Because it’s always been about power and ego. I’m sure there’s an element of “we can get people to quit without having layoffs or having to compensate them”, but the overwhelming reason for mandatory RTO is power and ego tripping.
If it were ever about productivity it would not have been universal and it would not have been mandatory.
>always been about power and ego.
No, it's about CRE investments. Pre-'rona, CRE was viewed as an extremely stable asset class. There are lots of interests (including a lot of 401Ks I bet) that don't wanna see the asset class fail.
Can you elaborate? To my knowledge, 401k target date funds sometimes have small allocations to REITs (like 3-5%) or REIT indices that might be comprised of a mix of commercial and residential. Maybe there is some exposure to CRE mortgage backed securities through the bond indices?
I know what definitely doesn't improve productivity. Constantly talking and arguing about the what's, who's and whataboutisms of it all. We should all just get back to work, remote, on site, hybrid, anything.
Sure. Lets say it is true. I would argue that there is a fix amount of real work a programmer can do per day. My limit is about 2h unless the task is straight forward which it usually isn't. Then I have to goof off. Like aligning whitespace or sorting papers. Obviously I would rather play computer games or go home, but that wont do.
We are pretending to work alot to not stir up social unrest on the work place among other types of staff.
But like there is no need to actually believe in it ourself.
I've always wondered what exactly that "useful productivity" cap is for programmers on average. I've been gifted with the capacity for 100% productive eight hour days, but it's definitely easy to recognize that as extremely unusual talking to coworkers for more than ten minutes over the years. In discussing the idea of "maximum productive hours per day" I've found that not only is the variance on the teams I've been a part of huge, but also that it's pretty hard to correlate that number with work ethic. Great engineers often know when they're out of that maximally effective window and pivot to other things for the rest of their day.
A related aside: I've noticed anecdotally that as you become more senior you get pretty good at feeling out what that number is for each of your teammates and it becomes a pretty useful metric to leverage in your day-to-day toolkit. I'd be curious to see what a workplace would look like if folks were actually allowed to be transparent about that (without repercussions) rather than it having to be guesstimated.
Very surprised to see this sort of comment outside of US business hours. Usually it’s just the US Coastal self-identified elites that forget that the rest of the world exists :)
Execs: Give me an office please, stop pretending it doesn’t matter. Commercial real estate is so cheap there is no good excuse to conserve space like this.
It's insane that we spent a good 30-40 years or so on the open-office concept. It's like the setup of school but without the structure of everyone having quiet time at the same time. That level of density only works when someone's directing the chaos.
Can someone high level finally just tell me why they’re doing RTO. I really want to know, is it just a power thing? What bother me is that they went with open space to improve productivity, but we all know that was to cram more people into less space. So why not just reduce costs even more and make employees work at home! Like it’s been so inconsistent I really want an opinion from someone on the inside.
Having talked to a few management people, it seems to just be the human nature: you feel more in control over your subordinates if you can watch them work. Even if they are just as productive from the comfort of their own homes, how can you really be sure if you don't observe them being busy? They might be secretly slacking off!
Imagine you work with a bad and slow laptop and your employer provides you with a new one, 1000x more powerful but the keyboard layout is different, it's dvorak.
You can then replace the keyboard with a layout you know or adapt the way you work by learning dvorak and to touch type.
What would you do if your productivity is at stakes and you could lose your job if your output slows down?
Transpose this to managers who "know" how to manage in a physical space and with small talk and now have to adapt to remote management.
They usually don't have any strong metric to measure productivity outside of seeing you work with their eyes, knowing what exactly you're working on and you being there whenever they need you.
They usually see their own productivity as THE indicator of productivity for their team.
Is it now better for THEM to bring back the old "org layout" or to learn the new one and admit they don't know how to measure productivity ?
For all the managers I've seen, they have no problem with fast evolving task they can delegate, but they are reluctant on anything that forces them to evolve, they want to evolve their own way. Like many of us.
This doesn't really match my observation, at least at a megacorp. Line managers seem to support remote work at roughly the same rate as ICs. The mandates are coming from execs, who are absolutely nowhere near the "I need smalltalk to understand productivity" situation.
I instead see this as part of an industry-wide pushback against rising compensation and power among engineers.
There are plenty of people voicing justification if you listen. The reality is that a lot of people, especially in dev communities, are similarly stubborn and will cry “you’re lying!” If the given justification isn’t one of the 2-3 accusatory things that anti-RTO people have come up with: “interest in commercial real estate”, “desire to see the peons work”, etc.
As someone who had been listening, I've heard maybe one good faith justification (onboarding and mentoring of new hires) and a multitude of vague "synergy" excuses. Honestly asking and sincerely listening, are there others?
I think it's a combination of two things: insecure management; and that companies have large ongoing real-estate expenses they can't get out of, and that doesn't look so bad if the leased spaces are full of people.
As someone whose health got messed up by COVID and going to the office every day would be absolute hell on earth, this endless argument feels beyond terrifying.
There is nothing wrong with my ability to get my job done sitting at my computer at home. I guess one day though, i might have to change jobs and end up with a less understanding management who will make me commute to an office every day.
i'm not even kidding that driving off a cliff on the way to work might start sounding pretty damn appealing at that point.
Leading a highly productive remote team and hearing great stories of competitors wasting cycles and churn creating their own problems trying to force RTO. Just treat adults like... adults?
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 54.0 ms ] threadIf it were ever about productivity it would not have been universal and it would not have been mandatory.
We are pretending to work alot to not stir up social unrest on the work place among other types of staff.
But like there is no need to actually believe in it ourself.
A related aside: I've noticed anecdotally that as you become more senior you get pretty good at feeling out what that number is for each of your teammates and it becomes a pretty useful metric to leverage in your day-to-day toolkit. I'd be curious to see what a workplace would look like if folks were actually allowed to be transparent about that (without repercussions) rather than it having to be guesstimated.
But for many larger companies that were already practicing distributed model prior to the pandemic, the ship has already sailed.
It no longer knows how to harness RTO effectively. That knowledge was long lost prior to Covid.
Imagine you work with a bad and slow laptop and your employer provides you with a new one, 1000x more powerful but the keyboard layout is different, it's dvorak.
You can then replace the keyboard with a layout you know or adapt the way you work by learning dvorak and to touch type.
What would you do if your productivity is at stakes and you could lose your job if your output slows down?
Transpose this to managers who "know" how to manage in a physical space and with small talk and now have to adapt to remote management. They usually don't have any strong metric to measure productivity outside of seeing you work with their eyes, knowing what exactly you're working on and you being there whenever they need you.
They usually see their own productivity as THE indicator of productivity for their team.
Is it now better for THEM to bring back the old "org layout" or to learn the new one and admit they don't know how to measure productivity ?
For all the managers I've seen, they have no problem with fast evolving task they can delegate, but they are reluctant on anything that forces them to evolve, they want to evolve their own way. Like many of us.
I instead see this as part of an industry-wide pushback against rising compensation and power among engineers.
For smaller companies: "big companies do it, there must be a good reason, let's do it too!".
Remote work doesn't seem to affect productivity, Fed study finds
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39037589
There is nothing wrong with my ability to get my job done sitting at my computer at home. I guess one day though, i might have to change jobs and end up with a less understanding management who will make me commute to an office every day.
i'm not even kidding that driving off a cliff on the way to work might start sounding pretty damn appealing at that point.
--
To the execs: go bully someone your own size.