Rto: Wtaf

As soon as there are any remote members involved, the local collaboration benefits are lost, and a mixed team becomes less effective than a fully-remote one - because few offices offer the necessary space and equipment for large groups of people to participate in remote / hybrid meetings and work groups effectively (most / almost all existing conference room equipment is complete junk). Unfortunately, fully co-located teams appear to be a thing of the past, and as you say, mandates aren't going to help here.

Alternatively, you networked, built useful relationships and shared knowledge.

IMO, RTO efficacy should be measured on a team-by-team basis. There are no doubt zero "one size fits all" approaches for entire orgs, or entire companies (and if there are, then the metrics should /strongly/ reflect that)

You spent $10m or $100m on a building that's now half empty.

Either you downsize or commit to enterprise scale sunk cost fallacy and enforce RTO so your real estate investment isn't "wasted".

City centres also thrive on RTO, with high street shopping on a generational decline it's up to office workers and their employers to prop up the economy of the CBD one overpriced lunch at a time.

But let’s get back to reality, the business decisions are made in the style “I like this” and “I don’t like this”. Only most obvious decisions are somehow backed up. And RTO is known to work well to ditch 2-3% of workforce in few months for free. Parents go first, high performers go afterwards. Headcount reduced, job well done!

The way with severance packages can go for years with many rounds when the packages are too small. Severance packages also involve social plan negotiations with unions… Somebody will go to court for sure and sue the company… So obviously let’s do RTO, it’s cheap and quick. And improves collaboration of course. First round with mandatory 3 days in the office and second one with 5 days in cheapest possible open office with chaos, distractions and noise.

So you're really going to have to deal with only hearing what people think.

RTO is trending for many reasons - some are doing this for bad reasons, I'm sure, but I also know that some managers are pushing for this because they a) see that junior developers aren't getting the necessary mentoring to help them develop and grow into seniors, and b) because they feel that people are spending more time on tasks because they're less likely to reach out if they have to ping people, wait for a response, and try to work through things without benefits like being able to draw on a whiteboard and such. --Maybe some companies are handling this better than others, but they are valid concerns.

Even if a bunch of companies adopt RTO, many others just embraced remote work as a competitive advantage. I can just choose to work for those.

So, RTO all you want. I am not joining.

[1] e.g. through leveraging class politics, hyperstition or militias.

[2] From the point of view of the responsible stakeholders, that is.

I think worthwhile evidence would only be available if two things, both questionable, were true:

1. an unbiased sample of companies implementing RTO are willing to disclose their reasons - e.g. make public announcements, or cooperate with academic studies. 2. they were honest about the reasons.

If common reasons for RTO would make the management look bad (and some might even be illegal in some places) then the first is less likely, and the second is highly unlikely.

One point I did note is that there is an increase in management overhead when workers are separated, and this increase in workload by senior management is likely a pain point for them - even though there are likely productivity benefits in forcing management to communicate through official channels and have a more organised approach to task delegation/internal messaging.

From a financial perspective office spaces are a type of investment vehicle. Prior to the GFC office space was lucrative, and that was again peaking pre-covid. There are likely secondary motivations at play beyond productivity.

My daughter still goes to after-school care twice a week, but this lets us save three days of after and five days of before-school care.

A lot of people abused it to care for babies and very young children while working though. I understand the appeal but it doesn’t sit right.

We can give them bigger/more-prominent zoom portraits by seniority. Should make everyone happy.

> Real estate

Probably shouldn't still be gambling company finances on real estate, 5 years after a pandemic forced us all to go remote.

> Extroverts

Great! We can put all the extroverts back in the glass fishbowl, while the rest of us do actual work from home

Why? If the lease was signed before the pandemic that gives a very easy "out". It's not like anyone could have predicted the pandemic and the associated shift to WFH. If for whatever reason they signed afterwards, that's just them being dumb.

The funny thing is that the CEO of my current employer lives in Connecticut and rarely (ever?) comes into the office in Manhattan. When he does come in, they shut the office down for "leadership meetings" so all the New York based employees can't come in anyway!

You know what, since the dawn of work - it's always been the extroverted way. Introverts suffered through. Now that the tide has changed, let the extroverts suffer too, it's their turn. We have done our part.

Covid normalized remote working, but also didn't necessarily make companies and teams _good_ at it; I suspect RTO is easier than fixing the fact that your org sucks at remote work. It is hard to do well! it requires different strategies than just picking some software.

Partial/voluntary RTO also is the worst of both worlds: people coming in the office to sit on Zoom with colleagues who never do. Ultimately, I think RTO is a valid choice as a company, and a lot of orgs are coming to regret not messaging from the beginning that remote would be a temporary arrangement during the pandemic.

Sounds like you think software development is like one of those stock photos with 8 people smiling and high-fiving around a whiteboard. Devs are (mostly) nerds. Nerds have been collaborating in the online world for decades. They somehow managed to achieve things and build genuine friendships without ever being crammed into an open office - crazy but true. Everytime I hear someone say/suggest "dev needs to happen in person", all I can picture is a PHB.

Also, likes commuting? You can listen to your podcast anywhere.

I disagree, this does not make any sense to me. You can work together with other people without being physically present, and you can socialize as well. We had regular after hour meetings online drinking beer.

If the agglomeration effects don’t exist, SF and Silicon Valley as the center of the tech world wouldn’t be a thing.

I guess part of the reason people don’t want to believe working colocated to your colleagues plays a role in your productivity is because it punctured the idea that the reason you’re being paid the high salary you are is completely merit based, and dismiss that your fortune in either being born in or being able to relocate to a city like SF played a huge role in your success.

RTO: Return to Office

RTO is about control and optics, not cost optimisation. It’s management preference, real estate sunk costs, and the illusion of productivity through visibility. Actual delivery of work is the only thing that matters in tech - and remote delivery has already proven itself at scale.

The idea that “physical location is your greatest asset” is backwards. If that were true, San Francisco developers wouldn’t already be competing with contractors in Bangalore and Bucharest. They are - yet the jobs remain, because employers value capability, not postcode.

In short: RTO doesn’t protect American tech workers from global competition. It just wastes time in traffic and props up bad management.

There are obviously plenty of brilliant people outside the US. Unfortunately, intelligence is not the only factor that revenue per employee emerges from - or else the US would not dominate the tech sector and it would be uncommon to find remote-first companies based entirely in the US.

American companies are welcome to start offering Western European level benefits (and compensate for missing government benefits) at any time. I would happily accept 30-50% less pay for a very solid health insurance plan, pay for my childcare 30 days of paid vacation a year that I'm actually entitled to take, 6 months of paid maternity leave + some paternity leave, a contract that restricts my working hours and makes it meaningfully legally difficult to frivolously fire me and practically impossible to lay me off of the company isn't failing, and an hour paid lunch every day.

Nobody seems to be offering that, for whatever reason. The closest is non-profits, who lack the cash to meet standard salaries but try to make up with benefits (which are, after all, cheaper), but for profit companies seem to prefer to pony up and retain the control at-will employment grants them

Based on this Canadian's browsing of the average Who's Hiring thread, it seems that a very small fraction of US based remote friendly jobs are open to being filled by foreigners. They do exist, just not many.

You're bang on about competition from domestic candidates in lower cost of living areas though.

Counterpoint, developer offshoring has been happening since at least the late nineties with eh, limited success. It's hard to get around major timezone differences and thick accents. This isn't even getting into the fatal mistake that everyone makes -- thinking that there's, for example, a billion more "Brilliant Indian Guy in Our Office" clones out there in India.

This only happens if the job market supports it. If every company effectively colludes with these mandates, on top of the bad job market, then you can squeeze as hard as you want without meaningful attrition.