Yep. Many of my days are 4-6 hours of meetings in the morning, 2 more hours of paperwork/email/coordination activities, go get dinner, then work another 2-3 hours.

Thank goodness I can work from home. I know in some ways that makes my flexibility more damaging to my work/life balance, but the tradeoff is worth it to me.

> since expectations got calibrated to when everyone had a private office and more control over their own time.

which is why you should not be doing overtime to meet expectation. Expectation (aka, productivity) needs to drop when RTO is mandated.

There's no way in hell I'd agree to additional remote work if I'm being demanded to return to the office. Either it's remote or it's not.

That’s how it was for me circa 2004-2005. The only way I could get anything real work done was from home, after hours. During the day all we did was sit in meetings and report status to each other and to the higher ups. Worse, then the higher ups decided that we don’t need a sustained engineering team for the past two releases (boxed software) and the team would context switch between building new stuff and patching what’s already out there, 2 releases back. I said fuck it and left.

When I lived in the Bay Area, my commute was ~2.5 hours each way. I would have killed for a 1 hour commute.

Everyone I know with a long commute can afford a shorter commute, they just trade the commute for a larger single-family dwelling.

If you're required to RTO and doing it you probably aren't in a position to "insist" on jack shit.

Tech office amenity spaces are visually impressive, but then your actual workstation is just a desk in an ocean of desks, where you have to wear noise-cancelling headphones to hear yourself think.

I was told at a previous job I couldn't work from home but they expected me to take my laptop home with me just in case something happened. My response was I couldn't work from home and just left my laptop at work.

West coast seems like the worst time zone to be remote. You have to get up early for meetings with your coworkers, and they can get your immediate feedback on their problems. But when you have your own problems, it's often too late for them to help you.

>It's the worst of both words.

And it's quickly becoming the status quo.

They really don't ever let a disaster go to waste, do they?

> being able to talk directly to people is much better than having to schedule meetings

i do not understand what people are talking about when they say things like this

    personA: hey @personB you got 20 mins to talk about XYZ?
    personB: yeah gimme 10 mins
    personA: k, i’ll grab a coffee
    personA: /zoom start

the rest of what your comment says is fair enough. i just see this mentioned a lot in anti-WFH leaning comments. often about how hard it is to mentor a junior.

(i can’t remember the exact slack command but you hopefully get the idea).

You 100% want your sales folks at customers not in your office.

Most roles can be hybrid/remote. Regardless of Tech, Finance, Marketing, whatever, if the job involves sitting in front of a computer or being on the phone all day it's a good candidate. If you were doing the job remotely from March 2020 through the end of 2021 and being effective, it's a good candidate.

Amazon is not mandating RTO for sales folks.

Google has always had the flexible working hours and didn't mind the occasional "plumber coming today" day, but before COVID it was very allergic to permanent WFH arrangements.

> mostly

Yeah, but here's an exception!

Tech organizations are all overstaffed from the pandemic. Engineering is usually boom/bust. Likely outcome is recession and purge. The plucky gen alphas will be in the cube farm to pay they rent.

Define “fraud”? If you get your work done in two hours and can’t progress until a teammate does their end, is it better or worse if you are scrolling HN in an office or at home?

I run my own company, I do not give a single fuck how, where, or when people get their job done. I only care they deliver.

Likewise, people who need to be watched over are not the employees I want in the first place. I’m not running a daycare for children. Adults can make their own decisions, if you need me over your shoulder to deliver you aren’t useful to me to start with.

"Work in the office" or "remote surveillance" are not the only two possible options here.

I work (remotely) for a company that treats their employees like adults. I have a work-provided laptop, but it doesn't contain any surveillance-ware and my boss doesn't care where I am or what I'm doing as long as I'm getting my stuff done and showing up for zoom meetings. When they hired me, they ran a background check to ensure that I was who I said I was, among other due diligence.

There are more companies like this. They may not be in the majority, but they exist.

who are these people who barely do any work from home? My office is an amusement park with free food and amazing views and yet I still work from home to minimize distractions and wasted time. My output is measurably higher when I work from home.

> You're making it sound as if working from home was something that everyone did eternally, and not something that started in 2020 out of necessity.

Err...what? Let's not rewrite history here. Plenty of people -- especially in tech -- worked remotely before Covid. Yes, the numbers increased dramatically, but don't make it sound like it was unheard of before the pandemic.

Also: tons and tons of people have no choice but to live far from the office. Rent is cheaper and more plentiful the farther out you get from metro centers, simple as.

Amazons RTO is a hidden layoff round. They are overstaffed because they hired like crazy during the pandemic, now they need to slimmdown and will simply wait for people to quit because of the RTO and fire those that dont comply. And they dont have to pay anything because those that leave do so out of free will, and the fired people were simply breaking their contract

Open office plans have data that shows it costs less than individual offices but it is sold as "fostering communication" and "team culture." The cost per office is easier to count than the lost productivity of a distracted programmer.

RTO has similar data. If we require a highly distributed workforce to be in a specific physical location x amount of time, y percentage will resign and we don't have to pay severance or announce layoffs. That's easy to calculate vs. the lost productivity of individuals or the impact of losing top performers and lowering the bar.

Only champion data driven decisions when they confirm your desired outcome. Nothing new under the sun.

Data-driven management is primarily to find goldbrickers and troublemakers through statistical mumbo-jumbo performed over shoddy proxy metrics. It's not supposed to promote or encourage sensible decisions.

“The proles rebelled, so Amazon dug their heels in harder” is not a great take. They’re supposed to lead, and they’ve lost their mandate.

Unfortunately a new job, even 5-8 miles away, may turn a then-5 minute commute into a 45m-1hr commute in many metropolitan areas.

I think more management needs to realize that forcing in-person isn't inherently beneficial. There can be value in meeting up if it's appropriately planned, though.

My current management has been very accommodating with remote/hybrid. If there's a meeting where face-time is beneficial, people voluntarily come in -- but there's no pressure to do so. Generally, we find it easier to pop into the office for a day every few months to whiteboard things instead of dealing with Miro/Zoom. We have a mix of remote folks who live next to the office, some folks within a couple hour drive, and some who need to fly in.

A former job of mine used to fly people to the same location 4x a year for a week to hash out a quarterly plan and grab drinks. The whole agenda was laid out and not a minute felt wasted. While not everyone went 4x a year, everyone was given the opportunity to do so, and this helped alleviate friction.

Another job of mine had remote folks fly in every 3-4 months for a couple of days at a time. Some teams did it more frequently (1x/mo for a couple days) when critical projects were in the pipeline, but they'd return to normal afterwards.

I don't have the discipline to stop working when I work from home. Being able to go into the office every day is a nice perk for me to help structure my day. If it was a longer drive, I'd probably feel differently.

> I feel like the commute is what people are actually feeling the worst, because it’s unpaid time that they just straight up lose.

There's also the associated side costs: getting ready to leave work (more for women, many feel socially obliged to put on makeup), extra clothes washing (personally, I don't like to wear clothes I had to travel in public transport with), having to schedule around errands like tradespeople coming in for repairs or picking up parcels from the post office, and for those with children all the shit associated with that, like picking up said children from daycare (whose opening times often conflict with expected work availability) or transporting them to school and after-school stuff like sports training... and finally, even though people like to deny even the most obvious (like in Munich, the current explosion of covid in wastewater tracking), there is still a pandemic raging on plus all the other "regular" bugs like influenza, RSV, measles and whatever else shit children catch at school, distribute to their parents, who then distribute it around work.

Had society actually learned anything from the two years of Covid dominance, in-presence work would be the exception not the norm, and people who have to perform in-presence work be compensated for their commute.

Yes that’s one of the sites they bailed on:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/02/google-ends-agreement-with-l...

My labour history knowledge is pretty non-existent, but I assume past progress was often made via unions, e.g. 8-hour work day. Seems like this is a situation begging for workers (at Amazon and elsewhere) to unionise and demand the right to WFH through the power of collective bargaining.

The workers that progressed labour rights in the past surely mostly needed their jobs too, so this situation doesn't seem unique at all.

I wonder how different things would be if there were laws where if a company required you to RTO then your commute time is included in your expected working hours.

Some companies are asking to RTO for half the week even if you're 50 miles away. Depending on where you're at that could be a ~5 hour round trip commute. If you factor in parking in certain places like NYC you're almost forced into taking a train so having meetings during the commute wouldn't be too realistic. That would mean getting to work at 11:30am and leaving at 3:30pm to work a usual 9-6 hour job. If you take a lunch with your commute then you end up working 3 hours total at the office.

Wow 4 months is pretty awesome. Are you based in that USA? I worked at companies that had unlimited PTO and no one ever took that much time off.

I'm not sure it's right to say they did anything here. All the article reports is that an unspecified Google VP made an offhand remark that no changes are expected to their 3-2 hybrid schedule - which used to be Amazon's schedule until Andy Jassy made an unexpected change.

They just want Amazon talent. Then they'll turn up the heat.

During the first wave of RTO and hybrid work, ProServe was exempted because it was considered “sales”. I was there then.

You’re always locked in to your infrastructure. The entire idea of “cloud agnosticism” is BS.

I’ve seen companies take over a year and thousands of man hours to move from VMs on premise to a cloud platform.

Cloud agnosticism is hardly ever a business differentiator

Ah return to office in the Henry Ford dictated 5-days 40 hours sense, not coming into the office for most of the week sense.

We see this all the time working at the intersection of the insurance / fintech space. I've had several big, legacy vendors make requests for multiple physical signatures on a piece of paper (printed and mailed or faxed, can't just annotate a PDF) from people who haven't even met eachother in person let alone ever worked at the same address.

The kicker? These papers are access authorization forms to APIs.

Your average tech company is probably reasonably well prepared to go truly distributed, but I bet many of their vendors aren't. Whole workflows in certain industries don't even conceptualize companies with employees distributed across offices, let alone companies with no office at all.

(I've fought similar battles over not being able to provide a direct phone extension because I don't have a phone on my office desk and even if I did I'm not at the office anything close to full time, and I don't provide my personal cell phone number to vendors... but thats a whole different topic. Employees exist without phone numbers! Entire offices exist without phones!)

> For large organizations, remote can be the difference between one state's paperwork + regs + taxation, and every state and country under the sun's paperwork + regs + taxation. That is a real burden. Not just the paperwork + administrative overhead, but being subject to differing employment + everything else laws from everywhere will really muck up ability to run a consistent business.

This is a real burden for small businesses. The nature of Amazon's business as an online retailer with a massive distribution network means that for any significant market they do business in, they will have employees. Practically speaking, this is a solved problem for any state in which Amazon has a warehouse (which I think is probably all of them for the US?).

"Anywhere in California" would also solve the LA density problem.

> state taxes are a big barrier to fully remote work

What percentage of remote-workers are in a different tax-jurisdiction? Especially post-COVID I expected that the majority of remote-work involved people already in the same US state, merely with a nontrivial commute.

At my last company I was officially in-office but I basically never went in because essentially everyone I worked with was in a different office or even a different country.

Do cities actually subsidize suburban infrastructure? I am skeptical but I don’t know all of the details on how people come to that conclusion. What happens if the economy is more spread out? Also a lot of the people that own and run companies that give a city its tax base live in the suburban areas. It might even be reasonable to say that they are the ones subsidizing the city and not the other way. How do you think about these angles?

Having been there: it's not that. It's that, unfortunately, they have enough hard numbers to know most people do their best work with a boss physically breathing down their neck.

I knew some folks at Google who worked 100% remote and only came into the office for critical meetings about once a month. They had proven they could operate that way with a more-or-less stellar track record.