I interviewed with Uber last year and they wanted me in the office two days a week so I could remote in with the rest of the team scattered throughout the US.
I don't mind the end of remote work, as long as the "cool office" actually comes back. Here in Ann Arbor it feels like the tech scene died with remote work and all the jobs are remote.
From my perspective, wages have increased faster elsewhere, and there are far more remote jobs than local ones. The whole reason I moved to Ann Arbor for work was because UMich had created a little startup scene that I could aspire to. I expected the scene to grow, not fade. It really seemed like the beers on tap, foosball table tech job fantasy for a few years there.
That's too bad. The little tiny "hip" area of town seemed pretty neat, as did the fledgling coworking spaces attached to a neat coffeehouse in an old brick building.
Of course, in my own operation it would be very hard to justify to building out some "cool office". Our workers simply seem to prefer other things. They sure aren't interested in forced socialisation.
I'm at a Fortune 500 that cut back nearly all of its remote work. I prefer remote work, and I thrive at it. However, it can't be denied that there are some drawbacks. A few: A) Training new hires, B) bonding (while those in-office chats often detract from raw work-time, they also contribute to relationships. Positive relationships are a worthwhile lubricant when make requests of others), C) increased friction for chatting, which is often a net positive, but does have the potential to block progress that is born from impromptu chats.
Yes, you can try to work around these and other challenges, but working around long-evolved brain firmware that, for many cases of interaction, favors in-person communication, is tough. Of course many people prefer to stay at home, as do I, but there is a huge increase in the level of connection I feel when I go back to the HQ and hang out with everyone (a handful of times each year).
This is word play. It can't be denied that there are some drawbacks to everything. It absolutely can be denied that the drawbacks of remote or individual choice are larger than the drawbacks of forced office work.
I disagree as strongly as possible with the implication that it makes sense to force everybody to communicate in-person because "the brain was designed for it". I communicate much more efficiently - and am even better at connecting socially - through text first, conference (audio or video) second, and in-person a distant third. Yet I speak well and am friendly and sociable in person. I.e. it has nothing to do with being anti-social or something. Most people I know personally are the same way. I don't think people like me are strictly the majority, but they are very common, and may even be the majority in tech contexts. I.e. it's irrational (or simply hostile) to ignore us.
The common implication that allowing each person to work in-person or remote at will is somehow a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too scenario is a fallacy.
It certainly can be denied--or at least argued. Are there actually studies that show these things are significant drawbacks which are worse in the balance after also accounting for the benefits of remote work?
Proponents of both in-office and remote work are just spouting feelings and vibes rather than actual evidence that it really makes a difference.
There is research supporting the benefits of remote work (less distraction, increased productivity, etc.), and there is research appearing to confirm the negatives. One excerpt from a study at MS[0] "Our results show that firm-wide remote work caused the collaboration network of workers to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts."
Gallup [1] found that far fewer workers felt respected while remote during the pandemic. I thought it was wild to see the huge uptick (31%) year-over-year in SEC whistle-blowers. [2]
Research of this type is challenging, especially because it's difficult to source the volume and quality of data needed from businesses. I'm sure we could find weaknesses in any study for or against.
Hybrid might be the best of both worlds per HBR, see [3]
Honestly I'd love to see a solid refutation of the benefits of in-person work, so that I could use it for leverage the next time my remote job is at risk of being converted back to in-person.
I have not searched for a new job for a long time so I have
little feel for what the job market it these days.
I do know that many companies have let devs go for various excuses.
We had a year (1?,2?,3? ) when different companies tried to put people back
in the office and the general sentiment was anger and and incredulity.
Devs were entitled to work from home 100% if a company didnt offer it
thye company would tank since all the devs would quit.
Has the job market now shifted as lot that enough that people accept restrictions
on working from home?
They creep it up. Like frog in boiling water, not much to be done. 1 day a week with 1 optional day for the social butterflies. 2 days mandatory with 1 day optional for social butterflies. 3 days mandatories + some extra mandatory days like all hands and Q-end. Next up is 5 days mandatory with 2 optional days for social butterflies.
During COVID WFH peak I naively thought that the government, especially the EU, will take the growth of remote working as an opportunity for its Green Deal the bureaucrats love so much talking about. It started falling apart quickly when they started subsidizing restaurants, albeit that was the national government prerogative.
To this day I still wonder why there are no parties that tout this as part of their election programs. It's the way to reduce pollution and stimulate less-populated regions which have been dwindling as cities have been growing and getting so expensive.
That might work for an organisation that only recently implemented remote work so has a great deal of their staff anyway in the same city as HQ. For fully remote workers there's no creeping. I live thousands of kilometres from my office, there's no practical difference for me between a day a week in office or full RTO.
My past 2 jobs have been a big Bay Area unicorn "startup", and a small real startup. I'm remote because I grew up and live in BFE, USA.
My take on remote work is that bigcos with big names can broadly do whatever they want and still get headcount because people want the name on their resume and their stock (mostly still privately held!) in their portfolios. So they can jerk people around in a million ways, one of which is RTO, and still hire. They obviously make exceptions where it would really hurt them wrt high level roles.
Meanwhile, literally everyone else has to be flexible or they're either not going to get applications, or the adverse selection of no-remote-work makes the candidates who do apply such worse quality that hiring takes forever.
My current company tried this. Our owner (no kids or spouse) wants people in office with him so he can keep pretending it's the good old days. It's somewhat well-intended in that all it means is we started posting dual job posts and/or started posting them for SF first, then opening to remote if we didn't get any SF apps of sufficient quality. That was almost a year ago now. Despite this, we've made exactly one hire in SF within commuting distance and they didn't even apply into that position and don't have any RTO in their contract. The other 10ish HC we've added have all been remote, despite these efforts.
I also know of a different tech SMB I worked for long ago and still have contacts in. They don't offer remote at all (boomer owner). The business has essentially failed, they can hardly hire and cannot retain, and they're only kept afloat because the owner is extremely rich off the efforts of the prior non-owner CEO who he ousted to come back and ruin everything.
Is what cases is hiring an expensive taxi to get to work and back every day cheaper than the all-in cost of owning, fueling, maintaining and insuring your own car?
I plugged a used 2022 Camry w/ a short commute in CA into AAA's tool: they estimate $850 TCO per month. So at say $18 an uber in SF, you can make ~24 round trips to the office a month. That assumes you can park the Camry for free I think. On the other hand if you need a car to get groceries and stuff, the math starts to tip dramatically. Also assumes you value your time waiting for an Uber at $0 I suppose.
I don’t know, but anecdotally, I took a bunch of Uber Pool rides when I was on a business trip with people who were clearly using it to commute to or from their job. Some of them were fairly long rides as well (downtown San Diego to Poway was the most common where I’d go with someone commuting). Maybe parking is expensive/impractical?
Honestly, in the cases where you have to pay for a parking spot near your work
That is very expensive in most big cities, so if your workplace doesn't have dedicated parking and they don't comp your parking spot, you wind up spending thousands per year on parking
On top of the other car stuff, it becomes prohibitive
A startup can now afford hiring better talent at lower costs, because people value remote work so much.
Remote doesn't necessarily mean working from home. There are people in situations (having babies / toddlers?) where their productivity would improve from working outside the home, so startups should offer to pay for a local coworking space or a similar arrangement.
the startup I'm working at is doing exactly that, not really optimizing on the cost but we're getting some exceptional talent and we have an incredible leverage
Unless startups with remote talent can't get funding, because investors look at big companies and thinking that if Uber, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Google think having in-office employees is better, there must be a good reason for it.
Most of the RTO reasons barely make sense for investors investing in startups, but may for established companies. Things like this RTO push rarely happen without a reason.
Off the top of my head:
- tax cuts if you're operating in a certain area, maybe even historical ones, political connections like - legacy of lobbying local politicians in said area to get some benefit
- conflict of interest from the owners (private or major shareholders) also somehow owning commercial real estate or businesses that rely on its vitality
- management having reasons to prefer RTO: simple preference for in-person management, fear of loss of control or being perceived as useless, misalignment with a personal-connections-over-merit advancement; these things are mostly misaligned with the owners' interests
only if the golden era was during Covid but I have been working remotely for the past 20 years. I'm sure there are more jobs available now than there was before Covid.
None that will make you happy. The market changed a lot, I myself not sure if I will be able to find contracts (I'm a contractor) for the next 20 years. The alternative isn't terrible tho: you gotta create your own job, contracting and then creating your own business online. The best way to prove remote works is to create jobs and hiring remote. Nobody should think they are entitled for a great remote job forever.
Management is completely clueless about how noisy and distracting offices are due to other coworkers, also how contagiously sick people make each other sick. Management sitting in their private offices are far removed from the ground reality, and the worse part is they never solicit direct feedback either from 2-3 levels down.
I generally view these moves as simply a soft layoff to cut down on costs.
Uber doesn't really have any way to grow. They can't exactly start charging more. They can't pay their drivers less, who already are paid poorly. The market for expensive taxi rides isn't going to expand, either.
So now they have to be in a cost-cutting mode. The app already exists, so they don't need a large staff of highly-paid technologists.
I wonder if you plotted layoffs cycles you’d see a big gaps for tech companies for the last couple years since RTO orders will have the same effect.
Reading about the different RTO rebellions is interesting. I know multiple people who have ended up in a half day schedule that they really like. All meetings scheduled before noon-ish, then head home to focus on work. These are all kind of against company policy but there’s a shield of willingly ignorant managers between the executives and workers. As long as the managers can say “as far as any metrics I have access to tell me my people are in the office the required days per week” they’re ok with it.
Uber bet incorrectly that we would have widespread self driving robo-taxis by now. The idea was to lose money gaining massive market share and then replace the human gig economy workers with AI.
Which seemed like an iffy bet. Someone who invents self-driving robo-taxis isn't going to want to give away their profit margin to Uber. Why would they? You can just open up the Waymo app and order, well, a Waymo.
Yeah, and building their own... seemed like a classic mistake where they confused the talent to replace the taxi dispatch telephone number with the talent needed top make a self-driving car, which are two very different things.
Well this doesn’t jibe with the current reality that Waymo is teaming with Uber right now. To make Waymo economically viable, it needs to be almost 100% utilized.
Also because people hate using multiple apps, you need an “aggregator” (see Stratechery). If I go to a city and I need a ride from
the airport, my default is going to be to open Uber - not to say “oh yeah, Waymo is available when I fly into ATL but not when I fly into JFK”. Uber was even available when I flew into QXP from San Jose Costa Rica (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quepos_La_Managua_Airport).
Also many businesses have “Uber for Business” where business travelers can automatically get their Uber rides charged to the company instead of having to do reimbursements. How many companies are going to establish relations with Waymo to and tell their sales people/consultants - “use the Waymo app in cities where it is available otherwise use Uber”?
Just like I’m not going to open some taxi app when I fly into DCA. But I will open the Uber app and choose a taxi (with the standard taxi regulations) if it is more convenient.
Business travellers is a lot more lucrative for companies than consumers.
But getting back to Waymo and utilization, if you know you need both enough capicity to handle peak utilization and want to have capacity to handle steady state, you are going to have Waymo as a baseline and people that will come out when they think it is worth it based on current surge pricing.
Having enough Waymo cars available to handle peak capacity would be about as dumb as Intuit having enough server capacity in a Colo to handle tax season instead of using AWS and autoscaling.
Uber is also managing maintenance for Waymo in the cities it is available.
When in Israel some people insisted on using the Uber app. Well, all Uber did was dispatch a Gett taxi.. with a 15% surcharge. And it turns out they also de-prioritised Uber's requests.
So anyone who actually knew what they were doing would just install the Gett taxi app, which was cheaper and better than Uber. If such an app existed in DCA, I would certainly install it. But I wouldn't bother with an app at all in DCA, since they already have an excellent and affordable taxi system. (Taxis in DC are cheaper than Ubers, particularly during surge pricing; if you want an app, install Curb.)
"Uber for Business" is an even more giant scam, where it costs more than Uber does personally. At the last place I worked, employees were advised to go ahead and set it up but switch to Personal and just request reimbursement because of how large the price difference was.
But you're right, Uber will always have a niche of people who are unable to install or use anything other than the Uber app and want to be blissfully unaware that better alternatives exist.
Let say “Uber for Business” is more expensive and you work for a large company that has enough business travelers where they have their own check in terminal out of SEA like where I worked when I did a lot of business travel (worked remotely and flew into SEA a few times). The time saved by both the business travelers and the reimbursement team would have been well worth the extra cost. Especially when either the client was paying for travel anyway (the consulting department) or sales was bringing in tens of millions in revenue.
Even if I had been aware of getting a taxi directly when we went to DC last month or had been aware of the DiDi app in Costa Rica or the local app in Israel, as a tourist, I am still going to use Uber because everything is one central place, I am on vacation so I’m not that price sensitive and especially in Costa Rica, I know my Spanish is still rough and the Uber app automatically translates to English.
I would personally be very annoyed if my company asked me to reconcile Uber rides to save a few bucks when I know how much money I directly and indirectly make the company when I’m on/over a project.
When I've worked for a large company, I had to spend more time on expense reports, not less. However much I was being paid seemed to have on relevance to how much time I had to spend on keying things into Concur (and no, we didn't have admin staff who would do it for us).
If you're not "price sensitive" on vacation, good for you. If I'm on vacation in Israel (or DC), I would prefer rides that show up faster and are cheaper. If you prefer to use the Uber app for everything, that's fine, but I doubt there is much of a use case for "people who don't want to install an extra app and are OK with paying 15% more for everything".
If you have mastered the art of user acquisition where you can get enough people to install an extra hypothetical Waymo app that is only useful in a few cities, not available during peak times with the value proposition that it may be 20% cheaper, you should really be starting your own business.
Well funded startups haven’t been able to beat the incumbents profitably. How many people that can afford to fly from the US to Isreal or anywhere else that requires crossing an ocean are going to be price sensitive enough to research the local ride sharing spp they never heard of to save a few dollars?
Even working for a startup, once you take into account all of the other costs if business travel, is saving 15% on Uber rides really meaningful? Before working for AWS (no longer there), I worked for a 70 person startup and even there they didn’t quibble about spending money for minor quality of life improvements. This wasn’t unicorn by any means. Just a run of the mill enterprise SaaS company in the medical industry.
I'll simply leave this on the table: Gett is completely dominant in Israel versus Uber, and Uber is stuck playing second fiddle to Gett where they simply resell Gett's service and have to do so at a markup. Because they can't drivers even interested using the Uber app, because the Gett app is better. (Note: Uber completely gave up in 2023, and you can't book at all in Israel using Uber anymore.)
It would appear that competitors to Uber can indeed exist. And yes, after flying to Israel I still care about cost (or my employer does). Two weeks on the ground can cost as much for taxis as the flight would.
If Gett has nationwide coverage for a whole country yes. If my Spanish was better (working on it, we are planning to snowbird in San Jose in a couple of years), I would use the DiDi app while there.
But that’s completely different than using Waymo in the few cities where it is available and still using Uber everywhere else in the country and constantly not having rides available during peak times.
Waymo would never have enough cars to handle peak capacity that are just sitting idle most of the time.
Why would Waymo want to maintain a large fleet when they want to focus on the technology? Self driving != self maintaining. Isn't Waymo and Uber partnering? [0]
Uber currently doesn’t maintain a large (or any) fleet either. I wonder how much the marginal gains from not paying drivers is shaved off by fleet maintenance of expensive cars.
Nope. They shift all of the costs of owning a vehicle onto their drivers.
They will be happy to lease a vehicle to you as the driver (with a predatory, abusive contract), but even this is almost entirely operated by third parties.
I suspect the plan was just to buy, merge, or partner with whatever company succeeded in self driving first. For a lot of startups, acquiring market share is the hard part, the technology is relatively easy. Obviously that’s not the case with full self driving vehicles, but the rest of Uber’s technology is fairly straightforward.
Sure, next they can corner the lucrative home improvement supply home delivery market. $50 to pick up a load of lumber from Lowes and deliver it to your back yard.
If you charge people $100 to deliver a loaf of bread and you have 0 customers it doesn't mean anything about your potential market size or equilibrium price to deliver a loaf of bread, because you have 0 data points.
Their latest earnings (Q4 2024) showed a 20% growth in revenue, an 18% increase in trips, and a 14% increase in the number of monthly active users (all numbers YoY).
Can someone tell me what the point of RTO is? These companies made insane profits during the pandemic and when everyone was WFH. Why rock the boat? Is it just corporate real estate prices? Is that all it comes down to?
Soft layoffs. Now with most of the software "done", big tech doesn't need an army of engineers. Revenue is not going to go up strong anymore so only way to increase profit is cutting cost.
In addition to the excellent points already made by others, some of it just comes down to the simple reality that some people are very poor performers in remote work settings. They should be dealt with individually on a case by case basis, but unfortunately blanket RTO mandates are much easier.
And usually from executives who seem to be away on "business trips" more often than not and when they join a Zoom, they're obviously in their home office.
We're in a time where all CEOs have to do "the current thing" because now there is no free money to paper over bad decisions. When the hammer drops, board is going to take inventory and say: "did you do these four things that everyone else was doing?", if one of those things is NOT implement RTO, they are out. This is a common groupthink problem at the top, encouraged by Linkedin thought pieces by similarly out of touch people, or whatever the flavor of the month book idea is.
It comes and goes in waves, this is just a current trend we have to surf.
Municipalities where the office is located threatening higher taxation if they don’t return to office. Mostly corporations who own their buildings are impacted.
A lot of people cite executive ego which I think is not entirely the case. But the board and execs are capitalist, and likely are financially incentivized by their holdings and portfolios to have a successful commercial real estate market and active municipal economy.
I think this is definitely a factor. I've seen companies do some weird shit with work-locations to get those sweet, sweet tax incentives. Think things like moving most of the people in one office across a parking lot to a new building for just a couple months, to meet occupancy targets for tax incentives, before they had enough hires to fill the new building with new people. Terribly disruptive, who knows what it cost, plus did exactly nothing for the spirit of the thing, just a total farce.
Totally believe that things like this are playing a role in RTO decisions. I also think the soft-layoff thing is a major factor, and generally that execs get uncomfortable when workers gain... anything, really, but especially perks of a higher "class" than they're "due".
Even those who own their own buildings, that's hardly an excuse. Buildings cost money. Every in-office employee has a cost associated with him or her, the cost of the facility itself. If they don't have in-office employees, the building can be sold (it's not an asset, just an ongoing cost).
Financially, it does not make sense to want to pay extra for each employee for square footage for the desk. Even if only some employees work remotely, that opens up the possibility of selling the building and leasing/purchasing a smaller one that costs less. Basically, remote work shifts the burden of paying for the desk to the employee... something you might be tempted to think the company would want to do.
Source? I have yet to see a single US government levy taxes as a function of how many employees work within their jurisdiction.
I don’t even understand how the logistics of that would work, nor if it would be legal, and especially politically unpopular since now small businesses are getting hit with taxes simply for being small.
This is a state thing, usually some N-year break an payroll taxes if they have M people working in the office. These deals are really about butts-in-seats unfortunately, and there is usually a non-trivial clawback clause.
Source: I was hired by a well-known hyperscalar cloud company that didn't want to send me to HQ, but wanted to place me at some random remote satellite offices. I looked into why, and it was this payroll / other tax break by the locality. (I sorta forced them to send me to HQ, as I don't deal with the heat / humidity well in the remote locations, which were in the US south).
Almost no companies that allow work from home are forcing you to work from home. You have always been free to come in those 2-3 days whenever you want, no?
It's reasonable if they already have an office where you live, and the office comes with perks (e.g. good food, gym) that save you the time you spent commuting there.
Relocating without even having a fixed contract from day 1, just to be able to go to the office, is a bet many (talented) people won't be willing to take these days.
It's downvoted because the rationale doesn't make sense logically, and also it implies that forcing people to do things that don't work for them is OK. It's not downvoted because the parent gets a benefit personally from being in an office.
Capital is getting cocky again and is trying to worsen the living conditions of workers to prop up its investments.
We as tech workers need to fight this. We need to finally unionize so we can strike and shut down production if necessary. The tactics of the industrial revolution still work in the digital age - labor is still the source of all revenue.
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