High paid tech employees don't want to go back to the office

Companies are very annoyed that they have to justify themselves to lowly employees.
They are shook by the simple question: Why do I have to be HERE to do the job that I can do anywhere????

The reality they are finding that the employees have choices and they will take less to stay home
25/hr at home > 27/hr getting in the car and driving a hour to work + having to put on pants and take showers and interact with other people

Hell they might take 23/hr to stay home

Rocket River

 

Apple finna lay off their fat for better profits.

I'm sure there is plenty of work for those who want to inefficiently work from home. They will just get paid less.

 

Jeez, imagine a company trying to enforce rules for very nice pay/jobs they provide people…..such as showing up at work!!!

 

Imagine people being ok with that or organizing to work against that

THIS IS AMERICA!

People are not necessarily more inefficient at home

Rocket River

 

CPA here, we were sent home in March of 2020 and asked to come back in August of 2021.

Can't even begin to communicate how awesome that period was. More sleep, more family time, less wasted travel, dress, park, time.

Cheaper, easier, best work benefit you could ask for.

By October of 2021, just two months after being called back, I was completely burnt out and completely over being in the office, so I quit for a full time remote gig. And my old company contracts me back to do some of the work no one else knows how to do. They are cool with me doing it nights / weekends.

A local company just asked me to come be their CFO, with a decent pay increase (about 30k more per year), but 5 days in the office, and I declined.

I am just not going back.

 

Alot of people are feeling this way
Covid exposed the benefits of a nice Life Work Balance
I mean seriously . . .Shaving the commute time off your day alone is magic
Add to it the inane useless interactions during the day
microaggressions and waste of times
I mean . . .you may waste the same time at home but it is not the stressful kind

Honestly I see ALOT of time wasted in offices

Rocket River

 

If you can do this, then ... this is how it should be done. I see positives and negatives with "showing up to work". I retired when the salary just wasn't worth the drive, but even before COVID, my previous two companies frequently allowed people to work from home. In my most recent company's case, it was because most of us lived so far away from the workplace. My average drive home from work was about 1 hour 20 minutes or so. If it rained or there was a wreck, I was screwed and either I'd just go back home and WFH or end up taking 2 hours or so to get to work in a few cases. The days I could work from home I was already working at 7am instead of driving for almost an hour and a half and being pissed when getting there. lol

That being said, I also miss being able to communicate with humans at work because my work sometimes demanded it. I'd rather talk with people face-to-face than over electrons. But after a while all that crap got old and I just quit, and when they made offers of more salary, I told them no amount of salary would get me to work there again - it was time enjoy life more than enjoy a paycheck while sacrificing life.

I'm all for people working from home. I'm also all for companies setting expectations, that if not met, allow them to tell those people to take a hike.

 

Keep in mind that there are many people who just cannot work from home. It's a privilege some knowledge workers have. So by acting super entitled about it while already being paid a ton more than most people in service jobs (which cannot be done from home), these people display some kind of arrogant selfishness, in my opinion.

Also, keep in mind that Apple wasn't trying to enforce 100 % presence. They asked to come in 3 days a week.

While I am a proponent of a hybrid solution and have instituted a VERY generous system in my company (people can work from anywhere they want and even move to a lower cost country, at the salary they got hired at in a more expensive location), it is 100 % clear to me that having some time face-to-face sometimes helps immensely to build trust and to work better together as a team. And unless you have very good middle managers you can trust, it is definitely easier to just "hide" at home and do very little than it would be in the office, in some jobs. I wouldn't enforce any kind of minimum presence rule in my company at this point in time, but I can see Apple's dilemma.

 

Whether remote work is efficient or not depends on the nature of the job. A lot of employees at tech companies work with international teams not in the same office and end up spending most of their day on conference calls anyway. Commuting to work just to sit in your cubicle talking to people on Teams or Zoom all day is stupid.

If your team is colocated then showing up to work makes more sense. The best scenario is for a company to offer employees the flexibility to work from home or the office depending on what they need to get done. Treat people like adults and rate their performance based on what they deliver rather than on their perceived productivity from showing up at the office. Most people want to do a good job. Requiring people to come to the office doesn't make an unproductive employee more productive.

 

I just moved to a company giving me 40k less to work 4 days per week at home. The ability to spend more time with my kids and ability to make my own office hours is worth every penny.

 

In most cases, one would think salaries and WFH requests would level out. Truly elite people in fields where they are exceptional and/or indispensable would be granted privileges others wouldn't, and in my opinion, that's fine. It's the replaceable clowns that are staying at home "hiding" like you said, goofing off for 90% of the time they're home like gaming, watching tv, etc. and then delaying projects or BS'ing their way through the day who should be weeded out. Those type of people can be replaced easily. If the employment situation ever goes back to "normal", one would hope the latter are the folks that get weeded out because they can hopefully be easily replaced. If given the choice, I would still rather show up to work at least 2 days a week. I used to work with several of the latter.

"Hey, can you check on ..."
50 minutes go by
"Oh hey, sorry, I didn't see your message until just now"

When this happens several times a week, you know something's up and these dudes are probably just goofing off. lol.

 

I think that a hybrid system is likely the best for a lot of jobs. I know Apple was discussing a 60/40 split with the 60% being physically located at the work site.

I think a compromise could be having two days a week in the office. That won’t satisfy some people that are hell bent on not coming to work or moved away, but it likely keeps a lot of employees satisfied