Executive wealth as a factor in return-to-office

https://twitter.com/EthanEvansVP/status/1895845734177452369

by kappi • 1 year ago

622 490 1 year ago

rybosome2• 1 year ago

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.

kurthr2• 1 year ago

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.

cogman10• 1 year ago

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.

techpeach2• 1 year ago

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”

toomuchtodo2• 1 year ago

A role worth replacing with Gemini.

hyperhopper3• 1 year ago

Which is ironic because they manage our time for us to force us to have less of it.

alabastervlog8• 1 year ago

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.

lostlogin2• 1 year ago

It’s funny how often Silicon Valley (the tv show) gets referenced. There are so many painfully accurate cliches.

PaulHoule• 1 year ago

Class is a really great book, as is are most of the books that Paul Fussell wrote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Fussell

lurk22• 1 year ago

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.

jumpman5002• 1 year ago

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.

einszwei• 1 year ago

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.

anonym295• 1 year ago

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.

kiliantics• 1 year ago

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...

mjmsmith• 1 year ago

This attitude seems more easily explained by the belief that, unlike you, the peons haven't earned their perks yet.

jumpman5002• 1 year ago

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.

mlinhares3• 1 year ago

It's a great reminder to tech people that they're still peasants.

AlwaysRock• 1 year ago

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...

abnercoimbre3• 1 year ago

I'm glad we pierced the illusion that tech workers are somehow "one of them" because of high salaries. You're not. You're just labor.

(And big tech execs still make orders of magnitude more in compensation than you do. You two were never alike!)

GeorgeTirebiter• 1 year ago

Have a listen to John Lennon's "Working-Class Hero". Still relevant. Maybe more so.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve-mANenpC4

switch007• 1 year ago

HR are professional gaslighters and internal-PR masters. I'm not even surprised by their ability to twist things anymore

ein0p2• 1 year ago

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".

hyperhopper3• 1 year ago

It's more insidious than that.

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.

toomuchtodo2• 1 year ago

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.

financetechbro• 1 year ago

This is disgusting. I’m sorry about that

jarsin2• 1 year ago

This was at Google?

thayne2• 1 year ago

It's quite likely RTO was an initial attempt to reduce headcount by encouraging people to quit, without having to pay severance.

h14h• 1 year ago

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.

pyrale• 1 year ago

Maybe they hoped that you’d leave because of RTO, sparing them the financial cost associated with the layoff.

DanielHB• 1 year ago

Of course the layoffs were planned during the RTO, that way they have to fire less people because a lot of them will leave on their own!

grandempire16• 1 year ago

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.

rybosome2• 1 year ago

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.

horns4lyfe2• 1 year ago

I would hope that they see people as people, but that’s clearly not the case

wnc3141• 1 year ago

It's not about reciprocity or coherent rules. Its about power distance. "you work for me" sort of thing.

drstewart• 1 year ago

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.

__turbobrew__2• 1 year ago

Somehow the people making policies always exempt themselves.

Velorivox• 1 year ago

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.

giantg2• 1 year ago

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.

EncomLab4• 1 year ago

Your last point is the biggest driver - it is also why the rules are arbitrarily enforced.

wahnfrieden• 1 year ago

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

dividefuel3• 1 year ago

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.

3eb7988a1663• 1 year ago

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.

tdeck• 1 year ago

I do genuinely think that a lot of them truly believe that working together in an office, face-to-face, is important.

Because their job is all having meetings and walking around asking people what's new.

tdiff• 1 year ago

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?

EncomLab4• 1 year ago

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!".

jalk• 1 year ago

Can you elaborate on the tax/rent incentives, as it's not obvious what those are.

barbazoo2• 1 year ago

Same talk as RTO being driven by real estate investors’ influence. I have yet to see some numbers, evidence of this.

dboreham2• 1 year ago

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.

EncomLab4• 1 year ago

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.

joshuaturner• 1 year ago

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.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/s-f-economy-tax-plan-...

bloomingkales• 1 year ago

some petty executive saying "let them commute!".

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.

2b3a51• 1 year ago

Good Lord. Over here in the UK Boxing day is a bank holiday.

Many (but not all) organisations take the week of Christmas out as mandatory holiday for efficiency reasons (close building, save heat &c).

mrguyorama2• 1 year ago

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.

NewJazz• 1 year ago

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.

mccoyb3• 1 year ago

“Disconnected” feels like “has no empathy”.

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?

GuinansEyebrows• 1 year ago

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.

techpeach2• 1 year ago

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.

codr75• 1 year ago

Have they ever claimed otherwise?

It's not like they have a choice, gaslighting the general population is their only hope of staying on top/alive.

silverquiet• 1 year ago

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.

markus_zhang3• 1 year ago

CXOs only need to have empathy with the shareholders, not the resources (us).

How does someone make others care about him/her? Hmmm...

codr75• 1 year ago

By refusing to play along in great numbers, always.

II2II2• 1 year ago

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.

mjburgess4• 1 year ago

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.

jack_riminton• 1 year ago

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

mjburgess4• 1 year ago

HN seems to prefer treating this is a failure to empathise with home-life, rather than work-life. The almost rich are, as ever, incensed.

mananaysiempre• 1 year ago

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.

mjburgess4• 1 year ago

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

dumbledoren15• 1 year ago

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.

mrguyorama2• 1 year ago

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!

spacebanana7• 1 year ago

I suspect many Return To Office programs are designed to be soft layoffs.

Enterprises can remove a meaningful number of employees for whom it’s a dealbreaker issue without the associated redundancy costs or PR issues.

dividefuel3• 1 year ago

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.

jajko• 1 year ago

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.

bigyabai2• 1 year ago

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.

SketchySeaBeast7• 1 year ago

I agree. Despite the the statement's pithiness, the reality is we don't all have the same 24 hours in a day.

alabastervlog8• 1 year ago

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?”

Jcampuzano24• 1 year ago

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.

timewizard2• 1 year ago

Making money and their success come above all.

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.

mlinhares3• 1 year ago

Oh come on, not a single one of these people is working anything anywhere close to 40 hours per week, let alone 60.

Ancapistani2• 1 year ago

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.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 1 year ago

I don't have different priorities but I can't afford to offload my obligations to others.

kcplate10• 1 year ago

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.

mystifyingpoi5• 1 year ago

Exactly. You must play by their rules.

AnthonyMouse13• 1 year ago

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.

fnordpiglet• 1 year ago

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.

Vaslo• 1 year ago

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.

Aeolun2• 1 year ago

What I don’t understand is, why have children if you are not going to raise them?

blitzar3• 1 year ago

Looks good on the CV.

consteval• 1 year ago

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.

jmward01• 1 year ago

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.

Invictus0• 1 year ago

People on HN love to pretend that no one was slacking off while ostensibly "working from home"

dboreham2• 1 year ago

That's an indication of poor management. People can slack off when in the office too.

SketchySeaBeast7• 1 year ago

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.

grandempire16• 1 year ago

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.

dividefuel3• 1 year ago

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.

mercwear• 1 year ago

Or maybe they just don’t feel like they need to state the obvious?

We all know some people slack off, they find ways to do it in office too.

watwut• 1 year ago

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.

flerchin• 1 year ago

Our metrics went up, and stayed elevated. Do you not have metrics? Those metrics will slide when RTO in invoked.

matwood2• 1 year ago

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'.

grandempire16• 1 year ago

“I know a guy who slacked off in the office”, is not evidence that it’s better or worse.

snozolli5• 1 year ago

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.

dumbledoren15• 1 year ago

He was also the main sysadmin and always got all of his work done on time.

I fail to see the problem there...

radnor• 1 year ago

All my former co-workers who slacked off don't work at my company any more. It was painfully obvious who was working and who was not.

ohgr• 1 year ago

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.

anti-soyboy• 1 year ago

My boy got triggered

chasd002• 1 year ago

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.

olyjohn• 1 year ago

People like you pretend that people in the office never slack off.

farts_mckensy2• 1 year ago

People slack off no matter their location, and managers generally don't care as long as they do the basics.

datavirtue4• 1 year ago

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.

asdf69693• 1 year ago

Why do you care if people slack off? That’s the company’s problem

missedthecue• 1 year ago

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.

dumbledoren15• 1 year ago

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.

dickersnoodle• 1 year ago

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.

barbazoo2• 1 year ago

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.

mccoyb3• 1 year ago

“Try and convince them that you’re not an animal”

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.

Jcampuzano24• 1 year ago

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.

Ancalagon• 1 year ago

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

derektank• 1 year ago

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.

2o39u5woRLO• 1 year ago

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.

multjoy• 1 year ago

It is physically impossible to be aware of the entirety of one's impact on others.

No it isn't. You just need a shred of empathy.

rexpop3• 1 year ago

they live literally in another world

Classic case of semantic drift, as "literally" now means "figuratively", but with emphasis. Try "virtually", "practically", or "all but".

lurk22• 1 year ago

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.

hrnnnnnn• 1 year ago

"Literally" has been used for emphasis in this way for hundreds of years.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/misuse-of-literally

lowbloodsugar2• 1 year ago

I mean the US electoral college disagrees with you.

moi2388• 1 year ago

“ This is not a screed against executive wealth. After all, I paid with 25 years of my life and I got some of the wealth”

Did the rest of the employees not do that as well though? Minus the wealth bit of course.

alex_suzuki• 1 year ago

Yeah, I noticed that too. Strong „I worked so much harder than you“ vibes.

broadsidepicnic• 1 year ago

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.

ein0p2• 1 year ago

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.

bsimpson• 1 year ago

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.

miltonlost• 1 year ago

Nah, disconnecting and then treating workers as if their outside lives and work lives are fungible is pretty evil.

neofrommatrix• 1 year ago

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.

VWWHFSfQ5• 1 year ago

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.

chasd002• 1 year ago

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

VWWHFSfQ5• 1 year ago

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.

looping__lui• 1 year ago

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?

VWWHFSfQ5• 1 year ago

Maybe we should all just live online

16mb2• 1 year ago

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.

datavirtue4• 1 year ago

No one owes the downtown business and property owners anything. Free market doing its thing. They got disrupted.

roarcher3• 1 year ago

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".

VWWHFSfQ5• 1 year ago

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.

rglullis3• 1 year ago

"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.

maleldil2• 1 year ago

A Brazilian middle class family would have a maid working 10 hours per day.

rglullis3• 1 year ago

That, or she would live in with the family.

pkaye• 1 year ago

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.

rglullis3• 1 year ago

I was thinking more on the private school, personal drivers, multiple vacation homes and the things on the "level above".

cowmix• 1 year ago

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.

EPWN3D• 1 year ago

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?"

dotdi• 1 year ago

I feel like this is a huge load of crap.

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.

datavirtue4• 1 year ago

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.

mhh__• 1 year ago

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.

mccoyb3• 1 year ago

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.

hypothesis• 1 year ago

remote work can be pretty bad for the younger end of a company

Not to worry, AI is going to rapidly solve this issue, according to tech CEOs that it.

siliconc0w2• 1 year ago

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.

danny_codes3• 1 year ago

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.

xvilka2• 1 year ago

Tokio (rush hours aside) is enjoyable for commuting and having lunch outside. Despite all that people and building density.

mystifyingpoi5• 1 year ago

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.

siliconc0w2• 1 year ago

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.

kj4211cash4• 1 year ago

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.

markus_zhang3• 1 year ago

Well the only thing to do is to lower productivity gradually and let them get used to it. Sure they can hire a new guy but it's not free either.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 1 year ago

Why can't I WFH w/ a company VR headset that transports me to a virtual office yet?

Jcampuzano24• 1 year ago

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.

lr4444lr• 1 year ago

I have been remotely working since 2020.

There will be no return to office.

The unspoken issue here is trust. Managers and execs at these RTO mandate companies do not trust that the rank and file are working productively when not monitored in office.

Why else would they want to lose hours to commuting, and not take advantage of their employees living in cheaper CoL areas? Because they don't truly trust their work output when not monitored in person, and the cost of higher salaries to afford housing near the office plus lost hours and energy commuting are worth buying the trust they otherwise don't feel they have. It's dysfunctional, but it makes sense.

I am glad to work in a high trust work environment. I have seen people who abuse the system get let go. They deserve it.

hyperhopper3• 1 year ago

Why else would they want to lose hours to commuting, and not take advantage of their employees living in cheaper CoL areas?

They abuse this and it definitely doesn't help the worker. As a Manhattan based worker who has lived in Aspen and Hawaii, Google wants to pay people in the higher COL areas of Aspen more than 30% less despite them being far more expensive than Aspen or Hawaii. They will fuck you with cost of living then if you expect more money they will say they are just following the cost of labor (which is a made up metric they can arbitrarily manipulate)

grandempire16• 1 year ago

not take advantage of their employees living in cheaper CoL areas

Because talent tends to be worse in those areas. (Inb4 I know someone really good in a low cost area)

antisthenes• 1 year ago

You know people can move, right?

I can move 20-30 miles in different directions within the same state that would land me in HCOL, MCOL and LCOL areas.

Moving to any of these areas doesn't change my skill set to be better or worse.

idkwhattocallme• 1 year ago

RTO full time just isn't possible for my family and I suspect I'm not alone. It has nothing to do with productivity. It's just the economics of childcare don't work. We live in SF both work tech jobs. We make above median income relative to rest of the country. Our 2 kids (< 10 years old) are in public schools. Kids need to be dropped off at 9.30 and picked up at 3.30 and 2.30 on weds.

The bare minimum for pickup/drop off help is ~ $2500 a month.

Frankly I don't know how people are managing.

milesrout8• 1 year ago

Just do what 95% of people did before: one picks up and one drops off.

mystifyingpoi5• 1 year ago

What people did before was simple in my childhood case: your grandma/grandpa, who live downstairs in a multifamily home, drops you off or picks you up.

How that's supposed to work with just 2 parents that work 8h/day - idk.

acdha2• 1 year ago

That’s less possible now in the era of longer commutes unless you have flexible hours. For example, I’m married to a teacher. I have to do the morning drop off because there is no flexibility in the schedules at either school. That means the earliest I can reliably be in the office is 9:15 (e-bike), 9:30 (transit) or 9:45 (car).

Since our son’s school day ends at 3:15, that also means that the only options are aftercare or me picking him up and resuming work after she gets home. When there are things like staff meetings that runs even later.

The reason this worked in the past was that women did not work full-time, or at all, and the entire system was set up around the idea that there is a “free” adult available to handle everything except instruction. Unfortunately, since wages for anyone below upper middle-class have been stagnant for roughly half a century most families now depend on both parents working to avoid falling further behind.

rwmj• 1 year ago

https://xcancel.com/EthanEvansVP/status/1895845734177452369

Non-xitter link since that site hasn't worked in Firefox for quite a long time. It'd be nice if HN rewrote such URLs automatically.

appleaday1• 1 year ago

AUTOMATE HR AND RELATED MANAGEMENT NOW.

blackeyeblitzar• 1 year ago

I think a lot of the return to office mandates are either meant to force people to quit, or to protect the value of real estate. With JP Morgan, they’re looking to protect the entire commercial real estate market since their business depends on it.

jcgrillo2• 1 year ago

The same lack of context is what (I think, if I'm feeling charitable) makes these people think AI is real:

If you spend your entire day in meetings, you might reasonably think that you'd be better off if all your meetings were face-to-face.

If you only touch a computer to write and respond to emails, the email summary parrot might reasonably seem like some omniscient god.

The trouble is I don't feel charitable. These people got to where they are by behaving like narcissists and sociopaths. That's because they are narcissists and sociopaths. It's about controlling other people and hurting them. Full stop.

the_gastropod• 1 year ago

A few years back, I worked at a "unicorn" startup that also did the pandemic remote work thing, then tried reeling it back in 2022. I remember one of the SVP's explaining how reasonable the RTO policy was, even for those who—like her—had moved away from NYC. She simply rented an apartment a few blocks from the office—midtown Manhattan—and stayed there during the week. Like her, we just needed to make our own adjustments to accommodate the new policy. I'd seen "out of touch" before. But suggesting that everyone just get their own Pied-à-terre still pretty much takes the cake for degree of out of touch I've witnessed personally.

datavirtue4• 1 year ago

All of this was known and built into the education of the elite wherein a sense of responsibility for upholding the overall prosperity of society was instilled. The fact that a post like this seems noteworthy is just an illustration that that sense of responsibility was lost. It seems like we have arrived full circle back to: "I got mine, fuck you." Lording, instead of leading.

What we are really witnessing is law and order breaking down.

gscott• 1 year ago

Gary's economics, YouTube.

mariusor• 1 year ago

This doesn't necessarily make them evil, just disconnected.

No, no, that level of lack of awareness and empathy makes them straight up evil.

cosmotic• 1 year ago

Another thing that makes them straight up evil is taking the value others produce as their own.

danny_codes3• 1 year ago

Comrade!

I agree.

IshKebab• 1 year ago

There's another factor: their jobs are different. Obviously working in an office is advantageous if your entire jobs is meetings and talking to people. They're going to get frustrated when they are in the office and the people they want to talk to aren't there.

But it's waaaay less useful if you are a worker bee just programming all day. Yes it's still better to talk to people next to a physical whiteboard, but it only matters very occasionally. My wife found it astounding that pre-covid I would sometimes go into the office and not really talk to anyone all day. Literally would just be sitting at a desk typing; the desk could have been anywhere.

If you're somehow a FAAaaaang executive reading this, consider making RTO only mandatory for the people you directly manage and talk to, and then let them decide the policy for their subordinates.

nemo44x• 1 year ago

So this is pretty much it in my opinion. Mangers collaborate with other managers and it’s much easier and effective to do this in person. A big part of the job is this. It’s how you align cross functionally and lots of serendipitous things occur because of this. It’s much easier to build the types of relationships you need to effectively lead.

Individual contributors in many cases do not benefit from this. In fact it can be an active hindrance. An ICs contribution and performance is easily tracked and captured through the outputs and metrics they produce.

I think the best organization will be one where leadership and managers spend a good deal of the week in the office. High ranking contributors (player coach managers, leads, etc) spend some so they can collaborate with other leads and leaders. And most ICs are optional.

kjkjadksj4• 1 year ago

easily the least productive days are when the team gets together for all hands. I'm sorry but people are going to schooze and dally and effectively write off that entire day from anything real getting done over the all hands meeting that takes up the bulk of the afternoon where like 2 people talk and everyone just looks at their inbox.

hackable_sand2• 1 year ago

it’s much easier and effective to do this in person.

People keep saying this but it's a preference, not a fact.

snozolli5• 1 year ago

Not only are their jobs different, most of them have no understanding whatsoever of how the workers generate business value. The age of the technical founder is over.

Gud• 1 year ago

You really think clueless manager types are the next batch of founders?

hackable_sand2• 1 year ago

You've described a daycare.

nedt• 1 year ago

I'm just somewhere in the middle doing engineering management, so I'm already talking a lot to people in meetings, but I really enjoy doing it from home. Much easier to do something on the side or in between of all the none work related stuff (like cooking lunch). In half of the meetings we wouldn't be able to meet those people directly anyway with us being in different countries or even continents.

_huayra_• 1 year ago

Yes it's still better to talk to people next to a physical whiteboard, but it only matters very occasionally.

Though I love a good whiteboard sess, a tablet with a stylus and one of many "interactive whiteboard applications" can also be pretty useful. Hard to have a whiteboard session good enough to compensate for the grueling traffic of most HCOL regions a good portion of us likely work in.

efitz2• 1 year ago

If you want people to return to the office, then make the working conditions at the office desirable to return to.

Yes, free meals, interesting spaces, massage rooms, etc are all great perks. But you’re there to work, and the reality is hoteling, no shred of privacy (need to have an ad hoc phone conversation with someone somewhere else? Good luck booking a phone room and walking 10min to get there).

If you want people in the office, give them offices. Small, glass-walled, but acoustically private. And above all, assigned, so that you can personalize it a little and not mind sitting there for 8-12 hours.

trey-jones• 1 year ago

Marie Antoinette was "just disconnected" and look what happened to her.

okanat• 1 year ago

They made sure that she stays disconnected.

jcgrillo2• 1 year ago

You might say airgapped

Tainnor2• 1 year ago

Yeah but that was also because she was a foreigner and people made up scandals around her.

dumbledoren15• 1 year ago

Her husband also got disconnected. A lot of French nobles who asked and collaborated with their foreign relatives to wage war on their people to repress them also got disconnected.

dumbledoren15• 1 year ago

Yep. People always think that the aristocracy of old was different. No, they were just normal people like anyone else who were just directly born into narcissist privilege and lived their lives out-of-touch right from their childhood on. The tech execs, investors, VCs, and shareholders have grown into the same narcissism after attaining that kind of privilege. With enough time in that privileged, disconnected, narcissistic world, they just develop the same behavior patterns and 'disconnect'.

People criticize the French Revolution for the execution of nobility, but their level of disconnect was at a "Send letters to your foreign aristocrat relatives asking them to come to your country to massacre your people to put them in their place and collaborate with them to do that" level.

Its amazing to see the disconnect of the modern nobility nearing those levels...

willhslade2• 1 year ago

I see a lot of comments here, but what I don't see is anybody speaking the quiet part out loud.

No judgment here to those who did, but during the pandemic, several people, including several software engineers, took the opportunity to work multiple jobs. Notably, at Equifax, which is probably the worst place to do it because they have records of most people's employment. https://www.businessinsider.com/equifax-used-itsproduct-to-f...

This is the main reason. Management doesn't want you pulling 2 salaries, even if you could, so they are trying to make it difficult so you don't even try.

In addition, if WFH becomes normalized, there is a lot of debt floating office buildings in major cities, and there will be a great renegotiation. This is really bad for senior management, the stock market, transit systems and the budget of most cities. So most people that manage you and manage your managers are aligned against you. https://nypost.com/2024/08/02/real-estate/huge-midtown-offic...

Lastly, and I'm only mentioning this because I think it needs to be said, but I think that most people who are pushing WFH are short sighted. If it is proved conclusively that software development can be managed and completed remotely, then it will devalue your labour as you are forced to compete with smart people in countries with significantly lower housing and energy costs. Anecdotally, this is already occurring.

iLoveOncall2• 1 year ago

This is the main reason.

No it's not.

According to your own article, Equifax fired 24 out of 10,000 employees for working multiple jobs. That's 0.24% of their employees.

This doesn't even come close to being a factor in their decision.

there is a lot of debt floating office buildings in major cities, and there will be a great renegotiation. This is really bad for senior management, the stock market, transit systems and the budget of most cities.

Why is it bad for senior management, outside of senior management for commercial real estate? You think Google gives a flying fuck about the fact that there are empty buildings and that it's costing money to the few massive companies who own most of the commercial real estate in the US and in the world? No. Do you think the stock market cares? No.

If it is proved conclusively that software development can be managed and completed remotely, then it will devalue your labour as you are forced to compete with smart people in countries with significantly lower housing and energy costs.

You say it yourself, "Anecdotally, this is already occurring", so why isn't it generalized? Why is there still ANY line of code written in the US or in western Europe? Because outsourcing simply doesn't work for the vast majority of software.

willhslade2• 1 year ago

I appreciate the pushback.

Fine, if it isn't the real reason, what is the real reason? Why can't any executives, at any organization, proffer a reason that makes sense?

astennumero• 1 year ago

Another interesting aspect that is often ignored is the government's role in this situation. Increased footfall is beneficial for the economy. People generally spend more when they're outside than they would if they were at home. For example, one might choose to cook food rather than buy it when at home.

Therefore, some governments are actively pushing corporations to bring people back to the office to revive the economy. I'm not exactly sure how I feel about this, though. On one hand, reviving the economy will have long-term benefits. On the other hand, forcing people to spend money is not ideal.

Also, personally, I think we all grow and learn more about the world when we are in the world. You get to see and experience so many things while commuting, for example. I think it builds character.

phendrenad22• 1 year ago

I'd like to see proof of government pressure for companies to RTO. In theory it seems likely, but it would be lovely to have a smoking gun to enter into evidence in the court of public opinion. DM me (joking, HN doesn't have DMs).

dguest• 1 year ago

This is an interesting case of the "revive the economy" argument. If you really don't see a benefit, to you or your employer, to returning to work, you are being forced to waste money (spending implies you get something out of it). More generously, it's a tax where the benefits go to your local Subway or gas station (or maybe bistro and public transit).

There are probably lots of other ways to force people to waste money, so this raises two questions:

- Is a larger GDP an unequivocally good thing if you get there by raising people's baseline expenses?

- Are the parts of the economy you are stimulating the ones we want to see growing?

I don't know the answer in either case. But in the later case, I know a lot of people who work in carpentry and delivery apps, and since the pandemic they have made an absolute killing: the work-from-home mandate invigorated that part of the economy like nothing before.

P.S. I agree with your personal point about leaving home. I like going in to the office too: my office is about 20 minutes away by bike and it's nice to get some air. I'm not sure if applies to people who have a less healthy or refreshing commute.

n3t• 1 year ago

Increased footfall is beneficial for the economy. People generally spend more when they're outside than they would if they were at home.

It sounds like the broken window fallacy.

orblivion• 1 year ago

It's kind of funny, when execs talk about employees feeling entitled to working remotely, I think that's a fair thing to criticize. We all earn our salaries and our perks, the market determines how much companies will put up with remote work (and how many employees even want it).

But since 2020, the market has swayed a lot in favor of remote work compared to before (though it seems to sway back and forth since then). And the way some of these execs talk about it, they say we're all spoiled and we need to put back into the offices where we belong. They're the ones with the self entitled attitude, not respecting the market.

tonnydourado• 1 year ago

They're not evil, just out of touch

Kinda hard to see the difference. I, too, live in a completely different world than people with much less money than me, but I can still conceive that they can't have a cleaner twice a month, order food every other day, or use uber more often than public transportation. I wouldn't even consider making a decision that impacts people's lives without having at least an inkling of how they actually live.

mystifyingpoi5• 1 year ago

That's why I like that I have 0 friends in tech and all of my friends reside outside this bubble. Like, recently someone asked me for help, because he didn't have enough money to pay the taxes. Like holy crap, this is unthinkable in tech, but totally normal outside.

JackFr2• 1 year ago

When I plead with my direct reports to please comply with the company policy of in the office 3 days a week, and I am deluged with a flood of complaints, I suppose sometimes I’m less empathetic than I might be. It’s not because I’m rich. I am not. I don’t own a home nor do I retain any personal assistants.

I’m less empathetic than I might be because I came into the office 5 days a week for 30 years. My wife also worked. We raised three kids. I went to night school. It’s all very doable, and honestly not that hard.

Now I understand that technology has changed circumstances, and what was not technologically feasible 30 years ago is easy today.

But with respect to empathy, most of the commenters here could bear to examine, if only just for a minute, the idea that the executives are acting in good faith, and just trying to run the company effectively and efficiently.

g-nair2• 1 year ago

I haven’t been working for nearly as long - coming up on 7 years here. I enjoy going into the office because I enjoy spending time with my team - they’re all really cool!

However, I find a good analogy for RTO to be the case of student loan forgiveness. Just because one individual had to pay their own tuition or student loans off, doesn’t mean that individual should wish that all future students share the same fate.

Just because you worked in an office for 30 years and it was manageable, or just because I like coming in for social reasons, need not result in our scorn for those who thrive by not coming into an office.

milesrout8• 1 year ago

Student loan forgiveness is using taxpayer money to pay off the loans of a huge number of people with good jobs and plenty of money.

You chose to borrow that money. Borrow. It wasn't a gift.

The idea that people are only against student loan forgiveness because they paid off their own loans and think others should share in their suffering or something is absurd. It is nothing to do with that at all. It is because you are stealing to give money to people that do not need it.

If talk of student loan forgiveness were limited to people with very limited incomes with no hope of ever paying off their loans, it would be one thing. But it is in reality about a massive transfer of wealth to people with degrees: people with plenty of earning capacity already.

Just because you worked in an office for 30 years and it was manageable, or just because I like coming in for social reasons, need not result in our scorn for those who thrive by not coming into an office.

The persom you replied to didn't say RTO was good because he worked in the office for 30 years. He said he had limited sympathy for that reason. I am sure his reason for imploring his team to RTO is that he recognises that people do two thirds of fuck all at home.

polishdude20• 1 year ago

I'd come into the office 3 days a week if I lived close to the office. I live far away because the office is downtown. Downtown is expensive to live in.

I think a lot of people who want to work from home want to not commute for an hour per day or can't afford to live nearby the office.

taysix• 1 year ago

I’m less empathetic than I might be because I came into the office 5 days a week for 30 years. My wife also worked. We raised three kids. I went to night school. It’s all very doable, and honestly not that hard.

To me this sentiment reads as "It sucked for me, therefore it needs to suck for you too. Feel the pain of previous generations!"

What happened to wanting to make life BETTER for people? Better for the next generation?

As someone that would complain about RTO mandates if I had to, I know that it's do-able, but does it make my life better? No, it doesn't.

Imagine your last 30 years of not having to go in 5 days a week? Think how much more time you would have had to do all the things you listed: raise your kids, spend time studying night school, etc. How much further ahead would you have gotten with that extra time?

II2II2• 1 year ago

The first thing that stuck out to me (emphasis added):

> When I plead with my direct reports to please comply with the company policy of in the office 3 days a week

Someone higher up is the decision maker here. They are acknowledging a lack of empathy while implementing those policies and trying to explain why they may lack empathy in the process. Yet, at the end of the day, they are simply one of the people who has to ensure compliance.

Imagine your last 30 years of not having to go in 5 days a week?

There are likely a lot of managers out there arguing against company mandates. The thing is, it is difficult to discuss their struggles with higher levels of management without creating a negative impact (or a negative impact of a different sort) in the workplace. So they have to carry out the orders without actually discussing how they feel about those orders with their reports.

JackFr2• 1 year ago

To me this sentiment reads as "It sucked for me, therefore it needs to suck for you too. Feel the pain of previous generations!"

I explicitly say it didn’t suck and it wasn’t painful.

dutchCourage• 1 year ago

I'm sure some might be acting in good faith. Nonetheless, I believe they're generally wrong. From experience going to the office for the sake of going to the office doesn't help.

The company I worked for who had the best company culture was fully remote but put a strong emphasis on communication.

Meanwhile, my current company insists that people show up to the office regularly, and it's costing me 8h per week and I get a less comfortable work environment. It does nothing to solve our communication issues however. Even worse, it feels like some execs think the company culture will build itself just by putting people together in a room. It reminds me of people who schedule meetings because they don't know how to organize their thoughts and write down what they want to say.

edit: Rephrasing, I got emotional. I don't know how you managed to have a life with three kids, night school and a full time job + commute. All my free time goes to my child and family. I barely have time for hobbies. If a company wants to take more of my time they better have a compelling reason.

Freedom2• 1 year ago

just trying to run the company effectively and efficiently.

So perhaps they should present evidence or data? Any at all will do. So far there has been very little evidence, especially from the big dogs, that actually present a positive view of RTO with respect to productivity.

dingnuts• 1 year ago

it's as simple as this: working from home is a benefit, like 401(k) matching.

If you hire remote workers, and then tell them they have to come in three days a week, you had better have a compensation renegotiation or you sure will get complaints, because you effectively just cut everyone's pay.

and your excuse is that you did it so everyone has to? no, I chose to go remote to access property I can afford, based on the agreement I negotiated.

if you unilaterally change that as an employer, you cannot be surprised when your reports act like you're cutting their pay, because you are!

goosejuice• 1 year ago

It won't be more effective or efficient if they don't want to be there. Nothing hurts productivity more than apathy.

mystifyingpoi5• 1 year ago

and just trying to run the company effectively and efficiently

The issue is, during covid, many companies thrived, the sales skyrocketed and everyone was happier than ever. Now, they backpedal and say that we need to go back butts in chairs for reasons, but there is zero mention of the previous prosperity and why can't we just keep doing the same.

It's a lie, simple as that.

arkadiytehgraet• 1 year ago

So you don't own a house after working for 30 years and you of all people are speaking about efficiency? This is really something to think about for you, mate

francisofascii• 1 year ago

Because the RTO mandate is not to increase productivity, it is to cause people to quit or give a reason to lay people off. It has NOTHING to do with making workers more productive. Also 20 years ago it was much more doable to live close to an office. Real estate prices are insane now, even in smaller cities. Also, it is hard to work full time, commute, raise kids, and keep a marriage successful. It doesn't leave much wiggle rooms for exercise, cooking, recreation, etc. It is a rat race. It is why people become overweight, have heart attacks, and get cancer. Keynes prediction of 15 hour work weeks didn't come true, despite unprecedented productivity growth. It is a shame.

scarface_743• 1 year ago

I’ve also worked almost 30 years. Even in 1996 I was able to work remotely occasionally by logging into a mainframe (DEC VAX and Stratus VOS) for half of my work and using PCAnyWhere for Windows based work over a modem.

I’ve worked remotely since March 2020 across three companies. I don’t work in an office. If you need me in an office for some face time, put me on a plane. I initially turned down the chance to interview at Amazon because they wanted me to uproot my life after Covid and only ended up working there because they suggested I interview at AWS Professionsl Services.

When GCP reached out to me multiple times about a similar position after leaving AWS and they said I would have to be in the office, I immediately ended the conversation.

danny_codes3• 1 year ago

The fundamental irony is that CEOs + execs are easy to replace at most orgs. Their compensation comes from nepotism and capitalism, not from any inherent capability. Hopefully I’ll live to see the end of the rotten scourge that is Capitalism. One can dream.

dumbledoren15• 1 year ago

Yes, they are like chancellors, castellans to the feudal lords who own the fief. They are even more vicious than the lord himself because their employment depends on that viciousness. Not that the lords would not be equally vicious if they ran the show.

stego-tech4• 1 year ago

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.

I ended up painting a picture that, when considering just the costs of vehicular wear and tear, associated insurance costs, added food costs, lost time commuting, and lost economic opportunity in housing choice, that it would end up being approximately equivalent to a $30,000 USD pay cut (primarily due to housing and vehicle costs to preserve the existing commute, rather than searching further afield with a hybrid or remote schedule). I also added that, for the technology teams in particular, our follow-the-sun support model meant we were all incredibly scattered about anyway with no real colleagues in our local office to network with.

The response was to double-down: those outside of "hubs" were increasingly passed over for promotions and growth opportunities, hubs started enforcing mandatory in-office days (dictated by the VP), and - of course - the company's promise to support minority colleagues was effectively compromised to "encourage" relocation to Texas. It wasn't really surprising when I got RIFed, just incredibly disappointing.

Data alone is not enough to sway these people. They have their own agendas that have no concern for their workers' needs or goals. The solution will be collective action, rather than bargaining for basic empathy.

jimt1234• 1 year ago

Data alone is not enough to sway these people.

True. And, they have their own data that says workers love RTO. My company sends out employee surveys every six months. They claim that employees who work-from-the-office have higher workplace satisfaction scores, and therefore working-from-the-office must be better - the data proves it!

codr75• 1 year ago

Finally, a good use for those pesky surveys that no one answers, I'm pretty sure the goal from the start was to generate cover for whatever policies they feel like enforcing.

nazgul17• 1 year ago

I wonder whether they adjusted for commute length. I imagine that IF you live close to the office, the RTO is not bad. Plus, if you're close maybe you live in a small apartment and maybe you are single, so the office is also a social place, and having no family means you don't have pressure from other duties.

bratbag• 1 year ago

I'm one of those people who is happier when spending some time in the office each week and have said that when surveyed.

Don't assume survey results that run counter to your anecdotal experience have been fabricated.

scott_w4• 1 year ago

I’ve seen employee satisfaction surveys show certain unhappy groups getting happier over time. Which, of course they did, the unhappy ones left!

nine_zeros2• 1 year ago

Data alone is not enough to sway these people. They have their own agendas that have no concern for their workers' needs or goals. The solution will be collective action, rather than bargaining for basic empathy.

Yes, because they don't NEED or WANT to do anything that jeopardizes their position in the executive group-think. Remember that every year they survive, they are going to get 10s of millions.

The cost of sticking out for their own reports is too high. They'd much rather their reports kill themselves and their own lives than forego the 10s of millions coming this year. Short term.

Also remember that they see their current position as a reward for sacrificing a lot in life. They feel entitled to boss people. People should bow to their command because they reached the top org chart positions. How dare people below them propose anything but loyalty to whatever they want?

try_the_bass11• 1 year ago

The irony in this comment is thick enough you could cut it with a knife.

Like many of the other responses in this thread, you're generalizing a small set of experiences to every company, and not even acknowledging that other companies may not work this way

I suspect this is due to not wanting "to do anything that jeopardizes [your] position in the [anti-]executive group-think."

I have worked for multiple companies that looked for feedback from employees, and claimed to use that information to better the company for those employees. Some actually did, and others did not.

Not all of them are the same, and many actually seek feedback in earnest. Meanwhile, you would have me believe that some of the companies I have worked for didn't exist.

null0pointer• 1 year ago

They do not use data as a decision making tool. They use data as post-hoc justification for decisions already made.

holografix• 1 year ago

But you see, you were trying to convince them of entirely the wrong thing. In fact you ended up providing solid reasons to reinforce their belief in RTO.

Leadership wants attrition. They want people to quit and if they don’t have to make you redundant and pay you out, fantastic. You just gave them good data points to indicate that a portion of people are likely to do just that.

If you upend your whole life and move to a hub then that means you need this job very badly. Guess when you’re getting promoted next? Not soon.

WalterBright14• 1 year ago

If you're correct that WFH is more efficient than work in the office, over time the work in the office companies will be replaced by the WFH ones.

Forcing things through collective action that prevent market forces from working are deleterious in the long run. See Europe's moribund economy.

They have their own agendas that have no concern for their workers' needs or goals.

That's right.

The solution will be collective action, rather than bargaining for basic empathy.

A business is not a jobs program. It's there to create wealth, and if it does not, it goes bankrupt and everyone loses their job.

You are always free to quit and join another company more to your liking, or you can quit and start your own business and run it as you please. It happens all the time, and this message board is run by a venture capital firm, looking for startups to fund.

intelVISA• 1 year ago

Is the market really free enough for WFH vs RTO to be visible?

p_l• 1 year ago

A market can be irrational longer than you can keep solvent applies to this as well

stego-tech4• 1 year ago

You keep waddling into my comments specifically to taut your mistaken notion of “the invisible hand of the free market”, and it’s not welcome - mostly because it’s demonstrably not true, and also because you have a history of moving goal posts when presented this data that knocks down your assertions.

Kindly go away and chew on this while you do so: if everyone started their own billion-dollar business like you claim it’s possible (and plausible) to do, then that means the cumulative wealth available out there is literally infinite and currency has no relevant function.

So for currency to be worthwhile and billion-dollar businesses to be viable, there must be finite resources. Furthermore, since humans cannot be trusted to act in the interest of society, then regulation is needed to ensure equitable outcomes and minimize harms.

Now go away and leave me be.

hn_throwaway_992• 1 year ago

I think there are two things going on, and while I think the Twitter post does a good job of highlighting this core issue, I think it's going to be overshadowed by the "execs can get all this support because they're rich" talk (which is true, just not what I think is the core issue).

For some subset of people, work is the most important thing in their lives and it is largely how they identify themselves. As the tweet points out, the vast majority of execs are in this bucket. This is almost by definition - despite what has been popular talk in some corners of the Internet, most execs do work extremely hard, as do most people who get to the upper echelons of their profession. These people essentially want to work more. FWIW, while I'm not an exec, I would put myself in this bucket.

On the other side are basically the "work to live" people. While this is a pretty broad bucket (some people may want to spend as little time working as possible, but I think most people in this bucket care about their careers and want to do well, but they still fundamentally see work as a means to an end to achieve goals outside of work), these folks are much more likely to not be execs. They want to do a good job, get paid well, and then go home.

So I think both sides talk past each other because they fundamentally have different goals. For people in the first bucket (again, that was definitely me), I grew to hate full-time remote work. I felt incredibly disconnected from my work and my colleagues over time, and my motivation definitely waned over time, and as someone who really identified myself in the context of my profession, that was really tough. But I also don't have kids, and not a lot of responsibilities outside of work, so I can definitely understand the other side of it.

I don't think there are any easy answers, but saying "data alone is not enough to sway these people" I think misses the point, because you're only showing data that pushes the viewpoint of your "second bucket" group. Again, to emphasize, not a bad thing, but it doesn't encompass all of the concerns that are in play of the first bucket group.

HeavyStorm3• 1 year ago

First bucket guy here! Work 12 hours days, use a significant amount of my free time to study/learn.

I love remote because it saves me 100+ minutes of my life every day. Minutes better spent working. I do miss joining me peers for lunch and Watercooler talk but not worth it.

Spooky234• 1 year ago

I love remote work. It made me 20x more productive when I was managing a distributed team of almost 1000 people during COVID - all of our metrics improved. 5 years later I am in a different role, and it’s the exact opposite. Executives represent the company and its interests, and there are some significant issues with the real problem - hybrid.

Grift and fraud. Nobody likes to talk about this, but many people are running grifts, from doing nothing, meetings in the supermarket or on vacation, to running multiple jobs. I had a couple working 5-6 different full time jobs together. Another was working offshore using a family member as “remote hands” to keep a device connected in the US. It’s difficult and expensive to police.

Hybrid decreases effectiveness. A remote only unit is great, a on-prem unit is great. “Permanent” hybrid is the worst of all worlds. Remote people rely on tools more and they don’t work as well with people in site. Meeting transcripts rely on the different clients to identify speakers, and work poorly in conference rooms, for example. It’s also easy for bad patterns to develop where remote people get cut out by people talking off the cuff in office, or vice versa.

The majority of the quality of life improvements are really about time freedom. You’d get most of it by giving employees sufficient paid time and allowing them to use it. Remote first by business unit makes sense too, but I think that the risk is the remote workers become like the folks in “provincial” branch offices.

draebek• 1 year ago

Thanks for your comment. I agree with a lot of what you said, in particular that trying to have it both ways (hybrid) often ends up with everyone being frustrated, in my experience.

I want to say very clearly that I don't doubt that "grift and fraud" happens. What percentage of the workforce are engaged in this grift? If you have 100 remote workers in your average IT shop at BigCo, how many of them do you think are truly running a scam that would never pass if they were in person? My guess is 3 or less, but that's just a guess.

In case it's not obvious, what I'm working towards is: If 3% of your workforce is engaged in grift, but a lot of the other 97% are happier and more productive, is it worth pissing off a substantial portion of that 97% just to shut down the 3%?

The majority of the quality of life improvements are really about time freedom. You’d get most of it by giving employees sufficient paid time and allowing them to use it.

This leaves out one of the main things to like about WFH for many (most?) Americans, at least: I get to avoid wasting 30–90 minutes of my day in a stressful commute that comes with its own share of expenses.

kjkjadksj4• 1 year ago

I don't understand how it is a problem if an employee takes on multiple jobs. Presumably you don't limit births either and being a parent is effectively taking on another job. If the work output is acceptible or not is what should matter alone to you as a manager. Not how exactly the sausage is getting made.

For example, this employee who is supposedly spending 1/6th of their time on your job. If you say tried to capitalize their time such that you now have 6/6ths on your tasks, would the employee even accept this arragement themselves? You are effectively giving them 1/6th the pay for the same full time day of work they do anyhow. Squeezing this employee is not going to see you get more work out of them. It is going to see them leave your company and replace that job with another, leaving you shortstaffed and having to invest in vetting candidates and onboarding. Now you ask how much you get out of an employee you put the squeeze on given that this will lead to turnover and an overall loss of that full time work being done as you suffer through a period of short staffing.

rendaw• 1 year ago

Surely these people are assigned tasks to do? Are they not getting the tasks done? How are your managers unable to tell whether the assigned tasks are getting done?

Are the tasks getting done but are poor quality? Are you implying that you'd be fine with the shoddy work if they weren't working multiple jobs? If not why do you keep them, irrespective of whether thy have multiple jobs?

Jcampuzano24• 1 year ago

Sounds like companies managers are shit at their jobs then if they can't make sure that people are actually doing there jobs.

Its really simple -> give them assigned tasks. If they don't get them done and can't prove they actually worked on it (provided it was reasonable for their skillset) then fire them.

It is really that easy. But people continue saying this "grift" exists of employees abusing their companies. If this is really true, then all it says is that managers at these companies are really REALLY terrible at managing and they should be the first to go.

bigs• 1 year ago

This remote colleagues problem is my issue. I don’t mind coming back in (except the cost) but it is very irritating and pointless as I’m a project manager with dispersed teams all across the country (and some in other countries). I come into the office, say hi to a few people I know, get on Teams calls all day in an open plan office with less privacy than at home, then commute home again.

stego-tech4• 1 year ago

I know exactly how you feel. I brought up the prior success my team had with a yearly meetup for a week of good, solid, complex work and planning, and suggested teams try to achieve that using the cost savings associated with real estate reductions.

That was also promptly shutdown, in favor of two new tech hubs in cheaper countries and a smattering of MSPs.

e40• 1 year ago

That’s because the reason for return to office is to get people to quit. Simple as that. Soft layoffs.

neilwilson• 1 year ago

The fix is increased competition or legislation.

Just as it is with racial, age or sex discrimination. And before that child labour, slavery and indenture.

To learn they have to be beaten in the market place, or the floor of the legislature.

dumbledoren15• 1 year ago

It does look like the exec class has become a new aristocracy that lives in a world separate from the rest of the society - new technofeudal lords.

The best solution to this is to create employee-owned private corporations like Huawei: All its shares are owned by its employee union, and the union democratically decides how much dividends to distribute to the employees every year. Easiest worker-ownership setup.

voidhorse2• 1 year ago

This goes deeper than just RTO. The current, growing rift stems from increasing recognition that:

1. Whether we like it or not, we are all in this together. Your dependency on others is extremely high, no matter where you sit in society.

2. We posses the technological means to realize a restructuring of labor and society, one which would benefit a large swath of people across several dimensions —remote work was just an existence proof of this—beyond that, we actually have the infrastructure and technical capacity to solve many societal problems that are being artificially maintained at this stage in history.

3. Different members of society have different incentives, and some benefit much more significantly from existing labor structure and organization than others. Often, these benefits are derived in direct opposition to realizing the net benefits possible in (2.) (see: modern healthcare in the united states).

Remote work during covid was a crack in the glass. External factors forced the C-suite and their ilk to make concessions that showed that the current labor structure is antiquated and that it persists mostly for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many. The psychopathy of the executives lies in their desire to make this structure persist. RTO mandates are an irrational attempt to brute-force rollback the tiny bit of power they gave up to the masses during covid. CEOs are evil. They are evil because they perpetuate a system of labor that increases inequality and puts most people under unnecessary duress because of an artificially imposed scarcity. It is not a "difference in lifestyle" that makes this class of people repulsive. It is their continual and persistent attempts to preserve a structure that demeans and subjugates human beings. They do this actively, and effectively by spreading "free-market" propaganda and continually steering the conversation away from the realization of a more equitable society, which is already technologically feasible.

milesrout8• 1 year ago

Your way of looking at things is fundamentally broken. You will never understand society or other people if your analysis is that we could transform society with technology but we choose not to because... some people are just evil and don't want to.

The reality is that remote work meant a massive drop in productivity. It sucks if you are one of the few that is equally or more productive at home than at work. If you are, then you are few and far between. Most people working from home do sweet FA. Everyone knows this and everyone talked about it constantly for all of the WFH period right until they were asked to work from the office again.

The psychopathy of the executives lies in their desire to make this structure persist. RTO mandates are an irrational attempt to brute-force rollback the tiny bit of power they gave up to the masses during covid. CEOs are evil. They are evil because they perpetuate a system of labor that increases inequality and puts most people under unnecessary duress because of an artificially imposed scarcity.

You are either insane or you have completely swallowed some source of propaganda. Evil? Artificial scarcity? System of labour? Do you even hear yourself? Take a step back from the computer, stop listening to podcasts and just think for yourself. Or if this is you thinking for yourself, find someone else to do your thinking for you, because you're not good at it.

voidhorse2• 1 year ago

You haven't provided any meaningful counterclaims or additional perspective. You seem to be upset just because I think c-suite executives are not morally respectable. You claim my way of looking at things is "broken" but you fail to provide any rationale as to why. I claim that execs are incentivized to preserve an inequitable system because they directly benefit from it. Talking about their "psychopathy" and "evil" is a hyperbolic way to illustrate that they put profit over people, which anyone with a single functioning cell behind their eyeballs could tell you is patently obvious. My use of these terms was in direct response to the OP tweet, which already dumbed down the discourse to the level of "evil" and "good"—blame the nincompoop exec for bringing the conversation to this level, I am merely operating on it.

The reality is that remote work meant a massive drop in productivity.

By what measure? Across all companies, or only for a few? How do you define "productivity" in a general sense without measuring against a specific goal?

Speaking of propaganda, you sound like someone who has bought into the current status quo so deeply that you find it anathema to even think about alternatives as being possible. If "thinking for yourself" means to blindly follow the status quo, not question the distribution of wealth in society and to not consider whether or not we can better leverage our current capabilities to the benefit of more people, then yes, no thanks, I'd rather not think for myself.

I don't listen to podcasts. I read books and I think beyond my immediate experience. You should try it sometime. It might help you realize how foolish you are to defend people that actively exploit you and your labor.

dumbledoren15• 1 year ago

CEOs are evil.

Worse, they are evil because the system filters out anyone who has any kind of empathy. If they don't maximize profits, they are immediately replaced by someone who is more psycho than them, who will maximize profits without blinking at any human or societal cost.

They do this actively, and effectively by spreading "free-market" propaganda and continually steering the conversation away from the realization of a more equitable society, which is already technologically feasible.

Moreover, they do this as the predicted collapse of capitalism due to the majority not being able to get any economic value out of the system to be able to buy products and services, happens in front of their eyes. There are products, but people don't have the money to buy them. The system collapses, but what the execs are doing is maximizing short-term profit because what happens afterward is "Someone else's problem".

wesselbindt• 1 year ago

They're not out of touch. They know. They don't care.

phendrenad22• 1 year ago

They may be out-of-touch but they understand when someone takes their money. And my message to tech CEOs is: if you want in-office, pay more. Or you will lose your company and your PJ and your golf club membership and your kids will go to public school in a big yellow bus built in 1982 with no seatbelts. You won't even be able to shift over to a successful company, because the companies will speak exclusively Chinese. The future of the western tech industry is in your hands, I hope you're smart enough to make the right choice.

farts_mckensy2• 1 year ago

Replace these fucking assholes with AI.

simonswords82• 1 year ago

Good on this guy for having the courage to be honest about his circumstances. Still, shitty that this is the situation.

newsclues• 1 year ago

Contrast both: minimum wage, lengthy bus commute, workday that exceeds 8 hours, limited or no weekends or vacation. People that never had a remote work option because they work production or service jobs that are tied to the workplace.

bvanderveen• 1 year ago

OP mentions housekeeping as part of his benefits. I also have had an every-other-week maid service for the past decade or so, and for me, it is a huge lifestyle improvement. The amount of time and cognitive overhead it saves is enormous.

I have paid less than $200/mo for this. In terms of cost, this isn't anything like having a nanny, your house paid off, or retiring at age 50. But it's interesting that for this guy, it's on the same list as those things.

In sum: I highly recommend deploying a couple hundred bucks a month to pay someone to do house chores if you have a hard time motivating yourself to do it or have housemates/partners you have to spend time arguing about it with.

Apreche• 1 year ago

Right on all counts except one. It DOES necessarily make them evil.

tennisflyi• 1 year ago

What irks me is when said from rank and file it’s just bitching. But when said from the c-suite it’s godsend

from-nibly• 1 year ago

These kinds of tweets miss the point. It's not about returning to the office. It's about reducing labor costs. It's about having a thing that shows you are trying harder (the anime kind where it just makes you win for no reason) to show to your investors.

Nothing in private equity or public companies is done for the purpose of making the company better. It's for making the company look like it will do better in the future, so that a bigger fool will hold the bag.

Don't try to rationalize the irrational, that only serves to promote the myth that they are trying to do something we just don't understand.

It's called misdirection.

corytheboyd• 1 year ago

We are already very painfully aware of the hyper rich being out of touch. This reads like rich guy A saying it’s actually rich guys B and C who are the problem. Maybe this is frustrating for people like the author to hear, because clearly they have good intent with this message, but I’m sorry, the only way I will ever perceive someone who received a 9082% pay increase is as another criminal destroying the world that I live in. I am a complete hypocrite though, because of course I would say yes to a 9082% pay increase, like most/all people would. The price of being this wealthy is exile from plebeian society. Sorry you have to be rich?

davesque• 1 year ago

This is not a screed against executive wealth. After all, I paid with 25 years of my life and I got some of the wealth.

That's the point though isn't it? He retired at 50. Most of us will work to at least age 65 (perhaps until we literally can't work anymore in today's economy). And we won't get some of the wealth.

BrenBarn• 1 year ago

Ironically one of the clearest signals of being out of touch is feeling that your noticing how out of touch you are is noteworthy. It's like "Gosh, I'm rich! How interesting!"

This is not a screed against executive wealth.

And that again shows how out of touch he still is. You haven't fully accepted how out-of-touch wealthy you are until you've made the decision to actively oppose allowing anyone to reach that situation.

lowbloodsugar2• 1 year ago

The rich own real estate around the office buildings. They want their REITs to go up not down. It’s a company town even if they did away with scrip.

dpc_01234• 1 year ago

If you're getting a private jet funded for your work, maybe it's your responsibility not to be out of touch.

If you're a manager, maybe it's your responsibility to figure out who's slacking and who's productive.

horns4lyfe2• 1 year ago

It’s not because they’re in a bubble, it’s because they hate you. If they could get rid of you and maintain the same revenue, then they would make more money and that’s the only thing that resonates. They hate you, and you should hate them right back.

dmitrygr• 1 year ago

Every recruiter who reaches out with non-remote jobs gets the same answer: "i am not currently taking any companies that demand i waste my time on a commute seriously". Many reply and tell me that they get this a lot from the more senior people they want to hire. Usually they also complain that their hands are tied.

alsoforgotmypwd• 1 year ago

Chris Hedges recently interviewed Catherine Liu, the author of Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class. They are a mostly invisible spectrum of plutocratic aristocracy who essentially replaced the middle class and gained immense wealth, power, and sense of entitlement.

wooger• 1 year ago

Ultra rich execs are out of touch sure, but equally so, middle aged people with houses, families, long commutes to the suburbs are out of touch with younger people who might've relocated to a city for their first / second job out of university, don't have social networks of friends and family nearby, and desperately need to be in the same office as older experienced staff to learn from them. They also don't have space or even privacy to work from home every day in a shared flat.

Remote working also doesn't suit some people at all, and their productivity went of the cliff during COVID and the big shift to remote / hybrid. If you don't see, socialise and really get to know your colleagues multiple times a week it's really hard for some people to see them as real people and care about how the job they're doing (or slacking off) affects others.

kermatt• 1 year ago

This doesn't necessarily make them evil, just disconnected.

If you are very highly compensated, responsible for people's ability to earn what they need to survive, and don't care enough to understand your employee's perspectives and realities, you some definition of evil.

Responsibility is the key word here.

etruong42• 1 year ago

In terms of the disconnect between executives and society, the elephant in the room here is society's approval of CEO, father, husband Brian Thompson's cold-blooded murder. The disconnect goes way beyond disagreements about RTO.

garfieldnate• 1 year ago

Remember, they live literally in another world.

One of my favorite sociology books is about rich people practically living in a different country, Richistan.

Executive wealth as a factor in return-to-office

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