During my 25 years working full time for large engineering companies in the UK, if you'd polled me at almost any time during that period about whether such-and-such would make me consider leaving then I'd have always said yes on some scale from fairly likely to definitely. The grass always looked greener in other companies. I went for half a dozen interviews and got offers but each time I settled for the grass on this side. I bet it's much the same today. People talk a good fight, but when the mentally-rehearsed interview with boss comes round and instead of the carefully prepared arguments the only option is take it or leave it then many of those people will balance the cramped train ride with the arseache of finding a new job, moving house, school, friends, ... etc., and start bargaining for a desk with a windowsill.

"instead of the carefully prepared arguments the only option is take it or leave it then many of those people will balance the cramped train ride with the arseache of finding a new job, moving house, school, friends"

The difference here is that you should no longer be comparing office job here with office job there but office job with working at home. In that case the only thing lost is the cramped train ride; house, friends, school remain the same. The choice then is take it or take it - for the boss.

"The difference here is that you should no longer be comparing office job here with office job there but office job with working at home. In that case the only thing lost is the cramped train ride; house, friends, school remain the same. The choice then is take it or take it - for the boss."

Only if you can find another job close to home. If your new job is 100 miles away then that two days per week in the office is going to be one hell of a commute. You might live in a place where jobs are thick on the ground or close enough to housing you can afford, but people who are taking cramped train rides to work aren't doing it because they like trains.

You misunderstand.

We are not going into an office at all.

Not twice a week. Not once a month. Never again.

Sadly, a certain buffoon soon to regain power in the US has decreed that workers will return to the office from the 20th.

If you don't then be prepared to head

YOU''RE FIRED. Get the hell out of here NOW. MAGA.

I'm sure that if he could, he'd make Mar-a-Lardon the official POTUS Residency and to hell with DC. That way, he can play golf 365 days a year and not 300.

I always feel that if you've gone as far as looking for other work, then your heart isn' in your current employment, and no bigger, better desk, pay rise, inducement, is likely to fix the reason you started looking, so isn't it better to just go for the new thing? No law says you have to stay there if you don't like it...

Work is transactional. I provide a service to my employer, I get paid for it. I don't work because I love it, I work because I need to buy food and pay bills. I work to earn money to spend on things when I'm not working.

My company is owned by a US-based multinational. Why the fuck should my "heart be in it"? If my employer decided to try to force me into the office, the person making that decision would almost certainly know nothing about me, or the work that I do to earn money for them. They may well not even be in the same country as me, almost certainly not in the same city. Any such decision would not be based on whether it would make me more productive, or be of any tangible benefit to the business. If your heart is in that, then you are delusional.

Convincing yourself that you love working to make money for someone who essentially owns your job, and almost certainly doesn't do any work themselves beyond being an "investor" is an ugly joke, a product of peak capitalism.

That's not always the case. Sometimes, you're just looking to see if there is a better option out there. Not everyone is passionate about their work, and even though I can get really into work at times, I keep in mind that it is not supposed to be the central thing in my life. That means that I don't need to love everything about it to continue doing it, and I don't need to hate it to stop doing it. The external factors involved in the decision shouldn't be discounted.

Never had any carefully prepared argument. When the time came I just found another job and quit.

No pointless messing about.

I have one job with a long commute. It was 40 miles each way by car. Never again. Even shifted to 7AM to 3:30PM to avoid traffic it was a waste of time and expensive use of fuel and vehicle wear and tear and some risk of road accidents for good measure.

Absolute madness, why would I? I lasted 10 months and quit for less salary but net gain when all the costs of commute were weighed in.

Criteria for a job is always life before money. Commutes are an awful way to live life.

Improving morale by filling the office with people who don't want to be there didn't work out?

I'm as surprised as you are. Nobody could have seen that coming from a hundred miles away.

I think you are confusing office-worker morale and office-owner morale

Looking out from my corner office over the masses of minions who are forced to endure a terrible commute to come into the office demonstrates the power of my awesome will.

I may only be divisional chief of paper clips for the East-North-Eastern region of Amalgamated Holdings (holdings) - but at least I can force 20 other people to be miserable

Because in the end it's cheaper for them to have people work from home.

... unless they're getting large tax breaks for dragging people to a down-town area, and also possess a great value of commercial real-estate (or leases) in that area.

We always notice that it's the large companies that put out these mandates - it seems rare that smaller companies are discussed, except when they're citing larger companies.

It's been my theory that the old companies will succumb to more efficient, more nimble companies as this goes on. It will take half a generation, though.

"unless they're getting large tax breaks for dragging people to a down-town area"

The tax breaks should come from not dragging people to a down-town area. For that to happen there's a need to work out what to do with the down-town areas when people aren't being dragged in to work there.

Pull down the office blocks, put in some public transport infrastructure (great time to cut and cover metro tunnels) and build mixed-use residential, leisure and shops in their place.

Not, however, what seems to be happening in practice, which is converting unsuitable and crumbling post-war office buildings directly into low-quality "co-living" and student housing to glean the maximum profit.

> Because in the end it's cheaper for them to have people work from home.

In some cases cases it may not be.

When your employees are working from their own home you can't get away with cheap idiots and have to hire people who can do their job.

The whole back-to-office thing reeks of the management anti-pattern that "personnel" are "resources" - fungible, interchangeable parts that can be moved or ordered around without consequence.

The survey says that 1/3 are seriously considering quitting, which means that 5%-10% actually will. But quitting is easier for those whose talents are most in demand - the ones managers can least afford to lose.

Will managers realise this? Some will, most won't. But you can help them to realise it, especially if you are "top talent" yourself.

You might even get more money as well as more time with your family!

It does make sense to come into the office a few days a week. For me on average about a 15 minute drive to, and 15 minute back. And even I work from home Thu-Fri + most other days switch from office to home after midday-break (i.e. eat lunch at corp). I like seeing my coworkers face to face when possible.

For others it is a 2*45 minute ride, so they prefer about two or one day per week in the office. And others in my group are beyond 2* 75 minute ride, so they come to the office maybe about once a week or once every two weeks. Anybody further away are more rare to be seen in the office.

Why enforce a waste of resources? Long commutes don't increase productivity, that's just the reality.

It isn't about productivity, it is about a burning angst amongst mediocre managers that when working from home their peons might not be doing the full 7.4 (or whatever) of make-work activities that we fill our days with in the office. If these managers were actually leaders, they'd understand their employees better, understand motivation, and also focus on what business outcomes they want rather than believing a high count of arses on seats is a business outcome.

I work hybrid, 2 days in, 3 at home, that works for me and my employer.

You are right, the fear of management to be exposed as useless plays a part here. Which defies logic and reason.

Agreed, I come into the office because it's 10 minute walk from home, it's warm and someone else makes my lunch and coffee. Those who come in from another country have a different view.

Still just doing 2 mornings a week. Utter waste of time and it's only 30 min each way for me.

> There is also a feeling engineers work better when in-person, and some say younger staff can't get a feel for corporate culture and learn from older colleagues when at home.

I'm self-taught, like probably many here. I learned via forums, chats, instant-messages, and so on. I didn't learn in-person. There's no merit to this.

Further, when you're forcing unsocial/anti-social people to group together, and forcing introverts to socialize, it's a net-bad-thing. Managers only know what they are, and the people who want to be managers tend to be extroverted - and so everyone must be like them.

"It's easier to talk about it," I grew up with the internet, on IRC, and reading forums. When you talk about things, people put their mask on and actively hide what they're feeling, thinking, misunderstanding. To me: I see someone who's confident and clear, and job well done! I cannot pick up on verbal cues, like maybe others can. When it's in writing, I can backspace, I can edit, I can clarify, I can make a much, MUCH better communication - and I can see and feel the parts where someone's not understanding something, and I can pick up easily on what they're *not* doing/getting from the communication. You can't? Sounds like a personal problem -- shouldn't be forcing me to do something wrong because you can't. But hey, you're the boss, so badly's the way, right?

There's not better way to demonstrate corporate culture than to issue ultimatums that defy available evidence.

My tech team is made up of people from across the uk and europe. It would be almost impossible for us to be in a single office on a regular basis. We are composed like this because of the talent available remotely. If we were limited to a london office, our pool of talent would be equally limited.

Having an office in a specific city and only employing people within a commutable distance seems bizarre in 2025.

teams + slack = a remote workforce of top talent

Yes, my team at the moment is spread across 7 countries. I've worked with some of them for 6 years, and I don't expect to ever meet them in person!

I deal with the "best of the best" wherever they reside.

I do ask the purely practical questions of what timezone they are in and what days of the week they work, but other than that I do not do any DEIS or other HR crap!

Just think how much more you could get out of your team if you bothered your ass to meet them.

My employer started enforcing RTO about 18 months ago. Loads of folks were up in arms, loads of folks were going to leave, they weren't going to stand for having to work in an office. Then they started looking for companies that were 100% remote. Yeah right, bugger all of them, and the one's that that were found could afford to be really, really choosy about who they interviewed.

All the surveys talk about who doesn't like the idea of RTO, and who won't stand for it. I'd love to see the actual figure for how many do eventually leave.

The vast majority of employers are implementing some form of RTO - all that differs is the number of days. The chances of most folks completely avoiding any form of RTO are probably in the region of zero.

Just what everyone wants.

Commuting, even in London adds 3 hours to my day, longer if there are issues. I get more ill & have to take more days off.

I get into the office & immediately am already pissed off. I have a bad leg which means I sometimes have to put my foot on the desk to help it...I'm tired off telling the "that isn't professional" people to fuck off.

Going into the office to spend all day in teams meetings is pointless, then meeting told to "keep it down" because we're all in open plan offices. Being disturbed every 10 minutes when someone mistakes you for support & gets pissed off when you tell them no, you can't help them.

And WOE BETIDE you if you ACTUALLY spend time talking to coworkers in the shitty kitchen....you should be working not taking! And if you pop out to go for a coffee because of the crap your average company provides?!

Oh why aren't you wearing a suit?! We're a no jeans office...the CEO likes people to wear ties...well tell the CEO to fuck off.

If your company doesn't want you to work from home, leave your laptop & work phone on the office...since they don't want you to work from home during work hours, they can all bugger off about working from home out of hours

My employer started to push RTO. Prior to that I tended to be in the office when I needed to be, as I had a short commute, but I could do most of my development at home. [As a firmware developer, I'd been sceptical about WFH but - having been forced by circumstance - I was surprised to find it was more productive, for me.

Anyway, there seemed no basis for the RTO decision and I found that very frustrating. I left. I didn't go immediately - I wasn't going to jump into any job! I'd also accept that RTO wasn't the only factor - life is more complicated than that. However, RTO was a factor and it needn't have been. The separation between RTO change and my leaving was such that it won't have been seen as a correlation, although I did provide feedback about my reasons, including RTO.

I doubt that I'm unique. The lack of correlation makes it difficult to measure the actual effect of such policies.

Option 1. Return to office

Option 2. Change jobs

There's a 3rd option, and the more experienced and older you are, the more likely it is you're going to just retire.

needs people to be in the office

F**king hilarious!

I work for a huge company that you'd expect to be in the list but isn't. It's had a flexible working policy for, well, as long as I can remember

If you can do your job effectively without going into the office … so can someone in Bangalore.

Just what my boss said, and he added,"for less money".

Like that on its own would be the dealbreaker for an employer. If they're already in the mindset of looking at Bangalore they're looking at paying peanuts where possible, the fact that you're not in the office is irrelevant.

That is true, but the original point is still valid. Wherever the most talented people are, remote working makes it easier to hire people who are not willing to go to the office or to move to where the employer has offices. That means it is easier for someone, formerly hired because they would go to the office, to be replaced. I think people supporting remote working understand that in theory, and it's not like they get a choice about this, but it is one risk of that arrangement which is lower if an office is involved. Whether that skilled person is in India, Canada, or Italy, they can be hired by a company that's embraced global remote working. Even if they're restricting it to the same continent or country, the number of available workers makes it easier for them to try to search for someone with better skills or one with similar skills willing to work for less.

I honestly thought so, too -- if your job can be done remote, then it can be outsourced.

They tried that all throughout the 2000's though, and the results were terrible. Companies don't really seem to be going that route this time around. Maybe a little bit, maybe Costa Ricans and Brazilians as opposed to Indians, but it's not nearly as internationally-outsourced as I was originally expecting.

What I'm not sure we're at yet is: if your job can be done remote, then it can be done by someone in Oklahoma for 1/3 the pay. That doesn't seem to be holding up so much either, though, as the big tech co's still need significant experience - and man-power - and so they still have to compete rather strongly. Maybe the smaller IT shops can get away with that, but same thing: if those smaller IT shops train you into experience, you'll be poached (or at least have options).

Citation required.

I thought we resolved this during the first "outsource to India" craze in the 90s?

Fun fact: in the UK, an employer can't unilaterally change a working arrangement that's been in place for more than six months even if the agreement is informal.