6 ms·

RTO is about controlling labor, nothing else. Everything else is a smoke screen. Ask yourself the following questions and you'll understand what happened: - wh

• thewebguyd 6mo ago
  Correct. Workers were starting to get power, people had seen through the fog at what was actually happening and were acting out against it. Agency is a direct threat to the owner class.
  • asdff 6mo ago
    It is amazing how much the constraints of working in the office shackle people to positions or locations. So many people working below their worth due to spouses ability to get a job in some location for example. Maybe you do land a job in your line of work in this little corner of the earth where your spouses jobs are more a plenty. Now you have to hold on for dear life to this company, do whatever the hell they ask of you and take whatever offer they give you because you have no leverage at all. The fact that people completely miss this fact and just go "well I like talking to people in person" I mean at a certain point belies ignorance that borders on stupidity with how hard people cling to the "ability to talk to people in the hallway" against even just the obvious negative externalities like the commute and limited home choices. No one ever talks about this career side and juggling a two body problem.
• asdff 6mo ago
  When you also consider the nation as you know, a nation, and not a rat race of individual interest, the best thing the government could do is encourage working from home. Break the hell up these "hubs" of white collar industry and let's disperse this work and compensation across the country. I'm betting we would see quite a lot more growth anyhow if these jobs were distributed across the country vs just concentrated in like sf/nyc/boston. like there are limits to how much growth little old south san fransisco can sustain. there are finite amount of office space. only finite amount of housing accomodations in the bay area (forgetting for a moment the rampant NIMBYism). And what else is that everyone loses in this present situation. People in the job hub in SF also lose, because they are operating in this fundamentally broken local economy, way too enriched for high income workers making their home cost 2.5m and their compensation actually pretty poor as far as what it can get in the local economy. West Atherton would be a 400k median home neighborhood in most of the midwest. Literally same floorplans, lot sizes, fit and finish. Same country club down the road. Same private school up the road. Boutique shopping and steak dinners still available.
  • ecshafer 6mo ago
    WFH aside. Any company that hits a certain size, starts to be broken up into multiple offices, buildings, floors, etc. and becomes de-facto remote. Meetings all become phone calls. and the team itself is mostly co-located. I am always a big confused at that point, why have a 20k person campus and 2 10k person campuses. Why not have 40 1k campuses? They are all effectively remote anyways.
    • asdff 6mo ago
      On our end COVID also turned every single meeting into a videoconference anyhow, because that is how IT set up the AV inputs for our conference rooms for slideshows. No more direct AV input, ipad in every room now and you start a video conference on it, join with your laptop and share your screen. Most of the time some people had to join in remote anyhow for various reasons. Still, pretty ironic using teleconference software to sit in the same room. 95% the way there, just got to get out of the building lease.
    • 6mo ago
• pdabbadabba 6mo ago
  I can't speak to your sector, but from the perspective in my management role (in law) the explanation is quite simple: managing remote workers is more difficult and less pleasant than managing workers in the office. I actually hate it. And even granting that remote and in-office workers are "productive" in the sense that they bill hours (though not even this seems true in my anecdotal experience), we find that people with less in-office time tend to have qualitatively worse performance. At least in my field, being in the office, spending time with your co-workers, and getting to know them has value. Of course, other things have value too. Often, our folks who prefer to work from home do so because they have small children who they want to spend time with, more fully share parental responsibilities with their partner, etc. I'm glad that they have the opportunity to do that, but it does generally seem to come at some professional cost.
  • kelseyfrog 6mo ago
    > qualitatively worse performance How does their quantative performance compare? Is there an opportunity in the differential?
    • pdabbadabba 6mo ago
      It's worse in the sense that a more senior person has to spend more time fixing it. I guess that's an opportunity in the sense that it allows a firm to bill more hours, but there is generally a reason we wanted that more junior person to do the work originally. (Client cost sensitivity, teal workloads, training, etc.)
      • kelseyfrog 6mo ago
        Interesting thanks!
  • jonpurdy 6mo ago
    I have the opposite experience (in tech at small or medium companies). Managing remote workers is much easier since outcomes (and outputs) are necessarily more visible. Before working remotely (pre-2019) when managing teams in person, I found myself necessarily having discussions to get synced with folks. At my most recent role (and previous remote first roles), team members were excellent at providing updates on Github issues (the sources of truth for work items). Of course, this required buy in at all levels and trickling company objectives down through the program(s) and linking work items to OKRs etc. It was very obvious when folks weren't hitting objectives and easy to gather detailed written evidence of this. And regarding getting to know folks. Most recent offsite was at a villa in Croatia where I got to both meet my team members and ended up getting to know them like friends. Now that I think about it this has happened at previous companies as well during remote offsites. I wonder if it's field-specific. Sounds like there are multiple anecdotes across a wide distribution of outcomes.
• matchbok3 6mo ago
  I think these conspiracy theories about RTO are really unhelpful and actually harmful to the viability of hybrid work arrangements. Please work in a day as a oil rig technician or a nurse. "I should be able to work anywhere and my employer must accommodate me" is an extremely privileged and elitist view of thinking. A few of your notes are actually just wrong as well. Salaries jumped during covid due to over-hiring and software booming. "Productivity" is not a number, but a business-by-business decision. The vast, vast majority of people don't want politics at work, and it's exclusively the viewpoint of the laptop class who demand that stuff. (Again, people who work toiling jobs for 10 hours a day don't create petitions and demands like that) At the end of the day, if you don't want to work in an office, you don't have to. But, believe it or not, many many people, including young people, like the office environment.
  • asdff 6mo ago
    Do you understand how rig work or nursing is? These are very flexible jobs. There is demand for nursing everywhere. You can be a travel nurse and go find work in HI or CA or Las Vegas right now if you want. Temp agencies that place you so you don't even need to really hunt either. Rig work it is weeks on weeks off sort of deal where you then get off that rig back to, quite literally, anywhere in the world where you live otherwise. You could live in the middle of the Amazon rainforest and make six figures a year on a rig in the middle of the ocean (well, maybe US jurisdiction is preferred from a tax perspective for employer payroll).
    • matchbok3 6mo ago
      I'm not sure I understand the point. The vast, vast majority of jobs simply cannot be done remotely. So I have little patience for the entitlement of people thinking they "deserve" it or yell about conspiracy theories about why it is going away. There is a reason YC is in person. There is a reason why the top companies are in person.
      • asdff 6mo ago
        What say you to the fact that there are companies that work remote today and are competitive and doing fine? Anomalous? Or maybe your prior assumptions need adjustment?
• fredgrott 6mo ago
  or was it capital becoming more expensive as that happened during the same period...
• ecshafer 6mo ago
  > why did RTO happen virtually in lockstep across all of white collar employment? This makes sense when you consider that all of these big companies are run by leaders who talk in similar networks and listen to the same consultants (McKinsey, BCG, etc). I know someone who is going through a McKinsey run structural re-org, that is identical to one they ran (and failed horribly) at a company I was in 8 years ago. > why did RTO happen at the same time that critical equity/diversity viewpoints were increasingly being discussed at work? There was a decent lag between the peak of equity nonsense and RTO, plus the evidence is that DEI/Equity/etc hurt workers and disrupt organizing tremendously. > why did RTO happen despite no evidence that productivity had anything to do with it? (and in fact, lots of evidence that it made employees more productive!) Company I was went from 1 quarter talking about the increases in productivity WFH brought to the next quarter town hall talking about RTO for the culture and productivity.
  • imcrs 6mo ago
    > This makes sense when you consider that all of these big companies are run by leaders who talk in similar networks and listen to the same consultants (McKinsey, BCG, etc Yes, it certainly does! I'm sure they also talk to Pinkerton :) > decent lag between the peak of equity nonsense and RTO Just about the amount of time it would take for management to (1) realize what was happening and what it meant for their power over labor; and (2) align on a policy. > Company I was went from 1 quarter talking about the increases in productivity WFH brought to the next quarter town hall talking about RTO for the culture and productivity. Yes, exactly. That's how you know anything about "productivity" is all a load of shit.
• heraldgeezer 6mo ago
  What if I actually like the office? It is a nice building in a nice area. I have a 40min walk to it or 10min bus ride. I like my colleagues. Sometimes you need to meet and solve problems face to face, and not have it be planned. I like dressing up a bit, not a full suit but nice pleated pants and OCBD/sweater/blazer. I have a shift schedule, sometimes I am the only one in the office, that is bliss :) But my work is 100% in office. But not being shut at home is nice.
  • thewebguyd 6mo ago
    For me it's about choice. Forcing either isn't necessarily good, but why not just allow people to choose? I sometimes go into the office, but maybe only once or twice per month. But I am allowed that choice, I can work from my house, any of the company's locations, a cafe, or anywhere else I feel like it on any given day. I value the freedom and flexibility. I'd be miserable being told "You must be in the office" and I'd also equally hate to be told "you must work from a desk in your house only"
  • dmitrygr 6mo ago
    > I have a 40min walk to it or 10min bus ride Sounds like you are taking 80 minutes away from your family every day. I would not be so proud of that. And you'll likely regret it on your deathbed. #1 regret is not enough time with fanmily.
    • throw-the-towel 6mo ago
      True, but not everyone even has a family.
    • 1718627440 6mo ago
      Most people do need time to shift focus from and to work. You can do groceries during that time, or administrative work like sending letters or going to the citizens office... .
    • z3dd 6mo ago
      They'll likely have more time with the family because walking and being outside leads to a longer healthier life.
• c0d3rPrimate 6mo ago
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• Kye 6mo ago
  Somewhere I empathize with all the laid off coders and coders worried about the future. I'm not one myself but I know a lot of them, and I never know what to say. The nth refrain of "unionize" doesn't really help when the power to do it is in freefall.
• kkfx 6mo ago
  RTO is also about forcing people in cities, the cities that have lost their factories to globalisation, because it was and still is cheaper to produce far away without the problems of density and then move things, rather than everyone staying close together. The cities that are losing their offices, their last economic engine, to remote working, and with them, the giant property owners who want everyone renting their buildings, not owning scattered homes and sheds. Cities that serve the ruling classes as a means of ensuring conformity, because the closer you are to your neighbour, the more the herd effect is felt. Cities that themselves serve as a means of control: you consume food and water that doesn't come from the city itself; control these and the four main arteries, and the city is yours, no questions asked.
• jjk166 6mo ago
  I would say that there was also a deliberate push to save the value of commercial real estate. If it were purely about management vs labor, letting people work from home was a great way to offer an attractive benefit for free (or even while saving money) and it made it easy to hire from lower cost of living areas. Wages were going up regardless because of high inflation rates, remote work if anything was tempering that. I'm sure there were some asshole bosses who just missed their petty kingdoms, but it would be too easy for those who could tolerate the remote work situation to gain an advantage. There had to be a smaller group, such as those heavily invested in real estate, that had an overwhelming incentive for demanding RTO and the pull to force their will on everyone at the same time.
• chrismcb 6mo ago
  Lockstep? Once the major company did it, it was easy for others to follow. No conspiracy here. You are right, it is about controlling labor, watching the workforce, justifying the office expense. But I think a lot of your questions are just coincidental. As much as I enjoy working from home (been doing it for most of the last two decades) there are some advantageous to new hires working in the office.
• benterix 6mo ago
  But this is blatantly obvious to everyone, I'm not sure this aspect is a taboo in official conversation. People wanted WFH long before the pandemic, but it was a privilege of a few high bosses, the rest had to be packed in cubicles or open-plan offices (not sure which is worse). Then the pandemic came and it turned out most people can work remotely without abusing it. But the management never wanted to give the employees that freedom, it was just a question of time.