Lets be honest here, a very significant portion of business practices are caused because upper management do not trust the team they hired.<p>Be it that they don't trust them to have the right idea, or trust them to do the work. Nearly all business practises we hate are caused by a measure of overt control over your daily time and a strict measuring of your time and tasks.<p>Unfortunately: there's about 10-20% of people who genuinely shouldn't be working because they are untrustworthy, and things like remote work just enabled them to take multiple jobs or slack-off massively.<p>So these practices mostly exist to deal with those people and the rest of us just suffer.
Mistake or not, life is all about leverage. And the balance of power has swung back from employee to employer now that we're done with the covid bubble. Managers must tame their unruly cattle and punish them for their past transgressions when the cattle briefly had a moment of increased leverage.
The sad part is that other industries are even worse about this, I know people in the medical system that have to buy gifts for people higher in the hierarchy in order to advance. So we're still kind of blessed for now, well until AI removes all our leverage at least.
What has played out with RTO is a prisoner's dilemma scenario with astoundingly low defection rates. Return to office is a prisoner's dilemma for executives where "defection" means permitting WFH and "cooperation" means enforcing return to office.<p>If a company dictates that their employees return to the physical office but their competitors do not, there is a likelihood of losing valuable talent to companies with remote-friendly working conditions.<p>If both the company and all their competitors allow work-from-home to continue, then all of them, as industry decision-makers, must adjust policies, expectations, and operations to reflect this shift. While this scenario does not lead to a talent exodus, it does entail some other costs. Potential costs to this mutual “defection,” the acceptance of a “new office normal,” could include investors pointing out the wasteful operational expense of unused office space. Additionally, investor pressure from commercial real estate interests may also oppose such leadership decisions.<p>If the company “cooperates,” such that they insist on RTO while all of their competitors simultaneously insist that their employees need to work in-the-office, then no one has to adjust company policies to operate in a remote company environment. The effect of this will be employees open to recruitment finding their choices for alternative, more accommodating employers scarce and in low supply.<p>In this multi-player, game-theoretic landscape, where CEOs want to avoid the costs (real or potential) of allowing their people the ability to work remotely, cooperating companies need as few “defector” companies in their industrial sector as possible. With their other choices few and far-between, employees seeking the freedom to continue working from home will eventually give up on their WFH-oriented job hunts and decide to stay on in their current positions.
I find this type of argument about RTO to be pretty poor. I think it’s pretty lazy to crank out a vibes based article describing specific grievances and generalizing to an entire population. I think the real discussion about RTO, pro or con, is a lot more nuanced, and this type of argument does a disservice to the complexities.<p>In my experience, a lot of the compelling arguments I’ve heard are actually complaints about poor North American city design, rather than necessarily anti-being in a reasonable office.
Looks like i’m in one of those minorities who like going to office. My major point is those spontaneous interactions that i have with my colleagues that gives me a lot of ideas. With work from home all those are gone. Hate commuting to office. An ideal world would be walk to office and have a hybrid model like 2-3 days in office for me.
There sure seem like a lot of data-driven companies out there that really want to just go with their gut feelings about whether or not returning to the office is a good idea.
Even Apple’s execs are willfully blind on this. Utterly baffling. There’s plenty of room at Apple Park for everyone to have a door that closes, but they insist on doubling people up in offices or open-plan labs. The entire executive class across the industry is broken.
When I don't intend to do any actual work, I go to the office. Socialising is nice, and in part important. Some discussions are only had in that setting.<p>When I want to do actual work, I stay at home.<p>If I couldn't decide how to best do my job, I'd have a chat with my manager, and change jobs if we couldn't agree on something so basic.
Every article I read about this topic, whether advocating for RTO or against it, is black and white. The policy, whichever way the article prefers, is good or bad. No in between.<p>If your job is highly collaborative, being in one place is so much better. Videoconferencing sucks, if your work requires collaborating with teams that do not share the same context as yours.<p>If your job requires long periods of sustained focus, working from home is better.<p>What I do agree with is that most companies and their leaders have no f*cking idea about how to think about remote or in-office work properly. They got with their own personal preferences, anecdotal evidence and authorative bullshit (if I don't see you working, I don't think you're working).
This is a thoroughly beaten horse.<p>The conditions for successful work from home are: hire well experienced back office employees, have relaxed yet firm deadlines, conduct daily meetings, keep your middle management busy with more important work than helicoptering over their team, use your office space for more than just a place to sit, etc.<p>Businesses with multiple offices have been doing "remote" work for decades. This is more about company scale than policy. Too small or too large and you'll struggle keeping people organized. Mid-sized businesses are the majority and few have required returning to the office.
Are there any F500 companies remaining which have not had a RTO push?<p>Not only has my company been increasingly pressuring RTO, they are getting rid of offices and even cubicles. You can now hotel in an open office hellscape. Return to office and double down on miserable working conditions.<p>It feels like the execs just want to reinforce who is in charge.
My company senior management said they're doing an RTO three days a week as other big companies are doing it. It feels like a version of brinkmanship between employers and employees to see who blinks first.<p>I work for this company because I am remote. I wouldn't work for them if I wasn't. These employers are either don't grasp that, don't want to, or are happy for the attritution.
WFH is not for everyone. With kids around, no matter where I isolate myself in the house it's impossible to do it. Leaving home, going to work, interacting with coworkers, telling jokes, eating at the same table, I realized 90% of the problems are solved at cigarette brake, brunch, launch, etc. Meetings are the only thing I would WFH... god burn them with fire.
People are not identical and you can't apply the same policy for a labor force of 3 billion. If you think your policy is so right, stop calling people names who disagree with you. Go run your company as you think is right. If your employees are happy, you're doing something right, ignore the stupid people on the internet.
If you work in a cubicle farm you are not making the big bucks, meaning that your house is probably not that big and comfortable. I prefer going to the office because there I have a big desk with multiple monitors and a powerful desktop computer, a set up that I really can't afford at home without sacrificing precious space. Sure, if you work at Google you can a afford a nice big home with a dedicated WFH space and you might rightly feel that going back to the office is a downgrade, but that's not for everyone.
Just from my last very few days feeds:<p>- <a href="https://nypost.com/2024/03/19/us-news/less-than-one-in-three-yorkers-planning-to-flee-city-and-just-30-are-happy-with-quality-of-life-survey/" rel="nofollow">https://nypost.com/2024/03/19/us-news/less-than-one-in-three...</a><p>- <a href="https://mishtalk.com/economics/half-of-downtown-pittsburgh-office-space-could-be-empty-in-4-years/" rel="nofollow">https://mishtalk.com/economics/half-of-downtown-pittsburgh-o...</a><p>- <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-20/baltimore-wants-to-sell-hundreds-of-vacant-homes-for-1-each" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-20/baltimore...</a> and <a href="https://buyintobmore.baltimorecity.gov/" rel="nofollow">https://buyintobmore.baltimorecity.gov/</a><p>Well... It's clear that the modern city, the modern Fordlandia, today named Telosa, Prospera, Arkadag, Innopolis, ... is just a farm of humans that works just to pay services they can't live without, ending up in owning nothing and NOT being happy except happy in the Canon idea of happiness: <a href="https://petapixel.com/2021/06/17/canon-uses-ai-cameras-that-only-let-smiling-workers-inside-offices/" rel="nofollow">https://petapixel.com/2021/06/17/canon-uses-ai-cameras-that-...</a> RTO policies are because of that.<p>If we start en masse to realize that we can live in homes, spread enough to have the ideal density for today sane economy of scale, modern surveillance capitalism, modern "sharing economy" fails. The biggest that have craft them and profit on them will fail. A new economy will emerge and they can't switch quick enough.<p>Money in the modern world are extractors of value from the 99%, given it to a small cleptocracy, this cleptocracy need humans like Ford model workers in Fordlandia. People who live to work in a factory they do not own, in a hierarchy not a democracy, trapped by economic genital lace, conformism, habits.<p>That's why most try to push RTO and SOME "slaves" help them fearing the change, unable to realize that changes happen anyway and try avoiding them means suffer them letting others decide and direct the change.
There’s an elephant in the room here. The pandemic pushed WFH over the Rubicon. Now the only way to put that genie back in the bottle is when the majority of companies force RTO. When the they don’t, RTO companies are deliberately and knowingly sabotaging their own companies by paying higher salaries and relocation for talent that is not geographically local. Remote companies are competing on a completely different playing field now they have reached that mass effect. So RTO company CEO’s should now be deeply questioned on their policies by shareholders since it is deliberately damaging to their companies to forcibly restrict talent and to pay more for it.
If developers are more productive at home, how are businesses that rent big expensive buildings for no benefit (or negative value) not being wiped out in the market? I don’t want RTO either but this seems suspicious.
I disagree. Like many HNers, I align with Paul Graham's thoughts on the matter [1].<p>[1]: <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/paul-graham-says-remote-does-225728000.html" rel="nofollow">https://finance.yahoo.com/news/paul-graham-says-remote-does-...</a>