Well, okay, that’s understandable then…and pretty shitty

It’s not as hard as it seems because of the way commercial buildings are built, the real ceiling is much higher than it looks and the visible ceiling can easily be removed then it’s just a matter of piercing some concrete, in the end your drains are mostly in your downstairs neighbor’s ceiling instead of being inside the limits of your unit. It’s super easy to run electricity and ventilation, framing is metal instead of wood (no moisture issue with concrete, no risk of splitting when using a ramset on the parts fixed to the floor), sheetrock for the ceiling is screwed to metal joists that hang from the metal frames the current ceiling tracks are hanging from…

I used to live in a building like that and the only time it was “problematic” when renovating the whole thing was when I had to change the bath drain as during the original construction they had repoured concrete around it to seal the floor after installing the bath.

I would love to see an actual study proving it’s possible for only 10% of them because I’ve lived in a building built like an office one and I’ve done renovations in it and there’s very little that’s different from a residential building with concrete floors once everything’s been stripped down.

It’s even more expensive as fuck to build a residential building of the size of those office buildings as well and once converted is guaranteed income forever, no pandemic stops people from living in it and there’s always people willing to rent, contrary to businesses that can change their policies or simply go bankrupt.

Those huge rents exist because demand exceeds supply (amongst other reasons). People want to live in walkable neighborhoods and not suburbs where you have to drive everywhere to survive.

Sadly a lot of rural areas have little to no Internet connectivity in the US because ISPs have been taking money meant for rural Internet and pocketing the money. Additionally, the internet in smaller towns can be spotty. It’s part of the reason why starlink was so hyped up when it was first announced. It’s also part of the reason why people who are allowed to work from home sometimes find it difficult to find cheaper places to live (another one being rural bigotry, though if you’re cis, straight, white and capable of pretending to be Christian, that shouldn’t be much of an issue). The cheaper the area, the worse the internet usually is.

Many people want to live downtown to be close to the action and with people living there 24/7 it would bring actual life to the area and would allow businesses to thrive instead of having restaurants and stores that close mid afternoon.

They’re bringing a few people back for 8h/day two days a week when they could bring a lot of people back for 24h/day seven days a week. What’s more logical from a business perspective?

I had the same thing happen. Job got outsourced, quality tanked but they continued to outsource more departments. Like six months later they were trying to rehire everyone. Fuck that noise.

And just because quality goes down the drain when outsourcing doesn’t necessarily mean that it won’t happen unfortunately.

My company outsourced some functions a few years ago and had hired Americans back within 2 years. Outsourcing is real but it’s also a terrible idea for anything with a high degree of accountability and knowledge. Currently there is an office/opco in Mexico (but the previous outsourcing was India) and if they need to hire but don’t have the budget for an American they’ll transfer someone to our team. But I know the Mexican office is held to decently high standards and everyone they’ve transferred to is speaka English well, and are on at approximately the same time as us since we’re all on the same continent. I like the Mexicans I work with but would like to see more Americans hired, but this is so much better than the alternative lol

You should

Some directors (or whatever manager managers are called in your pyramid) like to pretend to be the good guy to individuals and force their intermediaries to look like the assholes. Middle management sucks.

Hope you feel better.

These are largely dead in hybrid scenarios, because those that would be meeting face to face don’t work in the office on the same day.

I work at an office that started hybrid after covid because enough employees quit when they went to full RTO. The IT department ended up with 2 days in and 3 days remote, but the 2 days are the same for everyone so that we are all in the office at the same time for the spontaneous conversations.

It works pretty well. 2 days to collaborate and keep up relationships, the other three days to get individually completed work done.

I am not op but I’m pretty sure they’re speaking from the point of view of companies, not agreeing with their ideas

Do they know that it’s much harder to unionize if you’re remote?

The thing is, water cooler chats are impromptu, they are not planned. You meet your colleague, you talk about the weather, what’s new in his life, and one thing leads to another, to maybe to talk about work and how to strategise to get something done.

These impromptu conversations happen on a whim, they happen organically. They cannot be forced.

Personal experience. The juniors just out of school and interns are invariably stuck in something trivial that can often be solved with looking at their stuff for a few seconds. They don’t dare to disturb you with any questions and need a lot of explaining. Doing all the explaining through the screen is a pain and you have to hound them with calls to get them to ask questions.

Experienced new hires don’t have that issue. They can Google stuff, read a manual and know when to send a message for a blocking issue.

That’s doesn’t mean send everybody to the office. Just the new guy and the coach should be enough in most cases and reduce the presence as they hit their stride.

No, a lot of people just feel more trust from being in the same room with someone and getting a better feeling from being in proximity with the person. It has nothig to do with on and off the record. Do you really record all of your zoom calls to CYA?

Think of it like attending a concert in person compared to listening to an album, it is just a different experience in person. Not everyone gets that out of in person interactions, but a lot of people do.

I think hybrid only works if there is no minimum requirement on time in office.

Then it’s not really hybrid, it’s actually fully WFH with the option to come in. Hybrid forces you to come in.

I would call that “remote first” to avoid ambiguity. My current employer is like that too, with offices or co-working spaces in select major cities around the world.

The key differentiating factor is that you can go into the office if you feel like it. It’s only “hybrid” in the sense that you decide, on a purely personal whim, whether you want to or not.

Personally, I live fairly close to a big office, but have only go in for big yearly meetings. And with a remote first culture no one bats an eye at that.

Yeah, we’re the same. It’s hybrid in that we’re expected to come in when it makes sense to do so, but that’s more or less left to us. If your internet isn’t working then you’re expected to work from the office, that sort of thing.

As someone who has WFH for the last 10 years, I do wish I could go into the office occasionally to have face to face meetings for large projects. Those are actually very useful for faster communication and effective for full understanding between groups in a way that video calls just can’t do. We are, after all, social animals and there is something about breathing the same air that can’t be beat.

You mention 60% minimum, the second there’s a minimum then you can’t hire employees living far from an office or if you do you create two classes of employees.

Why should I RTO 60% of the time if they are ready to let others with the same job RTO 0% if the time? Just because I got unlucky and they happen to have an office less than X km away from where I live? How come I’m not allowed to move somewhere further away and get the same exemption then?

We call that discrimination and I’m not even getting into how it impacts women and POC more than white guys to have to RTO.

Congratulations you just cut your available employee pool down to…local access again. Hybrid is pointless and a waste of space and resources for less.

No meetings require in person. Get a white board and a camera if you can’t do in person meetings. It’s 2024, not 1975.

Then you run into the issue that you need a reservation model and you end up unable to provide enough desks to guarantee that teams are able to meet at the office when necessary if they don’t make their reservation early enough.

Hell, where I work we have quotas and people can’t meet them because they can’t manage to get a seat at the office they used to work in full time before 2020 and they certainly won’t waste an hour in traffic to go to the next office closest to them.

You realize that you’re experiencing massive selection bias right?

A) it’s not very socially acceptable to talk about how much you’d rather be at home with your cat than here talking with this colleague.

B) everyone you work with chose a hybrid job.

i.e. “People who choose to work a hybrid job think hybrid is better”

Or in your case, “people who get to go into a big tech office with free meals and gyms and laundry think it’s better to go into the office”.

Try working a hybrid job where you commute 45min each way, and still have to cook yourself three meals a day and then come back and tell us whether you think hybrid is really more productive. I spent a year at a MAANG firm as a contractor and got to go to their head campus near SF and thought ‘damn, if this was what working was like, I could more easily see myself going into the office’, then I returned to my home city and went to their office their and saw the stale muffins that were breakfast and remembered the whole rest of my career and what companies are like and returned to the real world.

Yes, I understand the hurdle in asking people questions, but quite frankly that is addressable through numerous ways from zoom office hours, to better team rituals and culture, to slack bots, occasional meetups, or just plain old fashioned pair programming… all methods that cost far less and cause far less disruption to people’s lives then forcing in them into an office 3 days a week.

And you know what else is more productive for a company? Having everyone working 60 hour weeks in the office all the time. Who. the. fuck. cares. We live in a world with literal billionaires. Working more doesn’t make the world a better place it enriches assholes who never learned how to share or be happy with what they have.

I’ve also seen the opposite happen - Bean counters think out sourcing to India will save lots of money, then they end up paying a more expensive us consulting company or independent consultant to come and clean up a mess, then they have to hire in house devs to maintain the code. Most of the out sourcing groups I’ve interacted with had a mentality of "we’ll do what was explicitly asked for and not a single thing more, and if we hit a roadblock, we’ll call it out and stop work until someone state side figures it out. And I can’t really fault them for the mentality - they know they’re being used because they’re cheaper labor, they don’t have any sense of ownership of the code, and when they develop stronger skills, they leave for a better opportunity.
I know there are strong devs in India, but I don’t think they usually end up in the out sourcing companies.

We found this to be NOT true. Half, at best. But wait.

So it’s 1/10 in its heyday, but when you pay someone 1/10th salary in a land of 1/50th salary, that person becomes a target. They look comparatively rich, their house gets repaired, their kids show the signs of an economic bump, etc. So now your guy can get robbed or kidnapped, so you need a driver and protection. And the kids need to go to a different school with a gate. And the spouse needs to get back and forth safely. And then a better house, moving to a gated community or apartment, with more guards. And suddenly you’re paying for company housing, schooling, cars, drivers, tutors, guards, cameras/surveillance, cooks, maids, deliveries, and even extended family is moving in for safety.

So it’s still a bargain on paper, but then it’s just half. They don’t mention this because it’s hard to sell an idea when 80% of it is eroded.

Your employee or team now works on the other side of the world, with a different culture and management style from what you’re used to with Americans, different communications and workflow, and everything’s still around the world so it’s a day’s delay for everything.

The culture and work environment has trained some regions to NEVER admit they don’t know something; just nod, smile, and try to figure it out with confidence. Dunning-kruger be damned, sometimes that’s not a good way to do something in my field, which is incredibly technical. We can’t even educate the locals on risks of bad supply chains (curl|sh anyone? Flatpacks and CPAN and NPM and composer? Find out why these are risks) and doing so with the different “never say you don’t understand or you’re fired” environment is an added challenge. “Did you check for compliance?” will only ever get a “Yes”, even if you don’t mention which standard.

So your management - especially in offshores - needs an entirely different mindset and workflow, and you need to have people to check on the compliance and readiness and completeness who will say when it’s not ready because they’re not gonna be fired for it. This kind of thing surprised us and it will surprise the "I just wanna save money and this guy said 1/10th! " crowd. It’s not “you get what you pay for”, so don’t misunderstand; it’s just different. And if you can cope with all the differences and don’t freak out that you’re not saving so much for same-same work, it’s … an idea. In my case, the offshored staff slowly shrunk until we moved the offshoring to Poland.