I ended up painting a picture that, when considering just the costs of vehicular wear and tear, associated insurance costs, added food costs, lost time commuting, and lost economic opportunity in housing choice, that it would end up being approximately equivalent to a $30,000 USD pay cut (primarily due to housing and vehicle costs to preserve the existing commute, rather than searching further afield with a hybrid or remote schedule). I also added that, for the technology teams in particular, our follow-the-sun support model meant we were all incredibly scattered about anyway with no real colleagues in our local office to network with.
The response was to double-down: those outside of "hubs" were increasingly passed over for promotions and growth opportunities, hubs started enforcing mandatory in-office days (dictated by the VP), and - of course - the company's promise to support minority colleagues was effectively compromised to "encourage" relocation to Texas. It wasn't really surprising when I got RIFed, just incredibly disappointing.
Data alone is not enough to sway these people. They have their own agendas that have no concern for their workers' needs or goals. The solution will be collective action, rather than bargaining for basic empathy.
True. And, they have their own data that says workers love RTO. My company sends out employee surveys every six months. They claim that employees who work-from-the-office have higher workplace satisfaction scores, and therefore working-from-the-office must be better - the data proves it!
After a few cycles, I noticed that the top problems from the surveys always stayed the same. Then I noticed that the changes they were claiming to make were either half-hearted or were gross misinterpretations of survey results to push their own agendas. Of course the survey results stayed the same, nothing was done to address the problems.
After I noticed this, I still filled out the survey, if only because they would track me down and tell me the complete the survey (wait, I thought this was anonymous...). One year I answered 5/5 on every question. The next year I answered 0/5 on every question. The next year I quit.
No business is different than the others, not really. Absent accountability, the executives will always act in their own self-interest; since their compensation is mostly stock, that means they will sacrifice the future of tomorrow for the stock bump of today, every single time.
The most amazing was a pretty detailed and well conducted survey over a two year period. It showed that satisfaction was inversely proportional to both rank and tenure, and the decline started at 6 months. So an executive or senior IC would be immediately dissatisfied. A lower level employee or supervisor would start very happy, but the luster would wear down after about 4 months lol. Long tenured employees grew increasingly dissatisfied until their personal liquidity event.
They fucked up and broke out the data in a way that demonstrated that the division leads were dissatisfied to the point that it was affecting their health. No more public data presentation from that point forward.
Yes, and so does everyone else, including me, including you.
> since their compensation is mostly stock, that means they will sacrifice the future of tomorrow for the stock bump of today, every single time.
When investors discover that a company is eating its seed corn for short term gain, the stock crashes.
Not sure why you are being downvoted. I see lots of people who are acting in their self interest by wanting to remain remote.
>When investors discover that a company is eating its seed corn for short term gain, the stock crashes.
Maybe. Companies have been eating their seed corn with offshoring for quite a while now. M&A and cornering the market is a good antidote for such things. People still use Google and Windows and those products are horrible now.
For people who are being forced to RTO, put in your notice if you can, or at least look for another job. It's going to be a tight market for a few quarters at least.
Me, I tried shorting, and got my adze handed to me. I'm not smart enough to be successful at that, and so just stick with long positions.
Not a downvoter, but I suspect it's because we all know that people have a tendency to act in their own best interest.
But, we also expect leaders to consider the best interests of their charges, as a function of good leadership.
I see. It would be nice, but leadership like that are few and far between, and they probably get it beaten out of them. I don't think that's even taught at MBA school. When I started all this, someone told me, "they show appreciation through your paycheck." Not very satisfying, but there it is. If you're productive, they certainly miss you when you are gone.
we used Lattice in an organization of ~150 people. We had roughly 10 leaders (exec and non-exec), responsible for various functions. The most any one leader had in their reporting tree was ~40 (one of the Eng leaders)
For Lattice, at least from what I was exposed to, the surveys ARE anonymous. They know who has and hasn't submitted a survey because everyone gets a personalized link, but that is not aggregated up into some dashboard where UUIDs are mapped back to respondents. It's something like "Bill in finance has 4 directs, and 2 of those haven't pressed submit on their unique survey." But as you can figure, that does not matter AT ALL. Anyone with a modicum of attention can figure out who wrote what when you have a reporting tree that small. You will see the responses broken out by leader, by function (say, Sales for example), and then division, whole company. The only people who had access to all the results AFAIK were the CEO, the head of IT, and HR.
In short, it's anonymity theater if your leadership has any inkling of how you communicate. I knew exactly who wrote what from my teams, and so did my leadership peers.
You might be able to identify your direct reports based on communication style alone, but I don't really find it believable that this is a property that naturally transfers to your leadership, and from them up the chain to executives.
If that is true, then the "anonymity theater" only really extends to direct leadership, and not much further. This means that you, as a leader, would have to be complicit in any attempts to deanonymize any specific respondents.
So to rephrase: your ability to deanonymize your direct reports' responses does not extrapolate to the entire exercise being "anonymity theater", because your ability to deanonymize any given respondent only extends as far as your direct reports and maybe a free others. This becomes increasingly less true the larger the set of total employees surveyed.
And when your leadership says that we should help whoever "isn't a good fit" to exit the company, will you use your knowledge of who wrote what to make the right choice of who to fire?
So my decision would necessarily require considering all of these factors: competence, satisfaction, and alignment. If their answers to an employee satisfaction survey tell me they're dissatisfied, and I can't or won't do what it takes to make them satisfied, I would be doing us both a disservice by not helping them exit the company.
At the end of the day, a company is a group of people dedicated towards some common goal. Everyone may have a different picture of how to get to that goal, but everyone should be trying to push things in the same general direction. Someone who is obviously pushing in the wrong direction or causing unnecessary friction should either be convinced to align more with the rest, convince others to push in the alternate direction, or asked to leave.
Now obviously companies should be encouraged to follow social norms in some respects, to make it clear that certain ways that they act are not tolerated by the society they exist within. However, this is still an inherently social problem, and requires social solutions.
If you feel like you're the odd one out, and that the majority of people in the company--or maybe just "the leadership"--are wrong, consider that at the end of the day, the reason usually comes down to "other people don't think like you". There are two things you can do about this:
1) change other people's minds. You generally can't do this by actively fighting against them, so you should at least make it clear you align with them in some way that matters to the company, first. 2) you can find a different group of people to work with, people who think more like you.
Consider that if the second option doesn't exist, you always have the option of doing it yourself.
Sure —- but then you know the exact answers of the last person to respond; it’s just the delta between the results before they responded and after, and you know who they are. So they’re fully de-anonymized. And of course that means you can de-anonymize the second-to-last respondent… and so on.
How many of these "executives" or "HR people" who contract these kinds of surveys actually have the a) time, b) interest, or c) acuity to perform this kind of exploit? Not many that I could think of.
The bar for exploiting this is high for non-technical people, and I don't think it's rational to conclude that it would be exploited in the majority of cases, much less a significant minority. I think the default usage of surveys like this is approximately: 1) come up with some questions, 2) put these into some survey software, 3) put in the employee email list, 4) blast everyone with a link and a deadline, then 5) check back in on the results when the deadline is near.
Ain't nobody got time to watch every result come in and do some computation to figure out everyone's exact answers. If that's what they were really after, they'd probably just remove the option to respond anonymously. There are far easier ways to achieve the same end than by some circuitous exploit, right?
Are elections rigged?
Also, voting records in the US indicate whether you voted or not, but not who you voted for; that part is anonymous. Perhaps his company was similar.
Or is it the same money pulling the strings of whoever takes the seat?
The illusion of choice is a very effective method for controlling people.
Surveys aren't a good way to do that.
I would guess the point of your parent comment was that the finding is more easily explained by people who like being in the office being more likely to go there.
Don't assume survey results that run counter to your anecdotal experience have been fabricated.
That was also promptly shutdown, in favor of two new tech hubs in cheaper countries and a smattering of MSPs.
Leadership wants attrition. They want people to quit and if they don’t have to make you redundant and pay you out, fantastic. You just gave them good data points to indicate that a portion of people are likely to do just that.
If you upend your whole life and move to a hub then that means you need this job very badly. Guess when you’re getting promoted next? Not soon.
For some subset of people, work is the most important thing in their lives and it is largely how they identify themselves. As the tweet points out, the vast majority of execs are in this bucket. This is almost by definition - despite what has been popular talk in some corners of the Internet, most execs do work extremely hard, as do most people who get to the upper echelons of their profession. These people essentially want to work more. FWIW, while I'm not an exec, I would put myself in this bucket.
On the other side are basically the "work to live" people. While this is a pretty broad bucket (some people may want to spend as little time working as possible, but I think most people in this bucket care about their careers and want to do well, but they still fundamentally see work as a means to an end to achieve goals outside of work), these folks are much more likely to not be execs. They want to do a good job, get paid well, and then go home.
So I think both sides talk past each other because they fundamentally have different goals. For people in the first bucket (again, that was definitely me), I grew to hate full-time remote work. I felt incredibly disconnected from my work and my colleagues over time, and my motivation definitely waned over time, and as someone who really identified myself in the context of my profession, that was really tough. But I also don't have kids, and not a lot of responsibilities outside of work, so I can definitely understand the other side of it.
I don't think there are any easy answers, but saying "data alone is not enough to sway these people" I think misses the point, because you're only showing data that pushes the viewpoint of your "second bucket" group. Again, to emphasize, not a bad thing, but it doesn't encompass all of the concerns that are in play of the first bucket group.
I love remote because it saves me 100+ minutes of my life every day. Minutes better spent working. I do miss joining me peers for lunch and Watercooler talk but not worth it.
The best solution to this is to create employee-owned private corporations like Huawei: All its shares are owned by its employee union, and the union democratically decides how much dividends to distribute to the employees every year. Easiest worker-ownership setup.
Yes, because they don't NEED or WANT to do anything that jeopardizes their position in the executive group-think. Remember that every year they survive, they are going to get 10s of millions.
The cost of sticking out for their own reports is too high. They'd much rather their reports kill themselves and their own lives than forego the 10s of millions coming this year. Short term.
Also remember that they see their current position as a reward for sacrificing a lot in life. They feel entitled to boss people. People should bow to their command because they reached the top org chart positions. How dare people below them propose anything but loyalty to whatever they want?
Like many of the other responses in this thread, you're generalizing a small set of experiences to every company, and not even acknowledging that other companies may not work this way
I suspect this is due to not wanting "to do anything that jeopardizes [your] position in the [anti-]executive group-think."
I have worked for multiple companies that looked for feedback from employees, and claimed to use that information to better the company for those employees. Some actually did, and others did not.
Not all of them are the same, and many actually seek feedback in earnest. Meanwhile, you would have me believe that some of the companies I have worked for didn't exist.
Arent they? If those 'not same's constituted any tangible statistics, the landscape would be different. But it is how it is.
That is like saying "But there were good people among that overwhelmingly vicious bunch too!". Yeah, there may have been a small percentage of good people who never went along with the mainstream even in Nazi Germany, but the majority did and they did what they did. The example is not extreme - you can apply the same logic to every case in which someone tries to acquit an overwhelmingly negative majority by mentioning an insignificant number of positive minority gaming that majority.
It's entirely possible the landscape isn't different because the "good" companies are inherently uncompetitive with the "bad", but this is not something to be solved by just writing every company off as "bad" and then blaming the resulting system on that.
You have to start by understanding why, to paraphrase you, "the landscape is not different". I think writing off all companies as "the same" avoids answering that question entirely, which really cripples any logic you build on top of that premise, to the point where it leads to contradictory or invalid conclusions.
I disagree that the "bad" companies represent "an overwhelmingly negative majority", because I do not see the necessary proof to support such a statement. It appears to be a generalization driven by motivated reasoning.
> Not all of them are the same, and many actually seek feedback in earnest.
And many actually seek to retaliate on feedback - as evidence by the parent post.
We can both be right but you cannot deny other's experiences and insight. You yourself are aware and have seen other execs who are more interested in self-preservation. So they exist, and are not a rarity.
So yeah, nOt EvErY eXeC iS lIkE tHaT - but plenty are and that's what my post intends to highlight to the avid reader. My intent is to highlight the truth and present the reality of what exec position is. And that, leadership is not to be expected by default.
In my career, I've had fewer "bad" companies than "good", and none of the "good" ones match any of your descriptions of what "companies are like". Am I to believe I've just had incredible luck? Maybe!
However, I reject the notion that the "vast majority" of companies are exploitative. This does not fit with my experience, or the experiences of my peers. I would say "less than half", if I were to really ballpark the number.
This, of course, puts your comments in a pretty poor light, for me. You're outright insulting the "good" companies I've worked for, by insinuating that they were only trying to exploit me for profit. I mean, they were "exploiting" me, if you really want to split hairs, but I understood the nature of the relationship and actively consented to it, because the relationship also benefitted me. I had a good job, good colleagues, challenging work, solid responsibilities, good benefits, good pay, and more. The fact that the "company" was trying to make more from the output of my work than they were offering to me as compensation is not an inherently bad thing. I could not, on my own, build the kinds of things these companies were building, nor would I have thought of the products/services on my own, so there is indeed value in being "a company".
I was also part of said company, and identified as such. My success was its success, and vice versa.
Your outlook on this topic is needlessly pessimistic.
Just as it is with racial, age or sex discrimination. And before that child labour, slavery and indenture.
To learn they have to be beaten in the market place, or the floor of the legislature.
Grift and fraud. Nobody likes to talk about this, but many people are running grifts, from doing nothing, meetings in the supermarket or on vacation, to running multiple jobs. I had a couple working 5-6 different full time jobs together. Another was working offshore using a family member as “remote hands” to keep a device connected in the US. It’s difficult and expensive to police.
Hybrid decreases effectiveness. A remote only unit is great, a on-prem unit is great. “Permanent” hybrid is the worst of all worlds. Remote people rely on tools more and they don’t work as well with people in site. Meeting transcripts rely on the different clients to identify speakers, and work poorly in conference rooms, for example. It’s also easy for bad patterns to develop where remote people get cut out by people talking off the cuff in office, or vice versa.
The majority of the quality of life improvements are really about time freedom. You’d get most of it by giving employees sufficient paid time and allowing them to use it. Remote first by business unit makes sense too, but I think that the risk is the remote workers become like the folks in “provincial” branch offices.
For example, this employee who is supposedly spending 1/6th of their time on your job. If you say tried to capitalize their time such that you now have 6/6ths on your tasks, would the employee even accept this arragement themselves? You are effectively giving them 1/6th the pay for the same full time day of work they do anyhow. Squeezing this employee is not going to see you get more work out of them. It is going to see them leave your company and replace that job with another, leaving you shortstaffed and having to invest in vetting candidates and onboarding. Now you ask how much you get out of an employee you put the squeeze on given that this will lead to turnover and an overall loss of that full time work being done as you suffer through a period of short staffing.
When you have your wife sending proof of life texts and posing as you, pretending to have technical difficulties in meetings, not only are you not doing anything, you’re like a disease that saps the productivity of your colleagues.
With respect to kids and other “life”, we set clear expectations - you’re not paid to babysit. Personally, my expectation is that our folks are professionals and we all deal with incidental things. I was stuck waiting for a gas meter change all afternoon last week. My admin’s son had a snow day. But if your car breaks down every Friday, or your 6th grandmother has passed, that’s a problem.
What you are saying is this: how an employee spends their time is 100% the responsibility of their manager. That's extremely infantilizing - strong teams I have worked on expect employees to self-manage their time productively and deliver about "full time" bandwidth (minus time off, maintenance work, etc) on a consistent basis so we can effectively plan and execute.
I'm speaking from experience: I had to deal with a new hire whom I was assigned to mentor who tried to juggle just one other job and it was super obvious they weren't working when they said they were. It took a long time to work through the PIP process, and effectively that person stole not only the company's time and money, but wasted a good deal my own time and patience. Fuck them and their entitled mentality. If they had gotten their shit done on time and without sketchy meeting aversion, they might have continued enjoying the second paycheck. Frankly if they had done good work and in a timely fashion it might not have mattered if they had another job - but if you're employed (not contracted) ethically speaking that employer and those coworkers are correct to expect that job to be your first priority during the work week.
Because that's the execs' privilege. Just like how the old feudal aristocracy was free to engage in as many economic activities as they wanted for self gain but the feudal serfs were supposed to tend to their lords' fields all the time and be loyal and honest and not steal from their lords.
Who are you, the lowly pleb, to think that you can have the same privilege with your modern technolords... Know your place.
Are the tasks getting done but are poor quality? Are you implying that you'd be fine with the shoddy work if they weren't working multiple jobs? If not why do you keep them, irrespective of whether thy have multiple jobs?
I want to say very clearly that I don't doubt that "grift and fraud" happens. What percentage of the workforce are engaged in this grift? If you have 100 remote workers in your average IT shop at BigCo, how many of them do you think are truly running a scam that would never pass if they were in person? My guess is 3 or less, but that's just a guess.
In case it's not obvious, what I'm working towards is: If 3% of your workforce is engaged in grift, but a lot of the other 97% are happier and more productive, is it worth pissing off a substantial portion of that 97% just to shut down the 3%?
> The majority of the quality of life improvements are really about time freedom. You’d get most of it by giving employees sufficient paid time and allowing them to use it.
This leaves out one of the main things to like about WFH for many (most?) Americans, at least: I get to avoid wasting 30–90 minutes of my day in a stressful commute that comes with its own share of expenses.
With employees, I agree it’s much lower, it’s mostly just lazy loafing that is harder to spot if the employer doesn’t have clear evidence of performance. The bigger issue for them are people who move away, lie and invent medical problems to avoid work rules.
The majority of my folks are in IT infrastructure and support. It’s pretty easy to spot on the operations side if you understand the tickets. The other side of the shop, who do more dev work relies on having good managers and leads. The documentation isn’t a fair evaluation— a single change may require weeks of work for a developer, so using counts isn’t fair unless you really understand the workflows. For those roles, hybrid makes hiding easier.
Don’t worry, people are perfectly capable of doing that in the office too.
Its really simple -> give them assigned tasks. If they don't get them done and can't prove they actually worked on it (provided it was reasonable for their skillset) then fire them.
It is really that easy. But people continue saying this "grift" exists of employees abusing their companies. If this is really true, then all it says is that managers at these companies are really REALLY terrible at managing and they should be the first to go.
Forcing things through collective action that prevent market forces from working are deleterious in the long run. See Europe's moribund economy.
> They have their own agendas that have no concern for their workers' needs or goals.
That's right.
> The solution will be collective action, rather than bargaining for basic empathy.
A business is not a jobs program. It's there to create wealth, and if it does not, it goes bankrupt and everyone loses their job.
You are always free to quit and join another company more to your liking, or you can quit and start your own business and run it as you please. It happens all the time, and this message board is run by a venture capital firm, looking for startups to fund.
Kindly go away and chew on this while you do so: if everyone started their own billion-dollar business like you claim it’s possible (and plausible) to do, then that means the cumulative wealth available out there is literally infinite and currency has no relevant function.
So for currency to be worthwhile and billion-dollar businesses to be viable, there must be finite resources. Furthermore, since humans cannot be trusted to act in the interest of society, then regulation is needed to ensure equitable outcomes and minimize harms.
Now go away and leave me be.
I don't exactly agree with GP, but I would ask you to perform a similar thought experiment: if companies could work the way you claim they should, where are the examples of these companies? Why do even you portray the environment as being full of companies whose primary goal is to exploit their workers?
We live in a remarkable free time, so alternative models should have ample room to grow. And yet, I don't see a flourishing of companies that work under your "better model". Why?
Companies primary goal is to exploit /everything/, and why wouldn't workers be included/
Yeah, but this isn't true as a blanket statement. Sure, most companies want to be profitable, and I agree "being profitable" is inherently exploitative. However, companies also generally produce useful products, the demand for which is often the primary driver of said profitability (i.e. economies of scale). So, it must be true that companies can often (and frequently do) have a different primary goal: "make a thing which has high enough demand for us to become profitable".
So assuming every company is out to exploit their workers is both narrow-minded and pretty obviously untrue, when given a little thought. It also turns out happier employees make better things--else, why would we constantly have people pushing for better working conditions? Some companies, by definition must meet some minimum bar of providing for their employees. This is often dictated by law, otherwise they will eventually be stripped away in search of "efficiency" (i.e. "profit margins"). However, this is strictly not true of many companies. Many companies go above and beyond the bare minimum when it comes to benefits for their employees.
I know these things because I have experienced them firsthand. I am not the only one who has done so, either, so clearly not all companies are actually exploiting their workers to the same degree. I would even go so far as to point out that some companies do their best to not exploit their workers. Even if this is purely done to differentiate the company from its competition, and serves to attract good employees, this is still a benefit to the employees of said company.
So I pretty soundly reject your hypothesis that all companies' primary goal is to "exploit everything". Not every company is an evil megacorp, and portraying them all as such does no service to the companies that are actually working hard to not be an evil megacorp.
The problem is transforming the word’s meaning in the next sentence to imply they use the resource/personnel unfairly, which is demonstrably untrue as you point out (though it’s certainly the case that for some companies both meanings apply)
Currency will always have a function because there will be certain services that will never be infinite, for example getting a massage from another human. Even with infinite resources and robots doing all jobs you can see how currency will still be worthwhile.
Nope - the 'free market' would just cause enough inflation to scoop away all that infinite money and make things end up exactly like how they are now. A tiniest minority at the top, living more luxuriously and comfortably than the feudal kings of old by doing less work, an overwhelming majority at the bottom struggling to survive.
Please demonstrate.
> that means the cumulative wealth available out there is literally infinite
There is no limit to the wealth that can be created. For example, if you gave Picasso a canvas and some paints he can turn $50 in supplies into $100,000 in art.
> if everyone started their own billion-dollar business like you claim it’s possible (and plausible) to do
I didn't say everyone. I said "anyone". Most will never try - but the option is available. Nor did I say it had to be a billion dollar business. Just a business. You can start one tomorrow by filling out a few forms and paying the state license fee.
> since humans cannot be trusted to act in the interest of society, then regulation is needed to ensure equitable outcomes and minimize harms.
I've always said the purpose of government is to protect peoples' rights. However, "equitable outcomes" is not possible and every government that tried it failed miserably.
> Now go away
It's a public message board. Feel free to downvote me all you like, though.
The only way dominance can be sustained is by using the government to throttle the competition.
For instance, IBM is a recognized mainframe monopoly. They are not valuable today not because they lost the mainframe dominance, but because mainframes are obsolete (or almost).
> What they won't do is lose to a competitor on their own terms.
Markets are always changing. Large companies tend to optimize for a particular market, and when it inevitably changes, they cannot adapt and get left behind. Often its their competitors that change the market.
See the classic book "The Innovators' Dilemma".
(The same thing happens in nature when a species over-specializes to a particular niche.)
This applies to both work location and number of hours per week. It's gotta be hard to understand and accept that lower-level workers have a different view and priorities from your own, especially when all your fellow execs share your own view.
And, as the tweet says, at a certain level you can afford to offset all the negatives of work location / work hours. No commute. Personal chef. All household chores covered. Full time individual childcare. It's a lot easier to come into the office for 50-60 hours per week when you don't have to also spend your time outside the office trying to balance sleep and survival. But, again, that's not what life looks like for an average employee.
Of course they did. If you want to convince a company doing RTO why it’s bad, you need to show the negative impacts to the organization. Everybody seems to approach this from their individual perspective.
There is a reason these are the same thing that should already be obvious: If you want people to take a job that costs them ~$30,000 more in expenses, you'll have to pay them more. If you split the difference, you both come out $15,000 ahead.
This before you even consider the costs to the company directly. If employees work from home you need less office space etc. That's not just rent but heat, power, security, insurance, internet, furniture, taxes, cleaning, lawyers and permits. That's a ton of money.
You could have 2 employees doing the same job, but one (Joe) has a 5 minute walk as their commute and the other (John) has a 50 minute drive in a personal vehicle. If there are enough Joe’s around to fill your roles, the costs associated with the Johns commutes don’t matter to the organization.
Facilities costs are actually pretty minor in the grand scheme of things…especially if your company has other roles that cannot be done remote. Incremental office space costs are minimal.
Your only hope to win the debate is to demonstrate with real productivity data. Perhaps things like demonstrating reduced sick time, turnover rate decreases, etc.
This doesn't mean they have different expenses. John is paying $2500/mo in time and commuting expenses, Joe is paying $2500/mo in additional rent to live in the downtown. Efficient market hypothesis says they're the same and anyway you care about the mean or median rather than rare outliers when operating at scale.
> Facilities costs are actually pretty minor in the grand scheme of things…especially if your company has other roles that cannot be done remote. Incremental office space costs are minimal.
Most offices are just offices. The jobs that can't be done remotely are the likes of data centers or factories, but these are different facilities in different places. If you're e.g. a tech company, your offices in San Francisco or New York contain entirely people who could work from home whereas your data centers might be in Oregon or Virginia.
So the costs are not incremental, they allow you to close entire facilities; and those facilities are the ones with higher costs per unit area; and the incremental costs are not trivial either. Things like rent and utilities scale approximately linearly with square footage or number of employees. Some are even super-linear because larger facilities succumb to bureaucracy, HR drama and combinatorial explosion in risk interactions.
> Your only hope to win the debate is to demonstrate with real productivity data.
I can win the debate this way too.
That two hours a day your employees were wasting in traffic? They're salaried employees, that's 10 hours a week they're not working.
They are still general living expenses. Those don’t go away based on employment or not, at home or not. They could decrease/increase some, but you can’t assume the whole amount is tied to employment only. Besides, if you don’t like your living expenses…quit or move.
> If you're e.g. a tech company…
What if you are not? what if you are a bank, a hospital, a factory, an insurance company, a processing center? You cannot make the assumption that every organization can just close “some” offices and leave others open. What about the HR and morale impact when 75% of your employees cannot work remote, but your SWEs can? Is it worth the office/desk footprint savings for leadership to create an elite group with a special benefits that pisses for every other person at the org? Probably not…
> That two hours a day your employees were wasting in traffic? They're salaried employees, that's 10 hours a week they're not working.
Now you are back to dealing with an individual impact here. If they are a salaried employee, the amount of work required for completion in a given week doesn’t change whether a commute is 10 hours or 10 minutes. That’s time the employee is investing by choosing to live where they live and work for the employer they work for. I have been on a salary for nearly 40 years…my employers have never expected me to work 168 hours a week. The expectation was an average of 40.
That wasn't the assumption. The assumption was that the difference was $2500/mo. Real estate in the heart of the downtown is significantly more expensive.
> Besides, if you don’t like your living expenses…quit or move.
At which point we're back to the efficient market hypothesis. If you live downtown, your rent is $2500/mo higher than if you live an hour away, but if you live an hour away you spend $2500/mo in time and commuting costs to get to the office.
But if you work from home then you live an hour away from the office, never go there and have no commuting expense, so you're ahead by $2500/mo and the company would have to compensate you for refusing to allow that.
> What if you are not?
Then you probably still have the same structure where the facilities that require in-person work are separate from the corporate offices:
> what if you are a bank, a hospital, a factory, an insurance company, a processing center?
A company is not a factory etc., a company has factories, or bank branches, or warehouses, or medical facilities. These facilities are generally already separate facilities from the offices where SWEs and other administrative staff work, because those facilities have different geographic requirements. Bank branches or medical facilities have to be near customers or patients. Warehouses or factories will be in places with cheap real estate or industrial zoning.
Offices have traditionally been in cities.
> What about the HR and morale impact when 75% of your employees cannot work remote, but your SWEs can?
This is a really dim view of people. Nurses and factory workers know perfectly well why they can't work from home. Why would they resent that someone else can when their job doesn't have the same requirements? Do they get mad at park rangers because their job allows them to spend time in the outdoors?
They might even notice that it's to their advantage because it gets 25% of the cars off the road so there isn't so much traffic during their commute, and stops them from being in competition with SWEs for the housing within reasonable distance of where they work.
> If they are a salaried employee, the amount of work required for completion in a given week doesn’t change whether a commute is 10 hours or 10 minutes.
You might expect that bosses would get away with giving you more work when you have more time, or that the quality of any given work might be influenced by how much time someone has available to spend on it. And nobody says you're working 168 hours a week, but a lot of people do more than 40, when they have the time.
> That’s time the employee is investing by choosing to live where they live and work for the employer they work for.
It's time the employee is being cost by being forced to commute into the office, which time would be available for other things in the alternative.
You also seem to have really limited experience with organizations that have in office work. My guess is your career started relatively recently (<5 years). Perhaps all you have known is remote—that would track with the strange perspectives you have posted on this thread.
They have to compensate you for the relative difference in value between working for them and working for someone else.
If another company allows WFH and you don't, and that costs the employee $30,000/year to not have, what do you expect them to do when the employer offering WFH offers the same salary? Or even $10,000 less? And what will you have to do in response?
No. They only have to offer enough compensation and benefits to attract enough people into the roles they need filled.
> what do you expect them to do when the employer offering WFH offers the same salary?
Does it matter what another company does if the other company can still fill the role without offering WFH? Your whole premise seems to hinge on this concept that a company offering an in office position can’t effectively fill the opportunities they are offering. That’s not the case in 2025 (at least in the US). Specifically with tech jobs every opening whether WFH or in office generates hundreds of applicants. Some people might prefer WFH, others might prefer in office, but if RTO is the trend, WFH opportunities will start decreasing and will fill up fast. My guess is that given the option between unemployment and employment in an office anyone and everyone who needs an income will opt for the latter and will not sit around stubbornly waiting for a WFH opportunity like a petulant child that has to eat their broccoli before they are allowed to get up from the dinner table.
In the absence of an infinite labor pool, in order to do that they need to outbid the other employers.
> Does it matter what another company does if the other company can still fill the role without offering WFH?
Of course it does, because you have the opportunity to be the other company. You would be able to hire the same person for thousands of dollars less by allowing them to work from home and they would still take the job.
> Your whole premise seems to hinge on this concept that a company offering an in office position can’t effectively fill the opportunities they are offering.
I feel like we've been over this. You can obviously fill the job by paying more, but since the difference in the amount you'd have to pay is more than the value of forcing people to come into the office, why would you throw away money just to have less satisfied employees?
> Specifically with tech jobs every opening whether WFH or in office generates hundreds of applicants.
Applying to job postings on the internet takes a matter of seconds. Have a guess what "hundreds of applicants" implies if the average applicant applies to hundreds of job postings.
Now consider that a lot of the applicants won't be qualified.
> Some people might prefer WFH, others might prefer in office, but if RTO is the trend, WFH opportunities will start decreasing and will fill up fast.
It sounds like you're saying employers offering WFH opportunities will find it even easier to hire at a given level of compensation.
> My guess is that given the option between unemployment and employment in an office anyone and everyone who needs an income will opt for the latter and will not sit around stubbornly waiting for a WFH opportunity like a petulant child that has to eat their broccoli before they are allowed to get up from the dinner table.
Surely this attitude will have no effect on morale or turnover?
But here is the thing—people adapt. People adapted in 2020 when a good portion of the workforce went remote. There were griping then while people learned to balance home and family distractions with work. There were complications around finding appropriate workspace in their homes but people managed to make it work. If your company RTOs you might have a choice to make: adapt and deal with the commute/rent/whatever challenges with it, or perhaps try and convince your organization’s leadership how wrongheaded and stupid they are for RTO (Good luck…as a former senior leader in a few orgs both public and private…you better work on your argument). If you can’t adapt or convince your leaders of the error of their ways—quit and take your chances to find and compete for those remaining, but shrinking inventory of remote gigs out there.
I say all of this as a remote worker happily riding out the sunset of my career for a few more years in a lovely low stress non-management gig. I definitely don’t want to RTO, but if my company chose that route I know won’t have a good argument to counter because there isn’t one. I know and my leadership know that I can adapt and be just as productive at the office as I am at home…in short order.
Instead of speculating, we can look at the data: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1401265/preferred-work-s...
Fully 91% of IT workers prefer to be fully remote or remote-first with no requirement to go into the office regularly, and it was disproportionately the first one. 6 of the remaining 9% still wanted to be remote first.
Only 1% of people wanted to be fully office-based. That's 3% less than the Lizardman's Constant.
> But here is the thing—people adapt.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -George Bernard Shaw
I prefer gin, but will drink vodka when that is what is available.
I prefer to fly first class, but economics often force me into economy.
A preference does not equal entitlement and frankly the only preference that matters in this case is what the employer’s preference is, especially when the workers are willing to compromise their preference where it differs from the employer’s preference.
The employer’s are the ones that hold the little green pieces of paper that you want and need and are willing to trade your labor to get. They will occasionally attach strings to those little green pieces of paper. As long as you or someone is willing to deal with those strings, your preference really only matters to you…at least to them.
I'm not following. How much is the difference? The difference to them is $30,000. But you forgot to specify what the difference to the company is.
In scenario A, Jim holds a remote job at Omnicorp.
In scenario B1, nothing changes.
In scenario B2, Jim is transferred into a job with the same responsibilities that is not remote. This raises Jim's expenses by $2,500 a month. It also raises Omnicorp's revenue by $X per month. X is the value you forgot to consider. What is it?
If, for example, it is -$500, then the total cost of transferring Jim is $36,000 per year. If we split that difference evenly between Jim and Omnicorp, Jim will receive a $12,000 raise... but Omnicorp will suffer a net loss of $18,000 per year, so it's hard to see why this would happen or who it helps.
If it's +$1,000, then the total cost of transferring Jim is $18,000 per year. Splitting that difference evenly means Jim gets a $21,000 raise, but again there is no reason this would actually take place, because the company is paying $21,000 a year in order to receive $12,000. Or, viewed another way, the transfer destroys value and you shouldn't expect it to happen.
If X is +$3,000, then the total cost of transferring Jim is -$6,000 per year. At this point the transfer makes sense and it should happen. Splitting the difference evenly means Jim will get a $33,000 raise.
At no point does it make any sense to consider leaving Jim where he is and giving him a $15,000 raise.
It is quite possibly a negative number. Remember that forcing Jim to show up to an office requires you to have an office, which is a huge, major expense that could easily overcome the benefits of having Jim in the office instead of at home. But let's continue with your assumption that it's of some actual value to the company:
> If, for example, it is -$500, then the total cost of transferring Jim is $36,000 per year. If we split that difference evenly between Jim and Omnicorp, Jim will receive a $12,000 raise... but Omnicorp will suffer a net loss of $18,000 per year, so it's hard to see why this would happen or who it helps.
This is the part where you're confused.
Suppose that Jim refuses to work from home for less than $8000/mo and refuses to work from the office for less than $10500/mo, because his incremental cost of working from the office is $2500/mo. Meanwhile the company values Jim working from the office at $500/mo. Since $500 is less than $2500, it does not make sense for Jim to work from the office, instead it makes sense for the company to pay Jim somewhere between $8000/mo and $10000/mo to work from home, because any of those numbers make both of them no worse off than paying Jim $10500/mo to work from the office. This does not depend on what Jim is currently being paid or even whether he is currently working from home.
If the value to the company of having Jim work from the office instead of from home is $3000/mo then the company should offer Jim anywhere between $10500/mo and $11000/mo to work from the office, for the same reason. But since $3000/mo is $36,000/year on top of their expenses for maintaining an office, that value to an ordinary company of having Jim work from the office is implausibly high.
However:
> instead it makes sense for the company to pay Jim somewhere between $8000/mo and $10000/mo to work from home, because any of those numbers make both of them no worse off than paying Jim $10500/mo to work from the office.
It can never make sense for the company to pay Jim more than $8,000 / month, because that is the amount he wants. As long as he's willing to work for $8,000 / month, the value of his work to the company can't exceed $8,000 / month.
You might notice that the value $15,000 doesn't occur anywhere in your most recent comment. How do you consider this comment related to your earlier claim that "If you split the difference, you both come out $15,000 ahead"? What difference have you identified that could be split this way?
The company doesn't know the minimum amount he's willing to work for. They have to guess. If they guess too low, he quits. If they guess too high, they pay more than $8000/mo.
The company also doesn't know exactly how much Jim values being able to work from home, so they have to guess that too. They can reasonably guess that it's in the thousands of dollars per month, but they don't know if it's $1000/mo or $4000/mo.
What they do know is that their cost for having him work from home -- arguably a savings to the company, but perhaps worth $500-$1000 in some cases -- appears to be less than this.
If they guess $1250/mo (i.e. $15,000/year) then they've guessed right in the middle between the start of the range and the actual limit, so each party gets half of the surplus. If the company's costs from allowing WFH are zero then they get to save $15,000/year, and Jim gets to save the $30,000 in commuting expenses in exchange for getting paid $15,000 less, which puts him $15,000 ahead too.
Even if the company's costs are non-zero they're still coming out ahead as long as they're not more than $1250/mo, so if they're $500/mo or $1000/mo and their guess of what he'll take is a reduction of $1250/mo then they'll still want to pay him that much less and let him work from home.
They might also make a better guess and get closer to the actual number of $2500/mo, but then they're running the risk that they overplay their hand and he walks away, and then they don't get the savings of thousands of dollars a year. So who actually gets more of the surplus from letting him work from home is down to salary negotiations, but it's in both of their interests to make it happen.
Sorry to be blunt, but I think this is incredibly naive given the current market. Since the explosion of remote work I've seen a ton of offshoring to excellent software developers in Latin American and Europe. There is absolutely zero benefit to paying an American salary in those situations because everyone is remote anyway (and there is enough timezone overlap that everyone can work roughly the same hours).
Workers will simply get fired if they don't come in and execs really want RTO, they're not going to get paid more.
If execs really want RTO then people will quit and they'll have to hire new people, pay retraining costs, pay them more because other companies are still offering WFH, lose out on all those lower cost workers in Latin America (or Texas or Virginia) and still be paying millions of dollars for office space their employees don't even want to be in.
There have been 550k tech layoffs in the last 2 years. Pretty sure there are quite a few folks ready and willing to do a commute to work in an office to get a paycheck again.
So suppose the employer's benefit from having the employee is $150,000 if they work from the office and $140,000 if they work from home. Meanwhile the employee would accept $130,000 if they had to work from the office or $100,000 if they can work from home.
You're saying, $150,000 is more than $130,000 so the employer can pay them $130,000 to work from the office and everything's fine.
But the difference between $150,000 and $130,000 is less than the difference between $140,000 and $100,000. By quite a lot. So why isn't the employer going to want any of that money?
Before the pandemic there was a big push to reduce occupancy costs and get roles that did not need to sit in an office to subsidize their own offices, just like BYOD - but the dollars involved were orders of magnitude better than BYOD. During the pandemic we proved the costs came at the cost of net productivity on average. The reaction we see now is one against a cultural change that is off putting to people who succeeded in a specific emergent reality - the office culture. A 60 year old CEO has trouble using zoom because they didn’t grow up using it. They don’t know how to be effective over a remote relationship because they have developed exceptionally effective in person skills - that’s why they are where they are. They simply can not accept or fathom a world that is different than that. So they invent hand waving bullshit not based on data.
But economics wins based on data sooner or later. It is better share holder value to eliminate occupancy costs aggressive and offload the occupancy per employee to the employee. The company effectively gets free facilities in this scenario. There is no way the marginal per employee value of in person vibes out paces the marginal cost to shelter their bodies during the work day. The vibes thing is managed through adaptation.
Finally there’s this meme the Dimon and Trump and others use of people not working when working remotely. First that’s not true, second if it’s is, that’s a performance issue. Since when did we stop measuring performance ? The in office or not in office simply isn’t a productivity variable but not working and working during the work day is.
RTO is a cultural thing and you’ll never convince the executives of today by any argument conceivable because you’re telling them the sky is green when they know it’s blue. It doesn’t matter that in this case it’s not objective like the color of the sky. It FEELS objectively true.
However the economics will change, and the leadership will age away, and one day; maybe when the kids who graduated college having gotten their degrees online run the shop - we will offload the cost of housing the employee during the day to the employee because it’s what makes the most economic sense and we will adapt around the challenges.
It’s ok to not be a busy body. I’m not one because it makes me miserable . But these imaginary tradeoffs we invent in our heads are often just justifications.
You think kids are taking up all your time? They have more kids and volunteer at the school, and run a church group, etc.
The clock is secondary because using time efficiently, planning, and classifying which hours you are awake and available are all skills.
Similar patterns happen all throughout life. People have non linear capacities and performance.
There are certain tasks that people need to do every day that take time and, if you can afford to have someone do those tasks, suddenly you have more time you can do other things with.
Of course paying someone saves you time.
But the question is whether that’s the key differentiator holding you back from X, Y, and Z. And no it’s not. There are people who do X, Y, and Z and don’t have a maid.
Maybe on some psychological level getting help is the only way you personally will have time (feels true for myself), but you have to recognize there is significant personality and skill difference when it comes to being busy.
As with a lot of things: individually, yes, this is the only useful way to look at it. Statistically? Over a population? No, of course high levels of unpaid obligations keep people from accomplishing things, in the sense that if you ease those up they accomplish more.
More to the point, I didn't make this about how it was "holding people back" so I'm now seeing why you're so resistant to it, since you think that's what I was getting at: no, it's about attitudes from executives who live life on easy mode then complain that their underlings are lazy.
Perhaps he's simply pointing out that with the right set of skills, you (or others) could also move yourself up (down?) the bell curve, and that your position on the curve isn't necessarily fixed. Treating it as such is inherently limiting.
Laundry, cleaning, cooking, shopping, lawn work, home maintenance, car maintenance, hell even managing your schedule—for an awful lot of executives (among others) much or all of that is optional. They have more freedom with their time because they pay to make a bunch of problems go away (and if they don't, it's a choice). They come home from work and choose what to do—they may still be busy, by choice! But they have far fewer demands on their time. The people who work for them come home from work, work two to four more hours, then, maybe, choose what to do. And you better believe they work weekends, too.
If you have a lot of kids, after a certain age, the older ones can start to help around depending on age. It's how humanity survives in self-sufficient conditions.
For serial kid rearing families there is a plateau in difficulty, and then a steady decline (depending on the personality and health of the kids of course).
It’s still true that having two young kids is more time than and effort than one.
I don't think it makes me busy. It does.
> You think kids are taking up all your time? They have more kids and volunteer at the school, and run a church group, etc.
I'm not counting extremely-optional stuff.
> The clock is secondary because using time efficiently, planning, and classifying which hours you are awake and available are all skills.
Money puts this on extremely-easy mode, because for a huge variety of things "this is a problem that will take much time and attention" becomes "just pay someone to make it go away". I know, because I have enough money that sometimes I can do this (I didn't always, and I didn't grow up that way) and holy god, it makes life so incredibly easy when I can.
Yes they live different lives, but they know they are different from their average worker, they just don't care about them. Making money and their success come above all.
When they make these decisions it is not because they're out of touch. It is because they actively opposed people below them taking an inch. They know it fucks with them, they know they don't like it. They do it anyway.
As an executive this person is excellent albeit trained at corporate speak. They're trying to gather sympathy for execs and it is all bullshit.
How else would you want to motivate them? This is a for profit company after all.
> It is because they actively opposed people below them taking an inch.
In a functioning labor market with high mobility for workers they would just quit and find a better place to work.
> They're trying to gather sympathy for execs and it is all bullshit.
They're trying to hide the fact they've monopolized the labor market and they want you to assume this is all normal. It's a much higher level problem.
> They're trying to hide the fact they've monopolized the labor market and they want you to assume this is all normal. It's a much higher level problem.
Your labor market isn't all that special. The truth is that "a functioning market with high mobility" is just a myth. The market is functioning as intended: The ones with power under capitalism are the ones with capital - and they don't wish for things to change. You can try to level the playing field with laws, but that's incompatible with the "small government" folks.
It's the primary market underpinning capitalism. Otherwise it's just feudalism or slavery. So, I'd hope you believe it's special.
> The truth is that "a functioning market with high mobility" is just a myth.
There is absolutely no truth in what you just said. I'd have to ask what set of evidence did you examine to arrive at this conclusion?
> The ones with power under capitalism are the ones with capital
Yes. Wealth and capital give you an _advantage_. However it's not exclusive. It's why we recognize things like intellectual property and performance rights. It turns out there's /tons/ of sources of advantage in competition.
> You can try to level the playing field with laws, but that's incompatible with the "small government" folks.
The size of the government seems to have zero impact on it's willingness to enforce laws that are already on the books. Your thesis is thin and based on inherited cynicism. I cannot take it seriously.
You can use money to move around time, but you can never buy it. Every second that passes is gone forever, never to be seen again. The recognition of this reality is the difference between those work-focused executives and laypeople.
Calling this “survivorship bias” though is like calling anything in evolution “survivorship bias”.
A person with a seriously work focused life is naturally going to excel and I have no problem with this. Someone that makes sacrifices in their personal life (paying to live in the city, not having children or too many etc) so they can be more available and work more hours may do better than me, even at the same level of skill and intelligence. This only seems fair.
Not all, but most. Family members of mine at the VP/EVP level in “enterprise” type companies regularly work 12+ hours on weekdays and ~8 per day on weekends. It’s brutal and their families suffer for it, but it pays exceedingly well.
As another poster put it, it’s survivorship bias. Most people who work that long and consistently end up with a destroyed family life and eventually the collapse of their professional life as well. Those who “make” it by and large keep their family intact because they can afford to make it difficult to leave - or because they’re married to someone of similar lifestyle.
What do they do in all those hours?
My only experience with executives is the CEO at a "startup" (it really wasn't) in SF. He had to have his email password reset every week because he couldn't remember it. He was furious that asses weren't in all the seats at 9am, but he knocked off at 3pm on Fridays to go drink with his executive chums. I never saw any sign of leadership, vision, or actual work. Just demands on others.
Maybe they are "working" from a hotel downtown with their lover.
what are they actually doing? what are the deliverables? are they actual doing intellectual work 12 hours a day?
> As you can see, in a typical day of mine one can count some twenty-five separate activities in which I participated, mostly information-gathering and - giving, but also decision-making and nudging. You can also see that some two thirds of my time was spent in a meeting of one kind or another. Before you are horrified by how much time I spend in meetings, answer a question: which of the activities -- information-gathering, information-giving, decision-making, nudging, and being a role model—could I have performed outside a meeting? The answer is practically none. Meetings provide an occasion for managerial activities.
At that level, they’re in the club and guaranteed to advance as long as they don’t make enemies and get kicked out of the club (which is rare, but happens, and usually means they spend a year or so finding another club.) So while some of them do work long hours, they don’t have to. They’ve already been judged to be in the in-crowd and could work 10 hours per week from wherever they want, and they’d still make every promotion.
So why do they work so much, and why do they go to the office? Because most of those guys (a) mutually dislike their families, (b) have psychological disorders, and (c) have office affairs. To psychopaths, 70 hours per week sunk into high-stakes office politics is fun.
Or so you say. But it sounds like a rationalization of why that doesn't matter/makes them morally bad people. First it's "they don't actually do any work, lol", then it's "but they totally don't have to, they could skate by on 2 hours a day, they are already pre-selected for success".
But really, it's perfectly fine if you don't care that much and won't go to that length. You don't have to justify that by coming up with narratives that others who do are evil, mentally ill, or hate their families. You can just say "that's not for me".
They care about their own profits, which are mostly bonus-based, and prestige. If they think they get any extra by appearing doing first and last thing that could drive up share price (or win some extra points in some meaningless internal battles), they will go for it.
They are mostly pretty bad absent parents with laser focus on themselves and their careers only, and then it shows on kids. But in their mind nobody under them should be granted more.
After a certain number of years, handing your kids off to the babysitters so you can work an extra 10 hours a week becomes outright sociopathic neglect. Using your wealth to separate you from the things that actually matter is arguably the peak of corporate disillusionment.
But it's waaaay less useful if you are a worker bee just programming all day. Yes it's still better to talk to people next to a physical whiteboard, but it only matters very occasionally. My wife found it astounding that pre-covid I would sometimes go into the office and not really talk to anyone all day. Literally would just be sitting at a desk typing; the desk could have been anywhere.
If you're somehow a FAAaaaang executive reading this, consider making RTO only mandatory for the people you directly manage and talk to, and then let them decide the policy for their subordinates.
Individual contributors in many cases do not benefit from this. In fact it can be an active hindrance. An ICs contribution and performance is easily tracked and captured through the outputs and metrics they produce.
I think the best organization will be one where leadership and managers spend a good deal of the week in the office. High ranking contributors (player coach managers, leads, etc) spend some so they can collaborate with other leads and leaders. And most ICs are optional.
People keep saying this but it's a preference, not a fact.
Though I love a good whiteboard sess, a tablet with a stylus and one of many "interactive whiteboard applications" can also be pretty useful. Hard to have a whiteboard session good enough to compensate for the grueling traffic of most HCOL regions a good portion of us likely work in.
> Remember, they live literally in another world. This doesn't necessarily make them evil, just disconnected. I do not want to be "out of touch" but it is important to acknowledge that this does happen over time.
No they don’t. We all live in the same world and it’s everyone’s responsibility to realize that and our impact on those around us as well as our environment. The ruling class’ personality disorders (detaching from the common folk) are primarily their problems and should be dealt with by them, not worked around by us.
It is physically impossible to be aware of the entirety of one's impact on others. One might be able to dimly perceive how the person across from you is feeling about something you said or did, but even in simple one to one interactions, there's frequent miscommunication and signal loss. If you extend this to making decisions that have an impact on not just one but hundreds or thousands of people, it's literally impossible to know the true impact of all those decisions on all those people. Good decision makers will intentionally cultivate information flows that provide them some insight but those are themselves imperfect.
No it isn't. You just need a shred of empathy.
Depressingly laughable suggestion.
Giving Jared (from Silicon Valley) suggesting “scream your name to your attacker so they are forced to recognize you are human” vibes.
But it's sugarcoated. The only part that makes sense is the fact they are sociopaths who only care about work success.
The rest of it is just sugarcoating the fact that they make these decisions because they simply couldn't give a shit what their peers below them think. They know it fucks with them and that they don't like it. It's not some "oh we don't understand cause we're too rich" sob story.
like fuck off with that, the data and the vibes all point to it being better for the employees and their productivity to work from home. too many "I went through it so you have to as well" types that aren't interested in evolving stuck in their old ways
Classic case of semantic drift, as "literally" now means "figuratively", but with emphasis. Try "virtually", "practically", or "all but".
Is it really so hard to imagine the struggles of someone who doesn’t have any of the benefits listed in the post?
Just sitting down and doing a quick calculation would immediately reveal time allocation dilemmas of prioritizing “return to office” for someone who doesn’t have the benefits.
Time is universally valuable! But even more so for someone who … has significantly less of it because they can’t hire legions of staff to manage their lives?
“What if I didn’t have this? How would that make me feel?” Pretty depressing. Empathy can’t run the business — but surely it is correlated with strong team cohesion and performance?
You also end up in these bubbles where you literally can’t empathize with people because you have no experience to fall back on.
Combine that with a sort of media and religious culture that will tell you you’re right to feel that way.
I’ve hear rich people complain about the fact that rich people are people to, d that poor people don’t appreciate them enough.
And actually, I think this is a common thread these days, that essentially the world’s problems are caused by the fact that rich people don’t have enough power and aren’t trusted enough by society. Marc Andreesen implied this in his Joe Rogan interview.
It's not like they have a choice, gaslighting the general population is their only hope of staying on top/alive.
Yes, it is hard. While you can break down the struggles to analyze them, actually understanding their emotional impact is a whole different story.
> Empathy can’t run the business — but surely it is correlated with strong team cohesion and performance?
As someone who has recently shifted towards managing people, I am facing two big struggles: how to be empathetic without taking on their emotional burdens and how to respect their situation in life while ensuring they respect their responsibilities in the work place. And this is management at a very low level in the hierarchy. There isn't terribly much that separates myself from them.
I'm not suggesting that there is no role for empathy in a business. Apparently the person who came before me lacked it and survived ten weeks. I'm simply suggesting that it is difficult to balance.
How does someone make others care about him/her? Hmmm...
During the TGIF (company all hands) discussing this, the architect of the policy, someone high up in the HR org, explained why it was necessary.
I don’t recall what they said, but I do recall that they happened to be working remotely at the time, after the policy against remote work had already gone into effect.
The brazenness of lecturing us on why remote work was harmful to Google while working remotely was shocking. Predictably, the internal anger over this was enormous.
Rules for thee but not for me, some animals are more equal than others, etc.
Being forced to RTO across the country, then immediately laid off after I uprooted my life to do so, all while knowing the layoffs were planned while they were telling me to move across the country, is fucked.
(also why employers are trying to staff up offices offshore in LATAM and India)
Edit: @tbrownaw all of the responses to your inquiry are accurate.
What does this mean in concrete terms? What useful power do they gain based on physical presence, and what rights are currently absent but coming (back?) soon?
If remote labor is the norm, then every tech company has to compete with every other, across all geographies. If local labor is required, the employers can manage or restrict their competitive environment. There are fewer options for the employee.
The bulk layoffs of the past couple of years have a similar effect - gaining power. It makes every employee a little more conscious that their employment is provisional and conditional.
But I think RTO goes beyond just market power gains. There are many workers who are conscientious, attentive, and dedicated. For each one of those there are plenty who are just punching their time card. I’m no expert but it seems to me that RTO gives the employer and mid-level managers better visibility into all of that dynamic.
But RTO fights against the reality that employers have constructed distributed teams, with people working from all over the globe on the same project. If that’s the case, what is the difference whether I work from my home office, or a hotel desk space in a big building alongside people I don’t know.?
Doesn’t that seem backwards? A company that supports remote work has a worldwide talent pool.l, including lower cost geographies. A company that insists on RTO can only hire locally, so has less talent available and can’t arbitrage labor costs.
I think RTO makes no sense, but I don’t see how it gives employers more power.
* Remote workers aren't actually a worldwide labor force because of time zones, so the competition on the labor side is less than in theory.
* Remote work diminished the difference in liquidity between labor and capital markets. Capital is by nature more liquid than labor, and being more liquid gives you an advantage. As you say, the competitive pressures exist in both markets, and maybe this is a wash in terms of power.
* Remote workers can pay off mortgages faster, leading to more early retirements.
I still think the primary reason is a desire to manage according to the old style, which is a different argument than the GP.
Humans are not just replaceable cogs. When you hire someone, there are several things built into the assumption of that work that we take for granted. For example, federal holidays or work culture. The US is notorious for accepting overwork as the norm (people even brag about working 60-hour weeks) where that's just not acceptable in other parts of the world. That's obviously not true everywhere (e.g. 9-9-6 in China), but is true in enough places that it's not trivial to just swap in person A from country X with person B in country Y. That's not even touching on labor laws, language barriers (e.g. understanding office lingo like "circle back"), or value structure. The latter is huge where Americans care a lot about their jobs and careers and most parts of the world don't have the concept of a career.
Of course. And the workers want more money.
It's how markets work.
As for workers having fewer protections rn, gestures in the general direction of DC.
This doesn't make any sense. Remote jobs are... remote. Moving to mountain view or whatever doesn't make you "limited to other companies in their metro". You can still find remote jobs, but now you have the additional option of in-person jobs in the bay area.
If you live in Omaha and work remotely, far more remote jobs are available.
Remote jobs on average pay less because you are competing with people who live in the MiddleOfNowhere Nebraska.
Even formerly “field by design” roles that were permanently remote at AWS (where I use to work) paid less than in office jobs. Now those jobs are also in office jobs at both Amazon and Google (GCP).
Since that’s always an option.. yeah clearly keeping talent in high col places is a part of the cudgel that employers want to use against employees. It’s similar to healthcare being connected to employment really. If the labor market was actually free from ultimately coercive tactics like this then the world would look very different.
My prediction is that as soon as interest rates fall, employers will be reintroducing “flexibility” to lure workers and attract talent. And at that point it might become more established.
Definitely power there if you know your staff have just uprooted their lives and now depend on you for their immediate term existence…
Fortunately I didn't have to uproot my life or move cities, but it was a wakeup call as to the true nature of at will employment. You can't take anything for granted.
A plan B is always a good thing to have. I knew a middle class engineer a few years ago who spent every dime of his salary on installment payments for this and that. The company then had to cut back, and he went into a furious panic. It was a trap he set for himself, although he blamed the company.
Even if the government guarantees you lifetime employment, it isn't a guarantee.
Some states even have laws that employers don't have to pay accrued vacation time. For example Nevada says employers with under 50 employees don't have to pay accrued vacation.
However, there are exceptions. In particular if the company is small enough, or the layoff is below a certain percentage of employees, it doesn't take effect.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retrai...
(And big tech execs still make orders of magnitude more in compensation than you do. You two were never alike!)
It took me about seven years in industry, starting from my first internship, to hit my first million. Non-FAANG and nothing magical happening with appreciating options or stock, just ordinary W-2 work.
"Millionaire" was added in a 2004 misquote by Robert Wright, and $1 million in 2004 dollars is about $1.7 million in 2025 dollars.
The main theme of their post was that engineering had become a second-class profession at a de-facto engineering firm.
If I recall correctly, Steve Jobs had something to say about that very transition…
Edit: By thread I mean internal Email thread at Google.
A major class marker distinguishing the upper-middle from the middle ends up being that the former are barely surveilled, largely free to set their own schedule, and basically are trusted to do the right thing (never mind that perfectly ordinary behavior patterns from them would be regarded as instantly fireable for others; it’s a different standard), while the middle gets constant status reports, return to office mandates, stricter start and stop times, maybe drug tests.
(The actual upper class, of course, simply don’t meaningfully have managers at all)
You know that older, expert manager everyone says is great that they bring in to run the business in the show Silicon Valley? Who spends a bunch of his time ignoring the place to breed horses or whatever, and seems to think that’s normal and fine? That’s this kind of thing. He doesn’t even get why that might be wrong, or why it might be shitty to take a big paycheck and ask hard work from others then fuck off to a rich-dude hobby half the time—that’s just what his kind of people do.
When I was having trouble finding work this was one of my biggest issues. I was qualified to be working independently but all the entry-level work I could find would have involved being treated like I was in high school again, whereas before I could use the afternoon to tinker or read and no one cared as long as my work was getting done. This is why office jobs end up being coveted to the point that a university graduate will be making the same amount working an office job as a retail associate at a Walmart.
I've found his upper-middle and upper class descriptions constantly useful for deepening my insight into media, the news, work-life, and even history. Usually in small ways, but it's still pretty cool. Class markers are everywhere in media, and a lot of it I was surely noticing subconsciously, but being aware of them and able to point out many elements of them is a different experience. It's like seeing into the minds of the set designers, costume designers, and actors.
1) I've developed a vague notion that much of the last 3-4 decades has, along with other (mostly bad) social, political, and economic changes in the time after trust-busting got neutered in the 1970s and Reaganism and neoliberalism took over (RIP neoliberalism, at least on one side of the aisle, LOL, glad to see you finally go even if the rest of that's all a shit-show) has been a kind of one-sided upper-middle civil war. It sure looks like the finance guys (solidly part of that class, for the most part) teamed up with the professional managerial class (the least-solidly part of that class, of the major traditional categories therein) to do their best to shove doctors, academics, and to some extent lawyers, down into the Middle, with no organized resistance on the other side.
2) I see a lot of how programmers are treated through this lens. Companies seem extremely reluctant to give programmers upper-middle perks. I think #1 is part of why: managers really, really don't want to mint a new upper-middle cohort even as they're busy clearing the field for only themselves and finance bros, and programmers (lots of us, at least) have the income to be there, but sit in a weird half-in-half-out for the upper middle, because we've mostly been denied things like private offices and certain other liberties, and subjected to micromanagement and humiliating hazing-ritual hiring processes, even as incomes soar and the snacks are good or whatever. Socially we are firmly "under" even a lot of other parts of companies that make less money, and part of that's come through cultivation of certain attitudes about programmers, and denial of "higher" perks.
Beyond that I was already pretty firmly on the side of stronger labor, better labor protection laws, and far more unionization, and Class didn't take me any farther from those things.
I read his optimism for his supposed "Class X" and the plain fact that none of that turned out to be what he thought it was as, if anything, another reason to be for the above. Organization and force (read broadly, I don't necessarily mean stuff like "hitting people") will get us to a better place, not hoping to be saved by a social movement.
P.S. Self-plug: you might find my newsletter last month [0] mildly interesting. See the section "My Own Views"
[0] https://handmadecities.com/news/splitting-from-handmade-netw...
Indeed, when you describe it, it does seem like the programmers are a medieval feudal peasant class that is let some freedom but actively kept down by the feudal aristocracy.
> (read broadly, I don't necessarily mean stuff like "hitting people")
I don't know of any period in history where the elite let go of their power and privilege without violence.
It was little surprise that more than half were showing up daily on picket lines as admin was apparently surprised that they couldn't find "travelers" to fill critical ICU roles, while surgeons continued scheduling elective surgeries.
It's still the case that the HR executive officer resides in LA and that Payroll is managed (with financially catastrophic results) from Hawaii. Both discipline and scheduling are also done almost entirely remote. It would be hilarious if not for the effects on staff and patients.
They went so far as to only hire travel nurses (temps), who were commanding 100k+ salaries, when things got bad enough rather than filling a full time position. And, to add insult to injury, the nurses themselves have been getting salaries in the 30->50k range. So HR could have literally filled 2+ positions for the cost of a single travel nurse.
That's what has lead to a nursing shortage and burnout. HR cost cutting because "we just need the minimum and no backups". It's a big part of the strikes.
Believe it or not, many nurses and doctors working in healthcare actually care about their patients. Something HR is more than willing to exploit to get them to work ridiculous hours.
I’m a radiographer and moaned to a colleague about the holdup I’d have with my 7am x-ray ward round in ICU. ‘The nurses are still doing handover at 8am, so won’t help and I can’t do anything.’
An older radiographer told me that the nurses stopped getting paid at 7am. The overtime they were working every single day after a night shift was all unpaid.
Of course the "why" is driven by the greatest risk in healthcare. Where most income comes from insurance is stable, the real risk is being sued. Hence rises "there shall be no exceptions" HR rule based hegemony.
HR works for management and the board.
This isn't a call to arms for luddites, this is a call to kill the trillion dollar companies with grassroots direct action that is intentionally and purposefully organized to decrease the revenue and social acceptance of these organizations. This is a pro-tech movement, it's just pro-tech that respects your freedom, your privacy, your rights to decide what your hardware and software are / are not doing. We will not be the feudal subjects of these tyrants.
We must be the revolutionary change we want to see by lunging straight for the hearts of these evil empires. Grassroots direct action, spread the word.
Android and iOS apps, with the exception of games, are usually just thin presentation layers around cloud apps. Hint: if you have to log in, the real app a cloud app running on a Linux server.
But I don’t see what that has to do with executive compensation.
Also, it's not about supporting Linux, it's about not supporting tyrants (Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Meta, et. al.). Whenever you offer compatibility for Windows, Mac OS, iOS, or Android, you are excusing, encouraging, and supporting tyranny and neofeudalism.
Consider using and supporting GNU/Linux phones. Sent from my Librem 5.
There was an internal survey (unofficial) at my workplace right after a mass layoff 2 years back about how many were interested in forming a union. There were 3 options - Interested, Not Sure and Against. The option with most votes was "Against".
I could go into the reasons which were submitted in survey but in short most were related to hyper individualism that is so pervasive.
But, as already mentioned, if you think sentiment is unfriendly to unions now, it's nothing compared to how it was back then. The typical tech worker somehow thought they were already changing the world, doing some VC's bidding for nickels on the dollar, adding sparkly features to another B2B SaaS product...
Rules for thee but not for me, typical tech nerds.
I know executives have different rules and laws that govern them. But I can remember a time when they would’ve had the decency, shame or whatever else to attempt to obscure this. That HR VP could have come into the office for one day, the day that he was explaining his RTO mandate to the entire company.
That he didn’t feel embarrassed about delivering this mandate while very visibly defying it himself is beyond differentiated treatment, it is open disdain for the (upper) working class.
There was a day after Christmas where the team was kinda taking it easy and went out for a longer than usual lunch, and an executive got in our face about how the day after Christmas is not an excuse to slack off. Then the person had us a deploy a feature that afternoon to prod even though it was supposed to be launched after the holidays. The person also did this remotely because they took the day off (the rest of us were actually in the office).
Power is much nastier than people realize. What I provided was an anecdote, but the #metoo movement probably started just like that.
Edit: I just realized how Dickensian this was, plot synopsis of A Christmas Carol. Just missing the ghosts and soul change.
The only reason they wanted this observation that way is so that, instead of having to sit down at their laptop and log into the VPN and manage 2FA and keep their computer open so it doesn't log out every 15 minutes and all that, they just had to glance at a teams message on their phone.
We, the peons and laborers of course were not extended that option, and any system built to automatically generate screenshots for teams probably would be treated as a security risk.
I genuinely consider my direct management chain to be effective, nice, and mostly empathetic within reason, but even they manage to internalize a "the peons can be used to give myself a convenience" ideology.
They don't think of you as people, you are just a resource to them.
Many (but not all) organisations take the week of Christmas out as mandatory holiday for efficiency reasons (close building, save heat &c).
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/s-f-economy-tax-plan-...
So for example, if you've got 500 people (customers) walking through your building plus 200 people (employees) doing things, then the restaurants and shipping stores and etc can estimate some % of those feet turning into sales.
But if you've got only 300 people (customers) walking through your building plus 50 people (employees) doing things, that % of feet turning into sales goes waaaaaay down. And your retail outlets in the building end up with far fewer sales. They either go out of business or demand cheaper rent.
That's just one way of estimating commercial real estate.
Let's figure your attached parking garage. Assuming it's not-free, then all those employees not paying their parking dues ends up causing the parking garage to not generate revenue. Ooof. Or, let's say it's "free". Well, the people who reserved spots paid for those spots whether they use them or not. But the people who don't reserve spots? The business isn't seeing a return on investment if their employees aren't using them, so why pay their share for maintenance of that parking garage?
What about the HVAC and plumbing? The building owner's son owns those businesses, and it's pretty damn expensive to keep HVAC and plumbing working at peak efficiency. It becomes a lot easier to do if they're not used as much! But your son's business is going to get churned if you don't pay them less for the decreased maintenance costs. And you can't just stop maintenance because those things get damned expensive when they're unmaintained.
And the shipping staff? Well they have to come to the office anyway otherwise nothing gets shipped. It's not fair to those staff! You pay them complete shit, and they used to be able to eat lunch at a decent restaurant and have a decent place to park and have good air conditioning and working toilet. But now, with just everyone else being out of office, the restaurant went out of business and the HVAC is set to a wider range of climate and the toilet's been clogged for a while.
Instead of paying the shipping staff something reasonable to offset their changes, or changing the way that lunch and support services are handled... just demand everyone else come to the office too. That's cheaper.
Nobody would hurt labor productivity to save an office. It’s backward
It's entirely possible that the question of "labor productivity" has nothing to do with why exec wants us all back in the bullpen, where they can gleefully stare at us from inside their offices.
Really? Then why do you think that return-to-office is mandated by so many large organizations? By following that line of thinking then surely their larger footprint would yield even larger savings for work-from-home?
They give employees space in that building so that people have a dedicated space to do their work, free from outside distraction.
Did the rest of the employees not do that as well though? Minus the wealth bit of course.
There's maybe a year or two I eventually wouldn't have to work if I was more aggressive about going for promo, but I have no desire to be someone who's stressed about work, even when I'm not supposed to be working.
> Most time goes to work, some to family.
I do two jobs, but do that _because_ I prioritize family life: I do my main (not remote) work only part time because that can't be done remotely, and do a second job (consulting, 90% remotely) on off days to make up the difference. I don't care about the money as long as we make do.
Whether those values actually lead to a better company is the part that, I feel, continues to lack evidence.
Management...apparently did not enjoy the time. I assume so many of them do nothing but meetings, they were probably bored. The upper leadership, for whom the work is predominantly meetings, is likely not satisfied without maximal people in sight.
Because their job is all having meetings and walking around asking people what's new.
This dynamic is at play in every big company I've encountered in my 27 year career in tech.
After all, are there any workforce troubles in companies that mandated RTO, besides negative hacker news comments?
There will be no return to office.
The unspoken issue here is trust. Managers and execs at these RTO mandate companies do not trust that the rank and file are working productively when not monitored in office.
Why else would they want to lose hours to commuting, and not take advantage of their employees living in cheaper CoL areas? Because they don't truly trust their work output when not monitored in person, and the cost of higher salaries to afford housing near the office plus lost hours and energy commuting are worth buying the trust they otherwise don't feel they have. It's dysfunctional, but it makes sense.
I am glad to work in a high trust work environment. I have seen people who abuse the system get let go. They deserve it.
They abuse this and it definitely doesn't help the worker. As a Manhattan based worker who has lived in Aspen and Hawaii, Google wants to pay people in the higher COL areas of Aspen more than 30% less despite them being far more expensive than Aspen or Hawaii. They will fuck you with cost of living then if you expect more money they will say they are just following the cost of labor (which is a made up metric they can arbitrarily manipulate)
Because talent tends to be worse in those areas. (Inb4 I know someone really good in a low cost area)
I can move 20-30 miles in different directions within the same state that would land me in HCOL, MCOL and LCOL areas.
Moving to any of these areas doesn't change my skill set to be better or worse.
Remote work is just such a massive improvement in every respect for people with families for that reason.
The executives are just on a different planet. These are people who embody Lucille Bluthe's quote "It's one banana Michael. How much can it cost, $10?"
I will say that zoom fatigue is real and remote work can be problematic for people that are mainly in meetings. But we could have solved this with a better solution than snapping back to office culture.
During Covid there was some surveys done on whether or not people missed their commute. People who walked or biked were very likely to say they missed commuting. Those who took transit were split (mild dislike), and those who drove nearly universally did not miss it.
We built a pile of shit instead of functional urbanism in America and this is the result.
They didn't miss the "commute to work", they missed the exercise and the internal soothing feeling, that they are doing something good for the health in spite of that trip being required to get the paycheck, and that it's not a total waste of time when done this way.
These are highly intelligent people. They got to be very high up in the food chain. They are driven. They are smart.
Yet, the claim is that they can't imagine there exist people not like themselves? Sorry, not buying it.
More plausible to me is that remote work will hurt their bottom lines because they (and their superiors, investors, board members, etc) heavily invested in real estate.
Means, motive and opportunity.
Residential, industrial, medical and retail are easy picks over office buildings.
The impact is real. Excutives are qualified as accredited investors and have access to private investments that are often tied to office space and other real estate that most people cannot participate in.
Enterprises can remove a meaningful number of employees for whom it’s a dealbreaker issue without the associated redundancy costs or PR issues.
Kinda hard to see the difference. I, too, live in a completely different world than people with much less money than me, but I can still conceive that they can't have a cleaner twice a month, order food every other day, or use uber more often than public transportation. I wouldn't even consider making a decision that impacts people's lives without having at least an inkling of how they actually live.
Therefore, some governments are actively pushing corporations to bring people back to the office to revive the economy. I'm not exactly sure how I feel about this, though. On one hand, reviving the economy will have long-term benefits. On the other hand, forcing people to spend money is not ideal.
Also, personally, I think we all grow and learn more about the world when we are in the world. You get to see and experience so many things while commuting, for example. I think it builds character.
There are probably lots of other ways to force people to waste money, so this raises two questions:
- Is a larger GDP an unequivocally good thing if you get there by raising people's baseline expenses?
- Are the parts of the economy you are stimulating the ones we want to see growing?
I don't know the answer in either case. But in the later case, I know a lot of people who work in carpentry and delivery apps, and since the pandemic they have made an absolute killing: the work-from-home mandate invigorated that part of the economy like nothing before.
P.S. I agree with your personal point about leaving home. I like going in to the office too: my office is about 20 minutes away by bike and it's nice to get some air. I'm not sure if applies to people who have a less healthy or refreshing commute.
It sounds like the broken window fallacy.
No judgment here to those who did, but during the pandemic, several people, including several software engineers, took the opportunity to work multiple jobs. Notably, at Equifax, which is probably the worst place to do it because they have records of most people's employment. https://www.businessinsider.com/equifax-used-itsproduct-to-f...
This is the main reason. Management doesn't want you pulling 2 salaries, even if you could, so they are trying to make it difficult so you don't even try.
In addition, if WFH becomes normalized, there is a lot of debt floating office buildings in major cities, and there will be a great renegotiation. This is really bad for senior management, the stock market, transit systems and the budget of most cities. So most people that manage you and manage your managers are aligned against you. https://nypost.com/2024/08/02/real-estate/huge-midtown-offic...
Lastly, and I'm only mentioning this because I think it needs to be said, but I think that most people who are pushing WFH are short sighted. If it is proved conclusively that software development can be managed and completed remotely, then it will devalue your labour as you are forced to compete with smart people in countries with significantly lower housing and energy costs. Anecdotally, this is already occurring.
No it's not.
According to your own article, Equifax fired 24 out of 10,000 employees for working multiple jobs. That's 0.24% of their employees.
This doesn't even come close to being a factor in their decision.
> there is a lot of debt floating office buildings in major cities, and there will be a great renegotiation. This is really bad for senior management, the stock market, transit systems and the budget of most cities.
Why is it bad for senior management, outside of senior management for commercial real estate? You think Google gives a flying fuck about the fact that there are empty buildings and that it's costing money to the few massive companies who own most of the commercial real estate in the US and in the world? No. Do you think the stock market cares? No.
> If it is proved conclusively that software development can be managed and completed remotely, then it will devalue your labour as you are forced to compete with smart people in countries with significantly lower housing and energy costs.
You say it yourself, "Anecdotally, this is already occurring", so why isn't it generalized? Why is there still ANY line of code written in the US or in western Europe? Because outsourcing simply doesn't work for the vast majority of software.
Fine, if it isn't the real reason, what is the real reason? Why can't any executives, at any organization, proffer a reason that makes sense?
Why do "FAANG"s RTO? Because they're massive people-movers, and cities that host them likely hold C-level meetings to pressure RTO so that people spend more money. More on transport, more on food, more on coffee, more consumption = more taxes = more movement = growing value to office spaces = win for the cities. Not to mention that managers at these corporations are pretty wealthy themselves, and likely hold investments that would depreciate were WFH to continue in any great scale.
Why do smaller companies RTO? Because what works for FAANGs surely works for them, too. Literally. I've seen multiple managers push for RTO because the big tech leaders are doing it. Add that a certain 'magical' belief that RTO means more productivity and an enriching 'office culture' where new profitable ideas brew - they're all only human, after all, and are as prone to magical thinking without any concrete evidence as we all are - and you've got perfectly good reasons. And mostly irrational from a business PoV.
Is this the case for literally everyone pushing for RTO? Of course not, I'm sure there are legitimate reasons there, but most of the justifications I've heard, as a huge advocate for WFH who always seeks to understand pro-RTO management, have little basis on evidence that it is something good for the business.
They don't pressure them, they give them tax breaks. But besides this you're on point.
The problem is that, as you can see a bit upthread, a lot of ICs don't notice or don't care about the collaborative aspects of their job. To someone who feels that writing out lots of code is their real job, that sensible reason sounds like a weird deflection, since "reduces the cost of collaboration" means by definition that I'm getting interrupted or distracted when I could be heads-down programming.
I don't want to put words in your mouth, but every time I've had this conversation in the past it's been that last option.
And if new grads and product managers are actually able to easily disrupt an IC who is concentrating, that is a sh*tty workplace.
Remote working also doesn't suit some people at all, and their productivity went of the cliff during COVID and the big shift to remote / hybrid. If you don't see, socialise and really get to know your colleagues multiple times a week it's really hard for some people to see them as real people and care about how the job they're doing (or slacking off) affects others.
One of my favorite sociology books is about rich people practically living in a different country, Richistan.
Non-xitter link since that site hasn't worked in Firefox for quite a long time. It'd be nice if HN rewrote such URLs automatically.
I’m less empathetic than I might be because I came into the office 5 days a week for 30 years. My wife also worked. We raised three kids. I went to night school. It’s all very doable, and honestly not that hard.
Now I understand that technology has changed circumstances, and what was not technologically feasible 30 years ago is easy today.
But with respect to empathy, most of the commenters here could bear to examine, if only just for a minute, the idea that the executives are acting in good faith, and just trying to run the company effectively and efficiently.
To me this sentiment reads as "It sucked for me, therefore it needs to suck for you too. Feel the pain of previous generations!"
What happened to wanting to make life BETTER for people? Better for the next generation?
As someone that would complain about RTO mandates if I had to, I know that it's do-able, but does it make my life better? No, it doesn't.
Imagine your last 30 years of not having to go in 5 days a week? Think how much more time you would have had to do all the things you listed: raise your kids, spend time studying night school, etc. How much further ahead would you have gotten with that extra time?
>> When I plead with my direct reports to please comply with the company policy of in the office 3 days a week
Someone higher up is the decision maker here. They are acknowledging a lack of empathy while implementing those policies and trying to explain why they may lack empathy in the process. Yet, at the end of the day, they are simply one of the people who has to ensure compliance.
> Imagine your last 30 years of not having to go in 5 days a week?
There are likely a lot of managers out there arguing against company mandates. The thing is, it is difficult to discuss their struggles with higher levels of management without creating a negative impact (or a negative impact of a different sort) in the workplace. So they have to carry out the orders without actually discussing how they feel about those orders with their reports.
I explicitly say it didn’t suck and it wasn’t painful.
Enjoy your kinks, but don't force them upon others
The company I worked for who had the best company culture was fully remote but put a strong emphasis on communication.
Meanwhile, my current company insists that people show up to the office regularly, and it's costing me 8h per week and I get a less comfortable work environment. It does nothing to solve our communication issues however. Even worse, it feels like some execs think the company culture will build itself just by putting people together in a room. It reminds me of people who schedule meetings because they don't know how to organize their thoughts and write down what they want to say.
edit: Rephrasing, I got emotional. I don't know how you managed to have a life with three kids, night school and a full time job + commute. All my free time goes to my child and family. I barely have time for hobbies. If a company wants to take more of my time they better have a compelling reason.
However, I find a good analogy for RTO to be the case of student loan forgiveness. Just because one individual had to pay their own tuition or student loans off, doesn’t mean that individual should wish that all future students share the same fate.
Just because you worked in an office for 30 years and it was manageable, or just because I like coming in for social reasons, need not result in our scorn for those who thrive by not coming into an office.
You chose to borrow that money. Borrow. It wasn't a gift.
The idea that people are only against student loan forgiveness because they paid off their own loans and think others should share in their suffering or something is absurd. It is nothing to do with that at all. It is because you are stealing to give money to people that do not need it.
If talk of student loan forgiveness were limited to people with very limited incomes with no hope of ever paying off their loans, it would be one thing. But it is in reality about a massive transfer of wealth to people with degrees: people with plenty of earning capacity already.
>Just because you worked in an office for 30 years and it was manageable, or just because I like coming in for social reasons, need not result in our scorn for those who thrive by not coming into an office.
The persom you replied to didn't say RTO was good because he worked in the office for 30 years. He said he had limited sympathy for that reason. I am sure his reason for imploring his team to RTO is that he recognises that people do two thirds of fuck all at home.
The issue is, during covid, many companies thrived, the sales skyrocketed and everyone was happier than ever. Now, they backpedal and say that we need to go back butts in chairs for reasons, but there is zero mention of the previous prosperity and why can't we just keep doing the same.
It's a lie, simple as that.
If you hire remote workers, and then tell them they have to come in three days a week, you had better have a compensation renegotiation or you sure will get complaints, because you effectively just cut everyone's pay.
and your excuse is that you did it so everyone has to? no, I chose to go remote to access property I can afford, based on the agreement I negotiated.
if you unilaterally change that as an employer, you cannot be surprised when your reports act like you're cutting their pay, because you are!
I think a lot of people who want to work from home want to not commute for an hour per day or can't afford to live nearby the office.
I’ve worked remotely since March 2020 across three companies. I don’t work in an office. If you need me in an office for some face time, put me on a plane. I initially turned down the chance to interview at Amazon because they wanted me to uproot my life after Covid and only ended up working there because they suggested I interview at AWS Professionsl Services.
When GCP reached out to me multiple times about a similar position after leaving AWS and they said I would have to be in the office, I immediately ended the conversation.
So perhaps they should present evidence or data? Any at all will do. So far there has been very little evidence, especially from the big dogs, that actually present a positive view of RTO with respect to productivity.
My point was that Marie Antoinette wasn't particularly more detached than the aristocracy in general, that she bore almost no personal blame for the catastrophic situation before the revolution and that she was hated basically from the moment she came to France due largely to anti-Austrian sentiment. The vitriol to which she was subjected during the revolution was not exactly proportional to anything grounded in facts.
People criticize the French Revolution for the execution of nobility, but their level of disconnect was at a "Send letters to your foreign aristocrat relatives asking them to come to your country to massacre your people to put them in their place and collaborate with them to do that" level.
Its amazing to see the disconnect of the modern nobility nearing those levels...
Ignoring that its quite hard to learn from other people remotely (somewhat easier in tech because people are used to it), a lot of people frankly don't realise that they're basically running off like a headless chicken working on stuff that doesn't actually matter - programmers especially. You really do need to see the whites of some peoples eyes to get them to actually do the right thing, some people just aren't the type to instinctively know the macro picture of what they're working on.
If I were running a company and had the cash to facilitate I think I would probably go for something like a cycle of "x weeks off 1 week of intense in-office sprinting" then repeat. Going into the office for no reason is basically pointless, or at least the option on spontaneity may be worth less than the cost of going, there's an arbitrage in recognising that.
As usual, the best model is not an extreme “easy answer”, but a nuanced take (in-person environments have tangible benefits, but also tangible downsides — and the same for fully remote environments).
It seems like our society (at least in the US) only has room for “easy answers” now a days … to the detriment of most.
Not to worry, AI is going to rapidly solve this issue, according to tech CEOs that it.
I have paid less than $200/mo for this. In terms of cost, this isn't anything like having a nanny, your house paid off, or retiring at age 50. But it's interesting that for this guy, it's on the same list as those things.
In sum: I highly recommend deploying a couple hundred bucks a month to pay someone to do house chores if you have a hard time motivating yourself to do it or have housemates/partners you have to spend time arguing about it with.
But since 2020, the market has swayed a lot in favor of remote work compared to before (though it seems to sway back and forth since then). And the way some of these execs talk about it, they say we're all spoiled and we need to put back into the offices where we belong. They're the ones with the self entitled attitude, not respecting the market.
1. Whether we like it or not, we are all in this together. Your dependency on others is extremely high, no matter where you sit in society.
2. We posses the technological means to realize a restructuring of labor and society, one which would benefit a large swath of people across several dimensions —remote work was just an existence proof of this—beyond that, we actually have the infrastructure and technical capacity to solve many societal problems that are being artificially maintained at this stage in history.
3. Different members of society have different incentives, and some benefit much more significantly from existing labor structure and organization than others. Often, these benefits are derived in direct opposition to realizing the net benefits possible in (2.) (see: modern healthcare in the united states).
Remote work during covid was a crack in the glass. External factors forced the C-suite and their ilk to make concessions that showed that the current labor structure is antiquated and that it persists mostly for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many. The psychopathy of the executives lies in their desire to make this structure persist. RTO mandates are an irrational attempt to brute-force rollback the tiny bit of power they gave up to the masses during covid. CEOs are evil. They are evil because they perpetuate a system of labor that increases inequality and puts most people under unnecessary duress because of an artificially imposed scarcity. It is not a "difference in lifestyle" that makes this class of people repulsive. It is their continual and persistent attempts to preserve a structure that demeans and subjugates human beings. They do this actively, and effectively by spreading "free-market" propaganda and continually steering the conversation away from the realization of a more equitable society, which is already technologically feasible.
Worse, they are evil because the system filters out anyone who has any kind of empathy. If they don't maximize profits, they are immediately replaced by someone who is more psycho than them, who will maximize profits without blinking at any human or societal cost.
> They do this actively, and effectively by spreading "free-market" propaganda and continually steering the conversation away from the realization of a more equitable society, which is already technologically feasible.
Moreover, they do this as the predicted collapse of capitalism due to the majority not being able to get any economic value out of the system to be able to buy products and services, happens in front of their eyes. There are products, but people don't have the money to buy them. The system collapses, but what the execs are doing is maximizing short-term profit because what happens afterward is "Someone else's problem".
The reality is that remote work meant a massive drop in productivity. It sucks if you are one of the few that is equally or more productive at home than at work. If you are, then you are few and far between. Most people working from home do sweet FA. Everyone knows this and everyone talked about it constantly for all of the WFH period right until they were asked to work from the office again.
>The psychopathy of the executives lies in their desire to make this structure persist. RTO mandates are an irrational attempt to brute-force rollback the tiny bit of power they gave up to the masses during covid. CEOs are evil. They are evil because they perpetuate a system of labor that increases inequality and puts most people under unnecessary duress because of an artificially imposed scarcity.
You are either insane or you have completely swallowed some source of propaganda. Evil? Artificial scarcity? System of labour? Do you even hear yourself? Take a step back from the computer, stop listening to podcasts and just think for yourself. Or if this is you thinking for yourself, find someone else to do your thinking for you, because you're not good at it.
> The reality is that remote work meant a massive drop in productivity.
By what measure? Across all companies, or only for a few? How do you define "productivity" in a general sense without measuring against a specific goal?
Speaking of propaganda, you sound like someone who has bought into the current status quo so deeply that you find it anathema to even think about alternatives as being possible. If "thinking for yourself" means to blindly follow the status quo, not question the distribution of wealth in society and to not consider whether or not we can better leverage our current capabilities to the benefit of more people, then yes, no thanks, I'd rather not think for myself.
I don't listen to podcasts. I read books and I think beyond my immediate experience. You should try it sometime. It might help you realize how foolish you are to defend people that actively exploit you and your labor.
If you are very highly compensated, responsible for people's ability to earn what they need to survive, and don't care enough to understand your employee's perspectives and realities, you some definition of evil.
Responsibility is the key word here.
I think the issue is just that fundamental difference between what the work of relevant people comprises -- moreso than class. Managers, executives, and so on are "social workers": their job is to align people, brainstorm ideas, communicate, "govern" etc.
"Knowledge workers" job is, in large part, to think alone, then to create alone -- and when that fails seek some minimal intervention by another knowledge worker to resolve an issue.
"The Office" is not well-designed for knowledge work -- it's design for "social work". It's born of an era when manual workers worked in factories, and "social workers" worked in offices -- and "knowledge workers" were in academia, in the basement or some hidden (, silent) back office.
Reducing this to class seems to miss the point. Will anyone ever just recognise what the job of creative knowledge work is? Is it so incomprehensible? In the quest to "comprehend" it, we're told its our lack of maids which burden us so.
It's kinda laughable. A maid is no help if you won't STFU.
Commute sucks, cubicles are worse than useless; you won’t get any argument from me on either of these.
But I also know how crucial it is for academia to talk with colleagues. Email kind of works. Video calls kind of work a bit more. But nothing beats knocking on the door of the office next to you. (Whether it’s polite to announce yourself by e.g. email first depends on the country; even if you just show up and you’re turned away, that’ll be until lunch or at worst until the next day.) And the post-seminar atmosphere of everybody talking chaotically to each other with their minds buzzing as others put away their papers, chairs, etc., thus far stays unreplicated by any technological means.
I guess what I want to say is, the more speculative your ideas are, the more important it becomes to bounce them off people in spontaneous conversation. And any friction (scheduling, calls, etc.) you add will significantly reduce the amount of spontaneous conversation you are going to have. So far, we haven’t figured out a better way than roughly everybody involved being in roughly the same place roughly all the time. That saddens me, given how much I hate commuting.
There's a certain sort of knowledge worker who wants to impress upon the others how communal, conversational, and social their job "really is!" --- but these are people who are likewise not empathetic with the managerial class. All you're really saying is in 20 hours of thinking a week, and 20 hours of typing --- some 2 with others might really help. I don't disagree.
The problem is the "social work" class do not have very much to think about -- their job is to align very rudimentary thoughts from a pool of people who need to negotiate their positions. The Grand Plan of an executive-type is a search through a paddling pool of combinatorial options. This isn't to trivialise the work, so much to point out its an operational and socio-logistical task.
Yes, conversing with one's knowledge-worker peers can speed things up a lot, advance ideas and the like. I am here only analysing where the gap in empathy lies -- I do not really think it's people who can well-afford maids (pretending they cannot) being misunderstood by people with private jets
20 houes of thinking, 20 hours of typing, and 2 hours of collaborating is just a bizarre numericalisation of something that probably cannot be quantified. How much time you spend on something doesn't tell you it is more or less important anyway. What percentage of the time do you spend coding vs committing and pushing? Yet if you didnt do the latter, the former would be a total waste of time.
The small amount of time (even conceding it is small, which it isnt necessarily) you spend on collaboration might be a force multiplier that makes the rest of your time far more valuable.
>The problem is the "social work" class do not have very much to think about -- their job is to align very rudimentary thoughts from a pool of people who need to negotiate their positions.
This is frankly insane. You don't actually think this, surely? Surely this is just rhetoric?
This has nothing to do with maids or private jets. Plenty of businesses want their workers in the office including those where the business owners and managers cannot afford private jets or maids.
The dialectic of this thread -- the OP beings with effectively a class analysis of why executives misunderstand office-worker employees. My reply is the origins lie in a different distribution of at-work activities in which executives require massive amounts of in-person communication to do their jobs, whilst knowledge-workers do not (and are often harmed by an excess).
> This has nothing to do with maids or private jets.
So you agree with me. It's important not to substitute a position I am opposing for one that I'm not.
As for my slight exaggerations around how I characterise the kinds of people, and work involved -- it is hyperboilic and hoperfully amusing characterisation -- but not one which I think is far off.
The "deep thought" of executive work is shallow, for those who prise complexity and such, no doubt this seems derogatory. But it's not. If you thinking can be readily terminated by the speech of another person, your own thinking process is not that deep. Sure, that of The Group's might be -- and much more so than any person's, but each individual is not engaged in deep thought.
If you can farm out depth to a group discussion, great -- that's one sort of work. It is not the work of a progammer, say, who is tracing execution flow in their own head -- this cannot be half-realised in one person's head and half-realised in another.
Oh boy. What you are saying is akin to kicking an IC in the balls while he was concentrating on something. I don't think it would be any different in academia for researchers who are concentrating on something.
Pretty much all of physics was collaborated on with snail mail and a couple times a year in the busiest years in person conferences to have what were essentially war rooms.
We still regularly get cross earth papers published, with explicit collaboration between labs on the opposite side of the world.
A significant amount of science collaboration happens with work that is translated!
If software development were to emulate such a system, it would be small teams of like 2-7 people working together in a small office with a hundred such offices all over coordinating when they need to.
Of course, none of those scientists ever needed change management!
It depends on whether you consider that evil or not. But no, I do not take that they don't understand somehow because of their privilege.
This is just another executive grift trying to make people feel better about them and the decisions they make.
Stop the bullshit and say the quiet part out loud. They do not care what your employees have going on. They understand it fucks with people's work life balance and simply do not care.
If you're a manager, maybe it's your responsibility to figure out who's slacking and who's productive.
In exchange for people staying home, and going to their local suburb's Target and Walmart to buy a sandwich, or go to a Starbucks. Get their nails done in a local chain stripmall place.
It's odd to suggest that people spending their money closer to home means shopping at large chain businesses, but spending downtown doesn't. Just because there isn't a Walmart in the city's corporate center doesn't mean you're patronizing Mom and Pop small businesses. You think that trendy gastropub with its gourmet hamburgers, cute waitresses that all share a suspiciously similar alt aesthetic, and tables full of people clad in business casual isn't a line item in some investment firm's portfolio?
Guess where the Mom and Pops are? They're in that "stripmall place" near your house.
That's not where they are though. You see it, too. Those stripmalls are all dead-dead-dead. The only business is at the shopping centers and megastores.
I can tell you where they most definitely aren't, though: downtown. Anybody who can afford that real estate is not the little guy. If they appear to be, that just means great effort (and money) was expended to create that image.
Edit: coffee shops seems to be doing very well too
While I think it's true that a lot of businesses have shifted to being more neighborhood-local and not relying on "business hours" to be sustainable, the reality for most suburban economies are that shopping centers and chain megastores basically absorb all the business. Places like Target, Whole Foods, Walmart are the ones that are primarily benefiting from this overnight migration outside of city centers. But that's been going on for a long time, COVID just accelerated it.
The bare minimum for pickup/drop off help is ~ $2500 a month.
Frankly I don't know how people are managing.
Since our son’s school day ends at 3:15, that also means that the only options are aftercare or me picking him up and resuming work after she gets home. When there are things like staff meetings that runs even later.
The reason this worked in the past was that women did not work full-time, or at all, and the entire system was set up around the idea that there is a “free” adult available to handle everything except instruction. Unfortunately, since wages for anyone below upper middle-class have been stagnant for roughly half a century most families now depend on both parents working to avoid falling further behind.
If you are married to a teacher, how is that not flexible hours? Half the reason people become teachers is that they can pick up and drop off their kids around school times. It isn't like you have to drop off or pick up at start/finish time exactly. There is a good half hour window on either end. Those periods were some of the most fun you have at school as a kid IMO.
And yes if you make different choices they have different tradeoffs. Mum and Dad don't both have to work full time. You don't have to live an hour away from work. You don't have to pretend a 10 year old can't get themselves home fine on their own.
It is a myth that wages have been stagnant for decades. The basket of goods you compare to then vs now are completely different. You can buy a 1970s fridge that cost kW more to run for cheap. A new bigger more efficient fridge is a different product so you can't just compare prices then and now. Same with all products: today they're bigger, they last longer, they need less maintenance and they are much more efficient.
Most people live where they can afford housing. Unless you are in the upper 5%, you are “choosing” a longer commute in the same way that you chose to use a time machine to set housing and transit policy after WWII.
Painting this as a choice around stranger danger is similarly ignoring that children need to get to school before they are capable of traveling independently, or that busing and transit have been cut in many areas – I’m all about not driving everywhere, and we don’t use a car personally, but many of the families I know do not have that option because the built environment doesn’t have safe routes even to get to the closest bus stop (which is not close).
There are a lot of things we could do better but the average parent does not have control over their municipal zoning or budget, and certainly can’t turn their neighborhood into Amsterdam on a whim because their boss thinks Zoom calls are more productive in a cubicle.
> If you are married to a teacher, how is that not flexible hours? Half the reason people become teachers is that they can pick up and drop off their kids around school times.
Neither of these claims are true. Teachers, like many other jobs, have set schedules. If they need to be at their worksite before school starts and at or after the time it gets out, that does not leave time to travel somewhere else.
> It is a myth that wages have been stagnant for decades. The basket of goods you compare to then vs now are completely different.
This is well studied and I’d tend to go with the academic consensus over your opinion. For example, this is in constant dollars:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...
One key thing to think about is whether paying less for a cheaper TV every decade is saving you as much money as higher housing, healthcare, education, and retirement costs have cost – and especially how the increases in mandatory costs hit most workers harder. Saving $100/year on my electric bill is nice, but for many people that was cancelled out by rate increases and since it was never that big a part of their budget it’s nowhere near recouping how much rent has increased.
20% of US family households with children under 18 years of age have a household income over $200,000/year. (Source: HINC-04). A large percentage of this forum earn more than that individually. You also don't need nearly that much to live close to work. And that's across the whole US.
So it is definitely not only the top 5% that can afford to choose where they live. You know you don't need a McMansion! You don't need a single family home in an area designed around 1h commutes.
>Painting this as a choice around stranger danger is similarly ignoring that children need to get to school before they are capable of traveling independently
Right but one of you working part time for a few years until the kids are old enough to get themselves around vs one of you working part time until the kids are adults? Big difference. A lot of teenagers in the US are carted around by their parents everywhere partly because their parents choose to live in car-dependent suburbia.
>Neither of these claims are true. Teachers, like many other jobs, have set schedules. If they need to be at their worksite before school starts and at or after the time it gets out, that does not leave time to travel somewhere else.
Teachers have among the most flexible and kid-friendly schedules of all professional or semiprofessional workers. They don't have weird night shift schedules half the week like nurses or 60 hour weeks like lawyers. They have pretty flexible hours when they aren't actually teaching. Because they are largely unionised and mostly women, they have negotiated flexible hours and openness to part time that you just don't find in many jobs.
You also ignore that even if they have to be there from say 8:30 to 4pm, that still means they have drop off flexibility with the kids at one end, and, obviously, in many cases the kids go where teacher-parent works!
>This is well studied and I’d tend to go with the academic consensus over your opinion. For example, this is in constant dollars:
As always this propaganda relates only to "production and non-supervisory workers". You can't just exclude large parts of the economy and call it proper analysis.
>One key thing to think about is whether paying less for a cheaper TV every decade is saving you as much money as higher housing, healthcare, education, and retirement costs have cost
It isn't just TVs but everything else. Appliances are better and cheaper across the board. Cars are cheaper. Houses are far bigger and families are smaller, so food and shelter are cheaper per earner. Clothing is virtually free, and decent clothing is still much cheaper than it was.
Education is free - no, tertiary education doesn't count because the expensive options are luxuries and move the average up a lot. Communication is cheap: remember long distance calls costing dollars a minute? Remember texts costing 79c each? And that was only 10 or 15 years ago.
Housing is more expensive largely (no, not entirely, but largely) because people's tastes are more expensive. You could build uninsulated damp houses with single glazed windows for a pittance if you want to spend what people spent in the 50s.
Retirement costs are up because people live longer. Cry me a river.
How that's supposed to work with just 2 parents that work 8h/day - idk.
> This is not a screed against executive wealth.
And that again shows how out of touch he still is. You haven't fully accepted how out-of-touch wealthy you are until you've made the decision to actively oppose allowing anyone to reach that situation.
What we are really witnessing is law and order breaking down.
1) No mortgage 2) A maid service cleans every two weeks 3) Someone else mows the grass "
Just an anecdote, but all of his examples (except maybe for the personal assistant) could be given by anyone living in a middle-class family from Brazil until the late 90s.
Keep in mind, COVID was still raging at this point.
Right in the middle of his calm rant, a courier—UPS or Amazon, I think—knocked on his door, rang the bell, and then dropped off a package, loud and clear for everyone to hear. It was hilarious and completely undercut his entire message. Funny, but also infuriating.
That's the point though isn't it? He retired at 50. Most of us will work to at least age 65 (perhaps until we literally can't work anymore in today's economy). And we won't get some of the wealth.
Yes, free meals, interesting spaces, massage rooms, etc are all great perks. But you’re there to work, and the reality is hoteling, no shred of privacy (need to have an ad hoc phone conversation with someone somewhere else? Good luck booking a phone room and walking 10min to get there).
If you want people in the office, give them offices. Small, glass-walled, but acoustically private. And above all, assigned, so that you can personalize it a little and not mind sitting there for 8-12 hours.
Nothing in private equity or public companies is done for the purpose of making the company better. It's for making the company look like it will do better in the future, so that a bigger fool will hold the bag.
Don't try to rationalize the irrational, that only serves to promote the myth that they are trying to do something we just don't understand.
It's called misdirection.
But yes, people can slack off anywhere. 'Butts in seats' is one of the laziest metrics for management to use for 'working'.
Plenty of jobs are intermittently high-demand and high-stakes while leaving a ton of free time throughout the day.
And to your point about high-demand/high-stakes, at the same job as the MUD guy there was an old guy. He would leave before lunch go play tennis, nap under his desk in his cube, etc... I asked one of the other young people one day (I was still in college), what the old guy did. Apparently he was the only one who knew how to code a certain system, and he was only there to do that job when the system needed a change or had a problem.
I fail to see the problem there...
Either your performance management can catch lazy employees or it can't. If it can't, then that's what you should be fixing.
Of course, there are some incentives at play here. The people voicing these opinions are adults, and adults benefit both when their children are taken away to free daycare... err i mean school all day, and when they get to enjoy the flexibility of home office. This set of incentives could create the confusing combination of beliefs above.
But I also think that maybe it's the sample group. Not all kids failed disastrously at remote school, some excelled and worked far ahead of their classmates. And similarly, a lot of adults truly do get a lot more work done from their laptop at home. My suspicion is that technical people like those in my social circle and here on HN are both the types that would have excelled at remote schooling, and also those that do well working as hermits in a remote home office environment. There's just a huge blindspot that the other 90% of the population is handling things really badly.
The other 90% of kids are reading 3 grade levels behind, and the other 90% of coworkers are doing an hour of work per day, going to the shopping mall at 10am and the dog park at 2, and doing it all with low levels of team cooperation that, just like with a teacher and her remote 5th graders, no level of management or coaching is going to materially improve.
Because children are not adults. They don't have the attention span and concentration skills to focus on something for 8 hours a day. Evolutionarily so - the job of children is to play, discover and learn. The job of adults is to concentrate and run the show.
Even the existing schooling system that crams kids into classrooms and gets them to look at a board to learn things is contrary to human evolution actually. Its the product of the early education system that developed from late medieval scholastic religious education practices.
My grandson was like this. He was in a "virtual school" pod with three other children and is reading far ahead of his grade level and one of the reasons is that he didn't have to spend a ton of time in the child-management boot camp that a lot of elementary schools tend to be.
But this was a complete restart of something two of my in-office colleagues fucked up over the space of 2 weeks.
The problem in orgs is shit people, not working from home.
When I'm at home I can at least be productive. I can make lunch, start a load of laundry, something. At work I have to sit there and pretend to work because exec loves watching people work, which is ultimately not as refreshing and doesn't allow me to get back in the zone as quickly.
Suddenly all these ideas from behavioral economics about implicit bias and contextual framing don’t apply, and we are now all Austrians studying rational and disciplined labor units.
We all know some people slack off, they find ways to do it in office too.
If you spend your entire day in meetings, you might reasonably think that you'd be better off if all your meetings were face-to-face.
If you only touch a computer to write and respond to emails, the email summary parrot might reasonably seem like some omniscient god.
The trouble is I don't feel charitable. These people got to where they are by behaving like narcissists and sociopaths. That's because they are narcissists and sociopaths. It's about controlling other people and hurting them. Full stop.