Is Return to Office making anyone happy in Tech? 

I was remote during covid, then experienced mandatory return to office. The thing is, my workload had increased 250% during the remote time due to other staff leaving. I had been there 15 years and I was keeping the place going. Upon return to the office, the workload did not decrease - so I was already dealing with working very long days and most weekends, and then I had to add the 2-way commute back into my day - with no decrease in workload. I was so tired and burned out I was convinced I would have an accident or a health issue within months if not weeks. I left, got a local job 5 minutes from home and I have not looked back. I’m so much healthier and happier.

I have worked in tech for nearly 30 years. During the pandemic I realized I could learn a completely new topic, develop a POC in the cloud and implement it in days. Commute time, excessive coffee breaks, office interruptions- gone. Today I work fully remote. I never say no to a challenge and never look back 😊.

I can’t think of a more distracting work environment than an open office concept which almost every company I worked for had. WFH allows me to focus on my work.

In my mind, management’s biggest fear is that by having remote teams, it will be visible that a lot of them fill bullshit positions. They just cannot have people working on their own, and not having to kiss their asses all of the time. Companies that pay for the employees time want to extract as much as they can from the workers. The fallacy is that sitting at the office for longer doesn’t make anyone more productive. It can force the opposite outcome, as people just become drained, and it doesn’t equal better outcome. If companies didn’t have to pay for imposing buildings and drag their employees across town every day, everyone would be able to conduct business far cheaper. Some people need to be around others, while others prefer to sit there alone without anyone bothering them while they work on a problem. If companies were serious about productivity, they would be taking that under consideration, not forcing a unified model down the workforce’s throat. In fact, the most productive workers are usually those who take the biggest hit by being interrupted by junior staff coming to them with what are quite often basic questions, to which they can find the answer by themselves. Performing as a top notch professional and at the same time training junior staff are to incompatible tasks if the management’s goal is to get genie level output from their elite programmers. These “creative” managing minds take forever to decide what they want, move the goal posts constantly, and can thus be the biggest factor in ruining the productivity of a team of programmers. The problem is, they don’t know any better. That’s how they were taught the world works, and they don’t seem to have either the brain of the stones to question the status quo. Even if they perceive that the system is wrong, by that time they have invested so much in that model, that they don’t want to go back to square one just to start doing things right. They want to cash in on all of the effort they put in getting this close to their goal. If all of a sudden it is perceived that teams can actually perform better without the people with the highest wages, and that worse of all, that they are not even needed, the entire game will change and they will be left looking at the butcher’s through the window. Some are competent, some aren’t, but that’s not the main point. They are happy to keep a broken model as long as it delivers what they expect out of it. Big fat pay checks for doing nothing else other than cracking the whip. A good programmer who leads a team towards results doesn’t give a shit about who is in the office or not. As long as people understand their role and deliver on time, the manager won’t give a toss about what they are doing at any given moment. Just as long as they can react to real emergencies, the rest is up to the individual. That’s why companies try to hire professionals, when they succeed they are micromanaged as if they were children, and things just tend to go south from there. The good ones end up leaving, while the ones the company should want to leave, end up staying. But, as long as management is happy…

I wouldn't mind going into the office but I don't want to drive forty five minutes each way to get there. That's always been a problem. People die in traffic doing this. Most of the time being in the office is of little benefit for a software developer.

My company is 100% remote with people in different countries. When we started investors said the model won't work and they wanted us to have a US based office in some tech hub. All this does is increase expenses and decrease the available talent pool. 5 years on and we still don't have any offices, people work from where ever they choose. I get a lot more done with less people, I feel a lot better about work and our costs are lower. We use Meet for scheduled calls and slack for adhoc comms. We work different time zones so sometimes I have to work early or late to make a call but otherwise my days are mine to schedule as I like.

It was always naive to think that managers would give up control

Beware the extrovert manager, danger with a smile

I do not like working in the office. I hate greeting people in the morning, small office talk, using the public bathroom, the drive to work. Absolutely nothing I like.

Working for a big tech company, i'd be happy to return to the office only if they didn't butcher office environment before. I always thought we couldn't go lower than open-spaces but i was wrong: Just before covid they replaced proper assigned desks, rooms and personalised areas by this disgusting open-space "flex office" with low end laptops just to optimise space allocation & costs: no team spirit, loss of spatial organisation, totally sterile environment each time you go there not to even see the people you're working with.

The odds of getting a real promotion are virtually zero anyway. The likelihood of having someone else's work dumped on them after they lay someone else off in a higher role - really high. Texas has 6 months of unemployment even if it is for insubordination, so it sounds like a lot of people are calling their bluff. Been there. Unemployment isn't the end of the world.

My collaboration is off the chain now. I actually spoke about 3 sentences with my co-worker. It was about his recent vacation. Also some lady completely out of the blue said good morning to me. 11 months to retirement. Can't wait! Oh, and I got Covid for the first time because of RTO.

I used to commute 1 hr to work and 1 hr back. I never got to see my kids. They were always asleep when I got home. Tech companies don't care. They want you to live at work, your kids are your problem. This is why I draw the line at WFH. They want my soul but mine isn't for sale. I don't want to hear about your nanny, I raise my own kids, and I write better code than your "principal engineer."

Coming back for what? Me and my GF work remote, when we have a child we can easily care for the child, start softly to work again. The child has a father who is there and can show him or her stuff instead of being away 10h a day. Even Non-Remote Workers benefit: Everyone who does not drives makes the streets emptier and saves resources.

This video is so jingle with the previous (Agile) video. I see the struggling of the managers during COVID: we're just do our jobs as usual without any disturbance at home, without unnecessary traveling for hours, actually more effective than in the office, but the managers are always asking us about how can they help, making meetings (even more than before). I feel they just want to prove their existence (there are many exceptions of course, but I hope you get the point).

Like the presence of a boss behind your back would make you work better! LOL!

I remember working in a office around a decade ago. I am good with it as my workday will then have a normal schedule 9-5. Come 5pm good luck reaching me until the following morning.

I saw this from a business insider YTer. It's a mass layoff, by forcing remote workers to either come into the office or get a new job. Layoffs look bad on a company's books, but not if their talent just leaves. Also, most companies lose money on business offices and their rent. It's a whole thing. If the office is not filled with employees, it cannot be written off on the taxes.

My work gets better in the office, a major part of the car rental industry runs on my software. The reason I am better, and the application is better, is because I can walk over to another office and vent, brainstorm, discuss with coworkers... 25% of the time, I answer my own questions just by being able to talk outloud. - but I am a developer, not a robot coder. I dont get told to code something, I design and develop, so its a different paradigm. Sometimes I get stuck, I take a break and go help someone else to clear my head.

The intent of the return to office push was mostly an attempt to increase attrition, rather than pay-out severance for lay-offs. The fact that the most capable staff - the ones with impressive work history and in-demand skills - were the ones to leave is an obvious consequence, but CEOs are rewarded for short-term improvements.

How can wasting 2 hours every day to get to and from work and being constantly interrupted by stupid conversations in the office being considered more productive?

The real estate costs can't be underestimated. For companies unwilling to cut off underutilized properties for various reasons (the just built/bought it, contract breaking penalties, srvices already paid for, etc), the only option left is to boost in office numbers to pre COVID levels. It's easy to say sell it off but try telling that to Tim Cook after Apple built Apple park😂

Hybrid work is the ideal for me. After working from home for 3 years I began to feel disconnected from my colleagues. It also makes it easier to let someone go when you don't see them. I learned that when my team was all remote they slowly started letting our team go as we were not seen around the office and not as visible. With a hybrid you are seen and able to keep that visibility that IMHO is needed to make a difference. Out of sight out of mine. So when cuts happen it is easier to let people go you don't need to face to face every day.

manager is a social construct as well as an actual role and its the hierarchical managers that are panicking about the decline of the office. When work went virtual the managerial status declined but managerial responsibilities remained. To adapt to the virtual environment managers need to be more transparent, build a trusting relationship with the workforce based on authenticity, vulnerability, empathy... but its easier for these hierarchical managers to go back to 'normal ' instead of building on soft skills

Most of these CEOs likely to have a lot of their money into real estate marked. Without employees in the offices, demand on office spaces fall and price should follow. So, since they don't want to lose their personal money on that, it's likely better to rise office space demand back.

I work as a it-developer consultant myself. I followed about 10-12 teams before, during and after the pandemic. What we found was a gap in the performance in terms of ability to deliver and ability to communicate within the teams. The teams who were already considered high performance managed to keep going while I lockdown but got. Significant boost when they were able to work togheter again physically. The medium and low performing teams were struggling with communication and had a lot more friction during lockdown. After the pandemic, the high performance teams wanted to get back to the office by themselves. The medium and low performing teams seemed to be much divided, and usually had a few members that kept sitting remotely. Almost all of the medium and low performing teams used a lot more time to solve their communication and performance issues, some never did. I am not saying this is a universal case for everyone, but we were surprised to see this result at our company.

I work way better from home because i am relaxed, i can scratch my nose, i can fart, i can eat etc....while at work you have to follow a certain conduit. When you are chill and relaxed you are more productive

If the work gets done promptly, whether they work from home or at the office should be irrelevant! It is more about power plays and ego! With all the trackers they put on their employee's equipment, it is not like they have no control! I also see how they are using this to prune and whittle down excess employees! It is always better for the company if they quit or resign!

there's an element of control. some managers just get a kick of having there minions around them- playing boss just aint as fun over zoom or teams.

Way pre-pandemic, when working in a Fortune 500 company, I would work remotely at a coffee shop at least once and often twice a week because I suffered far fewer interruptions. I had wide experience in many technical areas, and was constantly being distracted by being consulted on problems that had nothing to do with my responsibilities. Being in the office a few days a week was probably beneficial to the company, but not being in the office was definitely more beneficial to the projects I was working on. Yes, one piece of code I designed when I was working in a coffee shop is still being shipped over 20 years later. Thank goodness Zoom didn't exist.

It’s likely more about commercial real estate valuations. Why have such an are office space if it is only being used 10%. Also, most managers are afraid they will be “found out” that they are not really needed to keep the show running…

Thank you for sharing these insights! I remember reading about the push to return to work but don’t remember hearing anyone talk about if that return was actually working!

I needed to hear this, especially the part about the vision for hybrid work. Thank you

So glad The Algorithm suggested your channel. During the negotiations for my new gig - and the team wanted me bad - their RTO policy was a major sticking point and I held out, compromising on 2 days. As it turned out, this was apparently all driven by HR drones without my actual future manager even knowing. On my first day he pretty much told me "I don't micromanage, work from where you want". Which means there's actual sabotage of corporate policies going on down at the coalface. PS: asking why this org is so keen and adamant on RTO, I was informed sotto voce that it's because they are massively exposed in the commercial real estate market. They are panicking about the value of their portfolio and therefore want to "lead by example". That says it all!

A major reason my employer cited for return-to-office was that they have long-term leases on their offices, and when the offices are empty, they somehow lose money versus when the offices are more in-use. I don't understand how the math/taxes/incentives/whatever work in this case, because they were very hand-wavy about it, but just wanted to add another excuse I've heard first hand. I'm sure some C-levels are also simply embarrassed that their big offices are ghost towns. I'm not saying any of this is reasonable justification.

The reality is that city and business centers suffer due to work from home. Less people in the office means less people eating expensive lunches at the surrounding bars and restaurants. Also means less happy hours as well. It kills the local economy. Imagine the economy of NYC with no daily commuters? We saw it during the pandemic and it was bad. That is a big reason behind the mandates. On the flip side work from home strengthens neighborhood businesses. And many saw a sharp increase during the pandemic. I think work from home is inevitable. We are maybe a couple years off from It being a cultural norm. But Pandora’s box has already been opened.

i designed and was a coder for 10 years at an in office setting for 10 years, i'd say if I was lucky i'd get a maximum of maybe 4 solid hours of work, the rest being distracted with useless in person meetings, people on lunch and smoke breaks prevented quick approvals, i'd say maybe 2-3 jobs finished a day... since being remote, same style jobs and coding I now average 7-10 jobs done a day an under high turn over days up to 18 projects can be accomplished, and i'm less stressed, save money on food, gas, travel time... when i was in office I was miserable person, and companies never really didnt do anything for employees coming to the office... work from home i'm in better health, production is up, and i can get more things done... companies wanting staff to come back into the office is basically a way to save middle and senior manager jobs micro managing people,

I've said it before. If companies want employees to return to the office to do a job which can be done remotely, they should include travel time in working hours and pay employees extra for transport costs . It's completely unfair that employees alone have to burn the extra time and costs of having to come into the office. Some people will spend several hours a day commuting and the current high petrol prices eat a huge portion of their salary.

I have been work from home for almost 10 years, literally since day 1 of my current job. Yes, it wasn't official, there was no document signoff, it just happened. My manager loved my work, so he just basically left me alone. During Covid, my manager retired. My new manager is not accepting the fact I have been work from home from day 1 and is attempting to get me to return to office now that Covid is over. I am a programmer. Programming is the type of job that can be done almost anywhere, requires little face to face interaction and isolation actually helps programmers focus. In either event, I am not going to willingly return to office or quit. I'm going to wait to be fired over it and get my severance on the way out the door.

The reality is most of these companies have also ventured too far into non-core initiatives. They can prune staff by forcing people to leave and when they shred those non-productive non-core aspirational businesses, they will still have plenty of experienced employees to devote to the core business. Those of us have been through this cycle before know that the job losses still have a long way to go and so soon enough people will start to see that leaving voluntarily is not a realistic option. How many people know colleagues on their third round of layoffs with different companies.

if you have a reasonably repetitive job, or a predictable one, where you're simply processing documents, or responding to emails, etc., then being remote probably doesn't make that much of a difference. And since most meetings tend to be able to be an email, those meetings can't either be done on zoom or not at all. That being said, zoom isn't a replacement for in person interaction. If you get past the technical issues that people can experience, being able to have a conversation to connect with other employees and managers is increasingly difficult over the Internet. and remote workers should be very concerned about the confluence of work from home and artificial intelligence. Out of sight out of mind, if somebody doesn't think of you as a person, they are going to be far more likely to be willing to replace you with an an automated system. And if your job happens to be one of those that is predictable enough that you don't need to interact with other people very often, then there's a good chance that you're a good candidate for replacement with an automated system. Machine learning systems are not good enough yet, but they have been improving significantly recently. Thus, it is tempting to work from home as much as possible, I would advise anyone who likes the company they work for and wants to keep doing it take advantage of any opportunity to go to the office if they feel comfortable. Additionally, it's worth noting that if you can work from home, there is a good chance that somebody in China, or India, or many other countries where wages are significantly lower can do your job and do it from their home. It's not a perfect one to one replacement, having good communication skills and connectivity is a significant benefit,but working from home can make you more easily replaceable either by automation or cheaper labor. You may be able to move jobs now, but working from home convincing companies that they can get away with not having you in person. That is dangerous.

I run five engineering teams in a 100% remote environment. We've never been more productive, and our company has never been more innovative. I just don't see the upside of RTO. Yes, remote management is different, but we're supposed to be innovators, are we not? Innovate.

Covid affected peoples work ethic profoundly. We found our remote workers were disengaged and unproductive. It was a question of survival. We let go the ones who just wouldn't work, then tried to train replacements who were also disengaged, and didn't come up to speed normally. We brought everyone back in for training and were able to get things back on track. We have very granular measures of productivity, so once we get everyone productive again, we will go partially remote and see if it will work. Remote work was our company growth plan. We just need to find out how to make it work for our company.

Your videos are really good!

My (SW) company made the decision to go 100% work-from-home long before COVID. We used Skype to talk and for me to send new program versions to test. It worked really well, especially as my colleague doing the testing lived in a different country, about 2000 kilometers away.

I have been working as a remote webmaster since 2001. Webmasters have never come to the office, as long as I’ve known. It’s been that way since the internet began. It started at the pandemic when “random” workers got a taste of remote work life, something that we’ve always had forever and ruined it for tech workers. That’s what happened. I will remain remote and the best talent will as well. There is no need for webmasters who have 10K rigs and extensive software in their rigs to have to go into an office that do not provide extensive tools we work with. I’ve also had a couple of jobs where they asked me to come into the office, nothing got done with their 100 meetings, it made no sense. I wound up back at home where I can get quiet, and work done. I get shit done when working alone no from home.

I retired from ATOS (in the TOP 10 Systems integrator s worldwide) this year as a Program director. During COVID we adapted to homeworking for 90% of employees and we got SO GOOD at it. My last project was 50+ million dollars a year. I only spent 3 days on customer site and that was because I had 3 of my Romanian team in Paris who diçdn't speak French and I wanted to look after them - they were Key players. In that project I did not spend 5 hours a day driving in heavy traffic round Paris I did it all in my bedroom office. It was brilliant and we were SO PRODUCTIVE. However, after COVID all those BIG customers reverted back to wanting people on site, bums on seats. We had pushed iIT industry ten years forwards during COVID now wanting reverse gear. The same people still using COBOL, running their companies on Lotus Notes which is 10+ years out of maintenance. I gave up and retired. Your job now.

My experience is that WFH is a mix bag that amplifies a few office trends. The bigger drawback that I experienced was a loss of informal communications. Maybe that is a problem only because communication is poor where I work, but this is hardly the only place. These informal communications help detect technical issues, train junior employees, etc. This might not be a big issue everywhere, but we maintain a large proprietary software product. New people know coding, they just don't know the code base yet. Training through Teams or Zoom is possible, but part of the context is missing and it may take longer. Training through IM is even slower. On the other hand, you can focus on short term tasks with little interruptions and you save a lot of commute time. I feel that WFH works best with well established teams, but renewing the team in the long term requires an explicit effort to integrate news hires, both on the technical and relationships levels.

I am so happy my company allows working from home. Me and my team are mostly working from home. We are more happy. Save time. We produce more. We have a always ongoing chat on teams and we use video call and screen sharing all the time. It is perfect. Of course I go into the office from time to time just to attend social events or other important meetings. All in all I think I work better from home. I save time. I can put on the washing machine. I can do other small things while at home, but I work better and produce more.

Amazon mandated 3 days a week RTO, and more recently have been moving towards 3 days in an office with the team you work with. This has lead to a lot of people changing teams within groups, some people being offered relocation, and others just being out of luck and having to find a new role.

Maybe I'm alone on this but I really like being locationally close to my co-workers and end user. It's easier to collaborate and get customer feedback.

Thanks!

I got the RTO speech and all it did was make me so miserable commuting that I only give the company 7 hours a day and couldn’t care less what happens to it. It is only an “income stream” now. When I was remote, I worked at least 10 hours a day and cared about my role. You tell me you don’t care about me, then I don’t care about you.

I've mostly always worked remotely but I must say... I've just started a job with an international company with employees based in a few countries. The one thing that I wish I could be in an office for is the initial few months where I'm trying to learn their systems. Its been super tough doing it remotely with delays from time zones etc.

Sounds like return to office is a big cost saver. The most senior people would be the highest paid. This, in a time where tech companies have been reducing headcounts to lower cost.

I was a team lead with a stable team when lockdown came, promoted to program manager during lockdown. I found myself hugely more productive in the first job and completely disabled in the second. I think home working helps those who know what they have to do and who suffer from too many meetings. I think home working makes life harder for those who need to coach teams and manage misalignment. Return to office helps those who are trying to balance the cost of the office against its utility. They make the fallacious rationale that they have to fill up the office so that the money spent on it is not wasted. Meanwhile, going to the office twice a week I find myself most closely aligned with the people I meet there regardless of whether our jobs overlap.

I do like working remotely. Fully remote - feels very silo'd you dont know whats going on around you other than in your team maybe your org. You could be developing something someone has already done and not know it. While in the office its nice to be able to learn form others and ask question in a more meaningufl manner. Something really hit me working fully remote. (If i say i was 10% more productive at remote that means im probably working 10% harder or more for the same pay so essentially i took on more work for really less money and i was blind to things that were changing around me) If a senior i asked for help from time to time left the company or changed roles and is no longer on that team. i wouldnt know because work become more detatched and it did feel more like just do list each day. That social learnings I do think is just as valuable as getting my tasks done each day. But thats just me. I dont think people should be mandated back to office each day. But we the employees also shouldnt look at our tasks as the end all be all of our job. Its a give and take for sure. Seeing and working with people in person also helps us grow as people.

Nobody is happy, but the management, who feel in control again. They are not in control, but does not matter, because feeling of the few is so important, that the feelings of the thousands of knowledge workers can be hurt. One company starts with a stupid notion and all others follow. The migration of the lemmings.

Every time I commute back from a forced RTO day I feel like such a waste of productivity and if there is a competition with full homeworking I would sign up without questioning immediately.

Who is winning this war? The managers who get to show people who is boss. It satisfies them.

I love that my company has no RTO mandate of any kind. I don't even see the point of returning to the office. Our team is spread all over the world. If I returned to the office I would still be in remote calls all day. I just don't see the value of that.

I waste too much time when in office to find a quite place to think and work. Open Space Office what I most hate and not enough meeting rooms to have all the Teams Calls with colleagues around the globe. At my home I can have all the calls I need w/o disturbing my colleagues around (or being disturbed while they do their meetings). We are requested to be 3 days in office and 2 days remote is ok. I stretch it until someone formally instruct me to go back, which is hopefully not happen.

Like in your very good video about AGILE methodology, the issue is not the concept itself but the way it is implemented and very often bringing side effects. During COVID pandemic a lot of companies have found remote working as a solution and usually it was the only one to maintain their activity. They did the implementation in a hurry: no deep analysis of modalities, specific tools or updates needed, no adapted management, etc... However the benefit for employees has been revealed very quickly, as they were then able to find a better balance between their job and their private life. Then it is no suprise that going reverse is an issue. But keeping "remote" or even "hybrid" options for employees is also an issue if nothing is done to preserve efficiency. Sorry to say, but not everyone is able to work efficiently in remote: it strongly depends on your personal abilities, conditions and...job ! Could you imagine a Manufacturing Quality Controller working from home ? Obvious in that case, for sure, but also applicable to several other ones. There is a need for a complete overhaul of the work organisation, from tools to management approaches and also communication if we want to keep "remote" as an integrated option. Keeping it "as is" is not better than deleting it.

5:23 That Nike article... "disruptive products"... 🤣 What are they doing? They produce sports shoes and sportswear. Anything in this field most likely is already invented, and to be honest: 99% of improvement is iterative step by step in small increments. There is maybe 1% of stuff that is considered disruptive. So unless you are hiring a team of "disruptive sports equipment inventors" under the condition to be on site in an office, most improvements are made by talking - and that can happen via remote.

I'm not sure about other countries, but in the UK I'm pretty sure you can't explicitly state that opportunities for advancement or changing roles is dependent on *anything*

In office you have more micro breaks. And the cantina saves you time too. In home office you forget how the city looks after 3-4 years! => Both have their benefits and minuses. => If the commute time is >1 hour working 5 days/week is not longer acceptable. If it's less, you will leave your chair 2x a day at least.

Here is the same. Worse conditions and everyone is leaving. Maybe is a choice

3:50 Pittsborough? Is that in the Danelaw somewhere?

I would think it’s easier to get rid of things you don’t see. Really just become numbers and more efficient to say bye too.

do be honest, comparing my remote office days to my office days, i'm much more productive at home. in the office there are more useless meetings, coffee breaks or other onterruptions

I undoubtably prefer working from home. At the same time, I suspect companies have stats, which I don't have access to, and I believe it tells them a different story. Example stats could be lines of code, change list (PR) rate, design docs, bug closing rate, etc. Managers, even before COVID, claimed that meeting the people you work with and sitting close to them is the source of innovation and productivity. It would be nice if you can refute this.

I had been working remotely since 2010. Then when covid forced a lot of people to work remotely followed by the bean counters forcing everyone to come into the office shortly thereafter, I got really annoyed. The bean counters don't see innovation even after it kicks them in the arse. No I'm not coming back in and I'll take my PhD, 25 years of innovation and productivity and apply it somewhere else. We need to train AI to replace CEOs and CFOs, and probably the rest of the C-suite. Those are the jobs that are expendable from my point of view.

I've always told my employees that I don't care about keeping the chairs warm. Pre-COVID, when we all had to be in the office, I'd tell them it was fine to get up and go for a walk (especially when frustrated, something about walking can spark creativity, they'd often come back with a new approach and certainly a better attitude). Being flexible about people needing to run a quick errand, or take a longer lunch, it all built morale. I only ever had one employee who took advantage and her performance was poor in other areas so easy enough to ease her out. Bottom line, treat employees like adults and you'll have adults working for you.

I enjoyed this video

I get more done working from home. I also tend to work more hours and have less interruptions. To top it off our company doesn't have an office space to go back to 😁

I work for a company that asks me to try to be in the office once a week. If I miss that day for whatever reason they dont even care. I love the flexibility! Also I am more productive at home than the office IMO

It doesnt do anything other than make the building that the companies rent, have a meaning and thats it. The rent needs to be justified

While I don't disagree with the convenience and productivity benefit of wfh, I also think collaborating especially over complex technical topics is more difficult remotely. Of course some may be better than others when it comes to remote communication but adding several layers of potential failure points between people trying to discuss a deeply technical topic cannot be more efficient than direct face to face communication. In a multilingual/multicultural team, I have found that face to face communication is more efficient and there are less misunderstandings and rephrasing involved.

Remote works really well for the tech industry. That said, coming into the office to hang out is great too. Occasionally.

The worst part in my oppinion is that the CEOs do keep working remotely as much as they want.

Chances are it will artificially inflate profits in the short run because they are losing people and overhead costs thus boosting their stock price. Then they will take a big dip in a year or two and either the ceo will take a big bonus and leave or they will complain about there not being enough talent or ai as a scapegoat taking away profits but its ok because they are working on ai themselves to try to make the shareholders happy and stock prices stay as stable as possible.

I work hybrid with 2 days a week … sometimes Teams and email is not an replacement for interaction face to face

My company has been calling people back to office last year during a big flu infection wave, at the same that that the health minister asked people to stay at home (again). So my managers are really smart people, aren't they? Yes, a group of kindergarden kids would have made a better decision! If I go back to my office space I will have to do phone calls the whole day with other team members spread around the whole country, annoying 10 unrelated people in the same room. If someone thinks he saves time by talking to me in person, he is wrong too - we have to use web based tools and I'm not allowed to bypass the established official ways.

I like being in the office, if it means actually meeting and talking to people to get things done. Like meeting with the people that use the programs I write, so I can get direct feedback, for example. But if I have to come into the office to do my 8 hours of coding with the occasional Teams meeting, no thanks. I can do that very fine from the comfort of my home. If a CEO just wants to be able to go through the bullpen and see his monkeys dance for him, yeah, no, not doing that.

One of the big pushes for back to office is from the hedge funds that own.. the properties the companies Rent or lease... to protect their investments many of these funds and others... are infact buying shares or interests in the various tech companies.... IE you have to go back to the office as Entity X owns part of your company ... and has parasitic relationship

If you work cooperatively in a team, or its difficult to measure progress/success there may be value. That isn't most IT jobs. I would far rather contribute the commute time to work than do the commute. Commuting itself is exhausting and I'm done by the end of it. It also ensures clock-watching because I might be hungry before I get home if I stay late. Demanding three hours of travel per day, from which nobody benefits, burns good will and makes management look terrible.

"That's a leadership problem - - CEOs should be the visionaries" no no no no no. Visionary CEOs are the outlier; what you want from a CEO is to understand their industry, their operations, and their people, and how they all interact with one another. Whether or not it's working, trying to get employees back into a shared physical space because you believe that's the environment that best produces creative results is exactly what the CEO should be doing.

With home office and VPN I could observe our CI/CD pipeline from 6:00 to 22:00 and react to get everything through this spring. Before Corona this wouldn't be possible, and the throughput would be 1/3 till 1/2 only. But management doesn't care. 🤷‍♂

I have no idea what that article is talking about because Microsoft definitely does not have any return to office mandate

I worked at Microsoft and the only time we went to the office was when we needed to meet and workshop something together. Otherwise we were working remote. So I don't know why they're saying "back to the office" when we were never there to begin with.

I literally cannot work effectively in the office on the one day I go in as the WiFi actively blocks me from running the azure cli!

I work hybrid. Most my team is remote. They carry me bro. They are the ones doing most of the work uninterrupted with laser focus.These guys are working 10am to 7pm officially but 9am to 9pm unofficially. Meanwhile, I commute to work, grab a (few) coffees, join mindless meetings to look busy, make small talk and write comments on youtube like this one. I do 2, maybe 3, hours of actual work daily to hit my kpis in the office. At 7pm, I clock out and go hangout with friends or go home to play some vidya, while my remote bros are still working to justify their jobs. With that being said, when working remotely, I focus and complete tasks in a full flow state. They are the ones doing the actual work, while I coffee badge and show my face. If they get laid off for being remote (highly unlikely), I will switch out too since I don't want all our workload to fall on me. There are more than enough companies offering full remote positions, if you search with the Remote-Only option, you can separate the wheat from the chaff.

It is all a Power Game. Recently I looked for a new 100% remote job. The people could not fathom that I as employee would rejects them (the great company). All these Recruiter talking endlessly about all the stuff they have, they are like a family... More than once I had almost said: So like everyone else. I found a job and will sign the contract next week.

We were told to return back to the office and I retired.

More revenue or increased profit? I think it's more likely they are looking for increased productivity.

I am in the position where the customer does not want to get back to the office. In the beginning, this was great. No comute every day and I could spent way more time being productive. However, lately I have seen the downsides of not being in the office. First of, the productivity of the team I am part of has dropped dramatically. I will not go as far as to say that team members dont work, but it is too simple to be destracted at home. Another issue us the comunication. We have online meetings , but they are NEVER as effective and informative as when we (rearly , but sometimes) meet physically in the office. I also miss the talks arond the coffie machine. Some people call it missuse of time, but there are SO MANY great ideas and thoughts being discussed there, that are being missed when sitting at home all the time. I think the question is not if you schould go back to the office or not, but how to find the correct balance between working from home, and working in the office

One-two days in the office should be fine with most people and I like it too. What about you?

but but but think of the moldy office park. somebody's gotta protect my corporate interests.

It absolutely does increase revenue by decreasing costs, at least in the short term!!

It's for the commercial real estate investors and their bought and paid for politicians.