I have worked as a freelance for around 14 years, from home. My husband, a developer, always had told me that he couldn,t work without his colleagues around. Then the pandemic come and he had to work from home for more than two years. He loved it. No distractions, no commuting (I think that is the worst), better environment to concentrate in silence…he didn,t want to go back to an office. Like never ever.
But then the company he worked for said that everybody had to go back to the office because that is what’s the company wanted. My husband and the rest of his department got very angry. In three months, all the 10 people in it had gone to other remote works. The day my husband said he was leaving in three weeks was the last day of his immediate boss. So he gave notice to a higher boss, that had a big tantrum because he thought it was a workers plot.
It wasn,t, but seems that nobody has to be forced into the office if they can do better work elsewhere. Because they leave if they can. As a consequence they lost all their senior developers and two middle managers. My husband now is happy, works from home and travels to the office for meetings and things like that a two or three days every three months. He works for a big international company with people in remote in several countries. His prior company is struggling really hard to finde people to work for them. It is up to them: expert people on remote or junior people wanting experience to go remote later on other job.
Lol @ “he thought it was a worker’s plot.”
Capitalists are the fucking worst.
I on a 4/10 schedule, mostly work from home except 1 day a pay period.
While I’m not actively looking for a new job, I won’t turn away a fully remote position that meets my requirements, so I keep my resume posted on various job sites.
I get hit on by recruiters about 2 - 5 times a day looking for someone to fill my specific niche role or similar, for a contract term and/or fully onsite position. I always reply, “I don’t even consider looking at a position unless it is a permanent FTE and fully remote”.
I may not actually find a replacement job, as I’m happy where I’m at, but I figure I can at least help out all the other jobseekers out there by letting the headhunters know, that there are qualified people out there that won’t except any offer that isn’t fully remote.
expert people on remote or junior people wanting experience to go remote later on other job
This is what it’s shaping up to be. Also, junior people understand that there is no real loyalty on the part of the company - they will replace or lay off staff at a moment’s notice. And there is a real salary penalty for staying as studies have recently shown. (Also common sense and anecdotes from most everyone you know). Those junior people willing to be in the office will leave in a year or two for a WFH job elsewhere with a salary bump. If RTO /fulltime in the office companies want to keep them, they will have to compete salary-wise with WFH companies.
ETA: Here’s a very interesting article on the permanent shift to remote work.
In 2022, 34 percent of workers over age 15 reported working at home vs. 69 percent in the workplace, dipping slightly from the previous year. […] The pandemic spike in working from home was limited to college-educated workers, especially those with a bachelor’s degree or higher, about 54 percent of whom worked at home in 2022.
I will never again accept a job that isn’t 100% remote. My main gig has about 50 devs, we all used to commute to the office everyday in a high COL city. My commute would sometimes take 90 minutes each way, and I only lived around 15 miles away. We’ve been 100% remote since March 2020 and our overall productivity has gone up by 20%, which isn’t surprising considering the commute alone sucked the life out of all of us.
Remember y’all, unionize your workplace so they can’t take away remote work from you
Yes. Do this.
In my last year of uni now but I’d love to get remote work in the future. I’ve seen it totally change my mother’s lifestyle.
It’s totally changed mine. Like many folks covid pushed us remote in 2020. Started getting back to the office vibes and changed jobs ~6 weeks ago to a fully-remote position making 50% more. It was a hard choice, I had been at my previous company for almost 2 decades. The roles are out there! Best of luck mate!!
Thank you! Yeah my mum went from commuting 2 hours each way to being able to make exercise in the morning, cook good healthy food and spend more time with us than she has since she stopped being a SAHM 16 years ago. I don’t see why anyone would prioritise office interactions over that.
My employer recently announced plans to lay off much of their Finance department and outsource their work to a remote team based in Delhi. Basically means I’ll be made redundant within the next 6 months.
Why are they doing this? Because they’re having problems attracting and retaining staff.
This may be a shocker, but nobody wants to come into the office three days a week, work in an incredibly stressful high-volume transactional finance role, deal with shoddy systems which frequently crash, end up shackled to a lengthy notice period, and have 30% of their calendar year blocked for taking annual leave - all on low pay that isn’t competitive.
I work in Purchase Ledger and my team alone has suffered from a 95% employee turnover rate. The only reason I haven’t walked yet is because the severance package is actually quite generous.
It’s a free incentive to attract people who would otherwise go with a higher paying position. No-brainer for smaller companies IMO.
It is a thing to note about starting an IT business. Office space is an overhead you cannot afford. I was involved as a founder for a small custom dev and consulting company in the middle 2000s. We were about 10 and very distributed. Every Friday we would meet at a coffee shop with bottomless coffee 😉. Do our version of a standup and then get on with it for the week. Even then we managed with email and google chat and cell phones. The tooling is so much better today than then. So there is no reason to waste money on renting fancy spaces.
I wish someone in my field would attract me with that 😭.
I try to be as progressive as possible with the work from home thing. Two of my staff take service calls so I need them to kind of be in the office to do that work. It’s the kind of job where collaborating with your peers in person works better. However, if they need to work from home that day they are fully salaried and set up to do that. They can take calls from a work call app on their phone and manage the schedule from home that day. We also have a new meeting room with cameras and microphones so people who are working from home can attend work related meetings.
I was a little wary at first but I get a lot out of those two. One of the staff members couldn’t find anyone two watch her kids for two days so I let her remote in from home. We had a big 3 hour meeting about the calendar and she rocked it out during that meeting. We were able to get a lot of work done even though she wasn’t there at all.
I think they appreciate that they have the option when it’s important. We pay them pretty well and I haven’t really heard any complaints about coming to the office or the work from home policy. As it stands I think we have struck a pretty good balance with it.
Their job is to take phone calls, they can do it just fine from home, but you’re still saying
" the kind of job where collaborating with your peers in person works better." ?
Are you sure that’s true and not just how you feel? because with slack, teams, etc you can chat, call, video call and post shared docs easily. Also it sounds like you manage a call center. One of them most WFH jobs ever.You make a lot of asumptions about him to bring point to your side.
I’ve seen a lot of small call centers that could only partially be “from home” (usually people rotate).
Also call center is so wastly wide term.
I’ve seen beautiful small call centers (usually in smaller companies delivering product).
Those assumptions are being made because there are several red flags in the post.
“I need them to be in the office to work” suggests this is not their choice, it is the employer’s choice and they have no real option to freely choose, despite being completely able to with their work call app /meeting rooms with cameras and mics etc.
They have an option only if they have a good reason like their having to watch their kids, this also suggests they cannot just freely choose to. They are required to provide a reason beyond basic convenience to work from home.
“They have no complaints” suggests they aren’t being given the option and need to provide a reason or contest an argument with them about WFH being easier on everyone.
The suggestion that “they are paid pretty well” indicates this has some bearing on working from home vs the office, but to me this reads as “this is compensation so we can have them come into the office”.
Whether they are paid well shouldn’t even come into question - can they work from home or not?
Tell them they can work from home full time and come into the office whenever they want. Do they come in or do they stay at home?
Can they not collaborate over slack/teams/chat/video call and post shared docs like we were forced to do during covid time?
If they legitimately cannot, fine - go into the office. But we have to get rid of this paranoia that employees need to be in the office unless there is a very specific in-person absolute requirement to be there.
Collaboration/camaraderie is a known common excuse managers use that often doesn’t make sense.
Before the pandemic, my old company allowed us to remote work on occasion, but it was rare. With the pandemic we started to work from home regularly and it was a game changer. Little bit after the pandemic they forced us to go back to the office (also, in summer, in spain, to a office with broken AC), so I changed jobs.
Best decision I ever had. The company I work for now is US based, so obviously its remote only for me. There’s a big culture shift, both from being American and for being remote focused, but I think its fantastic. Never have been as productive in my life.
There’s a great difference between companies allowing remote and being remote oriented as well. Management has to fully buy into it and promote using remote tools, otherwise it won’t work.
Little bit after the pandemic they forced us to go back to the office (also, in summer, in spain, to a office with broken AC)
I don’t know what the relative humidity is like wherever in Spain you are, but if they had the windows open – and I assume that they could open and did, if the AC was offline and people were in there in the summer – and the humidity was low enough, could have thrown a portable evaporative cooler next to yourself. That can’t get things as cold as a sufficiently-powerful air conditioner, but it’s got a lot more punch than just a fan.
We did have the windows open, and the put some fans, but still was quite unbereable. Especially because of all the computers. We did have a lot of fights with the company for this, as spanish law dictates a maximum temp for a working space. Some days, when it was over 40ºC inside, it was like an oven (literally it was better to go outside below a tree or something), we ended up walking out of the office, fuck that shit.
How was the adjustment in office/work culture between Spain and US for you?
Maybe I’m an ignorant American, but isn’t work culture much more relaxed in Spain than much of the US? “Siestas” and all that?
