RTO = Really Terrible Outcome

(Est. Reading Time: 3 min)     

I've been working remotely since COVID. That was 5 years ago. Most of us/I have been vaccinated for 4 years. Why haven't I returned to the office?

As a Software Engineer, working remotely is extremely more productive for ME. I'm not going to get into the semantics of it, we all have heard the reasons both sides align to, but everyone has a preference, and that is just fine.

But it's not even about being more productive, or having more time for a work-life balance. Being a Software Engineer today means being in a "blue collar desk job" type career that is loaded with far more risk and constant highly unpredictable situations. If I had relocated to the cities of any of my previous employers that I was remote for, and they didn't work out like they did, that would have been so much more financial and emotional stress for not just me, but my whole family. Even my last major employer would have had me in California, coming from Texas, for just 13 months before laying off me and 800 other people.

Imagine moving to a completely different and far place and getting re-established there, then having to do that all over again months later when it didn't work out and you cannot afford to be there anymore. That is why the Return to Office (RTO) stance is so infuriating. To demand your workers to RTO is to say "our company isn't doing well" and you want people to completely interrupt their lives and world for that risk? Even if the RTO your company is doing isn't meant to be a form of "soft layoff", so many people view RTO as just another way to reduce staff.

In office work can be great and productive for so many people, and so can remote work. But requiring your staff to RTO, even for good reasons, still has to make sense to the individual persons that policy affects, not just the cumulative outcomes the business will expect.

TL;DR: Don't fix what already works. RTO is a horrible policy, even when it has good intentions. Don't make being a Software Engineer any more risky and frustrating than it already is.

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