’s time to talk to HR and to see about making some changes. HTH!
I certainly wouldn’t run to HR right away — but unfortunately, it’s true sometimes that people just aren’t a good fit for whatever reason. Deadweight that isn’t able to accomplish the tasks that need to be done doesn’t do you any favours — if you’re doing your job and their jobs because they just can’t handle the tasks that’s hardly fair to you, and isn’t doing the organization any good — eventually you’ll burn out, nobody will pickup the slack, and everyone will suffer for it.
My first instinct in your situation however would be that everyone has got used to the status quo, including the staff you have to constantly mentor. Hopefully if you can coach them into doing the work for themselves and keeping them accountable to tasks and completion dates will help change the dynamic.
To do this without being a helicopter manager, state clearly to them what your goal is. Most employees will work with you if the end result is wfh without a nannycam. Explain you need a way to confirm work product in a way that management can approve of without being too invasive, and keeping on pace with in office work.
In truth, you should not care if they slack off half the day as long as they produce quality work product at a similar rate. Wfh is fewer interruptions and meetings, and means already they will have more “free” time. This is a management principle that is hard to accept, but insisting on the appearance of work is detrimental. Obviously this varies based on the type of work, but yours sounds like a software development situation. “so long as your reports are filed and your queue is cleared every 48 hours, your pace is up to you”.
Give them the rope to hang themselves with. Tell them that’s what you’re doing. Maybe one dev prefers to go easy then crunch for 6 hours on the 2nd of that 2 day cycle, for example.
Ultimately you cannot teach people to be responsible but you get far more positive results from treating people with trust and positivity than with skepticism and monitoring. That makes you less a team and more “the other”.
Obviously this advice may not apply in your situation but in general try where you can to apply this in principle.
The rope. I’m afraid they will immediately hang themselves. They’re juniors, they need guidance. It’s difficult to guide people over Slack.
We do need better tasks created, and since we don’t have a proper PM, that usually falls on me. We aren’t a deadline oriented company. We all know what the project is. You take the time you need to make it happen. But historically, they have been waiting until the last minute to make the product and it comes back buggy. I’d be less concerned about what they do with their time if everything was spot-on. It’s getting a lot better, but not to where I’m comfortable just letting them loose.
personally I don’t think WFH is viable or productive for Junior devs, they need to learn a lot to be productive and unless they are the type they won’t learn it on their own time.
They do need to learn. They’re fine once you explain it. Mostly it’s issues with the bigger picture, not just a single task. We try to let them take a whole project from back to front. That includes database and api design. Sometimes it’s great, but often they are way over complicating things. K.I.S.S.
Why over complicate this? Tell them the expectations and if they can’t live up to those then fire them. It’s up to them to learn to either be professional or find a job in the office.
That’s fair. Still might be worth openly discussing that as a goal even if it’s nothing you can act on now. Let them show competence on their own perhaps.
Anyways, you sound like you already have the right mentality. Good looking out for your teammates.
If this would have surprised no one they wouldn’t have done it and just ate the cost of office spaec. No, there’s people out there who still think company loyalty is a thing and that fostering a “company culture” is actually viable.
It absolutely is. If you treat your employees like human beings, they’ll reward you with loyalty. But that just doesn’t seem to be a thing any more in the US.
What if I told you, there are other places than the US? While US style oligarchic capitalism has infected much of the world, it isn’t quite as dominant everywhere just yet.
Just for context, a large chunk of “top tech talent” at the companies in the study are going to be making 200-400k. While there’s still going to be issues with pay, it’s a pretty different situation than fast food workers or similar.
Forget the cost of travel, if my commute is one hour, that’s two per day, ten per week, that’s an EXTRA WEEK they demand that I donate of my time to the company each month.
And it’s not like public transportation (at least here in the USA) is worth a shit, it’s an option of last resort.
It would take me three hours to get to my job using a bus due to the routes. To get home even longer because the buses stop running and I would have to ride my bike at sunset.
And on top of it, the commute is costing money, too. Either public transport tickets or fuel and wear an tear on car.
I can so much understand my former coworker. He switched jobs because not only did they pay more, but now he has a five minute commute instead of a one hour one.
The push to return to office is nothing more than a push to thin out the numbers. Much cheaper for them to jump themselves than be pushed by management.
I think it’s more these companies invested millions into either building the offices or renting them (and can’t get out of the lease) so to make it worth while they’re having people come back.
One of my offices moved to a larger building across the street because there wasn’t enough room for FTEs and contractors to come in 3 days a week. The larger building still isn’t large enough even for just FTEs so they rented a floor of another building and are making contractors go to that building 3 days a week. They’re going to an office to still be remote lol. Talk about stupidity.
No, it is just incompetence. There’s a serious disconnect between the people making the return to office call and the people dealing with it. The thinking is that, over years, the talent lost will be replaced and the backlash will subside and whatever reason they have for the RTO is more important than these.
The trouble with the software industry upper management is that they have never had to deal with an industry in trouble. They’ve been working in a rapidly growing industry for their whole career. Bad decisions matter very little in such environments so they think they don’t make any.
Also most of these people in management roles seldom are the ones doing anything. A lot of them are either HR MBA type people, or sales. They don’t know anything of how a company actually works, what the jobs entail, or how to run a company.
Usually these companies all run in spite of them doing their best efforts to make it run as awful as possible.
Most of the VPs in my local Corpo are all politicians. They speak in buzzwords and value hearing themselves speak over hearing any feedback from people lower than them in the hierarchy. The disconnection between upper management and everyone else is greater than it’s ever been and it’s only getting worse.
Apparently smaller tech firms are loving office mandates, because it allows them to hire talent that they normally would not have access to at their budget.
Food and gasoline prices have skyrocketed. Infrastructure is a mess in most of the country so it takes longer and longer to get anywhere at peak times. Companies have cut costs in offices so they’re just crowded and full of distraction and germs. So yeah, lots of time and money is saved by working from home.
Yep. I’m willing to make 10% less to be fully remote. Given the alternative is fewer days of sleep each year, plus many more in time spent grooming and transiting, then the cost of transport and lunch, to ultimately get less done, both at home and at work (with the same deadlines) I might even take 15-20% less.
My company is based in CA, and employs me remotely from the Midwest. They pay me above average for my area, but less than they would have to if I lived in the Bay area where they are based. I feel like this works out for both of us! They even go so far as looking at the zip code of every employee when considering raises, and thus far (3 years) I have received an annual raise which is higher than the cost of living increase for my area.
In my situation at least, me working remotely benefits both myself and my company. I just can’t understand why so many larger companies are so adamant about return to office, especially ones in larger coastal cities.
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