During the TGIF (company all hands) discussing this, the architect of the policy, someone high up in the HR org, explained why it was necessary.
I don’t recall what they said, but I do recall that they happened to be working remotely at the time, after the policy against remote work had already gone into effect.
The brazenness of lecturing us on why remote work was harmful to Google while working remotely was shocking. Predictably, the internal anger over this was enormous.
Rules for thee but not for me, some animals are more equal than others, etc.
Being forced to RTO across the country, then immediately laid off after I uprooted my life to do so, all while knowing the layoffs were planned while they were telling me to move across the country, is fucked.
(also why employers are trying to staff up offices offshore in LATAM and India)
Edit: @tbrownaw all of the responses to your inquiry are accurate.
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.
(And big tech execs still make orders of magnitude more in compensation than you do. You two were never alike!)
The main theme of their post was that engineering had become a second-class profession at a de-facto engineering firm.
If I recall correctly, Steve Jobs had something to say about that very transition…
Edit: By thread I mean internal Email thread at Google.
A major class marker distinguishing the upper-middle from the middle ends up being that the former are barely surveilled, largely free to set their own schedule, and basically are trusted to do the right thing (never mind that perfectly ordinary behavior patterns from them would be regarded as instantly fireable for others; it’s a different standard), while the middle gets constant status reports, return to office mandates, stricter start and stop times, maybe drug tests.
(The actual upper class, of course, simply don’t meaningfully have managers at all)
You know that older, expert manager everyone says is great that they bring in to run the business in the show Silicon Valley? Who spends a bunch of his time ignoring the place to breed horses or whatever, and seems to think that’s normal and fine? That’s this kind of thing. He doesn’t even get why that might be wrong, or why it might be shitty to take a big paycheck and ask hard work from others then fuck off to a rich-dude hobby half the time—that’s just what his kind of people do.
When I was having trouble finding work this was one of my biggest issues. I was qualified to be working independently but all the entry-level work I could find would have involved being treated like I was in high school again, whereas before I could use the afternoon to tinker or read and no one cared as long as my work was getting done. This is why office jobs end up being coveted to the point that a university graduate will be making the same amount working an office job as a retail associate at a Walmart.
It was little surprise that more than half were showing up daily on picket lines as admin was apparently surprised that they couldn't find "travelers" to fill critical ICU roles, while surgeons continued scheduling elective surgeries.
It's still the case that the HR executive officer resides in LA and that Payroll is managed (with financially catastrophic results) from Hawaii. Both discipline and scheduling are also done almost entirely remote. It would be hilarious if not for the effects on staff and patients.
They went so far as to only hire travel nurses (temps), who were commanding 100k+ salaries, when things got bad enough rather than filling a full time position. And, to add insult to injury, the nurses themselves have been getting salaries in the 30->50k range. So HR could have literally filled 2+ positions for the cost of a single travel nurse.
That's what has lead to a nursing shortage and burnout. HR cost cutting because "we just need the minimum and no backups". It's a big part of the strikes.
Believe it or not, many nurses and doctors working in healthcare actually care about their patients. Something HR is more than willing to exploit to get them to work ridiculous hours.
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.
There was an internal survey (unofficial) at my workplace right after a mass layoff 2 years back about how many were interested in forming a union. There were 3 options - Interested, Not Sure and Against. The option with most votes was "Against".
I could go into the reasons which were submitted in survey but in short most were related to hyper individualism that is so pervasive.
But, as already mentioned, if you think sentiment is unfriendly to unions now, it's nothing compared to how it was back then. The typical tech worker somehow thought they were already changing the world, doing some VC's bidding for nickels on the dollar, adding sparkly features to another B2B SaaS product...
Rules for thee but not for me, typical tech nerds.
I know executives have different rules and laws that govern them. But I can remember a time when they would’ve had the decency, shame or whatever else to attempt to obscure this. That HR VP could have come into the office for one day, the day that he was explaining his RTO mandate to the entire company.
That he didn’t feel embarrassed about delivering this mandate while very visibly defying it himself is beyond differentiated treatment, it is open disdain for the (upper) working class.
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!
Don't assume survey results that run counter to your anecdotal experience have been fabricated.
That was also promptly shutdown, in favor of two new tech hubs in cheaper countries and a smattering of MSPs.
Leadership wants attrition. They want people to quit and if they don’t have to make you redundant and pay you out, fantastic. You just gave them good data points to indicate that a portion of people are likely to do just that.
If you upend your whole life and move to a hub then that means you need this job very badly. Guess when you’re getting promoted next? Not soon.
For some subset of people, work is the most important thing in their lives and it is largely how they identify themselves. As the tweet points out, the vast majority of execs are in this bucket. This is almost by definition - despite what has been popular talk in some corners of the Internet, most execs do work extremely hard, as do most people who get to the upper echelons of their profession. These people essentially want to work more. FWIW, while I'm not an exec, I would put myself in this bucket.
On the other side are basically the "work to live" people. While this is a pretty broad bucket (some people may want to spend as little time working as possible, but I think most people in this bucket care about their careers and want to do well, but they still fundamentally see work as a means to an end to achieve goals outside of work), these folks are much more likely to not be execs. They want to do a good job, get paid well, and then go home.
So I think both sides talk past each other because they fundamentally have different goals. For people in the first bucket (again, that was definitely me), I grew to hate full-time remote work. I felt incredibly disconnected from my work and my colleagues over time, and my motivation definitely waned over time, and as someone who really identified myself in the context of my profession, that was really tough. But I also don't have kids, and not a lot of responsibilities outside of work, so I can definitely understand the other side of it.
I don't think there are any easy answers, but saying "data alone is not enough to sway these people" I think misses the point, because you're only showing data that pushes the viewpoint of your "second bucket" group. Again, to emphasize, not a bad thing, but it doesn't encompass all of the concerns that are in play of the first bucket group.
I love remote because it saves me 100+ minutes of my life every day. Minutes better spent working. I do miss joining me peers for lunch and Watercooler talk but not worth it.
The best solution to this is to create employee-owned private corporations like Huawei: All its shares are owned by its employee union, and the union democratically decides how much dividends to distribute to the employees every year. Easiest worker-ownership setup.
Yes, because they don't NEED or WANT to do anything that jeopardizes their position in the executive group-think. Remember that every year they survive, they are going to get 10s of millions.
The cost of sticking out for their own reports is too high. They'd much rather their reports kill themselves and their own lives than forego the 10s of millions coming this year. Short term.
Also remember that they see their current position as a reward for sacrificing a lot in life. They feel entitled to boss people. People should bow to their command because they reached the top org chart positions. How dare people below them propose anything but loyalty to whatever they want?
Like many of the other responses in this thread, you're generalizing a small set of experiences to every company, and not even acknowledging that other companies may not work this way
I suspect this is due to not wanting "to do anything that jeopardizes [your] position in the [anti-]executive group-think."
I have worked for multiple companies that looked for feedback from employees, and claimed to use that information to better the company for those employees. Some actually did, and others did not.
Not all of them are the same, and many actually seek feedback in earnest. Meanwhile, you would have me believe that some of the companies I have worked for didn't exist.
Just as it is with racial, age or sex discrimination. And before that child labour, slavery and indenture.
To learn they have to be beaten in the market place, or the floor of the legislature.
Grift and fraud. Nobody likes to talk about this, but many people are running grifts, from doing nothing, meetings in the supermarket or on vacation, to running multiple jobs. I had a couple working 5-6 different full time jobs together. Another was working offshore using a family member as “remote hands” to keep a device connected in the US. It’s difficult and expensive to police.
Hybrid decreases effectiveness. A remote only unit is great, a on-prem unit is great. “Permanent” hybrid is the worst of all worlds. Remote people rely on tools more and they don’t work as well with people in site. Meeting transcripts rely on the different clients to identify speakers, and work poorly in conference rooms, for example. It’s also easy for bad patterns to develop where remote people get cut out by people talking off the cuff in office, or vice versa.
The majority of the quality of life improvements are really about time freedom. You’d get most of it by giving employees sufficient paid time and allowing them to use it. Remote first by business unit makes sense too, but I think that the risk is the remote workers become like the folks in “provincial” branch offices.
For example, this employee who is supposedly spending 1/6th of their time on your job. If you say tried to capitalize their time such that you now have 6/6ths on your tasks, would the employee even accept this arragement themselves? You are effectively giving them 1/6th the pay for the same full time day of work they do anyhow. Squeezing this employee is not going to see you get more work out of them. It is going to see them leave your company and replace that job with another, leaving you shortstaffed and having to invest in vetting candidates and onboarding. Now you ask how much you get out of an employee you put the squeeze on given that this will lead to turnover and an overall loss of that full time work being done as you suffer through a period of short staffing.
Are the tasks getting done but are poor quality? Are you implying that you'd be fine with the shoddy work if they weren't working multiple jobs? If not why do you keep them, irrespective of whether thy have multiple jobs?
I want to say very clearly that I don't doubt that "grift and fraud" happens. What percentage of the workforce are engaged in this grift? If you have 100 remote workers in your average IT shop at BigCo, how many of them do you think are truly running a scam that would never pass if they were in person? My guess is 3 or less, but that's just a guess.
In case it's not obvious, what I'm working towards is: If 3% of your workforce is engaged in grift, but a lot of the other 97% are happier and more productive, is it worth pissing off a substantial portion of that 97% just to shut down the 3%?
> The majority of the quality of life improvements are really about time freedom. You’d get most of it by giving employees sufficient paid time and allowing them to use it.
This leaves out one of the main things to like about WFH for many (most?) Americans, at least: I get to avoid wasting 30–90 minutes of my day in a stressful commute that comes with its own share of expenses.
Its really simple -> give them assigned tasks. If they don't get them done and can't prove they actually worked on it (provided it was reasonable for their skillset) then fire them.
It is really that easy. But people continue saying this "grift" exists of employees abusing their companies. If this is really true, then all it says is that managers at these companies are really REALLY terrible at managing and they should be the first to go.
Forcing things through collective action that prevent market forces from working are deleterious in the long run. See Europe's moribund economy.
> They have their own agendas that have no concern for their workers' needs or goals.
That's right.
> The solution will be collective action, rather than bargaining for basic empathy.
A business is not a jobs program. It's there to create wealth, and if it does not, it goes bankrupt and everyone loses their job.
You are always free to quit and join another company more to your liking, or you can quit and start your own business and run it as you please. It happens all the time, and this message board is run by a venture capital firm, looking for startups to fund.
Kindly go away and chew on this while you do so: if everyone started their own billion-dollar business like you claim it’s possible (and plausible) to do, then that means the cumulative wealth available out there is literally infinite and currency has no relevant function.
So for currency to be worthwhile and billion-dollar businesses to be viable, there must be finite resources. Furthermore, since humans cannot be trusted to act in the interest of society, then regulation is needed to ensure equitable outcomes and minimize harms.
Now go away and leave me be.
This applies to both work location and number of hours per week. It's gotta be hard to understand and accept that lower-level workers have a different view and priorities from your own, especially when all your fellow execs share your own view.
And, as the tweet says, at a certain level you can afford to offset all the negatives of work location / work hours. No commute. Personal chef. All household chores covered. Full time individual childcare. It's a lot easier to come into the office for 50-60 hours per week when you don't have to also spend your time outside the office trying to balance sleep and survival. But, again, that's not what life looks like for an average employee.
Of course they did. If you want to convince a company doing RTO why it’s bad, you need to show the negative impacts to the organization. Everybody seems to approach this from their individual perspective.
There is a reason these are the same thing that should already be obvious: If you want people to take a job that costs them ~$30,000 more in expenses, you'll have to pay them more. If you split the difference, you both come out $15,000 ahead.
This before you even consider the costs to the company directly. If employees work from home you need less office space etc. That's not just rent but heat, power, security, insurance, internet, furniture, taxes, cleaning, lawyers and permits. That's a ton of money.
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.
Yes they live different lives, but they know they are different from their average worker, they just don't care about them. Making money and their success come above all.
When they make these decisions it is not because they're out of touch. It is because they actively opposed people below them taking an inch. They know it fucks with them, they know they don't like it. They do it anyway.
As an executive this person is excellent albeit trained at corporate speak. They're trying to gather sympathy for execs and it is all bullshit.
How else would you want to motivate them? This is a for profit company after all.
> It is because they actively opposed people below them taking an inch.
In a functioning labor market with high mobility for workers they would just quit and find a better place to work.
> They're trying to gather sympathy for execs and it is all bullshit.
They're trying to hide the fact they've monopolized the labor market and they want you to assume this is all normal. It's a much higher level problem.
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 can use money to move around time, but you can never buy it. Every second that passes is gone forever, never to be seen again. The recognition of this reality is the difference between those work-focused executives and laypeople.
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.
They care about their own profits, which are mostly bonus-based, and prestige. If they think they get any extra by appearing doing first and last thing that could drive up share price (or win some extra points in some meaningless internal battles), they will go for it.
They are mostly pretty bad absent parents with laser focus on themselves and their careers only, and then it shows on kids. But in their mind nobody under them should be granted more.
After a certain number of years, handing your kids off to the babysitters so you can work an extra 10 hours a week becomes outright sociopathic neglect. Using your wealth to separate you from the things that actually matter is arguably the peak of corporate disillusionment.
But yes, people can slack off anywhere. 'Butts in seats' is one of the laziest metrics for management to use for 'working'.
Either your performance management can catch lazy employees or it can't. If it can't, then that's what you should be fixing.
Of course, there are some incentives at play here. The people voicing these opinions are adults, and adults benefit both when their children are taken away to free daycare... err i mean school all day, and when they get to enjoy the flexibility of home office. This set of incentives could create the confusing combination of beliefs above.
But I also think that maybe it's the sample group. Not all kids failed disastrously at remote school, some excelled and worked far ahead of their classmates. And similarly, a lot of adults truly do get a lot more work done from their laptop at home. My suspicion is that technical people like those in my social circle and here on HN are both the types that would have excelled at remote schooling, and also those that do well working as hermits in a remote home office environment. There's just a huge blindspot that the other 90% of the population is handling things really badly.
The other 90% of kids are reading 3 grade levels behind, and the other 90% of coworkers are doing an hour of work per day, going to the shopping mall at 10am and the dog park at 2, and doing it all with low levels of team cooperation that, just like with a teacher and her remote 5th graders, no level of management or coaching is going to materially improve.
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.
We all know some people slack off, they find ways to do it in office too.
I’m less empathetic than I might be because I came into the office 5 days a week for 30 years. My wife also worked. We raised three kids. I went to night school. It’s all very doable, and honestly not that hard.
Now I understand that technology has changed circumstances, and what was not technologically feasible 30 years ago is easy today.
But with respect to empathy, most of the commenters here could bear to examine, if only just for a minute, the idea that the executives are acting in good faith, and just trying to run the company effectively and efficiently.
To me this sentiment reads as "It sucked for me, therefore it needs to suck for you too. Feel the pain of previous generations!"
What happened to wanting to make life BETTER for people? Better for the next generation?
As someone that would complain about RTO mandates if I had to, I know that it's do-able, but does it make my life better? No, it doesn't.
Imagine your last 30 years of not having to go in 5 days a week? Think how much more time you would have had to do all the things you listed: raise your kids, spend time studying night school, etc. How much further ahead would you have gotten with that extra time?
The company I worked for who had the best company culture was fully remote but put a strong emphasis on communication.
Meanwhile, my current company insists that people show up to the office regularly, and it's costing me 8h per week and I get a less comfortable work environment. It does nothing to solve our communication issues however. Even worse, it feels like some execs think the company culture will build itself just by putting people together in a room. It reminds me of people who schedule meetings because they don't know how to organize their thoughts and write down what they want to say.
edit: Rephrasing, I got emotional. I don't know how you managed to have a life with three kids, night school and a full time job + commute. All my free time goes to my child and family. I barely have time for hobbies. If a company wants to take more of my time they better have a compelling reason.
However, I find a good analogy for RTO to be the case of student loan forgiveness. Just because one individual had to pay their own tuition or student loans off, doesn’t mean that individual should wish that all future students share the same fate.
Just because you worked in an office for 30 years and it was manageable, or just because I like coming in for social reasons, need not result in our scorn for those who thrive by not coming into an office.
The issue is, during covid, many companies thrived, the sales skyrocketed and everyone was happier than ever. Now, they backpedal and say that we need to go back butts in chairs for reasons, but there is zero mention of the previous prosperity and why can't we just keep doing the same.
It's a lie, simple as that.
If you hire remote workers, and then tell them they have to come in three days a week, you had better have a compensation renegotiation or you sure will get complaints, because you effectively just cut everyone's pay.
and your excuse is that you did it so everyone has to? no, I chose to go remote to access property I can afford, based on the agreement I negotiated.
if you unilaterally change that as an employer, you cannot be surprised when your reports act like you're cutting their pay, because you are!
I think a lot of people who want to work from home want to not commute for an hour per day or can't afford to live nearby the office.
I’ve worked remotely since March 2020 across three companies. I don’t work in an office. If you need me in an office for some face time, put me on a plane. I initially turned down the chance to interview at Amazon because they wanted me to uproot my life after Covid and only ended up working there because they suggested I interview at AWS Professionsl Services.
When GCP reached out to me multiple times about a similar position after leaving AWS and they said I would have to be in the office, I immediately ended the conversation.
So perhaps they should present evidence or data? Any at all will do. So far there has been very little evidence, especially from the big dogs, that actually present a positive view of RTO with respect to productivity.
> Remember, they live literally in another world. This doesn't necessarily make them evil, just disconnected. I do not want to be "out of touch" but it is important to acknowledge that this does happen over time.
No they don’t. We all live in the same world and it’s everyone’s responsibility to realize that and our impact on those around us as well as our environment. The ruling class’ personality disorders (detaching from the common folk) are primarily their problems and should be dealt with by them, not worked around by us.
It is physically impossible to be aware of the entirety of one's impact on others. One might be able to dimly perceive how the person across from you is feeling about something you said or did, but even in simple one to one interactions, there's frequent miscommunication and signal loss. If you extend this to making decisions that have an impact on not just one but hundreds or thousands of people, it's literally impossible to know the true impact of all those decisions on all those people. Good decision makers will intentionally cultivate information flows that provide them some insight but those are themselves imperfect.
No it isn't. You just need a shred of empathy.
Depressingly laughable suggestion.
Giving Jared (from Silicon Valley) suggesting “scream your name to your attacker so they are forced to recognize you are human” vibes.
But it's sugarcoated. The only part that makes sense is the fact they are sociopaths who only care about work success.
The rest of it is just sugarcoating the fact that they make these decisions because they simply couldn't give a shit what their peers below them think. They know it fucks with them and that they don't like it. It's not some "oh we don't understand cause we're too rich" sob story.
like fuck off with that, the data and the vibes all point to it being better for the employees and their productivity to work from home. too many "I went through it so you have to as well" types that aren't interested in evolving stuck in their old ways
Classic case of semantic drift, as "literally" now means "figuratively", but with emphasis. Try "virtually", "practically", or "all but".
But it's waaaay less useful if you are a worker bee just programming all day. Yes it's still better to talk to people next to a physical whiteboard, but it only matters very occasionally. My wife found it astounding that pre-covid I would sometimes go into the office and not really talk to anyone all day. Literally would just be sitting at a desk typing; the desk could have been anywhere.
If you're somehow a FAAaaaang executive reading this, consider making RTO only mandatory for the people you directly manage and talk to, and then let them decide the policy for their subordinates.
Individual contributors in many cases do not benefit from this. In fact it can be an active hindrance. An ICs contribution and performance is easily tracked and captured through the outputs and metrics they produce.
I think the best organization will be one where leadership and managers spend a good deal of the week in the office. High ranking contributors (player coach managers, leads, etc) spend some so they can collaborate with other leads and leaders. And most ICs are optional.
People keep saying this but it's a preference, not a fact.
Though I love a good whiteboard sess, a tablet with a stylus and one of many "interactive whiteboard applications" can also be pretty useful. Hard to have a whiteboard session good enough to compensate for the grueling traffic of most HCOL regions a good portion of us likely work in.
There was a day after Christmas where the team was kinda taking it easy and went out for a longer than usual lunch, and an executive got in our face about how the day after Christmas is not an excuse to slack off. Then the person had us a deploy a feature that afternoon to prod even though it was supposed to be launched after the holidays. The person also did this remotely because they took the day off (the rest of us were actually in the office).
Power is much nastier than people realize. What I provided was an anecdote, but the #metoo movement probably started just like that.
Edit: I just realized how Dickensian this was, plot synopsis of A Christmas Carol. Just missing the ghosts and soul change.
The only reason they wanted this observation that way is so that, instead of having to sit down at their laptop and log into the VPN and manage 2FA and keep their computer open so it doesn't log out every 15 minutes and all that, they just had to glance at a teams message on their phone.
We, the peons and laborers of course were not extended that option, and any system built to automatically generate screenshots for teams probably would be treated as a security risk.
I genuinely consider my direct management chain to be effective, nice, and mostly empathetic within reason, but even they manage to internalize a "the peons can be used to give myself a convenience" ideology.
They don't think of you as people, you are just a resource to them.
Many (but not all) organisations take the week of Christmas out as mandatory holiday for efficiency reasons (close building, save heat &c).
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/s-f-economy-tax-plan-...
Is it really so hard to imagine the struggles of someone who doesn’t have any of the benefits listed in the post?
Just sitting down and doing a quick calculation would immediately reveal time allocation dilemmas of prioritizing “return to office” for someone who doesn’t have the benefits.
Time is universally valuable! But even more so for someone who … has significantly less of it because they can’t hire legions of staff to manage their lives?
“What if I didn’t have this? How would that make me feel?” Pretty depressing. Empathy can’t run the business — but surely it is correlated with strong team cohesion and performance?
You also end up in these bubbles where you literally can’t empathize with people because you have no experience to fall back on.
Combine that with a sort of media and religious culture that will tell you you’re right to feel that way.
I’ve hear rich people complain about the fact that rich people are people to, d that poor people don’t appreciate them enough.
And actually, I think this is a common thread these days, that essentially the world’s problems are caused by the fact that rich people don’t have enough power and aren’t trusted enough by society. Marc Andreesen implied this in his Joe Rogan interview.
It's not like they have a choice, gaslighting the general population is their only hope of staying on top/alive.
Yes, it is hard. While you can break down the struggles to analyze them, actually understanding their emotional impact is a whole different story.
> Empathy can’t run the business — but surely it is correlated with strong team cohesion and performance?
As someone who has recently shifted towards managing people, I am facing two big struggles: how to be empathetic without taking on their emotional burdens and how to respect their situation in life while ensuring they respect their responsibilities in the work place. And this is management at a very low level in the hierarchy. There isn't terribly much that separates myself from them.
I'm not suggesting that there is no role for empathy in a business. Apparently the person who came before me lacked it and survived ten weeks. I'm simply suggesting that it is difficult to balance.
How does someone make others care about him/her? Hmmm...
Whether those values actually lead to a better company is the part that, I feel, continues to lack evidence.
Management...apparently did not enjoy the time. I assume so many of them do nothing but meetings, they were probably bored. The upper leadership, for whom the work is predominantly meetings, is likely not satisfied without maximal people in sight.
Because their job is all having meetings and walking around asking people what's new.
After all, are there any workforce troubles in companies that mandated RTO, besides negative hacker news comments?
I will say that zoom fatigue is real and remote work can be problematic for people that are mainly in meetings. But we could have solved this with a better solution than snapping back to office culture.
During Covid there was some surveys done on whether or not people missed their commute. People who walked or biked were very likely to say they missed commuting. Those who took transit were split (mild dislike), and those who drove nearly universally did not miss it.
We built a pile of shit instead of functional urbanism in America and this is the result.
They didn't miss the "commute to work", they missed the exercise and the internal soothing feeling, that they are doing something good for the health in spite of that trip being required to get the paycheck, and that it's not a total waste of time when done this way.
Edit: coffee shops seems to be doing very well too
Did the rest of the employees not do that as well though? Minus the wealth bit of course.
There's maybe a year or two I eventually wouldn't have to work if I was more aggressive about going for promo, but I have no desire to be someone who's stressed about work, even when I'm not supposed to be working.
> Most time goes to work, some to family.
I do two jobs, but do that _because_ I prioritize family life: I do my main (not remote) work only part time because that can't be done remotely, and do a second job (consulting, 90% remotely) on off days to make up the difference. I don't care about the money as long as we make do.
There will be no return to office.
The unspoken issue here is trust. Managers and execs at these RTO mandate companies do not trust that the rank and file are working productively when not monitored in office.
Why else would they want to lose hours to commuting, and not take advantage of their employees living in cheaper CoL areas? Because they don't truly trust their work output when not monitored in person, and the cost of higher salaries to afford housing near the office plus lost hours and energy commuting are worth buying the trust they otherwise don't feel they have. It's dysfunctional, but it makes sense.
I am glad to work in a high trust work environment. I have seen people who abuse the system get let go. They deserve it.
They abuse this and it definitely doesn't help the worker. As a Manhattan based worker who has lived in Aspen and Hawaii, Google wants to pay people in the higher COL areas of Aspen more than 30% less despite them being far more expensive than Aspen or Hawaii. They will fuck you with cost of living then if you expect more money they will say they are just following the cost of labor (which is a made up metric they can arbitrarily manipulate)
Because talent tends to be worse in those areas. (Inb4 I know someone really good in a low cost area)
I can move 20-30 miles in different directions within the same state that would land me in HCOL, MCOL and LCOL areas.
Moving to any of these areas doesn't change my skill set to be better or worse.
Therefore, some governments are actively pushing corporations to bring people back to the office to revive the economy. I'm not exactly sure how I feel about this, though. On one hand, reviving the economy will have long-term benefits. On the other hand, forcing people to spend money is not ideal.
Also, personally, I think we all grow and learn more about the world when we are in the world. You get to see and experience so many things while commuting, for example. I think it builds character.
There are probably lots of other ways to force people to waste money, so this raises two questions:
- Is a larger GDP an unequivocally good thing if you get there by raising people's baseline expenses?
- Are the parts of the economy you are stimulating the ones we want to see growing?
I don't know the answer in either case. But in the later case, I know a lot of people who work in carpentry and delivery apps, and since the pandemic they have made an absolute killing: the work-from-home mandate invigorated that part of the economy like nothing before.
P.S. I agree with your personal point about leaving home. I like going in to the office too: my office is about 20 minutes away by bike and it's nice to get some air. I'm not sure if applies to people who have a less healthy or refreshing commute.
It sounds like the broken window fallacy.
People criticize the French Revolution for the execution of nobility, but their level of disconnect was at a "Send letters to your foreign aristocrat relatives asking them to come to your country to massacre your people to put them in their place and collaborate with them to do that" level.
Its amazing to see the disconnect of the modern nobility nearing those levels...
Ignoring that its quite hard to learn from other people remotely (somewhat easier in tech because people are used to it), a lot of people frankly don't realise that they're basically running off like a headless chicken working on stuff that doesn't actually matter - programmers especially. You really do need to see the whites of some peoples eyes to get them to actually do the right thing, some people just aren't the type to instinctively know the macro picture of what they're working on.
If I were running a company and had the cash to facilitate I think I would probably go for something like a cycle of "x weeks off 1 week of intense in-office sprinting" then repeat. Going into the office for no reason is basically pointless, or at least the option on spontaneity may be worth less than the cost of going, there's an arbitrage in recognising that.
As usual, the best model is not an extreme “easy answer”, but a nuanced take (in-person environments have tangible benefits, but also tangible downsides — and the same for fully remote environments).
It seems like our society (at least in the US) only has room for “easy answers” now a days … to the detriment of most.
Not to worry, AI is going to rapidly solve this issue, according to tech CEOs that it.
1. Whether we like it or not, we are all in this together. Your dependency on others is extremely high, no matter where you sit in society.
2. We posses the technological means to realize a restructuring of labor and society, one which would benefit a large swath of people across several dimensions —remote work was just an existence proof of this—beyond that, we actually have the infrastructure and technical capacity to solve many societal problems that are being artificially maintained at this stage in history.
3. Different members of society have different incentives, and some benefit much more significantly from existing labor structure and organization than others. Often, these benefits are derived in direct opposition to realizing the net benefits possible in (2.) (see: modern healthcare in the united states).
Remote work during covid was a crack in the glass. External factors forced the C-suite and their ilk to make concessions that showed that the current labor structure is antiquated and that it persists mostly for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many. The psychopathy of the executives lies in their desire to make this structure persist. RTO mandates are an irrational attempt to brute-force rollback the tiny bit of power they gave up to the masses during covid. CEOs are evil. They are evil because they perpetuate a system of labor that increases inequality and puts most people under unnecessary duress because of an artificially imposed scarcity. It is not a "difference in lifestyle" that makes this class of people repulsive. It is their continual and persistent attempts to preserve a structure that demeans and subjugates human beings. They do this actively, and effectively by spreading "free-market" propaganda and continually steering the conversation away from the realization of a more equitable society, which is already technologically feasible.
Worse, they are evil because the system filters out anyone who has any kind of empathy. If they don't maximize profits, they are immediately replaced by someone who is more psycho than them, who will maximize profits without blinking at any human or societal cost.
> They do this actively, and effectively by spreading "free-market" propaganda and continually steering the conversation away from the realization of a more equitable society, which is already technologically feasible.
Moreover, they do this as the predicted collapse of capitalism due to the majority not being able to get any economic value out of the system to be able to buy products and services, happens in front of their eyes. There are products, but people don't have the money to buy them. The system collapses, but what the execs are doing is maximizing short-term profit because what happens afterward is "Someone else's problem".
The reality is that remote work meant a massive drop in productivity. It sucks if you are one of the few that is equally or more productive at home than at work. If you are, then you are few and far between. Most people working from home do sweet FA. Everyone knows this and everyone talked about it constantly for all of the WFH period right until they were asked to work from the office again.
>The psychopathy of the executives lies in their desire to make this structure persist. RTO mandates are an irrational attempt to brute-force rollback the tiny bit of power they gave up to the masses during covid. CEOs are evil. They are evil because they perpetuate a system of labor that increases inequality and puts most people under unnecessary duress because of an artificially imposed scarcity.
You are either insane or you have completely swallowed some source of propaganda. Evil? Artificial scarcity? System of labour? Do you even hear yourself? Take a step back from the computer, stop listening to podcasts and just think for yourself. Or if this is you thinking for yourself, find someone else to do your thinking for you, because you're not good at it.
I think the issue is just that fundamental difference between what the work of relevant people comprises -- moreso than class. Managers, executives, and so on are "social workers": their job is to align people, brainstorm ideas, communicate, "govern" etc.
"Knowledge workers" job is, in large part, to think alone, then to create alone -- and when that fails seek some minimal intervention by another knowledge worker to resolve an issue.
"The Office" is not well-designed for knowledge work -- it's design for "social work". It's born of an era when manual workers worked in factories, and "social workers" worked in offices -- and "knowledge workers" were in academia, in the basement or some hidden (, silent) back office.
Reducing this to class seems to miss the point. Will anyone ever just recognise what the job of creative knowledge work is? Is it so incomprehensible? In the quest to "comprehend" it, we're told its our lack of maids which burden us so.
It's kinda laughable. A maid is no help if you won't STFU.
Commute sucks, cubicles are worse than useless; you won’t get any argument from me on either of these.
But I also know how crucial it is for academia to talk with colleagues. Email kind of works. Video calls kind of work a bit more. But nothing beats knocking on the door of the office next to you. (Whether it’s polite to announce yourself by e.g. email first depends on the country; even if you just show up and you’re turned away, that’ll be until lunch or at worst until the next day.) And the post-seminar atmosphere of everybody talking chaotically to each other with their minds buzzing as others put away their papers, chairs, etc., thus far stays unreplicated by any technological means.
I guess what I want to say is, the more speculative your ideas are, the more important it becomes to bounce them off people in spontaneous conversation. And any friction (scheduling, calls, etc.) you add will significantly reduce the amount of spontaneous conversation you are going to have. So far, we haven’t figured out a better way than roughly everybody involved being in roughly the same place roughly all the time. That saddens me, given how much I hate commuting.
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.
These are highly intelligent people. They got to be very high up in the food chain. They are driven. They are smart.
Yet, the claim is that they can't imagine there exist people not like themselves? Sorry, not buying it.
More plausible to me is that remote work will hurt their bottom lines because they (and their superiors, investors, board members, etc) heavily invested in real estate.
Means, motive and opportunity.
Residential, industrial, medical and retail are easy picks over office buildings.
The impact is real. Excutives are qualified as accredited investors and have access to private investments that are often tied to office space and other real estate that most people cannot participate in.
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.
No, no, that level of lack of awareness and empathy makes them straight up evil.
No judgment here to those who did, but during the pandemic, several people, including several software engineers, took the opportunity to work multiple jobs. Notably, at Equifax, which is probably the worst place to do it because they have records of most people's employment. https://www.businessinsider.com/equifax-used-itsproduct-to-f...
This is the main reason. Management doesn't want you pulling 2 salaries, even if you could, so they are trying to make it difficult so you don't even try.
In addition, if WFH becomes normalized, there is a lot of debt floating office buildings in major cities, and there will be a great renegotiation. This is really bad for senior management, the stock market, transit systems and the budget of most cities. So most people that manage you and manage your managers are aligned against you. https://nypost.com/2024/08/02/real-estate/huge-midtown-offic...
Lastly, and I'm only mentioning this because I think it needs to be said, but I think that most people who are pushing WFH are short sighted. If it is proved conclusively that software development can be managed and completed remotely, then it will devalue your labour as you are forced to compete with smart people in countries with significantly lower housing and energy costs. Anecdotally, this is already occurring.
No it's not.
According to your own article, Equifax fired 24 out of 10,000 employees for working multiple jobs. That's 0.24% of their employees.
This doesn't even come close to being a factor in their decision.
> there is a lot of debt floating office buildings in major cities, and there will be a great renegotiation. This is really bad for senior management, the stock market, transit systems and the budget of most cities.
Why is it bad for senior management, outside of senior management for commercial real estate? You think Google gives a flying fuck about the fact that there are empty buildings and that it's costing money to the few massive companies who own most of the commercial real estate in the US and in the world? No. Do you think the stock market cares? No.
> If it is proved conclusively that software development can be managed and completed remotely, then it will devalue your labour as you are forced to compete with smart people in countries with significantly lower housing and energy costs.
You say it yourself, "Anecdotally, this is already occurring", so why isn't it generalized? Why is there still ANY line of code written in the US or in western Europe? Because outsourcing simply doesn't work for the vast majority of software.
The bare minimum for pickup/drop off help is ~ $2500 a month.
Frankly I don't know how people are managing.
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?"
Enterprises can remove a meaningful number of employees for whom it’s a dealbreaker issue without the associated redundancy costs or PR issues.
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.
Non-xitter link since that site hasn't worked in Firefox for quite a long time. It'd be nice if HN rewrote such URLs automatically.
I have paid less than $200/mo for this. In terms of cost, this isn't anything like having a nanny, your house paid off, or retiring at age 50. But it's interesting that for this guy, it's on the same list as those things.
In sum: I highly recommend deploying a couple hundred bucks a month to pay someone to do house chores if you have a hard time motivating yourself to do it or have housemates/partners you have to spend time arguing about it with.
But since 2020, the market has swayed a lot in favor of remote work compared to before (though it seems to sway back and forth since then). And the way some of these execs talk about it, they say we're all spoiled and we need to put back into the offices where we belong. They're the ones with the self entitled attitude, not respecting the market.
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.
It depends on whether you consider that evil or not. But no, I do not take that they don't understand somehow because of their privilege.
This is just another executive grift trying to make people feel better about them and the decisions they make.
Stop the bullshit and say the quiet part out loud. They do not care what your employees have going on. They understand it fucks with people's work life balance and simply do not care.
If you're a manager, maybe it's your responsibility to figure out who's slacking and who's productive.
What we are really witnessing is law and order breaking down.
> 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.
One of my favorite sociology books is about rich people practically living in a different country, Richistan.
Keep in mind, COVID was still raging at this point.
Right in the middle of his calm rant, a courier—UPS or Amazon, I think—knocked on his door, rang the bell, and then dropped off a package, loud and clear for everyone to hear. It was hilarious and completely undercut his entire message. Funny, but also infuriating.
That's the point though isn't it? He retired at 50. Most of us will work to at least age 65 (perhaps until we literally can't work anymore in today's economy). And we won't get some of the wealth.
Yes, free meals, interesting spaces, massage rooms, etc are all great perks. But you’re there to work, and the reality is hoteling, no shred of privacy (need to have an ad hoc phone conversation with someone somewhere else? Good luck booking a phone room and walking 10min to get there).
If you want people in the office, give them offices. Small, glass-walled, but acoustically private. And above all, assigned, so that you can personalize it a little and not mind sitting there for 8-12 hours.
Nothing in private equity or public companies is done for the purpose of making the company better. It's for making the company look like it will do better in the future, so that a bigger fool will hold the bag.
Don't try to rationalize the irrational, that only serves to promote the myth that they are trying to do something we just don't understand.
It's called misdirection.
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.
