I did exactly what this exec advocated - using hard data and statistics to paint a picture of what these mandates look like from a worker perspective - and was roundly shot down.
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!
Finally, a good use for those pesky surveys that no one answers, I'm pretty sure the goal from the start was to generate cover for whatever policies they feel like enforcing.
At the last place I worked I assiduously filled out those surveys. Twice a year the executives would do an all hands meeting and talk about the result of the recent survey. They would make a big deal out of all the changes they were making.
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.
This employer had similar surveys, and the results plummeted after a huge RIF and never really recovered. I was asked to join focus groups for more detailed feedback, and as soon as we gave it, they silently dismantled said groups rather than update us on how the powers that be would be acting on that feedback. All-hands meetings where questions about RTO, attendance policies, and flexible working arrangements were regularly diverted and ignored. That doesn’t even get into the technical concerns I was also fielding as an Engineer, these were areas solely focused on trying to contribute a sense of objective direction to the company like the executives repeatedly bragged about inviting us to do, to “be different” than other businesses.
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.
My favorite was an employer that did a massive “transformation” project. They brought in McKinsey to figure it out afterwards. It was probably the only McKinsey encounter I’ve had that seemed productive - the team was both interested and capable.
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.
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.
I have met several of these leaders. Problem is, that very few of them are also very successful.
Most of these "leaders" that I met, based a lot of their success from basically being able to stack their bs very high and bailing out before that stack fell over.
Interestingly, the one guy that I am the most sure of being a good guy and leader is also one of the most successful, having retired with several hundred millions in the bank.
But the most successful guy is the one with the worst methods, who is very close to become a billionaire (he might actually already be one, haven't checked on him for a few months).
>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.
My personal favorite tidbit about a company which gave surveys years ago was that they claimed they were anonymous but when I was late to submit mine one year, the CFO called me and asked me to do my survey since it was late...
It's entirely possible the survey is anonymous, but they can still see who hasn't responded. Depending on the survey software, these aren't exactly mutually-exclusive things?
I'll take a whack at this since I have some relative experience from playing at a functional exec in my last role
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.
> 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.
> It's entirely possible the survey is anonymous, but they can still see who hasn't responded.
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.
Cool, so it could be exploited by someone who makes a hard effort to exploit it (polling the answers and comparing them to the non-respondents, I guess?).
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?
I've done a fair amount of work with employee survey data as an HR data scientist. Particularly at large companies it can be pretty useful, but executives often like to reinterpret the reports they are sent in interesting and creative ways.
> I'm pretty sure the goal from the start was to generate cover for whatever policies they feel like enforcing.
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.
I wonder whether they adjusted for commute length. I imagine that IF you live close to the office, the RTO is not bad. Plus, if you're close maybe you live in a small apartment and maybe you are single, so the office is also a social place, and having no family means you don't have pressure from other duties.
I lived near an office for a good portion of my career when I was single. The office was definitely not a social spot. Most of the people that liked RTO when HN has been polled were married people with kids. If you're married with kids and live near a tech campus in a major city then I think it's safe to say that you're very wealthy.
They did not say the results were fabricated, but that they were misinterpreted. If you like being in the office, then your are gonna be more in the office than those who don’t like. It’s not being in the office that causes you liking being in the office, and thus if we force those who are not going in the office to go they will like it.
But you see, you were trying to convince them of entirely the wrong thing. In fact you ended up providing solid reasons to reinforce their belief in RTO.
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.
This remote colleagues problem is my issue. I don’t mind coming back in (except the cost) but it is very irritating and pointless as I’m a project manager with dispersed teams all across the country (and some in other countries). I come into the office, say hi to a few people I know, get on Teams calls all day in an open plan office with less privacy than at home, then commute home again.
I know exactly how you feel. I brought up the prior success my team had with a yearly meetup for a week of good, solid, complex work and planning, and suggested teams try to achieve that using the cost savings associated with real estate reductions.
That was also promptly shutdown, in favor of two new tech hubs in cheaper countries and a smattering of MSPs.
It does look like the exec class has become a new aristocracy that lives in a world separate from the rest of the society - new technofeudal lords.
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.
I think there are two things going on, and while I think the Twitter post does a good job of highlighting this core issue, I think it's going to be overshadowed by the "execs can get all this support because they're rich" talk (which is true, just not what I think is the core issue).
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.
First bucket guy here! Work 12 hours days, use a significant amount of my free time to study/learn.
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.
Yep, if the work itself is what drives you rather than the organisation and people, and you’re able to achieve that solo, then the question is just whether you prefer a commute and office experience. Personally, while I miss colleague interactions, I find offices and commutes truly depressing, so I would never choose that over remote all else equal.
I love remote work. It made me 20x more productive when I was managing a distributed team of almost 1000 people during COVID - all of our metrics improved. 5 years later I am in a different role, and it’s the exact opposite. Executives represent the company and its interests, and there are some significant issues with the real problem - hybrid.
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.
Surely these people are assigned tasks to do? Are they not getting the tasks done? How are your managers unable to tell whether the assigned tasks are getting done?
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?
Thanks for your comment. I agree with a lot of what you said, in particular that trying to have it both ways (hybrid) often ends up with everyone being frustrated, in my experience.
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 contractors, I’d guess 40% or more. I’ve discovered things that are pretty shocking.
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.
I don't understand how it is a problem if an employee takes on multiple jobs. Presumably you don't limit births either and being a parent is effectively taking on another job. If the work output is acceptible or not is what should matter alone to you as a manager. Not how exactly the sausage is getting made.
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.
If I’m paying you $200k to be a full time employee, I have an expectation that you’re proactive and working. Likewise, if you’re a contractor getting paid for hours, those hours are contractually exclusive to me - don’t accept the contract if you want to double dip. With a deliverable based contract, I don’t give a shit how many jobs you work, so long as you deliver. Respect is a two way street.
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.
Well, if they are affecting your teams performance then deal with it. If they don’t cause ripples then whatever. People were slacking off at work long before zoom was invented. Ever see Office Space?
People stacking jobs have next to no interest in anything about the jobs except getting paid, and are really easy to spot in high performance environments because they tend to make a lot of excuses and miss a lot of deadlines.
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.
Sounds like the system works fine. You cull low performers and don’t notice those who might be doing this and delivering on acceptible timelines for you. You’d have the same issues with any distraction really, job, wife, hobby, drugs, whatever it may be. All you have to really look at are the outputs no matter what you do. Alcoholics were drinking at work and slacking off when it was in person too after all. People would even simply stare at the cubical wall for a day to spite the boss.
> I don't understand how it is a problem if an employee takes on multiple jobs.
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.
Sounds like companies managers are shit at their jobs then if they can't make sure that people are actually doing there jobs.
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.
If you're correct that WFH is more efficient than work in the office, over time the work in the office companies will be replaced by the WFH ones.
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.
You keep waddling into my comments specifically to taut your mistaken notion of “the invisible hand of the free market”, and it’s not welcome - mostly because it’s demonstrably not true, and also because you have a history of moving goal posts when presented this data that knocks down your assertions.
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.
> 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.
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.
I think the problem is that exploit can mean multiple things, and it’s obviously true that companies want to exploit everything in the non-pejorative sense.
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)
Your reasoning is flawed. Potential wealth is infinite. Cumulative wealth at any given moment is finite but growing rapidly.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Regulation isn't the only thing that can make a market unfree. For example, some of the players in the market could be big enough to exert market power.
The history of business is that companies rise to dominance, are characterized as having unstoppable monopolies, and then they fall. The US business history is full of examples. Like IBM. Walmart. RCA. GE. Cisco Systems. Intel. Ford. AT&T.
The only way dominance can be sustained is by using the government to throttle the competition.
Monopolies don't need to be eternal to be a monopoly. They will fail when they make a mistake or become obsolete. What they won't do is lose to a competitor on their own terms.
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).
Microsoft outmanuevered IBM multiple times. IBM tried to dominate the PC business, was successful for a few years, and then failed.
> 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.)
I'd compare it to dictatorships: In the long run all dictatorships have failed. However, that doesn't mean that they don't cause immense damage in the medium term, that we shouldn't fight against them, or that they don't have significant influence upon society.
> 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.
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?
The irony in this comment is thick enough you could cut it with a knife.
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.
But this is assuming that "bad" companies outnumber the "good" by a significant margin, which has been untrue in my experience.
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.
The irony of your rant is that you are pointing to the other extreme.
> 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.
"plenty that are" isn't sufficient, though? Comments like yours tend toward the portrayal of all companies as being evil and exploitative. It's trivially obvious that this is not the case, so perhaps you're just trying to claim that the vast majority of them are evil and exploitative?
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.
This mirrors a lot of what I've suspected. Executives have a survivorship bias of a very work-focused life. It's hard for them to understand why anyone else would choose differently.
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.
> I did exactly what this exec advocated - using hard data and statistics to paint a picture of what these mandates look like from a worker perspective - and was roundly shot down.
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.
> If you want to convince a company doing RTO why it’s bad, you need to show the negative impacts to the organization.
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.
I think your reasoning is flawed because there is no fixed RTO cost to every employees commute and physical location (which I am assuming you mean by their expenses).
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Honestly, you have a really strange way of looking at all this in my opinion. You seem to believe that your employer should compensate you not just for the time you are working for them, but also the time you are not. At no point in my life have I ever seen that expectation from anyone else.
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.
> You seem to believe that your employer should compensate you not just for the time you are working for them, but also the time you are not.
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?
> They have to compensate you for the relative difference in value between working for them and working for someone else.
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.
> No. They only have to offer enough compensation and benefits to attract enough people into the roles they need filled.
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?
I am quite convinced that you probably started your career around or near to 2020, you seem to have a real naïveté around what is actually important to a company and how they calculate value. Especially a company that puts real value on in office work for its employees. I suspect you have probably had limited experience with in office work and automatically assume that everyone was miserable back pre-pandemic about it.
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.
> I suspect you have probably had limited experience with in office work and automatically assume that everyone was miserable back pre-pandemic about it.
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 steak, but will eat chicken if that is what is available.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> If execs really want RTO then people will quit and they'll have to hire new people
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.
The question is not whether they can find someone else to hire. They can always do that for the prevailing market price. The question is, how much more do they have to pay to get someone to take on ~$30,000/year in commuting costs than they would if they didn't require that?
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?
> 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.
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.
The difference to the company is that if you don't force people to take on $30,000 in expenses, you'll be able to find people willing to work for up to $30,000 less in compensation. In addition to the other benefits of expanding the talent pool beyond the local geographic area, which might let you get better people, e.g. because you can hire someone in Boston who wants to stay in Boston, without opening an office there.
Something has gone seriously wrong in your thinking. You appear to be attempting to subtract two unrelated quantities from each other. Let's try this another way:
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 also raises Omnicorp's revenue by $X per month. X is the value you forgot to consider. What is it?
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.
What is it that you think I'm confused about? Mostly you haven't said anything that wasn't already included in my prior comment.
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?
> 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.
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.
This is why RTO will end. It was ending before the pandemic. The cost to the organization is money. They subsidize the employees ability to sit in chair and drink water and use the bathroom. This is a very high cost at any organization. The reason given it’s necessary is CEO has vibes that it’s better. This works for a while but in the end it’s real money spent on questionable benefits.
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.
Yeah, I think it’s worth reflecting that most people with families work 80-hour weeks. Richer people can pay others to take on part of that workload so they can do 50 or 60 hours of work for a company and still actually be working less. Which is fine, I guess, until they’re all like “why are you poors always so sluggish and tired and wanting to clock out right at 5 on the dot?”
Nah. This kind of person tends to do more family stuff, and participate in more community events, and do more work.
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.
I'm not following your point. I've got a solid 30 hours of unpaid work a week, and it'd be closer to 40 if I had to commute, and when my kids were younger and I still had a commute it was around 50 hours, all on top of my actual job. I could and, if it weren't wildly financially irresponsible, absolutely would pay to make about 20 hours of that vanish at no harm whatsoever (benefit, actually) to my personal relationships & family, and then I'd have a lot more time and energy for other things. That's just... how clocks work, IDK. This is overwhelmingly the norm for people who can't afford to pay others to do lots of stuff for them.
What you're not differentiating here is between optional and mandatory tasks. If you're paying someone to cook, clean, grocery shop, or provide day to day child care you have time to do optional things, and people mistake that for being more efficient when in reality it's having the luxury to decide what to do with your time.
No adult with jobs and kids gets home and says “huh what will I fill my extra time with”. Everyone is busy. Now it’s up to effort, prioritization, and efficiency
The person who can't afford a cook and maid now needs to full those duties, cooking and cleaning, the person who can doesn't. The food is already made, the house is clean, the laundry is done, the kids are bathed, the fridge is full. They have time to decide what to do with. Sure, they could cook or clean, but that's now their choice. The activity is optional and can be prioritized instead of being mandatory.
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.
The people I know who accomplish a lot of things also cook and clean for themselves.
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.
> 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.
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.
I think his point is that such people exist, and they're on the upper end of some "distribution". The experience you're describing is more of the median experience.
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.
I'm not saying that people can't do X, Y, and Z, there are people who are just that driven, or people who have a spouse that fills in those roles, but it's far easier for people who the necessities of life are optional, and when you're surrounded by people for whom it's all optional, they are going to assume it's optional for everyone and no assume why everyone isn't doing more.
People with enough income have a whole list of things that do not fill their time unless they want them to, that aren't really optional for people without enough money to pay to make them go away.
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.
Your comment doesn't make any sense to me. A single kid sucks more time than you have in a regular day. You are sleep deprived, and in survival mode for the first part.
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).
> My point is busy people do even more of the things that you think make you busy.
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.
No, from my point of view this post is just another executive grift trying to make people feel better about why they do the things they do.
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.
> 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 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.
They definitely are, although that doesn’t justify actions.
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.
The boring answer is meetings. Chapter 3 of High Output Management has a great treatment on the topic, and it covers both middle management and the executive level, including a timetable from one of Andy Grove's days. Here is a quote where he summarizes:
> 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.
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.
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.
> So while some of them do work long hours, they don’t have to.
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".
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.
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.
Totally supportive of remote work before I make my comment to be clear.
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.
You are being too generous to that bunch of sociopaths (not snarky, just think for a second what kind of personality gets and thrives up there for decades).
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.
Sadly, I agree. There is probably an element of "hard worker" survivorship bias at play, but there's also an undeniable profit motive that overrides a lot of those instincts too.
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.
There's another factor: their jobs are different. Obviously working in an office is advantageous if your entire jobs is meetings and talking to people. They're going to get frustrated when they are in the office and the people they want to talk to aren't there.
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.
I'm just somewhere in the middle doing engineering management, so I'm already talking a lot to people in meetings, but I really enjoy doing it from home. Much easier to do something on the side or in between of all the none work related stuff (like cooking lunch). In half of the meetings we wouldn't be able to meet those people directly anyway with us being in different countries or even continents.
> Yes it's still better to talk to people next to a physical whiteboard, but it only matters very occasionally.
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.
So this is pretty much it in my opinion. Mangers collaborate with other managers and it’s much easier and effective to do this in person. A big part of the job is this. It’s how you align cross functionally and lots of serendipitous things occur because of this. It’s much easier to build the types of relationships you need to effectively lead.
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.
easily the least productive days are when the team gets together for all hands. I'm sorry but people are going to schooze and dally and effectively write off that entire day from anything real getting done over the all hands meeting that takes up the bulk of the afternoon where like 2 people talk and everyone just looks at their inbox.
Not only are their jobs different, most of them have no understanding whatsoever of how the workers generate business value. The age of the technical founder is over.
> If you need to influence an executive where their experiences may be out of touch with your reality, help them see the impact through stories, videos, and data.
> 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.
>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.
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.
And bad decision makers won't even try, and might attack the people who try to do it for them. And there are a shitload of bad decision makers. And I don't owe them anything.
You're passing over the key word "entirety." It is beyond our ability to understand the entirety of how our actions affect our own individual selves. How can we understand the entirety of how our actions affect dozens, hundreds or thousands of people every day. I would not trust someone who thought they only needed a dash of empathy to have this much insight.
This is just an executive trying to gather sympathy for themselves, and make others "empathize" with their decisions.
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.
agreed, thats the vibe I got from this story as well.
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
In a sense it is literal, if "world" is understood not as "planet earth" or "this realm of existence" but instead as a social circle. e.g. "He is from the software world," doesn't mean "He is from a world made up of software," but instead "He works in and is surrounded by people who develop software professionally." In that sense, a lot of these people are (literally) living in a world that is socially, physically, and even conceptually separate from those of lesser means.
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?
I think the problem is that like the business culture in the US is so cutthroat and stressful, and people generally so self-centered. That like, they literally can’t imagine a type of life or stress that isn’t solved by muscle through it or work more or whatever.
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.
I've said it here many times now, but Robert Sapolsky identified inequality as one of the highest causes of stress in any given primate society. Even for those at the top.
> Is it really so hard to imagine the struggles of someone who doesn’t have any of the benefits listed in the post?
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.
I mean we’re talking about a self-selected group of people who’ve chosen money over… nearly everything else. I do think it’s hard for them to empathize because nothing in their existence encourages them to do so. They’re richly rewarded for their choices and we all just go along with it.
I was at Google during their initial “return to office” mandate.
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.
It’s happening because employers are desperate to get their power back while workers have no rights. It also makes it harder to leave an org, as orgs are also desperate to hold on to and develop existing talent due to forward looking working age population demographics. This is a desperate immune response.
(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.
> It’s happening because employers are desperate to get their power back while workers have no rights.
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.?
> 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.
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.
> Doesn’t that seem backwards? A company that supports remote work has a worldwide talent pool.l, including lower cost geographies.
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.
Yes, and moreover it's obvious from anyone's experience that applying for remote roles means workers will have MUCH more competition for the role. Employers ought to love this.
Capturing and controlling a market is preferable to competitive markets under our political-economic system. It's been the model for Silicon Valley since Bezos sold his plan to lose money until Amazon had a controlling stake of the retail market in the late 90s. It's a seemingly unavoidable outcome of under-regulated capitalism.
Couple this with regular threats and fear mongering about AI coming for the jobs of tech workers, and the picture gets even more somber. The tech industry wants to cheapen labor.
Office work requires living within commute distance of the office, which is much more expensive and keeps the employee tethered to their job. Remote workers are less threatened by layoffs because they can choose to live in a lower COL area and have their pick of other remote-friendly jobs rather than being limited to other companies in their metro or having to uproot their lives to move somewhere else. This is on top of the perceived benefits employers have surveiling and micromanaging office work.
As for workers having fewer protections rn, gestures in the general direction of DC.
>Office work requires living within commute distance of the office, which is much more expensive and keeps the employee tethered to their job. Remote workers are less threatened by layoffs because they can choose to live in a lower COL area and have their pick of other remote-friendly jobs rather than being limited to other companies in their metro or having to uproot their lives to move somewhere else.
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 move to Mountain View, you need to be able to afford to live in Mountain View. That takes a lot of remote jobs off the table, or substantially diminishes their prospects.
If you live in Omaha and work remotely, far more remote jobs are available.
Fang companies have colluded together before to surpress the labor market, litigation about this goes back to 2010 or so.
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.
Yes. But living in Orlando Florida means I can accept a remote job that pays less. I would have to get a remote job that pays 5x more and I don’t pay state income taxes.
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).
Not OP, but RTO forces geographic centralization and reduces mobility of their employees. If you can work remotely then you have a much larger pool. And I think that opening the door to remote work made employees realize that there was some power and some negotiation to be had on working conditions (basically our generation’s version of the 40 hr work week in response to the Industrial Revolution)
This is an underrated comment. I like the framing of Remote as Millenial’s 40hr workweek. In the face of declining worker conditions we made the best of a crisis (pandemic) and showed that working remotely was viable for most jobs. But no, the ruling class could not tolerate those gains.
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.
I got laid off at the start of my first day back in the new office. Had to leave my morning standup early to receive the news.
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.
The WARN act dictates that you need to provide 60 days notice for certain mass layoffs. Typically this means you are laid off, but remain on payroll for 60 days.
No severance is not apart of the law. You can be laid off and fired at anytime for any reason without severance. My manager laughed in my face when I asked if there was severance when being laid off in GFC.
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.
As mentioned in another comment there is the WARN act[1] at the federal level. And many states have additional regulations. In practice, employers would often prefer the people laid off just stop working immediately than continuing coming to work knowing they are losing their jobs soon. And I think employers can offer employees a severance agreement where the employee waives their right to the 90 day notice in exchange for some other compensation, such as a lump sum payment.
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.
We still see this attitude in HN comments sometimes. People thinking their piddly $500K in RSUs that vests over the next decade somehow qualifies them entry into the Global Elite class. And then they’ll argue against unions and other things that help workers because they see themselves as rubbing elbows with Jeff Bezos. Yea, yea, your handful of stock options make you just like him…
The phrase temporarily embarrassed millionaires is even more true for tech workers than most Americans. Especially for any who have entrepreneurial dreams or who are at start-ups for the stock options. The carrot is right there...
The phrase originally means that the subject is not a millionaire and likely will never be one, whereas many of us in tech are already millionaires or very likely to become one if we work in industry for any amount of time.
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.
It's literally true, even without dreams or stock option bets, that many tech workers are temporarily embarrassed millionaires. The source tweets are by an Amazon VP; an Amazon SWE salary with even moderately responsible spending is enough to retire as a multimillionaire.
I mean, the steinbeck quote is from 1960.. You will need probably ~$30 million dollars at retirement if you are 30yo today to retire as a 1960s millionaire.
The Steinbeck quote from the 1960s said "temporarily embarassed capitalist". Someone who has "entrepreneurial dreams" or is "at start-ups for the stock options", hoping to get wealthy through appreciation of their equity ownership, is unambiguously a capitalist.
"Millionaire" was added in a 2004 misquote by Robert Wright, and $1 million in 2004 dollars is about $1.7 million in 2025 dollars.
I would imagine the logic from the HR director is something like “the reason you’re not as successful as me is you don’t know how to manage your time well”
Also a recent Xoogler. There was a pretty popular thread where someone essentially ragequit due to being talked down to by someone in an all-hands, after having tried to resolve their issues with specific policies via other means. They took a principled stand, which seems exceedingly rare at Google.
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.
Fussell’s Class (1983) covers some of this. His upper-middle (in class—income tends to track with these social classes, but not always) are accustomed to very free lifestyles relative to, especially, the middle class (or the lower two tiers of his multifaceted “prole” class—the upper tier of that class does stuff like own successful plumbing or welding businesses, not work at Wal Mart or whatever)
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.
> 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.
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 can't speak from personal experience to the accuracy of some of his characterizations, but he nailed the ones that (I now see) form parts of my background and are common in my family: various levels of "prole", plus "middle". It was really weird to see our quirks of behavior and taste (some of which I'd never have noticed if not for the book) dissected and analyzed that way, but fun and gave me new ways of looking at all of it.
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.
Awareness in general is already worthwhile, but has it been useful for other things? E.g. Changing your views on government labor policy, worker-friendly laws, etc.
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.
> 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.
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.
Wow I wasn't aware of the realities of #1 but I certainly lived through #2 before I became an independent organizer. I'm buying Class on my next bookstore trip -- thank you for expanding your thoughts!
P.S. Self-plug: you might find my newsletter last month [0] mildly interesting. See the section "My Own Views"
The Stanford Hospital Nurses strike was driven by similar dynamics. Nurses had to work overtime through the entire pandemic while executives literally phoned it in for years! They were shocked, shocked, to discover that there was anger and resentment.
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.
The nature of nursing is that you have to be in person. What HR did (and has been doing) is keeping the number of staff at a barebones level. They don't, for example, hire enough nurses that if one is out sick (during covid!) that there could be someone to cover the shift.
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 in a different country and have different almost everything, but one thing is constant: nurses are treated like crap.
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.
I thought I had seen businesses run by every conceivable group, founders, engineers, sales, marketing, finance... and then I saw a hospital and realized it was run by HR. Every "may" in a rule becomes "shall" since anything else could be perceived as preferential. It makes the lives of both supervisors and supervised hell. Only the spiteful or incompetent rise.
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.
It's time to unionize. The top is out of touch and the valuations of these tech titans aren’t just staggering; they’re symptomatic of a system that values profit over people. These tycoons at the helm are not just steering companies—they’re puppeteering democracy, pushing political agendas that many of us find abhorrent and irrelevant to our lives. Unionization isn’t merely about better pay or working conditions; it’s about reclaiming power from this oligarchy that’s grown too powerful, too influential. The tech community needs to wake up and get these clowns in line, we could shut these companies down if we organize.
Tech and Software adjacent professions have to be ones that are least likely to unionize.
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.
The right time would have been when the going was good some years back. Tech workers could have put together an unparalleled strike fund and commanded unprecedented political power. We could have truly changed the world.
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...
Former big tech worker here, I'd support unionization wholeheartedly, but it's also worth advocating for cessation of all Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, etc products and software. Build software for linux only, explicitly choose to not support Windows, Mac OS, iOS, or Android. Support and test on Gecko-based browsers, reject Webkit-based and Blink-based browsers. Act like people are making you uncomfortable whenever they offer statements, comments, or questions that normalize gmail, facebook, iphones, or outlook. Become a FLOSS evangelist. Help your non-technical friends install a browser that supports manifest v2 and full-fat ad blocking. Help people set up adguard or pihole. Make it sound cool, easy, and seductive. Disrespect the ruling elite / "eat the rich!" vibes. Normalize anti-surveillance. Normalize full-face masks and juggalo paint and avante garde clothing that disrupts facial recognition algorithms. Build on a VPS, build on a dedicated server, build on clouds that aren't owned and operated by multitrillion dollar conglomerate monstrosities. Make AWS, Azure, and GCP as socially unacceptable as racism, sexism, and transphobia.
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.
Practically all software that matters is already Linux only. That happened 15-20 years ago as a combination of “cloud” and “SaaS”.
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.
Exorbitant executive compensation coming from the same companies that are aggressively infringing upon the rights of their end users are two expressions of the same tyrannical desires of these big tech companies. They're trying to bring about neofeudalism where we're all peasants serving our big tech lords.
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.
Thanks for your support. However, your upvote didn't register (I still have 1 point on the comment). I noticed this sometimes happening with me recently, too. You can verify this by unvoting and looking at my karma in the profile not changing.
Oooh, just tried upvoting this one and it looks like your karma stayed constant at 8301. Strange. I wonder if there's a limit to how much karma one account can give another through upvotes within a certain time period.
Yup, that's the problem. They view people as peons. Not people with lives, ambitions, family and friends. The only way to correct that view is to disobey.
As Laszlo Bock (head of HR at the time) quipped at TGIF when he announced Obamacare cuts to Google's healthcare coverage: "But hey, you get unlimited colonoscopies".
lmao! It's the same as all the sysadmin folks at my organization who have a policy of locking down all our computers without admin rights whereas I noticed they DID have admin rights.
Rules for thee but not for me, typical tech nerds.
Imagine expecting equal treatment to higher ups who run your company. Anyone who told you otherwise lied to you. Set expectations accordingly and you won’t be disappointed.
Imagine a very fat king standing before his starving populace, explaining why there would be even less food this winter as he munched on a turkey leg.
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.
Proverbial kings are a fact of life. Use your circle of influence to ensure your concern is heard, but don’t set yourself up for disappointment when you find out they get better Christmas bonuses, time off, and cooler parties.
Not sure what the purpose is here - it reads more like a soft flex than anything else. We all know "why" RTO gets pushed - and it's not just that executives are living royal lives while the peasants are expected to stress over traffic while their kids wait abandoned at some public school. If anything, thinking that RTO is just about being disconnected highlights how disconnected the author actually is - because it is far more often the case that RTO is driven by tax incentives, rent incentives, and occupant use agreements than just some petty executive saying "let them commute!".
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.
We are ecommerce, so the holidays are important revenue events. Our team's management required us to sit at our keyboards, online, so we could screenshot NewRelic graphs and paste them into our teams chat. The people requiring this all had full access to NewRelic to log in and check the graphs. We also had alerts that would page you if something was bad.
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.
Cities benefit from people being in office and thus, in the city spending money. In 2024, SF had a new business tax plan to incentivize employers to bring people back to the office, and I wouldn't be surprised if other cities did similar.
This is what would happen if the Horse Carriage producers had lobbies with enough power and money back when automobiles were invented. They would illegitimately push rules, regulations and coerce the public to cripple cars for their profit and fight against change. Like how the real estate lobbies are doing at this moment. They are akin to horse carriage lobbies and they should be treated as the parasitic, unproductive, reactionary influence that they are on society - without even getting into the bloat in the real estate sector and how it cripples housing.
Right but this is a new thing. For decades working from the office was the overwhelming norm. It was just assumed. So I doubt there's many incentives right now. I imagine it's much more about being upset at your expensive rent building being 70+% empty while still costing you as much as well as old fashioned beliefs in performance and monitoring of employees in the office. Also I do think there's some things that may be more difficult to collaborate on even with remote even with video calling
Our building has multiple first floor stores/restaurants/gym - and post Covid our rental agreements stipulate an average daily occupancy threshold; with a penalty/incentive program based on failing or exceeding that threshold as it is part of the agreements set up with the retailers. There are business tax deductions for on-site workers like utilities, maintenance, office supplies, property insurance, etc. Additionally, there are tax situations - Schaad v. Alder in Ohio for example - where municipalities receive or lose income based on the location of remote workers. In that specific case the municipality where the remote employee actually worked received no income while the municipality where the office existed did.
Commercial real estate value is often estimated using number of people (feet) who go through the building.
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.
I don't necessarily buy the arguments around real estate investment, but I think it's important to note that the office is a construct from before the popularity of the internet. A lot of the current crop of exec started their jobs before remote work was viable, so their mental model of how work is done might require an office because that's how they used to work.
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.
Undoubtedly the internet makes more remote roles possible. I’m just saying the business already hates paying for the office. Their incentive is aligned with regards to having less office space.
> Their incentive is aligned with regards to having less office space.
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?
Productivity is difficult to measure. I suspect many managers just don't know how to do it, or are not very confident about the results. In-person interactions in an office give managers additional information (such as height). For many, it makes management tasks easier to carry out and generally less stressful (but not necessarily with objectively improved results, I assume).
Big companies extract tax benefits from governments in exchange for locating their large buildings within said government's jurisdiction. Presumably in some cases said tax benefits come with some sort of verification that the expected quid pro quo (employees wandering around buying lunch and so on) happened.
I wouldn't want those people's jobs tbh. You can't make every dollar, and they don't really have a life outside work. Fast forward to 60, you're retired and you haven't even lived yet. Sounds like a regrettable situation to be in even if you're rich - your youth is gone, everything hurts when you wake up, and your dick doesn't work anymore.
Part of how I coped with spending years at a big co underleveled and unaware of the ramifications was realizing that when I took vacation, I disappeared for months at a time. "K, I'm gonna be gone for ___. See you when I get back." As a low-level IC, your personal time is your own. I take time off when I want, fully disconnect, and nothing is completely on fire when I come back.
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.
That might be so but he did highlight that he put work ahead of the family
> 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.
They aren't pushing it because they want to get back to the office or even dont understand the impacts. They're pushing it because they want more control over and accountability from their employees. Some even want a percentage of the employees to quit.
I think there are a lot of reasons, and forced attrition is definitely something they see as a benefit. However, I do genuinely think that a lot of them truly believe that working together in an office, face-to-face, is important. RTO is not just a cold calculation, but also reflective of their moral values towards work.
Whether those values actually lead to a better company is the part that, I feel, continues to lack evidence.
I used to work for a place that had "Focus Weeks". A week where there were to be no meetings, and you could work on whatever was important. Everyone I knew loved it - could accomplish so much more when you are not interrupted every other hour for some marginal-utility status update.
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.
It's useful to have most of your workforce (or other populations, as with police forces) in routine violation of unenforced rules so that one has cover for any individual persecution one finds convenient
Exactly this. I've worked at a few places now where there were RTO policies that many workers ignored. But periodically low performers and/or people that had lost political battles were denied promotions or fired and their poor office attendance record was cited.
What exactly is wrong here? If workers don't want that control, well,
they can look for another place. Companies are not supposed to solve social problems like how people care for children.
After all, are there any workforce troubles in companies that mandated RTO, besides negative hacker news comments?
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.
> Why else would they want to lose hours to commuting, and not take advantage of their employees living in cheaper CoL areas?
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)
I've been saying this since RTO became a thing. Even well-compensated white collar ICs have to deal with many of the same day-to-day realities as blue collar workers. They pay bills, have to wrangle the kids, etc. Yes they live more comfortably, but they still have to personally deal with all this stuff -- they don't have the money for a household staff.
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?"
It's very sad to me that we didn't seize and expand on this alternative vision for work. A commuting culture is quite terrible for society and there are many examples of successful remote-first teams. Worse, we don't get even get the benefits of working together because these group-thinkers also buy into outsourcing and so we commute into an office only to spend most of our day on video call with remote teams. Idiocracy.
I agree. Just goes to show how difficult it is to have lasting, fundamental societal change.
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.
Eh, I think the commuting negativity mostly stems from bad land use in America. Driving is wasteful, polluting, boring, dangerous, expensive, and just generally unpleasant. If we’d designed our society around walking/biking/transit people would be much happier.
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.
Which doesn't make any sense, because people who walked or biked could just have done the same when working remotely - just turn around after 1/2 of distance to the office and go back home. Then repeat after work.
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.
Remote doesn't necessarily have to mean work-from-home either, corporations could provide hubs or co-working spaces that are walkable or bikeable. So they can still get the warm managerial feeling of seeing badge-ins on a dashboard while also moving as away from 2h commutes and sterile office parks.
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.
I invest primarily in REITs, avoiding those tied up in any significant amount of office space.
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.
Another interesting aspect that is often ignored is the government's role in this situation. Increased footfall is beneficial for the economy. People generally spend more when they're outside than they would if they were at home. For example, one might choose to cook food rather than buy it when at home.
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.
This is an interesting case of the "revive the economy" argument. If you really don't see a benefit, to you or your employer, to returning to work, you are being forced to waste money (spending implies you get something out of it). More generously, it's a tax where the benefits go to your local Subway or gas station (or maybe bistro and public transit).
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.
I'd like to see proof of government pressure for companies to RTO. In theory it seems likely, but it would be lovely to have a smoking gun to enter into evidence in the court of public opinion. DM me (joking, HN doesn't have DMs).
We had an RTO mandate in the last year. Amongst our top 10 compensated employees, at least half were out of the office for the last three months (we go in one week per month). I tried not to freak out and catastrophize whent he rto mandate was first communicated. But the double standard has left me feeling deeply unsettled and bitter. And I just know one exec who has been on leave for months is going to roll back in and complain that his pet projects aren't coming along like he told the board they already had. He is oversees over half the technical folks and has very little technical skills of his own. I might bring champagne to work the day after he leaves.
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.
That's why I like that I have 0 friends in tech and all of my friends reside outside this bubble. Like, recently someone asked me for help, because he didn't have enough money to pay the taxes. Like holy crap, this is unthinkable in tech, but totally normal outside.
I see a lot of comments here, but what I don't see is anybody speaking the quiet part out loud.
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.
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.
They don't proffer a reason that makes sense because they don't really need to. They make the rules. They can BS their way through a question at the All Hands meeting or on CNBC. It's pretty apparent that at many companies the real reason is soft layoffs but you won't hear the executives say this part out loud.
Frankly? I think this is a whole mix of things. There isn't a "real" reason, there's a smorgasbord of them.
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.
Because they’re not being reasonable. You’re assuming that they’re reasonable people and they’re not. Reasonable companies, of which there are many, are running successful remote teams and not demanding RTO. You’re not hearing about them because they’re doing the reasonable thing for their employees.
Executives at pretty much every organization offer the same sensible reason. Working in an office together greatly reduces the cost of collaboration, which is valuable in its own right as well as leading to more inventiveness and better mentorship.
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.
There's very little in the way of evidence demonstrating your "sensible" hypothesis. On the other hand, a lot of ICs have experience working in office and at home and have noticed we do better work at home.
The question is what you mean when you say "better work". Are you able to unblock new grads more quickly at home? Are you able to achieve consensus on a new product direction more quickly at home? Or are you able to write code better at home, because you can keep the the new grads and product managers in your Slack backlog for as many hours as you need to maximize code throughput?
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.
What you will be doing in your office environment will be unblocking that new grad in 20 minutes and then putting your noise-canceling headphones on and concentrating on your screen for the rest of the day.
And if new grads and product managers are actually able to easily disrupt an IC who is concentrating, that is a sh*tty workplace.
Well, right, that's what it usually comes back to. If you expect to spend all but 20 minutes of your day concentrating on your screen doing solo work, remote work is definitely the best model. The managers pushing RTO want ICs to spend more time collaborating than that.
When I plead with my direct reports to please comply with the company policy of in the office 3 days a week, and I am deluged with a flood of complaints, I suppose sometimes I’m less empathetic than I might be. It’s not because I’m rich. I am not. I don’t own a home nor do I retain any personal assistants.
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.
> 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.
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?
The first thing that stuck out to me (emphasis added):
>> 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'm sure some might be acting in good faith. Nonetheless, I believe they're generally wrong. From experience going to the office for the sake of going to the office doesn't help.
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.
I haven’t been working for nearly as long - coming up on 7 years here. I enjoy going into the office because I enjoy spending time with my team - they’re all really cool!
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.
Student loan forgiveness is using taxpayer money to pay off the loans of a huge number of people with good jobs and plenty of money.
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.
You made plenty of points that I don’t necessarily agree with, but the one I’d love to see data for is that the people’s who’s loans are being forgiven don’t “need” that money!
I’m 50 and he sounds like the prototypical boomer. It’s like the old people who can’t fathom why new grads would spend months “grinding leetCode” to make $170K+ right out of college when the boomer bought their first house in 2002 for $170k (like I did).
> and just trying to run the company effectively and efficiently
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.
I'd come into the office 3 days a week if I lived close to the office. I live far away because the office is downtown. Downtown is expensive to live in.
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.
Because the RTO mandate is not to increase productivity, it is to cause people to quit or give a reason to lay people off. It has NOTHING to do with making workers more productive. Also 20 years ago it was much more doable to live close to an office. Real estate prices are insane now, even in smaller cities. Also, it is hard to work full time, commute, raise kids, and keep a marriage successful. It doesn't leave much wiggle rooms for exercise, cooking, recreation, etc. It is a rat race. It is why people become overweight, have heart attacks, and get cancer. Keynes prediction of 15 hour work weeks didn't come true, despite unprecedented productivity growth. It is a shame.
So you don't own a house after working for 30 years and you of all people are speaking about efficiency? This is really something to think about for you, mate
it's as simple as this: working from home is a benefit, like 401(k) matching.
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’ve also worked almost 30 years. Even in 1996 I was able to work remotely occasionally by logging into a mainframe (DEC VAX and Stratus VOS) for half of my work and using PCAnyWhere for Windows based work over a modem.
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.
> just trying to run the company effectively and efficiently.
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.
Ultra rich execs are out of touch sure, but equally so, middle aged people with houses, families, long commutes to the suburbs are out of touch with younger people who might've relocated to a city for their first / second job out of university, don't have social networks of friends and family nearby, and desperately need to be in the same office as older experienced staff to learn from them. They also don't have space or even privacy to work from home every day in a shared flat.
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.
Her husband also got disconnected. A lot of French nobles who asked and collaborated with their foreign relatives to wage war on their people to repress them also got disconnected.
Yep. People always think that the aristocracy of old was different. No, they were just normal people like anyone else who were just directly born into narcissist privilege and lived their lives out-of-touch right from their childhood on. The tech execs, investors, VCs, and shareholders have grown into the same narcissism after attaining that kind of privilege. With enough time in that privileged, disconnected, narcissistic world, they just develop the same behavior patterns and 'disconnect'.
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...
I still would hate to be in the office every day by diktat but I honestly do think remote work can be pretty bad for the younger end of a company.
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.
Totally agree with this model, and I’ve seen it work.
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.
OP mentions housekeeping as part of his benefits. I also have had an every-other-week maid service for the past decade or so, and for me, it is a huge lifestyle improvement. The amount of time and cognitive overhead it saves is enormous.
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.
It's kind of funny, when execs talk about employees feeling entitled to working remotely, I think that's a fair thing to criticize. We all earn our salaries and our perks, the market determines how much companies will put up with remote work (and how many employees even want it).
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.
The only issue here is that many of the employees in question can likewise afford a weekly cleaner, to have groceries delivered and cooked meals delivered regularly. They can also live close to the office if they wish.
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.
You unintentionally strike at the heart of why I’m never completely on board with these anti-office discussions.
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.
I suspect if office workers had offices, we'd be in quite a different situation.
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
Approaching this from the perspective that other people only care about socially signalling how social their job is will not get you anywhere. It might feel good and make good rhetoric to make such wide generalisations but it doesn't get you any closer to the truth and cuts you off from seeing things through others' perspectives.
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.
I wasn't accusing my interlocutor of merely engaging in social signally. I gave an explanation of the position, which I can be more explicit about: it is an intra-knowledge-worker point. Its the point of a person who, quite rightly, goes around people who neglect to be social at all and impress the importance of it. This is a non-sequiteur when i'm addressing a hypersocial group.
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.
> 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
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.
>But I also know how crucial it is for academia to talk with colleagues.
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!
This is really well put. Those who's main job is email, meetings and the occassional spreadsheet can't understand why those who do something technical must have significant time alone to work through a problem
This goes deeper than just RTO. The current, growing rift stems from increasing recognition that:
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".
Your way of looking at things is fundamentally broken. You will never understand society or other people if your analysis is that we could transform society with technology but we choose not to because... some people are just evil and don't want to.
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.
You haven't provided any meaningful counterclaims or additional perspective. You seem to be upset just because I think c-suite executives are not morally respectable. You claim my way of looking at things is "broken" but you fail to provide any rationale as to why. I claim that execs are incentivized to preserve an inequitable system because they directly benefit from it. Talking about their "psychopathy" and "evil" is a hyperbolic way to illustrate that they put profit over people, which anyone with a single functioning cell behind their eyeballs could tell you is patently obvious. My use of these terms was in direct response to the OP tweet, which already dumbed down the discourse to the level of "evil" and "good"—blame the nincompoop exec for bringing the conversation to this level, I am merely operating on 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.
> This doesn't necessarily make them evil, just disconnected.
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.
We are already very painfully aware of the hyper rich being out of touch. This reads like rich guy A saying it’s actually rich guys B and C who are the problem. Maybe this is frustrating for people like the author to hear, because clearly they have good intent with this message, but I’m sorry, the only way I will ever perceive someone who received a 9082% pay increase is as another criminal destroying the world that I live in. I am a complete hypocrite though, because of course I would say yes to a 9082% pay increase, like most/all people would. The price of being this wealthy is exile from plebeian society. Sorry you have to be rich?
Sorry but this is completely off base. Executives know what they are doing. They just don't care because it makes them more money.
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.
They may be out-of-touch but they understand when someone takes their money. And my message to tech CEOs is: if you want in-office, pay more. Or you will lose your company and your PJ and your golf club membership and your kids will go to public school in a big yellow bus built in 1982 with no seatbelts. You won't even be able to shift over to a successful company, because the companies will speak exclusively Chinese. The future of the western tech industry is in your hands, I hope you're smart enough to make the right choice.
RTO full time just isn't possible for my family and I suspect I'm not alone. It has nothing to do with productivity. It's just the economics of childcare don't work. We live in SF both work tech jobs. We make above median income relative to rest of the country. Our 2 kids (< 10 years old) are in public schools. Kids need to be dropped off at 9.30 and picked up at 3.30 and 2.30 on weds.
The bare minimum for pickup/drop off help is ~ $2500 a month.
That’s less possible now in the era of longer commutes unless you have flexible hours. For example, I’m married to a teacher. I have to do the morning drop off because there is no flexibility in the schedules at either school. That means the earliest I can reliably be in the office is 9:15 (e-bike), 9:30 (transit) or 9:45 (car).
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.
It is less possible when people choose to live further away and to live in constant fear of predators so their kids can't walk/bus themselves home.
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.
> It is less possible when people choose to live further away and to live in constant fear of predators so their kids can't walk/bus themselves home.
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:
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.
What people did before was simple in my childhood case: your grandma/grandpa, who live downstairs in a multifamily home, drops you off or picks you up.
How that's supposed to work with just 2 parents that work 8h/day - idk.
Exactly how I just said? One picks up, one drops off. Not that hard, my parents managed it my whole childhood. And kids can make their own way to/from school after a few years.
Who gets to choose their own hours? This would get most people fired. You can’t just leave in the middle of the afternoon to spend an hour+ driving your kids around
Ironically one of the clearest signals of being out of touch is feeling that your noticing how out of touch you are is noteworthy. It's like "Gosh, I'm rich! How interesting!"
> 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.
It seems like these policies are more geared towards giving companies a way to fire people and avoid the consequences of that than they are around improving productivity.
"It would be hypocritical to talk about "executives" in general without owning my own situation first. For brevity, here are four examples:
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.
2 and 3 is not too hard to be able to afford here in the US. 1 would depend on when you bought your house because prices have shot up a lot. But if you are a tech workers and got some RSU and bonuses it would be achievable.
None of this is surprising.
I wouldn’t say they are disconnected, unless they were already born with a silver spoon and have never had to live like the rest of us. I would say they know how it is for the rest of us, but just don’t care.
A few years back, I worked at a "unicorn" startup that also did the pandemic remote work thing, then tried reeling it back in 2022. I remember one of the SVP's explaining how reasonable the RTO policy was, even for those who—like her—had moved away from NYC. She simply rented an apartment a few blocks from the office—midtown Manhattan—and stayed there during the week. Like her, we just needed to make our own adjustments to accommodate the new policy. I'd seen "out of touch" before. But suggesting that everyone just get their own Pied-à-terre still pretty much takes the cake for degree of out of touch I've witnessed personally.
> This is not a screed against executive wealth. After all, I paid with 25 years of my life and I got some of the wealth.
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.
Chris Hedges recently interviewed Catherine Liu, the author of Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class. They are a mostly invisible spectrum of plutocratic aristocracy who essentially replaced the middle class and gained immense wealth, power, and sense of entitlement.
About three years ago, when the major state university my wife worked for was starting its "return to office" push, the head of HR gave a Zoom town hall filled with condescending remarks. He said things like, "I don’t know why you all aren’t back in the office already..." and "I love going to the MU and chatting with students about their college experience."
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.
If you want people to return to the office, then make the working conditions at the office desirable to return to.
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.
The fundamental irony is that CEOs + execs are easy to replace at most orgs. Their compensation comes from nepotism and capitalism, not from any inherent capability. Hopefully I’ll live to see the end of the rotten scourge that is Capitalism. One can dream.
Yes, they are like chancellors, castellans to the feudal lords who own the fief. They are even more vicious than the lord himself because their employment depends on that viciousness. Not that the lords would not be equally vicious if they ran the show.
These kinds of tweets miss the point. It's not about returning to the office. It's about reducing labor costs. It's about having a thing that shows you are trying harder (the anime kind where it just makes you win for no reason) to show to your investors.
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.
Every recruiter who reaches out with non-remote jobs gets the same answer: "i am not currently taking any companies that demand i waste my time on a commute seriously". Many reply and tell me that they get this a lot from the more senior people they want to hire. Usually they also complain that their hands are tied.
It’s not because they’re in a bubble, it’s because they hate you. If they could get rid of you and maintain the same revenue, then they would make more money and that’s the only thing that resonates. They hate you, and you should hate them right back.
Contrast both: minimum wage, lengthy bus commute, workday that exceeds 8 hours, limited or no weekends or vacation.
People that never had a remote work option because they work production or service jobs that are tied to the workplace.
All of this was known and built into the education of the elite wherein a sense of responsibility for upholding the overall prosperity of society was instilled. The fact that a post like this seems noteworthy is just an illustration that that sense of responsibility was lost. It seems like we have arrived full circle back to: "I got mine, fuck you." Lording, instead of leading.
What we are really witnessing is law and order breaking down.
I think a lot of the return to office mandates are either meant to force people to quit, or to protect the value of real estate. With JP Morgan, they’re looking to protect the entire commercial real estate market since their business depends on it.
I enjoy working from home. But I'm not going to deny that it has had a catastrophic impact on the downtown business and commercial districts in many small and medium-sized cities. Those places stuggled badly with lockdown in general and a lot still have not recovered from the sudden societal shift where so many people just stay at home in the suburbs instead of coming into the office. I don't know what the answer is, and I certainly don't want to return to the office. But the outlook is bleak for a lot cities.
The answer is that it sucks to own one of those businesses, but things change and disruption happens. The answer isn't "the city's entire white-collar workforce needs to migrate downtown and back every day to provide an artificial customer base for $17 burritos".
There is more benefit to a vibrant downtown city center than just "white collar" people visiting everyday. Bars, restaurants, cafes. People go to the post office, they go to salons. All of those things are gone now.
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.
Those things are gone now because the only reason people were doing them downtown is because they had to be there for work.
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.
> 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.
They are where I live. Guess it depends on the city.
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.
The city and those business need to change to meet the shift. They are just being greedy and seem to want us workers to both support ourselves and bail them out.
Wouldn’t this be countered by the economic boon of the grocery stores and other places that are open where people actually live? In my neighborhood a couple of small eateries have opened up for the wfh crowd. I can get a decent sandwich and some chips to go for a reasonable price within a 20min walk from my home.
Edit: coffee shops seems to be doing very well too
> countered by the economic boon of the grocery stores and other places that are open where people actually live
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.
Maybe those were just artificial constructs that cost everyone a lot of money and we just started to realize now?
“Hey let’s support these 30$ lunches at the food truck downtown.”
Maybe we are as a society better off without these massive concrete structures that are only occupied 8h / 24h a day and serve no other purpose? Maybe requiring less resources and infrastructure to get people to and from other concrete structures that they only inhabit during the other part of the day is a good thing kind of?
Years before COVID or WFH was a thing, I knew a guy at work who played some MMO literally all day. He was also the main sysadmin and always got all of his work done on time.
But yes, people can slack off anywhere. 'Butts in seats' is one of the laziest metrics for management to use for 'working'.
I remember reading about SysAdmins who wrote mods for MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons, like a text-based MMO) to give them system status notifications in-game. For example, "a pigeon arrives with a note: Server 3 is down".
Plenty of jobs are intermittently high-demand and high-stakes while leaving a ton of free time throughout the day.
I knew a sysadmin at a different job who did that. And since MUDs were text, many in the office at the time had no idea what was on his screen.
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.
At the same time, execs love to paint with a broad brush that everyone working from home is slacking off... while also not sharing any data about how many people are being lazy.
Either your performance management can catch lazy employees or it can't. If it can't, then that's what you should be fixing.
It is very interesting to me that in my social/professional circle, and indeed here on HN, remote schooling during covid is practically universally seen as a massive failure resulting in serious consequences, yet remote work is a huge success and it's an outrage and borderline human rights violation whenever it's reduced or taken away.
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.
> Not all kids failed disastrously at remote school, some excelled and worked far ahead of their classmates.
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.
> It is very interesting to me that in my social/professional circle, and indeed here on HN, remote schooling during covid is practically universally seen as a massive failure resulting in serious consequences, yet remote work is a huge success and it's an outrage and borderline human rights violation whenever it's reduced or taken away.
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.
Anon for obvious reasons. I'm one of the few full time home workers at my org. I slack off all the time. I mean literally I did an hour of work on Friday.
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.
I’ve been wfh long before covid. I work in consulting so the metric is very easy. If a percentage of your time (typically 75-80%) isn’t billed to a client that yields a predefined margin then you’re fired. It seems brutal but it’s humane in a way. As long as I’m profitable to the firm they don’t care what I do or how I do it.
Slacking off is super easy in the office. You just have to spend a lot of time there, you can drag meetings forever, goof off behind computer - even if the screen is visible. But bonus if it is not visible.
Hell, I'd argue for knowledge professions it's required throughout the day. I cannot stay in the zone for 8 hours a day, so I'm going to need to take breaks.
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.
Ok. So environment and social factors have no effect?
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.
Where I work we are all remote and executives have to beg for a potty break because they are so busy. If you slack off when remote, you are probably worse in the office. WFH vs the office has nothing to do with a person's work ethic and dedication.
The same lack of context is what (I think, if I'm feeling charitable) makes these people think AI is real:
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.
I did exactly what this exec advocated - using hard data and statistics to paint a picture of what these mandates look like from a worker perspective - and was roundly shot down.
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.
> Data alone is not enough to sway these people.
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!
Finally, a good use for those pesky surveys that no one answers, I'm pretty sure the goal from the start was to generate cover for whatever policies they feel like enforcing.
At the last place I worked I assiduously filled out those surveys. Twice a year the executives would do an all hands meeting and talk about the result of the recent survey. They would make a big deal out of all the changes they were making.
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.
This employer had similar surveys, and the results plummeted after a huge RIF and never really recovered. I was asked to join focus groups for more detailed feedback, and as soon as we gave it, they silently dismantled said groups rather than update us on how the powers that be would be acting on that feedback. All-hands meetings where questions about RTO, attendance policies, and flexible working arrangements were regularly diverted and ignored. That doesn’t even get into the technical concerns I was also fielding as an Engineer, these were areas solely focused on trying to contribute a sense of objective direction to the company like the executives repeatedly bragged about inviting us to do, to “be different” than other businesses.
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.
My favorite was an employer that did a massive “transformation” project. They brought in McKinsey to figure it out afterwards. It was probably the only McKinsey encounter I’ve had that seemed productive - the team was both interested and capable.
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.
This sounds like a canonical example of the reason to hire a consulting firm.
> the executives will always act in their own self-interest;
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.
>Yes, and so does everyone else, including me, including you.
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.
If you're better than the market at predicting sacrificing the long term for the short term, you can make a lot of money by shorting those stocks.
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 sure why you are being downvoted
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.
Good leadership is in the leader's best interest. Having a capable, happy and motivated workforce is also in the leader's best interest.
Obvious in theory, but have you ever met one of those leaders?
I have met several of these leaders. Problem is, that very few of them are also very successful. Most of these "leaders" that I met, based a lot of their success from basically being able to stack their bs very high and bailing out before that stack fell over. Interestingly, the one guy that I am the most sure of being a good guy and leader is also one of the most successful, having retired with several hundred millions in the bank. But the most successful guy is the one with the worst methods, who is very close to become a billionaire (he might actually already be one, haven't checked on him for a few months).
Yes.
>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.
My personal favorite tidbit about a company which gave surveys years ago was that they claimed they were anonymous but when I was late to submit mine one year, the CFO called me and asked me to do my survey since it was late...
It's entirely possible the survey is anonymous, but they can still see who hasn't responded. Depending on the survey software, these aren't exactly mutually-exclusive things?
I'll take a whack at this since I have some relative experience from playing at a functional exec in my last role
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.
> 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.
> It's entirely possible the survey is anonymous, but they can still see who hasn't responded.
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.
Cool, so it could be exploited by someone who makes a hard effort to exploit it (polling the answers and comparing them to the non-respondents, I guess?).
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?
Vote in my country is mandatory. If I don't vote, I lose lots of rights and need to pay a fine(very cheap, token value).
Are elections rigged?
Does it make any difference in practice who wins?
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.
He didn't say they were rigged, he just said they were not anonymous as was claimed.
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.
My employer has just started not releasing the results of the survey.
To be clear: the results are anonymised. The only thing that the people chasing you have direct access to is whether you filled in the survey or not.
I've done a fair amount of work with employee survey data as an HR data scientist. Particularly at large companies it can be pretty useful, but executives often like to reinterpret the reports they are sent in interesting and creative ways.
> I'm pretty sure the goal from the start was to generate cover for whatever policies they feel like enforcing.
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.
I wonder whether they adjusted for commute length. I imagine that IF you live close to the office, the RTO is not bad. Plus, if you're close maybe you live in a small apartment and maybe you are single, so the office is also a social place, and having no family means you don't have pressure from other duties.
I lived near an office for a good portion of my career when I was single. The office was definitely not a social spot. Most of the people that liked RTO when HN has been polled were married people with kids. If you're married with kids and live near a tech campus in a major city then I think it's safe to say that you're very wealthy.
I’ve seen employee satisfaction surveys show certain unhappy groups getting happier over time. Which, of course they did, the unhappy ones left!
I'm one of those people who is happier when spending some time in the office each week and have said that when surveyed.
Don't assume survey results that run counter to your anecdotal experience have been fabricated.
They did not say the results were fabricated, but that they were misinterpreted. If you like being in the office, then your are gonna be more in the office than those who don’t like. It’s not being in the office that causes you liking being in the office, and thus if we force those who are not going in the office to go they will like it.
They do not use data as a decision making tool. They use data as post-hoc justification for decisions already made.
But you see, you were trying to convince them of entirely the wrong thing. In fact you ended up providing solid reasons to reinforce their belief in RTO.
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.
This remote colleagues problem is my issue. I don’t mind coming back in (except the cost) but it is very irritating and pointless as I’m a project manager with dispersed teams all across the country (and some in other countries). I come into the office, say hi to a few people I know, get on Teams calls all day in an open plan office with less privacy than at home, then commute home again.
I know exactly how you feel. I brought up the prior success my team had with a yearly meetup for a week of good, solid, complex work and planning, and suggested teams try to achieve that using the cost savings associated with real estate reductions.
That was also promptly shutdown, in favor of two new tech hubs in cheaper countries and a smattering of MSPs.
It does look like the exec class has become a new aristocracy that lives in a world separate from the rest of the society - new technofeudal lords.
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.
I think there are two things going on, and while I think the Twitter post does a good job of highlighting this core issue, I think it's going to be overshadowed by the "execs can get all this support because they're rich" talk (which is true, just not what I think is the core issue).
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.
First bucket guy here! Work 12 hours days, use a significant amount of my free time to study/learn.
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.
Yep, if the work itself is what drives you rather than the organisation and people, and you’re able to achieve that solo, then the question is just whether you prefer a commute and office experience. Personally, while I miss colleague interactions, I find offices and commutes truly depressing, so I would never choose that over remote all else equal.
That’s because the reason for return to office is to get people to quit. Simple as that. Soft layoffs.
The fix is increased competition or legislation.
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.
I love remote work. It made me 20x more productive when I was managing a distributed team of almost 1000 people during COVID - all of our metrics improved. 5 years later I am in a different role, and it’s the exact opposite. Executives represent the company and its interests, and there are some significant issues with the real problem - hybrid.
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.
Surely these people are assigned tasks to do? Are they not getting the tasks done? How are your managers unable to tell whether the assigned tasks are getting done?
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?
Thanks for your comment. I agree with a lot of what you said, in particular that trying to have it both ways (hybrid) often ends up with everyone being frustrated, in my experience.
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 contractors, I’d guess 40% or more. I’ve discovered things that are pretty shocking.
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.
> The bigger issue for them are people who move away, lie and invent medical problems to avoid work rules.
Don’t worry, people are perfectly capable of doing that in the office too.
I find it a lot easier to hide not doing anything in the office? If you are sitting at your desk the default assumption is that you are hard at work.
I don't understand how it is a problem if an employee takes on multiple jobs. Presumably you don't limit births either and being a parent is effectively taking on another job. If the work output is acceptible or not is what should matter alone to you as a manager. Not how exactly the sausage is getting made.
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.
If I’m paying you $200k to be a full time employee, I have an expectation that you’re proactive and working. Likewise, if you’re a contractor getting paid for hours, those hours are contractually exclusive to me - don’t accept the contract if you want to double dip. With a deliverable based contract, I don’t give a shit how many jobs you work, so long as you deliver. Respect is a two way street.
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.
Well, if they are affecting your teams performance then deal with it. If they don’t cause ripples then whatever. People were slacking off at work long before zoom was invented. Ever see Office Space?
People stacking jobs have next to no interest in anything about the jobs except getting paid, and are really easy to spot in high performance environments because they tend to make a lot of excuses and miss a lot of deadlines.
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.
Sounds like the system works fine. You cull low performers and don’t notice those who might be doing this and delivering on acceptible timelines for you. You’d have the same issues with any distraction really, job, wife, hobby, drugs, whatever it may be. All you have to really look at are the outputs no matter what you do. Alcoholics were drinking at work and slacking off when it was in person too after all. People would even simply stare at the cubical wall for a day to spite the boss.
> I don't understand how it is a problem if an employee takes on multiple jobs.
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.
Sounds like companies managers are shit at their jobs then if they can't make sure that people are actually doing there jobs.
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.
If you're correct that WFH is more efficient than work in the office, over time the work in the office companies will be replaced by the WFH ones.
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.
You keep waddling into my comments specifically to taut your mistaken notion of “the invisible hand of the free market”, and it’s not welcome - mostly because it’s demonstrably not true, and also because you have a history of moving goal posts when presented this data that knocks down your assertions.
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.
> 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.
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?
> Why do even you portray the environment as being full of companies whose primary goal is to exploit their workers?
Companies primary goal is to exploit /everything/, and why wouldn't workers be included/
> 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.
I think the problem is that exploit can mean multiple things, and it’s obviously true that companies want to exploit everything in the non-pejorative sense.
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)
This is a good insight, thanks for adding it!
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under socialism, it's the other way around!
Your reasoning is flawed. Potential wealth is infinite. Cumulative wealth at any given moment is finite but growing rapidly.
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.
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> 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.
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.
History shows us that socialism and communism are not remotely immune to inflation, either.
Your comment is a word salad. You misunderstand basic economics and this is a public forum where other people can reply to your comments.
> it’s demonstrably not true
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.
A market can be irrational longer than you can keep solvent applies to this as well
That doesn't justify being irrational yourself.
Is the market really free enough for WFH vs RTO to be visible?
No because switching costs are too high which distorts the market.
As far as I know, there aren't any regulations about WFH vs RTO.
Regulation isn't the only thing that can make a market unfree. For example, some of the players in the market could be big enough to exert market power.
The history of business is that companies rise to dominance, are characterized as having unstoppable monopolies, and then they fall. The US business history is full of examples. Like IBM. Walmart. RCA. GE. Cisco Systems. Intel. Ford. AT&T.
The only way dominance can be sustained is by using the government to throttle the competition.
Monopolies don't need to be eternal to be a monopoly. They will fail when they make a mistake or become obsolete. What they won't do is lose to a competitor on their own terms.
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).
Microsoft outmanuevered IBM multiple times. IBM tried to dominate the PC business, was successful for a few years, and then failed.
> 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.)
I'd compare it to dictatorships: In the long run all dictatorships have failed. However, that doesn't mean that they don't cause immense damage in the medium term, that we shouldn't fight against them, or that they don't have significant influence upon society.
> 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.
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?
The irony in this comment is thick enough you could cut it with a knife.
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.
> Not all of them are the same
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.
But this is assuming that "bad" companies outnumber the "good" by a significant margin, which has been untrue in my experience.
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.
The irony of your rant is that you are pointing to the other extreme.
> 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.
"plenty that are" isn't sufficient, though? Comments like yours tend toward the portrayal of all companies as being evil and exploitative. It's trivially obvious that this is not the case, so perhaps you're just trying to claim that the vast majority of them are evil and exploitative?
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.
This mirrors a lot of what I've suspected. Executives have a survivorship bias of a very work-focused life. It's hard for them to understand why anyone else would choose differently.
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.
> I did exactly what this exec advocated - using hard data and statistics to paint a picture of what these mandates look like from a worker perspective - and was roundly shot down.
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.
> If you want to convince a company doing RTO why it’s bad, you need to show the negative impacts to the organization.
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.
I think your reasoning is flawed because there is no fixed RTO cost to every employees commute and physical location (which I am assuming you mean by their expenses).
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.
> 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.
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.
> This doesn't mean they have different expenses.
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.
> 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.
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.
Honestly, you have a really strange way of looking at all this in my opinion. You seem to believe that your employer should compensate you not just for the time you are working for them, but also the time you are not. At no point in my life have I ever seen that expectation from anyone else.
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.
> You seem to believe that your employer should compensate you not just for the time you are working for them, but also the time you are not.
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?
> They have to compensate you for the relative difference in value between working for them and working for someone else.
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.
> No. They only have to offer enough compensation and benefits to attract enough people into the roles they need filled.
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?
I am quite convinced that you probably started your career around or near to 2020, you seem to have a real naïveté around what is actually important to a company and how they calculate value. Especially a company that puts real value on in office work for its employees. I suspect you have probably had limited experience with in office work and automatically assume that everyone was miserable back pre-pandemic about it.
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.
> I suspect you have probably had limited experience with in office work and automatically assume that everyone was miserable back pre-pandemic about it.
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 steak, but will eat chicken if that is what is available.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> If execs really want RTO then people will quit and they'll have to hire new people
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.
The question is not whether they can find someone else to hire. They can always do that for the prevailing market price. The question is, how much more do they have to pay to get someone to take on ~$30,000/year in commuting costs than they would if they didn't require that?
You are so fixated on costs that literally do not matter to an organization that can fill an in office job at the rate they want to pay.
The rate they want to pay is "less".
Doesn’t matter if someone will accept it and work in the office. That’s what the value the job is worth to both the employer and the employee.
I feel like you're still not...
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?
> 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.
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.
The difference to the company is that if you don't force people to take on $30,000 in expenses, you'll be able to find people willing to work for up to $30,000 less in compensation. In addition to the other benefits of expanding the talent pool beyond the local geographic area, which might let you get better people, e.g. because you can hire someone in Boston who wants to stay in Boston, without opening an office there.
Something has gone seriously wrong in your thinking. You appear to be attempting to subtract two unrelated quantities from each other. Let's try this another way:
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 also raises Omnicorp's revenue by $X per month. X is the value you forgot to consider. What is it?
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.
What is it that you think I'm confused about? Mostly you haven't said anything that wasn't already included in my prior comment.
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?
> 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.
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.
This is why RTO will end. It was ending before the pandemic. The cost to the organization is money. They subsidize the employees ability to sit in chair and drink water and use the bathroom. This is a very high cost at any organization. The reason given it’s necessary is CEO has vibes that it’s better. This works for a while but in the end it’s real money spent on questionable benefits.
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.
Exactly. You must play by their rules.
I agree. Despite the the statement's pithiness, the reality is we don't all have the same 24 hours in a day.
Yeah, I think it’s worth reflecting that most people with families work 80-hour weeks. Richer people can pay others to take on part of that workload so they can do 50 or 60 hours of work for a company and still actually be working less. Which is fine, I guess, until they’re all like “why are you poors always so sluggish and tired and wanting to clock out right at 5 on the dot?”
Nah. This kind of person tends to do more family stuff, and participate in more community events, and do more work.
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.
I'm not following your point. I've got a solid 30 hours of unpaid work a week, and it'd be closer to 40 if I had to commute, and when my kids were younger and I still had a commute it was around 50 hours, all on top of my actual job. I could and, if it weren't wildly financially irresponsible, absolutely would pay to make about 20 hours of that vanish at no harm whatsoever (benefit, actually) to my personal relationships & family, and then I'd have a lot more time and energy for other things. That's just... how clocks work, IDK. This is overwhelmingly the norm for people who can't afford to pay others to do lots of stuff for them.
My point is busy people do even more of the things that you think make you busy.
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.
What you're not differentiating here is between optional and mandatory tasks. If you're paying someone to cook, clean, grocery shop, or provide day to day child care you have time to do optional things, and people mistake that for being more efficient when in reality it's having the luxury to decide what to do with your time.
No adult with jobs and kids gets home and says “huh what will I fill my extra time with”. Everyone is busy. Now it’s up to effort, prioritization, and efficiency
The person who can't afford a cook and maid now needs to full those duties, cooking and cleaning, the person who can doesn't. The food is already made, the house is clean, the laundry is done, the kids are bathed, the fridge is full. They have time to decide what to do with. Sure, they could cook or clean, but that's now their choice. The activity is optional and can be prioritized instead of being mandatory.
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.
The people I know who accomplish a lot of things also cook and clean for themselves.
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.
> 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.
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.
I think his point is that such people exist, and they're on the upper end of some "distribution". The experience you're describing is more of the median experience.
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.
I'm not saying that people can't do X, Y, and Z, there are people who are just that driven, or people who have a spouse that fills in those roles, but it's far easier for people who the necessities of life are optional, and when you're surrounded by people for whom it's all optional, they are going to assume it's optional for everyone and no assume why everyone isn't doing more.
People with enough income have a whole list of things that do not fill their time unless they want them to, that aren't really optional for people without enough money to pay to make them go away.
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.
Your comment doesn't make any sense to me. A single kid sucks more time than you have in a regular day. You are sleep deprived, and in survival mode for the first part.
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).
That’s true, but it’s only one activity I mentioned.
It’s still true that having two young kids is more time than and effort than one.
> My point is busy people do even more of the things that you think make you busy.
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.
I think you’re taking my comment personally which is not intended.
No, from my point of view this post is just another executive grift trying to make people feel better about why they do the things they do.
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.
> Making money and their success come above all.
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.
> 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 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.
> Your labor market isn't all that special.
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.
I don't have different priorities but I can't afford to offload my obligations to others.
What I don’t understand is, why have children if you are not going to raise them?
Looks good on the CV.
Oh come on, not a single one of these people is working anything anywhere close to 40 hours per week, let alone 60.
They definitely are, although that doesn’t justify actions.
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.
It's funny, they get in later than me, go home earlier than me and I never see them at the office on the weekends.
Maybe they are "working" from a hotel downtown with their lover.
> work 12+ hours on weekdays and ~8 per day on weekends.
what are they actually doing? what are the deliverables? are they actual doing intellectual work 12 hours a day?
The boring answer is meetings. Chapter 3 of High Output Management has a great treatment on the topic, and it covers both middle management and the executive level, including a timetable from one of Andy Grove's days. Here is a quote where he summarizes:
> 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.
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.
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.
> So while some of them do work long hours, they don’t have to.
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".
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.
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.
Startups and large established companies are very different breeds.
And like I said, it wasn't really a startup. They just liked to use that phrase in order to convince people to work free overtime.
Totally supportive of remote work before I make my comment to be clear.
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.
You are being too generous to that bunch of sociopaths (not snarky, just think for a second what kind of personality gets and thrives up there for decades).
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.
Sadly, I agree. There is probably an element of "hard worker" survivorship bias at play, but there's also an undeniable profit motive that overrides a lot of those instincts too.
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.
s/disillusionment/alienation
It's only alienation if you refuse to fight back.
There's another factor: their jobs are different. Obviously working in an office is advantageous if your entire jobs is meetings and talking to people. They're going to get frustrated when they are in the office and the people they want to talk to aren't there.
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.
I'm just somewhere in the middle doing engineering management, so I'm already talking a lot to people in meetings, but I really enjoy doing it from home. Much easier to do something on the side or in between of all the none work related stuff (like cooking lunch). In half of the meetings we wouldn't be able to meet those people directly anyway with us being in different countries or even continents.
> Yes it's still better to talk to people next to a physical whiteboard, but it only matters very occasionally.
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.
So this is pretty much it in my opinion. Mangers collaborate with other managers and it’s much easier and effective to do this in person. A big part of the job is this. It’s how you align cross functionally and lots of serendipitous things occur because of this. It’s much easier to build the types of relationships you need to effectively lead.
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.
easily the least productive days are when the team gets together for all hands. I'm sorry but people are going to schooze and dally and effectively write off that entire day from anything real getting done over the all hands meeting that takes up the bulk of the afternoon where like 2 people talk and everyone just looks at their inbox.
> it’s much easier and effective to do this in person.
People keep saying this but it's a preference, not a fact.
You've described a daycare.
Not only are their jobs different, most of them have no understanding whatsoever of how the workers generate business value. The age of the technical founder is over.
You really think clueless manager types are the next batch of founders?
Yes.
> If you need to influence an executive where their experiences may be out of touch with your reality, help them see the impact through stories, videos, and data.
> 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.
>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.
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.
And bad decision makers won't even try, and might attack the people who try to do it for them. And there are a shitload of bad decision makers. And I don't owe them anything.
>It is physically impossible to be aware of the entirety of one's impact on others.
No it isn't. You just need a shred of empathy.
You're passing over the key word "entirety." It is beyond our ability to understand the entirety of how our actions affect our own individual selves. How can we understand the entirety of how our actions affect dozens, hundreds or thousands of people every day. I would not trust someone who thought they only needed a dash of empathy to have this much insight.
“Try and convince them that you’re not an animal”
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.
This is just an executive trying to gather sympathy for themselves, and make others "empathize" with their decisions.
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.
agreed, thats the vibe I got from this story as well.
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
> they live literally in another world
Classic case of semantic drift, as "literally" now means "figuratively", but with emphasis. Try "virtually", "practically", or "all but".
In a sense it is literal, if "world" is understood not as "planet earth" or "this realm of existence" but instead as a social circle. e.g. "He is from the software world," doesn't mean "He is from a world made up of software," but instead "He works in and is surrounded by people who develop software professionally." In that sense, a lot of these people are (literally) living in a world that is socially, physically, and even conceptually separate from those of lesser means.
"Literally" has been used for emphasis in this way for hundreds of years.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/misuse-of-literally
I mean the US electoral college disagrees with you.
“Disconnected” feels like “has no empathy”.
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?
I think the problem is that like the business culture in the US is so cutthroat and stressful, and people generally so self-centered. That like, they literally can’t imagine a type of life or stress that isn’t solved by muscle through it or work more or whatever.
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.
I've said it here many times now, but Robert Sapolsky identified inequality as one of the highest causes of stress in any given primate society. Even for those at the top.
Have they ever claimed otherwise?
It's not like they have a choice, gaslighting the general population is their only hope of staying on top/alive.
> Is it really so hard to imagine the struggles of someone who doesn’t have any of the benefits listed in the post?
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.
CXOs only need to have empathy with the shareholders, not the resources (us).
How does someone make others care about him/her? Hmmm...
By refusing to play along in great numbers, always.
Yeah that's a good start.
I mean we’re talking about a self-selected group of people who’ve chosen money over… nearly everything else. I do think it’s hard for them to empathize because nothing in their existence encourages them to do so. They’re richly rewarded for their choices and we all just go along with it.
I was at Google during their initial “return to office” mandate.
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.
It's more insidious than that.
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.
It’s happening because employers are desperate to get their power back while workers have no rights. It also makes it harder to leave an org, as orgs are also desperate to hold on to and develop existing talent due to forward looking working age population demographics. This is a desperate immune response.
(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.
> It’s happening because employers are desperate to get their power back while workers have no rights.
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?
The power in the market for labor.
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.?
> 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.
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.
I have thought about this too.
* 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.
> Doesn’t that seem backwards? A company that supports remote work has a worldwide talent pool.l, including lower cost geographies.
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.
Yes, and moreover it's obvious from anyone's experience that applying for remote roles means workers will have MUCH more competition for the role. Employers ought to love this.
Capturing and controlling a market is preferable to competitive markets under our political-economic system. It's been the model for Silicon Valley since Bezos sold his plan to lose money until Amazon had a controlling stake of the retail market in the late 90s. It's a seemingly unavoidable outcome of under-regulated capitalism.
It is worth mentioning that companies colluding for forced RTO, so people can’t easily leave
Couple this with regular threats and fear mongering about AI coming for the jobs of tech workers, and the picture gets even more somber. The tech industry wants to cheapen labor.
> The tech industry wants to cheapen labor.
Of course. And the workers want more money.
It's how markets work.
Office work requires living within commute distance of the office, which is much more expensive and keeps the employee tethered to their job. Remote workers are less threatened by layoffs because they can choose to live in a lower COL area and have their pick of other remote-friendly jobs rather than being limited to other companies in their metro or having to uproot their lives to move somewhere else. This is on top of the perceived benefits employers have surveiling and micromanaging office work.
As for workers having fewer protections rn, gestures in the general direction of DC.
>Office work requires living within commute distance of the office, which is much more expensive and keeps the employee tethered to their job. Remote workers are less threatened by layoffs because they can choose to live in a lower COL area and have their pick of other remote-friendly jobs rather than being limited to other companies in their metro or having to uproot their lives to move somewhere else.
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 move to Mountain View, you need to be able to afford to live in Mountain View. That takes a lot of remote jobs off the table, or substantially diminishes their prospects.
If you live in Omaha and work remotely, far more remote jobs are available.
Fang companies have colluded together before to surpress the labor market, litigation about this goes back to 2010 or so.
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.
Yes. But living in Orlando Florida means I can accept a remote job that pays less. I would have to get a remote job that pays 5x more and I don’t pay state income taxes.
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).
Not OP, but RTO forces geographic centralization and reduces mobility of their employees. If you can work remotely then you have a much larger pool. And I think that opening the door to remote work made employees realize that there was some power and some negotiation to be had on working conditions (basically our generation’s version of the 40 hr work week in response to the Industrial Revolution)
This is an underrated comment. I like the framing of Remote as Millenial’s 40hr workweek. In the face of declining worker conditions we made the best of a crisis (pandemic) and showed that working remotely was viable for most jobs. But no, the ruling class could not tolerate those gains.
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.
> Being forced to RTO across the country, then immediately laid off after I uprooted my life to do so
Definitely power there if you know your staff have just uprooted their lives and now depend on you for their immediate term existence…
It's not the details of the request, it is the request itself.
Do this, or else.
I got laid off at the start of my first day back in the new office. Had to leave my morning standup early to receive the news.
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.
> 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.
It's quite likely RTO was an initial attempt to reduce headcount by encouraging people to quit, without having to pay severance.
Do Americans companies HAVE to pay severance? Don't American companies do layoffs all the time?
The WARN act dictates that you need to provide 60 days notice for certain mass layoffs. Typically this means you are laid off, but remain on payroll for 60 days.
No severance is not apart of the law. You can be laid off and fired at anytime for any reason without severance. My manager laughed in my face when I asked if there was severance when being laid off in GFC.
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.
As mentioned in another comment there is the WARN act[1] at the federal level. And many states have additional regulations. In practice, employers would often prefer the people laid off just stop working immediately than continuing coming to work knowing they are losing their jobs soon. And I think employers can offer employees a severance agreement where the employee waives their right to the 90 day notice in exchange for some other compensation, such as a lump sum payment.
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...
Of course the layoffs were planned during the RTO, that way they have to fire less people because a lot of them will leave on their own!
Maybe they hoped that you’d leave because of RTO, sparing them the financial cost associated with the layoff.
This was at Google?
This is disgusting. I’m sorry about that
It's a great reminder to tech people that they're still peasants.
I'm glad we pierced the illusion that tech workers are somehow "one of them" because of high salaries. You're not. You're just labor.
(And big tech execs still make orders of magnitude more in compensation than you do. You two were never alike!)
We still see this attitude in HN comments sometimes. People thinking their piddly $500K in RSUs that vests over the next decade somehow qualifies them entry into the Global Elite class. And then they’ll argue against unions and other things that help workers because they see themselves as rubbing elbows with Jeff Bezos. Yea, yea, your handful of stock options make you just like him…
I hope they learn what the difference is between owning the means of production and selling your your labor force.
Have a listen to John Lennon's "Working-Class Hero". Still relevant. Maybe more so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve-mANenpC4
The phrase temporarily embarrassed millionaires is even more true for tech workers than most Americans. Especially for any who have entrepreneurial dreams or who are at start-ups for the stock options. The carrot is right there...
The phrase originally means that the subject is not a millionaire and likely will never be one, whereas many of us in tech are already millionaires or very likely to become one if we work in industry for any amount of time.
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.
That saying is from a time when being a millionaire was akin to being something like a billionaire today.
No, it is not.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43235932
It's literally true, even without dreams or stock option bets, that many tech workers are temporarily embarrassed millionaires. The source tweets are by an Amazon VP; an Amazon SWE salary with even moderately responsible spending is enough to retire as a multimillionaire.
I mean, the steinbeck quote is from 1960.. You will need probably ~$30 million dollars at retirement if you are 30yo today to retire as a 1960s millionaire.
The Steinbeck quote from the 1960s said "temporarily embarassed capitalist". Someone who has "entrepreneurial dreams" or is "at start-ups for the stock options", hoping to get wealthy through appreciation of their equity ownership, is unambiguously a capitalist.
"Millionaire" was added in a 2004 misquote by Robert Wright, and $1 million in 2004 dollars is about $1.7 million in 2025 dollars.
I would imagine the logic from the HR director is something like “the reason you’re not as successful as me is you don’t know how to manage your time well”
A role worth replacing with Gemini.
Most of the management, as well as bureaucracy could be substituted with AI for sure.
Which is ironic because they manage our time for us to force us to have less of it.
Also a recent Xoogler. There was a pretty popular thread where someone essentially ragequit due to being talked down to by someone in an all-hands, after having tried to resolve their issues with specific policies via other means. They took a principled stand, which seems exceedingly rare at Google.
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.
It's not about reciprocity or coherent rules. Its about power distance. "you work for me" sort of thing.
Fussell’s Class (1983) covers some of this. His upper-middle (in class—income tends to track with these social classes, but not always) are accustomed to very free lifestyles relative to, especially, the middle class (or the lower two tiers of his multifaceted “prole” class—the upper tier of that class does stuff like own successful plumbing or welding businesses, not work at Wal Mart or whatever)
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.
> 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.
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.
Class is a really great book, as is are most of the books that Paul Fussell wrote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Fussell
I can't speak from personal experience to the accuracy of some of his characterizations, but he nailed the ones that (I now see) form parts of my background and are common in my family: various levels of "prole", plus "middle". It was really weird to see our quirks of behavior and taste (some of which I'd never have noticed if not for the book) dissected and analyzed that way, but fun and gave me new ways of looking at all of it.
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.
Awareness in general is already worthwhile, but has it been useful for other things? E.g. Changing your views on government labor policy, worker-friendly laws, etc.
It's led to a few things:
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.
> 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.
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.
Wow I wasn't aware of the realities of #1 but I certainly lived through #2 before I became an independent organizer. I'm buying Class on my next bookstore trip -- thank you for expanding your thoughts!
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...
It’s funny how often Silicon Valley (the tv show) gets referenced. There are so many painfully accurate cliches.
The Stanford Hospital Nurses strike was driven by similar dynamics. Nurses had to work overtime through the entire pandemic while executives literally phoned it in for years! They were shocked, shocked, to discover that there was anger and resentment.
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.
The nature of nursing is that you have to be in person. What HR did (and has been doing) is keeping the number of staff at a barebones level. They don't, for example, hire enough nurses that if one is out sick (during covid!) that there could be someone to cover the shift.
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 in a different country and have different almost everything, but one thing is constant: nurses are treated like crap.
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.
I thought I had seen businesses run by every conceivable group, founders, engineers, sales, marketing, finance... and then I saw a hospital and realized it was run by HR. Every "may" in a rule becomes "shall" since anything else could be perceived as preferential. It makes the lives of both supervisors and supervised hell. Only the spiteful or incompetent rise.
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.
Your numbers are way off [https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Stanford-Health-Care/salaries/Reg...]
> Something HR is more than willing to exploit to get them to work ridiculous hours.
HR works for management and the board.
It's time to unionize. The top is out of touch and the valuations of these tech titans aren’t just staggering; they’re symptomatic of a system that values profit over people. These tycoons at the helm are not just steering companies—they’re puppeteering democracy, pushing political agendas that many of us find abhorrent and irrelevant to our lives. Unionization isn’t merely about better pay or working conditions; it’s about reclaiming power from this oligarchy that’s grown too powerful, too influential. The tech community needs to wake up and get these clowns in line, we could shut these companies down if we organize.
Tech and Software adjacent professions have to be ones that are least likely to unionize.
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.
Admitting in a survey that you're pro-union might be (rightly) perceived as high-risk, no reward.
Yes, but the hyper-individualism is very familiar. I wonder if the balance has changed since the 2022 wake-up call.
Wow that really sounds like a captor killing a few captives and then asking the rest of the “ok, so who else wants to try to work together to escape?”
One would get far better responses if you just used the word "professional association" instead of "union".
The right time would have been when the going was good some years back. Tech workers could have put together an unparalleled strike fund and commanded unprecedented political power. We could have truly changed the world.
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...
Former big tech worker here, I'd support unionization wholeheartedly, but it's also worth advocating for cessation of all Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, etc products and software. Build software for linux only, explicitly choose to not support Windows, Mac OS, iOS, or Android. Support and test on Gecko-based browsers, reject Webkit-based and Blink-based browsers. Act like people are making you uncomfortable whenever they offer statements, comments, or questions that normalize gmail, facebook, iphones, or outlook. Become a FLOSS evangelist. Help your non-technical friends install a browser that supports manifest v2 and full-fat ad blocking. Help people set up adguard or pihole. Make it sound cool, easy, and seductive. Disrespect the ruling elite / "eat the rich!" vibes. Normalize anti-surveillance. Normalize full-face masks and juggalo paint and avante garde clothing that disrupts facial recognition algorithms. Build on a VPS, build on a dedicated server, build on clouds that aren't owned and operated by multitrillion dollar conglomerate monstrosities. Make AWS, Azure, and GCP as socially unacceptable as racism, sexism, and transphobia.
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.
Practically all software that matters is already Linux only. That happened 15-20 years ago as a combination of “cloud” and “SaaS”.
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.
Exorbitant executive compensation coming from the same companies that are aggressively infringing upon the rights of their end users are two expressions of the same tyrannical desires of these big tech companies. They're trying to bring about neofeudalism where we're all peasants serving our big tech lords.
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.
> Android and iOS apps, with the exception of games, are usually just thin presentation layers around cloud apps.
Consider using and supporting GNU/Linux phones. Sent from my Librem 5.
Upvoted from my PinePhone Pro :)
Thanks for your support. However, your upvote didn't register (I still have 1 point on the comment). I noticed this sometimes happening with me recently, too. You can verify this by unvoting and looking at my karma in the profile not changing.
I think an equal number of upvotes and a downvotes/flags does this, too.
The test I suggested would reveal that, too.
Oooh, just tried upvoting this one and it looks like your karma stayed constant at 8301. Strange. I wonder if there's a limit to how much karma one account can give another through upvotes within a certain time period.
HR are professional gaslighters and internal-PR masters. I'm not even surprised by their ability to twist things anymore
This attitude seems more easily explained by the belief that, unlike you, the peons haven't earned their perks yet.
Yup, that's the problem. They view people as peons. Not people with lives, ambitions, family and friends. The only way to correct that view is to disobey.
As Laszlo Bock (head of HR at the time) quipped at TGIF when he announced Obamacare cuts to Google's healthcare coverage: "But hey, you get unlimited colonoscopies".
lmao! It's the same as all the sysadmin folks at my organization who have a policy of locking down all our computers without admin rights whereas I noticed they DID have admin rights.
Rules for thee but not for me, typical tech nerds.
Somehow the people making policies always exempt themselves.
Imagine expecting equal treatment to higher ups who run your company. Anyone who told you otherwise lied to you. Set expectations accordingly and you won’t be disappointed.
Imagine a very fat king standing before his starving populace, explaining why there would be even less food this winter as he munched on a turkey leg.
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.
Proverbial kings are a fact of life. Use your circle of influence to ensure your concern is heard, but don’t set yourself up for disappointment when you find out they get better Christmas bonuses, time off, and cooler parties.
I would hope that they see people as people, but that’s clearly not the case
Not sure what the purpose is here - it reads more like a soft flex than anything else. We all know "why" RTO gets pushed - and it's not just that executives are living royal lives while the peasants are expected to stress over traffic while their kids wait abandoned at some public school. If anything, thinking that RTO is just about being disconnected highlights how disconnected the author actually is - because it is far more often the case that RTO is driven by tax incentives, rent incentives, and occupant use agreements than just some petty executive saying "let them commute!".
some petty executive saying "let them commute!".
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.
Good Lord. Over here in the UK Boxing day is a bank holiday.
Many (but not all) organisations take the week of Christmas out as mandatory holiday for efficiency reasons (close building, save heat &c).
We are ecommerce, so the holidays are important revenue events. Our team's management required us to sit at our keyboards, online, so we could screenshot NewRelic graphs and paste them into our teams chat. The people requiring this all had full access to NewRelic to log in and check the graphs. We also had alerts that would page you if something was bad.
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.
Can you elaborate on the tax/rent incentives, as it's not obvious what those are.
Cities benefit from people being in office and thus, in the city spending money. In 2024, SF had a new business tax plan to incentivize employers to bring people back to the office, and I wouldn't be surprised if other cities did similar.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/s-f-economy-tax-plan-...
This is what would happen if the Horse Carriage producers had lobbies with enough power and money back when automobiles were invented. They would illegitimately push rules, regulations and coerce the public to cripple cars for their profit and fight against change. Like how the real estate lobbies are doing at this moment. They are akin to horse carriage lobbies and they should be treated as the parasitic, unproductive, reactionary influence that they are on society - without even getting into the bloat in the real estate sector and how it cripples housing.
Right but this is a new thing. For decades working from the office was the overwhelming norm. It was just assumed. So I doubt there's many incentives right now. I imagine it's much more about being upset at your expensive rent building being 70+% empty while still costing you as much as well as old fashioned beliefs in performance and monitoring of employees in the office. Also I do think there's some things that may be more difficult to collaborate on even with remote even with video calling
Our building has multiple first floor stores/restaurants/gym - and post Covid our rental agreements stipulate an average daily occupancy threshold; with a penalty/incentive program based on failing or exceeding that threshold as it is part of the agreements set up with the retailers. There are business tax deductions for on-site workers like utilities, maintenance, office supplies, property insurance, etc. Additionally, there are tax situations - Schaad v. Alder in Ohio for example - where municipalities receive or lose income based on the location of remote workers. In that specific case the municipality where the remote employee actually worked received no income while the municipality where the office existed did.
Same talk as RTO being driven by real estate investors’ influence. I have yet to see some numbers, evidence of this.
Commercial real estate value is often estimated using number of people (feet) who go through the building.
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.
All of that doesn’t make sense because offices are a cost paid to optimize the efficiency of labor.
Nobody would hurt labor productivity to save an office. It’s backward
I don't necessarily buy the arguments around real estate investment, but I think it's important to note that the office is a construct from before the popularity of the internet. A lot of the current crop of exec started their jobs before remote work was viable, so their mental model of how work is done might require an office because that's how they used to work.
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.
Undoubtedly the internet makes more remote roles possible. I’m just saying the business already hates paying for the office. Their incentive is aligned with regards to having less office space.
I'm arguing that maybe businesses don't actually hate it. Maybe execs love it and prioritize it.
> Their incentive is aligned with regards to having less office space.
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?
Because they believe it will optimize their labor costs (the most expensive part of white collar business ).
They give employees space in that building so that people have a dedicated space to do their work, free from outside distraction.
Productivity is difficult to measure. I suspect many managers just don't know how to do it, or are not very confident about the results. In-person interactions in an office give managers additional information (such as height). For many, it makes management tasks easier to carry out and generally less stressful (but not necessarily with objectively improved results, I assume).
I think this assumes there are no conflicts of interest?
You start a successful business- when do you start paying for an office?
This is very much an open question.
Big companies extract tax benefits from governments in exchange for locating their large buildings within said government's jurisdiction. Presumably in some cases said tax benefits come with some sort of verification that the expected quid pro quo (employees wandering around buying lunch and so on) happened.
“ This is not a screed against executive wealth. After all, I paid with 25 years of my life and I got some of the wealth”
Did the rest of the employees not do that as well though? Minus the wealth bit of course.
I wouldn't want those people's jobs tbh. You can't make every dollar, and they don't really have a life outside work. Fast forward to 60, you're retired and you haven't even lived yet. Sounds like a regrettable situation to be in even if you're rich - your youth is gone, everything hurts when you wake up, and your dick doesn't work anymore.
Part of how I coped with spending years at a big co underleveled and unaware of the ramifications was realizing that when I took vacation, I disappeared for months at a time. "K, I'm gonna be gone for ___. See you when I get back." As a low-level IC, your personal time is your own. I take time off when I want, fully disconnect, and nothing is completely on fire when I come back.
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.
Yeah, I noticed that too. Strong „I worked so much harder than you“ vibes.
That might be so but he did highlight that he put work ahead of the family
> 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.
They aren't pushing it because they want to get back to the office or even dont understand the impacts. They're pushing it because they want more control over and accountability from their employees. Some even want a percentage of the employees to quit.
I think there are a lot of reasons, and forced attrition is definitely something they see as a benefit. However, I do genuinely think that a lot of them truly believe that working together in an office, face-to-face, is important. RTO is not just a cold calculation, but also reflective of their moral values towards work.
Whether those values actually lead to a better company is the part that, I feel, continues to lack evidence.
I used to work for a place that had "Focus Weeks". A week where there were to be no meetings, and you could work on whatever was important. Everyone I knew loved it - could accomplish so much more when you are not interrupted every other hour for some marginal-utility status update.
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.
> I do genuinely think that a lot of them truly believe that working together in an office, face-to-face, is important.
Because their job is all having meetings and walking around asking people what's new.
Your last point is the biggest driver - it is also why the rules are arbitrarily enforced.
It's useful to have most of your workforce (or other populations, as with police forces) in routine violation of unenforced rules so that one has cover for any individual persecution one finds convenient
Exactly this. I've worked at a few places now where there were RTO policies that many workers ignored. But periodically low performers and/or people that had lost political battles were denied promotions or fired and their poor office attendance record was cited.
+1 Insightful.
This dynamic is at play in every big company I've encountered in my 27 year career in tech.
What exactly is wrong here? If workers don't want that control, well, they can look for another place. Companies are not supposed to solve social problems like how people care for children.
After all, are there any workforce troubles in companies that mandated RTO, besides negative hacker news comments?
I have been remotely working since 2020.
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.
> Why else would they want to lose hours to commuting, and not take advantage of their employees living in cheaper CoL areas?
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)
> not take advantage of their employees living in cheaper CoL areas
Because talent tends to be worse in those areas. (Inb4 I know someone really good in a low cost area)
You know people can move, right?
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.
Yep. And what we see now is select employees with a lot of trust are able to negotiate remote work.
I've been saying this since RTO became a thing. Even well-compensated white collar ICs have to deal with many of the same day-to-day realities as blue collar workers. They pay bills, have to wrangle the kids, etc. Yes they live more comfortably, but they still have to personally deal with all this stuff -- they don't have the money for a household staff.
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?"
It's very sad to me that we didn't seize and expand on this alternative vision for work. A commuting culture is quite terrible for society and there are many examples of successful remote-first teams. Worse, we don't get even get the benefits of working together because these group-thinkers also buy into outsourcing and so we commute into an office only to spend most of our day on video call with remote teams. Idiocracy.
I agree. Just goes to show how difficult it is to have lasting, fundamental societal change.
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.
Eh, I think the commuting negativity mostly stems from bad land use in America. Driving is wasteful, polluting, boring, dangerous, expensive, and just generally unpleasant. If we’d designed our society around walking/biking/transit people would be much happier.
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.
Which doesn't make any sense, because people who walked or biked could just have done the same when working remotely - just turn around after 1/2 of distance to the office and go back home. Then repeat after work.
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.
Remote doesn't necessarily have to mean work-from-home either, corporations could provide hubs or co-working spaces that are walkable or bikeable. So they can still get the warm managerial feeling of seeing badge-ins on a dashboard while also moving as away from 2h commutes and sterile office parks.
Tokio (rush hours aside) is enjoyable for commuting and having lunch outside. Despite all that people and building density.
I feel like this is a huge load of crap.
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.
I invest primarily in REITs, avoiding those tied up in any significant amount of office space.
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.
I suspect many Return To Office programs are designed to be soft layoffs.
Enterprises can remove a meaningful number of employees for whom it’s a dealbreaker issue without the associated redundancy costs or PR issues.
Another interesting aspect that is often ignored is the government's role in this situation. Increased footfall is beneficial for the economy. People generally spend more when they're outside than they would if they were at home. For example, one might choose to cook food rather than buy it when at home.
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.
This is an interesting case of the "revive the economy" argument. If you really don't see a benefit, to you or your employer, to returning to work, you are being forced to waste money (spending implies you get something out of it). More generously, it's a tax where the benefits go to your local Subway or gas station (or maybe bistro and public transit).
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.
> Increased footfall is beneficial for the economy. People generally spend more when they're outside than they would if they were at home.
It sounds like the broken window fallacy.
I'd like to see proof of government pressure for companies to RTO. In theory it seems likely, but it would be lovely to have a smoking gun to enter into evidence in the court of public opinion. DM me (joking, HN doesn't have DMs).
We had an RTO mandate in the last year. Amongst our top 10 compensated employees, at least half were out of the office for the last three months (we go in one week per month). I tried not to freak out and catastrophize whent he rto mandate was first communicated. But the double standard has left me feeling deeply unsettled and bitter. And I just know one exec who has been on leave for months is going to roll back in and complain that his pet projects aren't coming along like he told the board they already had. He is oversees over half the technical folks and has very little technical skills of his own. I might bring champagne to work the day after he leaves.
> They're not evil, just out of touch
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.
That's why I like that I have 0 friends in tech and all of my friends reside outside this bubble. Like, recently someone asked me for help, because he didn't have enough money to pay the taxes. Like holy crap, this is unthinkable in tech, but totally normal outside.
> This doesn't necessarily make them evil, just disconnected.
No, no, that level of lack of awareness and empathy makes them straight up evil.
Another thing that makes them straight up evil is taking the value others produce as their own.
Comrade!
I agree.
I see a lot of comments here, but what I don't see is anybody speaking the quiet part out loud.
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.
> This is the main reason.
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.
I appreciate the pushback.
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?
They don't proffer a reason that makes sense because they don't really need to. They make the rules. They can BS their way through a question at the All Hands meeting or on CNBC. It's pretty apparent that at many companies the real reason is soft layoffs but you won't hear the executives say this part out loud.
Frankly? I think this is a whole mix of things. There isn't a "real" reason, there's a smorgasbord of them.
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.
> cities that host them likely hold C-level meetings to pressure RTO so that people spend more money
They don't pressure them, they give them tax breaks. But besides this you're on point.
Because they’re not being reasonable. You’re assuming that they’re reasonable people and they’re not. Reasonable companies, of which there are many, are running successful remote teams and not demanding RTO. You’re not hearing about them because they’re doing the reasonable thing for their employees.
Executives at pretty much every organization offer the same sensible reason. Working in an office together greatly reduces the cost of collaboration, which is valuable in its own right as well as leading to more inventiveness and better mentorship.
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.
There's very little in the way of evidence demonstrating your "sensible" hypothesis. On the other hand, a lot of ICs have experience working in office and at home and have noticed we do better work at home.
The question is what you mean when you say "better work". Are you able to unblock new grads more quickly at home? Are you able to achieve consensus on a new product direction more quickly at home? Or are you able to write code better at home, because you can keep the the new grads and product managers in your Slack backlog for as many hours as you need to maximize code throughput?
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.
What you will be doing in your office environment will be unblocking that new grad in 20 minutes and then putting your noise-canceling headphones on and concentrating on your screen for the rest of the day.
And if new grads and product managers are actually able to easily disrupt an IC who is concentrating, that is a sh*tty workplace.
Well, right, that's what it usually comes back to. If you expect to spend all but 20 minutes of your day concentrating on your screen doing solo work, remote work is definitely the best model. The managers pushing RTO want ICs to spend more time collaborating than that.
https://xcancel.com/EthanEvansVP/status/1895845734177452369
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.
When I plead with my direct reports to please comply with the company policy of in the office 3 days a week, and I am deluged with a flood of complaints, I suppose sometimes I’m less empathetic than I might be. It’s not because I’m rich. I am not. I don’t own a home nor do I retain any personal assistants.
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.
> 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.
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?
The first thing that stuck out to me (emphasis added):
>> 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.
> To me this sentiment reads as "It sucked for me, therefore it needs to suck for you too. Feel the pain of previous generations!"
I explicitly say it didn’t suck and it wasn’t painful.
What sucks and is painful is in the eye of the beholder.
Enjoy your kinks, but don't force them upon others
I'm sure some might be acting in good faith. Nonetheless, I believe they're generally wrong. From experience going to the office for the sake of going to the office doesn't help.
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.
I haven’t been working for nearly as long - coming up on 7 years here. I enjoy going into the office because I enjoy spending time with my team - they’re all really cool!
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.
Student loan forgiveness is using taxpayer money to pay off the loans of a huge number of people with good jobs and plenty of money.
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.
You made plenty of points that I don’t necessarily agree with, but the one I’d love to see data for is that the people’s who’s loans are being forgiven don’t “need” that money!
I’m 50 and he sounds like the prototypical boomer. It’s like the old people who can’t fathom why new grads would spend months “grinding leetCode” to make $170K+ right out of college when the boomer bought their first house in 2002 for $170k (like I did).
> and just trying to run the company effectively and efficiently
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.
I'd come into the office 3 days a week if I lived close to the office. I live far away because the office is downtown. Downtown is expensive to live in.
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.
Because the RTO mandate is not to increase productivity, it is to cause people to quit or give a reason to lay people off. It has NOTHING to do with making workers more productive. Also 20 years ago it was much more doable to live close to an office. Real estate prices are insane now, even in smaller cities. Also, it is hard to work full time, commute, raise kids, and keep a marriage successful. It doesn't leave much wiggle rooms for exercise, cooking, recreation, etc. It is a rat race. It is why people become overweight, have heart attacks, and get cancer. Keynes prediction of 15 hour work weeks didn't come true, despite unprecedented productivity growth. It is a shame.
It won't be more effective or efficient if they don't want to be there. Nothing hurts productivity more than apathy.
So you don't own a house after working for 30 years and you of all people are speaking about efficiency? This is really something to think about for you, mate
it's as simple as this: working from home is a benefit, like 401(k) matching.
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’ve also worked almost 30 years. Even in 1996 I was able to work remotely occasionally by logging into a mainframe (DEC VAX and Stratus VOS) for half of my work and using PCAnyWhere for Windows based work over a modem.
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.
> just trying to run the company effectively and efficiently.
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.
Ultra rich execs are out of touch sure, but equally so, middle aged people with houses, families, long commutes to the suburbs are out of touch with younger people who might've relocated to a city for their first / second job out of university, don't have social networks of friends and family nearby, and desperately need to be in the same office as older experienced staff to learn from them. They also don't have space or even privacy to work from home every day in a shared flat.
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.
Marie Antoinette was "just disconnected" and look what happened to her.
Yeah but that was also because she was a foreigner and people made up scandals around her.
Her husband also got disconnected. A lot of French nobles who asked and collaborated with their foreign relatives to wage war on their people to repress them also got disconnected.
They made sure that she stays disconnected.
You might say airgapped
Yep. People always think that the aristocracy of old was different. No, they were just normal people like anyone else who were just directly born into narcissist privilege and lived their lives out-of-touch right from their childhood on. The tech execs, investors, VCs, and shareholders have grown into the same narcissism after attaining that kind of privilege. With enough time in that privileged, disconnected, narcissistic world, they just develop the same behavior patterns and 'disconnect'.
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...
I still would hate to be in the office every day by diktat but I honestly do think remote work can be pretty bad for the younger end of a company.
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.
Totally agree with this model, and I’ve seen it work.
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.
> remote work can be pretty bad for the younger end of a company
Not to worry, AI is going to rapidly solve this issue, according to tech CEOs that it.
OP mentions housekeeping as part of his benefits. I also have had an every-other-week maid service for the past decade or so, and for me, it is a huge lifestyle improvement. The amount of time and cognitive overhead it saves is enormous.
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.
It's kind of funny, when execs talk about employees feeling entitled to working remotely, I think that's a fair thing to criticize. We all earn our salaries and our perks, the market determines how much companies will put up with remote work (and how many employees even want it).
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.
The only issue here is that many of the employees in question can likewise afford a weekly cleaner, to have groceries delivered and cooked meals delivered regularly. They can also live close to the office if they wish.
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.
You unintentionally strike at the heart of why I’m never completely on board with these anti-office discussions.
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.
I suspect if office workers had offices, we'd be in quite a different situation.
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
Approaching this from the perspective that other people only care about socially signalling how social their job is will not get you anywhere. It might feel good and make good rhetoric to make such wide generalisations but it doesn't get you any closer to the truth and cuts you off from seeing things through others' perspectives.
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.
I wasn't accusing my interlocutor of merely engaging in social signally. I gave an explanation of the position, which I can be more explicit about: it is an intra-knowledge-worker point. Its the point of a person who, quite rightly, goes around people who neglect to be social at all and impress the importance of it. This is a non-sequiteur when i'm addressing a hypersocial group.
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.
> 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
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.
>But I also know how crucial it is for academia to talk with colleagues.
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!
This is really well put. Those who's main job is email, meetings and the occassional spreadsheet can't understand why those who do something technical must have significant time alone to work through a problem
HN seems to prefer treating this is a failure to empathise with home-life, rather than work-life. The almost rich are, as ever, incensed.
This goes deeper than just RTO. The current, growing rift stems from increasing recognition that:
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.
> CEOs are evil.
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".
Your way of looking at things is fundamentally broken. You will never understand society or other people if your analysis is that we could transform society with technology but we choose not to because... some people are just evil and don't want to.
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.
You haven't provided any meaningful counterclaims or additional perspective. You seem to be upset just because I think c-suite executives are not morally respectable. You claim my way of looking at things is "broken" but you fail to provide any rationale as to why. I claim that execs are incentivized to preserve an inequitable system because they directly benefit from it. Talking about their "psychopathy" and "evil" is a hyperbolic way to illustrate that they put profit over people, which anyone with a single functioning cell behind their eyeballs could tell you is patently obvious. My use of these terms was in direct response to the OP tweet, which already dumbed down the discourse to the level of "evil" and "good"—blame the nincompoop exec for bringing the conversation to this level, I am merely operating on 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.
> This doesn't necessarily make them evil, just disconnected.
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.
Nah, disconnecting and then treating workers as if their outside lives and work lives are fungible is pretty evil.
We are already very painfully aware of the hyper rich being out of touch. This reads like rich guy A saying it’s actually rich guys B and C who are the problem. Maybe this is frustrating for people like the author to hear, because clearly they have good intent with this message, but I’m sorry, the only way I will ever perceive someone who received a 9082% pay increase is as another criminal destroying the world that I live in. I am a complete hypocrite though, because of course I would say yes to a 9082% pay increase, like most/all people would. The price of being this wealthy is exile from plebeian society. Sorry you have to be rich?
Sorry but this is completely off base. Executives know what they are doing. They just don't care because it makes them more money.
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.
They may be out-of-touch but they understand when someone takes their money. And my message to tech CEOs is: if you want in-office, pay more. Or you will lose your company and your PJ and your golf club membership and your kids will go to public school in a big yellow bus built in 1982 with no seatbelts. You won't even be able to shift over to a successful company, because the companies will speak exclusively Chinese. The future of the western tech industry is in your hands, I hope you're smart enough to make the right choice.
Right on all counts except one. It DOES necessarily make them evil.
RTO full time just isn't possible for my family and I suspect I'm not alone. It has nothing to do with productivity. It's just the economics of childcare don't work. We live in SF both work tech jobs. We make above median income relative to rest of the country. Our 2 kids (< 10 years old) are in public schools. Kids need to be dropped off at 9.30 and picked up at 3.30 and 2.30 on weds.
The bare minimum for pickup/drop off help is ~ $2500 a month.
Frankly I don't know how people are managing.
Just do what 95% of people did before: one picks up and one drops off.
That’s less possible now in the era of longer commutes unless you have flexible hours. For example, I’m married to a teacher. I have to do the morning drop off because there is no flexibility in the schedules at either school. That means the earliest I can reliably be in the office is 9:15 (e-bike), 9:30 (transit) or 9:45 (car).
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.
It is less possible when people choose to live further away and to live in constant fear of predators so their kids can't walk/bus themselves home.
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.
> It is less possible when people choose to live further away and to live in constant fear of predators so their kids can't walk/bus themselves home.
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.
>Unless you are in the upper 5%
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.
What people did before was simple in my childhood case: your grandma/grandpa, who live downstairs in a multifamily home, drops you off or picks you up.
How that's supposed to work with just 2 parents that work 8h/day - idk.
Exactly how I just said? One picks up, one drops off. Not that hard, my parents managed it my whole childhood. And kids can make their own way to/from school after a few years.
Who gets to choose their own hours? This would get most people fired. You can’t just leave in the middle of the afternoon to spend an hour+ driving your kids around
Why would it take you an hour+? Also lots of people can...
taking the kids home takes at least as much time as commuting to home and back
“Just live closer” thanks I’ll just ask to double my income
Ironically one of the clearest signals of being out of touch is feeling that your noticing how out of touch you are is noteworthy. It's like "Gosh, I'm rich! How interesting!"
> 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.
It seems like these policies are more geared towards giving companies a way to fire people and avoid the consequences of that than they are around improving productivity.
"It would be hypocritical to talk about "executives" in general without owning my own situation first. For brevity, here are four examples:
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.
2 and 3 is not too hard to be able to afford here in the US. 1 would depend on when you bought your house because prices have shot up a lot. But if you are a tech workers and got some RSU and bonuses it would be achievable.
I was thinking more on the private school, personal drivers, multiple vacation homes and the things on the "level above".
A Brazilian middle class family would have a maid working 10 hours per day.
That, or she would live in with the family.
I've never seen that in practice, but a maid working 10 hours per day 5/6 days per week was very common.
What irks me is when said from rank and file it’s just bitching. But when said from the c-suite it’s godsend
AUTOMATE HR AND RELATED MANAGEMENT NOW.
If you're getting a private jet funded for your work, maybe it's your responsibility not to be out of touch.
If you're a manager, maybe it's your responsibility to figure out who's slacking and who's productive.
None of this is surprising. I wouldn’t say they are disconnected, unless they were already born with a silver spoon and have never had to live like the rest of us. I would say they know how it is for the rest of us, but just don’t care.
A few years back, I worked at a "unicorn" startup that also did the pandemic remote work thing, then tried reeling it back in 2022. I remember one of the SVP's explaining how reasonable the RTO policy was, even for those who—like her—had moved away from NYC. She simply rented an apartment a few blocks from the office—midtown Manhattan—and stayed there during the week. Like her, we just needed to make our own adjustments to accommodate the new policy. I'd seen "out of touch" before. But suggesting that everyone just get their own Pied-à-terre still pretty much takes the cake for degree of out of touch I've witnessed personally.
> This is not a screed against executive wealth. After all, I paid with 25 years of my life and I got some of the wealth.
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.
Chris Hedges recently interviewed Catherine Liu, the author of Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class. They are a mostly invisible spectrum of plutocratic aristocracy who essentially replaced the middle class and gained immense wealth, power, and sense of entitlement.
Well the only thing to do is to lower productivity gradually and let them get used to it. Sure they can hire a new guy but it's not free either.
Good on this guy for having the courage to be honest about his circumstances. Still, shitty that this is the situation.
About three years ago, when the major state university my wife worked for was starting its "return to office" push, the head of HR gave a Zoom town hall filled with condescending remarks. He said things like, "I don’t know why you all aren’t back in the office already..." and "I love going to the MU and chatting with students about their college experience."
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.
If you want people to return to the office, then make the working conditions at the office desirable to return to.
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.
The fundamental irony is that CEOs + execs are easy to replace at most orgs. Their compensation comes from nepotism and capitalism, not from any inherent capability. Hopefully I’ll live to see the end of the rotten scourge that is Capitalism. One can dream.
Yes, they are like chancellors, castellans to the feudal lords who own the fief. They are even more vicious than the lord himself because their employment depends on that viciousness. Not that the lords would not be equally vicious if they ran the show.
These kinds of tweets miss the point. It's not about returning to the office. It's about reducing labor costs. It's about having a thing that shows you are trying harder (the anime kind where it just makes you win for no reason) to show to your investors.
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.
Every recruiter who reaches out with non-remote jobs gets the same answer: "i am not currently taking any companies that demand i waste my time on a commute seriously". Many reply and tell me that they get this a lot from the more senior people they want to hire. Usually they also complain that their hands are tied.
Gary's economics, YouTube.
It’s not because they’re in a bubble, it’s because they hate you. If they could get rid of you and maintain the same revenue, then they would make more money and that’s the only thing that resonates. They hate you, and you should hate them right back.
The rich own real estate around the office buildings. They want their REITs to go up not down. It’s a company town even if they did away with scrip.
Contrast both: minimum wage, lengthy bus commute, workday that exceeds 8 hours, limited or no weekends or vacation. People that never had a remote work option because they work production or service jobs that are tied to the workplace.
All of this was known and built into the education of the elite wherein a sense of responsibility for upholding the overall prosperity of society was instilled. The fact that a post like this seems noteworthy is just an illustration that that sense of responsibility was lost. It seems like we have arrived full circle back to: "I got mine, fuck you." Lording, instead of leading.
What we are really witnessing is law and order breaking down.
I think a lot of the return to office mandates are either meant to force people to quit, or to protect the value of real estate. With JP Morgan, they’re looking to protect the entire commercial real estate market since their business depends on it.
I enjoy working from home. But I'm not going to deny that it has had a catastrophic impact on the downtown business and commercial districts in many small and medium-sized cities. Those places stuggled badly with lockdown in general and a lot still have not recovered from the sudden societal shift where so many people just stay at home in the suburbs instead of coming into the office. I don't know what the answer is, and I certainly don't want to return to the office. But the outlook is bleak for a lot cities.
The answer is that it sucks to own one of those businesses, but things change and disruption happens. The answer isn't "the city's entire white-collar workforce needs to migrate downtown and back every day to provide an artificial customer base for $17 burritos".
There is more benefit to a vibrant downtown city center than just "white collar" people visiting everyday. Bars, restaurants, cafes. People go to the post office, they go to salons. All of those things are gone now.
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.
Those things are gone now because the only reason people were doing them downtown is because they had to be there for work.
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.
> 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.
They are where I live. Guess it depends on the city.
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.
The city and those business need to change to meet the shift. They are just being greedy and seem to want us workers to both support ourselves and bail them out.
Wouldn’t this be countered by the economic boon of the grocery stores and other places that are open where people actually live? In my neighborhood a couple of small eateries have opened up for the wfh crowd. I can get a decent sandwich and some chips to go for a reasonable price within a 20min walk from my home.
Edit: coffee shops seems to be doing very well too
> countered by the economic boon of the grocery stores and other places that are open where people actually live
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.
Maybe those were just artificial constructs that cost everyone a lot of money and we just started to realize now? “Hey let’s support these 30$ lunches at the food truck downtown.” Maybe we are as a society better off without these massive concrete structures that are only occupied 8h / 24h a day and serve no other purpose? Maybe requiring less resources and infrastructure to get people to and from other concrete structures that they only inhabit during the other part of the day is a good thing kind of?
Maybe we should all just live online
Or we build things that people actually want to use in those prime locations.
No one owes the downtown business and property owners anything. Free market doing its thing. They got disrupted.
People on HN love to pretend that no one was slacking off while ostensibly "working from home"
Years before COVID or WFH was a thing, I knew a guy at work who played some MMO literally all day. He was also the main sysadmin and always got all of his work done on time.
But yes, people can slack off anywhere. 'Butts in seats' is one of the laziest metrics for management to use for 'working'.
> He was also the main sysadmin and always got all of his work done on time.
I fail to see the problem there...
“I know a guy who slacked off in the office”, is not evidence that it’s better or worse.
I remember reading about SysAdmins who wrote mods for MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons, like a text-based MMO) to give them system status notifications in-game. For example, "a pigeon arrives with a note: Server 3 is down".
Plenty of jobs are intermittently high-demand and high-stakes while leaving a ton of free time throughout the day.
I knew a sysadmin at a different job who did that. And since MUDs were text, many in the office at the time had no idea what was on his screen.
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.
At the same time, execs love to paint with a broad brush that everyone working from home is slacking off... while also not sharing any data about how many people are being lazy.
Either your performance management can catch lazy employees or it can't. If it can't, then that's what you should be fixing.
It is very interesting to me that in my social/professional circle, and indeed here on HN, remote schooling during covid is practically universally seen as a massive failure resulting in serious consequences, yet remote work is a huge success and it's an outrage and borderline human rights violation whenever it's reduced or taken away.
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.
> Not all kids failed disastrously at remote school, some excelled and worked far ahead of their classmates.
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.
> It is very interesting to me that in my social/professional circle, and indeed here on HN, remote schooling during covid is practically universally seen as a massive failure resulting in serious consequences, yet remote work is a huge success and it's an outrage and borderline human rights violation whenever it's reduced or taken away.
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.
Our metrics went up, and stayed elevated. Do you not have metrics? Those metrics will slide when RTO in invoked.
Anon for obvious reasons. I'm one of the few full time home workers at my org. I slack off all the time. I mean literally I did an hour of work on Friday.
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.
I’ve been wfh long before covid. I work in consulting so the metric is very easy. If a percentage of your time (typically 75-80%) isn’t billed to a client that yields a predefined margin then you’re fired. It seems brutal but it’s humane in a way. As long as I’m profitable to the firm they don’t care what I do or how I do it.
Or maybe they just don’t feel like they need to state the obvious?
We all know some people slack off, they find ways to do it in office too.
Slacking off is super easy in the office. You just have to spend a lot of time there, you can drag meetings forever, goof off behind computer - even if the screen is visible. But bonus if it is not visible.
All my former co-workers who slacked off don't work at my company any more. It was painfully obvious who was working and who was not.
That's an indication of poor management. People can slack off when in the office too.
Hell, I'd argue for knowledge professions it's required throughout the day. I cannot stay in the zone for 8 hours a day, so I'm going to need to take breaks.
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.
Ok. So environment and social factors have no effect?
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.
People slack off no matter their location, and managers generally don't care as long as they do the basics.
My boy got triggered
People like you pretend that people in the office never slack off.
Why do you care if people slack off? That’s the company’s problem
Where I work we are all remote and executives have to beg for a potty break because they are so busy. If you slack off when remote, you are probably worse in the office. WFH vs the office has nothing to do with a person's work ethic and dedication.
They're not out of touch. They know. They don't care.
Replace these fucking assholes with AI.
Why can't I WFH w/ a company VR headset that transports me to a virtual office yet?
The same lack of context is what (I think, if I'm feeling charitable) makes these people think AI is real:
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.
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