Blue Origin tells staff to catch next rocket back to their desks Blue Origin, the off-planet enterprise owned by Jeff Bezos, has told staff to get back to the office for a five-day week – a move which sees the twilight of flexible WFH arrangements at the company. According to reports, executives recently reminded the great unwashed about the new policy dictating a return to the corporate …
When I was in aerospace, our small team would have a Monday morning meeting where we shared what we did the last week and what we were working on this week and what inputs we needed from others on the team. We would then go off to our desks/workspaces and do things. Unless we had something scheduled to do at the test range, we didn't need to be in the office. I had a better electronics bench at home than I did at work. I wasn't going to bring my personal test gear and parts into the office. They didn't pay me enough for that.
The office was often too full of distractions as people took calls and moved around. While we needed to collaborate, interrupting each other's work was too often a problem. I know I'd get into a flow and, bang, somebody bothers me with a stupid question and I lose my place. If they had sent an email, I could get back to them when I reached a certain point in what I was doing.
I see the whole push towards getting everybody in the office with the excuses they are putting forth as piffle and wasteful. The article is good in pointing out that some offices don't have the capacity to have everybody in either by not having desks for them or insufficient parking and I would assume, little in the way of public transport. It might be good to have set days for teams to meet up in the office, but many engineers and designers will be better served by working from home in a space they can assemble to fit how they like to work. A long table with outlets, large monitors and no storage is the worst. Even regular plots of assigned cubicles are a poor choice. Everybody needs to put on blinders and noise cancelling headphones to help stay focused which doesn't lend itself to 'synergy', cooperation and sharing of ideas. If you don't get your work done, you will be sacked. Exchanging ideas with coworkers on an ad hoc basis isn't going to be measured in a way that looks good in your HR file.
I suspect that there are two key factors at play: collaboration and the perception of fairness. Collaboration is important for teammates working creative projects together and is fostered by in-person contact. This is especially true for new hires, who get a lot more out of in-person conversations than they do out of remote training. Fairness is a concern because some employees will feel resentful if not everyone is required to come into the office, so even people working solo must have the same rules applied as people working on a team, even if the solo people feel more productive working from home.
Welcome to corporate life!
"Fairness is a concern because some employees will feel resentful if not everyone is required to come into the office, "
Tough. There is very little to the concept of "fair". Why would it still be fair for the c-level execs to have private offices, catered lunches and a reserved parking space at the front of the building?
Some jobs can be done remotely in a WFH manner and some can't. There's also a vast grey zone where people spend working hours at both. There's even good arguments for functional groups to be in an entirely different buildings that aren't in the city center.
Collaboration is also not a good reason to have everybody in one office 5 days a week. I can and do work with people around the world on projects where we aren't even in the same time zone. I have a project kicking off this month with an engineer in Moldova. There's no chance a company would get me to go to that part of the world for any pay right now. Given all of the easy ways there are to communicate these days, it won't be a problem at all to collaborate.
They didn't say that doing something unfair was simply wrong, but that it could cause problems. That is true, and you are certainly aware of it in aspects other than where the desk is. For example, if someone came to everyone on your team and informed them that some people were receiving dramatically lower pay than some others, there would probably be a lot of concern by people wondering if they'd been shortchanged, trying to figure out whether they were in the low or high group, providing excuses why they deserve to be in the high group and others didn't, etc. That's perceived unfairness, and it could be warranted differences in pay or quite easily be something worse. I think you misread their argument and interpreted a demand where they intended a caution.
I enjoy the company of my colleagues - some of the time. When I'm in "the zone" (how I hate that term) I hate distractions, so home office is preferred. When we are brainstorming as a group, in person is better. I'm also training a new colleague (was an intern, did the degree while in my group), and I prefer a big whiteboard (blackboard would be even better) for our discussions.
I also like having a coffee with my colleagues, we have a better atmosphere in the group by also talking about life, not just work.
I'm not going to the office more than twice a week. If you want that get somebody else.
I'm not going to the office more than twice a week. If you want that get somebody else.
One of our top people told her boss exactly that when the "flexible working arrangements" came into force where I work so she comes in when she needs to and it's fine.
Those "flexible work arrangements" are anything but of course.
"When we are brainstorming as a group, in person is better. I'm also training a new colleague (was an intern, did the degree while in my group), and I prefer a big whiteboard (blackboard would be even better) for our discussions."
I absolutely agree with all of that. Trying to brainstorm and do engineering concepts is much easier and faster in person. One group I was in spent a half day designing a rocket lander test vehicle in a room full of white boards, we all took photos at the end of the session and disappeared for a week. The next time we got together, we all had outlines of what each department was going to design/build (lots of one person departments). That let us connect things together before we all scattered again to ready drawings for parts to be made. In six months we had a rocket lander that could give us an average of 19cm accuracy and enough delta V to get from lunar orbit to the surface. I think of that project when looking at the ratio of meetings to doing actual work. I did some of my work at home as did everybody else. Our building was WWII surplus and didn't have very good AC. I don't recall anybody feeling that the team was out of touch and we swapped doing time at the facility to keep the interns doing something productive.
This is one of the important parts to me. I don't mind working in an office, in fact there are some advantages I've noticed when doing so, but the office needs to be designed for the kind of work that people are doing. If a company is hiring workers who really can work efficiently while wedged into an open office and thus wearing headphones to hear themselves think, then they can probably work as efficiently if not more efficiently anywhere else. There's something to be said for walls and doors that allow people to separate when needed, hold impromptu meetings when necessary (rather than trying to bring everybody into one of three meeting rooms which are always already reserved by someone or trying to hold a meeting by talking past someone who is doing something else), and contain the tools they need frequently to do their work. Offices that aren't designed in that way are likely throwing away lots of productivity for tiny savings in real estate costs, something that remote working can decrease even more.
"Offices that aren't designed in that way are likely throwing away lots of productivity for tiny savings in real estate costs, something that remote working can decrease even more."
A big room with lots of whiteboards, chairs, table, internet etc is one of those things that makes going into an office a useful thing. It could be that some companies might want to look at providing those sorts of facilities with a few open area desks and transient offices. If somebody is going to come in for the day, they might want to do things after a meeting.
I haven't run into many situations where an impromptu meeting was a useful thing. There have been times when I've needed to work with somebody in software to coordinate what they needed in hardware and what sort of things I needed to get into the UI readouts such as current power input type and battery levels. We needed to know if the rocket was running off of ground power or internal battery and the charge in those batteries. No need for a meeting room, we could do all of that over the phone or via an online chat space. Anything with more people or something more formal would be scheduled.
"I haven't run into many situations where an impromptu meeting was a useful thing."
Maybe our environments or experiences are different. I have had a few occasions where we were assigned a goal to be split among a few people, and we had the freedom to design and implement something between us. At times like that, it could be convenient to get those people together to discuss ideas, diagram something out, and see if we agreed on things or if we had questions that needed to be asked. That can be done on a call, just as your large office with whiteboards can be replaced by a screen share and a program that lets you draw, but I've found that the speed of bringing people together could be useful. It could also be scheduled in advance, but that requires coordination when, in all likelihood, everyone is available sometime today without having to juggle calendars.
I find that the "big room with lots of whiteboards, chairs, table, internet etc" works even better if there are walls in the middle, because then you don't have to wear headphones all the time or worry about distracting people when you discuss something around a whiteboard near which someone unrelated is trying to work.
"I find that the "big room with lots of whiteboards, chairs, table, internet etc" works even better if there are walls in the middle, "
Yeah, I'm thinking of 'big' as a room that can hold 10-12 people, not an entire floor of a building. I'm most comfortable making notes with pencil and paper and sketch ideas since a picture is worth a thousand words, etc. A table to work on is important and the table needs to be big enough to spread out a "bedsheet" sized drawing. I've worked on projects where a giant overview of a system is super helpful over trying to look at it on a screen.
I'm currently on theregister because although I'm meant to be doing a review, it's a task that takes concentration and I'm sitting in an open plan office where two loud meetings are going on and a printer is running. The same would apply if I was writing or programming. Ear defenders are only so much use because in that environment, particularly speech even if knocked down in volume is still distracting (not sure if I'm allowed the ear defenders, we've been told we can't use noise cancelling headphones, which seems to be due to worries about hearing alarms). Pre covid (when working from home even part time was not an option) we had to have occasional meetings about the level of noise, which often involved hours of outright gossip, you'd be amazed the things people come up with to justify it. Contrary to the "shirking from home" phrase I've seen knocked around here I believe it's fully possible for people to waste a whole day at the office if they wish, some people may even be more likely to.
Absolutely it's useful to meet people in person, but as with everything else this comes down to organisation.
"not sure if I'm allowed the ear defenders, we've been told we can't use noise cancelling headphones, which seems to be due to worries about hearing alarms)."
Bizarrre! Where I work we test the alarms each week and the main worry is the risk of hearing damage if you *aren't* wearing some sort of protection.
"we've been told we can't use noise cancelling headphones, which seems to be due to worries about hearing alarms"
I guess they've never tried noise-cancelling headphones. They don't magically erase all sound, just knock some of it down. An alarm is grating enough that it's getting through and everybody getting up and heading for the doors is hard to miss. I'd also expect that if somebody is totally blissed out with their headphones on, somebody will tap them on the shoulder as they pass.
"Contrary to the "shirking from home" phrase I've seen knocked around here I believe it's fully possible for people to waste a whole day at the office if they wish, some people may even be more likely to."
Most certainly and that's why the arguments against WfH are mainly due to insufficient management. It shouldn't be that hard to set some goals, let the employee know what they are and hand them their head. They get the work done or they have to show why the assignment wasn't reasonable to have done in the timeframe given.
I had a screen saver I could invoke that looked like a spread sheet. Drag the mouse to the lower right corner and, poof, spread sheet instantly appears and the roving supervisor doesn't see that I was watching something on YouTube. If I'm not getting assignments done or making progress on a design, there's no hiding that. It also gets noticed if what I'm doing feeds into what somebody else is doing. If they get asked why they aren't getting their tasks done, they'd throw me under the bus and no mistake. Good people will strive to not be the long hold on something if they can help it.
"I had a screen saver I could invoke that looked like a spread sheet. Drag the mouse to the lower right corner and, poof, spread sheet instantly appears and the roving supervisor doesn't see that I was watching something on YouTube."
Remember back in the day when some PC games had a "boss" screen? :-)
In your "nothing", do you include socialising with colleagues and building a rapport with them which will make future queries easier (in both directions)?
I'm a big fan of WFH, but do see benefits in actually meeting people occasionally.
If your work can be done fully remotely, the chances are it could be done cheaper by someone else in a different country. It won't take long for management to realise that, so don't give up on the idea of going to the office.
"If your work can be done fully remotely, the chances are it could be done cheaper by someone else in a different country. It won't take long for management to realise that, so don't give up on the idea of going to the office."
Cheaper, yes. But looking at the standards of offshore coding, or offshore customer service, I think it's pretty obvious that the costs of poor quality outweigh the savings in first world wages. Then you've got time zone differences, differences in culture, verbal communication challenges etc etc. If you can find somebody in (say) Indonesia who genuinely speaks impeccable English, understands UK social and business culture, understands enough of relevant UK law and regulation, has the skills to do the relevant white collar job, and is willing work from early afternoon to late evening, then they aren't going to be willing to work for the sort of call centre wages that outsourcing is built around.
You also have to remember that if the organisation offshores the proles, then the management don't have anybody to manage, that's usually not so good for justifying megabucks. Look at the dismal state of Virgin Media, who've tried to outsource and offshore everything that they possibly can. And still they don't make much money, their service and reputation is appalling, and they're now starting to see rising competition for high speed internet. Where do they go from here, short of offshoring their board of mediocrities?
"If your work can be done fully remotely, the chances are it could be done cheaper by someone else in a different country."
Somebody in a different time zone with an accent so thick that they're hard to understand?
Cheaper, sure. Better, doubtful. Going for the lowest price is often the best way to get the least value at the same time.
Add to that the intricacies of different holidays, payroll requirements, employment regulations, etc. Oh, and taxes.
Meeting with others in the office can be a good thing, but having to sit next to them 8-5, M-F might not strengthen a working relationship, but do the opposite.
"Somebody in a different time zone with an accent so thick that they're hard to understand?"
I already have that issue in our onshore based company. We're pretty diverse and there's a quite a number of first gen immigrants. It can take time to get an "ear" for some of the accents, especially on Teams calls etc. which is how I deal with them, me being in a different part of the company and rarely if ever visit head office. Having said that, we have at least a couple of UK born and bred with thick local accents which, if you are not "tuned" to can make then difficult to understand too, especially on an audio only call when you don't get the visual cues.
The best part about being in the office is the lunchroom. Free food, free snacks, socializing, or organizing a group to go out for lunch.
It's a pretty bad place for getting computer work done. Time wasted commuting, people messing with the thermostats, distractions, gossiping, and cheap office equipment. Everyone has headphones on for isolation. If it's a newer office, everyone is hiding somewhere quiet.
It also doesn't solve the problem of people attending unproductive meetings 35 hours a week so they look busy. In or out of the office doesn't matter.
"I name this desk 'HMSO Red Stapler' and wish godspeed to all who toil on her"
A mug of lukewarm canteen tea is majestically (how else?) smashed over the desk's secretarial return, that magnificent structure that marks this as Design Classic. A hoarse cheer rings out and is echoed across the watching crowd as the chair majestically rolls down the unloading ramp and docks into place.
As dignitaries leave their platform, small children and other urchins gawp up at the long, smooth sides of the modesty panel, until shooed away by gruff yet friendly working men carrying hessian covered panels. These are carefully arranged around the shiny new desk to form the easily recognisable shape of a cubicle that appears to be an quiet and efficient place to work and yet, by the careful selection of a too low divider, is neither.
Their jobs now formally over, the men file out of the yard and head back up the steep cobbled streets for home. As the last of them leave, the heavy gates close slowly behind them, shutting with a final ringing clang.
A cold and foggy quiet now falls over the rows of terraces that line the grey streets. Streets that all lead down to the great lumber yards and chipboard pressing sheds that form the heart of the community. Yards that now stand silent, a community that stands silent, silent to ensure they'll not miss the call, the call they all pray to hear yet fear may not come again:
"They're takin' on men, they're takin' on men down Staverton yard again. Hunts and Hawk have opened the gates, for contracts to Staples and Equipu came in and they're takin' on men."
[1] oh, you just meant employes with an assigned desk, not actually a named one!
Let's take all the most expensive and important staff, those who have the capacity to just up and walk away on a moments notice because they remembered to pay attention in school and are performing the core work of the company, and start pissing them off with micromangling immediately after we (and in some cases, they) built the technology that allows people to escape the micromanglers and then spent two years proving beyond a doubt in the minds of every human alive that it works.
The most ridiculous part about these policies is when they don't care which of their many offices you're in.
"The most ridiculous part about these policies is when they don't care which of their many offices you're in."
I've literally had this. I used to work for a large company based in Reading. I handed in my notice when me and my SO decided to move to Northern Ireland. I got a lot of ums, ahs and are-you-sures, and about two weeks before I was due to finish the company offered to have my place of work moved to their Belfast office (about 2 hours commute from my new home town). I agreed, mostly because I didn't have a new job lined up at that point.
The ridiculous thing was that I was still working with my team in Reading, telecommuting from the Belfast office. No-one in the office knew what I did - I barely spoke to anyone. But the company didn't trust me to work from home, they had to see me sitting at my desk.
Right at the end, I actually tried working from home for a couple of days. Spoke to my manager in Reading a couple of times by video call, did my normal job. No-one even noticed I wasn't in the office.
"The most ridiculous part about these policies is when they don't care which of their many offices you're in."
Ok fine. How about a small office in the Peak District that's walking distance from a good pub and the homes in the area aren't too dear.
I'd be all for something like that were the office is comprised of a functional group and avoids having to go anywhere near HR trolls or execs that don't have a clue what your group actually does. I could ride a bike on nice days, nip home for lunch to save eating out and be close to the kid's (if I had any) school where I can pop out for few and make sure they make it home safely in the afternoon.
There's no point anymore to the soul crushing commute to a city center office block so the whole staff of a company can be warehoused in one central location. The time, cost and waste of resources for that are holding the world back.
"The WFH movement seems to be faltering across the IT industry"
So, an industry that has seen massive growth in "work at home" technologies is pulling back on their own staff working from home? Companies like Google etc, all sing their own praise about how their services can be accessed anywhere (indeed, that's one of the ways cloud companies promote themselves), yet they want their own workers in their cubicles.
If they themselves don't think it works, why would people buy their products/services?
We have a WFH agreement where a "day" in the office doesn't need to be a full day, it may be just an hour or two.
This gives us the opportunity to meet, discuss and socialise with colleagues where that fits our schedule, and return home to focus on other work/meetings without distractions.
This is great system and means that I'm in the office more regularly but I don't need to travel during rush hours.
"We have a WFH agreement where a "day" in the office doesn't need to be a full day, it may be just an hour or two."
That can be useful if you aren't too far from the office. If it's >30mins of travel, it might be better to spend at least half a day, but you could do that outside of typical rush hour times.
"Translation: We can't renegotiate our leases and it's embarrassing."
If they would just also look at how each person, coffee maker and printer adds to the heat load of the building and how much that costs to offset with AC, they might not whinge as much. There's plenty of other costs to having employees in the office that the employee can be made responsible for if they work from home. Bog rolls and janitorial services are two. If the building has lifts, it's less of an electric bill if they aren't in constant use.
Are they going to force people to move home or sack them when they were taken on during COVID WfH and have never actually been to an office, never mind live within commuting distance of one? Or the people who moved home to somewhere nicer when WfH was stated as being permanent and suddenly now it's not? And if they do get to keep their jobs and continue WfH, why is that not ok for people who do live near an office?
There's no real extra cost to the company with WfH, so they can suck up the fixed cost of the building lease if they can't get out of it, costs they will be paying whether people come in or not, and use their badge entry system or desk booking system or whatever so see what the minimum, maximum and average office attendance is. Once they know, they can either sub-let some of that leased space or wait for the lease tu run down and either move somewhere smaller or let the building owner decide what to do with the now empty space the company is not going to pay for. But it might take a brave CEO to decide that an enormous prestigious building is no longer what they want. ISTR some "big names" have done this, not with HQ, but still large prestigious buildings.
I was a new hire on WFH fully contract in the UK
When our Canadian CEO told us everyone had to work from the nearest office, we effectively told him to FRO.
Only after they lost over 80% of WFH staff did they recognise the devastation that diktat caused.
Having just recently absconded from my first stint (and I guarantee the last) in an open plan office there are two thing I would observe: firstly its an optimal petri dish for culturing the current viruses (influenza B, RSV) and secondly its pretty much like a teacherless school class room full of distracted teenagers in terms of clarity and focus of thought and productive activity.
I wonder if AT&T's Bell Labs had embraced such lunacy in the 1960s we would have had anything like the innovation which has formed the foundations of much of our contemporary world.
The strategy then appears to have been lure clever people into the organisation, give them reasonable offices and facilities then give them a selection of "hard" problems to choose to work on (sneaking in a few practical problems:). Bugger off and leave them to it. Bit like growing mushrooms. ;)
There really nowhere like that now. Academia is casualized, distracted by the fog and flak of the culture wars, overloaded with vacuous administrative tasks as well as having to meet insane performance monitoring metrics - miracle that anything useful is done at all. Big Tech isn't much better if the inside of a Google building (ca 2016) is any guide - looked like a cross between a pre-school (~kindergarten) and an institution for the intellectually deficient. To be honest I am not sure this impression was inaccurate. For the colossal resources available to global tech corporations their useful and original contributions to modern world appear rather puny and derivative. So much of their output is little more than a slight reworking of independent public domain or "free to use" contributions of private individuals.
It is an inconvenient truth that most of open source world (FOSS) is essentially WFH where for W = Work and unfortunately for most W != Work$. Taken as a whole the sheer scale of the contribution of this de facto WFH cohort dwarfs that of the "batteries" of the largest enterprises.
The wet dream of the C-suite appears to be an enterprise without actual employees but the X-Twitmeister has pretty much demonstrated how that is likely to play out.
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