> The problems with voluntary layoffs like that is the most competent people are always the first ones to quit.
Rather, the ones who have the easiest time finding a new job will often be the first ones to quit. These are not necessarily the most competent ones because, for example, people who are better at self-promotion often do have it easier to find a new job, without necessarily being more competent.
That may be a possibility with regular mass layoffs, because it indicates a company in trouble.
However, that’s probably not the case for companies that were laying off people earlier this year despite making record profits (I think most people understood that many of the more profitable companies had overhired over the pandemic) and unlikely to be a driver in RTO driven “layoffs” since they’re not layoffs in the first place and say nothing about employees job security.
RTO driven “layoffs” would be the people who don’t live near the office.
"My advice to the many CEOs tasked with this decision? Just own it."
It would be nice if we could get this level of honesty from CEOs - but let's not pretend that firing people is the only driver for RTO.
Some other motivations include:
- We took a tax break that specifies some level of in-office time per employee and we already spent the money
- We're getting pressured from local governments to bring customers into the city to spend money at local businesses
- We've sunk cost into our little in-person fiefdom and upper management needs the powertrip to justify the headache that is working in upper management
Obviously this is not an exhaustive list - but it's annoying to deal with the deception when looking for jobs or trying to determine if a company is going to pull the rug out for the purposes of "business".
So yes - the CEOs should just own "it", but so should the politicians and real estate owners/investors who are also concerned that their tax base or investment value don't hold up to this new model of working.
> We took a tax break that specifies some level of in-office time per employee and we already spent the money
> We're getting pressured from local governments to bring customers into the city to spend money at local businesses
Extremely interested in any examples if you have them handy.
If I'm in the office simply because of a tax break, then I feel I'm productive and revenue-generating by doing absolutely nothing while in said office. I mean they could hire homeless people to do that and solve a lot of problems at once.
Don’t have an example with citation handy, but anecdote that I’ve seen such programs used at small businesses, with tax advantages tied to having employees within the city limits or in a certain district, and I’ve seen bigger bespoke incentive plans to draw larger businesses include similar language. X jobs at Y location, that kind of thing.
Is it crazy to think that working from an office is just more productive? Especially if you’re a big company and have a lot of new grads/inexperienced hires that are harder to train up remotely?
Yes, there's tons of evidence that distractions are incredibly costly, especially for complex or creative work, and that modern offices are super distracting places.
Sure you could imagine a hypothetical world in which offices were designed differently, but for the most part RTO is return-to-open-office, with multiple distractions per hour.
Yes, there's tons of evidence that distractions are incredibly costly, especially for complex or creative work,
and that home offices are cramped places where work intrudes on the home sanctum; where the chores and unfinished personal tasks of one's life haunt the mind of the worker and distract them from the undivided attention of their work tasks and interactions with coworkers.
I am more on edge from waiting for someone to message me while at home than I ever was when I thought someone was going to walk up to me.
Disclaimer: like everyone else here, this is an opinion. Thinking WFH is magical is also an opinion. WFH has some upsides, and some people get more upside than others.
It's certainly more efficient for me that I don't have to commute 2 hours per day on my own dime to spend the day in some open plan office with inferior equipment to what I have at home...
> I’m not sure why I can’t reply to the guy below me
You can't reply too fast, there's a timeout
> but plenty of Google results about surveys that show WFH is less productive
And plenty show WFH is more productive. And some show there's a trust gap, which might explain the productivity difference. I would say there's no definitive study yet. Some companies have banked on WFH even before the pandemic. It could well be that it's a market and there's a split that optimises productivity.
I dislike that you’re being downvoted, downvoting is not a disagree button.
There’s a lot of studies that show that productivity is better at home for some individuals, I don’t think there has been a proper meta-study because there’s studies that prove whatever you want to believe right now.
Even without citing any study, it does feel organic that it depends entirely on your job, your level of autonomy, your existing relationship to your colleagues and manager, the level of trust and ultimately your home situation.
Having 3 kids running around most of the day in a 2bedroom apartment is not going to be as productive as sitting in an air conditioned office that has good physical and auditory privacy.
However, it’s also true that management has been basically cutting costs extremely in terms of office space for decades, you don’t even get enough personal space or privacy for a cubicle now: let alone a door you could close.
Erosion of the quality of the office over this period of time has created a pretty large gulf to cross. I would argue that most people have better working conditions at home than the torrid open office that we’ve been subjected to.
It's not anything other than a "something pressed a button" button. Offering nothing more than a poor man's analytics system, at best. No additional information can be obtained from it. But, that is still good information, as it tells that there is activity in the vicinity of the comment, which is why one comes here to post and not instead write in their private journal.
Ranking productivity over retention is what is crazy. Enterprises have fostered a culture that promotes thinking of people as replaceable commodities instead of assets that gain value over time. The turnover that view engenders means there is no institutional knowledge built up over time, forever keeping the company on unstable footing as they never really know what's going on.
Is it crazy to think a big company should have a comprehensive onboarding program that includes training and shadowing someone? Especially for an intern? That can all be done remotely.
I spent 8.5 years commuting in the Toronto area with traffic getting worse and worse each year.
Being a morning person meant I lost my most productive work hours in the car (public transport would take almost twice as long) and arrived at the office stressed from the 1.5 hour drive, all while getting emails and calls that I couldn't really deal with in the car, stressing me out more, arriving at the office in no mood to be able to think clearly.
I quit that job (difficult, financially and emotionally, because as the President of the company I had literally built large parts and hire more than 2/3rds of the team), and went back to consulting.
It was night and day, in far fewer hours I produced a lot more, simply because I eliminated stresses and had more and better focus time.
It also helped me create and set up boundaries, because the modern workplace is pretty toxic, at all levels. Maybe always has been.
> Is it crazy to think that working from an office is just more productive?
For much work, yes, even moreso per hour the employee must dedicate to work (which, in working from office is substantially more than WFH for the same on-the-clock hours.)
> Especially if you’re a big company and have a lot of new grads/inexperienced hires that are harder to train up remotely?
Why would it be harder to train people up remotely, in general? Sure, there's cases whwre this is likely true, but they probably largely correspond to the same types of work that weren't remotable in the first place.
> Is it crazy to think that working from an office is just more productive?
Not per se but this is an assertion that's being made by the people in powerful positions[0] without really being backed up. I hear at least as much "it just feels better" talk from pro-RTO managers as I do from pro-WFH contributors. Rather than think that working from an office is more productive, pro-RTO arguers want others to assume that it is. It's not an entirely unreasonable thought but the actual "thinking" is sidestepped in order to skip to the desired conclusion.
0: They make organizational decisions and can choose the terminate the employment of the persons who need to be employed for health insurance and income.
How much more productive? 2%? 50%? That matters. Making a lot of people miserable for an extra 2% productivity sure seems like the American way but maybe we should stop being okay with that.
It can be, provided your colleagues are all there, your team has its own dedicated space, meeting rooms are alway available, connectivity is good etc etc.
If not, and you're still having to work remotely just in the office with crowded hotdesking, shit wifi and no rooms available, worse coffee, worse monitors and keyboards etc, then no - being at home is way better.
You've hit the nail on the head. The workers know it's BS, they know they're having smoke blown up their ass, and they know they're being lied to. The next thing you know there's going to be companies complaining of poor employee morale. Wow! Who would have thought continually lying to your employees would produce poor morale?
Then what really burns my ass is these are the same people who are going to be whining to the major "news" outlets that "nobody wants to work anymore." No, we just don't want to work for assholes like them.
Really frustrating that instead of moving towards making city centers cheaper to live in and attract more local customers that way, municipal govts and corporations want to just force working-class people to waste time and money commuting on infrastructure already well past its carrying capacity.
More and more working professionals I know are essentially forced to live dozens of miles away from where they work in a heavily urbanized area, or give up the dream of ever owning a house.
> The problem is, in 2020, employees took these remote-work policy changes as an "implied" promise.
And that's where employees 'dun goofed. Unless they got permanent remote work in a written contract, this was all a temporary measure until the pandemic was over.
I agree. We were supposed to go back after 1 month, then 3 months, than 1 year, than 18 months, and then it was "we give up, work wherever you want - but for taxes and insurance purposes you MUST stay inside the state".
And now our office lease is up; CEO recently announced where the new office will be. It will be extremely close to his new house and will have desks for even more people than we have now. You'd have to be delusional to think that RTO isn't coming next year after the move is finished.
I moved to a new house during the pandemic and am now feeling very vindicated knowing that I focused my search on an area that assumed we'd go back to the office and that the office would eventually move closer to the CEO's house (there is published research about this). It's going to end up saving me about 45 minutes of commuting per day!
In my 40 year work experience, ass-kissing is good for the short-term, it fails for the long-term. Ever hear of the Peter Principle? That's what happens to ass-kissers. They're not liked and as such can't lead. Because they can't lead they will get promoted beyond their capability. I've seen this happen so many times over the course of my career I've lost count.
The people who tell people what they need to hear? They may not do as well in the short-term, in fact they often don't, but over the long haul they have the most success and make the best leaders.
Of course these are just overall trends, there are always exceptions.
The best career advice I can give anyone is to know what's going to happen before the boss does. It has gotten a lot easier in the last decade or so since most managers think that Agile means "don't have to do any planning"
To paraphrase Wayne Gretzky a bit: "An ass-kisser plays where the manager is now; a great employee plays where the manager is going to be."
Legally, there was no "implied" promise as the company has to register in the state in which you're working in order to handle local taxes. That's not an implication. Also, many employees have been hired in the 3.5 years everybody was sent home and were hired as remote employees. Again, no implication. My personal anecdote, I've been identified as a full-remote employee with the appropriate updates to my employment status. Once again, that's not an implication.
Frankly, in many cases, these companies are in breech of contract. In some states that contract isn't worth the paper it's written on and in others, it does. Here's the thing - it's the state where the employee actually works who determines the enforcement of the contract. States benefiting from WFH are going to be more inclined to enforce those contracts.
Um every big company RTO hard announcement was followed by mass layoffs. Their hope was to get a chunk out before the announcement to lower the severance numbers.
In any case, I personally like being at the office with lots of WFH flexibility.
Well... Those that are best at interviewing and selling themselves are the most likely to quit after finding a new position. That doesn't necessarily correlate with the highest performers. Might actually correlate more with those that also spend a lot of time on internal politics, which are good for their performance reviews but not for the companies actual performance.
Especially in the more technical roles most of the real top performers I've seen were not very good at politics or interviewing.
The really talented technical people I know have what I call “eff you skills.”
They literally walk away over minor inconveniences like “you can’t use your own mouse here” or “you have to use VS Code and not your Vim setup.” Don’t like something management does? “Eff you.”
Last place I was at did one day in the office, and they all left without new jobs.
The real reason CEOs want people back in office is 100% because they are broadly part of the same socio-economic class that owns the vast majority of commercial real estate around the world. They and their friends and family own all the commercial real estate, and high vacancy rates are are hurting their bottom lines and reducing the rate at which their property values increase, so they want people back in the office to prop up their property values and keep the commercial real estate graving train flowing.
I've heard this before, but would the actual collusion mechanics be to make this happen? Like, my landlord buddy golfing just won't stop pestering me about getting my company to return to office so I convince the board of my company to do it?
There's probably no real mechanism, it's just that the circles they all run in agree "yes, yes, office life is important", the same way you're more likely to support some social issue if your friends do.
Most executives have major real estate holdings in their pension plans. If the employer owns the building, the employer and equity-owning executives have yet more real estate holdings, albiet indirectly.
Because of ZIRP, pensions have been reaching for yield by doing anything they can, and that has often been CMBS, CRE equity, CRE bank loans, etc.
One thing that video meetings don't support is higher-level managers throwing their weight around where they technically shouldn't.
When you have multiple levels of people working under you in an office, you can go down the management structure as many levels as you want just by dropping into people's offices, and there's no record of it and no way to prevent it. If you have to schedule a zoom call it shows up in people's calendars and gives worker's immediate supervisors the chance to intervene.
This seems pretty absurd that CEOs would make huge decisions for their companies like RTO just because their kid goes to school with another kid whose parents own a bunch of office buildings.
I am really confused when I think about all the big bosses praising cooperation in the office. And when a group meetings occur they call in from home while peasants sit in the windowless conference room with poor ventilation. I just quit a company who did full return to the office. I don’t mind 2-3 days in the office, but not 5.
You can speculate about various external reasons, but I suspect the real explanation is less rational and more psychological, instinctive, primal: managers enjoy the physicality and immediacy of management. They love to survey their domain, as if a lord, to be able to watch their underlings, to stand over their shoulders or get in their face, force them to acknowledge and respond to you. With WFH, a lot of that is lost, especially if as a natural consequence the communication workflow becomes more async than sync.
I think this is exactly right. Also I think that control over the bodies of others is a big point as well. You are talking about power and physical power to dominate the body of another is a very pure form of this power. So telling people where to sit, when they come and go, having them gather in this room and that room, it fulfills a primal need.
I've seen this attribution of RTO to "managers" before but it doesn't ring true in my experience. Managers is too broad of a group of people. Every manager I've had since the beginning of the pandemic has loved working from home and said they don't want to go back.
If this [1] story from a few weeks ago is to be believed these directives are coming from the people at the top: executives, high level management, and investors. That story is about Microsoft specifically, but I don't see anything in there that would indicate the same couldn't have happened at other tech companies.
Frontline manager here. I trust my team and would be totally fine with any one of them working from home permanently. I know many other managers who feel the same. Anecdotal, of course, but in my experience the RTO mandate is generally coming from very high up the chain.
Yup. Imagine Michael Scott trying to manage a team of remote workers. He would do ANYTHING to get them back in the office again. And it would have absolutely nothing to do with profitability.
I am a manager and I certainly don't share this view and I know my manager doesn't either. In a lot of cases this push is coming from the executive committee which I think supports the argument made in the article if you extrapolate where we might be heading in the economic cycle. We just have to deal with it.
armchair psychiatry at its finest. you've never managed anything significant clearly.
Here I'll do one: "software developers like to choose their own tools because they don't care about using the most efficient best in class tool available, they like to think of themselves as artists as if they were all little da vincis who have yet to be recognized for their brilliance"
> you've never managed anything significant clearly.
Also armchair psychiatry.
> See how condescending and dumb this is?
I think your wording was a bit exaggerated but has a grain of truth in that many software developers do think of themselves as artists, and they're not wrong about that in essence. I do think it's wrong to claim that there's a unique "most efficient best in class tool available". Different people naturally find different tools more efficient for their personal workflows.
I actually think that the majority of human behavior, including my own, can be explained in animalistic terms. It's not condescending, because we are undeniably animals. In fact, it makes no rational sense for me to waste time commenting on HN, but I do it anyway!
Another way of framing this without the fiefdom comparisons is that a lot of managers simply don't trust their employees. Weekly check-ins leave them with 4-5 days of fretting, not knowing if progress is happening.
Looking over at an employee and seeing them working is the worlds most common self-soothing mechanism. It really is as simple as that.
On the fringes, I'm sure there are a lot of creative collaborative environments with employees that have actual autonomy to act on such collaborations where RTO would move the needle, but I would speculate that very few of these environments actually exist even though everyone thinks they definitely have that environment (this is more at the executive level)
And that’s why folks office work is the factory work of yesterday. You are meant to sit at your assembly line and not complain. Corpo-communism have killed small businesses and moved everyone into offices just like cattle to a barn. Fight back with all you’ve got. The more good people they lose the lower the quality of their products the more clients switching back to small businesses.
Counterpoints: social bonding in sharing a physical space, lots of nonverbal communication in face-to-face meetings.
Don't get me wrong, I love remote work. And Zoom meetings have made it way easier to pull together groups of people on different schedules. But there are significant benefits to being in-office too.
I don't think so. I think they honestly believe that RTO will make employees more productive. Productivity has been trending downward since 2010 or thereabouts and nobody knows why, so they're willing to try anything.
81 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadRather, the ones who have the easiest time finding a new job will often be the first ones to quit. These are not necessarily the most competent ones because, for example, people who are better at self-promotion often do have it easier to find a new job, without necessarily being more competent.
Doesn't that mean the layoff is as humane as possible? It means you inflict the least amount of suffering you could.
However, that’s probably not the case for companies that were laying off people earlier this year despite making record profits (I think most people understood that many of the more profitable companies had overhired over the pandemic) and unlikely to be a driver in RTO driven “layoffs” since they’re not layoffs in the first place and say nothing about employees job security.
RTO driven “layoffs” would be the people who don’t live near the office.
It would be nice if we could get this level of honesty from CEOs - but let's not pretend that firing people is the only driver for RTO.
Some other motivations include:
Obviously this is not an exhaustive list - but it's annoying to deal with the deception when looking for jobs or trying to determine if a company is going to pull the rug out for the purposes of "business".So yes - the CEOs should just own "it", but so should the politicians and real estate owners/investors who are also concerned that their tax base or investment value don't hold up to this new model of working.
> We're getting pressured from local governments to bring customers into the city to spend money at local businesses
Extremely interested in any examples if you have them handy.
If I'm in the office simply because of a tax break, then I feel I'm productive and revenue-generating by doing absolutely nothing while in said office. I mean they could hire homeless people to do that and solve a lot of problems at once.
Edit: I’m not sure why I can’t reply to the guy below me but plenty of Google results about surveys that show WFH is less productive.
Sure you could imagine a hypothetical world in which offices were designed differently, but for the most part RTO is return-to-open-office, with multiple distractions per hour.
and that home offices are cramped places where work intrudes on the home sanctum; where the chores and unfinished personal tasks of one's life haunt the mind of the worker and distract them from the undivided attention of their work tasks and interactions with coworkers.
I am more on edge from waiting for someone to message me while at home than I ever was when I thought someone was going to walk up to me.
Disclaimer: like everyone else here, this is an opinion. Thinking WFH is magical is also an opinion. WFH has some upsides, and some people get more upside than others.
You can't reply too fast, there's a timeout
> but plenty of Google results about surveys that show WFH is less productive
And plenty show WFH is more productive. And some show there's a trust gap, which might explain the productivity difference. I would say there's no definitive study yet. Some companies have banked on WFH even before the pandemic. It could well be that it's a market and there's a split that optimises productivity.
There’s a lot of studies that show that productivity is better at home for some individuals, I don’t think there has been a proper meta-study because there’s studies that prove whatever you want to believe right now.
Even without citing any study, it does feel organic that it depends entirely on your job, your level of autonomy, your existing relationship to your colleagues and manager, the level of trust and ultimately your home situation.
Having 3 kids running around most of the day in a 2bedroom apartment is not going to be as productive as sitting in an air conditioned office that has good physical and auditory privacy.
However, it’s also true that management has been basically cutting costs extremely in terms of office space for decades, you don’t even get enough personal space or privacy for a cubicle now: let alone a door you could close.
Erosion of the quality of the office over this period of time has created a pretty large gulf to cross. I would argue that most people have better working conditions at home than the torrid open office that we’ve been subjected to.
It's not anything other than a "something pressed a button" button. Offering nothing more than a poor man's analytics system, at best. No additional information can be obtained from it. But, that is still good information, as it tells that there is activity in the vicinity of the comment, which is why one comes here to post and not instead write in their private journal.
I spent 8.5 years commuting in the Toronto area with traffic getting worse and worse each year.
Being a morning person meant I lost my most productive work hours in the car (public transport would take almost twice as long) and arrived at the office stressed from the 1.5 hour drive, all while getting emails and calls that I couldn't really deal with in the car, stressing me out more, arriving at the office in no mood to be able to think clearly.
I quit that job (difficult, financially and emotionally, because as the President of the company I had literally built large parts and hire more than 2/3rds of the team), and went back to consulting.
It was night and day, in far fewer hours I produced a lot more, simply because I eliminated stresses and had more and better focus time.
It also helped me create and set up boundaries, because the modern workplace is pretty toxic, at all levels. Maybe always has been.
For much work, yes, even moreso per hour the employee must dedicate to work (which, in working from office is substantially more than WFH for the same on-the-clock hours.)
> Especially if you’re a big company and have a lot of new grads/inexperienced hires that are harder to train up remotely?
Why would it be harder to train people up remotely, in general? Sure, there's cases whwre this is likely true, but they probably largely correspond to the same types of work that weren't remotable in the first place.
Not per se but this is an assertion that's being made by the people in powerful positions[0] without really being backed up. I hear at least as much "it just feels better" talk from pro-RTO managers as I do from pro-WFH contributors. Rather than think that working from an office is more productive, pro-RTO arguers want others to assume that it is. It's not an entirely unreasonable thought but the actual "thinking" is sidestepped in order to skip to the desired conclusion.
0: They make organizational decisions and can choose the terminate the employment of the persons who need to be employed for health insurance and income.
If not, and you're still having to work remotely just in the office with crowded hotdesking, shit wifi and no rooms available, worse coffee, worse monitors and keyboards etc, then no - being at home is way better.
Then what really burns my ass is these are the same people who are going to be whining to the major "news" outlets that "nobody wants to work anymore." No, we just don't want to work for assholes like them.
More and more working professionals I know are essentially forced to live dozens of miles away from where they work in a heavily urbanized area, or give up the dream of ever owning a house.
And that's where employees 'dun goofed. Unless they got permanent remote work in a written contract, this was all a temporary measure until the pandemic was over.
And now our office lease is up; CEO recently announced where the new office will be. It will be extremely close to his new house and will have desks for even more people than we have now. You'd have to be delusional to think that RTO isn't coming next year after the move is finished.
I moved to a new house during the pandemic and am now feeling very vindicated knowing that I focused my search on an area that assumed we'd go back to the office and that the office would eventually move closer to the CEO's house (there is published research about this). It's going to end up saving me about 45 minutes of commuting per day!
Life lessons from a too-blunt guy who just wants to work without the politics.
The people who tell people what they need to hear? They may not do as well in the short-term, in fact they often don't, but over the long haul they have the most success and make the best leaders.
Of course these are just overall trends, there are always exceptions.
To paraphrase Wayne Gretzky a bit: "An ass-kisser plays where the manager is now; a great employee plays where the manager is going to be."
Frankly, in many cases, these companies are in breech of contract. In some states that contract isn't worth the paper it's written on and in others, it does. Here's the thing - it's the state where the employee actually works who determines the enforcement of the contract. States benefiting from WFH are going to be more inclined to enforce those contracts.
In any case, I personally like being at the office with lots of WFH flexibility.
Especially in the more technical roles most of the real top performers I've seen were not very good at politics or interviewing.
They literally walk away over minor inconveniences like “you can’t use your own mouse here” or “you have to use VS Code and not your Vim setup.” Don’t like something management does? “Eff you.”
Last place I was at did one day in the office, and they all left without new jobs.
All are now employed again, most a level up.
Because of ZIRP, pensions have been reaching for yield by doing anything they can, and that has often been CMBS, CRE equity, CRE bank loans, etc.
When you have multiple levels of people working under you in an office, you can go down the management structure as many levels as you want just by dropping into people's offices, and there's no record of it and no way to prevent it. If you have to schedule a zoom call it shows up in people's calendars and gives worker's immediate supervisors the chance to intervene.
If this [1] story from a few weeks ago is to be believed these directives are coming from the people at the top: executives, high level management, and investors. That story is about Microsoft specifically, but I don't see anything in there that would indicate the same couldn't have happened at other tech companies.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37643608
It should go without saying that I was talking about the people making the decisions about RTO.
Here I'll do one: "software developers like to choose their own tools because they don't care about using the most efficient best in class tool available, they like to think of themselves as artists as if they were all little da vincis who have yet to be recognized for their brilliance"
See how condescending and dumb this is?
I don't deny it. I literally said "I suspect".
> you've never managed anything significant clearly.
Also armchair psychiatry.
> See how condescending and dumb this is?
I think your wording was a bit exaggerated but has a grain of truth in that many software developers do think of themselves as artists, and they're not wrong about that in essence. I do think it's wrong to claim that there's a unique "most efficient best in class tool available". Different people naturally find different tools more efficient for their personal workflows.
I actually think that the majority of human behavior, including my own, can be explained in animalistic terms. It's not condescending, because we are undeniably animals. In fact, it makes no rational sense for me to waste time commenting on HN, but I do it anyway!
Looking over at an employee and seeing them working is the worlds most common self-soothing mechanism. It really is as simple as that.
On the fringes, I'm sure there are a lot of creative collaborative environments with employees that have actual autonomy to act on such collaborations where RTO would move the needle, but I would speculate that very few of these environments actually exist even though everyone thinks they definitely have that environment (this is more at the executive level)
Don't get me wrong, I love remote work. And Zoom meetings have made it way easier to pull together groups of people on different schedules. But there are significant benefits to being in-office too.