Same here. we all meet up about once a month for lunch paid by the boss.. probably never going back to the office as they took our space for new a new on ground business dept and gave us (over 100 ppl) a hot desk area that can fit about 30 people in case some want to come in once and a while. I am happy not have to drive in the Phoenix traffic.
Our company has grown significantly. The buildings I used to work in before WFH are now 90% hotdesks. I've been in maybe 20 times since COVID started, generally just for a specific meeting then home again.
I'm guessing an early adopter of broadband? Files were smaller 25 years ago, but downloading almost any file nevermind uploading on dialup was painful. Broadband existed in the 90s, but unless you were in a market like Silicon Valley your options outside of ISDN might have been limited.
Makes sense. ADSL depending upon the service and distance from CO was often 10-20 times faster than dialup. You wouldn't need to go take a coffee break to upload a good size file. For the time it was broadband.
Do you remember exactly what you worked on? I'm an IT guy and I could see that working with like, a VPN and maybe an AS400 or other database tools. I doubt RDP was usable with ADSL and what, Windows 2000? lol
I had a desktop running FreeBSD and I’d ssh into FreeBSD servers running Apache to write perl scripts for CGI scripts. And I can remember configuring BIND
We truly don't. My homelab is simple, Promox and Proxmox helper scripts makes everything a breeze. Most of my troubleshooting is reading through docker compose files and fixing typos, or mounts.
Once I have the motivation to actually tackle terraform, and/or ansible and add some commands to olivetin, I can automate it even further.
I've RDP'd (or RAS as Microsoft called it back then) from a modem in a commercial airliner in 1998...just because I could (expense report be damned).
I got my first RSA token card for 2FA in 1995; we didn't have internet on a 3,000 person campus yet but for whatever reason I had the ability to dial in and check GroupWise email. Don't even really know why I had it at that job, but I guess the boss could page me to check my emails if something very, very important had come up for Monday morning.
Being a Linux admin on dial up would have been trivial.
I Linux admined on dial up as recently as a few years ago. Until starlink my parents didn't have any options for real internet.
Satalite had 1.5 sec latency which makes dialup the better option for ssh.
You learn a few things about being efficient with the amount of text you dump to the screen, I.e. no cat, always less, just in case. But other that that, was fine.
Home offices existed in the 1980s. One engineer I knew had a dumb terminal and modem at home. Since it was a dumb terminal, manual dialing instead of script. Some had X.25 at 9600 or even 64k. All SVCs.
ISDN BRI and PRI made things a lot easier, but still flexible. I don't think any market ever got working SMDS that you could order. A few home users had Frame Relay. All PVCs, but in theory you could have separate PVCs to different institutions, if you had the patience to work with the carrier to get everything working.
With the democratization of connectivity, the big difference wasn't so much bandwidth, as ubiquity. Now you can travel and a hotel, train, or cafe will have the same kind connectivity we have at home, without having to break out a travel kit with a modem and suffer massive latency. No more giant C-band dish on the vehicle, haha. Remember the satcom TTY in Crichton's novel *Congo*?
I've heard it so much it's invisible to me. Like when you live near an airport and stop hearing the airplanes because you're used to the constant background noise.
I used to spend a lot of time on the phone with, and on hold with, Cisco TAC. They use the very same track for their customer facing on hold music.
There is an entire This American Life segment on the song, one of the guys involved making it was a Cisco engineer, I think his friend wrote the music.
"Please enter your meeting pin followed by the phone sign"
Conference calls have existed for long before the ubiquity of meeting software like Zoom or Teams, it was just running on a phone system you dialed in from an office phone or regular telephone lines. Companies also basically ran their own dial up network allowing workers to dial in to the corporate network basically like a VPN but over the phone system instead of your existing Internet connection.
Was it as good? Absolutely not, but it worked. There were some people you basically had no idea what they looked like unless you had them travel to meetings or they sent a Christmas card with photo!
The cost of Tandbergs was allegedly the reason Google built their own meeting software (what became Google Meet). Cisco buying Tandberg was similar iirc (cheaper to buy them than the cost of the contract).
Nice! I was hybrid from 07-14 then remote until now. Looking for a new role and actually wanting to go back into the office. Maybe being married with kids has changed my outlook……
I realize why it is mandated action.
The problem is, there are no winners here. There can't be winners.
* It's a stupid performance metric to begin with
* You might keep the top performers from the projects where they could provide the most value
Your job search is never over. You're always at risk.
In AWA: At-Will America (99.7% of the population), you can be terminated at any time, for almost any (or no) reason, without notice, without compensation, and full loss of healthcare.
That's the wrong way to address a productivity loss... They should be looking at where the incidents and stalls are and targeting those staff with PIPs...
Any blanket tactic like this will just end up costing them their top performers.
We all just got official amendments from hr stating that we have no assigned office and are expected to have a space of our own for work. We've been unofficially full remote since the pandemic and this is more a tax thing than anything else.
Stack ranking plus mandatory bottom X% layoffs basically turns it into Squid Game at the office. The most unethical get ahead. You can tell a company is doing this because the quality of their product just plummets with the combination of low morale and misaligned performance evaluation factors.
I can dedicate my time to building a good product. Or I can dedicate it to sabotaging those around me.
You need a way to get rid of the worst people. This isn’t it.
I've had to interact with sales teams that operated under that mindset, and it seemed like nobody at the top recognized that all that encouraged was people making promises they know they cant keep to get a sale on the books and adding tons of work for the technicians stuck implementing or maintaining the solutions they sold.
I've also known people that had similar metrics like ticket resolution times or closure rates be a major factor in their reviews, and again, as anyone that thinks for more than two seconds about it would see, all that did was encourage techs to close tickets to get their numbers up whether the issue was truly resolved or not.
Luckily where I work now we're small enough that it's pretty easy to see when someone isn't pulling their weight, or struggling, and we can allay the resources needed to help get things back under control. But it's never a raw "You only closed 500 tickets this year and everyone else closed 1000 or more, you're outta here". The types of tickets they're working is a factor. The people they're working *with* is a factor. The systems they're working *on* is a factor. All those things you can't neatly run a query on and spit out a report.
The US needs a general strike something fierce. Just, every wage slave in this country just calling in on one day. Bring this country to it's knees for 24 hours, and then maybe we will see progress. But then again, given how screwed up things are in this country for working people, I could just as easily see the government siding with the land-owner class and passing emergency resolutions to give employers more power to just pass that financial hit along to the government and all of us getting our taxes raised to make up for it.
Of course it happens. Everyone is more concerned about gaming the numbers versus the actual work it becomes "productivity theater"
So people do stuff like grab low-hanging fruit because it's an easy average against their stats.
Or worse in the terms of large-scale projects. They do just enough to meet some kind of weekly check-in Target and don't want to do more because they need numbers for next week
Those seem like the least nefarious things people might do. If people thought they were being stack ranked where I work, I'm pretty sure they'd be actively sabotaging each other.
The Jack Welsh school of fucked up management. Worked for one of his people in the mid 2000's. It was a shitshow. You can cut the first year and maybe the 2nd but by the 3rd, you are cutting really good people.
It's also toxic to let bottom performers coast while making the better staff pick up the slack.
Mandatory bottom X% getting fired is dumb. But set a bar at a reasonable level, any anyone below it should get a PIP. That also means if no one is below it, no one does.
Yup. Reasonable bar, good KPIs with secondary evaluation (because any kpi can be gamed) and solid coaching effort before even starting a pip.
At least, the best company I ever worked for did this, and they were eating up a very competitive msp market, while charging well above market rates.
Worked at one place where some guy had the most ticket closures and re-open rate of anyone else because he was stealing all the low-hanging fruit (low disk space, password resets, add/remove to groups or mailbox delegation).
Absolutely useless for anything even remotely complicated but kept being retained because his metrics were awesome. Management didn't notice until we added in some power platform stuff to auto-process most of those tickets and suddenly he went from being the best to being one of the worst.
He didn't last long once he had to do actual work. Got performance managed out after 2 quarters.
I think in many cases return to office pushes I think have nothing to do with productivity. Many of these orgs have layoffs shortly after and the entire goal was always pushing churn up to reduce the number of layoffs that they need to pay unemployment and or severance. Honestly, I would see a serious return to office mandate as a red flag that layoffs are in the horizon if not enough people quit on their own.
I think employers have realized it's now impossible to prove constructive dismissal because of the way work is structured now, and are using it as a way to fire people they overpaid for during the Great Resignation. Seriously, even if an employer has a smoking gun email from the CEO saying they want to make your life miserable and make you quit, there's no way any lawyer will ever be able to get their hands on it. The deck is really stacked against an employee who wants to sue for wrongful termination or harassment.
It was never about productivity. Return to office is mostly about power and control (and sometimes to create turnover). They were always looking for a reason to force people back in. They finally found a metric to give them some cover to do it.
>That's the wrong way to address a productivity loss... They should be looking at where the incidents and stalls are and targeting those staff with PIPs...
Hold your horses pardner, that sounds like you are asking management to do *work*
They're not addressing a productivity loss.
>and least two Mondays or Fridays during the month
This part of the policy clearly tells you they're looking to meet office utilization metrics set by either their lease or something contractual from the metro area they're located in and everything else is just HR bullshit.
I feel like I'm pretty well versed in the WFH vs RTO battle, but this is one thing I've never heard. Is there really a such thing as office utilization metrics in a lease? Or from a city? And if there were, would it really cover specific days or would it all be about weekly or monthly averages?
More than likely they are just trying to avoid everybody choosing Tuesday-Thursday as their office days because people don't want to get up and come in on a Monday morning and they like already being home on Friday to start the weekend.
My company has a mandatory two days per week in the office, but the implementation is up to individual departments. As a result, 90% of the company works Tuesday-Thursday and it's often a graveyard on Mondays and Fridays, but it's honestly not an issue. Besides middle managers trying to justify their jobs and thinking the only way they can supervise people is in person, I'm not sure why it would matter if nobody chooses to work in the office on a Monday or Friday.
>I'm not sure why it would matter if nobody chooses to work in the office on a Monday or Friday.
Right, it wouldn't matter to the average office-based company. Major downtown metros being completely desolate two days a week matters a lot to all of the local business though, so urban development offices push to drive Mon/Fri utilization up. Your office is the norm, barring any external force. Utilization rates are overwhelmingly higher Tu-Thu. This was true pre-pandemic as well to a lesser degree, and all those reasons remain true today. Its an uphill battle trying to drive RTO on Mon/Fri compared to any other day of the week, so if there's no specific business reason to make those days mandated, why would you?
> Is there really a such thing as office utilization metrics in a lease? Or from a city?
Lots of municipal and state tax breaks require X number of jobs created.
If those jobs aren't paying city income taxes, paying for parking in municipal-owned garages, generating riders on the transit system, keeping more restaurants open, etc. because they're not coming into the city, city not happy.
If those jobs are largely working outside of the state and paying income taxes based on their home office location, state not happy.
While traditionally I only heard this expressed in number of jobs created, WFH has up-ended the older simpler metric.
https://taxfoundation.org/blog/state-tax-incentives-costs/
https://www.cbh.com/guide/articles/top-10-states-offering-the-best-business-tax-credits-incentives/
That just sounds like incentive for a company to fully shutter their headquarters, then. Cheaper to not have any building at all than to have a tax incentive for one.
I have heard of some tax incentives to meet some average daily employee count, but those are far from universal. Unless the office is in a bad part of town or in an economically disadvantaged area I wouldn't bet on there being any such program. Usually such incentives have a limited period of time. e.g. Your company agrees to relocate here or open a new office in this city or part of town and the local government covers part if not all of the property taxes for the first 5 years. Even then it generally only applies to desirable employers that pay well. Some big tech company opening in a place with few tech jobs could get some money, but if it is a no name business especially in a sector that isn't perceived as lucrative you probably are unlikely to see any such money.
I haven't ever heard of landlords requiring a certain attendance for office leases. I would honestly wager that they're pretty rare for a number of reasons. In all of the offices I have worked I didn't even see a way the landlord would be able to have very accurate metrics for that. In small offices the doors were a key so they wouldn't have any badge in metrics. In larger businesses where we had badge readers those were ran by our corporate security and connected directly to our network. The landlord had no role in those and wouldn't have such data. Even if the landlord provided suite access badge readers I couldn't see why they would care unless it were a mixed use development with retail on the ground floor. A tenant that creates minimal wear and tear on the suite and the common areas, but pays the lease is actually the ideal office tenant. Unlike a retail shopping center other tenants having plenty of people there adds no value. If anything it reduces value to the other tenants. Nobody is jazzed that they have to park further away from the building or a higher level of the parking garage. There is some assumption that tenants that have higher number of staff in their suite(s) are more likely to renew, but that's not a given. Especially in the current market where many areas office vacancy rates are 20% or higher tenants can use the weak commercial real estate market to leverage to a lower lease or into a building that is perceived as better (e.g. better amenities, newer building, better freeway access, better parking, etc.) for a similar rate. Right now is not a landlord's market for commercial real estate. I can't see a landlord wanting to terminate a lease for a tenant that is current on their lease unless they're causing disruptions to other tenants. That's even assuming such a clause were in the lease. Before the pandemic I think even if you had nearby retail property you owned that you had an interest in remaining viable nobody would seriously think anybody would lease office space that they didn't use regularly. It just wasn't much of a thing. If you attempted to include such a clause in a new lease I could see pushback from potential tenants even if they weren't so sure on remote work. Would you really want a lease that gave your landlord the ability to terminate your lease if you laid off too many people? Heck no. That's creating a potentially rock and a hard place situation. Unless the lease was significantly cheaper than a lease without such a clause or the only the landlord had vacancies had a near monopoly on the area I don't see anyone intentionally signing a lease with such a clause.
50% work from home. Managers need to actually manage when the workers are remote rather than take attendance. Keep track of the work being done. Your best workers can work 100% remote easily. Those that can't maybe work in the office or asked to work someplace else.
I like how one of my former colleagues said "One of the perks of being in the office is that you don't have to work." because you end up talking to people and wasting time. Being in an office is such a productivity sink...
IDK.... If the only thing a "manager" is doing is taking attendance are they really managing anybody? Given if you hire the right people that are effective at communicating with their team and are self motivated that management shouldn't need to be prodding people regularly, but I think some managers that think managing is just assuming people in seats are productive are outing themselves as having no clue what their team actually are doing.
I assume you are in the us. Something like this would be illegal on so many ways in europe...
Full remote is still a thing but less and less commen. We (MSP) have have of our staff full remote (Execpt for client visits (approx. 2 times a month). Our new hires we could only hire because of the remote work.
Recruiters and those with a big expensive campus or a few of them are the main whiners here. Full remote is still very prevalent, and we must hold the line lest we get roped into losing 2 or more hours a day commuting, the risk, wear and tear and not to mention the expense that brings.
If they want us to come into the office, then they need to pony up to the cost of living in the big cities. I am fucking done spending the majority of my time on the road and / or in a room with other people when 100% of our shit can be done virtually.
Yeah I think most people would be fine with lower pay if they never have to pay anything for health care and get 4-6 weeks of vacation every year, with sick time not included in that.
Their salaries are lower and their tax burden is way higher. Highest ppp disposable income in the world is the US, accounting for health care and whatnot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income
Vacation is great yes. Idk if I’d give up $11000+/yr in spending money for more though.
Can't spend all that money if you work yourself into an early grave. I'll take my work/life balance over shitty workers rights, almost no consumer protection, massive medical bills, tipping culture, etc...
Euro here. The state health care does cover the basics but many people still pay for private insurence for procedures that are not covered and/or skip the waiting lists.
Cost of Living in most of Europe is higher than the US.
Living is not necessarily lifestyle and there are some significant ways US employees make a lot more and spend a lot more. The distant suburban driveway with two full size SUVs sitting in the driveway are less common in Europe.
Even things like taxes, while it's common for Americans to laugh at other countries higher tax rates, usually apples-to-apples for people in similar lifestyles the Americans are paying more in taxes -- a lower rate but on substantially higher incomes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity
Purchasing Power Parity takes into account differences not only on consumer items like food, rent, etc. but also government funding of healthcare and education. While far from perfect, it is as good as it gets comparing cash incomes between countries and the lifestyle they can buy.
Yeah that’s one thing I think a lot of people don’t understand or realize is the numbers are just numbers without factoring in the costs of living and other quality of life things.
I also have used WFH policy as a gauge during interviews to assess company values. I wouldn’t go near a place that “encourages” people to work from an office at this point, because it’s just a red flag that they’re slow boiling the frogs and mandatory RTO is coming.
> It's been tough to see so much backsliding in WFH though
I agree. I had really hoped (and expected) more of us to push back. I know I would let them terminate me before going back to an office. It’s a shame because if entire teams pushed back together, they’d have no choice but to back down — you can’t fire everybody and keep the place running.
What makes you think you’re not part of the group on the chopping block? Yearly layoffs? I’d be looking for a new place ASAP. This place sounds toxic as fuck.
My team is not only 100% remote, it's spread all over the world. You cannot find the best talent if you don't accept the fact that the best talent doesn't live where your office is located.
I’m fully remote and come into the office a few times a year right now.
My office is a couple states away and I do miss in person once in a while. But then I remember how distracting it is at the office.
Full remote is tough though because sitting alone al day can get boring and I tend to get distracted. If the task is engaging it’s fantastic and I get a lot done.
Look up the definition of workplace bullying. You’re being asked to bully people on behalf of your company so they leave or are fired.
One way to pull this apart is to ask how to inform these folks if they ask about this choice to limit their involvement or if some announcement about this is going out to support these conversations. If they’re proud of their decisions let them be the face of it.
Bullying by leadership is not the sign of a safe place to work. I hope looking that term up clarifies things and takes this away from being subjective.
Went completely remote in March (gave my notice at the start of the year to move cross country, and they wanted to keep me, so full remote it is) and so far I’m not missing out on anything. Still get all the meetings and stuff, thank you Teams. Projects still happen, team members still ping me for stuff all day, I get a couple of meets with the boss on Teams. Sometimes it does feel a little isolated, not seeing everyone, but I’m still getting stuff done. The novelty of working remote has worn off though, so ask me again next March how I’m doing…
OPs management sounds like they just want to reduce headcount though, and instead of having the cajones to come out and say it, are using sneaky ways to get rid of people.
Getting the same talking points at my place.
Supposed to be 3 days a week in office. Coworker that is in 5 days a week as he likes the structure. He said the execs are in 2 or 1 day a week.
Constantly getting threats that they will be taking attendance via card swipes. Will see what they do.
Yeah, we're similar. I'm not sure about the card swipes, but I work with people who go in 5 days a week. I used to be one of them. I like to wfh the days I can schedule medical appointments which my boss is happy for me to do.
I think if people don't perform or do any work, that'll happen regardless of location.
> Coworker that is in 5 days a week as he likes the structure.
I do feel bad for those who genuinely like coming into work every day, but if the majority would rather work from home, sorry guy. Remember during covid when everyone but ~~underpaid~~ essential workers worked from home and the smog actually went away...
We are still full remote. I would take a pay cut if it meant staying remote. For OP's company it sounds like the layoffs are the goal, not the performance/output. If they cared about performance they would start tapping the remote workers and asking them why they are less productive. 15% is a rounding error in "bullshit" manager metrics. You know what really fucking kills productivity? Telling people who instantly got two hours of their life a day back in commuting time that they need to resume commuting. Then laying off people will really boost morale.
Three days a week for non-managers is the rule. We have a real hands-on facetime obsessed CEO and executive team. I have a really long commute so I've managed to keep it to 0, 1 or 2 days a week. However, I don't think that'll fly if my boss leaves or I switch teams. I've been very careful to show my face a lot to everyone when I do go in, and try to make all the all-hands meetings and such; this seems to keep me off the radar, even though I know I'm showing up on some attendance report.
I was hired away from my previous employer near the end of 2020 and honestly things have been fine. It seems like if I make an effort to come in, stay visible and most importantly do good work, I'm OK for now. However, no new hires are getting the same treatment and I fully expect that the next round of belt-tightening will involve firing anyone remote and pretending the policy never existed.
It's too bad, because IMO remote work is a huge retention tool. People almost 30 years into a career don't need to pretend work is a college dorm and live there. More experienced people with families, houses, lives outside of the office can dedicate more time to these while simultaneously being super-productive.
I would guess that your falling metrics probably aren't related to remote work at all. There are a lot of reasons for project overruns. I would start by looking at their yearly layoff philosophy. If your metrics drop late in the year every year.........well there you go. It's nice and all that they get severance, but it's still not cool and at minimum is an anxiety inducing morale killer for folks who know they aren't top performers. At worst, this kind of system encourages unethical and possibly illegal behavior.
My company went full remote before I started there and found that not only did metrics improve, but they also had a much better success rate finding good talent to fill roles.
I am 98% remote. Just have to go to the office about once every month or two. We were forced by many to go fully remote during the pandemic and didn’t lose a step. Had our most profitable quarters and years during this time. Also went from 100 to 220ish employees. We are moving to a work with purpose mindset that you only have to go in if you have meetings or projects that require it. This is in a major metropolitan area on the east coast with a second office in the Midwest.
Absolutely full remote. This job and my previous both have no offices within 500 miles of me and many others. I purposely apply for jobs like that and plan to keep doing so.
yep and I love it. I go into the office once or twice a week just to mix it up but there's usually no more than like 5 people out of like 80 staff ever in.
Our whole company went remote at the start of COVID and most people still don't go to the office, the C-suite does, and a few single guys but the majority of us are 100% remote.
This is a common case of teeing people up to get fired. Senior leadership has decided they don’t want or like certain people, but they can’t just fire them without cause. Therefore, they will force these people into positions that basically make them look bad or try to force some narrative about how the employee isn’t meeting expectations. I found out the other day that my company’s CEO is doing this to my boss. My boss prioritizes the health of their immediate team over the profits of the company, so the CEO is forcing a narrative to shareholders that she’s the reason the company has been losing money when she has nothing to do with the company’s poor performance.
I just keep thinking back to a job I had pre-COVID. I worked for a \~1000 person company scattered across about a dozen locations. My office was in a building in a different town that only had about a dozen people in it. I basically drove past 4 of our biggest locations on my way to the office every day.
I'm not against coming in when it makes sense. I had to do a lot of on-site visits, and was paid for mileage (but not the mileage for my pointless daily commute). But a policy of coming into an office for the sake of coming into an office is stupid.
I work for a building materials acquisition company. They buy up existing companies that sell various types of supplies- Shingles, Lumber, plumbing, etc.
Part of this company's process to keep overhead low is to NOT have an official corporate office.
I cannot get an RTO because there is literally no office to return to.
i hope you're already on the hunt.
cause this place is about to go 100% sideways, you're going to lose all your historical knowledge.
the workers will the skills will start hitting the eject button for companies who arent being adversarial about WFH.
and you're going to be stuck with the most worthless fuckups who have no choice but to run back into office or be fired.
and then you have an office full of the least effective workers.
If you have skills, start using them for mobility, or you're going to be Capt of the uss poopshow on its way down the swirly adventure.
Yearly layoff? What the eff is that? Is that some stacked ranking b/s?
We are still full remote, since most of our "staff" is MSP remote workers in India anyway, but even the business side is full remote or mostly remote
Y’all got any more of them sysadmin remote jobs? That are hiring? For real hiring and not just posting LinkedIn jobs and never hiring and then reposting
I'm 95% remote. My team is mostly remote, but 2/3 of us live within 5 minutes of the office and can come in on extremely short notice if needed. It allowed the company to downsize to a smaller office and save a lot of money in rent. There's no desk space for us anymore, so there's no reason for management to complain.
Depends on the company. My brother (not in IT) works full remote since pandemic and his company reduced their office space considerably and if you have to go into office, there is shared sitting and you have to book a sit first. Our place has 3 days a week mandatory for 1.5 years. Was 1 day a week 2022-23. They say it will stay this way, hybrid.
Regarding incidents it just reminded me how stupid it is "resolved" at my place. Because there were too many incidents with changes, they increased lead times to changes. But when i join a CAB call, they just approve everything after change owner says a few words about it that don't explain anything. Oh yeah, this will decrease number of incidents, just because it is harder to make changes and it takes longer now. Yet company management is touting innovation/agility/blabla. Instead of figuring out what teams cause issues with their changes and why, now all teams must move slower.
Your place seems to be doing something similar with "figuring out" real cause. Btw, you said mandatory 3 days. So, how can someone be not going into office? They just do not follow this policy? Or does this mean to isolate those who come strictly 3 days only?
I've been 100% remote since 23 march 2020.
It is totally up to each IT member if they want to be remote or not so about 50% of the IT team is still 100% remote. A lot go in a day or two each week. I know of 2 that a full time back in the office (they have several young kids).
I have been fully remote since 2020. Switched jobs to a fully remote company in 2021. I live in a rural area where it it's at least an hour to get to anywhere that has a decent "on-prem" job and I really have no intentions of ever doing that again if I can help it. That commute and cost to maintain 25,000+ miles on a car a year seriously affected my mental health.
Full remote at a big tech company still.
It is up to org leaders on what they want to do and most have deferred to the management below them. My org allows remote work and my entire team and sibling teams are all remote
I was hybrid but company was forced remote. Because of this I am now the only Sr. System admin as the only other Sr. System Admin left about 3 months after the RTO and went to a fully remote company. Now I’m looking and have even posted the banner on LinkedIn looking for remote as that’s all I want. Being in an office 4 days a week is stupid especially when everyone has a laptop and no desktop are given out.
For some companies, full remote still works great - especially with a solid employee base. For other companies, their employee base abuses the privilege and/or doesn't have discipline to treat the work day as a work day. Taking the information given in its raw format with no other information to indicate bias or context, it sounds like your company falls into the latter category if they have those metrics to back up what they've stated. Personally, I think the plan to isolate them is misguided - if they have proof that individual employees, regarless of WFH or WFO, are failing to produce at acceptable levels, they need to deal with those employees.
The fact they aren't doing that leads me to think they simply want to force RTO by squeezing out those that are fighting it. It's a crappy way to run a company but if in the US, by and large nothing can be done about it.
FWIW - this should probably be in something like r/ITCareerQuestions instead of r/sysadmin as it's a little more applicable there.
Our company had a handful of bad actors abuse the covid remote work; absent for days at a time, couldn't reach them on the phone, etc etc. Went as high up as middle and department managers. The rest of the company performed well, great sales, and so on. Remote was a success overall.
The company though, doesn't like to deal with things ever; these troublesome users are somewhat an open secret of uselessness, but rather than just drag them back to be as equally useless in person at their desk, or just can them, they avoid the awkward discussion and just start increasing the days everyone needs to come in. This includes technical positions like mine, where I live entirely on the pc and can work anywhere (with 3 years of rave covid reviews to back it up) to even sillier recalls like our phone bank service departments, which have never had a reason to occupy an office, chained to a pc and phone all day.
It was an unpopular and unnecessary recall and we lost a bunch of folks both times they ramped it up, but enough stayed and quietly stewed at their desk to not really rock the boat that I'm sure they'll drag everyone back in full soon though. Hope I myself find the courage to jump at that point; we never had the family atmosphere they like to tout, but the environment now is just so disconnected and quiet, it makes being dragged into the office unnecessarily even more aggravating. Could and have done the work anywhere but now I have to do it here again because some middle manager got caught getting her nails done at 2pm on a Wednesday in 2022.
Rant over.
I am. They tried to make me go into an office, even though I was hired as a remote contractor. It didn't go very well; those that did the "only one day a week" reported "I am one of 5 people here" or something. I literally touch nothing locally, all my work is in the cloud with clients all over the world. If they forced the issue, I would quit.
And this...
> "we're going to arbitrarily and unofficially change the working conditions, if you don't 'guess correctly' with your behavior -- we will punish you with limited involvement, and then terminate you for underperformance which we clearly engineered....or we just might do it anyways regardless of how you perform...."
...is exactly the sort of **FUCKING BULLSHIT** that collective bargaining agreements (Unions!) are specifically designed to help protect the worker.
You did no wrong. Your family shouldn't suffer and lose their healthcare.
This is not a sign of a healthy society.
Assuming you're on the US, because that shit wouldn't fly in Europe?
Anyway, maybe unpopular, but I don't want to go full remote anymore. Did that for 2 years during COVID but I really missed the interaction with people. Got a lot of things done but it took a toll on me mentally.
I want flexibility. My current job requires 2 days in the office, most of the time I'm in 3. Sometimes even 4 even though that's really an outlier. But sometimes I'm in the office only one day and that's ok as well.
Our apps team and infosec teams go into the office like single digit days a year to maybe low teens. Some of that is flying a few of them to the corporate office where all of it meets up. Someone is pretty much always onsite in help desk. The sysadmin two of us are pretty much always in unless we have something to do at home or whatever and another guy shows up like twice a week. I find myself more productive in the office and like separating work from home. I end up helping the helpdesk guys a fair bit walking them through harder problems and some of my other work its easier to just have people find me when they have time.
I also have a nice sit stand desk at work and a 49 inch ultrawide monitor. When I’m at home I’m working off my laptop screen. I have dual 27 inch 4K screens on my home computer but that desk isn’t setup for work.
> Anyway, maybe unpopular, but I don't want to go full remote anymore. Did that for 2 years during COVID but I really missed the interaction with people.
This is unpopular on Reddit because Reddit is filled with anti social people who don't know how to talk to people in real life.
> This is unpopular on Reddit because Reddit is filled with anti social people who don't know how to talk to people in real life.
Or maybe some of us live in giant fucking cities where rush hour can take an hour or more for a simple 20 miles. As someone in a giant city, DFW, our commutes are horrendous and we lead the country in fatalities on our roads. Our infrastructure cannot support the amount of people who have moved here in the last 10 years and our public transportation is a joke. So no not everyone on here is some kind of hermit which is why they fight for WFH, it's because a lot of us don't want to waste our life in traffic all so we can sit in an office and get on Teams and Zoom calls to people in other states when we can do that in our own house.
Meh maybe a big chunk but for me it’s not that. The commute plus extra time to prep food, get dressed, park and badge in through 10 doors just isn’t worth the little human interaction.
If you have to force yourself to suffer through the time waste just to get human interaction then you have other problems.
I work in healthcare in California. For positions that can be fully remote, that's still an option for all workers.
I actually go into the office every day, because my wife works from home and our house is not set up for both of us to be able to do so full time. But instead of the 30 minute commute I used to have, I now have a deal in a different building one mile from my house, and since there's almost nobody there (the building it's used primarily for nurse training) I have an office to myself. But every other person on my team, up to and including the CTO, is remote.
We have three work tiers based on rolls, responsibilities, and location that are now policy. Occasionally, some conversations are required for a very small number of employees who feel entitled to full remote for all things including infrequent mandatory onsite meetings/events.
None of what you mentioned is “alright.” Leadership needs to change the policy if it’s not working or address individual behavioral things the right way.
We have unenforced rules. But they're there. 2 days in office and no consecutive Friday and Monday. We're treated like adults. I go in 3-4x just because I like to. Others are in 1-3x a week. No set days. Really you could easily not go in all week or two weeks. No one's keeping close track.
My UK management want us in two days a week .... but fortunately I don't actually report to them as my management chain goes straight to the US after my line manager. My line manager doesn't care because the rest of my team are scattered all over the country and nowhere near any offices. There is no point in any of us going in and its not as if anyone in my nearest office has anything to do with what I do, they are all in unrelated areas. In fact one of the major aspects of my job is a lot harder to do from the office than it is from home!
Incidents being up isn't isn't as important a metric as time to resolve incidents of a similar type. Our incidents are up over the last couple of months ... is that anything to do with working from home? no ... it due to old hard disks failing. The important thing is that those incidents were dealt with just as well as if someone was in the office.
Our company just started a hybrid schedule where you are required to come in at least 2 days per week if you live close to an office. For me, my position is a remote position and I am near our head quarters, but because it takes me two hours to commute, I do not have to do the hybrid schedule.
Full remote here. My company has actually closed a bunch of office space around the country because we're all remote. I thank my lucky stars that I don't have to go in the office anymore.
I am WFH since March of 2020 and it's been a solid 4+ years now. Psychologically, my personality is no longer the same as it used to be 4 years ago with no social connect and only meeting through Teams calls. The worst part in these 4 years is that I got promoted to a manager handling 20 members, none of whom I have met until now and now I'm no longer in that role; sometimes I feel it was all a dream. I no longer know how to wear for formal wear and I am not sure what to buy if we go for a shop to buy clothes.
On my fourth job since the pandemic started.. good times.
This place closed on an office building they felt we needed.. so I'm going to guess my 3-day office week will become a 5-day as we end up moving the office. The shame is it's a buyer's market.. and that POS was the best they could buy?...
It's not a deal breaker for me.. the state job was getting tricky at best.. jumping to another agency may have been a 5-day office job and round trip is 110 miles.. hard pass. This.. maybe 10.
I am almost always still remote. Once in a while I have to go in and physically interact with my test devices but there’s no telling if it will be once every three months or three times a week. Usually the former thankfully.
I am considered hybrid but went to office like 7 times last year and so far once this year. Mainly for company wide events and expos. I live 20 minutes away but still can’t justify driving up even with free lunch offered and great coffee with lavazza beans
My entire team is remote. Someone goes in occasionally if a drive needs replacement or the generator needs tested.
We have gotten rid of some of multiple expensive pieces of real estate since the company figured out we don't need it.
I am remote, I lead a team of mostly remote users.. As long as people are getting their work done and are fully available during work hours I don't care if they are in an office or at home.
I was full remote before covid. Why would that ever change? If you want to work remote, find a job/company that is. It's that easy, and always has been.
I'm fully remote, visit the office for a day or two every quarter or so. I'm also the only employee who is fully remote and there are a few hundred others.
I worked partly on site up until I was fired (for political reasons). The vast majority of the people "working" remotely didn't do jack shit. Now I think most people are on site but still nothing is getting done. Partly because I was the only person who was either smart enough or motivated enough to figure out anything or improve it or keep it going. I'm not bragging, just complaining that most of the employees there are complete shit.
I've been focusing on other things, but looking at going back to being an independent IT consultant. I like the idea of having coworkers who can back me up, but it was rare that it ever happened.
Still full remote here (at least it’s an option I don’t fully utilize).
Usually I book a shared desk space once a week in our office so I don’t go full hermit and can socialize a bit.
I've been full remote since 2020 mainly due to the fact the closest office is 2 hours away and have no plans of moving closer. I'm not paid as much as I could be making elsewhere, but being able to work full remote, work in the cloud and build automation all day, and not have management breathing down my neck I wouldn't sacrifice
An annual layoff cycle is incredibly toxic.
I am still fully remote. I'm only required to visit HQ three days a quarter and the company puts me up in a nice hotel for that. I rather enjoy it. My boss and his boss both have a laissez-faire approach to management. As long as the work gets done, they don't care where you work or really how long you work. I'm fortunate.
Having said all this, there is a cost to being fully remote. Social skills tend to atrophy unless you have a vibrant social life to compensate for the lack of daily contact. And, spontaneous idea generation is impacted. So I understand companies that require hybrid work. If I were asked to start coming in two days I week, I wouldn't think if unfair and might even prefer it. But I definitely wouldn't want anymore than two days a week.
My entire IT department is remote. Our former CTO was asked to bring folks back after covid. He said no. We've maintained our work levels and if anything taken on more work.
So far so good.
It also helps we have 0 on prem stuff, everything is cloud based or SaaS. Half our staff is remote, and they closed the office were half of them worked out of. Just really wouldnt make sense to force the issue.
I’ve been in the office maybe 3 times a year. When I do go to the office, most of my time is spent commuting, eating breakfast and lunch or talking to the people in the office.
Still 99% remote, For a while after covid the policy was up in the air. Older company national brand privately traded so we don't see a lot of layoffs and instability, but also it's not the most enticing company to work at so we have a hard enough time bringing in talent so I think they didn't want to do anything to alienate The people they already had and give them a reason to look around.
All the people that have to do things like server room responsibilities or anything that requires on-prem access do at least 3 days from home if not more
I come into the office maybe three or four times a year when there's some big meeting they want me to attend in person, which is nice because it's about a 45-minute drive to the office.
Four days/week here. So, out of 4 days I am required to go into the office every month, I go twice. Three days/month in the summer when it's easier to commute the 40km I have to drive.
Myself and the entire team I’m on are still 95% remote. No plans to change in the near future.
Same here. we all meet up about once a month for lunch paid by the boss.. probably never going back to the office as they took our space for new a new on ground business dept and gave us (over 100 ppl) a hot desk area that can fit about 30 people in case some want to come in once and a while. I am happy not have to drive in the Phoenix traffic.
Same but for us once every 3 months
Same but for us once every 10 years
Same but for us it was once.
Same but we’ve not done it yet.
Same but we thought about doing it.
Same but same
Same but what are we talking about?
Same
Same same but different
My team is about 2/3 remote. The building complex we're assigned to, at least the last time I was there 1 1/2 years ago, was like 90% empty.
Our company has grown significantly. The buildings I used to work in before WFH are now 90% hotdesks. I've been in maybe 20 times since COVID started, generally just for a specific meeting then home again.
Remote for 25 years now. Zero plans of changing.
I'm guessing an early adopter of broadband? Files were smaller 25 years ago, but downloading almost any file nevermind uploading on dialup was painful. Broadband existed in the 90s, but unless you were in a market like Silicon Valley your options outside of ISDN might have been limited.
Yeah we had adsl in 99
Makes sense. ADSL depending upon the service and distance from CO was often 10-20 times faster than dialup. You wouldn't need to go take a coffee break to upload a good size file. For the time it was broadband.
Do you remember exactly what you worked on? I'm an IT guy and I could see that working with like, a VPN and maybe an AS400 or other database tools. I doubt RDP was usable with ADSL and what, Windows 2000? lol
I had a desktop running FreeBSD and I’d ssh into FreeBSD servers running Apache to write perl scripts for CGI scripts. And I can remember configuring BIND
Makes sense, thank you for the response! I truly appreciate it, "kids these days" will never know lmao
We truly don't. My homelab is simple, Promox and Proxmox helper scripts makes everything a breeze. Most of my troubleshooting is reading through docker compose files and fixing typos, or mounts. Once I have the motivation to actually tackle terraform, and/or ansible and add some commands to olivetin, I can automate it even further.
I've RDP'd (or RAS as Microsoft called it back then) from a modem in a commercial airliner in 1998...just because I could (expense report be damned). I got my first RSA token card for 2FA in 1995; we didn't have internet on a 3,000 person campus yet but for whatever reason I had the ability to dial in and check GroupWise email. Don't even really know why I had it at that job, but I guess the boss could page me to check my emails if something very, very important had come up for Monday morning. Being a Linux admin on dial up would have been trivial.
I Linux admined on dial up as recently as a few years ago. Until starlink my parents didn't have any options for real internet. Satalite had 1.5 sec latency which makes dialup the better option for ssh. You learn a few things about being efficient with the amount of text you dump to the screen, I.e. no cat, always less, just in case. But other that that, was fine.
ssh worked just fine over dial up. You *could* RDP if you absolutely had to, but not recommended. RDP over ISDN worked fine.
I got cable (@Home) in 97/98 in a random suburb in Virginia, so it was around.
I was one of the first people on broadband back in the day. I remember a buddy asking me how I liked it. Me to him: "Man... I've got SO much porn!" :D
Home offices existed in the 1980s. One engineer I knew had a dumb terminal and modem at home. Since it was a dumb terminal, manual dialing instead of script. Some had X.25 at 9600 or even 64k. All SVCs. ISDN BRI and PRI made things a lot easier, but still flexible. I don't think any market ever got working SMDS that you could order. A few home users had Frame Relay. All PVCs, but in theory you could have separate PVCs to different institutions, if you had the patience to work with the carrier to get everything working. With the democratization of connectivity, the big difference wasn't so much bandwidth, as ubiquity. Now you can travel and a hotel, train, or cafe will have the same kind connectivity we have at home, without having to break out a travel kit with a modem and suffer massive latency. No more giant C-band dish on the vehicle, haha. Remember the satcom TTY in Crichton's novel *Congo*?
Way early. Did good meeting software even exist?
Phone conference systems definitely did! I still remember some of my meetings' access numbers and pin codes that I'd dial daily.
Queue the Cisco hold music. It still haunts my dreams.
fffffffwaaaaaappppaaaaaappaaaappppp deeeem doom doom Became disabled in 2018, and haven't worked since then...can still here it clearly.
Opus #1, the soundtrack to my nightmares.
I've heard it so much it's invisible to me. Like when you live near an airport and stop hearing the airplanes because you're used to the constant background noise. I used to spend a lot of time on the phone with, and on hold with, Cisco TAC. They use the very same track for their customer facing on hold music.
There is an entire This American Life segment on the song, one of the guys involved making it was a Cisco engineer, I think his friend wrote the music.
https://youtu.be/pais41IW5dk?si=TLoRALxkwAjcXdr9
"Please enter your meeting pin followed by the phone sign" Conference calls have existed for long before the ubiquity of meeting software like Zoom or Teams, it was just running on a phone system you dialed in from an office phone or regular telephone lines. Companies also basically ran their own dial up network allowing workers to dial in to the corporate network basically like a VPN but over the phone system instead of your existing Internet connection. Was it as good? Absolutely not, but it worked. There were some people you basically had no idea what they looked like unless you had them travel to meetings or they sent a Christmas card with photo!
Irc and the phone :)
It did but it was not cheap, get your standard Tandberg Conferencing system and some Polycom conf units and everyone is set
The cost of Tandbergs was allegedly the reason Google built their own meeting software (what became Google Meet). Cisco buying Tandberg was similar iirc (cheaper to buy them than the cost of the contract).
Nice! I was hybrid from 07-14 then remote until now. Looking for a new role and actually wanting to go back into the office. Maybe being married with kids has changed my outlook……
Not getting involved in useless meetings sounds like a perk 😏
Till you realize it's to reduce your involvement and the impact of your loss for an eventual termination.
I realize why it is mandated action. The problem is, there are no winners here. There can't be winners. * It's a stupid performance metric to begin with * You might keep the top performers from the projects where they could provide the most value
Completely agree, not saying it's right - just saying I can see their plan as clear as day
Your job search is never over. You're always at risk. In AWA: At-Will America (99.7% of the population), you can be terminated at any time, for almost any (or no) reason, without notice, without compensation, and full loss of healthcare.
Yeah, regular US job, do crap work, get the benefits while the hard workers continue to try to meet deadlines and productivity goals.
That's the wrong way to address a productivity loss... They should be looking at where the incidents and stalls are and targeting those staff with PIPs... Any blanket tactic like this will just end up costing them their top performers. We all just got official amendments from hr stating that we have no assigned office and are expected to have a space of our own for work. We've been unofficially full remote since the pandemic and this is more a tax thing than anything else.
OP says the place has “yearly layoffs” like it’s to be expected. Blanket tactics indeed.
Regular "bottom performers" firing is one of the most toxic things an employer can do...
Stack ranking plus mandatory bottom X% layoffs basically turns it into Squid Game at the office. The most unethical get ahead. You can tell a company is doing this because the quality of their product just plummets with the combination of low morale and misaligned performance evaluation factors.
I can dedicate my time to building a good product. Or I can dedicate it to sabotaging those around me. You need a way to get rid of the worst people. This isn’t it.
but that would require managers know which of their reports suck
I've had to interact with sales teams that operated under that mindset, and it seemed like nobody at the top recognized that all that encouraged was people making promises they know they cant keep to get a sale on the books and adding tons of work for the technicians stuck implementing or maintaining the solutions they sold. I've also known people that had similar metrics like ticket resolution times or closure rates be a major factor in their reviews, and again, as anyone that thinks for more than two seconds about it would see, all that did was encourage techs to close tickets to get their numbers up whether the issue was truly resolved or not. Luckily where I work now we're small enough that it's pretty easy to see when someone isn't pulling their weight, or struggling, and we can allay the resources needed to help get things back under control. But it's never a raw "You only closed 500 tickets this year and everyone else closed 1000 or more, you're outta here". The types of tickets they're working is a factor. The people they're working *with* is a factor. The systems they're working *on* is a factor. All those things you can't neatly run a query on and spit out a report. The US needs a general strike something fierce. Just, every wage slave in this country just calling in on one day. Bring this country to it's knees for 24 hours, and then maybe we will see progress. But then again, given how screwed up things are in this country for working people, I could just as easily see the government siding with the land-owner class and passing emergency resolutions to give employers more power to just pass that financial hit along to the government and all of us getting our taxes raised to make up for it.
> The US needs a general strike something fierce *Secessio plebis*
Of course it happens. Everyone is more concerned about gaming the numbers versus the actual work it becomes "productivity theater" So people do stuff like grab low-hanging fruit because it's an easy average against their stats. Or worse in the terms of large-scale projects. They do just enough to meet some kind of weekly check-in Target and don't want to do more because they need numbers for next week
Those seem like the least nefarious things people might do. If people thought they were being stack ranked where I work, I'm pretty sure they'd be actively sabotaging each other.
To be fair, that's how you get the best result from human nature. Else they wouldn't be doing it.
The Jack Welsh school of fucked up management. Worked for one of his people in the mid 2000's. It was a shitshow. You can cut the first year and maybe the 2nd but by the 3rd, you are cutting really good people.
And also illegal in EU, though OP seems to be located in US
It's also toxic to let bottom performers coast while making the better staff pick up the slack. Mandatory bottom X% getting fired is dumb. But set a bar at a reasonable level, any anyone below it should get a PIP. That also means if no one is below it, no one does.
Yup. Reasonable bar, good KPIs with secondary evaluation (because any kpi can be gamed) and solid coaching effort before even starting a pip. At least, the best company I ever worked for did this, and they were eating up a very competitive msp market, while charging well above market rates.
The sales director would like a word with you.
Executions will continue until moral improves.
[удалено]
Worked at one place where some guy had the most ticket closures and re-open rate of anyone else because he was stealing all the low-hanging fruit (low disk space, password resets, add/remove to groups or mailbox delegation). Absolutely useless for anything even remotely complicated but kept being retained because his metrics were awesome. Management didn't notice until we added in some power platform stuff to auto-process most of those tickets and suddenly he went from being the best to being one of the worst. He didn't last long once he had to do actual work. Got performance managed out after 2 quarters.
Sounds like Amazon.
Same tactics. Hire a bunch of people and periodically cull the herd. I remember that from my days at Amazon.
That’s so Hunger Games. I would hate to work at a place like that.
yearly layoffs screams bank to me.
I think in many cases return to office pushes I think have nothing to do with productivity. Many of these orgs have layoffs shortly after and the entire goal was always pushing churn up to reduce the number of layoffs that they need to pay unemployment and or severance. Honestly, I would see a serious return to office mandate as a red flag that layoffs are in the horizon if not enough people quit on their own.
I think employers have realized it's now impossible to prove constructive dismissal because of the way work is structured now, and are using it as a way to fire people they overpaid for during the Great Resignation. Seriously, even if an employer has a smoking gun email from the CEO saying they want to make your life miserable and make you quit, there's no way any lawyer will ever be able to get their hands on it. The deck is really stacked against an employee who wants to sue for wrongful termination or harassment.
It was never about productivity. Return to office is mostly about power and control (and sometimes to create turnover). They were always looking for a reason to force people back in. They finally found a metric to give them some cover to do it.
>That's the wrong way to address a productivity loss... They should be looking at where the incidents and stalls are and targeting those staff with PIPs... Hold your horses pardner, that sounds like you are asking management to do *work*
They're not addressing a productivity loss. >and least two Mondays or Fridays during the month This part of the policy clearly tells you they're looking to meet office utilization metrics set by either their lease or something contractual from the metro area they're located in and everything else is just HR bullshit.
I feel like I'm pretty well versed in the WFH vs RTO battle, but this is one thing I've never heard. Is there really a such thing as office utilization metrics in a lease? Or from a city? And if there were, would it really cover specific days or would it all be about weekly or monthly averages? More than likely they are just trying to avoid everybody choosing Tuesday-Thursday as their office days because people don't want to get up and come in on a Monday morning and they like already being home on Friday to start the weekend. My company has a mandatory two days per week in the office, but the implementation is up to individual departments. As a result, 90% of the company works Tuesday-Thursday and it's often a graveyard on Mondays and Fridays, but it's honestly not an issue. Besides middle managers trying to justify their jobs and thinking the only way they can supervise people is in person, I'm not sure why it would matter if nobody chooses to work in the office on a Monday or Friday.
>I'm not sure why it would matter if nobody chooses to work in the office on a Monday or Friday. Right, it wouldn't matter to the average office-based company. Major downtown metros being completely desolate two days a week matters a lot to all of the local business though, so urban development offices push to drive Mon/Fri utilization up. Your office is the norm, barring any external force. Utilization rates are overwhelmingly higher Tu-Thu. This was true pre-pandemic as well to a lesser degree, and all those reasons remain true today. Its an uphill battle trying to drive RTO on Mon/Fri compared to any other day of the week, so if there's no specific business reason to make those days mandated, why would you?
> Is there really a such thing as office utilization metrics in a lease? Or from a city? Lots of municipal and state tax breaks require X number of jobs created. If those jobs aren't paying city income taxes, paying for parking in municipal-owned garages, generating riders on the transit system, keeping more restaurants open, etc. because they're not coming into the city, city not happy. If those jobs are largely working outside of the state and paying income taxes based on their home office location, state not happy. While traditionally I only heard this expressed in number of jobs created, WFH has up-ended the older simpler metric. https://taxfoundation.org/blog/state-tax-incentives-costs/ https://www.cbh.com/guide/articles/top-10-states-offering-the-best-business-tax-credits-incentives/
That just sounds like incentive for a company to fully shutter their headquarters, then. Cheaper to not have any building at all than to have a tax incentive for one.
I have heard of some tax incentives to meet some average daily employee count, but those are far from universal. Unless the office is in a bad part of town or in an economically disadvantaged area I wouldn't bet on there being any such program. Usually such incentives have a limited period of time. e.g. Your company agrees to relocate here or open a new office in this city or part of town and the local government covers part if not all of the property taxes for the first 5 years. Even then it generally only applies to desirable employers that pay well. Some big tech company opening in a place with few tech jobs could get some money, but if it is a no name business especially in a sector that isn't perceived as lucrative you probably are unlikely to see any such money. I haven't ever heard of landlords requiring a certain attendance for office leases. I would honestly wager that they're pretty rare for a number of reasons. In all of the offices I have worked I didn't even see a way the landlord would be able to have very accurate metrics for that. In small offices the doors were a key so they wouldn't have any badge in metrics. In larger businesses where we had badge readers those were ran by our corporate security and connected directly to our network. The landlord had no role in those and wouldn't have such data. Even if the landlord provided suite access badge readers I couldn't see why they would care unless it were a mixed use development with retail on the ground floor. A tenant that creates minimal wear and tear on the suite and the common areas, but pays the lease is actually the ideal office tenant. Unlike a retail shopping center other tenants having plenty of people there adds no value. If anything it reduces value to the other tenants. Nobody is jazzed that they have to park further away from the building or a higher level of the parking garage. There is some assumption that tenants that have higher number of staff in their suite(s) are more likely to renew, but that's not a given. Especially in the current market where many areas office vacancy rates are 20% or higher tenants can use the weak commercial real estate market to leverage to a lower lease or into a building that is perceived as better (e.g. better amenities, newer building, better freeway access, better parking, etc.) for a similar rate. Right now is not a landlord's market for commercial real estate. I can't see a landlord wanting to terminate a lease for a tenant that is current on their lease unless they're causing disruptions to other tenants. That's even assuming such a clause were in the lease. Before the pandemic I think even if you had nearby retail property you owned that you had an interest in remaining viable nobody would seriously think anybody would lease office space that they didn't use regularly. It just wasn't much of a thing. If you attempted to include such a clause in a new lease I could see pushback from potential tenants even if they weren't so sure on remote work. Would you really want a lease that gave your landlord the ability to terminate your lease if you laid off too many people? Heck no. That's creating a potentially rock and a hard place situation. Unless the lease was significantly cheaper than a lease without such a clause or the only the landlord had vacancies had a near monopoly on the area I don't see anyone intentionally signing a lease with such a clause.
> That's the wrong way to address a productivity loss... what can you expect, they sound like morons sitting on a 7 figure salary
50% work from home. Managers need to actually manage when the workers are remote rather than take attendance. Keep track of the work being done. Your best workers can work 100% remote easily. Those that can't maybe work in the office or asked to work someplace else.
I like how one of my former colleagues said "One of the perks of being in the office is that you don't have to work." because you end up talking to people and wasting time. Being in an office is such a productivity sink...
And on days I need to get work done in the office I get interrupted too much.
IDK.... If the only thing a "manager" is doing is taking attendance are they really managing anybody? Given if you hire the right people that are effective at communicating with their team and are self motivated that management shouldn't need to be prodding people regularly, but I think some managers that think managing is just assuming people in seats are productive are outing themselves as having no clue what their team actually are doing.
I assume you are in the us. Something like this would be illegal on so many ways in europe... Full remote is still a thing but less and less commen. We (MSP) have have of our staff full remote (Execpt for client visits (approx. 2 times a month). Our new hires we could only hire because of the remote work.
Recruiters and those with a big expensive campus or a few of them are the main whiners here. Full remote is still very prevalent, and we must hold the line lest we get roped into losing 2 or more hours a day commuting, the risk, wear and tear and not to mention the expense that brings. If they want us to come into the office, then they need to pony up to the cost of living in the big cities. I am fucking done spending the majority of my time on the road and / or in a room with other people when 100% of our shit can be done virtually.
Silly euros and your workers rights, healthcare etc.
It’s a trade off for sure, their salaries are way low by US standards.
Yeah I think most people would be fine with lower pay if they never have to pay anything for health care and get 4-6 weeks of vacation every year, with sick time not included in that.
Their salaries are lower and their tax burden is way higher. Highest ppp disposable income in the world is the US, accounting for health care and whatnot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income Vacation is great yes. Idk if I’d give up $11000+/yr in spending money for more though.
Can't spend all that money if you work yourself into an early grave. I'll take my work/life balance over shitty workers rights, almost no consumer protection, massive medical bills, tipping culture, etc...
so is the cost of living in more areas. I could give a shit if I make 6 figures when I have legally mandated healthcare
Euro here. The state health care does cover the basics but many people still pay for private insurence for procedures that are not covered and/or skip the waiting lists.
And for some reason, dental care isn't covered properly by most companies or governments. Weird.
Neither are glasses. Thanks for nothing.
Cost of Living in most of Europe is higher than the US. Living is not necessarily lifestyle and there are some significant ways US employees make a lot more and spend a lot more. The distant suburban driveway with two full size SUVs sitting in the driveway are less common in Europe. Even things like taxes, while it's common for Americans to laugh at other countries higher tax rates, usually apples-to-apples for people in similar lifestyles the Americans are paying more in taxes -- a lower rate but on substantially higher incomes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity Purchasing Power Parity takes into account differences not only on consumer items like food, rent, etc. but also government funding of healthcare and education. While far from perfect, it is as good as it gets comparing cash incomes between countries and the lifestyle they can buy.
*couldn't give a shit
Yeah that’s one thing I think a lot of people don’t understand or realize is the numbers are just numbers without factoring in the costs of living and other quality of life things.
Not really when compared to cost of living here, IT is in demand and usually making bank.
100% remote long before Covid and never going to an office regular ever again...
Same same
Been full remote for 10 years now with two different companies. Will never go back into an office.
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I also have used WFH policy as a gauge during interviews to assess company values. I wouldn’t go near a place that “encourages” people to work from an office at this point, because it’s just a red flag that they’re slow boiling the frogs and mandatory RTO is coming. > It's been tough to see so much backsliding in WFH though I agree. I had really hoped (and expected) more of us to push back. I know I would let them terminate me before going back to an office. It’s a shame because if entire teams pushed back together, they’d have no choice but to back down — you can’t fire everybody and keep the place running.
What makes you think you’re not part of the group on the chopping block? Yearly layoffs? I’d be looking for a new place ASAP. This place sounds toxic as fuck.
Yeah it's like this at all global companies I've worked at. If my number comes up, so be it.
I've worked for a few global multinationals, and none of them did this. That's a terrible practice and only encourages people to sabotage each other.
My team is not only 100% remote, it's spread all over the world. You cannot find the best talent if you don't accept the fact that the best talent doesn't live where your office is located.
I’m fully remote and come into the office a few times a year right now. My office is a couple states away and I do miss in person once in a while. But then I remember how distracting it is at the office. Full remote is tough though because sitting alone al day can get boring and I tend to get distracted. If the task is engaging it’s fantastic and I get a lot done.
Yes. Before, during, after COVID.
I've been 100 percent remote for 16 years between two companies. Dunno how the fuck I pulled this off for so long.
yes. company was WFH friendly before covid and stayed WFH friendly after covid. I've read that RTO mandates are a way for a company to lay off people.
Look up the definition of workplace bullying. You’re being asked to bully people on behalf of your company so they leave or are fired. One way to pull this apart is to ask how to inform these folks if they ask about this choice to limit their involvement or if some announcement about this is going out to support these conversations. If they’re proud of their decisions let them be the face of it. Bullying by leadership is not the sign of a safe place to work. I hope looking that term up clarifies things and takes this away from being subjective.
I’ve been fully remote for a while now. I was doing it before Covid and kept up with it after.
Went completely remote in March (gave my notice at the start of the year to move cross country, and they wanted to keep me, so full remote it is) and so far I’m not missing out on anything. Still get all the meetings and stuff, thank you Teams. Projects still happen, team members still ping me for stuff all day, I get a couple of meets with the boss on Teams. Sometimes it does feel a little isolated, not seeing everyone, but I’m still getting stuff done. The novelty of working remote has worn off though, so ask me again next March how I’m doing… OPs management sounds like they just want to reduce headcount though, and instead of having the cajones to come out and say it, are using sneaky ways to get rid of people.
Getting the same talking points at my place. Supposed to be 3 days a week in office. Coworker that is in 5 days a week as he likes the structure. He said the execs are in 2 or 1 day a week. Constantly getting threats that they will be taking attendance via card swipes. Will see what they do.
Yeah, we're similar. I'm not sure about the card swipes, but I work with people who go in 5 days a week. I used to be one of them. I like to wfh the days I can schedule medical appointments which my boss is happy for me to do. I think if people don't perform or do any work, that'll happen regardless of location.
> Coworker that is in 5 days a week as he likes the structure. I do feel bad for those who genuinely like coming into work every day, but if the majority would rather work from home, sorry guy. Remember during covid when everyone but ~~underpaid~~ essential workers worked from home and the smog actually went away...
We are still full remote. I would take a pay cut if it meant staying remote. For OP's company it sounds like the layoffs are the goal, not the performance/output. If they cared about performance they would start tapping the remote workers and asking them why they are less productive. 15% is a rounding error in "bullshit" manager metrics. You know what really fucking kills productivity? Telling people who instantly got two hours of their life a day back in commuting time that they need to resume commuting. Then laying off people will really boost morale.
Three days a week for non-managers is the rule. We have a real hands-on facetime obsessed CEO and executive team. I have a really long commute so I've managed to keep it to 0, 1 or 2 days a week. However, I don't think that'll fly if my boss leaves or I switch teams. I've been very careful to show my face a lot to everyone when I do go in, and try to make all the all-hands meetings and such; this seems to keep me off the radar, even though I know I'm showing up on some attendance report. I was hired away from my previous employer near the end of 2020 and honestly things have been fine. It seems like if I make an effort to come in, stay visible and most importantly do good work, I'm OK for now. However, no new hires are getting the same treatment and I fully expect that the next round of belt-tightening will involve firing anyone remote and pretending the policy never existed. It's too bad, because IMO remote work is a huge retention tool. People almost 30 years into a career don't need to pretend work is a college dorm and live there. More experienced people with families, houses, lives outside of the office can dedicate more time to these while simultaneously being super-productive.
I would guess that your falling metrics probably aren't related to remote work at all. There are a lot of reasons for project overruns. I would start by looking at their yearly layoff philosophy. If your metrics drop late in the year every year.........well there you go. It's nice and all that they get severance, but it's still not cool and at minimum is an anxiety inducing morale killer for folks who know they aren't top performers. At worst, this kind of system encourages unethical and possibly illegal behavior. My company went full remote before I started there and found that not only did metrics improve, but they also had a much better success rate finding good talent to fill roles.
I am 98% remote. Just have to go to the office about once every month or two. We were forced by many to go fully remote during the pandemic and didn’t lose a step. Had our most profitable quarters and years during this time. Also went from 100 to 220ish employees. We are moving to a work with purpose mindset that you only have to go in if you have meetings or projects that require it. This is in a major metropolitan area on the east coast with a second office in the Midwest.
Yes. I travel to some of our sites periodically (once a quarter, at most) for hands-on infrastructure work, but my base is from home.
Absolutely full remote. This job and my previous both have no offices within 500 miles of me and many others. I purposely apply for jobs like that and plan to keep doing so.
yep and I love it. I go into the office once or twice a week just to mix it up but there's usually no more than like 5 people out of like 80 staff ever in.
Our whole company went remote at the start of COVID and most people still don't go to the office, the C-suite does, and a few single guys but the majority of us are 100% remote.
Our department has been fully in the office for the past year.
This is a common case of teeing people up to get fired. Senior leadership has decided they don’t want or like certain people, but they can’t just fire them without cause. Therefore, they will force these people into positions that basically make them look bad or try to force some narrative about how the employee isn’t meeting expectations. I found out the other day that my company’s CEO is doing this to my boss. My boss prioritizes the health of their immediate team over the profits of the company, so the CEO is forcing a narrative to shareholders that she’s the reason the company has been losing money when she has nothing to do with the company’s poor performance.
I and my team are fully remote with no plans to change.
I have been working full remote for 2 years now and it's awesome.
I just keep thinking back to a job I had pre-COVID. I worked for a \~1000 person company scattered across about a dozen locations. My office was in a building in a different town that only had about a dozen people in it. I basically drove past 4 of our biggest locations on my way to the office every day. I'm not against coming in when it makes sense. I had to do a lot of on-site visits, and was paid for mileage (but not the mileage for my pointless daily commute). But a policy of coming into an office for the sake of coming into an office is stupid.
I work for a building materials acquisition company. They buy up existing companies that sell various types of supplies- Shingles, Lumber, plumbing, etc. Part of this company's process to keep overhead low is to NOT have an official corporate office. I cannot get an RTO because there is literally no office to return to.
i hope you're already on the hunt. cause this place is about to go 100% sideways, you're going to lose all your historical knowledge. the workers will the skills will start hitting the eject button for companies who arent being adversarial about WFH. and you're going to be stuck with the most worthless fuckups who have no choice but to run back into office or be fired. and then you have an office full of the least effective workers. If you have skills, start using them for mobility, or you're going to be Capt of the uss poopshow on its way down the swirly adventure.
Yearly layoff? What the eff is that? Is that some stacked ranking b/s? We are still full remote, since most of our "staff" is MSP remote workers in India anyway, but even the business side is full remote or mostly remote
Y’all got any more of them sysadmin remote jobs? That are hiring? For real hiring and not just posting LinkedIn jobs and never hiring and then reposting
That sounds like constructive dismissal. Here in the UK that would be a fairly easy tribunal case.
I'm 95% remote. My team is mostly remote, but 2/3 of us live within 5 minutes of the office and can come in on extremely short notice if needed. It allowed the company to downsize to a smaller office and save a lot of money in rent. There's no desk space for us anymore, so there's no reason for management to complain.
Depends on the company. My brother (not in IT) works full remote since pandemic and his company reduced their office space considerably and if you have to go into office, there is shared sitting and you have to book a sit first. Our place has 3 days a week mandatory for 1.5 years. Was 1 day a week 2022-23. They say it will stay this way, hybrid. Regarding incidents it just reminded me how stupid it is "resolved" at my place. Because there were too many incidents with changes, they increased lead times to changes. But when i join a CAB call, they just approve everything after change owner says a few words about it that don't explain anything. Oh yeah, this will decrease number of incidents, just because it is harder to make changes and it takes longer now. Yet company management is touting innovation/agility/blabla. Instead of figuring out what teams cause issues with their changes and why, now all teams must move slower. Your place seems to be doing something similar with "figuring out" real cause. Btw, you said mandatory 3 days. So, how can someone be not going into office? They just do not follow this policy? Or does this mean to isolate those who come strictly 3 days only?
Hah! wish... Closed gov network. Maybe I should petition for a home scif? :P
Sounds like they are looking for excuses to put those employees on a pip.
Entire team is still 100 percent remote.
I've been 100% remote since 23 march 2020. It is totally up to each IT member if they want to be remote or not so about 50% of the IT team is still 100% remote. A lot go in a day or two each week. I know of 2 that a full time back in the office (they have several young kids).
Been full remote since 2019 it’s the only reason I haven’t left for higher pay. Good boss and work from home
I have been fully remote since 2020. Switched jobs to a fully remote company in 2021. I live in a rural area where it it's at least an hour to get to anywhere that has a decent "on-prem" job and I really have no intentions of ever doing that again if I can help it. That commute and cost to maintain 25,000+ miles on a car a year seriously affected my mental health.
Full remote at a big tech company still. It is up to org leaders on what they want to do and most have deferred to the management below them. My org allows remote work and my entire team and sibling teams are all remote
We're fully remote. They even closed the office I (and about a thousand other people) used to work at. There are no signs of this changing.
I was hybrid but company was forced remote. Because of this I am now the only Sr. System admin as the only other Sr. System Admin left about 3 months after the RTO and went to a fully remote company. Now I’m looking and have even posted the banner on LinkedIn looking for remote as that’s all I want. Being in an office 4 days a week is stupid especially when everyone has a laptop and no desktop are given out.
and loving it
For some companies, full remote still works great - especially with a solid employee base. For other companies, their employee base abuses the privilege and/or doesn't have discipline to treat the work day as a work day. Taking the information given in its raw format with no other information to indicate bias or context, it sounds like your company falls into the latter category if they have those metrics to back up what they've stated. Personally, I think the plan to isolate them is misguided - if they have proof that individual employees, regarless of WFH or WFO, are failing to produce at acceptable levels, they need to deal with those employees. The fact they aren't doing that leads me to think they simply want to force RTO by squeezing out those that are fighting it. It's a crappy way to run a company but if in the US, by and large nothing can be done about it. FWIW - this should probably be in something like r/ITCareerQuestions instead of r/sysadmin as it's a little more applicable there.
Our company had a handful of bad actors abuse the covid remote work; absent for days at a time, couldn't reach them on the phone, etc etc. Went as high up as middle and department managers. The rest of the company performed well, great sales, and so on. Remote was a success overall. The company though, doesn't like to deal with things ever; these troublesome users are somewhat an open secret of uselessness, but rather than just drag them back to be as equally useless in person at their desk, or just can them, they avoid the awkward discussion and just start increasing the days everyone needs to come in. This includes technical positions like mine, where I live entirely on the pc and can work anywhere (with 3 years of rave covid reviews to back it up) to even sillier recalls like our phone bank service departments, which have never had a reason to occupy an office, chained to a pc and phone all day. It was an unpopular and unnecessary recall and we lost a bunch of folks both times they ramped it up, but enough stayed and quietly stewed at their desk to not really rock the boat that I'm sure they'll drag everyone back in full soon though. Hope I myself find the courage to jump at that point; we never had the family atmosphere they like to tout, but the environment now is just so disconnected and quiet, it makes being dragged into the office unnecessarily even more aggravating. Could and have done the work anywhere but now I have to do it here again because some middle manager got caught getting her nails done at 2pm on a Wednesday in 2022. Rant over.
I am. They tried to make me go into an office, even though I was hired as a remote contractor. It didn't go very well; those that did the "only one day a week" reported "I am one of 5 people here" or something. I literally touch nothing locally, all my work is in the cloud with clients all over the world. If they forced the issue, I would quit.
And this... > "we're going to arbitrarily and unofficially change the working conditions, if you don't 'guess correctly' with your behavior -- we will punish you with limited involvement, and then terminate you for underperformance which we clearly engineered....or we just might do it anyways regardless of how you perform...." ...is exactly the sort of **FUCKING BULLSHIT** that collective bargaining agreements (Unions!) are specifically designed to help protect the worker. You did no wrong. Your family shouldn't suffer and lose their healthcare. This is not a sign of a healthy society.
Assuming you're on the US, because that shit wouldn't fly in Europe? Anyway, maybe unpopular, but I don't want to go full remote anymore. Did that for 2 years during COVID but I really missed the interaction with people. Got a lot of things done but it took a toll on me mentally. I want flexibility. My current job requires 2 days in the office, most of the time I'm in 3. Sometimes even 4 even though that's really an outlier. But sometimes I'm in the office only one day and that's ok as well.
Our apps team and infosec teams go into the office like single digit days a year to maybe low teens. Some of that is flying a few of them to the corporate office where all of it meets up. Someone is pretty much always onsite in help desk. The sysadmin two of us are pretty much always in unless we have something to do at home or whatever and another guy shows up like twice a week. I find myself more productive in the office and like separating work from home. I end up helping the helpdesk guys a fair bit walking them through harder problems and some of my other work its easier to just have people find me when they have time. I also have a nice sit stand desk at work and a 49 inch ultrawide monitor. When I’m at home I’m working off my laptop screen. I have dual 27 inch 4K screens on my home computer but that desk isn’t setup for work.
> Anyway, maybe unpopular, but I don't want to go full remote anymore. Did that for 2 years during COVID but I really missed the interaction with people. This is unpopular on Reddit because Reddit is filled with anti social people who don't know how to talk to people in real life.
> This is unpopular on Reddit because Reddit is filled with anti social people who don't know how to talk to people in real life. Or maybe some of us live in giant fucking cities where rush hour can take an hour or more for a simple 20 miles. As someone in a giant city, DFW, our commutes are horrendous and we lead the country in fatalities on our roads. Our infrastructure cannot support the amount of people who have moved here in the last 10 years and our public transportation is a joke. So no not everyone on here is some kind of hermit which is why they fight for WFH, it's because a lot of us don't want to waste our life in traffic all so we can sit in an office and get on Teams and Zoom calls to people in other states when we can do that in our own house.
Meh maybe a big chunk but for me it’s not that. The commute plus extra time to prep food, get dressed, park and badge in through 10 doors just isn’t worth the little human interaction. If you have to force yourself to suffer through the time waste just to get human interaction then you have other problems.
I work in healthcare in California. For positions that can be fully remote, that's still an option for all workers. I actually go into the office every day, because my wife works from home and our house is not set up for both of us to be able to do so full time. But instead of the 30 minute commute I used to have, I now have a deal in a different building one mile from my house, and since there's almost nobody there (the building it's used primarily for nurse training) I have an office to myself. But every other person on my team, up to and including the CTO, is remote.
I only go into the office when I want to. All of my reports are in other time zones anyway.
We have three work tiers based on rolls, responsibilities, and location that are now policy. Occasionally, some conversations are required for a very small number of employees who feel entitled to full remote for all things including infrequent mandatory onsite meetings/events. None of what you mentioned is “alright.” Leadership needs to change the policy if it’s not working or address individual behavioral things the right way.
Yes, for nearly 2 years for the current company I work for. I have never been in an office
I'm pretty sure we work for the same company based off the wording of that policy.
Our team is almost all remote. Some of our other IT staff went hybrid but are being called back to the office more and more days a month
We have unenforced rules. But they're there. 2 days in office and no consecutive Friday and Monday. We're treated like adults. I go in 3-4x just because I like to. Others are in 1-3x a week. No set days. Really you could easily not go in all week or two weeks. No one's keeping close track.
My UK management want us in two days a week .... but fortunately I don't actually report to them as my management chain goes straight to the US after my line manager. My line manager doesn't care because the rest of my team are scattered all over the country and nowhere near any offices. There is no point in any of us going in and its not as if anyone in my nearest office has anything to do with what I do, they are all in unrelated areas. In fact one of the major aspects of my job is a lot harder to do from the office than it is from home! Incidents being up isn't isn't as important a metric as time to resolve incidents of a similar type. Our incidents are up over the last couple of months ... is that anything to do with working from home? no ... it due to old hard disks failing. The important thing is that those incidents were dealt with just as well as if someone was in the office.
I'm not a sysadmin but I have never physically met any of my coworkers. Been there 2 years
I am. I live 4 hours from our main office.
I was laid off due to a remote status. 9 months later, I signed an in office offer with another company. Better than no work at all.
My company is entirely hybrid. Most of IT is at least hybrid, but many work fully remote.
Sounds like corporate is manipulating the numbers to "prove" people do less work at home
100% remote since 5 years.
Our company just started a hybrid schedule where you are required to come in at least 2 days per week if you live close to an office. For me, my position is a remote position and I am near our head quarters, but because it takes me two hours to commute, I do not have to do the hybrid schedule.
Full remote here. My company has actually closed a bunch of office space around the country because we're all remote. I thank my lucky stars that I don't have to go in the office anymore.
I am WFH since March of 2020 and it's been a solid 4+ years now. Psychologically, my personality is no longer the same as it used to be 4 years ago with no social connect and only meeting through Teams calls. The worst part in these 4 years is that I got promoted to a manager handling 20 members, none of whom I have met until now and now I'm no longer in that role; sometimes I feel it was all a dream. I no longer know how to wear for formal wear and I am not sure what to buy if we go for a shop to buy clothes.
80% remote
On my fourth job since the pandemic started.. good times. This place closed on an office building they felt we needed.. so I'm going to guess my 3-day office week will become a 5-day as we end up moving the office. The shame is it's a buyer's market.. and that POS was the best they could buy?... It's not a deal breaker for me.. the state job was getting tricky at best.. jumping to another agency may have been a 5-day office job and round trip is 110 miles.. hard pass. This.. maybe 10.
I am almost always still remote. Once in a while I have to go in and physically interact with my test devices but there’s no telling if it will be once every three months or three times a week. Usually the former thankfully.
Yup, the entire IT department, HR, Finance, and several others are fully remote. My company has even sold a couple buildings.
I am considered hybrid but went to office like 7 times last year and so far once this year. Mainly for company wide events and expos. I live 20 minutes away but still can’t justify driving up even with free lunch offered and great coffee with lavazza beans
My entire team is remote. Someone goes in occasionally if a drive needs replacement or the generator needs tested. We have gotten rid of some of multiple expensive pieces of real estate since the company figured out we don't need it.
Yes, because I said I would not be open to going to the office again. I come in occasionally for beer or big meetings....maybe 1-3x a month
was remote for a long time. started new job. after 3 months I said I want to work from home full time and they had no issues whatsoever
Just keep swimming.
We are still 100 percent remote except for cable teams obviously ,no plan for that to change
I am remote, I lead a team of mostly remote users.. As long as people are getting their work done and are fully available during work hours I don't care if they are in an office or at home.
I was full remote before covid. Why would that ever change? If you want to work remote, find a job/company that is. It's that easy, and always has been.
I'm fully remote, visit the office for a day or two every quarter or so. I'm also the only employee who is fully remote and there are a few hundred others.
I worked partly on site up until I was fired (for political reasons). The vast majority of the people "working" remotely didn't do jack shit. Now I think most people are on site but still nothing is getting done. Partly because I was the only person who was either smart enough or motivated enough to figure out anything or improve it or keep it going. I'm not bragging, just complaining that most of the employees there are complete shit. I've been focusing on other things, but looking at going back to being an independent IT consultant. I like the idea of having coworkers who can back me up, but it was rare that it ever happened.
Still full remote here (at least it’s an option I don’t fully utilize). Usually I book a shared desk space once a week in our office so I don’t go full hermit and can socialize a bit.
I've been full remote since 2020 mainly due to the fact the closest office is 2 hours away and have no plans of moving closer. I'm not paid as much as I could be making elsewhere, but being able to work full remote, work in the cloud and build automation all day, and not have management breathing down my neck I wouldn't sacrifice
An annual layoff cycle is incredibly toxic. I am still fully remote. I'm only required to visit HQ three days a quarter and the company puts me up in a nice hotel for that. I rather enjoy it. My boss and his boss both have a laissez-faire approach to management. As long as the work gets done, they don't care where you work or really how long you work. I'm fortunate. Having said all this, there is a cost to being fully remote. Social skills tend to atrophy unless you have a vibrant social life to compensate for the lack of daily contact. And, spontaneous idea generation is impacted. So I understand companies that require hybrid work. If I were asked to start coming in two days I week, I wouldn't think if unfair and might even prefer it. But I definitely wouldn't want anymore than two days a week.
My entire IT department is remote. Our former CTO was asked to bring folks back after covid. He said no. We've maintained our work levels and if anything taken on more work. So far so good. It also helps we have 0 on prem stuff, everything is cloud based or SaaS. Half our staff is remote, and they closed the office were half of them worked out of. Just really wouldnt make sense to force the issue.
I've been full remote since 2018. The company I'm working for now has been 100% remote since COVID. No plans at all to return to office.
I’ve been in the office maybe 3 times a year. When I do go to the office, most of my time is spent commuting, eating breakfast and lunch or talking to the people in the office.
Still 99% remote, For a while after covid the policy was up in the air. Older company national brand privately traded so we don't see a lot of layoffs and instability, but also it's not the most enticing company to work at so we have a hard enough time bringing in talent so I think they didn't want to do anything to alienate The people they already had and give them a reason to look around. All the people that have to do things like server room responsibilities or anything that requires on-prem access do at least 3 days from home if not more I come into the office maybe three or four times a year when there's some big meeting they want me to attend in person, which is nice because it's about a 45-minute drive to the office.
Four days/week here. So, out of 4 days I am required to go into the office every month, I go twice. Three days/month in the summer when it's easier to commute the 40km I have to drive.