Are there any F500 companies remaining which have not had a RTO push?
Not only has my company been increasingly pressuring RTO, they are getting rid of offices and even cubicles. You can now hotel in an open office hellscape. Return to office and double down on miserable working conditions.
It feels like the execs just want to reinforce who is in charge.
Lets be honest here, a very significant portion of business practices are caused because upper management do not trust the team they hired.
Be it that they don't trust them to have the right idea, or trust them to do the work. Nearly all business practises we hate are caused by a measure of overt control over your daily time and a strict measuring of your time and tasks.
Unfortunately: there's about 10-20% of people who genuinely shouldn't be working because they are untrustworthy, and things like remote work just enabled them to take multiple jobs or slack-off massively.
So these practices mostly exist to deal with those people and the rest of us just suffer.
Actually it's a complicated effect. One person doing it often causes many people to do it. And its one of those things that doesn't replicate in an "in office" atmosphere.
I think there's a large pool of good talent that can't fully be trusted to do the right thing (not slack off), but can be employed successfully with sufficient guardrails (return to office).
Loosely related anecdote why I feel so:
For a while right after Apple started its mandatory RTO and ramped up Caffe Macs, the soda "grab n go" sections had an honor system - you paid your $1.25 for a coke and went on your way. Apparently there was a _lot_ of petty theft of drinks, so they have a person with an iPad check you off now, and I assume theft has basically plummeted since there's far less employees brazen enough to just barge off with one without checking off their name.
So maybe the RTO is effective in someway? Or maybe the real lesson is that the soda should have been free to begin with.
Yes, free basic cheap commodity drinks and snacks are bare minimum for a FAANG-class employer, and every other FAANG-class employer I'm familiar with goes well above and beyond that.
Even my first job out of college as a boilerroom MSP sysadmin earning $40k in manhattan gave us free soda (the only benefit lol)
I mean, even if you work as a mechanic at a body shop, there is often free coffee in an old pot in the break room, it's not that crazy.
But outside of that context, no of course I don't expect/care if my employer provides me with free soda. I don't even drink it.
It just seems weirdly cheapskate for a supposed FAANG-class employer.
I actually kind of agree as I am not even a soda drinker, but that was not the point. The point is the message it sends. And it really doesn't cost that much on a per-employee basis -- I would guess some employees might consume a six pack per day, valued at $5, and some others might consume nothing, valued at $0, so average that to maybe say $3 or $4. This is less than that employee already paid out of pocket to commute themselves to work. And having some basic food/drink taken care of centrally is more efficient in terms of saving time stocking up, going and buying more during break, etc.
But most of all, it's just the message. All the other "nice" employers do it, even some pretty "basic" employers do (not surprising, this is a very cheap perk, only a little more expensive than breakroom coffee), so if you don't, it you look like a cheapskate. Like what else are you cheaping out on?
I also don't drink much coffee, but would see it as a red flag if they cut costs by getting rid of the coffee in the break room, and that's a red flag that would hold even if I was working as a retail cashier (that's not an industry where free break room coffee is standard, but it's not unusual, so while I wouldn't care if a company never offered it, if I was a cashier at a company that had it, and then they took it away, the message would be obvious -- we are preparing to cut costs at the expense of your work life, our company is no longer growing, jump ship if you can)
Sure, you could cap the expense per-employee so its a non-issue. I was thinking about benefits in general that nobody cares about or uses. But even if they use it, snacks/food can get expensive real quick.
There is a classic text [1] about exactly this, the free soda.
In short, when a company starts to pay attention to such petty details as the cost of soda, which must be a rounding error in the cost of running an office of a decent engineering company, it's a signal that the culture has changed. With that change, best engineering talent often leaves towards places where priorities are still aligned with lofty goals, not bean-counting.
(Disclaimer: of last 10 companies I've worked for, only two did not offer free soda, due to being 100% remote.)
Thanks for the explanation. It makes sense, but is entirely foreign to me (at least for soda). In my history of 20 years of software/DBA in the Australian mining/construction industry, most have had free coffee but none have had free soda. Though two did free Friday-afternoon beer and pizza.
My current place has free instant coffee (until it runs out) and everyone who wants to push for more than that is viewed with 'tall poppy syndrome'.
I worked at the KFC/YUM! headquarters for 10 years. When I started, we had free soda in the lobby of the building. It was great for those late afternoon doldrums and a group of us would often walk down 5 flights of stairs to get a pick-me-up.
About 3 years before I left they removed the soda machines. My understanding was that it only cost about $30k / year and most of that was for cups & lids. We even had an executive that was willing to pay for it out of their budget. No go.
It turns out that the catering company that supplied food to the building didn't like losing out on the soda money. So they told KFC/YUM! to remove the free soda option, and they did. It really was the beginning of the end.
It's not so much that the soda was gone it was the thought of it. That free soda actually solved quite a few programming problems, or at least allowed us to solve them on our way downstairs. It also let us work harder/later than we normally would by giving us that afternoon journey. It's positive effect was much greater than it's financial cost.
> I think there's a large pool of good talent that can't fully be trusted to do the right thing (not slack off)
Ever worked in an office? At any corporation size no one works 8 hours a day and if you want to slack, there are plenty opportunities in the office as well. Hell, you can spend the whole day there without doing ANYTHING.
So that is a non-point for me, slackers gonna slack.
I knew a guy whose daily routine was something like:
9:25 - Arrival (cafeteria stopped serving breakfast at 9:30.
9:30-10:15 - Breakfast
10:15-11:30 - A lot of walking around the office, having business-sounding conversations with others but really getting nothing done.
11:30-1:00 - Out for lunch.
1:00-3:00 - Sneak out to car in the parking lot for a nap.
3:00-3:30 - Daily standup. Vaguely talk about how he’s “merging code” or “updating library dependencies” this week.
3:30-4:00 - At desk working.
4:00-5:30 - Doing his walk-around-talk-arounds through the office hallways again.
5:30-6:00 - At his desk again!
6:00 - Cafeteria starts serving dinner. Grabs a bunch of food, throws it in his backpack, and heads to the parking lot.
This went on for years. The other teammates joked that he must have blackmail dirt on the boss because it was obvious to everyone that he wasn’t doing anything and nobody seemed to care. He was there when I joined the company and was there when I left, years later. He may very well be still there today, merging code.
I remember when Oracle took over Sun and they brought in the free soda drinks where you can grab a can and they're constantly replenished. I brought in a backpack and filled it then took it home. After a week of doing that I had all these soda cans to drink but I realized I didn't like soda anymore. Larry is the best.
I'm sorry but the example you gave for your argument makes no sense at all. Most people here have tasks and daily meetings where these tasks are discussed or at least briefly mentioned (in other words, your "iPad guy" is already there).
If someone is slacking, it is immediately visible. Can you abuse the system by providing fake explanations for why one task takes so long? Of course, but you can do the same whether you work remotely or not, and this can also be easily verified in both cases.
Well all the people at the top were machiavellian bastards on their rise. But they need underlings to not be machiavellian to get the best operating business and stock performance.
So they need to be visibly watched.
Of course ascending the hierarchy means visibly larger and larger numbers of underlings. Zoom phantoms don't count in that swinging duck contest.
> Unfortunately: there's about 10-20% of people who genuinely shouldn't be working because they are untrustworthy, and things like remote work just enabled them to take multiple jobs or slack-off massively.
There are better ways to deal with those people. I'm not convinced that is the reason for RTO.
The real reason, IMO, is there is all this office real estate that needs a justification to exist.
I think a lot of people aren't actually aware of how much they already rely on trust - I dread to think how much an actually adversarial employee could have cost as many of the places I have worked...
It did always strike me as somewhat unreasonable that my job trusts me with the ability to spin up an arbitrary number of $100/hour AWS instances, but not with purchasing a $60 mouse.
It’s kind of terrifying to have and give out admin powers with no oversight (except maybe forensics if we’re lucky). I’m interested in what alternatives could look like. Maybe provisioning requests take multiple signatures, like turning missile keys?
Trust is a key enabler. I avoid low-trust environments, because nothing can get done there, everyone is suspicious and puts CYA first.
Ironically, a high-transparency, high-trust environment is exactly what makes teams of remote workers efficient. But it greatly helps in the office, too.
>Unfortunately: there's about 10-20% of people who genuinely shouldn't be working because they are untrustworthy, and things like remote work just enabled them to take multiple jobs or slack-off massively.
Many of these people suffer from chronic procrastination. They don't want to slack off, but they do it anyway. They want to work, but they're not capable of working in a remote environment. These might be the people who have ADD/ADHD, people who suffer from depression, extroverts, etc. For some of them, the fix is surprisingly easy: put them in an environment where there are people around them. It can be a coffee shop, library, or whole-day video call.
Source: I'm a co-founder of a body-doubling platform for remote workers.
On other platforms, you work with the platforms' other users. If you don't show up to a scheduled session or disconnect mid-session, nobody is going to care. You might get a bad review or an automated email, but that's it. If you're a chronic procrastinator, you might have just started another zero-day.
On WorkMode you work with our employee (Productivity Partner), and their only job is to ensure that you stay productive throughout the day. You always work with the same Productivity Partner. They'll call you 15-30 minutes before your session starts to remind you about it and to make sure you prepare for work. They will notice if you don't show up, and they'll call you to find out what happened. They'll call you if you disappear mid-day or your lunch break takes more than you planned.
They'll keep track of your to-do list and help you break down tasks into manageable pieces. They pay much more attention to what you do and how you do it (perfectionism/productive procrastination/detrimental context switching). They know when you might procrastinate and what may trigger it. You can do 30, 60, or 4-hour sessions - it's up to you. The focus is on you.
Now, should you try WorkMode? If you already use Focusmate, Flown, or Focus101 and it works for you - keep doing that; you're doing great! If, however, it's hit-and-miss, you have zero days or need extra accountability, definitely try WorkMode :-)
Being in a random coffee shop won’t help. I do way less work than I used to because it’s just not visible anymore. Working really hard or working 50% and talking it up well in standup looks exactly the same. Back in the office you couldn’t get away with watching YouTube or sleeping for half the day.
It doesn't help you. Merely going to a coffee shop works for some people (me included). This is exactly what allowed me to finish my master's thesis two decades ago.
When discussing procrastination, it's important to remember that it's just a result of something else. Many things may cause procrastination, and everyone is different. It's like a headache. You might have the flu, a hangover, too high blood pressure, cancer, or be overly sensitive to external stimuli. You might also suffer from thousands of other causes. The result is that you have a headache, but there's no single cure for it.
I'm undiagnosed "but many markers" (according to a psychiatrist) ADHD and I find the opposite. A problem, in context, with a time-frame and I can do it much much easier remote.
In the office there's too many things that either distract me directly or are distractions for me indirectly. (people coming up to me to ask questions vs overhearing a problem and thinking I need to listen or step in).
Even Apple’s execs are willfully blind on this. Utterly baffling. There’s plenty of room at Apple Park for everyone to have a door that closes, but they insist on doubling people up in offices or open-plan labs. The entire executive class across the industry is broken.
I'll admit that I kind of like being in the office. However, I absolutely loathe commuting. There's honestly not a good solution. The best solutions are all overly optimistic. The ideal would be that all the employees lived 5-10 minutes away.
I prefer hybrid models don't dictate constraints like that and just set percentages that you should hit over time.
I'm in a long distance relationship and I'm okay with going into the office 4-5 days a week for 6 out of 8 weeks as long as I can be full remote for 2 out of 8 weeks.
I personally have really not had this experience - especially given that a lot of companies in tech seem to have landed on either remote or hybrid (3 days in two days optional). I also think that this is fundamentally a city design issue (expenses, time, mental health), rather than a work issue.
"creativity", my ass. 99% of people aren't hired to be creative. They're hired to be quick and efficient.
After over three years WFH now, I know that my performance has improved. Anyone asking me to move around town every day will simply have to pay for that additional task now.
Indeed, I think VCs and founders are (predictably) focused on the cases where creativity and learning are important.
I think I have a job like that where we're building a new product, and very often we have ideas or realise issues that I don't think we would if we didn't have in person communication.
But there are a lot of jobs where your won't get rewarded for that and where in person interactions don't actually produce that much value.
Bunch of bs and conjectures strung into a fluff piece. There is no way to construct best teams while concentrated into 1 physical place. It's impossible, especially when looking to build a distributed team on 24hrs. You can get a few people to work together but for full 24/7 coverage wfh distribution is best. Easier to hire and replace workers, consequently.
So far all responses to articles about to wfh or not wfh have been far more nuanced; it’s good for some, not good for others to wfh. Some people love the office and do their best work to waste half a day or more of the day commuting and talking about the weather in ‘meetings’ while others (and I guess you feel in what camp I am) get far more done at home.
Forcing everyone into offices is only about control and bad managers not being sure how to show their job is actually worth anything at all. Hint; it very often isn’t. Their jobs can often be replaced by a trivial piece of saas software.
> Like many HNers
Show of hands please as I don’t know if this is the case; I haven’t seen it. Like said; it’s mostly more nuanced and almost no one here I have seen claiming that ‘everyone RTO’ is a good plan, at all.
What has played out with RTO is a prisoner's dilemma scenario with astoundingly low defection rates. Return to office is a prisoner's dilemma for executives where "defection" means permitting WFH and "cooperation" means enforcing return to office.
If a company dictates that their employees return to the physical office but their competitors do not, there is a likelihood of losing valuable talent to companies with remote-friendly working conditions.
If both the company and all their competitors allow work-from-home to continue, then all of them, as industry decision-makers, must adjust policies, expectations, and operations to reflect this shift. While this scenario does not lead to a talent exodus, it does entail some other costs. Potential costs to this mutual “defection,” the acceptance of a “new office normal,” could include investors pointing out the wasteful operational expense of unused office space. Additionally, investor pressure from commercial real estate interests may also oppose such leadership decisions.
If the company “cooperates,” such that they insist on RTO while all of their competitors simultaneously insist that their employees need to work in-the-office, then no one has to adjust company policies to operate in a remote company environment. The effect of this will be employees open to recruitment finding their choices for alternative, more accommodating employers scarce and in low supply.
In this multi-player, game-theoretic landscape, where CEOs want to avoid the costs (real or potential) of allowing their people the ability to work remotely, cooperating companies need as few “defector” companies in their industrial sector as possible. With their other choices few and far-between, employees seeking the freedom to continue working from home will eventually give up on their WFH-oriented job hunts and decide to stay on in their current positions.
> there is a likelihood of losing valuable talent to companies with remote-friendly working conditions.
They ARE losing talent to remote-friendly companies, actually.
It's just that retaining talent isn't their priority. They overhired and don't want a PR issue so they'd rather make it as miserable as possible so that some people leave on their own.
The big tech companies own and lease commercial property and are all trying to prevent the CRE landscape from completely detonating on them. They are all incentivized directly towards RTO and to loudly banging the drum about RTO to try to convince others not to defect.
I find this type of argument about RTO to be pretty poor. I think it’s pretty lazy to crank out a vibes based article describing specific grievances and generalizing to an entire population. I think the real discussion about RTO, pro or con, is a lot more nuanced, and this type of argument does a disservice to the complexities.
In my experience, a lot of the compelling arguments I’ve heard are actually complaints about poor North American city design, rather than necessarily anti-being in a reasonable office.
Completely agree; I think an argument can be made that there are a lot of benefits to in-person interaction. Most anti-RTO arguments I’ve seen boil down to “I don’t like my commute” which has less to do with RTO and more to do with America’s lack of meaningful transportation infrastructure.
I believe, most of the companies that we hear instituting an RTO mandate have distributed teams, so that in-person interaction wouldn't manifest in these cases. Also, I live in a country with very meaningful transportation infrastructure, I still wouldn't want to spend 1.5-2 hours every day crammed into said infrastructure at rush hour for no good reason. Buying a car would have saved me 30 minutes tops and I find it irresponsible when public transport is available.
Thankfully, I no longer work for a company that mandates in-office work and even the telco (!) I used to work for had unlimited home office even before the pandemic, which worked beautifully and saved them lots of money.
Having an office to go to helps the more socially inclined employees, but doesn't boost productivity uniformly, especially when everyone is on calls all day anyway.
Just like home office, full in-office work needs a very special setup to be truly effective and given global hiring, may be harder to achieve that a remote culture.
> I believe, most of the companies that we hear instituting an RTO mandate have distributed teams, so that in-person interaction wouldn't manifest in these cases.
I agree that RTO makes no sense if you’re going to spend your entire day in calls. That said, I would actually go a bit further, and argue that distributed teams themselves are a bad idea for that reason.
That then becomes a hiring problem as that's limiting it to one geographic area. If it falls out of favor in 5 or 10 years, it's really hard to move the company. I've seen effective remote teams, but it requires a high degree of independence from everyone. Typically, it's also much harder for people early in their careers.
The pandemic helped me understand the cost of infectious disease and made me realize that I could work effectively remotely and that the cost of in-person on my health wasn't worth it.
I used to live right next to the office, but I wouldn't go today even if I still lived that close. Also, living in a more rural environment is pretty great.
Couldn't agree with you more, and honestly I think you're softballing it here:
> I think it’s pretty lazy to crank out a vibes based article describing specific grievances and generalizing to an entire population.
In that the article doesn't even describe _specific_ grievances, really; we get three quotes in this order:
- A Paul Graham tweet where he says "multiple founders" have changed their minds; the _personal_ opinion he expresses is that "he doubts things will go all the way back to the way they were before Covid, but it looks like they will go most of the way back." Nothing specific mentioned about why the founders changed their minds.
- A truly stripped-of-context quote from Keith Rabois that gets closest to saying something specific i.e. 'that younger workers “learn by osmosis,” which requires in-person interaction' (false as presented, and if this is a genuine reflection of his opinion then he doesn't actually understand training) and 'supervisors discover hidden talent by watching [younger employees]' (true enough, but presented as a problem with remote work when it's actually not)
- Absolute banger from Sam Altman: “I think definitely one of the tech industry’s worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody could go full remote forever, and startups didn’t need to be together in person and, you know, there was going to be no loss of creativity ... I would say that the experiment on that is over.” - the implied grievance here is that "remote work makes startups less creative" which is, to its' credit, an actual position for which one can make a coherent argument. He may even have gone to the trouble of doing this at some point, for all I know. The rest is pure sophistry, though - "one of the tech industry's worst mistakes ... was that everybody could go full remote forever" is just not an accurate reflection of what actually happened, and if he's exaggerating for effect, then I'd be interested to know what effect he was going for; he's also really softballing the reason why remote work happened in the first place: it wasn't an "experiment," it was a forced response to a world crisis with existential implications!
There's significant overgeneralizing happening here too, as you suggested; at best, you can say that these guys are referring to what's true of _startups specifically_, where they're at least domain experts, but even if their arguments ARE true of startups (and I am deeply skeptical that this is the case) you can't assume that they'll be true of OTHER organizational types.
If you work in a cubicle farm you are not making the big bucks, meaning that your house is probably not that big and comfortable. I prefer going to the office because there I have a big desk with multiple monitors and a powerful desktop computer, a set up that I really can't afford at home without sacrificing precious space. Sure, if you work at Google you can a afford a nice big home with a dedicated WFH space and you might rightly feel that going back to the office is a downgrade, but that's not for everyone.
GOD I KNOW RIGHT. Elder millenial here, I got the luxury of a cubicle ONCE, briefly at the start of my career.... never again.
Never understood Dilbert poking fun of cubicles so much till I realized what they replaced was widespread private offices! For most or all engineering staff, not just the executives!
What really confuses me is -- isn't corporate america in 2025 way way way way more profitable than in 1980? So why can't we afford private offices or even cubicles anymore?
Yes, I briefly considered that idea and immediately discarded it. It would only make any sense at all in industries where the cubicles were a big part of the costs and margins were thin.
I'd say most industries do not match this description, and that most of the increase in the S&P500 over the last 40 years was due to real revenue growth, not cost cutting
Because the bare minimum employers can get away with is increasing. They see they can cram more people into a space with poorer conditions and it's not causing a huge backlash, so that's how it becomes common everywhere.
We need a Benjamin button movie set in the work place where you have a 20 something starting today and working back till the 1960s so people can see what we've lost.
Looks like i’m in one of those minorities who like going to office. My major point is those spontaneous interactions that i have with my colleagues that gives me a lot of ideas. With work from home all those are gone. Hate commuting to office. An ideal world would be walk to office and have a hybrid model like 2-3 days in office for me.
I have the same and I don't think we're a (small) minority, at least not in the company where I work.
Almost everyone on my team comes in 2 or 3 times a week. We have some meetings, great (free) lunch, work together on some things, crack lots of jokes and get to informally chat about things you don't easily schedule a call for (how you're doing, how you feel things are going in the team, in the company, in life in general - the under current that doesn't get visible easily).
It of course helps that my commute is 25 minutes and that our office space is only for our team. There is a natural ebb and flow to when people get loud and active, and when we're burried in our screens cracking a problem, so you also get to be productive.
I do work from home as well. I really like that I have the freedom to balance wfh and wfo.
Even though I could WFH most days, I go to the office whenever I can. The point is exactly in being away from home and its distractions. It's much easier to concentrate when in an office.
I worked from home for years, on and off, so I can definitely compare.
> Many believe that the incidental, physical interaction that occurs between people at the office is superior to the conversations that take place on video calls and Slack.
I didn't believe it and when I started going in to scope things out, I started believe it. I think what happens here is the author of each individual article will have had a specific set of experiences and that's the assumption they make for everyone. IME I don't see how the incidental conversations happen remotely, everyone is eager to get off calls, as there can be so many it becomes draining. So clearly me and my colleagues are missing some key ingredient that's probably obvious to everyone else.
A lot of folk need the social interaction of work, while other just want to do the job and that's it. Dealing with people constantly is exhausting for some of us.
It’s only a minority opinion in tech. Every non tech worker I’ve spoken to says they wouldn’t want to work entirely remote. Most people do not desire that level of social isolation.
Mistake or not, life is all about leverage. And the balance of power has swung back from employee to employer now that we're done with the covid bubble. Managers must tame their unruly cattle and punish them for their past transgressions when the cattle briefly had a moment of increased leverage.
The sad part is that other industries are even worse about this, I know people in the medical system that have to buy gifts for people higher in the hierarchy in order to advance. So we're still kind of blessed for now, well until AI removes all our leverage at least.
Yup, guard robots won't be useful until they can beat 30+ people or do something to the first guy that the rest would have to run away. Same for AGI, it won't be called AGI (or conscious for that matter) until it can purposefully do malice.
If you care about leverage then you should consider what kind of immigration policies you support, because bringing in more workers reduces the leverage of the current pool of workers, by increasing supply. The harder it is for your boss to find a competent replacement, the more leverage you have when negotiating with him/her.
It's more expensive for my employer to hire people in my country than to hire people in other countries, because the salaries in other countries are lower. As an effect, they basically don't hire new employees in my country because eastern Europe, India, Vietnam etc is cheaper.
With your reasoning I should definitively support immigration policies which bring more people to my country, since that will make the hiring pool smaller and my leverage will go up. Is that what you meant?
There sure seem like a lot of data-driven companies out there that really want to just go with their gut feelings about whether or not returning to the office is a good idea.
If developers are more productive at home, how are businesses that rent big expensive buildings for no benefit (or negative value) not being wiped out in the market? I don’t want RTO either but this seems suspicious.
Because developer productivity doesn't matter that much to big companies regardless of what they say. Their margins are high, and it's why google can have an entire team making sure their AI can't generate images of white people and still rake in more cash than god from their search monopoly.
The companies mandating RTO seem to be in the few thousand employees and up range. My experience is that at those sizes a developer spends most of their time figuring out what and how to code, which is mostly done in meetings. Writing code in such a setup is a relatively small part of the work. Developer effectiveness doesn't have that large of an impact on their success, whereas organizational skills and leadership do.
WFH is not for everyone. With kids around, no matter where I isolate myself in the house it's impossible to do it. Leaving home, going to work, interacting with coworkers, telling jokes, eating at the same table, I realized 90% of the problems are solved at cigarette brake, brunch, launch, etc. Meetings are the only thing I would WFH... god burn them with fire.
The conditions for successful work from home are: hire well experienced back office employees, have relaxed yet firm deadlines, conduct daily meetings, keep your middle management busy with more important work than helicoptering over their team, use your office space for more than just a place to sit, etc.
Businesses with multiple offices have been doing "remote" work for decades. This is more about company scale than policy. Too small or too large and you'll struggle keeping people organized. Mid-sized businesses are the majority and few have required returning to the office.
People are not identical and you can't apply the same policy for a labor force of 3 billion. If you think your policy is so right, stop calling people names who disagree with you. Go run your company as you think is right. If your employees are happy, you're doing something right, ignore the stupid people on the internet.
There’s an elephant in the room here. The pandemic pushed WFH over the Rubicon. Now the only way to put that genie back in the bottle is when the majority of companies force RTO. When the they don’t, RTO companies are deliberately and knowingly sabotaging their own companies by paying higher salaries and relocation for talent that is not geographically local. Remote companies are competing on a completely different playing field now they have reached that mass effect. So RTO company CEO’s should now be deeply questioned on their policies by shareholders since it is deliberately damaging to their companies to forcibly restrict talent and to pay more for it.
When I don't intend to do any actual work, I go to the office. Socialising is nice, and in part important. Some discussions are only had in that setting.
When I want to do actual work, I stay at home.
If I couldn't decide how to best do my job, I'd have a chat with my manager, and change jobs if we couldn't agree on something so basic.
Well... It's clear that the modern city, the modern Fordlandia, today named Telosa, Prospera, Arkadag, Innopolis, ... is just a farm of humans that works just to pay services they can't live without, ending up in owning nothing and NOT being happy except happy in the Canon idea of happiness: https://petapixel.com/2021/06/17/canon-uses-ai-cameras-that-... RTO policies are because of that.
If we start en masse to realize that we can live in homes, spread enough to have the ideal density for today sane economy of scale, modern surveillance capitalism, modern "sharing economy" fails. The biggest that have craft them and profit on them will fail. A new economy will emerge and they can't switch quick enough.
Money in the modern world are extractors of value from the 99%, given it to a small cleptocracy, this cleptocracy need humans like Ford model workers in Fordlandia. People who live to work in a factory they do not own, in a hierarchy not a democracy, trapped by economic genital lace, conformism, habits.
That's why most try to push RTO and SOME "slaves" help them fearing the change, unable to realize that changes happen anyway and try avoiding them means suffer them letting others decide and direct the change.
Every article I read about this topic, whether advocating for RTO or against it, is black and white. The policy, whichever way the article prefers, is good or bad. No in between.
If your job is highly collaborative, being in one place is so much better. Videoconferencing sucks, if your work requires collaborating with teams that do not share the same context as yours.
If your job requires long periods of sustained focus, working from home is better.
What I do agree with is that most companies and their leaders have no f*cking idea about how to think about remote or in-office work properly. They got with their own personal preferences, anecdotal evidence and authorative bullshit (if I don't see you working, I don't think you're working).
My company senior management said they're doing an RTO three days a week as other big companies are doing it. It feels like a version of brinkmanship between employers and employees to see who blinks first.
I work for this company because I am remote. I wouldn't work for them if I wasn't. These employers are either don't grasp that, don't want to, or are happy for the attritution.
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[ 8.8 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadNot only has my company been increasingly pressuring RTO, they are getting rid of offices and even cubicles. You can now hotel in an open office hellscape. Return to office and double down on miserable working conditions.
It feels like the execs just want to reinforce who is in charge.
Be it that they don't trust them to have the right idea, or trust them to do the work. Nearly all business practises we hate are caused by a measure of overt control over your daily time and a strict measuring of your time and tasks.
Unfortunately: there's about 10-20% of people who genuinely shouldn't be working because they are untrustworthy, and things like remote work just enabled them to take multiple jobs or slack-off massively.
So these practices mostly exist to deal with those people and the rest of us just suffer.
Loosely related anecdote why I feel so:
For a while right after Apple started its mandatory RTO and ramped up Caffe Macs, the soda "grab n go" sections had an honor system - you paid your $1.25 for a coke and went on your way. Apparently there was a _lot_ of petty theft of drinks, so they have a person with an iPad check you off now, and I assume theft has basically plummeted since there's far less employees brazen enough to just barge off with one without checking off their name.
So maybe the RTO is effective in someway? Or maybe the real lesson is that the soda should have been free to begin with.
Even my first job out of college as a boilerroom MSP sysadmin earning $40k in manhattan gave us free soda (the only benefit lol)
I mean, even if you work as a mechanic at a body shop, there is often free coffee in an old pot in the break room, it's not that crazy.
But outside of that context, no of course I don't expect/care if my employer provides me with free soda. I don't even drink it.
It just seems weirdly cheapskate for a supposed FAANG-class employer.
But most of all, it's just the message. All the other "nice" employers do it, even some pretty "basic" employers do (not surprising, this is a very cheap perk, only a little more expensive than breakroom coffee), so if you don't, it you look like a cheapskate. Like what else are you cheaping out on?
I also don't drink much coffee, but would see it as a red flag if they cut costs by getting rid of the coffee in the break room, and that's a red flag that would hold even if I was working as a retail cashier (that's not an industry where free break room coffee is standard, but it's not unusual, so while I wouldn't care if a company never offered it, if I was a cashier at a company that had it, and then they took it away, the message would be obvious -- we are preparing to cut costs at the expense of your work life, our company is no longer growing, jump ship if you can)
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-free-cafeteria-lun...
In short, when a company starts to pay attention to such petty details as the cost of soda, which must be a rounding error in the cost of running an office of a decent engineering company, it's a signal that the culture has changed. With that change, best engineering talent often leaves towards places where priorities are still aligned with lofty goals, not bean-counting.
(Disclaimer: of last 10 companies I've worked for, only two did not offer free soda, due to being 100% remote.)
[1]: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
My current place has free instant coffee (until it runs out) and everyone who wants to push for more than that is viewed with 'tall poppy syndrome'.
About 3 years before I left they removed the soda machines. My understanding was that it only cost about $30k / year and most of that was for cups & lids. We even had an executive that was willing to pay for it out of their budget. No go.
It turns out that the catering company that supplied food to the building didn't like losing out on the soda money. So they told KFC/YUM! to remove the free soda option, and they did. It really was the beginning of the end.
It's not so much that the soda was gone it was the thought of it. That free soda actually solved quite a few programming problems, or at least allowed us to solve them on our way downstairs. It also let us work harder/later than we normally would by giving us that afternoon journey. It's positive effect was much greater than it's financial cost.
Ever worked in an office? At any corporation size no one works 8 hours a day and if you want to slack, there are plenty opportunities in the office as well. Hell, you can spend the whole day there without doing ANYTHING.
So that is a non-point for me, slackers gonna slack.
9:25 - Arrival (cafeteria stopped serving breakfast at 9:30.
9:30-10:15 - Breakfast
10:15-11:30 - A lot of walking around the office, having business-sounding conversations with others but really getting nothing done.
11:30-1:00 - Out for lunch.
1:00-3:00 - Sneak out to car in the parking lot for a nap.
3:00-3:30 - Daily standup. Vaguely talk about how he’s “merging code” or “updating library dependencies” this week.
3:30-4:00 - At desk working.
4:00-5:30 - Doing his walk-around-talk-arounds through the office hallways again.
5:30-6:00 - At his desk again!
6:00 - Cafeteria starts serving dinner. Grabs a bunch of food, throws it in his backpack, and heads to the parking lot.
This went on for years. The other teammates joked that he must have blackmail dirt on the boss because it was obvious to everyone that he wasn’t doing anything and nobody seemed to care. He was there when I joined the company and was there when I left, years later. He may very well be still there today, merging code.
09:25 - arrive.
09:30 - 10:00; breakfast
10:00 - 10:30; standup
10:30 - 11:00; Coffee after standup
11:00 - 11:30; checking emails before lunch
11:30 - 13:00; lunch
13:00 - 13:30; food coma, better just check some emails
13:30 - 14:00; coffee and a chat
14:00 - 15:00; maybe some actual work
15:00 - 15:45; someone needs help, they come over and have a chat
15:45 - 16:30; maybe some more work
16:30 - 17:00 wrap up, go home, urgently write some emails and expect a response before you arrive 09:25 tomorrow.
I've seen this, a lot of this.
If someone is slacking, it is immediately visible. Can you abuse the system by providing fake explanations for why one task takes so long? Of course, but you can do the same whether you work remotely or not, and this can also be easily verified in both cases.
So they need to be visibly watched.
Of course ascending the hierarchy means visibly larger and larger numbers of underlings. Zoom phantoms don't count in that swinging duck contest.
There are better ways to deal with those people. I'm not convinced that is the reason for RTO.
The real reason, IMO, is there is all this office real estate that needs a justification to exist.
https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/the-art-of-simple-sabotage...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/id-governance/privil...
Ironically, a high-transparency, high-trust environment is exactly what makes teams of remote workers efficient. But it greatly helps in the office, too.
Many of these people suffer from chronic procrastination. They don't want to slack off, but they do it anyway. They want to work, but they're not capable of working in a remote environment. These might be the people who have ADD/ADHD, people who suffer from depression, extroverts, etc. For some of them, the fix is surprisingly easy: put them in an environment where there are people around them. It can be a coffee shop, library, or whole-day video call.
Source: I'm a co-founder of a body-doubling platform for remote workers.
On WorkMode you work with our employee (Productivity Partner), and their only job is to ensure that you stay productive throughout the day. You always work with the same Productivity Partner. They'll call you 15-30 minutes before your session starts to remind you about it and to make sure you prepare for work. They will notice if you don't show up, and they'll call you to find out what happened. They'll call you if you disappear mid-day or your lunch break takes more than you planned.
They'll keep track of your to-do list and help you break down tasks into manageable pieces. They pay much more attention to what you do and how you do it (perfectionism/productive procrastination/detrimental context switching). They know when you might procrastinate and what may trigger it. You can do 30, 60, or 4-hour sessions - it's up to you. The focus is on you.
Now, should you try WorkMode? If you already use Focusmate, Flown, or Focus101 and it works for you - keep doing that; you're doing great! If, however, it's hit-and-miss, you have zero days or need extra accountability, definitely try WorkMode :-)
It doesn't help you. Merely going to a coffee shop works for some people (me included). This is exactly what allowed me to finish my master's thesis two decades ago.
When discussing procrastination, it's important to remember that it's just a result of something else. Many things may cause procrastination, and everyone is different. It's like a headache. You might have the flu, a hangover, too high blood pressure, cancer, or be overly sensitive to external stimuli. You might also suffer from thousands of other causes. The result is that you have a headache, but there's no single cure for it.
In the office there's too many things that either distract me directly or are distractions for me indirectly. (people coming up to me to ask questions vs overhearing a problem and thinking I need to listen or step in).
I'm in a long distance relationship and I'm okay with going into the office 4-5 days a week for 6 out of 8 weeks as long as I can be full remote for 2 out of 8 weeks.
But I am NOT okay with 2 days every week.
[1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/paul-graham-says-remote-does-...
After over three years WFH now, I know that my performance has improved. Anyone asking me to move around town every day will simply have to pay for that additional task now.
I think I have a job like that where we're building a new product, and very often we have ideas or realise issues that I don't think we would if we didn't have in person communication.
But there are a lot of jobs where your won't get rewarded for that and where in person interactions don't actually produce that much value.
Forcing everyone into offices is only about control and bad managers not being sure how to show their job is actually worth anything at all. Hint; it very often isn’t. Their jobs can often be replaced by a trivial piece of saas software.
> Like many HNers
Show of hands please as I don’t know if this is the case; I haven’t seen it. Like said; it’s mostly more nuanced and almost no one here I have seen claiming that ‘everyone RTO’ is a good plan, at all.
If a company dictates that their employees return to the physical office but their competitors do not, there is a likelihood of losing valuable talent to companies with remote-friendly working conditions.
If both the company and all their competitors allow work-from-home to continue, then all of them, as industry decision-makers, must adjust policies, expectations, and operations to reflect this shift. While this scenario does not lead to a talent exodus, it does entail some other costs. Potential costs to this mutual “defection,” the acceptance of a “new office normal,” could include investors pointing out the wasteful operational expense of unused office space. Additionally, investor pressure from commercial real estate interests may also oppose such leadership decisions.
If the company “cooperates,” such that they insist on RTO while all of their competitors simultaneously insist that their employees need to work in-the-office, then no one has to adjust company policies to operate in a remote company environment. The effect of this will be employees open to recruitment finding their choices for alternative, more accommodating employers scarce and in low supply.
In this multi-player, game-theoretic landscape, where CEOs want to avoid the costs (real or potential) of allowing their people the ability to work remotely, cooperating companies need as few “defector” companies in their industrial sector as possible. With their other choices few and far-between, employees seeking the freedom to continue working from home will eventually give up on their WFH-oriented job hunts and decide to stay on in their current positions.
That could be the official slogan of any successful ruling class.
They ARE losing talent to remote-friendly companies, actually.
It's just that retaining talent isn't their priority. They overhired and don't want a PR issue so they'd rather make it as miserable as possible so that some people leave on their own.
In my experience, a lot of the compelling arguments I’ve heard are actually complaints about poor North American city design, rather than necessarily anti-being in a reasonable office.
Thankfully, I no longer work for a company that mandates in-office work and even the telco (!) I used to work for had unlimited home office even before the pandemic, which worked beautifully and saved them lots of money.
Having an office to go to helps the more socially inclined employees, but doesn't boost productivity uniformly, especially when everyone is on calls all day anyway.
Just like home office, full in-office work needs a very special setup to be truly effective and given global hiring, may be harder to achieve that a remote culture.
I agree that RTO makes no sense if you’re going to spend your entire day in calls. That said, I would actually go a bit further, and argue that distributed teams themselves are a bad idea for that reason.
I used to live right next to the office, but I wouldn't go today even if I still lived that close. Also, living in a more rural environment is pretty great.
> I think it’s pretty lazy to crank out a vibes based article describing specific grievances and generalizing to an entire population.
In that the article doesn't even describe _specific_ grievances, really; we get three quotes in this order:
- A Paul Graham tweet where he says "multiple founders" have changed their minds; the _personal_ opinion he expresses is that "he doubts things will go all the way back to the way they were before Covid, but it looks like they will go most of the way back." Nothing specific mentioned about why the founders changed their minds.
- A truly stripped-of-context quote from Keith Rabois that gets closest to saying something specific i.e. 'that younger workers “learn by osmosis,” which requires in-person interaction' (false as presented, and if this is a genuine reflection of his opinion then he doesn't actually understand training) and 'supervisors discover hidden talent by watching [younger employees]' (true enough, but presented as a problem with remote work when it's actually not)
- Absolute banger from Sam Altman: “I think definitely one of the tech industry’s worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody could go full remote forever, and startups didn’t need to be together in person and, you know, there was going to be no loss of creativity ... I would say that the experiment on that is over.” - the implied grievance here is that "remote work makes startups less creative" which is, to its' credit, an actual position for which one can make a coherent argument. He may even have gone to the trouble of doing this at some point, for all I know. The rest is pure sophistry, though - "one of the tech industry's worst mistakes ... was that everybody could go full remote forever" is just not an accurate reflection of what actually happened, and if he's exaggerating for effect, then I'd be interested to know what effect he was going for; he's also really softballing the reason why remote work happened in the first place: it wasn't an "experiment," it was a forced response to a world crisis with existential implications!
There's significant overgeneralizing happening here too, as you suggested; at best, you can say that these guys are referring to what's true of _startups specifically_, where they're at least domain experts, but even if their arguments ARE true of startups (and I am deeply skeptical that this is the case) you can't assume that they'll be true of OTHER organizational types.
Never understood Dilbert poking fun of cubicles so much till I realized what they replaced was widespread private offices! For most or all engineering staff, not just the executives!
What really confuses me is -- isn't corporate america in 2025 way way way way more profitable than in 1980? So why can't we afford private offices or even cubicles anymore?
I'd say most industries do not match this description, and that most of the increase in the S&P500 over the last 40 years was due to real revenue growth, not cost cutting
I find commuting both annoying and nice. It allows me to clear my head and switch over to the other mindset.
Almost everyone on my team comes in 2 or 3 times a week. We have some meetings, great (free) lunch, work together on some things, crack lots of jokes and get to informally chat about things you don't easily schedule a call for (how you're doing, how you feel things are going in the team, in the company, in life in general - the under current that doesn't get visible easily).
It of course helps that my commute is 25 minutes and that our office space is only for our team. There is a natural ebb and flow to when people get loud and active, and when we're burried in our screens cracking a problem, so you also get to be productive.
I do work from home as well. I really like that I have the freedom to balance wfh and wfo.
I worked from home for years, on and off, so I can definitely compare.
I didn't believe it and when I started going in to scope things out, I started believe it. I think what happens here is the author of each individual article will have had a specific set of experiences and that's the assumption they make for everyone. IME I don't see how the incidental conversations happen remotely, everyone is eager to get off calls, as there can be so many it becomes draining. So clearly me and my colleagues are missing some key ingredient that's probably obvious to everyone else.
Show HN: Return To Office Mandates suck
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39745254
Oh we still have the leverage of being a big mass then. AI won't beat physical violence in case of a revolution.
On a long enough time scale it beats everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_warfare
With your reasoning I should definitively support immigration policies which bring more people to my country, since that will make the hiring pool smaller and my leverage will go up. Is that what you meant?
I'd like to have a conversation with an executive at a company about that. The logical somersaults I'd likely hear would be something else.
Also, non-IT stuff can also keep office rental businesses up and running.
The conditions for successful work from home are: hire well experienced back office employees, have relaxed yet firm deadlines, conduct daily meetings, keep your middle management busy with more important work than helicoptering over their team, use your office space for more than just a place to sit, etc.
Businesses with multiple offices have been doing "remote" work for decades. This is more about company scale than policy. Too small or too large and you'll struggle keeping people organized. Mid-sized businesses are the majority and few have required returning to the office.
When I want to do actual work, I stay at home.
If I couldn't decide how to best do my job, I'd have a chat with my manager, and change jobs if we couldn't agree on something so basic.
- https://nypost.com/2024/03/19/us-news/less-than-one-in-three...
- https://mishtalk.com/economics/half-of-downtown-pittsburgh-o...
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-20/baltimore... and https://buyintobmore.baltimorecity.gov/
Well... It's clear that the modern city, the modern Fordlandia, today named Telosa, Prospera, Arkadag, Innopolis, ... is just a farm of humans that works just to pay services they can't live without, ending up in owning nothing and NOT being happy except happy in the Canon idea of happiness: https://petapixel.com/2021/06/17/canon-uses-ai-cameras-that-... RTO policies are because of that.
If we start en masse to realize that we can live in homes, spread enough to have the ideal density for today sane economy of scale, modern surveillance capitalism, modern "sharing economy" fails. The biggest that have craft them and profit on them will fail. A new economy will emerge and they can't switch quick enough.
Money in the modern world are extractors of value from the 99%, given it to a small cleptocracy, this cleptocracy need humans like Ford model workers in Fordlandia. People who live to work in a factory they do not own, in a hierarchy not a democracy, trapped by economic genital lace, conformism, habits.
That's why most try to push RTO and SOME "slaves" help them fearing the change, unable to realize that changes happen anyway and try avoiding them means suffer them letting others decide and direct the change.
If your job is highly collaborative, being in one place is so much better. Videoconferencing sucks, if your work requires collaborating with teams that do not share the same context as yours.
If your job requires long periods of sustained focus, working from home is better.
What I do agree with is that most companies and their leaders have no f*cking idea about how to think about remote or in-office work properly. They got with their own personal preferences, anecdotal evidence and authorative bullshit (if I don't see you working, I don't think you're working).
I work for this company because I am remote. I wouldn't work for them if I wasn't. These employers are either don't grasp that, don't want to, or are happy for the attritution.