> Amazon in October 2021 paid $123 million for the 29-acre property in Milpitas, California
Talk about buying at the exact peak of the market.
The cat is out of the proverbial bag for all these large tech employers. Doesn't matter if you are Amazon or Google or whoever else. Once people got a taste of WFH life they were never going back to the hour plus commutes, weird social structures and power dynamics, noisy environment, lack of privacy.
Just a couple of hours ago I was kicking off a build that would take about 20 minutes. It's a slow sprint so I went and put the laundry in the dryer and then had a quick coffee with my partner before going back to work just in time for the build to finish. It's heaven. This is the best work life balance I've ever had in my career and I love it. I can't think of anything right now that would get me back into an office in the city.
This sounds good if family relationships are priority. I think networking and building professional relationships are often improved over in-person interactions.
As we get more isolated in remote work, are there any diminishing returns which often not talked about? Any idea, how are these concerns for folks who are in or want to work for startups? How are WFH folks networking in bayarea?
> This sounds good if family relationships are priority. I think networking and building professional relationships are often improved over in-person interactions.
This is overlooked so often by (I am assuming) experienced, older engineers. And it's really a one-two punch for younger professionals.
One, they may not have the family at home to spend that time with. Of course, it's also wonderful to spend time alone, but if a person doesn't have a partner and wants a partner, they're going to get more value out of going to the office for several hours than reading a book for 15 minutes at home. It may be they don't/can't/won't date anyone at work directly, but at the very least they're building their social network - which, before dating apps, was THE best source of dating partners.
And punch number two is that networking is so, so important early to one's career. Sure, you can still reach out for references to people you worked with even if you never saw their face, but the connection is almost never as strong as with someone you meet day-to-day. Plus, social events mean you may meet people in their networks, etc.
I am not fighting for return-to-office. Work from home should always be an option for anyone who wants it, and should be the default for many jobs/companies.
However, it's a tricky situation, because if you're young and want to get the value of going in to the office, but 75% of your peers are WFH, well you're not actually getting much of that networking bonus. Then it becomes an issue of finding the right workplace - but again, that's so much harder for younger people or those earlier in their career (those overlap but are not 1:1).
Optimistically, perhaps normalizing WFH will have the effect of reducing the importance of and the need to constantly be "networking". To me it's exhausting hanging out at the water cooler making small talk with people about sportsball, just because it happens to be a ritual that (for some people) somehow leads to career development. Now that the water cooler doesn't have anyone hanging around, it might start becoming less important to your career.
I think this is a dangerous dream to have. The reality will probably be that the water cooler (or some virtual equivalent) will still be integral to career development, just maybe not yours.
People are inherently social and no workplace will ever be a strict meritocracy. Eschew small talk at your own risk!
The upside of having most of the big industry names in a relatively small geographic area is that you can't throw a stone in the bay without hitting someone working in tech. I've done as much networking, if not more, by just having a healthy social life versus going into the office.
> This sounds good if family relationships are priority. I think networking and building professional relationships are often improved over in-person interactions.
I don't understand this comment. We're living in a world where the bulk of our social relationships have mostly an online component. Whether it is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, slack, mastodon, WhatsApp, etc... It's all online. We search for jobs online. We have professional social networks.
And we're expected to believe that networking is either done in person or not at all?
I signed up to go to Hacker Dojo in Mountain View to get out the house, my employer pays for me to use WeWork whenever I want, and most importantly the bar (I found any freelance work I've wanted to pick up by having a beer and someone there asking for help for their startup from time to time).
So quite reduced from their initial operations though, correct? Why is that notion apparently so threatening? I remember people here proudly loathing the distracting music and making (apt) comparisons to existing co-working spaces, shared offices, coffee shops and public libraries (in order of increasing affordability).
I never used one, but the idea that it's a household name is just tone deaf. Most people probably know it best from the Hulu series about it's demise.
What if it becomes clear across the industry that remote workers are first in line for convenience layoffs? Beyond reduced pay and benefit scenarios, I'm curious if reduced job security will be a price workers are willng to pay for WFH.
What if it becomes clear that remote workers are the last to go since they have less overhead in office space and other office amenities that companies offer to entice them to come to the office (on site gym, snacks, lunch, etc).
Amazon just got rid of a 29 acre property that they paid $123m for, why wouldn’t other companies recognize savings from remote workers?
> What if it becomes clear that remote workers are the last to go since they have less overhead in office space and other office amenities that companies offer to entice them to come to the office (on site gym, snacks, lunch, etc).
The lavish amenities of big tech were put there for a reason -- to get people to work more. Maybe secondarily for retention.
If you think that companies are going to look at declining productivity and think "hm, that's an acceptable tradeoff, since I'm paying less for office space!", then I'll take that bet.
I'm not begging the question -- it's the core assumption of the entire thread. I am agnostic on the "who is more productive" question. I find it less interesting to speculate than to observe what is actually happening.
Parent is asserting that even in a world where companies want employees in the office (i.e. the current world), they're going to cave on the matter because of the money they're saving on office stuff.
I made no such assumption, you read that into my comment. I made the same statement about productivity as the post I replied to… none.
I guess I missed the decision that an in-office workforce is more productive than fully remote (I personally think that hybrid is bad for productivity, and companies should pick one or the other). There is certainly a lot of evidence and debate on both sides but no real proof one way or another.
And of course I am talking about knowledge workers, not surgeons or assembly line workers.
As I said, it's the core assumption of the entire thread. GP set things off with:
> What if it becomes clear across the industry that remote workers are first in line for convenience layoffs? Beyond reduced pay and benefit scenarios, I'm curious if reduced job security will be a price workers are willing to pay for WFH.
I grant you that it's not explicitly stated, but it's reasonable to assume that companies aren't just laying off productive workers out of sheer pettiness. Replying to GP with the premise reversed (as you did) implies that the cost/benefit equation is reversed as well.
>I grant you that it's not explicitly stated, but it's reasonable to assume that companies aren't just laying off productive workers out of sheer pettiness.
The premise was that remote workers might be first in line for layoffs, no mention of productivity, and as you said, companies wouldn’t lay off more productive workers out of pettiness. So it’s fair to assume that the list of workers that are candidates to be laid off are already at the same level of productivity.
My comment was asking what if the opposite was true and if when it came time for layoffs, workers in the office were first in line because laying off office workers saves money in office space.
At no point did I say or imply that productivity would be ignored.
Companies actually track productivity. WFH had been around for a long time, treated as a perk. If it's been improving productivity it had been mandatory already. If it's been neutral - it had been encouraged (due to additional expenses on the office environment). It's pretty obvious by the push to RTO that it have been neither of the above.
It doesn't always improve productively. It doesn't work for some people.
But a lot of the resistance is less about productivity and more about sunk costs and not fully understanding a relatively new world. Work was done in the office exclusively for so long that it will be hard to change the way some people think about it.
Work has not been done in the office exclusively, we had WFH for a long while. The only thing new now is that it's been mandatory for a while so the productivity data is rock solid.
Yeah, like for example when they talk about NSA collecting data all the time on this same website... Performance drop figures is not something a company would like to publicize for everyone to know, it's usually shared internally but I guess not in your case (which is understandable if you are an IC in a big public co, anything shared with everyone in such an environment goes public in minutes).
So to recap ... there's a bevy of "rock solid" performance data but you can't link to it because it's guarded like NSA data. But you're either privy to it or just gleaned it by using your brain and not Reddit.
This is really what you're going with?
You know it'd be perfectly fine if you just said "it's my opinion." It's certainly a whole lot less eye rolling than this story you're selling.
There is no need to be upset to the point of making up quotes, if you don't even know that your performance is being measured you are obviously not in a position to change WFH/RTO policy anywhere so just accept whatever is coming to you, being snarky will only make it hurt more.
To be clear, I would have been really interested in data about this, particularly if it were "rock solid" (which is a real quote, btw, not made up).
But you're clearly just blowing a lot of smoke. You don't have that data.
Not supplying any actual support was a tip-off, but there's little doubt once you started with snark "Real life is not Reddit, sometimes you need to use your brain to figure things out and get ahead" (real quote, not made up) and then trying to project it onto me.
Like I said, I don't care if your answer is "it's just my opinion that WFH is less productive" or "I've heard about data" but you don't have anything to support what you're claiming.
And doing the "you're mad" thing is the last refuge for a broken argument. Do better.
Yours is probably the best rebuttal on the subthread. Measuring productivity is hard.
I do think this is something that is identified in aggregate, however. Maybe you can't attribute the loss in productivity to individual employees, but you definitely notice if projects start taking a lot longer than they used to.
They are paying less for all those amenities, too. Food and all the other things provided per employee really add up. When in a rough economy, cutting those things and keeping your 'best' employees regardless of WFH status is the best of both worlds for an MBA
Depends on how it's viewed. When you're looking to save money, WFH workers have less financial overhead than Office workers. They often take the burden of office, electricity, etc costs.
After all, we're in a thread about Amazon selling an Office to save money.
I feel the exact same way, I run a data science team from my basement. At 4:30, I walk to my daughter's daycare and we play together in the time that I used to spend commuting. I never want to go back to an office.
WFH for a programmer can be far more productive because you don't have the interruptions of random colleagues. If you have kids at home, however, it might be just as bad. I think at some point there is going to be a surge in working-from-the-WeWork-closest-to-home for people who can't afford a dedicated home office.
Thats pretty cool, I can see it being annoying for those that don’t have a partner and don’t have any structured environments to meet more people
I’m not saying hit on coworkers, having coworkers increases the entropy of activities after work and their additional social circles. but yes, also hitting on coworkers happens without incident too
Absolute numbers are kind of meaningless but I for sure would take a 10% lower pay at a company that did 100% WFH. Thow in another couple percentage points for a 4 day work week.
I feel for all the folks that work at a place that implemented a hybrid model because I don't see that working ever if some people are in the office and some are permanently remote. I bet collaboration and feeling of togetherness suffers. When everyone's remote, you have to adjust your processes and ceremonies to account for that.
I can’t imagine a firm offering “a couple” of percentage points of comp for 20% less paid hours. Would you take a 20% pay cut for 4 day/32 hour workweek?
Just curious about your mindset on this. I would love to find myself at a spot where I’m working 4 days a week, but not interested in doing 10 hour days.
By the way, I do understand that most people, including myself, would probably have a greater fraction of productive hours of work working 4/32 than 5/40. Not sure if many employees would recognize that though.
I took a 20% pay cut for a 4 day/32 hour work week a few years ago and it was great. One additional day off is much more free time than you'd think. It's 50% more days off compared to the weekend. I'd recommend it to anyone whose circumstances permit it.
I would argue that an extra day off is effectively much more than 50% more "days off" for someone who typically only gets weekends off. Weekends are a miserable day to be off if you need to run errands, or just want to go anywhere in public where crowds can diminish your enjoyment or even keep you out entirely.
I take time off during the week for "appointments" at the park for precisely that reason - it's almost impossible to get a relaxing hike at some of my favorite trails on a saturday or sunday.
The flipside is that it's much easier to hang out with your friends on weekends, because most of them are also probably off. So having a little of both is best.
"Would you take a 20% pay cut for 4 day/32 hour workweek?"
I would take an 80% pay cut for a 1 day/8 hr workweek in a heartbeat (the industry is remarkably inflexible and I ended up having to do a 100% paycut for 0 workdays and I'm happy with that too).
Yeah you're obviously right, 20% would be more of a starting point for a negotiation. I'm still thinking about it but right now I feel like with WFH and PTO I get enough time with my family that I don't need a full day yet. If that changes, I'm planning on taking a day a week off to spend with my kid before he's at school age, I'll do it. 20% less comp (in reality it'll be less due to tax brackets)for 50% more time is a no-brainer for me.
That is just a preference for myself, I bet it's much easier to negotiate 4/10 than 4/32 - I just hate working extended hours even if it means a day off.
I'm sure there are some forms of carefully crafted hybrid that works well - but in our case it's become a weird case of "whoever happens to live near an office comes in". End result is you have folks with no team overlap across the company hanging out. You get the social bits, which is nice, but none of the collaborative parts. Net/net feels like the worst possible option from a company productivity perspective.
WFH and 4 day workweek should just be standard, and you're saving the company massive amounts of money from doing WFH, so there's no way you should be taking a paycut for it.
You could easily spend 10k on commuting. That's only about $40/day. Between fuel, maint, tolls, and maybe food, you can easily bust $40/day in the Bay Area. That's not even considering the _time_ spent commuting.
I already hated cars, but since I began WFH I've become really averse to driving unnecessarily. Getting killed by a car is one of the absolute stupidest ways to go. My dad smoked all his life and still made it past 60; my brain could hit pavement tonight if I run out of milk.
And the worst part is that it wouldn't have to be my fault at all, and it wouldn't even require somebody to do something extraordinarily reckless. Driving too fast through my neighborhood is typical, because it happens to offer the shortest path from A to B for many people, and the road is wide thanks to bike lanes that I have never seen bikes in (because: cars drive too fast). I'll cut myself off here before this becomes an overly long screed.
My car conveniently started having reliability problems about the same time I started working remotely. We're not talking "oops need an oil change today" but "car won't start for weeks on end and is in the shop more than it's on the road". When I had to commute to the office, this would have been a pants-on-fire career-ending emergency, but now it's just a minor inconvenience. I might just sell the damn lemon and get a bicycle for those rare times I need to go anywhere. Would not have had that option with my previous 50 mile (each way) commute.
I so rarely see this pointed out in the WFH threads, but it is one of the biggest ones to me. I don't want to get killed by some idiot driver for the sake of the company I'm working for.
If you spend an hour in traffic each direction, that $10k is about $20/hour, before you start talking about costs like wear and tear, gas, parking, etc.
You can change jobs, become a virtual worker at new company, and increase your salary. I did this at the end of 2021 and made a 45% increase.
Screw a pay cut the company should be increasing my salary so they can reduce spending on office space. Except they likely get tax benefits on a lease so that’s not happening.
For most of the people on this site that is probably not very significant in percentage terms, and even in absolute terms is probably easily outweighed by the cost savings associated with WFH.
I think management somehow think they are getting less ( and I am not convinced that is the case ) and want to price "it" accordingly. What is missing from the story is what they are getting less of.
I want to say I am participating in less gossip, less pointless meetings and less ass-kissing rituals. To me, personally, this counts as a major win. What I certainly do not generate is more 'spontaneous collaboration" that various executives are quick to trot out, but.. I never have beforehand either.
Unpaid commute... I know lots of folks in the Bay area spending hours per day commuting (and NOVA/DC area, if you live there you know). I'm not sure why it isn't considered stolen wages.
If your employer dictated where you worked AND where you lived, the time traveling between the two would logically be their responsibility. Since they've only dictated at most one of those two things, I don't see it as reasonable for them to pay you to move between a place they didn't pick and one they did.
My office used to be just outside of Boston. Could I move to Utica, NY and claim that my 8 hour round-trip was the entirety of my work obligation and that I was, by definition, "meeting expectations" merely by driving back and forth every workday?
If your employer requires you to report to an office to work, then they are indirectly dictating where you live based on the salary they pay you. It is rational for people to live in the best / most convenient place they can afford to. Why else would the people cleaning your office live an hour or more away, while senior employees can live a only short walk / bike / drive away?
I'm sure this is a false equivalency in some way, but many gov postings have wages set to the locality. My cousin was offered wages for a particular agency location, and required to move to the area.
If your cousin had the freedom to pick the specific address in a reasonably broad area, I think the worst-case obligation for that agency would be to cover the commute time from the single closest residential address to the agency's location. If your cousin picked a place farther away than that, for whatever combination of reasons mattered to them, they own the outcome of that choice (same as I'd own the decision to move to Utica).
2. Compared to the normal population, software engineers, near equivalent tech professionals, and people working in the sciences or medical industry disproportionately represent most of HN users based on the content being posted.
Just because you can theoretically perform your job from the location of your choice doesn't mean you have a right to restitution for doing it somewhere else.
Your employer has a right to set their terms of employment and you have a right to tell them to pound sand if you don't want to abide by them.
A massive power imbalance to be sure. I have a right to my time, and an employer located in a place with zero affordable housing closer than an hour or two away should definitely be responsible for providing restitution for that time. An employer doesn't have the right to my time, but they currently have the power to force me to accept terms via the "wouldn't it suck if you and your family lived on the street" tactics.
It doesn't work that way as employment terms are based on industry norms and expectations. That makes the relation asymmetrical and your personal leverage is about zero.
Three years ago, if you'd skip over any employer not offering fully remote, you'd simply not find a job. So your "right" has no meaning.
> I’m not sure why it isn’t considered stolen wages.
Because the employer isn’t choosing where you live. If they did, then, sure, the commute time would be a cost they imposed, rather than a cost imposed by your choice of residence.
I've tried living in my office, but they told me I had to leave. The next best option I could come up with was living in a van in the parking garage, but that didn't last very long either.
It turns out that it's not actually my choice to live somewhere that requires commuting to a work location dictated by my employer.
OK, how about this - your employer has to pay you for the commute you would have on the closest possible housing option to your employer at the time you sign your contract. You'd probably average a whole extra 3 minutes of pay every day.
How about your employer has to cover the rent or mortgage of an average single-family unit within a 30-minute rush hour commute of the office if they require you to come in?
Also, your commute time is your commute time. Your employer does not control how you go to your work nor what you do while traveling. Your employer also doesn't choose your housing.
> Some employers offer company buses to/from certain cities, with wifi, and they count that as working hours.
Yes, effectively your company is choosing to send your worksite to (a place closer to) your home, so that you can start working sooner and stop working later.
Hasn't the last couple years demonstrated that employers do exactly that?
- You can work remote, but you must live within X miles of an office.
- You can work remote, but you must live in one of these states / countries.
- You can work remote N times per week.
- You can work flexible hours! Choose any 10 consecutive hours from this list of 13 hours!
- You can work from any one of our N offices.
- We're closing this office. You can continue with your duties if you relocate to one of our other locations.
- Here's a laptop and travel bag. Give us your cell # so you can work from anywhere at any time we need you.
edit: I can't be bothered to fix the formatting of this message.
I bet that if employers were legally mandated to pay their workers for the time they commute that those employers would suddenly appreciate the importance of effective public transit and increased urban density.
> I bet that if employers were legally mandated to pay their workers for the time they commute that those employers would suddenly appreciate the importance of effective public transit and increased urban density.
I bet that if employers were legally mandated to pay their workers for the time they commute, that those employers would suddenly see effective reserved private transit as a competitive advantage.
Sure, just like how coal miners used to spend their paychecks at the company store, and came home to pay rent at the company town.
In society, we recognize that one cannot always have a fully 'consensual' agreement between parties of wildly different levels of power. The only reason this hasn't been extended to corporations is because our political system serves them, not the common man.
Software engineers in historically well-comped roles in the 21st Century: "My commute is exactly like being a 19th Century coal miner in a company town."
It's good to appreciate the privileges that come with being a well-paid 21st Century knowledge worker.
It's also good to appreciate what even a well-paid 21st C knowledge worker has in common with other labor, including coal miners. Solidarity helps achieve goals.
No of course not. I just took issue with the idea presented that an agreement between a corporation and worker is always 'consensual and voluntary'.
It's not. It never has been. If I disagree with the terms of my employment, me being unemployed is a far higher burden than the company not having one extra worker. To act like the employee and employer are equals in negotiation is laughable.
Pretty much the same power balance and probably even worse wealth gap exists in such a socialistic european country like Sweden.
Unions do exist there, however they probably do more harm than good for software engineers because they effectively do not allow raising salaries if needed (any rise in every employment contract needs approval by the union).
"wage theft" in general includes things like forcing employees to clock out before the end of their work or clock in after the start of their work (e.g. "first clock out, then do this long procedure, then you can leave"). People "opt into" those jobs too, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't get paid for all of their work. It's not unreasonable to draw a parallel to commuting, and when the alternative is work-from-home, expecting to get paid for commuting seems perfectly reasonable.
Sure but both parties can be wrong. Saying taxation is not theft and commute expenses for salaried workers is not wage theft seems non-contradictory to me.
The cost of living is typically a factor in the wages offered though, with people considering the job having the opportunity to decide what trade offs are available and which ones to make.
Like if 2 people get hired into the same role at the same time and one decides to rent a small apartment near the subway and the other decides to drive 45 miles to a suburb, why is the company on the hook to then compensate them differently?
I think your argument makes some sense when it comes to high-paid, salaried jobs. I don't think this is the reality for low-wage earners, however. There often exists a significant gap between their pay and a livable wage for the area immediately around their workplace.
I guess I maybe implied an argument, but I didn't directly make an argument, I put forth a scenario and asked a question.
You've not answered the question, instead pointing out that some people have wages that encourage a commute (at the moment we can probably at least assume that they are choosing that job over other choices, for reasons left unexplored as of yet).
I'm arguing that, within many major urban areas, wage levels in certain classes of work necessitate a commute. Read the section "A persistent spatial mismatch for American low-wage workers" in this report: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/expanding-supply-af...
Right, we generally have terrible housing policy, but I still don't see an articulated theory of how employers should compensate workers that make different choices.
Like, the low paying jobs that don't have nearby housing options probably do have to increase compensation to make up for the lack of housing options. Why is it good policy to force the employer to treat the commute as part of the work day vs working to improve the generally available housing and transport options?
Paid vs unpaid time is irrelevant for salaried jobs, which describes the vast majority of tech. I will say though that only a minority of people get any real work done on shuttles, and so you end up staying at the office for the full ~8 hours regardless.
As I was visiting the new space-age buildings at Meta, Google, and Apple in 2021 (and reading about Amazon's new HQ), I was thinking "Wow, all 4 are building new headquarters. I wonder if this means we're at the high point of Big Tech." Seems like that was prescient.
That's a reason to ask for immediate relocation within the company to ensure your love interest isn't in your chain of command/review and vv. Many companies have pretty explicit rules around this.
Just a couple of things you might open the company (and yourself) up to (from the POV of the person in the supervisor role):
- a sexual harassment lawsuit in case things end on a bad note
- colleagues complaining (possibly rightfully so) about favoritism
- inability to set policy because you yourself violate policy
- a potentially very toxic situation in case the relationship ends and you have to continue to work together
It doesn't really matter whether the person in the supervisor role is a male or a female, either way it looks bad and will likely lead to trouble.
And for an encore: between founders the risks (but also some of the potential rewards) are even higher. I've seen a start-up that was doing fantastically well end up in shreds because the co-founders got romantically involved, got married, had kids and then divorced, the divorce pretty much killed the company.
The rest of the world laughs at the American prudes and their extreme fear of letting romance and life itself come in the way of the profit interests of their 85 year old corporate lords. I don't mean to insult, but please look at your reasoning and think about if it is healthy? Is it appropriate for an adult to talk about "lead to trouble". Kids get in trouble, grown ups don't.
Oh, it is so unprofessional to let the wonder of being alive ever interrupt the demands of efficiency and a steady stream of taxes to the IRS. Imagine the nerve of that co-founder who destroyed the startup for unprofessional things like having children! My accountant will make a very stern frown when I tell him.
Please corporate working Americans if you read this: It is okay to have romance in the workplace! Life is too short. All the rest of the world does this and knows it is natural and healthy.
It is only from Americans I have ever seen this perspective and these thoughts being communicated. Otherwise I wouldn't have mentioned nationality. Every nation has their variant of conventions that make no sense, and this is the American entry in that competition.
So you think it’s not destructive for someone to not Resist unwanted advances because doing so might mean they don’t have food to put in the table?
Consensual peer level dating is not a problem in the US either. The issue arises when there is a power differential between the 2 partners. And I don’t know what sad little country you live in where one cannot meet anyone outside work, but doing so is not difficult for me in the U.S. at all.
Great quote! That's my point now as well, the puritan ideals you are putting forward are only considered in a very small subset of niche industries, and on very fragile grounds even there. Nothing is more valuable and natural than romance, so please would you consider changing your values? Love is not something filthy that should be banished from the workspace, it is much more important than increasing the profits for the 85 year old stock owners.
You seem to be stuck in a groove. I suggest lifting the needle and trying again a bit further. If that fails, try another record.
Seriously though: you are making a lot of fuss about a problem that doesn't exist whilst at the same time pretending that only the US has a workforce sexual harassment problem which I can pretty much guarantee you isn't the case, and which - without even knowing where you live - I guarantee is also a problem where you live, whatever your personal views on the matter, which seem to hover somewhere between 'outright dismissal' and 'romance is so valuable all rules should be forbidden'.
The profits of stock owners, especially those that are 85 have exactly nothing to do with the matter.
Dating in the work place is not sexual harassment, how can you come to such a conclusion? Look around in your life, don't you know of couples who met at their jobs or who worked at the same job? For each couple that stuck together there are many more who dated or just had flings.
The profits for the 85 year old stock owners have everything to do with it, since it is the company leadership who issues these insane policies of trying to forbid their workers from dating. It is one more way that they seek to dehumanize their employees. That anybody actually listens to them is bewildering to me. I haven't met anybody yet who has such low self respect that they would accept an employer doing that to them.
You talked about getting in trouble, but let's step back and we see that who can actually get into legal trouble if they discipline or discriminate against employees on grounds of their private affairs, or try to interfere in the privacy of their employees.
The crime of sexual harassment has nothing to do with this, the subject is dating in the workplace.
You're still in your groove. Absolutely nobody said that 'dating in the workplace is sexual harassment' that's your strawman and I really wonder how you can be so confused that you believe that that is my conclusion, it really isn't.
So I'll ignore the rest of all that follows from that ridiculous conclusion because it isn't based in fact, nor is it attributed correctly (it's yours, not mine).
These 'insane policies' are issued by just about every workplace anywhere on the globe with more than a handful of employees because those policies seem to work reasonably well in practice whilst accommodating the reality that people will date other people in the workplace.
As for sexual harassment: that happens and more often than not it is exactly in the situation where superiors push subordinates to do more than their job description strictly requires. Likewise for co-workers if superiors don't run a tight ship.
That none of this happens where you happen to work doesn't mean it doesn't happen. And no, the subject is not 'dating in the workplace', the subject is Amazon that is selling a bay area office complex, but if you want to be specific I did mention the word 'superior' in my comment and you seem to have completely ignored it.
You are bringing up sexual harassment again and again when the top comment you replied to was talking about dating. Accusing me of weird opinions:
"pretending that only the US has a workforce sexual harassment problem"
I haven't touched on sexual harassment. I'm talking about dating and romance in the workplace, and I can assure you that few workplaces globally have any policies against this, including large and very large companies. Principally the largest workplaces of all: the public sector.
American corporate (and American inspired) anti-dating policies are creepy. Not even the Soviets infringed on their workers like that.
If somebody reads our little flame war here, I'd like to tell them: Your boss or company trying to control who you date is as weird as they trying to control what you eat.
But I do honestly think we have different perspective on the roles of bosses and workers in the workplace. For me, it is alien to refer to any boss as a "superior". They lead the daily work, and that's as far as their authority stretches. Referring to them as "superior" would be fit in a military setting, but nowhere else. Is the worker "inferior" then? Calling them "subordinate" is also very alien to me. Where does that kind of language regarding fellow workmates come from?
I've had bosses and I've been a boss. I'd expect my employees to laugh in my face if I tried to tell them what to do outside of job tasks, just as I would laugh in the face of any boss doing the same to me.
It’s a good way to meet people with shared interests. Everyone with everyone having more free time, not everyone wants to attend meetups outside of work. Not saying meeting at work has no downsides.
Maybe people work at the same place because they have similar interests? We are not randomly assigned where to work, it is a personal choice. Is it better for couples to meet when they're out getting blasted on the weekend?
I get that power imbalance can be abused, and even if not - things can get complicated. But on the other hand, love does not know about org chart and if you meet your soulmate that way, why should potential long-life happiness of two people be less important than what HR says?
Disclaimer: met my wife on the job 22 years ago, although we were both developers in same positions, not subordinate situation.
The power imbalance doesn't just affect the couple in the romantic (or lustful) entanglement. It affect those outside of the entanglement as well.
At the worst it can be akin to nepotism which can quickly erode morale and productivity -- (there's no reason to work harder since the "fiance" will get the promotion).
At a previous company a manager dated her direct employee, and working in her team was really an awful experience because of it. Everyone knew it, and nobody could say anything for fear of retribution.
How about the CEO and director of HR are married, and your department head is married to the head of a department that your team supports, and the heads of finance are married to each other. All in one company! Strange power dynamics everywhere in those nepotistic little fiefdoms.
It wasn't a family business. The CEO fired the old HR and hired his wife to replace her. My department manager married the other dept manager. The finance head hired his wife when they expanded the department. With the exception of my dept manager, I guess it was just very lucky that these people's partners were "the best person for the job" out of the applicant pool.
I think “As Return to Office Stalls” is a bit of wishful thinking. 18000 employees gone, probably more to go, trimming real estate is just another cost cutting measure.
Commuting is my biggest complaint with forcefully going back to office. If I have a bus or train that requires no brain power for me to get to office, I am more tolerable to it.
Perhaps this will be a kick in the improve US public transportation for the masses? It is the only silver lining I can think of here.
Just wait till you get a mayor who has decided to kill public transit. Trains/buses don't show up, they're packed with homeless using it as a bed and a toliet, and gangsters who smoke it up. On top of that they're not running the schedule, but "keeping the schedule intact". That's what's been happening in Chicago. (Thanks Lori "we're a car city" Lightfoot)
I'm not sure you can blame Lightfoot for that. I've lived in Chicago on-and-off for 30 years -- never with a car -- and the CTA has always been like that.
That's why some L cars have a "hobo corner," and why there's (was?) a homeless shelter at the O'Hare airport Blue Line station.
The CTA may be smelly, but it beats getting shot at by thugs on the expressways.
This is really the kicker. I would have no problem commuting 1+ hours into the city for work if I could actually make use of my time.
I can't do anything while driving beyond listen to music. An audiobook is either going to get my full attention and I'll be distracted while driving or I'm going to miss 30-40% of the book trying to stay alert on the road. At that point I might as well just not listen to the audio book at all if I care about the contents.
However if I could just take trains/buses into the city, provided they actually run regularly (i.e. they don't turn a 40 minute drive into 6 hours), I'd have 1-4 hours a day I could allocate to reading, listening to an audio book, watching TV, playing a game, working on personal projects, or continuing my education.
Sure it might be a long commute but I could do the things that I'd otherwise barely have time for so it's not really lost time. Doubly so if I could actually do work on a company device while I commute (no surprise team meetings if you aren't actually on site yet meaning work would actually get done).
> Once people got a taste of WFH life they were never going back to the hour plus commutes, weird social structures and power dynamics, noisy environment, lack of privacy.
Unless managers/directors/VPs/SVPs/C-suite executives get even more strict and companies around the country band together to not offer remote work closing any/all openings, forcing people back to work.
3 options:
1. get lucky enough to find a job that allows work from home
2. be unemployed
3. suck it up and work for a company that demands you work in the office unless you can find an alternative (aka a remote job)
if you can't find a remote job, you're out of luck.
whether this breaks down in reality (aka... what % of open jobs right now after all of these layoffs are in person vs hybrid vs full remote)
is it a fairytale dream that there's a ton of remote jobs out there? especially with microsoft + google + apple + amazon being relatively against remote work.
Don't worry about it, seriously. If you'd like to work remotely then do so.
It took a little bit of work a decade back to find a great paying remote job. These days it's so much more simple even with some of the largest tech employers forcing people back into the office. I'd argue you don't want to work somewhere that "does remote since the pandemic". Apply at remote-only companies and if you're employable they'll find you a spot since they're dealing with brain drain too.
Hot take, but I've done this remote engineer thing for a long time. Feels like we're in the golden age of remote work compared to my experiences a decade back. Find the position in the world wherein you both enjoy your work and how/where you do it. It's out there, guaranteed.
No, it isn't a fairy tale. I think because you're posting on HN you're only thinking about the popular stocks first. BLS says there's just shy of four million IT jobs out there. I'd say your chances are pretty good you can find one that doesn't have a shitty commute and/or allows remote/WFH options.
The number of them fully remote has been dropping fast, at least based on what I see in my feed on various job sites like indeed, and linked in
Hybrid seems to be more popular with 2 or 3 days of WFH
Even the fully remote alot of them are requiring people to be with in 1-2 hour of a company office signalling that maybe they will be going hybrid as well
I would like to be as optimistic as you are, but CEOs are clearly bent on returning to the old ways[1]( the gist of the article is:"it is not your decision to make").
Sure it is! Free market competition was made for exactly this sort of scenario. As long as some employers offer WFH, workers can make the choice. If we put a $$ figure on WFH and this makes salaries cheaper for employers that offer WFH, they may eventually win out the market.
Saying "employees can't choose to WFH" may eventually be seen as silly of a decision as saying "we only buy inputs from countries with the highest import tariffs".
Let the market decide. It's going to either way.
Say I'm a company saving $50,000,000/year on office leases. That's a lot of room for higher salaries and nicer bonuses for my employees (including execs). And I still get to keep a huge chunk as extra profit.
Long-term what sounds better to the board: A CEO who says "I saved us 50mil" or a CEO that says "I lost 30% of our workforce but we got them all back to the office! Btw I need another 50mil for the office"
Agree. I worry that many companies will maintain notional "support" for remote roles, but it will revert to a two tiered system where in-office workers have better career growth.
CEOs are clearly bent on returning to the old ways
My company was like that. It started firing people who didn't return to work.
Then someone noticed that there weren't enough people left in certain departments to get things done.
Now the company is 90% remote, and selling some of its office buildings. The only people in the office are those who choose to be, and those whose jobs require them to be hands-on.
Maybe we'll collectively consider return to "office" again, as in a real office. Nobody wants to be in a bullpen, no matter how clever the PR is around open-plan. We all know it's just being too cheap to build walls.
Making people work in the office is cruelty for the sake of cruelty. I will not accept any job in future that makes me go into an office. There's no reason for it. It's power tripping.
When I read the article it seems to be more about going from "Everything via Amazon Prime" to "Return to Physical Stores" versus going from "WFH" to "Return to Office"?
"Amazon in October 2021 paid $123 million for the 29-acre property in Milpitas, California, part of a strategy to lock up real estate near big cities that could be used for new warehouses and facilitate future growth."
Seems kind of crazy to buy an office complex and raze it for an Amazon warehouse/distribution center.
Both me and my wife hate working from home. She is forced to but I elected to go into the office once it was available.
The work life balance is better, sure, but my productivity plummeted and I was stuck doing nothing for hours every day waiting to hear back from coworkers. The stress involved especially during a recession is more than the benefit of no commute for me.
I worked at the Googleplex pre pandemic. It was bustling. I quit during the pandemic but biked through it for fun. Ghost town. I still bike through and it’s still a ghost town. Office space went from being a problem to a burden.
Sadly building offices in places that prohibit new housing will not make sense. Your staff will have a hellish commute and/or extremely high housing prices. The hardest possible sell to employees accustom to WFH.
Love the Bay Area, but we've plucked the golden goose.
For every company forcing a return to the office, there will always be the smaller company that can't pay as well offering fully remote roles. I'll gladly take a pay cut to never be confined to an office again.
This. If I really care about purchasing power, I'll take the lower salary and move to a lower cost area or country. I'm not going back to an office unless it's my dream job.
As someone who lives in a "lower-cost area", consider that the grass may not be greener on the other side. My sister just bought a place in the city. Tiny compared to mine up north. And almost as much. But if the next 10 years are like the last 10, she could likely sell hers and buy my whole street.
So, live in a shoebox in the city and then what? Completely sever all contact with your in-person social network and start from scratch in a place where you can live like a king? I know that's a choice some folks make, but it seems odd to me.
> But if the next 10 years are like the last 10, she could likely sell hers and buy my whole street.
And yet, on _her_ street, she'll still only be able to afford that tiny place, no matter the market. Only works if you plan on leaving in the city at some point, and many don't.
The middle ground is to live in a suburb 50+ miles out from a city center. You can still go into the city for flights and events, but you can often find homes on 1+ acre of land that will appreciate in value since urban sprawl isn't going away anytime soon.
Yeah what I'd say is this: I miss working co-located with my human coworkers. But I don't miss them enough to wreck my back and risk my sanity & health commuting again. And some of the people I was working with? I'm glad not to be seeing anymore anyways.
Now... my coworkers are from all over the world, they're all really awesome and smart so far, and I feel super lucky they chose me to work with them. I'd probably be more productive in the same physical space as them, but that also wouldn't be likely to ever happen.
Companies doing fully remote properly get access to a much more diverse and broad labour pool. They can create combinations of people that never would have been feasible before.
Yeah, these people who are so all in on remote work are a bit foreign to me. Before trying it I too thought it would be great, but I can see what it's done to company culture and my engagement with work. I'm sure there are people it's better for, but there are definite downsides especially if you aren't 40 with partner and kids
Oh man, i hated my commute so much. Weekdays are already short on time and then throw in 1.5h<->3h of driving depending on traffic.. ugh, it was really bad. Suddenly i'm getting paid for 8 hours but i'm losing 11h a day on the whole experience of being in office.
I can totally understand that. I wasn't terribly fond of my own commute, but it was 23 minutes door-to-door, which is a non-trivial chunk of my waking hours but isn't nearly as terrible as multiple hours.
As someone in my 40s with kids, I'll say for sure that the only reason I've survived this WFH experience is because of that. The very few times I tried remote work when I was in my 20s, living alone, it made me stir crazy in a matter of days.
But surviving is all I can say for it. I worked with people that I would call friends, who I haven't seen now in a couple years. I don't want someone to tell me they weren't really friends, either. They were.
This is what I don’t understand. What is keeping you from seeing them without being compelled into the same office together? I’ve had coworkers who were friends that I have not seen in an office since 2019, but we have made plans to meet for lunch on the weekend occasionally to compensate.
There's just a lot of research + just my experience that shows forming friendships is mostly about proximity, being in the same place at the same time and talking. Sure I can and do continue to hang out with the people I'm closest to, but there's a whole host of people that I'm not quite close enough with to want to go through the work to organize, but it was nice to see and talk to.
Obviously work taking on the role of social commons isn't ideal and I'm actively trying to grow more places, but it is striking how I'm not friends with literally anyone at work who started after the pandemic, but I am with many of the people who I met in the office
There are a couple of these friends that I do make time to go out for beer with. So I haven't lost all of them. It's just that there is a group of people that I think are more than coworkers, but are still activity-based friendships where the activity is work. We're in the same department, we work in the same space, on projects which are adjacent but not necessarily joined. Take the office environment away, and the relationships fade. Yes that means they don't have the same value as a close friendship. But I still feel the loss.
I think it's similar to many of the people I interacted with in high school/university. They're not close enough that I saw them much outside of school, and I lost touch with them after graduation, but I still thought the interactions I had with them were net-positive and worthwhile.
My suspicion is that eventually we'll see a bifurcation of company cultures -- job openings will say outright whether it is an in office or remote job.
From any comment thread here, it's clear that some people really like working from office and some people really prefer working from home. What I find interesting is that neither side seems to be able to acknowledge that the other exists.
IMHO There's a bit of an evo-psych thing going on there, and a lack of awareness of what that means... mixed with the both sides being skeptical about management picking one side or the other.
So you end up with this sort of semi faustian thing where thoughts of "maybe certain sub groups of product/design/sales/eng really should just be together/remote" are ejected like hot shit in fear that if that thought is allowed to consume management, which ever option that is picked will dominate everyone.
It's already started. I know around 60% of companies in the vertical I work in have basically become entirely remote and this remote first position is heavily promoted.
People working from home for the first time over the last few years are still in the honeymoon period where it seems 100% positive with no downsides. After 10+ years of working remotely I can tell you it's not as great as it seems. First unless you have an active social life outside work you are setting yourself up for a life of extreme social isolation. Second when your boss and co-workers don't see you in human form often there is a tendency for them to start treating you like a stranger with less trust and empathy. Third your work/life balance will never be the same. First you will be guilty you're not working hard enough then you'll be resentful you're working too hard. In my experience hybrid is the ideal setup so you can maintain good human relationships with your co-workers.
I'm now just coming into my 6th year and 2nd job that have been largely remote work, and while I can relate to the issues with the blurred boundaries between work and life... I'm still in the honeymoon period.
I've probably been lucky that both the teams I've worked with have been small enough to get to know and strong at mixing async messaging, video calls, and occasional facetime to good effect for both coordination and camaraderie. Not everyone is set up that way; I can think of some previous off-site contract gigs I had which didn't fit that description and your downsides match my experience more closely there.
Overall, though, whether in-office or remote the worst work/life balance issues have always come from sheer workload more than anything else. If that's addressed remote work doesn't make it worse, just changes the moment to moment tradeoffs, and the gains from being able to flexibly context shift and not having to manage commutes are alone so strong I wouldn't want to give it up. Social isolation is a problem I'm willing to solve for myself (and at some level have to anyway).
The last thing is team familiarity is waning. Back in 2020/21 everyone went remote but they already knew each other well from dealing with each other face to face. Now we have new people in the team who never really learned properly and are often just ignored. I am back in the office and the grad who is here 4 days a week with me gets a lot more attention.
Yeah for me it's been a mixed bag, for the exact reasons you specify.
I've moved to a hybrid work environment. I go into the office twice a week, which helps with these issues tremendously. It also means that my employer has to keep paying salaries that are livable within driving distance of our headquarters (I live about 20 minutes away). My biggest fear about WFH is that employers will wise up and start only hiring people willing to live in the middle of nowhere because they can live just as comfortably on half the salary.
Hybrid loses huge proximity benefits. Rather than living in a low COL/low tax area or close to family, you’re back paying through the nose for Bay Area housing.
Although remote-heavy hybrid expands your reasonable commute distance quite a bit. a An hour-a-way commute is is pretty bad doing it every day, if you're only doing it once a week, or once a fortnight, it becomes a lot more bearable.
That's a good and a bad thing. Some people actually want to live in a high COL area. Ubiquitous WFH could mean many of us are stuck moving to rural towns when we'd prefer to live in big cities.
I disagree with all three points.
Your social life is your responsibility. It is not as easy as working in an office, but personally I never expect real friendships to foster from office interactions anyways.
If your boss and coworkers don’t trust you, work for a better team. Many teams have trust by default. Find them and work for them. Leave toxic teams quickly.
My work life balance is exactly the same. I work 40 hours a week, 9-5. If I run out of time on a project, I communicate it early to stakeholders and we reschedule it to realistic deadlines.
No one should be relying on their job for their primary social experience. If you have never had a social life outside of it, you’re missing out on life.
I work for a huge health care company. Throughout the early 2000's they were busy buying up multiple large commercial buildings to house all of their employees.
Then Covid hit and we went through several iterations trying to get people back into the office.
The company spent tens of millions renovating the majority of their buildings to open office concepts less than 18 months before Covid hit and was still in the middle of finishing several of the buildings when C19 hit - thus having people back in the office was a huge risk without cubes and people using "hoteling" and they immediately went to assigned areas and desks to try and get people to come back in.
First it was in two week shifts of A and B with assigned seating. Clean, rotate, repeat. Then it was VP's who wanted everybody back in the office and wanted badge reports so they could go after the people not coming in. They got a metric TON of pushback from managers who were telling their people not to come in if they didn't feel safe. In the end, the executives relented and approved full-time telecommuting to a majority of the employees.
The company has already sold off four of its buildings to out-state real estate companies and over the last year have been consolidating everybody down to one or two of the larger buildings.
I've been about half and half. Its a good break to just to get out of the house once in a while and have lunch with the other devs who are essentially doing the same thing.
Even before covid there were reasonable arguments that open office concepts were a form of managerial malfeasance. With the reminder that infectious disease is a thing and is often spread via the air, nobody has an excuse to not know that it's inviting illness to spread unchecked through your workforce on top of the other productivity hits.
>> With the reminder that infectious disease is a thing and is often spread via the air
One of the places I worked at in the early 2000's "experimented" with the open office concept they read about and how awesome it was for "collaboration" and "team building" and really improved communication.
It lasted six months. Two waves of the flu that knocked down a bunch of developers like napalm was the final nail in the coffin. They took out all the huge tables they put in place of the cubicles and replaced them with the 3/4 height cubicles. They also reverted back to the standard communication. Don't just walk over to someone and start talking. Use IM, ask if they have a minute, be polite, use proper channels, etc.
Suddenly, the office was like a library again. People got it. People getting sick all the time was pretty much eliminated, it was much easier to concentrate and it really felt harmonious again.
FWIW, all the startups (series B-ish) I'm currently in talks with to join are full-remote, and I did not specifically set that as a criteria when choosing which roles to go for. I think smaller companies see office space as pure overhead. They don't have the sunk costs of these large companies that have invested hundreds of millions building out luxurious workspaces that are hard to justify without regular use and are hard to divest from given the glut of office space on the market.
Before the Industrial Revolution, companies would farm out production tasks to individuals who would churn out work at home. As office work became less physical and more knowledge-based, companies forgot to go back to the old model that worked well before.
The pandemic just reminded companies that working from home is a natural, efficient way to produce output when you don’t require special facilities or equipment that you don’t happen to have in your house.
Near the beginning of the pandemic (May/June '20) I interviewed with AWS, specifically in the Lambda space. Before even speaking with the hiring manager, I made it clear that I wasn't interested in relocation, but they pushed for it anyway. After I reiterated my statement, I was told that WFH wasn't an option, and they moved on to other candidates.
Doesn't make sense to me. $123M is a lot of money, but not to Amazon. Surely keeping the property as a long-term investment would make sense? It's not like California is suffering terminal decline. Perhaps it is the ongoing cost of keeping it, like the taxes?
Looks like Bloomberg has invented a new reason why Amazon is selling this property. It's not RTO after all! who knew!? The title is now "Amazon to Sell Bay Area Office Complex as Sales Growth Cools".
Officially, my employer has moved on to three common "in office" work days per week (T-Th). Unofficially, that's a goal and people still often work from home during those days. But it's nice to at least have a compromise. It isn't the one I'd prefer (1 or 2 days only), but it acknowledges that employees want to keep it, and similarly employees acknowledge that for our particular industry we do sometimes need in-office or in-lab time. It also allows employees to push back on any in-office meetings on non-common days per official policy.
That's a bit of reassuring news, it's nice to see a tech giant forced by circumstances to pump the brakes / perhaps even reconsider the whole RTO thing.
I wonder what's going to happen in the new Vancouver office. Amazon bought the old Post office building that spanned two half-blocks in downtown Vancouver and built two massive towers inside it. Seems hard to imagine they'll need all that real estate
Remote work is going to do a real number on any US software engineering talent that's not extremely competent, and a big boon to engineers in Europe, Latin America, and to some extent India and China (although timezones make that a bit tough)
Talk about buying at the exact peak of the market.
The cat is out of the proverbial bag for all these large tech employers. Doesn't matter if you are Amazon or Google or whoever else. Once people got a taste of WFH life they were never going back to the hour plus commutes, weird social structures and power dynamics, noisy environment, lack of privacy.