I was at Google during their initial “return to office” mandate.
During the TGIF (company all hands) discussing this, the architect of the policy, someone high up in the HR org, explained why it was necessary.
I don’t recall what they said, but I do recall that they happened to be working remotely at the time, after the policy against remote work had already gone into effect.
The brazenness of lecturing us on why remote work was harmful to Google while working remotely was shocking. Predictably, the internal anger over this was enormous.
Rules for thee but not for me, some animals are more equal than others, etc.
The Stanford Hospital Nurses strike was driven by similar dynamics. Nurses had to work overtime through the entire pandemic while executives literally phoned it in for years! They were shocked, shocked, to discover that there was anger and resentment.
It was little surprise that more than half were showing up daily on picket lines as admin was apparently surprised that they couldn't find "travelers" to fill critical ICU roles, while surgeons continued scheduling elective surgeries.
It's still the case that the HR executive officer resides in LA and that Payroll is managed (with financially catastrophic results) from Hawaii. Both discipline and scheduling are also done almost entirely remote. It would be hilarious if not for the effects on staff and patients.
The nature of nursing is that you have to be in person. What HR did (and has been doing) is keeping the number of staff at a barebones level. They don't, for example, hire enough nurses that if one is out sick (during covid!) that there could be someone to cover the shift.
They went so far as to only hire travel nurses (temps), who were commanding 100k+ salaries, when things got bad enough rather than filling a full time position. And, to add insult to injury, the nurses themselves have been getting salaries in the 30->50k range. So HR could have literally filled 2+ positions for the cost of a single travel nurse.
That's what has lead to a nursing shortage and burnout. HR cost cutting because "we just need the minimum and no backups". It's a big part of the strikes.
Believe it or not, many nurses and doctors working in healthcare actually care about their patients. Something HR is more than willing to exploit to get them to work ridiculous hours.
I thought I had seen businesses run by every conceivable group, founders, engineers, sales, marketing, finance... and then I saw a hospital and realized it was run by HR. Every "may" in a rule becomes "shall" since anything else could be perceived as preferential. It makes the lives of both supervisors and supervised hell. Only the spiteful or incompetent rise.
Of course the "why" is driven by the greatest risk in healthcare. Where most income comes from insurance is stable, the real risk is being sued. Hence rises "there shall be no exceptions" HR rule based hegemony.
I’m in a different country and have different almost everything, but one thing is constant: nurses are treated like crap.
I’m a radiographer and moaned to a colleague about the holdup I’d have with my 7am x-ray ward round in ICU. ‘The nurses are still doing handover at 8am, so won’t help and I can’t do anything.’
An older radiographer told me that the nurses stopped getting paid at 7am. The overtime they were working every single day after a night shift was all unpaid.
I would imagine the logic from the HR director is something like “the reason you’re not as successful as me is you don’t know how to manage your time well”
Fussell’s Class (1983) covers some of this. His upper-middle (in class—income tends to track with these social classes, but not always) are accustomed to very free lifestyles relative to, especially, the middle class (or the lower two tiers of his multifaceted “prole” class—the upper tier of that class does stuff like own successful plumbing or welding businesses, not work at Wal Mart or whatever)
A major class marker distinguishing the upper-middle from the middle ends up being that the former are barely surveilled, largely free to set their own schedule, and basically are trusted to do the right thing (never mind that perfectly ordinary behavior patterns from them would be regarded as instantly fireable for others; it’s a different standard), while the middle gets constant status reports, return to office mandates, stricter start and stop times, maybe drug tests.
(The actual upper class, of course, simply don’t meaningfully have managers at all)
You know that older, expert manager everyone says is great that they bring in to run the business in the show Silicon Valley? Who spends a bunch of his time ignoring the place to breed horses or whatever, and seems to think that’s normal and fine? That’s this kind of thing. He doesn’t even get why that might be wrong, or why it might be shitty to take a big paycheck and ask hard work from others then fuck off to a rich-dude hobby half the time—that’s just what his kind of people do.
I can't speak from personal experience to the accuracy of some of his characterizations, but he nailed the ones that (I now see) form parts of my background and are common in my family: various levels of "prole", plus "middle". It was really weird to see our quirks of behavior and taste (some of which I'd never have noticed if not for the book) dissected and analyzed that way, but fun and gave me new ways of looking at all of it.
I've found his upper-middle and upper class descriptions constantly useful for deepening my insight into media, the news, work-life, and even history. Usually in small ways, but it's still pretty cool. Class markers are everywhere in media, and a lot of it I was surely noticing subconsciously, but being aware of them and able to point out many elements of them is a different experience. It's like seeing into the minds of the set designers, costume designers, and actors.
Awareness in general is already worthwhile, but has it been useful for other things? E.g. Changing your views on government labor policy, worker-friendly laws, etc.
1) I've developed a vague notion that much of the last 3-4 decades has, along with other (mostly bad) social, political, and economic changes in the time after trust-busting got neutered in the 1970s and Reaganism and neoliberalism took over (RIP neoliberalism, at least on one side of the aisle, LOL, glad to see you finally go even if the rest of that's all a shit-show) has been a kind of one-sided upper-middle civil war. It sure looks like the finance guys (solidly part of that class, for the most part) teamed up with the professional managerial class (the least-solidly part of that class, of the major traditional categories therein) to do their best to shove doctors, academics, and to some extent lawyers, down into the Middle, with no organized resistance on the other side.
2) I see a lot of how programmers are treated through this lens. Companies seem extremely reluctant to give programmers upper-middle perks. I think #1 is part of why: managers really, really don't want to mint a new upper-middle cohort even as they're busy clearing the field for only themselves and finance bros, and programmers (lots of us, at least) have the income to be there, but sit in a weird half-in-half-out for the upper middle, because we've mostly been denied things like private offices and certain other liberties, and subjected to micromanagement and humiliating hazing-ritual hiring processes, even as incomes soar and the snacks are good or whatever. Socially we are firmly "under" even a lot of other parts of companies that make less money, and part of that's come through cultivation of certain attitudes about programmers, and denial of "higher" perks.
Beyond that I was already pretty firmly on the side of stronger labor, better labor protection laws, and far more unionization, and Class didn't take me any farther from those things.
I read his optimism for his supposed "Class X" and the plain fact that none of that turned out to be what he thought it was as, if anything, another reason to be for the above. Organization and force (read broadly, I don't necessarily mean stuff like "hitting people") will get us to a better place, not hoping to be saved by a social movement.
Wow I wasn't aware of the realities of #1 but I certainly lived through #2 before I became an independent organizer. I'm buying Class on my next bookstore trip -- thank you for expanding your thoughts!
P.S. Self-plug: you might find my newsletter last month [0] mildly interesting. See the section "My Own Views"
> 2) I see a lot of how programmers are treated through this lens. Companies seem extremely reluctant to give programmers upper-middle perks. I think #1 is part of why: managers really, really don't want to mint a new upper-middle cohort even as they're busy clearing the field for only themselves and finance bros, and programmers (lots of us, at least) have the income to be there, but sit in a weird half-in-half-out for the upper middle, because we've mostly been denied things like private offices and certain other liberties, and subjected to micromanagement and humiliating hazing-ritual hiring processes, even as incomes soar and the snacks are good or whatever.
Indeed, when you describe it, it does seem like the programmers are a medieval feudal peasant class that is let some freedom but actively kept down by the feudal aristocracy.
> (read broadly, I don't necessarily mean stuff like "hitting people")
I don't know of any period in history where the elite let go of their power and privilege without violence.
> A major class marker distinguishing the upper-middle from the middle ends up being that the former are barely surveilled, largely free to set their own schedule, and basically are trusted to do the right thing (never mind that perfectly ordinary behavior patterns from them would be regarded as instantly fireable for others; it’s a different standard), while the middle gets constant status reports, return to office mandates, stricter start and stop times, maybe drug tests.
When I was having trouble finding work this was one of my biggest issues. I was qualified to be working independently but all the entry-level work I could find would have involved being treated like I was in high school again, whereas before I could use the afternoon to tinker or read and no one cared as long as my work was getting done. This is why office jobs end up being coveted to the point that a university graduate will be making the same amount working an office job as a retail associate at a Walmart.
It's time to unionize. The top is out of touch and the valuations of these tech titans aren’t just staggering; they’re symptomatic of a system that values profit over people. These tycoons at the helm are not just steering companies—they’re puppeteering democracy, pushing political agendas that many of us find abhorrent and irrelevant to our lives. Unionization isn’t merely about better pay or working conditions; it’s about reclaiming power from this oligarchy that’s grown too powerful, too influential. The tech community needs to wake up and get these clowns in line, we could shut these companies down if we organize.
Tech and Software adjacent professions have to be ones that are least likely to unionize.
There was an internal survey (unofficial) at my workplace right after a mass layoff 2 years back about how many were interested in forming a union. There were 3 options - Interested, Not Sure and Against. The option with most votes was "Against".
I could go into the reasons which were submitted in survey but in short most were related to hyper individualism that is so pervasive.
Former big tech worker here, I'd support unionization wholeheartedly, but it's also worth advocating for cessation of all Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, etc products and software. Build software for linux only, explicitly choose to not support Windows, Mac OS, iOS, or Android. Support and test on Gecko-based browsers, reject Webkit-based and Blink-based browsers. Act like people are making you uncomfortable whenever they offer statements, comments, or questions that normalize gmail, facebook, iphones, or outlook. Become a FLOSS evangelist. Help your non-technical friends install a browser that supports manifest v2 and full-fat ad blocking. Help people set up adguard or pihole. Make it sound cool, easy, and seductive. Disrespect the ruling elite / "eat the rich!" vibes. Normalize anti-surveillance. Normalize full-face masks and juggalo paint and avante garde clothing that disrupts facial recognition algorithms. Build on a VPS, build on a dedicated server, build on clouds that aren't owned and operated by multitrillion dollar conglomerate monstrosities. Make AWS, Azure, and GCP as socially unacceptable as racism, sexism, and transphobia.
This isn't a call to arms for luddites, this is a call to kill the trillion dollar companies with grassroots direct action that is intentionally and purposefully organized to decrease the revenue and social acceptance of these organizations. This is a pro-tech movement, it's just pro-tech that respects your freedom, your privacy, your rights to decide what your hardware and software are / are not doing. We will not be the feudal subjects of these tyrants.
We must be the revolutionary change we want to see by lunging straight for the hearts of these evil empires. Grassroots direct action, spread the word.
Practically all software that matters is already Linux only. That happened 15-20 years ago as a combination of “cloud” and “SaaS”.
Android and iOS apps, with the exception of games, are usually just thin presentation layers around cloud apps. Hint: if you have to log in, the real app a cloud app running on a Linux server.
But I don’t see what that has to do with executive compensation.
Exorbitant executive compensation coming from the same companies that are aggressively infringing upon the rights of their end users are two expressions of the same tyrannical desires of these big tech companies. They're trying to bring about neofeudalism where we're all peasants serving our big tech lords.
Also, it's not about supporting Linux, it's about not supporting tyrants (Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Meta, et. al.). Whenever you offer compatibility for Windows, Mac OS, iOS, or Android, you are excusing, encouraging, and supporting tyranny and neofeudalism.
Thanks for your support. However, your upvote didn't register (I still have 1 point on the comment). I noticed this sometimes happening with me recently, too. You can verify this by unvoting and looking at my karma in the profile not changing.
Oooh, just tried upvoting this one and it looks like your karma stayed constant at 8301. Strange. I wonder if there's a limit to how much karma one account can give another through upvotes within a certain time period.
The right time would have been when the going was good some years back. Tech workers could have put together an unparalleled strike fund and commanded unprecedented political power. We could have truly changed the world.
But, as already mentioned, if you think sentiment is unfriendly to unions now, it's nothing compared to how it was back then. The typical tech worker somehow thought they were already changing the world, doing some VC's bidding for nickels on the dollar, adding sparkly features to another B2B SaaS product...
Yup, that's the problem. They view people as peons. Not people with lives, ambitions, family and friends. The only way to correct that view is to disobey.
The phrase temporarily embarrassed millionaires is even more true for tech workers than most Americans. Especially for any who have entrepreneurial dreams or who are at start-ups for the stock options. The carrot is right there...
It's literally true, even without dreams or stock option bets, that many tech workers are temporarily embarrassed millionaires. The source tweets are by an Amazon VP; an Amazon SWE salary with even moderately responsible spending is enough to retire as a multimillionaire.
I mean, the steinbeck quote is from 1960.. You will need probably ~$30 million dollars at retirement if you are 30yo today to retire as a 1960s millionaire.
The Steinbeck quote from the 1960s said "temporarily embarassed capitalist". Someone who has "entrepreneurial dreams" or is "at start-ups for the stock options", hoping to get wealthy through appreciation of their equity ownership, is unambiguously a capitalist.
"Millionaire" was added in a 2004 misquote by Robert Wright, and $1 million in 2004 dollars is about $1.7 million in 2025 dollars.
The phrase originally means that the subject is not a millionaire and likely will never be one, whereas many of us in tech are already millionaires or very likely to become one if we work in industry for any amount of time.
It took me about seven years in industry, starting from my first internship, to hit my first million. Non-FAANG and nothing magical happening with appreciating options or stock, just ordinary W-2 work.
We still see this attitude in HN comments sometimes. People thinking their piddly $500K in RSUs that vests over the next decade somehow qualifies them entry into the Global Elite class. And then they’ll argue against unions and other things that help workers because they see themselves as rubbing elbows with Jeff Bezos. Yea, yea, your handful of stock options make you just like him…
As Laszlo Bock (head of HR at the time) quipped at TGIF when he announced Obamacare cuts to Google's healthcare coverage: "But hey, you get unlimited colonoscopies".
Being forced to RTO across the country, then immediately laid off after I uprooted my life to do so, all while knowing the layoffs were planned while they were telling me to move across the country, is fucked.
It’s happening because employers are desperate to get their power back while workers have no rights. It also makes it harder to leave an org, as orgs are also desperate to hold on to and develop existing talent due to forward looking working age population demographics. This is a desperate immune response.
(also why employers are trying to staff up offices offshore in LATAM and India)
Edit: @tbrownaw all of the responses to your inquiry are accurate.
> It’s happening because employers are desperate to get their power back while workers have no rights.
What does this mean in concrete terms? What useful power do they gain based on physical presence, and what rights are currently absent but coming (back?) soon?
If remote labor is the norm, then every tech company has to compete with every other, across all geographies. If local labor is required, the employers can manage or restrict their competitive environment. There are fewer options for the employee.
The bulk layoffs of the past couple of years have a similar effect - gaining power. It makes every employee a little more conscious that their employment is provisional and conditional.
But I think RTO goes beyond just market power gains. There are many workers who are conscientious, attentive, and dedicated. For each one of those there are plenty who are just punching their time card. I’m no expert but it seems to me that RTO gives the employer and mid-level managers better visibility into all of that dynamic.
But RTO fights against the reality that employers have constructed distributed teams, with people working from all over the globe on the same project. If that’s the case, what is the difference whether I work from my home office, or a hotel desk space in a big building alongside people I don’t know.?
> If remote labor is the norm, then every tech company has to compete with every other, across all geographies. If local labor is required, the employers can manage or restrict their competitive environment.
Doesn’t that seem backwards? A company that supports remote work has a worldwide talent pool.l, including lower cost geographies. A company that insists on RTO can only hire locally, so has less talent available and can’t arbitrage labor costs.
I think RTO makes no sense, but I don’t see how it gives employers more power.
* Remote workers aren't actually a worldwide labor force because of time zones, so the competition on the labor side is less than in theory.
* Remote work diminished the difference in liquidity between labor and capital markets. Capital is by nature more liquid than labor, and being more liquid gives you an advantage. As you say, the competitive pressures exist in both markets, and maybe this is a wash in terms of power.
* Remote workers can pay off mortgages faster, leading to more early retirements.
I still think the primary reason is a desire to manage according to the old style, which is a different argument than the GP.
> Doesn’t that seem backwards? A company that supports remote work has a worldwide talent pool.l, including lower cost geographies.
Humans are not just replaceable cogs. When you hire someone, there are several things built into the assumption of that work that we take for granted. For example, federal holidays or work culture. The US is notorious for accepting overwork as the norm (people even brag about working 60-hour weeks) where that's just not acceptable in other parts of the world. That's obviously not true everywhere (e.g. 9-9-6 in China), but is true in enough places that it's not trivial to just swap in person A from country X with person B in country Y. That's not even touching on labor laws, language barriers (e.g. understanding office lingo like "circle back"), or value structure. The latter is huge where Americans care a lot about their jobs and careers and most parts of the world don't have the concept of a career.
Yes, and moreover it's obvious from anyone's experience that applying for remote roles means workers will have MUCH more competition for the role. Employers ought to love this.
Capturing and controlling a market is preferable to competitive markets under our political-economic system. It's been the model for Silicon Valley since Bezos sold his plan to lose money until Amazon had a controlling stake of the retail market in the late 90s. It's a seemingly unavoidable outcome of under-regulated capitalism.
Couple this with regular threats and fear mongering about AI coming for the jobs of tech workers, and the picture gets even more somber. The tech industry wants to cheapen labor.
Not OP, but RTO forces geographic centralization and reduces mobility of their employees. If you can work remotely then you have a much larger pool. And I think that opening the door to remote work made employees realize that there was some power and some negotiation to be had on working conditions (basically our generation’s version of the 40 hr work week in response to the Industrial Revolution)
This is an underrated comment. I like the framing of Remote as Millenial’s 40hr workweek. In the face of declining worker conditions we made the best of a crisis (pandemic) and showed that working remotely was viable for most jobs. But no, the ruling class could not tolerate those gains.
My prediction is that as soon as interest rates fall, employers will be reintroducing “flexibility” to lure workers and attract talent. And at that point it might become more established.
Office work requires living within commute distance of the office, which is much more expensive and keeps the employee tethered to their job. Remote workers are less threatened by layoffs because they can choose to live in a lower COL area and have their pick of other remote-friendly jobs rather than being limited to other companies in their metro or having to uproot their lives to move somewhere else. This is on top of the perceived benefits employers have surveiling and micromanaging office work.
As for workers having fewer protections rn, gestures in the general direction of DC.
>Office work requires living within commute distance of the office, which is much more expensive and keeps the employee tethered to their job. Remote workers are less threatened by layoffs because they can choose to live in a lower COL area and have their pick of other remote-friendly jobs rather than being limited to other companies in their metro or having to uproot their lives to move somewhere else.
This doesn't make any sense. Remote jobs are... remote. Moving to mountain view or whatever doesn't make you "limited to other companies in their metro". You can still find remote jobs, but now you have the additional option of in-person jobs in the bay area.
If you move to Mountain View, you need to be able to afford to live in Mountain View. That takes a lot of remote jobs off the table, or substantially diminishes their prospects.
If you live in Omaha and work remotely, far more remote jobs are available.
Fang companies have colluded together before to surpress the labor market, litigation about this goes back to 2010 or so.
Since that’s always an option.. yeah clearly keeping talent in high col places is a part of the cudgel that employers want to use against employees. It’s similar to healthcare being connected to employment really. If the labor market was actually free from ultimately coercive tactics like this then the world would look very different.
Yes. But living in Orlando Florida means I can accept a remote job that pays less. I would have to get a remote job that pays 5x more and I don’t pay state income taxes.
Remote jobs on average pay less because you are competing with people who live in the MiddleOfNowhere Nebraska.
Even formerly “field by design” roles that were permanently remote at AWS
(where I use to work) paid less than in office jobs. Now those jobs are also in office jobs at both Amazon and Google (GCP).
No severance is not apart of the law. You can be laid off and fired at anytime for any reason without severance. My manager laughed in my face when I asked if there was severance when being laid off in GFC.
Some states even have laws that employers don't have to pay accrued vacation time. For example Nevada says employers with under 50 employees don't have to pay accrued vacation.
As mentioned in another comment there is the WARN act[1] at the federal level. And many states have additional regulations. In practice, employers would often prefer the people laid off just stop working immediately than continuing coming to work knowing they are losing their jobs soon. And I think employers can offer employees a severance agreement where the employee waives their right to the 90 day notice in exchange for some other compensation, such as a lump sum payment.
However, there are exceptions. In particular if the company is small enough, or the layoff is below a certain percentage of employees, it doesn't take effect.
The WARN act dictates that you need to provide 60 days notice for certain mass layoffs. Typically this means you are laid off, but remain on payroll for 60 days.
I got laid off at the start of my first day back in the new office. Had to leave my morning standup early to receive the news.
Fortunately I didn't have to uproot my life or move cities, but it was a wakeup call as to the true nature of at will employment. You can't take anything for granted.
A plan B is always a good thing to have. I knew a middle class engineer a few years ago who spent every dime of his salary on installment payments for this and that. The company then had to cut back, and he went into a furious panic. It was a trap he set for himself, although he blamed the company.
Even if the government guarantees you lifetime employment, it isn't a guarantee.
Imagine expecting equal treatment to higher ups who run your company. Anyone who told you otherwise lied to you. Set expectations accordingly and you won’t be disappointed.
Imagine a very fat king standing before his starving populace, explaining why there would be even less food this winter as he munched on a turkey leg.
I know executives have different rules and laws that govern them. But I can remember a time when they would’ve had the decency, shame or whatever else to attempt to obscure this. That HR VP could have come into the office for one day, the day that he was explaining his RTO mandate to the entire company.
That he didn’t feel embarrassed about delivering this mandate while very visibly defying it himself is beyond differentiated treatment, it is open disdain for the (upper) working class.
Proverbial kings are a fact of life. Use your circle of influence to ensure your concern is heard, but don’t set yourself up for disappointment when you find out they get better Christmas bonuses, time off, and cooler parties.
lmao! It's the same as all the sysadmin folks at my organization who have a policy of locking down all our computers without admin rights whereas I noticed they DID have admin rights.
Rules for thee but not for me, typical tech nerds.
Also a recent Xoogler. There was a pretty popular thread where someone essentially ragequit due to being talked down to by someone in an all-hands, after having tried to resolve their issues with specific policies via other means. They took a principled stand, which seems exceedingly rare at Google.
The main theme of their post was that engineering had become a second-class profession at a de-facto engineering firm.
If I recall correctly, Steve Jobs had something to say about that very transition…
Edit: By thread I mean internal Email thread at Google.
They aren't pushing it because they want to get back to the office or even dont understand the impacts. They're pushing it because they want more control over and accountability from their employees. Some even want a percentage of the employees to quit.
It's useful to have most of your workforce (or other populations, as with police forces) in routine violation of unenforced rules so that one has cover for any individual persecution one finds convenient
Exactly this. I've worked at a few places now where there were RTO policies that many workers ignored. But periodically low performers and/or people that had lost political battles were denied promotions or fired and their poor office attendance record was cited.
I think there are a lot of reasons, and forced attrition is definitely something they see as a benefit. However, I do genuinely think that a lot of them truly believe that working together in an office, face-to-face, is important. RTO is not just a cold calculation, but also reflective of their moral values towards work.
Whether those values actually lead to a better company is the part that, I feel, continues to lack evidence.
I used to work for a place that had "Focus Weeks". A week where there were to be no meetings, and you could work on whatever was important. Everyone I knew loved it - could accomplish so much more when you are not interrupted every other hour for some marginal-utility status update.
Management...apparently did not enjoy the time. I assume so many of them do nothing but meetings, they were probably bored. The upper leadership, for whom the work is predominantly meetings, is likely not satisfied without maximal people in sight.
What exactly is wrong here? If workers don't want that control, well,
they can look for another place. Companies are not supposed to solve social problems like how people care for children.
After all, are there any workforce troubles in companies that mandated RTO, besides negative hacker news comments?
Not sure what the purpose is here - it reads more like a soft flex than anything else. We all know "why" RTO gets pushed - and it's not just that executives are living royal lives while the peasants are expected to stress over traffic while their kids wait abandoned at some public school. If anything, thinking that RTO is just about being disconnected highlights how disconnected the author actually is - because it is far more often the case that RTO is driven by tax incentives, rent incentives, and occupant use agreements than just some petty executive saying "let them commute!".
Commercial real estate value is often estimated using number of people (feet) who go through the building.
So for example, if you've got 500 people (customers) walking through your building plus 200 people (employees) doing things, then the restaurants and shipping stores and etc can estimate some % of those feet turning into sales.
But if you've got only 300 people (customers) walking through your building plus 50 people (employees) doing things, that % of feet turning into sales goes waaaaaay down. And your retail outlets in the building end up with far fewer sales. They either go out of business or demand cheaper rent.
That's just one way of estimating commercial real estate.
Let's figure your attached parking garage. Assuming it's not-free, then all those employees not paying their parking dues ends up causing the parking garage to not generate revenue. Ooof. Or, let's say it's "free". Well, the people who reserved spots paid for those spots whether they use them or not. But the people who don't reserve spots? The business isn't seeing a return on investment if their employees aren't using them, so why pay their share for maintenance of that parking garage?
What about the HVAC and plumbing? The building owner's son owns those businesses, and it's pretty damn expensive to keep HVAC and plumbing working at peak efficiency. It becomes a lot easier to do if they're not used as much! But your son's business is going to get churned if you don't pay them less for the decreased maintenance costs. And you can't just stop maintenance because those things get damned expensive when they're unmaintained.
And the shipping staff? Well they have to come to the office anyway otherwise nothing gets shipped. It's not fair to those staff! You pay them complete shit, and they used to be able to eat lunch at a decent restaurant and have a decent place to park and have good air conditioning and working toilet. But now, with just everyone else being out of office, the restaurant went out of business and the HVAC is set to a wider range of climate and the toilet's been clogged for a while.
Instead of paying the shipping staff something reasonable to offset their changes, or changing the way that lunch and support services are handled... just demand everyone else come to the office too. That's cheaper.
Productivity is difficult to measure. I suspect many managers just don't know how to do it, or are not very confident about the results. In-person interactions in an office give managers additional information (such as height). For many, it makes management tasks easier to carry out and generally less stressful (but not necessarily with objectively improved results, I assume).
I don't necessarily buy the arguments around real estate investment, but I think it's important to note that the office is a construct from before the popularity of the internet. A lot of the current crop of exec started their jobs before remote work was viable, so their mental model of how work is done might require an office because that's how they used to work.
It's entirely possible that the question of "labor productivity" has nothing to do with why exec wants us all back in the bullpen, where they can gleefully stare at us from inside their offices.
Undoubtedly the internet makes more remote roles possible. I’m just saying the business already hates paying for the office. Their incentive is aligned with regards to having less office space.
> Their incentive is aligned with regards to having less office space.
Really? Then why do you think that return-to-office is mandated by so many large organizations? By following that line of thinking then surely their larger footprint would yield even larger savings for work-from-home?
Big companies extract tax benefits from governments in exchange for locating their large buildings within said government's jurisdiction. Presumably in some cases said tax benefits come with some sort of verification that the expected quid pro quo (employees wandering around buying lunch and so on) happened.
Our building has multiple first floor stores/restaurants/gym - and post Covid our rental agreements stipulate an average daily occupancy threshold; with a penalty/incentive program based on failing or exceeding that threshold as it is part of the agreements set up with the retailers. There are business tax deductions for on-site workers like utilities, maintenance, office supplies, property insurance, etc. Additionally, there are tax situations - Schaad v. Alder in Ohio for example - where municipalities receive or lose income based on the location of remote workers. In that specific case the municipality where the remote employee actually worked received no income while the municipality where the office existed did.
Cities benefit from people being in office and thus, in the city spending money. In 2024, SF had a new business tax plan to incentivize employers to bring people back to the office, and I wouldn't be surprised if other cities did similar.
Right but this is a new thing. For decades working from the office was the overwhelming norm. It was just assumed. So I doubt there's many incentives right now. I imagine it's much more about being upset at your expensive rent building being 70+% empty while still costing you as much as well as old fashioned beliefs in performance and monitoring of employees in the office. Also I do think there's some things that may be more difficult to collaborate on even with remote even with video calling
This is what would happen if the Horse Carriage producers had lobbies with enough power and money back when automobiles were invented. They would illegitimately push rules, regulations and coerce the public to cripple cars for their profit and fight against change. Like how the real estate lobbies are doing at this moment. They are akin to horse carriage lobbies and they should be treated as the parasitic, unproductive, reactionary influence that they are on society - without even getting into the bloat in the real estate sector and how it cripples housing.
There was a day after Christmas where the team was kinda taking it easy and went out for a longer than usual lunch, and an executive got in our face about how the day after Christmas is not an excuse to slack off. Then the person had us a deploy a feature that afternoon to prod even though it was supposed to be launched after the holidays. The person also did this remotely because they took the day off (the rest of us were actually in the office).
Power is much nastier than people realize. What I provided was an anecdote, but the #metoo movement probably started just like that.
Edit: I just realized how Dickensian this was, plot synopsis of A Christmas Carol. Just missing the ghosts and soul change.
We are ecommerce, so the holidays are important revenue events. Our team's management required us to sit at our keyboards, online, so we could screenshot NewRelic graphs and paste them into our teams chat. The people requiring this all had full access to NewRelic to log in and check the graphs. We also had alerts that would page you if something was bad.
The only reason they wanted this observation that way is so that, instead of having to sit down at their laptop and log into the VPN and manage 2FA and keep their computer open so it doesn't log out every 15 minutes and all that, they just had to glance at a teams message on their phone.
We, the peons and laborers of course were not extended that option, and any system built to automatically generate screenshots for teams probably would be treated as a security risk.
I genuinely consider my direct management chain to be effective, nice, and mostly empathetic within reason, but even they manage to internalize a "the peons can be used to give myself a convenience" ideology.
They don't think of you as people, you are just a resource to them.
We had an RTO mandate in the last year. Amongst our top 10 compensated employees, at least half were out of the office for the last three months (we go in one week per month). I tried not to freak out and catastrophize whent he rto mandate was first communicated. But the double standard has left me feeling deeply unsettled and bitter. And I just know one exec who has been on leave for months is going to roll back in and complain that his pet projects aren't coming along like he told the board they already had. He is oversees over half the technical folks and has very little technical skills of his own. I might bring champagne to work the day after he leaves.
Is it really so hard to imagine the struggles of someone who doesn’t have any of the benefits listed in the post?
Just sitting down and doing a quick calculation would immediately reveal time allocation dilemmas of prioritizing “return to office” for someone who doesn’t have the benefits.
Time is universally valuable! But even more so for someone who … has significantly less of it because they can’t hire legions of staff to manage their lives?
“What if I didn’t have this? How would that make me feel?” Pretty depressing. Empathy can’t run the business — but surely it is correlated with strong team cohesion and performance?
I mean we’re talking about a self-selected group of people who’ve chosen money over… nearly everything else. I do think it’s hard for them to empathize because nothing in their existence encourages them to do so. They’re richly rewarded for their choices and we all just go along with it.
I think the problem is that like the business culture in the US is so cutthroat and stressful, and people generally so self-centered. That like, they literally can’t imagine a type of life or stress that isn’t solved by muscle through it or work more or whatever.
You also end up in these bubbles where you literally can’t empathize with people because you have no experience to fall back on.
Combine that with a sort of media and religious culture that will tell you you’re right to feel that way.
I’ve hear rich people complain about the fact that rich people are people to, d that poor people don’t appreciate them enough.
And actually, I think this is a common thread these days, that essentially the world’s problems are caused by the fact that rich people don’t have enough power and aren’t trusted enough by society. Marc Andreesen implied this in his Joe Rogan interview.
I've said it here many times now, but Robert Sapolsky identified inequality as one of the highest causes of stress in any given primate society. Even for those at the top.
> Is it really so hard to imagine the struggles of someone who doesn’t have any of the benefits listed in the post?
Yes, it is hard. While you can break down the struggles to analyze them, actually understanding their emotional impact is a whole different story.
> Empathy can’t run the business — but surely it is correlated with strong team cohesion and performance?
As someone who has recently shifted towards managing people, I am facing two big struggles: how to be empathetic without taking on their emotional burdens and how to respect their situation in life while ensuring they respect their responsibilities in the work place. And this is management at a very low level in the hierarchy. There isn't terribly much that separates myself from them.
I'm not suggesting that there is no role for empathy in a business. Apparently the person who came before me lacked it and survived ten weeks. I'm simply suggesting that it is difficult to balance.
The only issue here is that many of the employees in question can likewise afford a weekly cleaner, to have groceries delivered and cooked meals delivered regularly. They can also live close to the office if they wish.
I think the issue is just that fundamental difference between what the work of relevant people comprises -- moreso than class. Managers, executives, and so on are "social workers": their job is to align people, brainstorm ideas, communicate, "govern" etc.
"Knowledge workers" job is, in large part, to think alone, then to create alone -- and when that fails seek some minimal intervention by another knowledge worker to resolve an issue.
"The Office" is not well-designed for knowledge work -- it's design for "social work". It's born of an era when manual workers worked in factories, and "social workers" worked in offices -- and "knowledge workers" were in academia, in the basement or some hidden (, silent) back office.
Reducing this to class seems to miss the point. Will anyone ever just recognise what the job of creative knowledge work is? Is it so incomprehensible? In the quest to "comprehend" it, we're told its our lack of maids which burden us so.
It's kinda laughable. A maid is no help if you won't STFU.
This is really well put. Those who's main job is email, meetings and the occassional spreadsheet can't understand why those who do something technical must have significant time alone to work through a problem
You unintentionally strike at the heart of why I’m never completely on board with these anti-office discussions.
Commute sucks, cubicles are worse than useless; you won’t get any argument from me on either of these.
But I also know how crucial it is for academia to talk with colleagues. Email kind of works. Video calls kind of work a bit more. But nothing beats knocking on the door of the office next to you. (Whether it’s polite to announce yourself by e.g. email first depends on the country; even if you just show up and you’re turned away, that’ll be until lunch or at worst until the next day.) And the post-seminar atmosphere of everybody talking chaotically to each other with their minds buzzing as others put away their papers, chairs, etc., thus far stays unreplicated by any technological means.
I guess what I want to say is, the more speculative your ideas are, the more important it becomes to bounce them off people in spontaneous conversation. And any friction (scheduling, calls, etc.) you add will significantly reduce the amount of spontaneous conversation you are going to have. So far, we haven’t figured out a better way than roughly everybody involved being in roughly the same place roughly all the time. That saddens me, given how much I hate commuting.
I suspect if office workers had offices, we'd be in quite a different situation.
There's a certain sort of knowledge worker who wants to impress upon the others how communal, conversational, and social their job "really is!" --- but these are people who are likewise not empathetic with the managerial class. All you're really saying is in 20 hours of thinking a week, and 20 hours of typing --- some 2 with others might really help. I don't disagree.
The problem is the "social work" class do not have very much to think about -- their job is to align very rudimentary thoughts from a pool of people who need to negotiate their positions. The Grand Plan of an executive-type is a search through a paddling pool of combinatorial options. This isn't to trivialise the work, so much to point out its an operational and socio-logistical task.
Yes, conversing with one's knowledge-worker peers can speed things up a lot, advance ideas and the like. I am here only analysing where the gap in empathy lies -- I do not really think it's people who can well-afford maids (pretending they cannot) being misunderstood by people with private jets
Approaching this from the perspective that other people only care about socially signalling how social their job is will not get you anywhere. It might feel good and make good rhetoric to make such wide generalisations but it doesn't get you any closer to the truth and cuts you off from seeing things through others' perspectives.
20 houes of thinking, 20 hours of typing, and 2 hours of collaborating is just a bizarre numericalisation of something that probably cannot be quantified. How much time you spend on something doesn't tell you it is more or less important anyway. What percentage of the time do you spend coding vs committing and pushing? Yet if you didnt do the latter, the former would be a total waste of time.
The small amount of time (even conceding it is small, which it isnt necessarily) you spend on collaboration might be a force multiplier that makes the rest of your time far more valuable.
>The problem is the "social work" class do not have very much to think about -- their job is to align very rudimentary thoughts from a pool of people who need to negotiate their positions.
This is frankly insane. You don't actually think this, surely? Surely this is just rhetoric?
This has nothing to do with maids or private jets. Plenty of businesses want their workers in the office including those where the business owners and managers cannot afford private jets or maids.
I wasn't accusing my interlocutor of merely engaging in social signally. I gave an explanation of the position, which I can be more explicit about: it is an intra-knowledge-worker point. Its the point of a person who, quite rightly, goes around people who neglect to be social at all and impress the importance of it. This is a non-sequiteur when i'm addressing a hypersocial group.
The dialectic of this thread -- the OP beings with effectively a class analysis of why executives misunderstand office-worker employees. My reply is the origins lie in a different distribution of at-work activities in which executives require massive amounts of in-person communication to do their jobs, whilst knowledge-workers do not (and are often harmed by an excess).
> This has nothing to do with maids or private jets.
So you agree with me. It's important not to substitute a position I am opposing for one that I'm not.
As for my slight exaggerations around how I characterise the kinds of people, and work involved -- it is hyperboilic and hoperfully amusing characterisation -- but not one which I think is far off.
The "deep thought" of executive work is shallow, for those who prise complexity and such, no doubt this seems derogatory. But it's not. If you thinking can be readily terminated by the speech of another person, your own thinking process is not that deep. Sure, that of The Group's might be -- and much more so than any person's, but each individual is not engaged in deep thought.
If you can farm out depth to a group discussion, great -- that's one sort of work. It is not the work of a progammer, say, who is tracing execution flow in their own head -- this cannot be half-realised in one person's head and half-realised in another.
> But nothing beats knocking on the door of the office next to you. (Whether it’s polite to announce yourself by e.g. email first depends on the country; even if you just show up and you’re turned away
Oh boy. What you are saying is akin to kicking an IC in the balls while he was concentrating on something. I don't think it would be any different in academia for researchers who are concentrating on something.
>But I also know how crucial it is for academia to talk with colleagues.
Pretty much all of physics was collaborated on with snail mail and a couple times a year in the busiest years in person conferences to have what were essentially war rooms.
We still regularly get cross earth papers published, with explicit collaboration between labs on the opposite side of the world.
A significant amount of science collaboration happens with work that is translated!
If software development were to emulate such a system, it would be small teams of like 2-7 people working together in a small office with a hundred such offices all over coordinating when they need to.
Of course, none of those scientists ever needed change management!
This mirrors a lot of what I've suspected. Executives have a survivorship bias of a very work-focused life. It's hard for them to understand why anyone else would choose differently.
This applies to both work location and number of hours per week. It's gotta be hard to understand and accept that lower-level workers have a different view and priorities from your own, especially when all your fellow execs share your own view.
And, as the tweet says, at a certain level you can afford to offset all the negatives of work location / work hours. No commute. Personal chef. All household chores covered. Full time individual childcare. It's a lot easier to come into the office for 50-60 hours per week when you don't have to also spend your time outside the office trying to balance sleep and survival. But, again, that's not what life looks like for an average employee.
You are being too generous to that bunch of sociopaths (not snarky, just think for a second what kind of personality gets and thrives up there for decades).
They care about their own profits, which are mostly bonus-based, and prestige. If they think they get any extra by appearing doing first and last thing that could drive up share price (or win some extra points in some meaningless internal battles), they will go for it.
They are mostly pretty bad absent parents with laser focus on themselves and their careers only, and then it shows on kids. But in their mind nobody under them should be granted more.
Sadly, I agree. There is probably an element of "hard worker" survivorship bias at play, but there's also an undeniable profit motive that overrides a lot of those instincts too.
After a certain number of years, handing your kids off to the babysitters so you can work an extra 10 hours a week becomes outright sociopathic neglect. Using your wealth to separate you from the things that actually matter is arguably the peak of corporate disillusionment.
Yeah, I think it’s worth reflecting that most people with families work 80-hour weeks. Richer people can pay others to take on part of that workload so they can do 50 or 60 hours of work for a company and still actually be working less. Which is fine, I guess, until they’re all like “why are you poors always so sluggish and tired and wanting to clock out right at 5 on the dot?”
Nah. This kind of person tends to do more family stuff, and participate in more community events, and do more work.
It’s ok to not be a busy body. I’m not one because it makes me miserable . But these imaginary tradeoffs we invent in our heads are often just justifications.
I'm not following your point. I've got a solid 30 hours of unpaid work a week, and it'd be closer to 40 if I had to commute, and when my kids were younger and I still had a commute it was around 50 hours, all on top of my actual job. I could and, if it weren't wildly financially irresponsible, absolutely would pay to make about 20 hours of that vanish at no harm whatsoever (benefit, actually) to my personal relationships & family, and then I'd have a lot more time and energy for other things. That's just... how clocks work, IDK. This is overwhelmingly the norm for people who can't afford to pay others to do lots of stuff for them.
What you're not differentiating here is between optional and mandatory tasks. If you're paying someone to cook, clean, grocery shop, or provide day to day child care you have time to do optional things, and people mistake that for being more efficient when in reality it's having the luxury to decide what to do with your time.
No adult with jobs and kids gets home and says “huh what will I fill my extra time with”. Everyone is busy. Now it’s up to effort, prioritization, and efficiency
The person who can't afford a cook and maid now needs to full those duties, cooking and cleaning, the person who can doesn't. The food is already made, the house is clean, the laundry is done, the kids are bathed, the fridge is full. They have time to decide what to do with. Sure, they could cook or clean, but that's now their choice. The activity is optional and can be prioritized instead of being mandatory.
There are certain tasks that people need to do every day that take time and, if you can afford to have someone do those tasks, suddenly you have more time you can do other things with.
The people I know who accomplish a lot of things also cook and clean for themselves.
Of course paying someone saves you time.
But the question is whether that’s the key differentiator holding you back from X, Y, and Z. And no it’s not. There are people who do X, Y, and Z and don’t have a maid.
Maybe on some psychological level getting help is the only way you personally will have time (feels true for myself), but you have to recognize there is significant personality and skill difference when it comes to being busy.
I'm not saying that people can't do X, Y, and Z, there are people who are just that driven, or people who have a spouse that fills in those roles, but it's far easier for people who the necessities of life are optional, and when you're surrounded by people for whom it's all optional, they are going to assume it's optional for everyone and no assume why everyone isn't doing more.
> But the question is whether that’s the key differentiator holding you back from X, Y, and Z. And no it’s not. There are people who do X, Y, and Z and don’t have a maid.
As with a lot of things: individually, yes, this is the only useful way to look at it. Statistically? Over a population? No, of course high levels of unpaid obligations keep people from accomplishing things, in the sense that if you ease those up they accomplish more.
More to the point, I didn't make this about how it was "holding people back" so I'm now seeing why you're so resistant to it, since you think that's what I was getting at: no, it's about attitudes from executives who live life on easy mode then complain that their underlings are lazy.
I think his point is that such people exist, and they're on the upper end of some "distribution". The experience you're describing is more of the median experience.
Perhaps he's simply pointing out that with the right set of skills, you (or others) could also move yourself up (down?) the bell curve, and that your position on the curve isn't necessarily fixed. Treating it as such is inherently limiting.
People with enough income have a whole list of things that do not fill their time unless they want them to, that aren't really optional for people without enough money to pay to make them go away.
Laundry, cleaning, cooking, shopping, lawn work, home maintenance, car maintenance, hell even managing your schedule—for an awful lot of executives (among others) much or all of that is optional. They have more freedom with their time because they pay to make a bunch of problems go away (and if they don't, it's a choice). They come home from work and choose what to do—they may still be busy, by choice! But they have far fewer demands on their time. The people who work for them come home from work, work two to four more hours, then, maybe, choose what to do. And you better believe they work weekends, too.
> My point is busy people do even more of the things that you think make you busy.
I don't think it makes me busy. It does.
> You think kids are taking up all your time? They have more kids and volunteer at the school, and run a church group, etc.
I'm not counting extremely-optional stuff.
> The clock is secondary because using time efficiently, planning, and classifying which hours you are awake and available are all skills.
Money puts this on extremely-easy mode, because for a huge variety of things "this is a problem that will take much time and attention" becomes "just pay someone to make it go away". I know, because I have enough money that sometimes I can do this (I didn't always, and I didn't grow up that way) and holy god, it makes life so incredibly easy when I can.
Your comment doesn't make any sense to me. A single kid sucks more time than you have in a regular day. You are sleep deprived, and in survival mode for the first part.
If you have a lot of kids, after a certain age, the older ones can start to help around depending on age. It's how humanity survives in self-sufficient conditions.
For serial kid rearing families there is a plateau in difficulty, and then a steady decline (depending on the personality and health of the kids of course).
No, from my point of view this post is just another executive grift trying to make people feel better about why they do the things they do.
Yes they live different lives, but they know they are different from their average worker, they just don't care about them. Making money and their success come above all.
When they make these decisions it is not because they're out of touch. It is because they actively opposed people below them taking an inch. They know it fucks with them, they know they don't like it. They do it anyway.
As an executive this person is excellent albeit trained at corporate speak. They're trying to gather sympathy for execs and it is all bullshit.
> In a functioning labor market with high mobility for workers they would just quit and find a better place to work.
> They're trying to hide the fact they've monopolized the labor market and they want you to assume this is all normal. It's a much higher level problem.
Your labor market isn't all that special. The truth is that "a functioning market with high mobility" is just a myth. The market is functioning as intended: The ones with power under capitalism are the ones with capital - and they don't wish for things to change. You can try to level the playing field with laws, but that's incompatible with the "small government" folks.
It's the primary market underpinning capitalism. Otherwise it's just feudalism or slavery. So, I'd hope you believe it's special.
> The truth is that "a functioning market with high mobility" is just a myth.
There is absolutely no truth in what you just said. I'd have to ask what set of evidence did you examine to arrive at this conclusion?
> The ones with power under capitalism are the ones with capital
Yes. Wealth and capital give you an _advantage_. However it's not exclusive. It's why we recognize things like intellectual property and performance rights. It turns out there's /tons/ of sources of advantage in competition.
> You can try to level the playing field with laws, but that's incompatible with the "small government" folks.
The size of the government seems to have zero impact on it's willingness to enforce laws that are already on the books. Your thesis is thin and based on inherited cynicism. I cannot take it seriously.
They definitely are, although that doesn’t justify actions.
Not all, but most. Family members of mine at the VP/EVP level in “enterprise” type companies regularly work 12+ hours on weekdays and ~8 per day on weekends. It’s brutal and their families suffer for it, but it pays exceedingly well.
As another poster put it, it’s survivorship bias. Most people who work that long and consistently end up with a destroyed family life and eventually the collapse of their professional life as well. Those who “make” it by and large keep their family intact because they can afford to make it difficult to leave - or because they’re married to someone of similar lifestyle.
Family members of mine at the VP/EVP level in “enterprise” type companies regularly work 12+ hours on weekdays and ~8 per day on weekends.
At that level, they’re in the club and guaranteed to advance as long as they don’t make enemies and get kicked out of the club (which is rare, but happens, and usually means they spend a year or so finding another club.) So while some of them do work long hours, they don’t have to. They’ve already been judged to be in the in-crowd and could work 10 hours per week from wherever they want, and they’d still make every promotion.
So why do they work so much, and why do they go to the office? Because most of those guys (a) mutually dislike their families, (b) have psychological disorders, and (c) have office affairs. To psychopaths, 70 hours per week sunk into high-stakes office politics is fun.
> So while some of them do work long hours, they don’t have to.
Or so you say. But it sounds like a rationalization of why that doesn't matter/makes them morally bad people. First it's "they don't actually do any work, lol", then it's "but they totally don't have to, they could skate by on 2 hours a day, they are already pre-selected for success".
But really, it's perfectly fine if you don't care that much and won't go to that length. You don't have to justify that by coming up with narratives that others who do are evil, mentally ill, or hate their families. You can just say "that's not for me".
Family members of mine at the VP/EVP level in “enterprise” type companies regularly work 12+ hours on weekdays and ~8 per day on weekends.
What do they do in all those hours?
My only experience with executives is the CEO at a "startup" (it really wasn't) in SF. He had to have his email password reset every week because he couldn't remember it. He was furious that asses weren't in all the seats at 9am, but he knocked off at 3pm on Fridays to go drink with his executive chums. I never saw any sign of leadership, vision, or actual work. Just demands on others.
The boring answer is meetings. Chapter 3 of High Output Management has a great treatment on the topic, and it covers both middle management and the executive level, including a timetable from one of Andy Grove's days. Here is a quote where he summarizes:
> As you can see, in a typical day of mine one can count some twenty-five
separate activities in which I participated, mostly information-gathering and -
giving, but also decision-making and nudging. You can also see that some two
thirds of my time was spent in a meeting of one kind or another. Before you are
horrified by how much time I spend in meetings, answer a question: which of the
activities -- information-gathering, information-giving, decision-making,
nudging, and being a role model—could I have performed outside a meeting?
The answer is practically none. Meetings provide an occasion for managerial
activities.
> I did exactly what this exec advocated - using hard data and statistics to paint a picture of what these mandates look like from a worker perspective - and was roundly shot down.
Of course they did. If you want to convince a company doing RTO why it’s bad, you need to show the negative impacts to the organization. Everybody seems to approach this from their individual perspective.
> If you want to convince a company doing RTO why it’s bad, you need to show the negative impacts to the organization.
There is a reason these are the same thing that should already be obvious: If you want people to take a job that costs them ~$30,000 more in expenses, you'll have to pay them more. If you split the difference, you both come out $15,000 ahead.
This before you even consider the costs to the company directly. If employees work from home you need less office space etc. That's not just rent but heat, power, security, insurance, internet, furniture, taxes, cleaning, lawyers and permits. That's a ton of money.
> If you want people to take a job that costs them ~$30,000 more in expenses, you'll have to pay them more. If you split the difference, you both come out $15,000 ahead.
I'm not following. How much is the difference? The difference to them is $30,000. But you forgot to specify what the difference to the company is.
The difference to the company is that if you don't force people to take on $30,000 in expenses, you'll be able to find people willing to work for up to $30,000 less in compensation. In addition to the other benefits of expanding the talent pool beyond the local geographic area, which might let you get better people, e.g. because you can hire someone in Boston who wants to stay in Boston, without opening an office there.
Something has gone seriously wrong in your thinking. You appear to be attempting to subtract two unrelated quantities from each other. Let's try this another way:
In scenario A, Jim holds a remote job at Omnicorp.
In scenario B1, nothing changes.
In scenario B2, Jim is transferred into a job with the same responsibilities that is not remote. This raises Jim's expenses by $2,500 a month. It also raises Omnicorp's revenue by $X per month. X is the value you forgot to consider. What is it?
If, for example, it is -$500, then the total cost of transferring Jim is $36,000 per year. If we split that difference evenly between Jim and Omnicorp, Jim will receive a $12,000 raise... but Omnicorp will suffer a net loss of $18,000 per year, so it's hard to see why this would happen or who it helps.
If it's +$1,000, then the total cost of transferring Jim is $18,000 per year. Splitting that difference evenly means Jim gets a $21,000 raise, but again there is no reason this would actually take place, because the company is paying $21,000 a year in order to receive $12,000. Or, viewed another way, the transfer destroys value and you shouldn't expect it to happen.
If X is +$3,000, then the total cost of transferring Jim is -$6,000 per year. At this point the transfer makes sense and it should happen. Splitting the difference evenly means Jim will get a $33,000 raise.
At no point does it make any sense to consider leaving Jim where he is and giving him a $15,000 raise.
> It also raises Omnicorp's revenue by $X per month. X is the value you forgot to consider. What is it?
It is quite possibly a negative number. Remember that forcing Jim to show up to an office requires you to have an office, which is a huge, major expense that could easily overcome the benefits of having Jim in the office instead of at home. But let's continue with your assumption that it's of some actual value to the company:
> If, for example, it is -$500, then the total cost of transferring Jim is $36,000 per year. If we split that difference evenly between Jim and Omnicorp, Jim will receive a $12,000 raise... but Omnicorp will suffer a net loss of $18,000 per year, so it's hard to see why this would happen or who it helps.
This is the part where you're confused.
Suppose that Jim refuses to work from home for less than $8000/mo and refuses to work from the office for less than $10500/mo, because his incremental cost of working from the office is $2500/mo. Meanwhile the company values Jim working from the office at $500/mo. Since $500 is less than $2500, it does not make sense for Jim to work from the office, instead it makes sense for the company to pay Jim somewhere between $8000/mo and $10000/mo to work from home, because any of those numbers make both of them no worse off than paying Jim $10500/mo to work from the office. This does not depend on what Jim is currently being paid or even whether he is currently working from home.
If the value to the company of having Jim work from the office instead of from home is $3000/mo then the company should offer Jim anywhere between $10500/mo and $11000/mo to work from the office, for the same reason. But since $3000/mo is $36,000/year on top of their expenses for maintaining an office, that value to an ordinary company of having Jim work from the office is implausibly high.
What is it that you think I'm confused about? Mostly you haven't said anything that wasn't already included in my prior comment.
However:
> instead it makes sense for the company to pay Jim somewhere between $8000/mo and $10000/mo to work from home, because any of those numbers make both of them no worse off than paying Jim $10500/mo to work from the office.
It can never make sense for the company to pay Jim more than $8,000 / month, because that is the amount he wants. As long as he's willing to work for $8,000 / month, the value of his work to the company can't exceed $8,000 / month.
You might notice that the value $15,000 doesn't occur anywhere in your most recent comment. How do you consider this comment related to your earlier claim that "If you split the difference, you both come out $15,000 ahead"? What difference have you identified that could be split this way?
> It can never make sense for the company to pay Jim more than $8,000 / month, because that is the amount he wants. As long as he's willing to work for $8,000 / month, the value of his work to the company can't exceed $8,000 / month.
The company doesn't know the minimum amount he's willing to work for. They have to guess. If they guess too low, he quits. If they guess too high, they pay more than $8000/mo.
The company also doesn't know exactly how much Jim values being able to work from home, so they have to guess that too. They can reasonably guess that it's in the thousands of dollars per month, but they don't know if it's $1000/mo or $4000/mo.
What they do know is that their cost for having him work from home -- arguably a savings to the company, but perhaps worth $500-$1000 in some cases -- appears to be less than this.
If they guess $1250/mo (i.e. $15,000/year) then they've guessed right in the middle between the start of the range and the actual limit, so each party gets half of the surplus. If the company's costs from allowing WFH are zero then they get to save $15,000/year, and Jim gets to save the $30,000 in commuting expenses in exchange for getting paid $15,000 less, which puts him $15,000 ahead too.
Even if the company's costs are non-zero they're still coming out ahead as long as they're not more than $1250/mo, so if they're $500/mo or $1000/mo and their guess of what he'll take is a reduction of $1250/mo then they'll still want to pay him that much less and let him work from home.
They might also make a better guess and get closer to the actual number of $2500/mo, but then they're running the risk that they overplay their hand and he walks away, and then they don't get the savings of thousands of dollars a year. So who actually gets more of the surplus from letting him work from home is down to salary negotiations, but it's in both of their interests to make it happen.
> There is a reason these are the same thing that should already be obvious: If you want people to take a job that costs them ~$30,000 more in expenses, you'll have to pay them more. If you split the difference, you both come out $15,000 ahead.
Sorry to be blunt, but I think this is incredibly naive given the current market. Since the explosion of remote work I've seen a ton of offshoring to excellent software developers in Latin American and Europe. There is absolutely zero benefit to paying an American salary in those situations because everyone is remote anyway (and there is enough timezone overlap that everyone can work roughly the same hours).
Workers will simply get fired if they don't come in and execs really want RTO, they're not going to get paid more.
> Workers will simply get fired if they don't come in and execs really want RTO, they're not going to get paid more.
If execs really want RTO then people will quit and they'll have to hire new people, pay retraining costs, pay them more because other companies are still offering WFH, lose out on all those lower cost workers in Latin America (or Texas or Virginia) and still be paying millions of dollars for office space their employees don't even want to be in.
> If execs really want RTO then people will quit and they'll have to hire new people
There have been 550k tech layoffs in the last 2 years. Pretty sure there are quite a few folks ready and willing to do a commute to work in an office to get a paycheck again.
The question is not whether they can find someone else to hire. They can always do that for the prevailing market price. The question is, how much more do they have to pay to get someone to take on ~$30,000/year in commuting costs than they would if they didn't require that?
So suppose the employer's benefit from having the employee is $150,000 if they work from the office and $140,000 if they work from home. Meanwhile the employee would accept $130,000 if they had to work from the office or $100,000 if they can work from home.
You're saying, $150,000 is more than $130,000 so the employer can pay them $130,000 to work from the office and everything's fine.
But the difference between $150,000 and $130,000 is less than the difference between $140,000 and $100,000. By quite a lot. So why isn't the employer going to want any of that money?
I think your reasoning is flawed because there is no fixed RTO cost to every employees commute and physical location (which I am assuming you mean by their expenses).
You could have 2 employees doing the same job, but one (Joe) has a 5 minute walk as their commute and the other (John) has a 50 minute drive in a personal vehicle. If there are enough Joe’s around to fill your roles, the costs associated with the Johns commutes don’t matter to the organization.
Facilities costs are actually pretty minor in the grand scheme of things…especially if your company has other roles that cannot be done remote. Incremental office space costs are minimal.
Your only hope to win the debate is to demonstrate with real productivity data. Perhaps things like demonstrating reduced sick time, turnover rate decreases, etc.
> You could have 2 employees doing the same job, but one (Joe) has a 5 minute walk as their commute and the other (John) has a 50 minute drive in a personal vehicle.
This doesn't mean they have different expenses. John is paying $2500/mo in time and commuting expenses, Joe is paying $2500/mo in additional rent to live in the downtown. Efficient market hypothesis says they're the same and anyway you care about the mean or median rather than rare outliers when operating at scale.
> Facilities costs are actually pretty minor in the grand scheme of things…especially if your company has other roles that cannot be done remote. Incremental office space costs are minimal.
Most offices are just offices. The jobs that can't be done remotely are the likes of data centers or factories, but these are different facilities in different places. If you're e.g. a tech company, your offices in San Francisco or New York contain entirely people who could work from home whereas your data centers might be in Oregon or Virginia.
So the costs are not incremental, they allow you to close entire facilities; and those facilities are the ones with higher costs per unit area; and the incremental costs are not trivial either. Things like rent and utilities scale approximately linearly with square footage or number of employees. Some are even super-linear because larger facilities succumb to bureaucracy, HR drama and combinatorial explosion in risk interactions.
> Your only hope to win the debate is to demonstrate with real productivity data.
I can win the debate this way too.
That two hours a day your employees were wasting in traffic? They're salaried employees, that's 10 hours a week they're not working.
They are still general living expenses. Those don’t go away based on employment or not, at home or not. They could decrease/increase some, but you can’t assume the whole amount is tied to employment only. Besides, if you don’t like your living expenses…quit or move.
> If you're e.g. a tech company…
What if you are not? what if you are a bank, a hospital, a factory, an insurance company, a processing center? You cannot make the assumption that every organization can just close “some” offices and leave others open. What about the HR and morale impact when 75% of your employees cannot work remote, but your SWEs can? Is it worth the office/desk footprint savings for leadership to create an elite group with a special benefits that pisses for every other person at the org? Probably not…
> That two hours a day your employees were wasting in traffic? They're salaried employees, that's 10 hours a week they're not working.
Now you are back to dealing with an individual impact here. If they are a salaried employee, the amount of work required for completion in a given week doesn’t change whether a commute is 10 hours or 10 minutes. That’s time the employee is investing by choosing to live where they live and work for the employer they work for. I have been on a salary for nearly 40 years…my employers have never expected me to work 168 hours a week. The expectation was an average of 40.
> They are still general living expenses. Those don’t go away based on employment or not, at home or not. They could decrease/increase some, but you can’t assume the whole amount is tied to employment only.
That wasn't the assumption. The assumption was that the difference was $2500/mo. Real estate in the heart of the downtown is significantly more expensive.
> Besides, if you don’t like your living expenses…quit or move.
At which point we're back to the efficient market hypothesis. If you live downtown, your rent is $2500/mo higher than if you live an hour away, but if you live an hour away you spend $2500/mo in time and commuting costs to get to the office.
But if you work from home then you live an hour away from the office, never go there and have no commuting expense, so you're ahead by $2500/mo and the company would have to compensate you for refusing to allow that.
> What if you are not?
Then you probably still have the same structure where the facilities that require in-person work are separate from the corporate offices:
> what if you are a bank, a hospital, a factory, an insurance company, a processing center?
A company is not a factory etc., a company has factories, or bank branches, or warehouses, or medical facilities. These facilities are generally already separate facilities from the offices where SWEs and other administrative staff work, because those facilities have different geographic requirements. Bank branches or medical facilities have to be near customers or patients. Warehouses or factories will be in places with cheap real estate or industrial zoning.
Offices have traditionally been in cities.
> What about the HR and morale impact when 75% of your employees cannot work remote, but your SWEs can?
This is a really dim view of people. Nurses and factory workers know perfectly well why they can't work from home. Why would they resent that someone else can when their job doesn't have the same requirements? Do they get mad at park rangers because their job allows them to spend time in the outdoors?
They might even notice that it's to their advantage because it gets 25% of the cars off the road so there isn't so much traffic during their commute, and stops them from being in competition with SWEs for the housing within reasonable distance of where they work.
> If they are a salaried employee, the amount of work required for completion in a given week doesn’t change whether a commute is 10 hours or 10 minutes.
You might expect that bosses would get away with giving you more work when you have more time, or that the quality of any given work might be influenced by how much time someone has available to spend on it. And nobody says you're working 168 hours a week, but a lot of people do more than 40, when they have the time.
> That’s time the employee is investing by choosing to live where they live and work for the employer they work for.
It's time the employee is being cost by being forced to commute into the office, which time would be available for other things in the alternative.
Honestly, you have a really strange way of looking at all this in my opinion. You seem to believe that your employer should compensate you not just for the time you are working for them, but also the time you are not. At no point in my life have I ever seen that expectation from anyone else.
You also seem to have really limited experience with organizations that have in office work. My guess is your career started relatively recently (<5 years). Perhaps all you have known is remote—that would track with the strange perspectives you have posted on this thread.
> You seem to believe that your employer should compensate you not just for the time you are working for them, but also the time you are not.
They have to compensate you for the relative difference in value between working for them and working for someone else.
If another company allows WFH and you don't, and that costs the employee $30,000/year to not have, what do you expect them to do when the employer offering WFH offers the same salary? Or even $10,000 less? And what will you have to do in response?
> They have to compensate you for the relative difference in value between working for them and working for someone else.
No. They only have to offer enough compensation and benefits to attract enough people into the roles they need filled.
> what do you expect them to do when the employer offering WFH offers the same salary?
Does it matter what another company does if the other company can still fill the role without offering WFH? Your whole premise seems to hinge on this concept that a company offering an in office position can’t effectively fill the opportunities they are offering. That’s not the case in 2025 (at least in the US). Specifically with tech jobs every opening whether WFH or in office generates hundreds of applicants. Some people might prefer WFH, others might prefer in office, but if RTO is the trend, WFH opportunities will start decreasing and will fill up fast. My guess is that given the option between unemployment and employment in an office anyone and everyone who needs an income will opt for the latter and will not sit around stubbornly waiting for a WFH opportunity like a petulant child that has to eat their broccoli before they are allowed to get up from the dinner table.
> No. They only have to offer enough compensation and benefits to attract enough people into the roles they need filled.
In the absence of an infinite labor pool, in order to do that they need to outbid the other employers.
> Does it matter what another company does if the other company can still fill the role without offering WFH?
Of course it does, because you have the opportunity to be the other company. You would be able to hire the same person for thousands of dollars less by allowing them to work from home and they would still take the job.
> Your whole premise seems to hinge on this concept that a company offering an in office position can’t effectively fill the opportunities they are offering.
I feel like we've been over this. You can obviously fill the job by paying more, but since the difference in the amount you'd have to pay is more than the value of forcing people to come into the office, why would you throw away money just to have less satisfied employees?
> Specifically with tech jobs every opening whether WFH or in office generates hundreds of applicants.
Applying to job postings on the internet takes a matter of seconds. Have a guess what "hundreds of applicants" implies if the average applicant applies to hundreds of job postings.
Now consider that a lot of the applicants won't be qualified.
> Some people might prefer WFH, others might prefer in office, but if RTO is the trend, WFH opportunities will start decreasing and will fill up fast.
It sounds like you're saying employers offering WFH opportunities will find it even easier to hire at a given level of compensation.
> My guess is that given the option between unemployment and employment in an office anyone and everyone who needs an income will opt for the latter and will not sit around stubbornly waiting for a WFH opportunity like a petulant child that has to eat their broccoli before they are allowed to get up from the dinner table.
Surely this attitude will have no effect on morale or turnover?
I am quite convinced that you probably started your career around or near to 2020, you seem to have a real naïveté around what is actually important to a company and how they calculate value. Especially a company that puts real value on in office work for its employees. I suspect you have probably had limited experience with in office work and automatically assume that everyone was miserable back pre-pandemic about it.
But here is the thing—people adapt. People adapted in 2020 when a good portion of the workforce went remote. There were griping then while people learned to balance home and family distractions with work. There were complications around finding appropriate workspace in their homes but people managed to make it work. If your company RTOs you might have a choice to make: adapt and deal with the commute/rent/whatever challenges with it, or perhaps try and convince your organization’s leadership how wrongheaded and stupid they are for RTO (Good luck…as a former senior leader in a few orgs both public and private…you better work on your argument). If you can’t adapt or convince your leaders of the error of their ways—quit and take your chances to find and compete for those remaining, but shrinking inventory of remote gigs out there.
I say all of this as a remote worker happily riding out the sunset of my career for a few more years in a lovely low stress non-management gig. I definitely don’t want to RTO, but if my company chose that route I know won’t have a good argument to counter because there isn’t one. I know and my leadership know that I can adapt and be just as productive at the office as I am at home…in short order.
> I suspect you have probably had limited experience with in office work and automatically assume that everyone was miserable back pre-pandemic about it.
Fully 91% of IT workers prefer to be fully remote or remote-first with no requirement to go into the office regularly, and it was disproportionately the first one. 6 of the remaining 9% still wanted to be remote first.
Only 1% of people wanted to be fully office-based. That's 3% less than the Lizardman's Constant.
> But here is the thing—people adapt.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -George Bernard Shaw
I prefer steak, but will eat chicken if that is what is available.
I prefer gin, but will drink vodka when that is what is available.
I prefer to fly first class, but economics often force me into economy.
A preference does not equal entitlement and frankly the only preference that matters in this case is what the employer’s preference is, especially when the workers are willing to compromise their preference where it differs from the employer’s preference.
The employer’s are the ones that hold the little green pieces of paper that you want and need and are willing to trade your labor to get. They will occasionally attach strings to those little green pieces of paper. As long as you or someone is willing to deal with those strings, your preference really only matters to you…at least to them.
This is why RTO will end. It was ending before the pandemic. The cost to the organization is money. They subsidize the employees ability to sit in chair and drink water and use the bathroom. This is a very high cost at any organization. The reason given it’s necessary is CEO has vibes that it’s better. This works for a while but in the end it’s real money spent on questionable benefits.
Before the pandemic there was a big push to reduce occupancy costs and get roles that did not need to sit in an office to subsidize their own offices, just like BYOD - but the dollars involved were orders of magnitude better than BYOD. During the pandemic we proved the costs came at the cost of net productivity on average. The reaction we see now is one against a cultural change that is off putting to people who succeeded in a specific emergent reality - the office culture. A 60 year old CEO has trouble using zoom because they didn’t grow up using it. They don’t know how to be effective over a remote relationship because they have developed exceptionally effective in person skills - that’s why they are where they are. They simply can not accept or fathom a world that is different than that. So they invent hand waving bullshit not based on data.
But economics wins based on data sooner or later. It is better share holder value to eliminate occupancy costs aggressive and offload the occupancy per employee to the employee. The company effectively gets free facilities in this scenario. There is no way the marginal per employee value of in person vibes out paces the marginal cost to shelter their bodies during the work day. The vibes thing is managed through adaptation.
Finally there’s this meme the Dimon and Trump and others use of people not working when working remotely. First that’s not true, second if it’s is, that’s a performance issue. Since when did we stop measuring performance ? The in office or not in office simply isn’t a productivity variable but not working and working during the work day is.
RTO is a cultural thing and you’ll never convince the executives of today by any argument conceivable because you’re telling them the sky is green when they know it’s blue. It doesn’t matter that in this case it’s not objective like the color of the sky. It FEELS objectively true.
However the economics will change, and the leadership will age away, and one day; maybe when the kids who graduated college having gotten their degrees online run the shop - we will offload the cost of housing the employee during the day to the employee because it’s what makes the most economic sense and we will adapt around the challenges.
Totally supportive of remote work before I make my comment to be clear.
Calling this “survivorship bias” though is like calling anything in evolution “survivorship bias”.
A person with a seriously work focused life is naturally going to excel and I have no problem with this. Someone that makes sacrifices in their personal life (paying to live in the city, not having children or too many etc) so they can be more available and work more hours may do better than me, even at the same level of skill and intelligence. This only seems fair.
Money can offset a lot of things, but money is still inferior to exactly one good - time.
You can use money to move around time, but you can never buy it. Every second that passes is gone forever, never to be seen again. The recognition of this reality is the difference between those work-focused executives and laypeople.
It seems like these policies are more geared towards giving companies a way to fire people and avoid the consequences of that than they are around improving productivity.
Hell, I'd argue for knowledge professions it's required throughout the day. I cannot stay in the zone for 8 hours a day, so I'm going to need to take breaks.
When I'm at home I can at least be productive. I can make lunch, start a load of laundry, something. At work I have to sit there and pretend to work because exec loves watching people work, which is ultimately not as refreshing and doesn't allow me to get back in the zone as quickly.
Ok. So environment and social factors have no effect?
Suddenly all these ideas from behavioral economics about implicit bias and contextual framing don’t apply, and we are now all Austrians studying rational and disciplined labor units.
At the same time, execs love to paint with a broad brush that everyone working from home is slacking off... while also not sharing any data about how many people are being lazy.
Either your performance management can catch lazy employees or it can't. If it can't, then that's what you should be fixing.
Slacking off is super easy in the office. You just have to spend a lot of time there, you can drag meetings forever, goof off behind computer - even if the screen is visible. But bonus if it is not visible.
Years before COVID or WFH was a thing, I knew a guy at work who played some MMO literally all day. He was also the main sysadmin and always got all of his work done on time.
But yes, people can slack off anywhere. 'Butts in seats' is one of the laziest metrics for management to use for 'working'.
I remember reading about SysAdmins who wrote mods for MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons, like a text-based MMO) to give them system status notifications in-game. For example, "a pigeon arrives with a note: Server 3 is down".
Plenty of jobs are intermittently high-demand and high-stakes while leaving a ton of free time throughout the day.
I knew a sysadmin at a different job who did that. And since MUDs were text, many in the office at the time had no idea what was on his screen.
And to your point about high-demand/high-stakes, at the same job as the MUD guy there was an old guy. He would leave before lunch go play tennis, nap under his desk in his cube, etc... I asked one of the other young people one day (I was still in college), what the old guy did. Apparently he was the only one who knew how to code a certain system, and he was only there to do that job when the system needed a change or had a problem.
Anon for obvious reasons. I'm one of the few full time home workers at my org. I slack off all the time. I mean literally I did an hour of work on Friday.
But this was a complete restart of something two of my in-office colleagues fucked up over the space of 2 weeks.
The problem in orgs is shit people, not working from home.
I’ve been wfh long before covid. I work in consulting so the metric is very easy. If a percentage of your time (typically 75-80%) isn’t billed to a client that yields a predefined margin then you’re fired. It seems brutal but it’s humane in a way. As long as I’m profitable to the firm they don’t care what I do or how I do it.
Where I work we are all remote and executives have to beg for a potty break because they are so busy. If you slack off when remote, you are probably worse in the office. WFH vs the office has nothing to do with a person's work ethic and dedication.
It is very interesting to me that in my social/professional circle, and indeed here on HN, remote schooling during covid is practically universally seen as a massive failure resulting in serious consequences, yet remote work is a huge success and it's an outrage and borderline human rights violation whenever it's reduced or taken away.
Of course, there are some incentives at play here. The people voicing these opinions are adults, and adults benefit both when their children are taken away to free daycare... err i mean school all day, and when they get to enjoy the flexibility of home office. This set of incentives could create the confusing combination of beliefs above.
But I also think that maybe it's the sample group. Not all kids failed disastrously at remote school, some excelled and worked far ahead of their classmates. And similarly, a lot of adults truly do get a lot more work done from their laptop at home. My suspicion is that technical people like those in my social circle and here on HN are both the types that would have excelled at remote schooling, and also those that do well working as hermits in a remote home office environment. There's just a huge blindspot that the other 90% of the population is handling things really badly.
The other 90% of kids are reading 3 grade levels behind, and the other 90% of coworkers are doing an hour of work per day, going to the shopping mall at 10am and the dog park at 2, and doing it all with low levels of team cooperation that, just like with a teacher and her remote 5th graders, no level of management or coaching is going to materially improve.
> It is very interesting to me that in my social/professional circle, and indeed here on HN, remote schooling during covid is practically universally seen as a massive failure resulting in serious consequences, yet remote work is a huge success and it's an outrage and borderline human rights violation whenever it's reduced or taken away.
Because children are not adults. They don't have the attention span and concentration skills to focus on something for 8 hours a day. Evolutionarily so - the job of children is to play, discover and learn. The job of adults is to concentrate and run the show.
Even the existing schooling system that crams kids into classrooms and gets them to look at a board to learn things is contrary to human evolution actually. Its the product of the early education system that developed from late medieval scholastic religious education practices.
> Not all kids failed disastrously at remote school, some excelled and worked far ahead of their classmates.
My grandson was like this. He was in a "virtual school" pod with three other children and is reading far ahead of his grade level and one of the reasons is that he didn't have to spend a ton of time in the child-management boot camp that a lot of elementary schools tend to be.
> If you need to influence an executive where their experiences may be out of touch with your reality, help them see the impact through stories, videos, and data.
> Remember, they live literally in another world. This doesn't necessarily make them evil, just disconnected. I do not want to be "out of touch" but it is important to acknowledge that this does happen over time.
No they don’t. We all live in the same world and it’s everyone’s responsibility to realize that and our impact on those around us as well as our environment. The ruling class’ personality disorders (detaching from the common folk) are primarily their problems and should be dealt with by them, not worked around by us.
This is just an executive trying to gather sympathy for themselves, and make others "empathize" with their decisions.
But it's sugarcoated. The only part that makes sense is the fact they are sociopaths who only care about work success.
The rest of it is just sugarcoating the fact that they make these decisions because they simply couldn't give a shit what their peers below them think. They know it fucks with them and that they don't like it. It's not some "oh we don't understand cause we're too rich" sob story.
agreed, thats the vibe I got from this story as well.
like fuck off with that, the data and the vibes all point to it being better for the employees and their productivity to work from home. too many "I went through it so you have to as well" types that aren't interested in evolving stuck in their old ways
>We all live in the same world and it’s everyone’s responsibility to realize that and our impact on those around us as well as our environment.
It is physically impossible to be aware of the entirety of one's impact on others. One might be able to dimly perceive how the person across from you is feeling about something you said or did, but even in simple one to one interactions, there's frequent miscommunication and signal loss. If you extend this to making decisions that have an impact on not just one but hundreds or thousands of people, it's literally impossible to know the true impact of all those decisions on all those people. Good decision makers will intentionally cultivate information flows that provide them some insight but those are themselves imperfect.
And bad decision makers won't even try, and might attack the people who try to do it for them. And there are a shitload of bad decision makers. And I don't owe them anything.
You're passing over the key word "entirety." It is beyond our ability to understand the entirety of how our actions affect our own individual selves. How can we understand the entirety of how our actions affect dozens, hundreds or thousands of people every day. I would not trust someone who thought they only needed a dash of empathy to have this much insight.
In a sense it is literal, if "world" is understood not as "planet earth" or "this realm of existence" but instead as a social circle. e.g. "He is from the software world," doesn't mean "He is from a world made up of software," but instead "He works in and is surrounded by people who develop software professionally." In that sense, a lot of these people are (literally) living in a world that is socially, physically, and even conceptually separate from those of lesser means.
Is that a useful understanding of "world" in this case? I think it's important to remember that we share the same planet, the same economic system, the same borders and system of visas. This way, their inordinate privileges stand out in sharp relief. It seems almost apologetic to say they live in a different world.
That might be so but he did highlight that he put work ahead of the family
> Most time goes to work, some to family.
I do two jobs, but do that _because_ I prioritize family life: I do my main (not remote) work only part time because that can't be done remotely, and do a second job (consulting, 90% remotely) on off days to make up the difference. I don't care about the money as long as we make do.
I wouldn't want those people's jobs tbh. You can't make every dollar, and they don't really have a life outside work. Fast forward to 60, you're retired and you haven't even lived yet. Sounds like a regrettable situation to be in even if you're rich - your youth is gone, everything hurts when you wake up, and your dick doesn't work anymore.
Part of how I coped with spending years at a big co underleveled and unaware of the ramifications was realizing that when I took vacation, I disappeared for months at a time. "K, I'm gonna be gone for ___. See you when I get back." As a low-level IC, your personal time is your own. I take time off when I want, fully disconnect, and nothing is completely on fire when I come back.
There's maybe a year or two I eventually wouldn't have to work if I was more aggressive about going for promo, but I have no desire to be someone who's stressed about work, even when I'm not supposed to be working.
None of this is surprising.
I wouldn’t say they are disconnected, unless they were already born with a silver spoon and have never had to live like the rest of us. I would say they know how it is for the rest of us, but just don’t care.
I enjoy working from home. But I'm not going to deny that it has had a catastrophic impact on the downtown business and commercial districts in many small and medium-sized cities. Those places stuggled badly with lockdown in general and a lot still have not recovered from the sudden societal shift where so many people just stay at home in the suburbs instead of coming into the office. I don't know what the answer is, and I certainly don't want to return to the office. But the outlook is bleak for a lot cities.
Wouldn’t this be countered by the economic boon of the grocery stores and other places that are open where people actually live? In my neighborhood a couple of small eateries have opened up for the wfh crowd. I can get a decent sandwich and some chips to go for a reasonable price within a 20min walk from my home.
Edit: coffee shops seems to be doing very well too
> countered by the economic boon of the grocery stores and other places that are open where people actually live
While I think it's true that a lot of businesses have shifted to being more neighborhood-local and not relying on "business hours" to be sustainable, the reality for most suburban economies are that shopping centers and chain megastores basically absorb all the business. Places like Target, Whole Foods, Walmart are the ones that are primarily benefiting from this overnight migration outside of city centers. But that's been going on for a long time, COVID just accelerated it.
Maybe those were just artificial constructs that cost everyone a lot of money and we just started to realize now?
“Hey let’s support these 30$ lunches at the food truck downtown.”
Maybe we are as a society better off without these massive concrete structures that are only occupied 8h / 24h a day and serve no other purpose? Maybe requiring less resources and infrastructure to get people to and from other concrete structures that they only inhabit during the other part of the day is a good thing kind of?
The city and those business need to change to meet the shift. They are just being greedy and seem to want us workers to both support ourselves and bail them out.
The answer is that it sucks to own one of those businesses, but things change and disruption happens. The answer isn't "the city's entire white-collar workforce needs to migrate downtown and back every day to provide an artificial customer base for $17 burritos".
There is more benefit to a vibrant downtown city center than just "white collar" people visiting everyday. Bars, restaurants, cafes. People go to the post office, they go to salons. All of those things are gone now.
In exchange for people staying home, and going to their local suburb's Target and Walmart to buy a sandwich, or go to a Starbucks. Get their nails done in a local chain stripmall place.
Those things are gone now because the only reason people were doing them downtown is because they had to be there for work.
It's odd to suggest that people spending their money closer to home means shopping at large chain businesses, but spending downtown doesn't. Just because there isn't a Walmart in the city's corporate center doesn't mean you're patronizing Mom and Pop small businesses. You think that trendy gastropub with its gourmet hamburgers, cute waitresses that all share a suspiciously similar alt aesthetic, and tables full of people clad in business casual isn't a line item in some investment firm's portfolio?
Guess where the Mom and Pops are? They're in that "stripmall place" near your house.
> Guess where the Mom and Pops are? They're in that "stripmall place" near your house.
That's not where they are though. You see it, too. Those stripmalls are all dead-dead-dead. The only business is at the shopping centers and megastores.
They are where I live. Guess it depends on the city.
I can tell you where they most definitely aren't, though: downtown. Anybody who can afford that real estate is not the little guy. If they appear to be, that just means great effort (and money) was expended to create that image.
"It would be hypocritical to talk about "executives" in general without owning my own situation first. For brevity, here are four examples:
1) No mortgage
2) A maid service cleans every two weeks
3) Someone else mows the grass
"
Just an anecdote, but all of his examples (except maybe for the personal assistant) could be given by anyone living in a middle-class family from Brazil until the late 90s.
2 and 3 is not too hard to be able to afford here in the US. 1 would depend on when you bought your house because prices have shot up a lot. But if you are a tech workers and got some RSU and bonuses it would be achievable.
About three years ago, when the major state university my wife worked for was starting its "return to office" push, the head of HR gave a Zoom town hall filled with condescending remarks. He said things like, "I don’t know why you all aren’t back in the office already..." and "I love going to the MU and chatting with students about their college experience."
Keep in mind, COVID was still raging at this point.
Right in the middle of his calm rant, a courier—UPS or Amazon, I think—knocked on his door, rang the bell, and then dropped off a package, loud and clear for everyone to hear. It was hilarious and completely undercut his entire message. Funny, but also infuriating.
I've been saying this since RTO became a thing. Even well-compensated white collar ICs have to deal with many of the same day-to-day realities as blue collar workers. They pay bills, have to wrangle the kids, etc. Yes they live more comfortably, but they still have to personally deal with all this stuff -- they don't have the money for a household staff.
Remote work is just such a massive improvement in every respect for people with families for that reason.
The executives are just on a different planet. These are people who embody Lucille Bluthe's quote "It's one banana Michael. How much can it cost, $10?"
These are highly intelligent people. They got to be very high up in the food chain. They are driven. They are smart.
Yet, the claim is that they can't imagine there exist people not like themselves? Sorry, not buying it.
More plausible to me is that remote work will hurt their bottom lines because they (and their superiors, investors, board members, etc) heavily invested in real estate.
I invest primarily in REITs, avoiding those tied up in any significant amount of office space.
Residential, industrial, medical and retail are easy picks over office buildings.
The impact is real. Excutives are qualified as accredited investors and have access to private investments that are often tied to office space and other real estate that most people cannot participate in.
I still would hate to be in the office every day by diktat but I honestly do think remote work can be pretty bad for the younger end of a company.
Ignoring that its quite hard to learn from other people remotely (somewhat easier in tech because people are used to it), a lot of people frankly don't realise that they're basically running off like a headless chicken working on stuff that doesn't actually matter - programmers especially. You really do need to see the whites of some peoples eyes to get them to actually do the right thing, some people just aren't the type to instinctively know the macro picture of what they're working on.
If I were running a company and had the cash to facilitate I think I would probably go for something like a cycle of "x weeks off 1 week of intense in-office sprinting" then repeat. Going into the office for no reason is basically pointless, or at least the option on spontaneity may be worth less than the cost of going, there's an arbitrage in recognising that.
Totally agree with this model, and I’ve seen it work.
As usual, the best model is not an extreme “easy answer”, but a nuanced take (in-person environments have tangible benefits, but also tangible downsides — and the same for fully remote environments).
It seems like our society (at least in the US) only has room for “easy answers” now a days … to the detriment of most.
It's very sad to me that we didn't seize and expand on this alternative vision for work. A commuting culture is quite terrible for society and there are many examples of successful remote-first teams. Worse, we don't get even get the benefits of working together because these group-thinkers also buy into outsourcing and so we commute into an office only to spend most of our day on video call with remote teams. Idiocracy.
Eh, I think the commuting negativity mostly stems from bad land use in America. Driving is wasteful, polluting, boring, dangerous, expensive, and just generally unpleasant. If we’d designed our society around walking/biking/transit people would be much happier.
During Covid there was some surveys done on whether or not people missed their commute. People who walked or biked were very likely to say they missed commuting. Those who took transit were split (mild dislike), and those who drove nearly universally did not miss it.
We built a pile of shit instead of functional urbanism in America and this is the result.
Which doesn't make any sense, because people who walked or biked could just have done the same when working remotely - just turn around after 1/2 of distance to the office and go back home. Then repeat after work.
They didn't miss the "commute to work", they missed the exercise and the internal soothing feeling, that they are doing something good for the health in spite of that trip being required to get the paycheck, and that it's not a total waste of time when done this way.
Remote doesn't necessarily have to mean work-from-home either, corporations could provide hubs or co-working spaces that are walkable or bikeable. So they can still get the warm managerial feeling of seeing badge-ins on a dashboard while also moving as away from 2h commutes and sterile office parks.
I agree. Just goes to show how difficult it is to have lasting, fundamental societal change.
I will say that zoom fatigue is real and remote work can be problematic for people that are mainly in meetings. But we could have solved this with a better solution than snapping back to office culture.
Sorry but this is completely off base. Executives know what they are doing. They just don't care because it makes them more money.
It depends on whether you consider that evil or not. But no, I do not take that they don't understand somehow because of their privilege.
This is just another executive grift trying to make people feel better about them and the decisions they make.
Stop the bullshit and say the quiet part out loud. They do not care what your employees have going on. They understand it fucks with people's work life balance and simply do not care.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 330 ms ] threadDuring the TGIF (company all hands) discussing this, the architect of the policy, someone high up in the HR org, explained why it was necessary.
I don’t recall what they said, but I do recall that they happened to be working remotely at the time, after the policy against remote work had already gone into effect.
The brazenness of lecturing us on why remote work was harmful to Google while working remotely was shocking. Predictably, the internal anger over this was enormous.
Rules for thee but not for me, some animals are more equal than others, etc.
It was little surprise that more than half were showing up daily on picket lines as admin was apparently surprised that they couldn't find "travelers" to fill critical ICU roles, while surgeons continued scheduling elective surgeries.
It's still the case that the HR executive officer resides in LA and that Payroll is managed (with financially catastrophic results) from Hawaii. Both discipline and scheduling are also done almost entirely remote. It would be hilarious if not for the effects on staff and patients.
They went so far as to only hire travel nurses (temps), who were commanding 100k+ salaries, when things got bad enough rather than filling a full time position. And, to add insult to injury, the nurses themselves have been getting salaries in the 30->50k range. So HR could have literally filled 2+ positions for the cost of a single travel nurse.
That's what has lead to a nursing shortage and burnout. HR cost cutting because "we just need the minimum and no backups". It's a big part of the strikes.
Believe it or not, many nurses and doctors working in healthcare actually care about their patients. Something HR is more than willing to exploit to get them to work ridiculous hours.
HR works for management and the board.
Of course the "why" is driven by the greatest risk in healthcare. Where most income comes from insurance is stable, the real risk is being sued. Hence rises "there shall be no exceptions" HR rule based hegemony.
I’m a radiographer and moaned to a colleague about the holdup I’d have with my 7am x-ray ward round in ICU. ‘The nurses are still doing handover at 8am, so won’t help and I can’t do anything.’
An older radiographer told me that the nurses stopped getting paid at 7am. The overtime they were working every single day after a night shift was all unpaid.
A major class marker distinguishing the upper-middle from the middle ends up being that the former are barely surveilled, largely free to set their own schedule, and basically are trusted to do the right thing (never mind that perfectly ordinary behavior patterns from them would be regarded as instantly fireable for others; it’s a different standard), while the middle gets constant status reports, return to office mandates, stricter start and stop times, maybe drug tests.
(The actual upper class, of course, simply don’t meaningfully have managers at all)
You know that older, expert manager everyone says is great that they bring in to run the business in the show Silicon Valley? Who spends a bunch of his time ignoring the place to breed horses or whatever, and seems to think that’s normal and fine? That’s this kind of thing. He doesn’t even get why that might be wrong, or why it might be shitty to take a big paycheck and ask hard work from others then fuck off to a rich-dude hobby half the time—that’s just what his kind of people do.
I've found his upper-middle and upper class descriptions constantly useful for deepening my insight into media, the news, work-life, and even history. Usually in small ways, but it's still pretty cool. Class markers are everywhere in media, and a lot of it I was surely noticing subconsciously, but being aware of them and able to point out many elements of them is a different experience. It's like seeing into the minds of the set designers, costume designers, and actors.
1) I've developed a vague notion that much of the last 3-4 decades has, along with other (mostly bad) social, political, and economic changes in the time after trust-busting got neutered in the 1970s and Reaganism and neoliberalism took over (RIP neoliberalism, at least on one side of the aisle, LOL, glad to see you finally go even if the rest of that's all a shit-show) has been a kind of one-sided upper-middle civil war. It sure looks like the finance guys (solidly part of that class, for the most part) teamed up with the professional managerial class (the least-solidly part of that class, of the major traditional categories therein) to do their best to shove doctors, academics, and to some extent lawyers, down into the Middle, with no organized resistance on the other side.
2) I see a lot of how programmers are treated through this lens. Companies seem extremely reluctant to give programmers upper-middle perks. I think #1 is part of why: managers really, really don't want to mint a new upper-middle cohort even as they're busy clearing the field for only themselves and finance bros, and programmers (lots of us, at least) have the income to be there, but sit in a weird half-in-half-out for the upper middle, because we've mostly been denied things like private offices and certain other liberties, and subjected to micromanagement and humiliating hazing-ritual hiring processes, even as incomes soar and the snacks are good or whatever. Socially we are firmly "under" even a lot of other parts of companies that make less money, and part of that's come through cultivation of certain attitudes about programmers, and denial of "higher" perks.
Beyond that I was already pretty firmly on the side of stronger labor, better labor protection laws, and far more unionization, and Class didn't take me any farther from those things.
I read his optimism for his supposed "Class X" and the plain fact that none of that turned out to be what he thought it was as, if anything, another reason to be for the above. Organization and force (read broadly, I don't necessarily mean stuff like "hitting people") will get us to a better place, not hoping to be saved by a social movement.
P.S. Self-plug: you might find my newsletter last month [0] mildly interesting. See the section "My Own Views"
[0] https://handmadecities.com/news/splitting-from-handmade-netw...
Indeed, when you describe it, it does seem like the programmers are a medieval feudal peasant class that is let some freedom but actively kept down by the feudal aristocracy.
> (read broadly, I don't necessarily mean stuff like "hitting people")
I don't know of any period in history where the elite let go of their power and privilege without violence.
When I was having trouble finding work this was one of my biggest issues. I was qualified to be working independently but all the entry-level work I could find would have involved being treated like I was in high school again, whereas before I could use the afternoon to tinker or read and no one cared as long as my work was getting done. This is why office jobs end up being coveted to the point that a university graduate will be making the same amount working an office job as a retail associate at a Walmart.
There was an internal survey (unofficial) at my workplace right after a mass layoff 2 years back about how many were interested in forming a union. There were 3 options - Interested, Not Sure and Against. The option with most votes was "Against".
I could go into the reasons which were submitted in survey but in short most were related to hyper individualism that is so pervasive.
This isn't a call to arms for luddites, this is a call to kill the trillion dollar companies with grassroots direct action that is intentionally and purposefully organized to decrease the revenue and social acceptance of these organizations. This is a pro-tech movement, it's just pro-tech that respects your freedom, your privacy, your rights to decide what your hardware and software are / are not doing. We will not be the feudal subjects of these tyrants.
We must be the revolutionary change we want to see by lunging straight for the hearts of these evil empires. Grassroots direct action, spread the word.
Android and iOS apps, with the exception of games, are usually just thin presentation layers around cloud apps. Hint: if you have to log in, the real app a cloud app running on a Linux server.
But I don’t see what that has to do with executive compensation.
Also, it's not about supporting Linux, it's about not supporting tyrants (Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Meta, et. al.). Whenever you offer compatibility for Windows, Mac OS, iOS, or Android, you are excusing, encouraging, and supporting tyranny and neofeudalism.
Consider using and supporting GNU/Linux phones. Sent from my Librem 5.
But, as already mentioned, if you think sentiment is unfriendly to unions now, it's nothing compared to how it was back then. The typical tech worker somehow thought they were already changing the world, doing some VC's bidding for nickels on the dollar, adding sparkly features to another B2B SaaS product...
"Millionaire" was added in a 2004 misquote by Robert Wright, and $1 million in 2004 dollars is about $1.7 million in 2025 dollars.
It took me about seven years in industry, starting from my first internship, to hit my first million. Non-FAANG and nothing magical happening with appreciating options or stock, just ordinary W-2 work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43235932
(And big tech execs still make orders of magnitude more in compensation than you do. You two were never alike!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve-mANenpC4
Being forced to RTO across the country, then immediately laid off after I uprooted my life to do so, all while knowing the layoffs were planned while they were telling me to move across the country, is fucked.
(also why employers are trying to staff up offices offshore in LATAM and India)
Edit: @tbrownaw all of the responses to your inquiry are accurate.
What does this mean in concrete terms? What useful power do they gain based on physical presence, and what rights are currently absent but coming (back?) soon?
Definitely power there if you know your staff have just uprooted their lives and now depend on you for their immediate term existence…
If remote labor is the norm, then every tech company has to compete with every other, across all geographies. If local labor is required, the employers can manage or restrict their competitive environment. There are fewer options for the employee.
The bulk layoffs of the past couple of years have a similar effect - gaining power. It makes every employee a little more conscious that their employment is provisional and conditional.
But I think RTO goes beyond just market power gains. There are many workers who are conscientious, attentive, and dedicated. For each one of those there are plenty who are just punching their time card. I’m no expert but it seems to me that RTO gives the employer and mid-level managers better visibility into all of that dynamic.
But RTO fights against the reality that employers have constructed distributed teams, with people working from all over the globe on the same project. If that’s the case, what is the difference whether I work from my home office, or a hotel desk space in a big building alongside people I don’t know.?
Doesn’t that seem backwards? A company that supports remote work has a worldwide talent pool.l, including lower cost geographies. A company that insists on RTO can only hire locally, so has less talent available and can’t arbitrage labor costs.
I think RTO makes no sense, but I don’t see how it gives employers more power.
* Remote workers aren't actually a worldwide labor force because of time zones, so the competition on the labor side is less than in theory.
* Remote work diminished the difference in liquidity between labor and capital markets. Capital is by nature more liquid than labor, and being more liquid gives you an advantage. As you say, the competitive pressures exist in both markets, and maybe this is a wash in terms of power.
* Remote workers can pay off mortgages faster, leading to more early retirements.
I still think the primary reason is a desire to manage according to the old style, which is a different argument than the GP.
Humans are not just replaceable cogs. When you hire someone, there are several things built into the assumption of that work that we take for granted. For example, federal holidays or work culture. The US is notorious for accepting overwork as the norm (people even brag about working 60-hour weeks) where that's just not acceptable in other parts of the world. That's obviously not true everywhere (e.g. 9-9-6 in China), but is true in enough places that it's not trivial to just swap in person A from country X with person B in country Y. That's not even touching on labor laws, language barriers (e.g. understanding office lingo like "circle back"), or value structure. The latter is huge where Americans care a lot about their jobs and careers and most parts of the world don't have the concept of a career.
Of course. And the workers want more money.
It's how markets work.
My prediction is that as soon as interest rates fall, employers will be reintroducing “flexibility” to lure workers and attract talent. And at that point it might become more established.
As for workers having fewer protections rn, gestures in the general direction of DC.
This doesn't make any sense. Remote jobs are... remote. Moving to mountain view or whatever doesn't make you "limited to other companies in their metro". You can still find remote jobs, but now you have the additional option of in-person jobs in the bay area.
If you live in Omaha and work remotely, far more remote jobs are available.
Since that’s always an option.. yeah clearly keeping talent in high col places is a part of the cudgel that employers want to use against employees. It’s similar to healthcare being connected to employment really. If the labor market was actually free from ultimately coercive tactics like this then the world would look very different.
Remote jobs on average pay less because you are competing with people who live in the MiddleOfNowhere Nebraska.
Even formerly “field by design” roles that were permanently remote at AWS (where I use to work) paid less than in office jobs. Now those jobs are also in office jobs at both Amazon and Google (GCP).
Do this, or else.
Some states even have laws that employers don't have to pay accrued vacation time. For example Nevada says employers with under 50 employees don't have to pay accrued vacation.
However, there are exceptions. In particular if the company is small enough, or the layoff is below a certain percentage of employees, it doesn't take effect.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retrai...
Fortunately I didn't have to uproot my life or move cities, but it was a wakeup call as to the true nature of at will employment. You can't take anything for granted.
A plan B is always a good thing to have. I knew a middle class engineer a few years ago who spent every dime of his salary on installment payments for this and that. The company then had to cut back, and he went into a furious panic. It was a trap he set for himself, although he blamed the company.
Even if the government guarantees you lifetime employment, it isn't a guarantee.
I know executives have different rules and laws that govern them. But I can remember a time when they would’ve had the decency, shame or whatever else to attempt to obscure this. That HR VP could have come into the office for one day, the day that he was explaining his RTO mandate to the entire company.
That he didn’t feel embarrassed about delivering this mandate while very visibly defying it himself is beyond differentiated treatment, it is open disdain for the (upper) working class.
Rules for thee but not for me, typical tech nerds.
The main theme of their post was that engineering had become a second-class profession at a de-facto engineering firm.
If I recall correctly, Steve Jobs had something to say about that very transition…
Edit: By thread I mean internal Email thread at Google.
This dynamic is at play in every big company I've encountered in my 27 year career in tech.
Whether those values actually lead to a better company is the part that, I feel, continues to lack evidence.
Management...apparently did not enjoy the time. I assume so many of them do nothing but meetings, they were probably bored. The upper leadership, for whom the work is predominantly meetings, is likely not satisfied without maximal people in sight.
Because their job is all having meetings and walking around asking people what's new.
After all, are there any workforce troubles in companies that mandated RTO, besides negative hacker news comments?
So for example, if you've got 500 people (customers) walking through your building plus 200 people (employees) doing things, then the restaurants and shipping stores and etc can estimate some % of those feet turning into sales.
But if you've got only 300 people (customers) walking through your building plus 50 people (employees) doing things, that % of feet turning into sales goes waaaaaay down. And your retail outlets in the building end up with far fewer sales. They either go out of business or demand cheaper rent.
That's just one way of estimating commercial real estate.
Let's figure your attached parking garage. Assuming it's not-free, then all those employees not paying their parking dues ends up causing the parking garage to not generate revenue. Ooof. Or, let's say it's "free". Well, the people who reserved spots paid for those spots whether they use them or not. But the people who don't reserve spots? The business isn't seeing a return on investment if their employees aren't using them, so why pay their share for maintenance of that parking garage?
What about the HVAC and plumbing? The building owner's son owns those businesses, and it's pretty damn expensive to keep HVAC and plumbing working at peak efficiency. It becomes a lot easier to do if they're not used as much! But your son's business is going to get churned if you don't pay them less for the decreased maintenance costs. And you can't just stop maintenance because those things get damned expensive when they're unmaintained.
And the shipping staff? Well they have to come to the office anyway otherwise nothing gets shipped. It's not fair to those staff! You pay them complete shit, and they used to be able to eat lunch at a decent restaurant and have a decent place to park and have good air conditioning and working toilet. But now, with just everyone else being out of office, the restaurant went out of business and the HVAC is set to a wider range of climate and the toilet's been clogged for a while.
Instead of paying the shipping staff something reasonable to offset their changes, or changing the way that lunch and support services are handled... just demand everyone else come to the office too. That's cheaper.
Nobody would hurt labor productivity to save an office. It’s backward
It's entirely possible that the question of "labor productivity" has nothing to do with why exec wants us all back in the bullpen, where they can gleefully stare at us from inside their offices.
Really? Then why do you think that return-to-office is mandated by so many large organizations? By following that line of thinking then surely their larger footprint would yield even larger savings for work-from-home?
They give employees space in that building so that people have a dedicated space to do their work, free from outside distraction.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/s-f-economy-tax-plan-...
There was a day after Christmas where the team was kinda taking it easy and went out for a longer than usual lunch, and an executive got in our face about how the day after Christmas is not an excuse to slack off. Then the person had us a deploy a feature that afternoon to prod even though it was supposed to be launched after the holidays. The person also did this remotely because they took the day off (the rest of us were actually in the office).
Power is much nastier than people realize. What I provided was an anecdote, but the #metoo movement probably started just like that.
Edit: I just realized how Dickensian this was, plot synopsis of A Christmas Carol. Just missing the ghosts and soul change.
Many (but not all) organisations take the week of Christmas out as mandatory holiday for efficiency reasons (close building, save heat &c).
The only reason they wanted this observation that way is so that, instead of having to sit down at their laptop and log into the VPN and manage 2FA and keep their computer open so it doesn't log out every 15 minutes and all that, they just had to glance at a teams message on their phone.
We, the peons and laborers of course were not extended that option, and any system built to automatically generate screenshots for teams probably would be treated as a security risk.
I genuinely consider my direct management chain to be effective, nice, and mostly empathetic within reason, but even they manage to internalize a "the peons can be used to give myself a convenience" ideology.
They don't think of you as people, you are just a resource to them.
Is it really so hard to imagine the struggles of someone who doesn’t have any of the benefits listed in the post?
Just sitting down and doing a quick calculation would immediately reveal time allocation dilemmas of prioritizing “return to office” for someone who doesn’t have the benefits.
Time is universally valuable! But even more so for someone who … has significantly less of it because they can’t hire legions of staff to manage their lives?
“What if I didn’t have this? How would that make me feel?” Pretty depressing. Empathy can’t run the business — but surely it is correlated with strong team cohesion and performance?
You also end up in these bubbles where you literally can’t empathize with people because you have no experience to fall back on.
Combine that with a sort of media and religious culture that will tell you you’re right to feel that way.
I’ve hear rich people complain about the fact that rich people are people to, d that poor people don’t appreciate them enough.
And actually, I think this is a common thread these days, that essentially the world’s problems are caused by the fact that rich people don’t have enough power and aren’t trusted enough by society. Marc Andreesen implied this in his Joe Rogan interview.
It's not like they have a choice, gaslighting the general population is their only hope of staying on top/alive.
How does someone make others care about him/her? Hmmm...
Yes, it is hard. While you can break down the struggles to analyze them, actually understanding their emotional impact is a whole different story.
> Empathy can’t run the business — but surely it is correlated with strong team cohesion and performance?
As someone who has recently shifted towards managing people, I am facing two big struggles: how to be empathetic without taking on their emotional burdens and how to respect their situation in life while ensuring they respect their responsibilities in the work place. And this is management at a very low level in the hierarchy. There isn't terribly much that separates myself from them.
I'm not suggesting that there is no role for empathy in a business. Apparently the person who came before me lacked it and survived ten weeks. I'm simply suggesting that it is difficult to balance.
I think the issue is just that fundamental difference between what the work of relevant people comprises -- moreso than class. Managers, executives, and so on are "social workers": their job is to align people, brainstorm ideas, communicate, "govern" etc.
"Knowledge workers" job is, in large part, to think alone, then to create alone -- and when that fails seek some minimal intervention by another knowledge worker to resolve an issue.
"The Office" is not well-designed for knowledge work -- it's design for "social work". It's born of an era when manual workers worked in factories, and "social workers" worked in offices -- and "knowledge workers" were in academia, in the basement or some hidden (, silent) back office.
Reducing this to class seems to miss the point. Will anyone ever just recognise what the job of creative knowledge work is? Is it so incomprehensible? In the quest to "comprehend" it, we're told its our lack of maids which burden us so.
It's kinda laughable. A maid is no help if you won't STFU.
Commute sucks, cubicles are worse than useless; you won’t get any argument from me on either of these.
But I also know how crucial it is for academia to talk with colleagues. Email kind of works. Video calls kind of work a bit more. But nothing beats knocking on the door of the office next to you. (Whether it’s polite to announce yourself by e.g. email first depends on the country; even if you just show up and you’re turned away, that’ll be until lunch or at worst until the next day.) And the post-seminar atmosphere of everybody talking chaotically to each other with their minds buzzing as others put away their papers, chairs, etc., thus far stays unreplicated by any technological means.
I guess what I want to say is, the more speculative your ideas are, the more important it becomes to bounce them off people in spontaneous conversation. And any friction (scheduling, calls, etc.) you add will significantly reduce the amount of spontaneous conversation you are going to have. So far, we haven’t figured out a better way than roughly everybody involved being in roughly the same place roughly all the time. That saddens me, given how much I hate commuting.
There's a certain sort of knowledge worker who wants to impress upon the others how communal, conversational, and social their job "really is!" --- but these are people who are likewise not empathetic with the managerial class. All you're really saying is in 20 hours of thinking a week, and 20 hours of typing --- some 2 with others might really help. I don't disagree.
The problem is the "social work" class do not have very much to think about -- their job is to align very rudimentary thoughts from a pool of people who need to negotiate their positions. The Grand Plan of an executive-type is a search through a paddling pool of combinatorial options. This isn't to trivialise the work, so much to point out its an operational and socio-logistical task.
Yes, conversing with one's knowledge-worker peers can speed things up a lot, advance ideas and the like. I am here only analysing where the gap in empathy lies -- I do not really think it's people who can well-afford maids (pretending they cannot) being misunderstood by people with private jets
20 houes of thinking, 20 hours of typing, and 2 hours of collaborating is just a bizarre numericalisation of something that probably cannot be quantified. How much time you spend on something doesn't tell you it is more or less important anyway. What percentage of the time do you spend coding vs committing and pushing? Yet if you didnt do the latter, the former would be a total waste of time.
The small amount of time (even conceding it is small, which it isnt necessarily) you spend on collaboration might be a force multiplier that makes the rest of your time far more valuable.
>The problem is the "social work" class do not have very much to think about -- their job is to align very rudimentary thoughts from a pool of people who need to negotiate their positions.
This is frankly insane. You don't actually think this, surely? Surely this is just rhetoric?
This has nothing to do with maids or private jets. Plenty of businesses want their workers in the office including those where the business owners and managers cannot afford private jets or maids.
The dialectic of this thread -- the OP beings with effectively a class analysis of why executives misunderstand office-worker employees. My reply is the origins lie in a different distribution of at-work activities in which executives require massive amounts of in-person communication to do their jobs, whilst knowledge-workers do not (and are often harmed by an excess).
> This has nothing to do with maids or private jets.
So you agree with me. It's important not to substitute a position I am opposing for one that I'm not.
As for my slight exaggerations around how I characterise the kinds of people, and work involved -- it is hyperboilic and hoperfully amusing characterisation -- but not one which I think is far off.
The "deep thought" of executive work is shallow, for those who prise complexity and such, no doubt this seems derogatory. But it's not. If you thinking can be readily terminated by the speech of another person, your own thinking process is not that deep. Sure, that of The Group's might be -- and much more so than any person's, but each individual is not engaged in deep thought.
If you can farm out depth to a group discussion, great -- that's one sort of work. It is not the work of a progammer, say, who is tracing execution flow in their own head -- this cannot be half-realised in one person's head and half-realised in another.
Oh boy. What you are saying is akin to kicking an IC in the balls while he was concentrating on something. I don't think it would be any different in academia for researchers who are concentrating on something.
Pretty much all of physics was collaborated on with snail mail and a couple times a year in the busiest years in person conferences to have what were essentially war rooms.
We still regularly get cross earth papers published, with explicit collaboration between labs on the opposite side of the world.
A significant amount of science collaboration happens with work that is translated!
If software development were to emulate such a system, it would be small teams of like 2-7 people working together in a small office with a hundred such offices all over coordinating when they need to.
Of course, none of those scientists ever needed change management!
Enterprises can remove a meaningful number of employees for whom it’s a dealbreaker issue without the associated redundancy costs or PR issues.
This applies to both work location and number of hours per week. It's gotta be hard to understand and accept that lower-level workers have a different view and priorities from your own, especially when all your fellow execs share your own view.
And, as the tweet says, at a certain level you can afford to offset all the negatives of work location / work hours. No commute. Personal chef. All household chores covered. Full time individual childcare. It's a lot easier to come into the office for 50-60 hours per week when you don't have to also spend your time outside the office trying to balance sleep and survival. But, again, that's not what life looks like for an average employee.
They care about their own profits, which are mostly bonus-based, and prestige. If they think they get any extra by appearing doing first and last thing that could drive up share price (or win some extra points in some meaningless internal battles), they will go for it.
They are mostly pretty bad absent parents with laser focus on themselves and their careers only, and then it shows on kids. But in their mind nobody under them should be granted more.
After a certain number of years, handing your kids off to the babysitters so you can work an extra 10 hours a week becomes outright sociopathic neglect. Using your wealth to separate you from the things that actually matter is arguably the peak of corporate disillusionment.
It’s ok to not be a busy body. I’m not one because it makes me miserable . But these imaginary tradeoffs we invent in our heads are often just justifications.
You think kids are taking up all your time? They have more kids and volunteer at the school, and run a church group, etc.
The clock is secondary because using time efficiently, planning, and classifying which hours you are awake and available are all skills.
Similar patterns happen all throughout life. People have non linear capacities and performance.
There are certain tasks that people need to do every day that take time and, if you can afford to have someone do those tasks, suddenly you have more time you can do other things with.
Of course paying someone saves you time.
But the question is whether that’s the key differentiator holding you back from X, Y, and Z. And no it’s not. There are people who do X, Y, and Z and don’t have a maid.
Maybe on some psychological level getting help is the only way you personally will have time (feels true for myself), but you have to recognize there is significant personality and skill difference when it comes to being busy.
As with a lot of things: individually, yes, this is the only useful way to look at it. Statistically? Over a population? No, of course high levels of unpaid obligations keep people from accomplishing things, in the sense that if you ease those up they accomplish more.
More to the point, I didn't make this about how it was "holding people back" so I'm now seeing why you're so resistant to it, since you think that's what I was getting at: no, it's about attitudes from executives who live life on easy mode then complain that their underlings are lazy.
Perhaps he's simply pointing out that with the right set of skills, you (or others) could also move yourself up (down?) the bell curve, and that your position on the curve isn't necessarily fixed. Treating it as such is inherently limiting.
Laundry, cleaning, cooking, shopping, lawn work, home maintenance, car maintenance, hell even managing your schedule—for an awful lot of executives (among others) much or all of that is optional. They have more freedom with their time because they pay to make a bunch of problems go away (and if they don't, it's a choice). They come home from work and choose what to do—they may still be busy, by choice! But they have far fewer demands on their time. The people who work for them come home from work, work two to four more hours, then, maybe, choose what to do. And you better believe they work weekends, too.
I don't think it makes me busy. It does.
> You think kids are taking up all your time? They have more kids and volunteer at the school, and run a church group, etc.
I'm not counting extremely-optional stuff.
> The clock is secondary because using time efficiently, planning, and classifying which hours you are awake and available are all skills.
Money puts this on extremely-easy mode, because for a huge variety of things "this is a problem that will take much time and attention" becomes "just pay someone to make it go away". I know, because I have enough money that sometimes I can do this (I didn't always, and I didn't grow up that way) and holy god, it makes life so incredibly easy when I can.
If you have a lot of kids, after a certain age, the older ones can start to help around depending on age. It's how humanity survives in self-sufficient conditions.
For serial kid rearing families there is a plateau in difficulty, and then a steady decline (depending on the personality and health of the kids of course).
It’s still true that having two young kids is more time than and effort than one.
Yes they live different lives, but they know they are different from their average worker, they just don't care about them. Making money and their success come above all.
When they make these decisions it is not because they're out of touch. It is because they actively opposed people below them taking an inch. They know it fucks with them, they know they don't like it. They do it anyway.
As an executive this person is excellent albeit trained at corporate speak. They're trying to gather sympathy for execs and it is all bullshit.
How else would you want to motivate them? This is a for profit company after all.
> It is because they actively opposed people below them taking an inch.
In a functioning labor market with high mobility for workers they would just quit and find a better place to work.
> They're trying to gather sympathy for execs and it is all bullshit.
They're trying to hide the fact they've monopolized the labor market and they want you to assume this is all normal. It's a much higher level problem.
> They're trying to hide the fact they've monopolized the labor market and they want you to assume this is all normal. It's a much higher level problem.
Your labor market isn't all that special. The truth is that "a functioning market with high mobility" is just a myth. The market is functioning as intended: The ones with power under capitalism are the ones with capital - and they don't wish for things to change. You can try to level the playing field with laws, but that's incompatible with the "small government" folks.
It's the primary market underpinning capitalism. Otherwise it's just feudalism or slavery. So, I'd hope you believe it's special.
> The truth is that "a functioning market with high mobility" is just a myth.
There is absolutely no truth in what you just said. I'd have to ask what set of evidence did you examine to arrive at this conclusion?
> The ones with power under capitalism are the ones with capital
Yes. Wealth and capital give you an _advantage_. However it's not exclusive. It's why we recognize things like intellectual property and performance rights. It turns out there's /tons/ of sources of advantage in competition.
> You can try to level the playing field with laws, but that's incompatible with the "small government" folks.
The size of the government seems to have zero impact on it's willingness to enforce laws that are already on the books. Your thesis is thin and based on inherited cynicism. I cannot take it seriously.
Not all, but most. Family members of mine at the VP/EVP level in “enterprise” type companies regularly work 12+ hours on weekdays and ~8 per day on weekends. It’s brutal and their families suffer for it, but it pays exceedingly well.
As another poster put it, it’s survivorship bias. Most people who work that long and consistently end up with a destroyed family life and eventually the collapse of their professional life as well. Those who “make” it by and large keep their family intact because they can afford to make it difficult to leave - or because they’re married to someone of similar lifestyle.
At that level, they’re in the club and guaranteed to advance as long as they don’t make enemies and get kicked out of the club (which is rare, but happens, and usually means they spend a year or so finding another club.) So while some of them do work long hours, they don’t have to. They’ve already been judged to be in the in-crowd and could work 10 hours per week from wherever they want, and they’d still make every promotion.
So why do they work so much, and why do they go to the office? Because most of those guys (a) mutually dislike their families, (b) have psychological disorders, and (c) have office affairs. To psychopaths, 70 hours per week sunk into high-stakes office politics is fun.
Or so you say. But it sounds like a rationalization of why that doesn't matter/makes them morally bad people. First it's "they don't actually do any work, lol", then it's "but they totally don't have to, they could skate by on 2 hours a day, they are already pre-selected for success".
But really, it's perfectly fine if you don't care that much and won't go to that length. You don't have to justify that by coming up with narratives that others who do are evil, mentally ill, or hate their families. You can just say "that's not for me".
What do they do in all those hours?
My only experience with executives is the CEO at a "startup" (it really wasn't) in SF. He had to have his email password reset every week because he couldn't remember it. He was furious that asses weren't in all the seats at 9am, but he knocked off at 3pm on Fridays to go drink with his executive chums. I never saw any sign of leadership, vision, or actual work. Just demands on others.
Maybe they are "working" from a hotel downtown with their lover.
what are they actually doing? what are the deliverables? are they actual doing intellectual work 12 hours a day?
> As you can see, in a typical day of mine one can count some twenty-five separate activities in which I participated, mostly information-gathering and - giving, but also decision-making and nudging. You can also see that some two thirds of my time was spent in a meeting of one kind or another. Before you are horrified by how much time I spend in meetings, answer a question: which of the activities -- information-gathering, information-giving, decision-making, nudging, and being a role model—could I have performed outside a meeting? The answer is practically none. Meetings provide an occasion for managerial activities.
Of course they did. If you want to convince a company doing RTO why it’s bad, you need to show the negative impacts to the organization. Everybody seems to approach this from their individual perspective.
There is a reason these are the same thing that should already be obvious: If you want people to take a job that costs them ~$30,000 more in expenses, you'll have to pay them more. If you split the difference, you both come out $15,000 ahead.
This before you even consider the costs to the company directly. If employees work from home you need less office space etc. That's not just rent but heat, power, security, insurance, internet, furniture, taxes, cleaning, lawyers and permits. That's a ton of money.
I'm not following. How much is the difference? The difference to them is $30,000. But you forgot to specify what the difference to the company is.
In scenario A, Jim holds a remote job at Omnicorp.
In scenario B1, nothing changes.
In scenario B2, Jim is transferred into a job with the same responsibilities that is not remote. This raises Jim's expenses by $2,500 a month. It also raises Omnicorp's revenue by $X per month. X is the value you forgot to consider. What is it?
If, for example, it is -$500, then the total cost of transferring Jim is $36,000 per year. If we split that difference evenly between Jim and Omnicorp, Jim will receive a $12,000 raise... but Omnicorp will suffer a net loss of $18,000 per year, so it's hard to see why this would happen or who it helps.
If it's +$1,000, then the total cost of transferring Jim is $18,000 per year. Splitting that difference evenly means Jim gets a $21,000 raise, but again there is no reason this would actually take place, because the company is paying $21,000 a year in order to receive $12,000. Or, viewed another way, the transfer destroys value and you shouldn't expect it to happen.
If X is +$3,000, then the total cost of transferring Jim is -$6,000 per year. At this point the transfer makes sense and it should happen. Splitting the difference evenly means Jim will get a $33,000 raise.
At no point does it make any sense to consider leaving Jim where he is and giving him a $15,000 raise.
It is quite possibly a negative number. Remember that forcing Jim to show up to an office requires you to have an office, which is a huge, major expense that could easily overcome the benefits of having Jim in the office instead of at home. But let's continue with your assumption that it's of some actual value to the company:
> If, for example, it is -$500, then the total cost of transferring Jim is $36,000 per year. If we split that difference evenly between Jim and Omnicorp, Jim will receive a $12,000 raise... but Omnicorp will suffer a net loss of $18,000 per year, so it's hard to see why this would happen or who it helps.
This is the part where you're confused.
Suppose that Jim refuses to work from home for less than $8000/mo and refuses to work from the office for less than $10500/mo, because his incremental cost of working from the office is $2500/mo. Meanwhile the company values Jim working from the office at $500/mo. Since $500 is less than $2500, it does not make sense for Jim to work from the office, instead it makes sense for the company to pay Jim somewhere between $8000/mo and $10000/mo to work from home, because any of those numbers make both of them no worse off than paying Jim $10500/mo to work from the office. This does not depend on what Jim is currently being paid or even whether he is currently working from home.
If the value to the company of having Jim work from the office instead of from home is $3000/mo then the company should offer Jim anywhere between $10500/mo and $11000/mo to work from the office, for the same reason. But since $3000/mo is $36,000/year on top of their expenses for maintaining an office, that value to an ordinary company of having Jim work from the office is implausibly high.
However:
> instead it makes sense for the company to pay Jim somewhere between $8000/mo and $10000/mo to work from home, because any of those numbers make both of them no worse off than paying Jim $10500/mo to work from the office.
It can never make sense for the company to pay Jim more than $8,000 / month, because that is the amount he wants. As long as he's willing to work for $8,000 / month, the value of his work to the company can't exceed $8,000 / month.
You might notice that the value $15,000 doesn't occur anywhere in your most recent comment. How do you consider this comment related to your earlier claim that "If you split the difference, you both come out $15,000 ahead"? What difference have you identified that could be split this way?
The company doesn't know the minimum amount he's willing to work for. They have to guess. If they guess too low, he quits. If they guess too high, they pay more than $8000/mo.
The company also doesn't know exactly how much Jim values being able to work from home, so they have to guess that too. They can reasonably guess that it's in the thousands of dollars per month, but they don't know if it's $1000/mo or $4000/mo.
What they do know is that their cost for having him work from home -- arguably a savings to the company, but perhaps worth $500-$1000 in some cases -- appears to be less than this.
If they guess $1250/mo (i.e. $15,000/year) then they've guessed right in the middle between the start of the range and the actual limit, so each party gets half of the surplus. If the company's costs from allowing WFH are zero then they get to save $15,000/year, and Jim gets to save the $30,000 in commuting expenses in exchange for getting paid $15,000 less, which puts him $15,000 ahead too.
Even if the company's costs are non-zero they're still coming out ahead as long as they're not more than $1250/mo, so if they're $500/mo or $1000/mo and their guess of what he'll take is a reduction of $1250/mo then they'll still want to pay him that much less and let him work from home.
They might also make a better guess and get closer to the actual number of $2500/mo, but then they're running the risk that they overplay their hand and he walks away, and then they don't get the savings of thousands of dollars a year. So who actually gets more of the surplus from letting him work from home is down to salary negotiations, but it's in both of their interests to make it happen.
Sorry to be blunt, but I think this is incredibly naive given the current market. Since the explosion of remote work I've seen a ton of offshoring to excellent software developers in Latin American and Europe. There is absolutely zero benefit to paying an American salary in those situations because everyone is remote anyway (and there is enough timezone overlap that everyone can work roughly the same hours).
Workers will simply get fired if they don't come in and execs really want RTO, they're not going to get paid more.
If execs really want RTO then people will quit and they'll have to hire new people, pay retraining costs, pay them more because other companies are still offering WFH, lose out on all those lower cost workers in Latin America (or Texas or Virginia) and still be paying millions of dollars for office space their employees don't even want to be in.
There have been 550k tech layoffs in the last 2 years. Pretty sure there are quite a few folks ready and willing to do a commute to work in an office to get a paycheck again.
So suppose the employer's benefit from having the employee is $150,000 if they work from the office and $140,000 if they work from home. Meanwhile the employee would accept $130,000 if they had to work from the office or $100,000 if they can work from home.
You're saying, $150,000 is more than $130,000 so the employer can pay them $130,000 to work from the office and everything's fine.
But the difference between $150,000 and $130,000 is less than the difference between $140,000 and $100,000. By quite a lot. So why isn't the employer going to want any of that money?
You could have 2 employees doing the same job, but one (Joe) has a 5 minute walk as their commute and the other (John) has a 50 minute drive in a personal vehicle. If there are enough Joe’s around to fill your roles, the costs associated with the Johns commutes don’t matter to the organization.
Facilities costs are actually pretty minor in the grand scheme of things…especially if your company has other roles that cannot be done remote. Incremental office space costs are minimal.
Your only hope to win the debate is to demonstrate with real productivity data. Perhaps things like demonstrating reduced sick time, turnover rate decreases, etc.
This doesn't mean they have different expenses. John is paying $2500/mo in time and commuting expenses, Joe is paying $2500/mo in additional rent to live in the downtown. Efficient market hypothesis says they're the same and anyway you care about the mean or median rather than rare outliers when operating at scale.
> Facilities costs are actually pretty minor in the grand scheme of things…especially if your company has other roles that cannot be done remote. Incremental office space costs are minimal.
Most offices are just offices. The jobs that can't be done remotely are the likes of data centers or factories, but these are different facilities in different places. If you're e.g. a tech company, your offices in San Francisco or New York contain entirely people who could work from home whereas your data centers might be in Oregon or Virginia.
So the costs are not incremental, they allow you to close entire facilities; and those facilities are the ones with higher costs per unit area; and the incremental costs are not trivial either. Things like rent and utilities scale approximately linearly with square footage or number of employees. Some are even super-linear because larger facilities succumb to bureaucracy, HR drama and combinatorial explosion in risk interactions.
> Your only hope to win the debate is to demonstrate with real productivity data.
I can win the debate this way too.
That two hours a day your employees were wasting in traffic? They're salaried employees, that's 10 hours a week they're not working.
They are still general living expenses. Those don’t go away based on employment or not, at home or not. They could decrease/increase some, but you can’t assume the whole amount is tied to employment only. Besides, if you don’t like your living expenses…quit or move.
> If you're e.g. a tech company…
What if you are not? what if you are a bank, a hospital, a factory, an insurance company, a processing center? You cannot make the assumption that every organization can just close “some” offices and leave others open. What about the HR and morale impact when 75% of your employees cannot work remote, but your SWEs can? Is it worth the office/desk footprint savings for leadership to create an elite group with a special benefits that pisses for every other person at the org? Probably not…
> That two hours a day your employees were wasting in traffic? They're salaried employees, that's 10 hours a week they're not working.
Now you are back to dealing with an individual impact here. If they are a salaried employee, the amount of work required for completion in a given week doesn’t change whether a commute is 10 hours or 10 minutes. That’s time the employee is investing by choosing to live where they live and work for the employer they work for. I have been on a salary for nearly 40 years…my employers have never expected me to work 168 hours a week. The expectation was an average of 40.
That wasn't the assumption. The assumption was that the difference was $2500/mo. Real estate in the heart of the downtown is significantly more expensive.
> Besides, if you don’t like your living expenses…quit or move.
At which point we're back to the efficient market hypothesis. If you live downtown, your rent is $2500/mo higher than if you live an hour away, but if you live an hour away you spend $2500/mo in time and commuting costs to get to the office.
But if you work from home then you live an hour away from the office, never go there and have no commuting expense, so you're ahead by $2500/mo and the company would have to compensate you for refusing to allow that.
> What if you are not?
Then you probably still have the same structure where the facilities that require in-person work are separate from the corporate offices:
> what if you are a bank, a hospital, a factory, an insurance company, a processing center?
A company is not a factory etc., a company has factories, or bank branches, or warehouses, or medical facilities. These facilities are generally already separate facilities from the offices where SWEs and other administrative staff work, because those facilities have different geographic requirements. Bank branches or medical facilities have to be near customers or patients. Warehouses or factories will be in places with cheap real estate or industrial zoning.
Offices have traditionally been in cities.
> What about the HR and morale impact when 75% of your employees cannot work remote, but your SWEs can?
This is a really dim view of people. Nurses and factory workers know perfectly well why they can't work from home. Why would they resent that someone else can when their job doesn't have the same requirements? Do they get mad at park rangers because their job allows them to spend time in the outdoors?
They might even notice that it's to their advantage because it gets 25% of the cars off the road so there isn't so much traffic during their commute, and stops them from being in competition with SWEs for the housing within reasonable distance of where they work.
> If they are a salaried employee, the amount of work required for completion in a given week doesn’t change whether a commute is 10 hours or 10 minutes.
You might expect that bosses would get away with giving you more work when you have more time, or that the quality of any given work might be influenced by how much time someone has available to spend on it. And nobody says you're working 168 hours a week, but a lot of people do more than 40, when they have the time.
> That’s time the employee is investing by choosing to live where they live and work for the employer they work for.
It's time the employee is being cost by being forced to commute into the office, which time would be available for other things in the alternative.
You also seem to have really limited experience with organizations that have in office work. My guess is your career started relatively recently (<5 years). Perhaps all you have known is remote—that would track with the strange perspectives you have posted on this thread.
They have to compensate you for the relative difference in value between working for them and working for someone else.
If another company allows WFH and you don't, and that costs the employee $30,000/year to not have, what do you expect them to do when the employer offering WFH offers the same salary? Or even $10,000 less? And what will you have to do in response?
No. They only have to offer enough compensation and benefits to attract enough people into the roles they need filled.
> what do you expect them to do when the employer offering WFH offers the same salary?
Does it matter what another company does if the other company can still fill the role without offering WFH? Your whole premise seems to hinge on this concept that a company offering an in office position can’t effectively fill the opportunities they are offering. That’s not the case in 2025 (at least in the US). Specifically with tech jobs every opening whether WFH or in office generates hundreds of applicants. Some people might prefer WFH, others might prefer in office, but if RTO is the trend, WFH opportunities will start decreasing and will fill up fast. My guess is that given the option between unemployment and employment in an office anyone and everyone who needs an income will opt for the latter and will not sit around stubbornly waiting for a WFH opportunity like a petulant child that has to eat their broccoli before they are allowed to get up from the dinner table.
In the absence of an infinite labor pool, in order to do that they need to outbid the other employers.
> Does it matter what another company does if the other company can still fill the role without offering WFH?
Of course it does, because you have the opportunity to be the other company. You would be able to hire the same person for thousands of dollars less by allowing them to work from home and they would still take the job.
> Your whole premise seems to hinge on this concept that a company offering an in office position can’t effectively fill the opportunities they are offering.
I feel like we've been over this. You can obviously fill the job by paying more, but since the difference in the amount you'd have to pay is more than the value of forcing people to come into the office, why would you throw away money just to have less satisfied employees?
> Specifically with tech jobs every opening whether WFH or in office generates hundreds of applicants.
Applying to job postings on the internet takes a matter of seconds. Have a guess what "hundreds of applicants" implies if the average applicant applies to hundreds of job postings.
Now consider that a lot of the applicants won't be qualified.
> Some people might prefer WFH, others might prefer in office, but if RTO is the trend, WFH opportunities will start decreasing and will fill up fast.
It sounds like you're saying employers offering WFH opportunities will find it even easier to hire at a given level of compensation.
> My guess is that given the option between unemployment and employment in an office anyone and everyone who needs an income will opt for the latter and will not sit around stubbornly waiting for a WFH opportunity like a petulant child that has to eat their broccoli before they are allowed to get up from the dinner table.
Surely this attitude will have no effect on morale or turnover?
But here is the thing—people adapt. People adapted in 2020 when a good portion of the workforce went remote. There were griping then while people learned to balance home and family distractions with work. There were complications around finding appropriate workspace in their homes but people managed to make it work. If your company RTOs you might have a choice to make: adapt and deal with the commute/rent/whatever challenges with it, or perhaps try and convince your organization’s leadership how wrongheaded and stupid they are for RTO (Good luck…as a former senior leader in a few orgs both public and private…you better work on your argument). If you can’t adapt or convince your leaders of the error of their ways—quit and take your chances to find and compete for those remaining, but shrinking inventory of remote gigs out there.
I say all of this as a remote worker happily riding out the sunset of my career for a few more years in a lovely low stress non-management gig. I definitely don’t want to RTO, but if my company chose that route I know won’t have a good argument to counter because there isn’t one. I know and my leadership know that I can adapt and be just as productive at the office as I am at home…in short order.
Instead of speculating, we can look at the data: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1401265/preferred-work-s...
Fully 91% of IT workers prefer to be fully remote or remote-first with no requirement to go into the office regularly, and it was disproportionately the first one. 6 of the remaining 9% still wanted to be remote first.
Only 1% of people wanted to be fully office-based. That's 3% less than the Lizardman's Constant.
> But here is the thing—people adapt.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -George Bernard Shaw
I prefer gin, but will drink vodka when that is what is available.
I prefer to fly first class, but economics often force me into economy.
A preference does not equal entitlement and frankly the only preference that matters in this case is what the employer’s preference is, especially when the workers are willing to compromise their preference where it differs from the employer’s preference.
The employer’s are the ones that hold the little green pieces of paper that you want and need and are willing to trade your labor to get. They will occasionally attach strings to those little green pieces of paper. As long as you or someone is willing to deal with those strings, your preference really only matters to you…at least to them.
Before the pandemic there was a big push to reduce occupancy costs and get roles that did not need to sit in an office to subsidize their own offices, just like BYOD - but the dollars involved were orders of magnitude better than BYOD. During the pandemic we proved the costs came at the cost of net productivity on average. The reaction we see now is one against a cultural change that is off putting to people who succeeded in a specific emergent reality - the office culture. A 60 year old CEO has trouble using zoom because they didn’t grow up using it. They don’t know how to be effective over a remote relationship because they have developed exceptionally effective in person skills - that’s why they are where they are. They simply can not accept or fathom a world that is different than that. So they invent hand waving bullshit not based on data.
But economics wins based on data sooner or later. It is better share holder value to eliminate occupancy costs aggressive and offload the occupancy per employee to the employee. The company effectively gets free facilities in this scenario. There is no way the marginal per employee value of in person vibes out paces the marginal cost to shelter their bodies during the work day. The vibes thing is managed through adaptation.
Finally there’s this meme the Dimon and Trump and others use of people not working when working remotely. First that’s not true, second if it’s is, that’s a performance issue. Since when did we stop measuring performance ? The in office or not in office simply isn’t a productivity variable but not working and working during the work day is.
RTO is a cultural thing and you’ll never convince the executives of today by any argument conceivable because you’re telling them the sky is green when they know it’s blue. It doesn’t matter that in this case it’s not objective like the color of the sky. It FEELS objectively true.
However the economics will change, and the leadership will age away, and one day; maybe when the kids who graduated college having gotten their degrees online run the shop - we will offload the cost of housing the employee during the day to the employee because it’s what makes the most economic sense and we will adapt around the challenges.
Calling this “survivorship bias” though is like calling anything in evolution “survivorship bias”.
A person with a seriously work focused life is naturally going to excel and I have no problem with this. Someone that makes sacrifices in their personal life (paying to live in the city, not having children or too many etc) so they can be more available and work more hours may do better than me, even at the same level of skill and intelligence. This only seems fair.
You can use money to move around time, but you can never buy it. Every second that passes is gone forever, never to be seen again. The recognition of this reality is the difference between those work-focused executives and laypeople.
When I'm at home I can at least be productive. I can make lunch, start a load of laundry, something. At work I have to sit there and pretend to work because exec loves watching people work, which is ultimately not as refreshing and doesn't allow me to get back in the zone as quickly.
Suddenly all these ideas from behavioral economics about implicit bias and contextual framing don’t apply, and we are now all Austrians studying rational and disciplined labor units.
Either your performance management can catch lazy employees or it can't. If it can't, then that's what you should be fixing.
We all know some people slack off, they find ways to do it in office too.
But yes, people can slack off anywhere. 'Butts in seats' is one of the laziest metrics for management to use for 'working'.
Plenty of jobs are intermittently high-demand and high-stakes while leaving a ton of free time throughout the day.
And to your point about high-demand/high-stakes, at the same job as the MUD guy there was an old guy. He would leave before lunch go play tennis, nap under his desk in his cube, etc... I asked one of the other young people one day (I was still in college), what the old guy did. Apparently he was the only one who knew how to code a certain system, and he was only there to do that job when the system needed a change or had a problem.
I fail to see the problem there...
But this was a complete restart of something two of my in-office colleagues fucked up over the space of 2 weeks.
The problem in orgs is shit people, not working from home.
Of course, there are some incentives at play here. The people voicing these opinions are adults, and adults benefit both when their children are taken away to free daycare... err i mean school all day, and when they get to enjoy the flexibility of home office. This set of incentives could create the confusing combination of beliefs above.
But I also think that maybe it's the sample group. Not all kids failed disastrously at remote school, some excelled and worked far ahead of their classmates. And similarly, a lot of adults truly do get a lot more work done from their laptop at home. My suspicion is that technical people like those in my social circle and here on HN are both the types that would have excelled at remote schooling, and also those that do well working as hermits in a remote home office environment. There's just a huge blindspot that the other 90% of the population is handling things really badly.
The other 90% of kids are reading 3 grade levels behind, and the other 90% of coworkers are doing an hour of work per day, going to the shopping mall at 10am and the dog park at 2, and doing it all with low levels of team cooperation that, just like with a teacher and her remote 5th graders, no level of management or coaching is going to materially improve.
Because children are not adults. They don't have the attention span and concentration skills to focus on something for 8 hours a day. Evolutionarily so - the job of children is to play, discover and learn. The job of adults is to concentrate and run the show.
Even the existing schooling system that crams kids into classrooms and gets them to look at a board to learn things is contrary to human evolution actually. Its the product of the early education system that developed from late medieval scholastic religious education practices.
My grandson was like this. He was in a "virtual school" pod with three other children and is reading far ahead of his grade level and one of the reasons is that he didn't have to spend a ton of time in the child-management boot camp that a lot of elementary schools tend to be.
> Remember, they live literally in another world. This doesn't necessarily make them evil, just disconnected. I do not want to be "out of touch" but it is important to acknowledge that this does happen over time.
No they don’t. We all live in the same world and it’s everyone’s responsibility to realize that and our impact on those around us as well as our environment. The ruling class’ personality disorders (detaching from the common folk) are primarily their problems and should be dealt with by them, not worked around by us.
Depressingly laughable suggestion.
Giving Jared (from Silicon Valley) suggesting “scream your name to your attacker so they are forced to recognize you are human” vibes.
But it's sugarcoated. The only part that makes sense is the fact they are sociopaths who only care about work success.
The rest of it is just sugarcoating the fact that they make these decisions because they simply couldn't give a shit what their peers below them think. They know it fucks with them and that they don't like it. It's not some "oh we don't understand cause we're too rich" sob story.
like fuck off with that, the data and the vibes all point to it being better for the employees and their productivity to work from home. too many "I went through it so you have to as well" types that aren't interested in evolving stuck in their old ways
It is physically impossible to be aware of the entirety of one's impact on others. One might be able to dimly perceive how the person across from you is feeling about something you said or did, but even in simple one to one interactions, there's frequent miscommunication and signal loss. If you extend this to making decisions that have an impact on not just one but hundreds or thousands of people, it's literally impossible to know the true impact of all those decisions on all those people. Good decision makers will intentionally cultivate information flows that provide them some insight but those are themselves imperfect.
No it isn't. You just need a shred of empathy.
Classic case of semantic drift, as "literally" now means "figuratively", but with emphasis. Try "virtually", "practically", or "all but".
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/misuse-of-literally
Did the rest of the employees not do that as well though? Minus the wealth bit of course.
> Most time goes to work, some to family.
I do two jobs, but do that _because_ I prioritize family life: I do my main (not remote) work only part time because that can't be done remotely, and do a second job (consulting, 90% remotely) on off days to make up the difference. I don't care about the money as long as we make do.
There's maybe a year or two I eventually wouldn't have to work if I was more aggressive about going for promo, but I have no desire to be someone who's stressed about work, even when I'm not supposed to be working.
Edit: coffee shops seems to be doing very well too
While I think it's true that a lot of businesses have shifted to being more neighborhood-local and not relying on "business hours" to be sustainable, the reality for most suburban economies are that shopping centers and chain megastores basically absorb all the business. Places like Target, Whole Foods, Walmart are the ones that are primarily benefiting from this overnight migration outside of city centers. But that's been going on for a long time, COVID just accelerated it.
In exchange for people staying home, and going to their local suburb's Target and Walmart to buy a sandwich, or go to a Starbucks. Get their nails done in a local chain stripmall place.
It's odd to suggest that people spending their money closer to home means shopping at large chain businesses, but spending downtown doesn't. Just because there isn't a Walmart in the city's corporate center doesn't mean you're patronizing Mom and Pop small businesses. You think that trendy gastropub with its gourmet hamburgers, cute waitresses that all share a suspiciously similar alt aesthetic, and tables full of people clad in business casual isn't a line item in some investment firm's portfolio?
Guess where the Mom and Pops are? They're in that "stripmall place" near your house.
That's not where they are though. You see it, too. Those stripmalls are all dead-dead-dead. The only business is at the shopping centers and megastores.
I can tell you where they most definitely aren't, though: downtown. Anybody who can afford that real estate is not the little guy. If they appear to be, that just means great effort (and money) was expended to create that image.
1) No mortgage 2) A maid service cleans every two weeks 3) Someone else mows the grass "
Just an anecdote, but all of his examples (except maybe for the personal assistant) could be given by anyone living in a middle-class family from Brazil until the late 90s.
Keep in mind, COVID was still raging at this point.
Right in the middle of his calm rant, a courier—UPS or Amazon, I think—knocked on his door, rang the bell, and then dropped off a package, loud and clear for everyone to hear. It was hilarious and completely undercut his entire message. Funny, but also infuriating.
Remote work is just such a massive improvement in every respect for people with families for that reason.
The executives are just on a different planet. These are people who embody Lucille Bluthe's quote "It's one banana Michael. How much can it cost, $10?"
These are highly intelligent people. They got to be very high up in the food chain. They are driven. They are smart.
Yet, the claim is that they can't imagine there exist people not like themselves? Sorry, not buying it.
More plausible to me is that remote work will hurt their bottom lines because they (and their superiors, investors, board members, etc) heavily invested in real estate.
Means, motive and opportunity.
Residential, industrial, medical and retail are easy picks over office buildings.
The impact is real. Excutives are qualified as accredited investors and have access to private investments that are often tied to office space and other real estate that most people cannot participate in.
Ignoring that its quite hard to learn from other people remotely (somewhat easier in tech because people are used to it), a lot of people frankly don't realise that they're basically running off like a headless chicken working on stuff that doesn't actually matter - programmers especially. You really do need to see the whites of some peoples eyes to get them to actually do the right thing, some people just aren't the type to instinctively know the macro picture of what they're working on.
If I were running a company and had the cash to facilitate I think I would probably go for something like a cycle of "x weeks off 1 week of intense in-office sprinting" then repeat. Going into the office for no reason is basically pointless, or at least the option on spontaneity may be worth less than the cost of going, there's an arbitrage in recognising that.
As usual, the best model is not an extreme “easy answer”, but a nuanced take (in-person environments have tangible benefits, but also tangible downsides — and the same for fully remote environments).
It seems like our society (at least in the US) only has room for “easy answers” now a days … to the detriment of most.
Not to worry, AI is going to rapidly solve this issue, according to tech CEOs that it.
During Covid there was some surveys done on whether or not people missed their commute. People who walked or biked were very likely to say they missed commuting. Those who took transit were split (mild dislike), and those who drove nearly universally did not miss it.
We built a pile of shit instead of functional urbanism in America and this is the result.
They didn't miss the "commute to work", they missed the exercise and the internal soothing feeling, that they are doing something good for the health in spite of that trip being required to get the paycheck, and that it's not a total waste of time when done this way.
I will say that zoom fatigue is real and remote work can be problematic for people that are mainly in meetings. But we could have solved this with a better solution than snapping back to office culture.
It depends on whether you consider that evil or not. But no, I do not take that they don't understand somehow because of their privilege.
This is just another executive grift trying to make people feel better about them and the decisions they make.
Stop the bullshit and say the quiet part out loud. They do not care what your employees have going on. They understand it fucks with people's work life balance and simply do not care.