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The home-working revolution is harming younger workers: Bosses who insist on a return to the office are demonised — but turning up is better for your career
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- Title
- The home-working revolution is harming younger workers
The WFH revolution might have a negative impact on your career, sure. But what's the real opportunity cost? More responsibility and more pay?
I only need the extra pay to afford the insane cost of housing and transportation around offices. WFH lets me live someplace with more access to activities I enjoy and a much lower cost of living. Of course, the cost of living has skyrocketed in most of the USA since 2020 (hard to find a studio anywhere for less than $1000/mo, for instance -- that used to be easy in all but the most expensive cities!), but I still save a lot living where I want to... which is not close to the soulless, unwalkable business parks where most offices are (or the obscenely expensive and still not very walkable downtowns).
If I returned to the office, my household would have to get a second car and pay all of the upkeep on that vehicle. And I'd wind up wasting 40+ minutes per day in traffic. And I'd have to drive an hour or more in traffic to do outdoor activities (on weekends only, no more after work outdoor activities). And my rent would increase, even if we seriously downgraded our house size.
I have a hard time understanding how anyone can justify RTO from my perspective. And the only benefit is that my career might move higher up in the soulless bureaucracy, faster?
If bosses really want butts in seats, the USA needs to build some livable cities that provide pleasant places to work and play. The current sky-high housing and rental market only make the choice easier than before. Without the hope of a better life, what incentive do any of us have to climb the corporate ladder?
If everyone works from home they still have to promote someone? I think this is just a other pandering headline.
It's the Financial Times. Seems unlikely that a news outlet that is focused on capitalism would be concerned about quality of life unless it directly created more capital.
These publication hardly care about us. Recently The Economist wrote an article explaining why you shouldn't retire. Apparently that pleasure cruise, golf are not that pleasing enough.
https://www.economist.com/business/2024/01/25/why-you-should-never-retire
I mean if your work is meaningful and fulfilling (admittedly a big if) then why would you want to give it up just because you have hit a certain age? The Economist writes things which cater to its readership – i.e. affluent people who do have that kind of occupation (or own a business).
Doing something as a “real job” can change how you feel about it. A very common one I’ve seen online, and have experienced myself, is software engineering. When it was a hobby, I’d spend hours bashing away on the keyboard just for fun and intellectual curiosity. Now that it’s a job, while it’s fulfilling and I still think about problems in the shower or toss around ideas for personal projects, after a day and a week of doing it for an employer, I don’t enjoy it the same way or have it in me to actually do those personal/opensource projects anymore. The activity fatigue (too much of a good thing), limited time and other commitments, etc all come into play when you’re committed to a Job.
Semi-jokingly, I’m looking forward to retiring from programming so I can start programming again.
I think this is key in a lot of WFH discourse. It's your perspective, and it's totally valid that RTO doesn't make sense for you. But everyone has their own perspective. Although it would be nice if different parties considered each other's perspectives, but even if they did there's no reason for anyone to act against their own self interest.
I still feel relatively early in my career, but have been in purely remote roles since graduating with my degree. I've done the whole commute to the office thing as an intern and honestly never want to do so again. A few years ago I would have worried about my career progression, but I no longer care about that and many other younger workers feel the same.
Career progression means more responsibilities and higher sense of urgency to do more. It increases the chances of overtime, on-call duties, and having to be cutthroat. I just want to put in my 40 hours with the least amount of effort and left alone in peace. The recent trends of layoffs and being thrown into awful work dynamics has killed my desire to over-acheive because that's just an easy way to get taken advantage of. A mentor of mine who had 15+ years of experience and consistently bent backwards to contribute to the company was laid off with little notice. He did everything right technically in consideration of how things used to work. He is the ringing example that company loyalty and career progression drive means nothing if shareholders aren't happy with growth expectations.
If the rules of engagement were different, say more walkable cities or better employment protections, perhaps I would think differently. But nope, I used to act with that rigor to asscend the ranks of corporate America. I'm only 5 years in and already burned out on this system. I don't have the energy to care anymore and if others can get away with gaming the system with awful consequences, my work-your-wage attitude is small potatoes in comparison.
I’ve never heard this before. I assume you’re not talking about this zebedee?
I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all solution with this. I run a large team of developers, many of the young (within 5 years of college graduation). The preferences are all over the place. Some love to work remotely 100%. But many like to come in a few days a week and schedule meetings around that schedule where we can whiteboard designs/troubleshooting and such. A couple hate working from home and come in 4 or 5 days a week.
Our company doesn't have a mandate, so everyone gets to do whatever they want. Some people (like myself) like to come in and chase extra responsibility for a promotions and a higher paycheck. Some are fine with staying home and making whatever money they're making for whatever effort they're putting in. This is the way it should be. Let people decide what works best for them based on their personal priorities and lifestyle choices.
I am skeptical around a lot of claims supporting return-to-office policy on the basis that it is good (and not just good for corporations beacuse they owns a bunch of now-empty office buildings or shareholders who have substantial real-estate policy). I do agree with the author though. I think there is certainly a kind of Dasein (to borrow a turn from German philosohpy) you obtain from being physically present in a workplace, and it can be especially useful when trying to move up the career ladder (because you get to network).
I don’t find the real estate reasoning to make very much sense. In the end, office spaces are a cost center. It’s like the old charitable deductions misunderstanding - spending $100 to save $30 does not make a lot of sense! Most companies lease buildings, and just like when you rent it’s just money out the bank. Even for owners, the office itself doesn’t generate any revenue. Unless you think a particular company survives by being corporate house flipper, it’s not going to change the way the revenue goes. That doesn’t even include all the costs like property taxes, utilities, staff, and so on.
If you go on any of the company’s doing RTO loudly’s balance sheets, I really doubt any of them make most of their revenue by flipping their office space.
That doesn’t mean that RTO isn’t necessarily misguided, but it’d be general managerial unease, not the real estate conspiracy.
To reiterate, imo, if corporate executives honestly believed that productivity would be the same, or better, with WFH, most companies would not have an RTO policy. If they did believe that, whatever value their offices have, if any, would be outweighed by eliminating an entire part of your costs. So they really do believe that productivity would go down over the long run.
That doesn't mean they're right, they can definitely be wrong. Or they can be right for nefarious reasons - maybe RTO allows them to suppress wages more, and that balances up the productivity/cost scale. But either way, it's a productivity/cost of labor decision, not a real estate thing.
You're analysis here is ignoring the human element. One thing to remember is that by the time you reach the level where you are making big decisions for a major company, you aren't really working for money anymore. Sure, you get paid to be a CEO, but that isn't really why you do it. You do it because you have some vision you want to implement, because you like the status of it, or in the worst case, because you like having direct power over people or want to be able to extract sexual favors from your employees.
Most normal people, if handed just a few months of a CEO salary, would retire and never work again. They have friends; they have family; they have hobbies. But for corporate decision makers, the company replaces their friends, family, and hobbies. You don't get put in charge of a billion dollar company unless you're obsessively devoted to working, networking, schmoozing, and advancing.
Work from home could be a strong net positive for the corporate bottom line, but it would be a negative for the specific individuals who run companies. Human beings are neither rational nor objective. CEOs aren't actually robots dispassionately maximizing corporate profit; they're human beings with all the same biases and flaws as anyone else.
This is why there's been such pushback against WFH. Most of those making big corporate decisions are fundamentally broken people. They've let work become their whole life, and that is the only reason they have a chance at ever being a CEO in the first place. They have no hobbies and only facile relationships with friends and family. For some, the ability to extract sex from their workers is a primary benefit of the job. Work isn't just a job for them; it's their whole life. And they lose most of that when working remote. The vast majority of the employees view work as just a job, and if anything are concerned primarily with just whether it helps the bottom line or not. But for the actual decision makers, who again personally work more for fun than for money, the bottom line is secondary. They would rather make the company less money if it means they can keep their clubhouse running.
This state of play, however, will not continue indefinitely. In time, new leaders will arise that aren't so addicted to the frivolities of an in-person office. They will found new companies, and the dinosaurs will be driven to extinction.
This is painfully accurate after interning for a company that had a "kool-aid" problem. They were a major company that invested in a massive campus that had multiple huge rooms and theaters for schmoozing events. Things like hear this executive speak on how they sold X thing or did Y stuff in their career. And of course all the employees who attended these events would clap and adore these executives as if they were celebrities; it was just all so odd.
Unsurprisingly, when Covid struck and WFH had to be accepted, they pushed the hardest to have people RTO in July of 2020!!! They even directly linked performance reviews that year to how often you came into the office in the middle of a pandemic. It couldn't be more obvious that it was a control thing from executives to continue to assert that submissive kool-aid culture and continue to have a stage for them to stroke their egos.
Companies that strong arm RTO can go jump in a river.
The real-estate thing always seemed so indirect to me. It made a lot more sense once I read about cities offering tax breaks for companies that open offices on certain areas. Some of them are starting to claw back that money since the agreement was that companies would bring x amount of jobs and people to a certain area.
My take as a manager is that RTO absolutely doesn't make financial sense for a lot of roles. The common internet opinion that it doesn't make financial sense for any role is wrong though.
There are certain roles where progress is easily measurable, work is mostly solitary, and the cost of distraction is far higher than the benefit of random information gathering. Software development is the classic example here. Being able to sit in a dark room and solve problems and bang out code by yourself is the ideal environment the majority of the time. That's not the ideal work environment for many, many jobs though.
I manage a cybersecurity team, and our job is generally a lot harder to do remote. Even though we're on a hybrid model, I notice that it's more difficult to get things done when we're not in the office. A lot of people make the case that that's because my management style is flawed. That may be the case, but it's still irrefutable that "fixing" that management style to better accommodate remote work is a significant opportunity cost.
My analysts and engineers learn about security flaws so often from just people walking by their desks and mentioning things offhand, or listening in on conversations, or doing physical pentests with hacking devices.
Being able to walk through the SOC and get information in person is so much more valuable and frictionless compared to hopping on slack or teams or any other collaboration tools.
I think there are organizations who's culture is more conducive to remote work, but changing culture, workflows, tooling, equipment and so on is a huge investment for most companies, and its an investment that isn't even guaranteed to return. Like yes, you save on office space, but office space probably isn't even the top 5 expenses most companies are paying for, so if you're losing 20% of your productivity, or increasing administrative costs by 100%, it's just not worth it.
I don't think there's a shady, nefarious conspiracy at play. I honestly think that most companies just have noticed that they're not operating as efficiently with WFH, and they're not interested in making a massive investment with questionable chances of success to try to change that. They'd rather just go back to being in person, which to them, is much more of a sure bet.
But that would still be a cost worth paying. The alternative is that you stick with an obsolete management style and your company slowly goes bankrupt because of it. You lose your best employees as those with the most in-demand skills leave for places that let workers control their work method. The obvious analogy is upgrading or replacing obsolete software. Sure, it might cost money, and maybe you have to put it off for awhile. But if you don't, eventually you will find yourself behind and out of a job.
Nothing is without downsides. Maybe you get stuck with an obsolete management style, but it doesn't seem that way currently; lots of companies are doing hybrid work instead of fully remote, and they're not hurting for employees because of it. To use your analogy, there are still plenty of mission critical apps running on mainframes written in COBOL, because rewriting them in a modern language and redesigning all the architecture around it would cost a ton, and the benefits don't outweigh that cost.
To the extent it involves real estate, it's that the companies need time to figure out how to divest themselves of it. Leases expire at different times, they may need to retain some level of physical presence, and renovating space costs money.
I've said it before, that they are very aware of the financials when they weren't using the real estate. RTO, I'm convinced, is mostly another profit squeeze. They'll cut payroll without paying severance. In a few years, they'll be embracing hybrid and remote work again.
Uhm... it could be true that showing up may now slightly increase your chance your boss will remember you when it's time to choose promotions and bonuses but it depends... maybe your boss is still a moron.
Anyway, when I read there articles what I understand is that the biggest problem is that bosses and middle management in general are inept to do their job. In the office most of their inability was hidden micro managing the workers so they could call it a day, in a WFH they don't know what to do and they whine and try to gaslight their workers saying "it's for their interests to come back" for it will (eventually) pay in the end.
The solution should be: let the workers work how they feel more comfortable and teach the middle management to really do their job...
My issue again and again with middle management is that they don't have a job. They are liaisons of information between C-suite and workers, and they micro-manage. I can't count the number of times another pair of hands would've got something done more efficiently, but they would just check in on progress and leave.
I can see the value of leadership, but "bosses" in the traditional sense needs to go.
edit: During an exit interview, my co-worker told the business we worked for that they had a "too many cooks" problem. She told them they needed more leadership, less management. They responded that they don't hire leaders, they hire managers.
Tangent: We were a locally owned small-ish (100 people) business with a community focused approach. But then an international company bought the business, and it became just another branch. Our branch suffered because they tried to implement their national approach. Instead of serving lots and lots of small business, we were not directed to catch less but bigger fish. As acquisitions go, they promised no jobs would be lost, then made layoffs a year later at the height of COVID due to restructuring. Shortly after started mandating a return to office, but it didn't work because it was still 2021 and many in the office got sick. They were so determined to get us back in the office that they assigned us each groups and said group A would come in on Mondays and Tuesdays, Group B would come in on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Still, tons of people got sick. After that they would cede that it was too early, send everyone home, then a month later try again, rinse, repeat. They just had no idea how to turn a small business into a branch of a corporation while fumbling the ball repeatedly in regards to COVID.
I say all this to say, the whole experience completely obliterated the illusion of the "corporate executive" and "middle management" that young me had. I thought they had received educations and experience that gave them the ability to lead and guide. From my point of view now, anyone well reasoned and thoughtful could run a successful business, but it takes a whole C-suite to squeeze every penny out of one and burn it to the ground.
I have a nice setup at work. It’s 3, soon to be 4, people in a room. We’re all highly interested in our work and want to talk through problems never before solved by mankind face-to-face. I’m willing to commute 50 minutes each way by train/bike for this opportunity. The pay is good, I own 3% of company (which is legally 3% of $0), and the morale is really high. Working remotely I’d end up spending nearly 20 out of 24 hours in my apartment. That’s enough to make it feel more like a prison than a home.
Now, I absolutely do not want to give grief to people that have many good reasons to WFH. I just want to add my voice to the mix. I like RTO and I’m really glad I can work in person.
It sounds as though your life's focus right now is work, which is great, assuming you don't wreck your mental or physical health doing it.
That's not everybody, and it may not be who you are as much as where you are right now. Many people find that excising commute from their lives dramatically improves their quality of life. As I spend roughly half of my workday driving and sitting in traffic, I can definitely appreciate that.
Yeah that’s fair. I’m able to commute during normal work hours while still delivering on time, and thankfully I’m not sitting in traffic.
I think I’m not bad at taking care of my mind and body. In fact, any time I’ve had a job I can’t be passionate about I slowly slip into depression. I started having weird and gross nightmares when my last job ended up being, explicitly, just a way to collect a paycheck without any requirement I get anything done or even show up.
Mirror, for those hit by the paywall:
https://archive.is/HEhWm
Hands up: who here has noticed that the best and most productive workers are the ones who receive promotions and advance in their careers?
OK, so who has noticed that people better at kissing ass and putting up with superiors' dominance displays are the ones who get promoted and make more money?
I wonder which of these things is better served by going into an office? Could it be productivity, the thing that many studies have shown bears little relation to office versus home working? Or could it be the atavistic and galling one that best pleases people who up until four years ago relied on it for personal validation?
I'm not any more convinced by this rationale than I was the twenty others before it.