I work for a large tech company with several branches in the US, one of which I'm a part of and live its same city. We went remote during COVID and it has been decent work; I sign in everyday, have my tasks to work on, have a daily voice meeting reporting my status, collaborate with my coworkers, and have a monthly touch-base meeting with my primary manager who is otherwise rather uninvolved and detached from my work.
The date we were expected to RTO kept getting pushed back as COVID refused to decline, but the day finally came. We were expected to work hybrid, with two days per week being in the office. I returned begrudgingly once irritated that I was expected to spend time and money to cross town with my company-supplied laptop and power supply every day to sit in an office and do the same work that I already did. So after that day, I simply didn't. At the time, I figured that, considering the relatively low number of people on my team, the statistical probability of me never being in the office on the same day as them was high enough that no individual one of them would notice enough to both care and say anything about it.
Turns out, I was right. Nobody said a word, at least not that I'm aware. A few months into my experiment I had a meeting with my manager at the time, and thinking I was sure to finally be in trouble I actually got promoted to the next level of my position for a nearly 15% raise! Eventually the company-wide online meetings became more intense on the RTO propaganda from the C-suite, and we were informed that they knew many of us weren't coming in via badge scans and they they would be upping the RTO to three days per week and using that same info to discipline us. That never happened, and was over a year ago.
I've thought about sharing this to this subreddit for a while now, but I didn't really feel like I had a takeaway conclusion for it worthy of a good post outside of just sharing news of my office hiatus that could be forced to end at any time. I don't feel as though I'm cheating this company; I provide them good work (far better than I would be if I actually had to go in for them) and have received good praise for the last several projects I have worked on, although because my own risky choice I now have the freedom to not pretend to be useful to them in subpar conditions. Don't get me wrong, I still daily live under the fear of them finally dropping the hammer on me, but I have mostly made peace with the possibility of losing my position; I'm young, I'm single, I have savings from barely spending anything, and my current company was ecstatic to have me after interviews so I'm sure I can repeat that again with another, for a more senior position and a far bigger raise than the measly one I was given this year.
Not really sure how I want to end this post. Still scared this at the very least getting associated to me by an unfriendly reader. But considering this is a worker's rights subreddit I hope that if they're reading it here, it would rather give them permission to consider pulling back on giving time that is far more valuable to them in real life hours and meaningful dollars than it is as a arbitrary 7+ digit number in the bank accounts of their superiors.
If you're a crazy person like me who's risked their job with your job's RTO policy and gotten away with it, share for camaraderie?