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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Why RTO makes sense,

    People working at companies like Zoom typically get large sums of RSUs. These RSUs typically start to vest at 1 year and then continue to vest for 2-3 years. By forcing people to go into the office, some of these people will leave, forfeiting any non-vested RSUs. This allows companies to do layoffs without the cost associated.

    Salary. These companies will just hire new bodies with lower salaries and higher RSU packages that will vest over longer time with the goal of saving money in the immediate now that debt is no longer cheap.

    Training/Mentoring require more effort remotely.

    Corporate real estate.

    Why RTO doesn’t make sense,

    Many companies like Zoom have offices scattered across the country. The tech company I work for, for example, me and 3 colleagues are the only ones near my local office in a team of 80. My manager is in another state and most of my 80+ member team are in other states or countries (follow the sun posture). Any internal meeting I have to have would have to be done over Zoom.

    Consultant companies like PWC are doing much more consultant hours virtually instead of traveling to clients because clients don’t want to spend the extra billable for the travel, which is a key indicator that remote work isn’t the detriment that it’s being made out to be.

    Open office floor plans make productivity worse.

    .

    Personally I will never take a job again that requires office time, I much prefer meeting up with coworkers for dinner every couple months over forced “teambuilding”






  • Japan is very similar but not exclusive to parks, even in the middle of Tokyo. Pretty much EVERYWHERE in Japan expects you to carry your own trash.

    The only exception to this really being at restaurant’s, street food markets, and “some” vending machines (which will have recycling for cans/plastic).

    And you know what? There’s very little trash on the streets. The dirtiest areas I experienced was Osaka near Amerika-mura (young trendy area) which was mostly just stuck gum, cigarette butts, and in the early AM maybe an empty can of beer.


  • The entire pandemic, our security operations team got constant commendations for how rapidly we scaled up, and they touted the increased productivity we had WFH. I was officially reclassified as a remote worker at the start of Covid.

    Then we got a new manager after 2 years who decided everyone needed to RTO “as needed”, then monthly, then weekly.

    My disabilities and medication prevents me from safely operating a vehicle to commute and my respiratory disability puts me at an extremely high risk of complications from Covid (was bedrested for 3 days from Covid, took almost a month to mostly recover, after multiple booster shots).

    Tried to get accommodation, which I had never had to formally get before. Was surprisingly easy to get from HR, but my manager on the other hand made my life hell.

    My manager, though, pulled out all the stops.

    • He submitted a “request for family leave” for every workday that I was working from home instead of the office while I was working through HR accommodation request process. which I only found out about after HR mailed me a letter formally denying the requests.
    • Then my manager straight up told me, “I think the only reason you put in a request for accommodation is to avoid coming into the office”
    • Manager would “Forget” to invite only me to meetings, when others that were WFH due to illnesses like Covid would get an invite.

    Jokes on them, though, I left with a very short notice, little to no documentation on key projects that I was the sole driver and maintainer on. Literally left 2-year project with 2 pages of documentation that weren’t even up to date.

    • Went from making $100K total comp to over $150K total comp.
    • Insurance is kickass, talking like $400/m medication only costing $15/m with no deductible.
    • Nice RSU package, 60k over 4 years
    • No after-hours or on-call, no SLAs