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.<p>I ended up painting a picture that, when considering <i>just</i> 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.<p>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 - <i>of course</i> - 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 <i>incredibly</i> disappointing.<p>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.
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.<p>This applies to both work location and number of hours per week. It's gotta be hard to understand <i>and accept</i> that lower-level workers have a different view and priorities from your own, <i>especially</i> when all your fellow execs share your own view.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
> 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.<p>> 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.<p>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.
“Disconnected” feels like “has no empathy”.<p>Is it really so hard to imagine the struggles of someone who doesn’t have any of the benefits listed in the post?<p>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.<p>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?<p>“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 was at Google during their initial “return to office” mandate.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Rules for thee but not for me, some animals are more equal than others, etc.
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!".
“ 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”<p>Did the rest of the employees not do that as well though? Minus the wealth bit of course.
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 have been remotely working since 2020.<p>There will be no return to office.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>Remote work is just such a massive improvement in every respect for people with families for that reason.<p>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 feel like this is a huge load of crap.<p>These are highly intelligent people. They got to be very high up in the food chain. They are driven. They are smart.<p>Yet, the claim is that they can't imagine there exist people not like themselves? Sorry, not buying it.<p>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.<p>Means, motive and opportunity.
I suspect many Return To Office programs are designed to be soft layoffs.<p>Enterprises can remove a meaningful number of employees for whom it’s a dealbreaker issue without the associated redundancy costs or PR issues.
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.
> They're not evil, just out of touch<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
> This doesn't necessarily make them evil, just disconnected.<p>No, no, that level of lack of awareness and empathy makes them straight up evil.
I see a lot of comments here, but what I don't see is anybody speaking the quiet part out loud.<p>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.
<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/equifax-used-itsproduct-to-fire-employees-working-two-jobs-2022-10" rel="nofollow">https://www.businessinsider.com/equifax-used-itsproduct-to-f...</a><p>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.<p>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.
<a href="https://nypost.com/2024/08/02/real-estate/huge-midtown-office-building-sells-for-a-97-discount/" rel="nofollow">https://nypost.com/2024/08/02/real-estate/huge-midtown-offic...</a><p>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.
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.<p>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.
<a href="https://xcancel.com/EthanEvansVP/status/1895845734177452369" rel="nofollow">https://xcancel.com/EthanEvansVP/status/1895845734177452369</a><p>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.<p>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 <i>that</i> hard.<p>Now I understand that technology has changed circumstances, and what was not technologically feasible 30 years ago is easy today.<p>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 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.<p>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.<p>If I were running a company and had the cash to facilitate I think I would probably go for something like a cycle of "<i>x</i> 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.
Every recruiter who reaches out with non-remote jobs gets the same answer: "i am not currently taking any companies that demand i waste <i>my</i> 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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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?
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).<p>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.
This goes deeper than just RTO. The current, growing rift stems from increasing recognition that:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>Remote work during covid was a crack in the glass. External factors <i>forced</i> 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.
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.
In terms of the disconnect between executives and society, the elephant in the room here is society's approval of CEO, father, husband Brian Thompson's cold-blooded murder. The disconnect goes way beyond disagreements about RTO.
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.<p>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.<p>"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.<p>"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.<p>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.<p>It's kinda laughable. A maid is no help if you won't STFU.
> This doesn't necessarily make them evil, just disconnected.<p>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.<p>Responsibility is the key word here.
Sorry but this is completely off base. Executives <i>know</i> what they are doing. They just don't care because it makes them more money.<p>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.<p>This is just another executive grift trying to make people feel better about them and the decisions they make.<p>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.
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.
If you're getting a private jet funded for your work, maybe it's your responsibility not to be out of touch.<p>If you're a manager, maybe it's your responsibility to figure out who's slacking and who's productive.
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.
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.
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.<p>The bare minimum for pickup/drop off help is ~ $2500 a month.<p>Frankly I don't know how people are managing.
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.<p>What we are really witnessing is law and order breaking down.
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!"<p>> This is not a screed against executive wealth.<p>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 would be hypocritical to talk about "executives" in general without owning my own situation first. For brevity, here are four examples:<p>1) No mortgage
2) A maid service cleans every two weeks
3) Someone else mows the grass
"<p>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.
>Remember, they live literally in another world.<p>One of my favorite sociology books is about rich people practically living in a different country, <i>Richistan</i>.
Chris Hedges recently interviewed Catherine Liu, the author of <i>Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class.</i> 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."<p>Keep in mind, COVID was still raging at this point.<p>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.
> 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.<p>That's the point though isn't it? He retired at 50. Most of us will work to at <i>least</i> age 65 (perhaps until we literally can't work anymore in today's economy). And we <i>won't get some of the wealth.</i>
If you want people to return to the office, then make the working conditions at the office desirable to return to.<p>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).<p>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>It's called misdirection.
The same lack of context is what (I think, if I'm feeling charitable) makes these people think AI is real:<p>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.<p>If you only touch a computer to write and respond to emails, the email summary parrot might reasonably seem like some omniscient god.<p>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 <i>are</i> narcissists and sociopaths. It's about controlling other people and hurting them. Full stop.