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I find it funny that when people were required to be home, employers talked about what great productivity they were getting with people at home. Then when it is

by troupe 3y ago

I find it funny that when people were required to be home, employers talked about what great productivity they were getting with people at home. Then when it isn't required anymore, they want everyone back in the office for...productivity. My guess is that most employers really have no way to measure if an employee is being productive or not so managers are just reporting what makes them look good...and now we are back to where managers will look better with lots of people running around the office.

mkl95 3y ago
> My guess is that most employers really have no way to measure if an employee is being productive or not so managers are just reporting what makes them look good...and now we are back to where managers will look better with lots of people running around the office. My guess is that CEOs and VCs have some obscure reason to force people back into the office. Perhaps related to real estate, especially considering how hard to sell it is and how much higher the interest rates are. Middle management will typically eat up whatever narrative C-level feeds them.
- rabuse 3y ago
  I honestly think it's mostly a huge ego boost to flex with. "Look at how GIANT our new billion dollar HQ is, and look at all of these people working for ME!"
  - nine_zeros 3y ago
    > I honestly think it's mostly a huge ego boost to flex with. "Look at how GIANT our new billion dollar HQ is, and look at all of these people working for ME!" This may sound like a joke but having gleaming, globally distributed offices is absolutely is a matter of great pride and ego for the C-Suite. They absolutely fantasize about how they are jet setting from one office to another and how all the employees roll a red carpet for them.
    - AtlasBarfed 3y ago
      And of course the mountains of deductions and balance sheet games you can play with a lot of real estate. We already know the C-suite is oligarchical in nature with wage suppression in Silicon Valley, so we know they meet and communication. And things like corporate real estate is garden variety MBA stuff that these guys can freely talk about at the get-togethers. Not having employees in buildings means those buildings aren't really worth anything. A collapse in the value of office space is something none of these companies want. It would impact share price, options, and executive pay, because these things are 30-50 year investments at a minimum.
  - MBCook 3y ago
    Don’t forget that a lot of offices are leased for many years or even purchased/built. Do you know what looks REALLY bad? A giant fancy office with five people in it. Better force people to fill it up. We are stuck, we spent the money, can’t have it look bad.
    - ekianjo 3y ago
      Who cares what it looks like. Sunk cost fallacy
      - MBCook 3y ago
        Executives who dream of big fancy offices? Workers certainly don’t.
    - ornornor 3y ago
      Maybe they could hire all these movie extras who will soon be replaced by AI generated alter egos and be out of work? Everybody wins: extras get to not be homeless and pay their bills, companies look busier than ever, extras can act whatever fantasy management wants to show off, offices have some kind of purpose again, we get to work wherever we like and do actual work… What’s not to like?
      - petre 3y ago
        That would totally be a thing in Japan where you can pay people to act like they are your family.
      - rs999gti 3y ago
        Bernie Madoff staged busy trading floors to fool auditors and investors, so this is not far off the mark
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  Even if your firm isn’t exposed to real estate, its probable that a lot if its shareholders are and are interested in ending the slump in commercial real estate. Plus, while the overall employment situation is strong, the tech downsizing wave may not be over and if you can get people to self-select out, you can maybe avoid having to officially have layoffs.
  - generic92034 3y ago
    > Plus, while the overall employment situation is strong, the tech downsizing wave may not be over and if you can get people to self-select out, you can maybe avoid having to officially have layoffs. Are you sure announcing layoffs hurts share prices? I mean, companies only recently were doing it while still being highly profitable.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > Are you sure announcing layoffs hurts share prices? I'm relatively sure losing people without severance and without WARN Act and similar notice issues, is easier on the financials for the same number of positions cut than the alternative.
      - generic92034 3y ago
        So why did SV companies fire a lot of employees recently, if the severance and WARN act outweigh the positive impact on the share prices?
        dragonwriter 3y ago
        > So why did SV companies fire a lot of employees recently, if the severance and WARN act outweigh the positive impact on the share prices? I didn’t say they did. I said that if you can get people to leave voluntarily, that’s better for the financials. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t conditions where the best available option (from a serving the shareholders perspective) is layoffs. Just that, ceteris paribus, its better to shed the headcount without the added costs imposed by layoffs; the benefit (when there is a benefit) of layoffs is reducing the headcount, not bearing the severance, WARN Act compliance, and other costs particular to layoffs.
- ajkjk 3y ago
  I doubt that very much. Most likely it's because unlike before, in WFH when nothing is happening it feels like there's nothing they can do about it.
- also23throwaway 3y ago
  In my company’s case, RTO is because of tax cut deals with the city/state. They need butts in seats to maximize profit after taxes, so they are passing the cost onto their employees.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    That's one of the few non-productivity/collaboration/etc. rationales that may actually make some sense. States (e.g. NH and MA) have had tiffs because workers living out of state are no longer commuting into an office and are no longer paying income tax to the state they used to commute to as a result. I'm sure there are many local cases where there was some agreement about creating jobs in some town which have been essentially thrown out the window now that very few people are actually working in that town except maybe on paper.
    - hamburglar 3y ago
      I’ve heard this “tax impact / tax break” idea floated as a theory about what’s going on, but if municipalities are putting that type of pressure on companies, shouldn’t we see some concrete evidence of it? What is the actual mechanism by which such force is being applied? I have a little bit of a hard time believing that such large company policies are frequently being set based on deals that we have no actual evidence of. Is there actual evidence that I just haven’t seen?
      - lacrimacida 3y ago
        That and wouldn’t the saved rent expenses offset those taxes anyway? Second companies would have the freedom to move the main location freely to cities/states with lower taxes.
- PeterStuer 3y ago
  Not obscure at all. They are also invested in all the other lucrative service businesses that feed and clean and move and supply all those offices. And then there's the leases on the office buildings they own that are under threat etc etc.
- berkes 3y ago
  The article mentions "sunken cost [fallacy]" as a driver to fill the offices again. Where office space is paid for, and hence has to be filled or else this investment is wasted.
- spacemadness 3y ago
  HN keeps telling me it’s sunk cost and it’s not real estate so stop saying that. Then this article also mentions it’s real estate. Guess what HN? It’s partly real estate costs and having few people fill those spaces.
- ngneer 3y ago
  I heard a story of high up executives stepping into an Uber, only to discover that the driver was actually an employee for their firm.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> I find it funny that when people were required to be home, employers talked about what great productivity they were getting with people at home. Then when it isn't required anymore, they want everyone back in the office for...productivity Whatever management’s current whim is represents not only a reasonable but the only effective way to serve shareholder interests, amd to do anything differently would be a irresponsible and anyone disagreeing is objectively working against the interest of the firm, and any prior contrary statements about what is best for the firm are nonoperational and any reference to them is a bad faith distraction. Oceania, Inc., has always been at war with EastAsia, LLC.
deleted 3y ago
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Waterluvian 3y ago
Management and entrepreneurism is incredibly cult-like and I find it increasingly difficult to quietly sit through all their ridiculous sermons.
lamontcg 3y ago
> I find it funny that when people were required to be home, employers talked about what great productivity they were getting with people at home. Then when it isn't required anymore, they want everyone back in the office for...productivity. The decades of evidence that open office plans are utter shit for productivity already proved that the emperor wears no clothes and they have no idea what makes for better productivity.
- deaddodo 3y ago
  Open offices are the literal reason (after commuting/traffic) that I no longer want to go into the office. My work doesn't require a ton of person:person engagement and it's much easier for me to just zone out in my own headspace to do it. When I was required in the office, I would just wear headphones to avoid distractions, but I would have to deal with 2-3hrs of driving/day on top of it. This meant that my employer generally only got those 8hrs out of me, period; because I had none of my personal time to spare. Working from home, on the other hand, gives me more flexibility for meetings, to work at different hours, to be on later in the evening, to put in more time (when needed), etc; and I'm happier.
  - 0xblinq 3y ago
    The headphones thing reminds me of a big events ticketing company I worked for that, when people complained about noise, distractions, etc they came up with the amazing solution of using your health and wellness budget to buy noise cancelling headphones. Most full of bullshit company I’ve ever worked for.
    - ornornor 3y ago
      I’d be outraged.
    - stevezsa8 3y ago
      Reminds me of one job, my boss was looking to leave, and was handing over portions of her job to the rest of us. I said I don't have time to do more additional work... she said they can send me on a course to better manage my time. haha.
Natsu 3y ago
> I find it funny that when people were required to be home, employers talked about what great productivity they were getting with people at home. In our case, we do have good, long-standing metrics: we measure how happy our customers say they are with our service. Since the whole point is to have happy, repeat customers and they have no reason to lie about being happy, we can trust this. That went up significantly and sustained itself during the pandemic. While my employer did initially want to bring people back to the office, they relented after the push back and have been relatively soft and flexible about this, actually opening up a dialog to talk to everyone about what they need and want. It doesn't hurt that they're looking at some significant cost savings by significantly downsizing our office footprint.
- mattw2121 3y ago
  One point to remember is that during the pandemic, customers were much more sympathetic to everyone. The overall quality of customer service has gone done since the pandemic (even in companies that returned to office) and we, the customer, are forgiving of that. Pre-pandemic, we were not nearly as forgiving.
  - Natsu 3y ago
    That doesn't seem to have regressed much, though. I do feel like people are more forgiving of home office interruptions since they became more common, but I don't think it makes that much difference. At the end of the day they still need their stuff fixed quickly and want good advice. And at least the current management believes in human capital and keeps good people for a long time, so people generally get that and turnover is rather low.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- datavirtue 3y ago
  Yeah, thankfully they weren't trying to play Jack Welch by renting from themselves or some other distracting financial "strategy" involving your office space.
HWR_14 3y ago
Public statements about productivity are rarely negative. No one wants to hire a business with lazy workers who might not fulfill their contract. So public statements have to be positive.
- ghaff 3y ago
  It's reasonable to think in retrospect that, even assuming companies had reasonable measures of productivity and related metrics (which is by no means a given), OF COURSE during the pandemic, they were going to make statements to the effect that "everything is fine/better than we expected." And, even from a somewhat less cynical perspective, it's reasonable to see a more complicated picture where many things, but not all things, are indeed more or less OK. Overlaid on this is that a lot of companies have cut back on travel etc. budgets so one of the alternatives to people getting together in local offices is at least somewhat off the table.
nucleardog 3y ago
> My guess is that most employers really have no way to measure if an employee is being productive or not so managers are just reporting what makes them look good My money would be on that being half right. They have no way to really measure productivity, but they were very afraid that productivity would drop to zero—and that is something they would be able to see. Before COVID I don’t know how many times discussions around WFH basically stopped at “we can’t know that people aren’t just watching TV all day”. I think in a lot of places that was a genuine fear—nobody will be working. So seeing productivity not go near enough to zero to be noticeable was… really good productivity compared to some people’s initial expectations.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  Honestly, when I work from home, I watch TV all day. Not literally -- I mostly read HN and other sites, do personal email, do household tasks, walk the dogs, do a load of laundry. I still get my work done, to a "meets expectations" level, which takes me a few hours, normally right after lunch, and that's good enough for me.
  - throw__away7391 3y ago
    I start work around 6:00 AM and frequently am still at it at 8:00 PM. I've always been a top performer, but I still worry I'm not productive enough and that I'll get laid off. I still prefer this arrangement to going to the office.
    - eulgro 3y ago
      Is this satire? If not I don't think that's a sustainable lifestyle.
      - Tempest1981 3y ago
        You've never met a workaholic... it's sustainable for quite a while, for some.
renecito 3y ago
I wonder how much of is just about getting local cities tax breaks, or even state taxes in some cases. Governments are not ready for the majority of people having the freedom to work anywhere. The whole foundation of our local and state governments control is based on manageable demographics, we are red or blue, we embrace the old or the new ways, etc., they are not ready for a sudden change in the mix, every local government had worked really hard to keep the status quo.
- mathewsanders 3y ago
  Our company is mandating a 3-day in office starting soon. I’m a bit of an exception because I’m in a city that only has a couple hundred employees, but when I do return to the office, it won’t be to collaborate with teammates: I will be joining zoom calls with people in other cities (which was my day-to-day pre-pandemic). Pre pandemic I would travel every 2-weeks to company HQ to be in-person for demo with stakeholders and sprint planning, but even then many people would join via zoom anyway. I don’t think return for office has anything to do with productivity and more about anxiety around investments in commercial real estate.
  - MBCook 3y ago
    The few times I’ve been back it’s worse. Since everyone is on zoom meetings anyway, everyone is just talking all day long making it hard for the other people on zoom meetings at the office to hear what they’re doing. So productivity actually goes down. All of which makes things worse for the people at home on the zoom meetings. As soon as a significant fraction of your employees aren’t in office, it starts to become a productivity problem to force people to stay! Well, unless you gave everyone their individual offices with doors. But you can’t do that can you. Because then what would make the senior people special? So you have to use cubes so everyone can hear each other on zoom calls.
yieldcrv 3y ago
I’ve started talking about crystals to attract hot chicks that are already into crystals. Many are, or want to believe, just like researchers want to believe in a room temperature superconductor. The alpha is that pedantic and over-analytical guys dismiss crystal energy at the expense of their reproductive opportunities, and the way around it is literally just not doing that. One thing I quickly noticed is that the purpose of all crystals are expected to be the same. “It absorbs energy and gives out good energy” So I same the same thing everytime. Employers must be encountering something similar from some form of stakeholder, such as the board for an analogous self preservation or reproductive opportunity, so the answer is always “increase productivity” every time.
- deleted 3y ago
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- logical_ferry 3y ago
  Not sure I follow the logic.
  - datavirtue 3y ago
    It's because you are over-analyzing it.
tbrownaw 3y ago
Changing to work-at-home increases productivity. Changing to work-at-office increases productivity. . Maybe the Hawthorne Effect actually is real?
conductr 3y ago
It’s because meetings and full calendars of check ins and touch bases is constant and actually is the productive work for an executive. They are the ones wanting productivity for themselves. The byproduct of this executive productivity is it causes the busy work for the people who are lower in the org chart. Busywork for them is a big source of their nonproductive time and what was freed up during mandatory WFH generating the productivity boost. Then what happened was a lot of the pending and backlog of projects and busyness got moved over to a completed status. But the lack of productivity at the executive levels meant that the project funnel wasn’t keeping up. So the company was at risk of having a ton of people with not enough to do. This is purely my personal anthropological perspective of the situation having been an active participant working closely with executives making these decisions the past few years as well as talking with colleagues that do the same. I’m aware it’s probably completely BS.
ulfw 3y ago
It's all about PR to keep stock prices up. Which employer would ever say: "ah man it's all fucked up. Our productivity is completely gone. We're not getting anything done" Imagine what that would do the stock prices
Xelbair 3y ago
I think that there's something else at play - mostly two major factors: - real estate agencies push for return to office(as they own a lot of office space that's now empty) - Turns out.. you don't need so many middle managers - without their direct oversight everything just kept working fine. So now you have internal vested interest in return to office for people in power.
ascotan 3y ago
I think the definition of "productivity" is part of the problem. Managers view "productivity" as the ability to bounce ideas off each other and working collaboratively to get traction on hard problems. This isn't how most engineers write software at the ground level though. Engineers need quiet concentration, free from distraction. Yes, there are hard problems that need collaboration to solve, but that type of interaction can be scheduled when needed. Far from needing to "bounce ideas" off other engineers, most senior engineers are pretty self-sufficient. There is a different issue at play with junior engineers. They need supervision and that's hard to do unless your on a zoom call with them all day long. This isn't a new problem - it's simply a problem exposed by being remote. When we were in the office, all these junior engineers, were pulling productivity away from your senior engineers. Moving everything back to the office didn't increase productivity, it's actually decreasing it. Commute + sidebar conversations + mentoring junior engineers = less productivity out of your senior engineering staff. There's definitely a "managers are from mars and engineers are from venus" sort of vibe happening here. Managers need that interaction and collaboration in order to provide oversight and provide direction. Senior engineers need a place to concentrate - and typically that isn't in the office where we have noisy open floor plans.
- josephd79 3y ago
  You can't "manage" people who work remotely the same way you manage people in the office. That's the issue. Also, you shouldn't have to watch newer employees like a hawk if you've given them clear tasks / projects and expectations. No need to micromanage people.
  - frostiness 3y ago
    It's not about managing. It's about the friction to reaching out for help and lost productivity from having to schedule meetings combined with inexperience making it hard to decide which problems are worth the friction of reaching out and which ones aren't. There's also the sense of isolation that being remote gives, because asking for help over a private message makes it look like you're the only one that needs help. All of this is still a problem regardless of clarity of expectations and tasks. My preferences are likely going to change once I get more experience under my belt but I absolutely feel there are some facets of remote work that benefit senior engineers at the expense of junior engineers.
datavirtue 3y ago
It's not about productivity just like it's never about "the children." It's about the desire to control thier investments. They want their investments to work out, so they try to force people back into the office. Conflict of interest.
gdilla 3y ago
Maybe that's what they said but they were also on the hook for rents or big real estate assets collecting dust.
doktorhladnjak 3y ago
The conditions aren't the same. When COVID caused many workplaces to go full WFH, most employees had nothing to do except work and hang out with those in their household. A lot of the increased productivity came from working instead of doing other things. Once things opened up, in aggregate they stopped working as many hours. Ultimately, it was never sustainable.
bentt 3y ago
Satisfied employees are more productive, unsatisfied ones are less productive. Consult complete, that will be $10000
ExoticPearTree 3y ago
One aspect is company culture. Where there is no trust, people feel the need to micromanage just to feel in control. Where there is trust, people do what they know best and managers intervene only at say critical moments if needed.

by troupe 3y ago

mkl95 3y ago

> My guess is that most employers really have no way to measure if an employee is being productive or not so managers are just reporting what makes them look good...and now we are back to where managers will look better with lots of people running around the office. My guess is that CEOs and VCs have some obscure reason to force people back into the office. Perhaps related to real estate, especially considering how hard to sell it is and how much higher the interest rates are. Middle management will typically eat up whatever narrative C-level feeds them.

rabuse 3y ago
I honestly think it's mostly a huge ego boost to flex with. "Look at how GIANT our new billion dollar HQ is, and look at all of these people working for ME!"
- nine_zeros 3y ago
  > I honestly think it's mostly a huge ego boost to flex with. "Look at how GIANT our new billion dollar HQ is, and look at all of these people working for ME!" This may sound like a joke but having gleaming, globally distributed offices is absolutely is a matter of great pride and ego for the C-Suite. They absolutely fantasize about how they are jet setting from one office to another and how all the employees roll a red carpet for them.
  - AtlasBarfed 3y ago
    And of course the mountains of deductions and balance sheet games you can play with a lot of real estate. We already know the C-suite is oligarchical in nature with wage suppression in Silicon Valley, so we know they meet and communication. And things like corporate real estate is garden variety MBA stuff that these guys can freely talk about at the get-togethers. Not having employees in buildings means those buildings aren't really worth anything. A collapse in the value of office space is something none of these companies want. It would impact share price, options, and executive pay, because these things are 30-50 year investments at a minimum.
- MBCook 3y ago
  Don’t forget that a lot of offices are leased for many years or even purchased/built. Do you know what looks REALLY bad? A giant fancy office with five people in it. Better force people to fill it up. We are stuck, we spent the money, can’t have it look bad.
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    Who cares what it looks like. Sunk cost fallacy
    - MBCook 3y ago
      Executives who dream of big fancy offices? Workers certainly don’t.
  - ornornor 3y ago
    Maybe they could hire all these movie extras who will soon be replaced by AI generated alter egos and be out of work? Everybody wins: extras get to not be homeless and pay their bills, companies look busier than ever, extras can act whatever fantasy management wants to show off, offices have some kind of purpose again, we get to work wherever we like and do actual work… What’s not to like?
    - petre 3y ago
      That would totally be a thing in Japan where you can pay people to act like they are your family.
    - rs999gti 3y ago
      Bernie Madoff staged busy trading floors to fool auditors and investors, so this is not far off the mark
dragonwriter 3y ago
Even if your firm isn’t exposed to real estate, its probable that a lot if its shareholders are and are interested in ending the slump in commercial real estate. Plus, while the overall employment situation is strong, the tech downsizing wave may not be over and if you can get people to self-select out, you can maybe avoid having to officially have layoffs.
- generic92034 3y ago
  > Plus, while the overall employment situation is strong, the tech downsizing wave may not be over and if you can get people to self-select out, you can maybe avoid having to officially have layoffs. Are you sure announcing layoffs hurts share prices? I mean, companies only recently were doing it while still being highly profitable.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > Are you sure announcing layoffs hurts share prices? I'm relatively sure losing people without severance and without WARN Act and similar notice issues, is easier on the financials for the same number of positions cut than the alternative.
    - generic92034 3y ago
      So why did SV companies fire a lot of employees recently, if the severance and WARN act outweigh the positive impact on the share prices?
      - dragonwriter 3y ago
        > So why did SV companies fire a lot of employees recently, if the severance and WARN act outweigh the positive impact on the share prices? I didn’t say they did. I said that if you can get people to leave voluntarily, that’s better for the financials. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t conditions where the best available option (from a serving the shareholders perspective) is layoffs. Just that, ceteris paribus, its better to shed the headcount without the added costs imposed by layoffs; the benefit (when there is a benefit) of layoffs is reducing the headcount, not bearing the severance, WARN Act compliance, and other costs particular to layoffs.
ajkjk 3y ago
I doubt that very much. Most likely it's because unlike before, in WFH when nothing is happening it feels like there's nothing they can do about it.
also23throwaway 3y ago
In my company’s case, RTO is because of tax cut deals with the city/state. They need butts in seats to maximize profit after taxes, so they are passing the cost onto their employees.
- ghaff 3y ago
  That's one of the few non-productivity/collaboration/etc. rationales that may actually make some sense. States (e.g. NH and MA) have had tiffs because workers living out of state are no longer commuting into an office and are no longer paying income tax to the state they used to commute to as a result. I'm sure there are many local cases where there was some agreement about creating jobs in some town which have been essentially thrown out the window now that very few people are actually working in that town except maybe on paper.
  - hamburglar 3y ago
    I’ve heard this “tax impact / tax break” idea floated as a theory about what’s going on, but if municipalities are putting that type of pressure on companies, shouldn’t we see some concrete evidence of it? What is the actual mechanism by which such force is being applied? I have a little bit of a hard time believing that such large company policies are frequently being set based on deals that we have no actual evidence of. Is there actual evidence that I just haven’t seen?
    - lacrimacida 3y ago
      That and wouldn’t the saved rent expenses offset those taxes anyway? Second companies would have the freedom to move the main location freely to cities/states with lower taxes.
PeterStuer 3y ago
Not obscure at all. They are also invested in all the other lucrative service businesses that feed and clean and move and supply all those offices. And then there's the leases on the office buildings they own that are under threat etc etc.
berkes 3y ago
The article mentions "sunken cost [fallacy]" as a driver to fill the offices again. Where office space is paid for, and hence has to be filled or else this investment is wasted.
spacemadness 3y ago
HN keeps telling me it’s sunk cost and it’s not real estate so stop saying that. Then this article also mentions it’s real estate. Guess what HN? It’s partly real estate costs and having few people fill those spaces.
ngneer 3y ago
I heard a story of high up executives stepping into an Uber, only to discover that the driver was actually an employee for their firm.

dragonwriter 3y ago

> I find it funny that when people were required to be home, employers talked about what great productivity they were getting with people at home. Then when it isn't required anymore, they want everyone back in the office for...productivity Whatever management’s current whim is represents not only a reasonable but the only effective way to serve shareholder interests, amd to do anything differently would be a irresponsible and anyone disagreeing is objectively working against the interest of the firm, and any prior contrary statements about what is best for the firm are nonoperational and any reference to them is a bad faith distraction. Oceania, Inc., has always been at war with EastAsia, LLC.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Waterluvian 3y ago

Management and entrepreneurism is incredibly cult-like and I find it increasingly difficult to quietly sit through all their ridiculous sermons.

lamontcg 3y ago

> I find it funny that when people were required to be home, employers talked about what great productivity they were getting with people at home. Then when it isn't required anymore, they want everyone back in the office for...productivity. The decades of evidence that open office plans are utter shit for productivity already proved that the emperor wears no clothes and they have no idea what makes for better productivity.

deaddodo 3y ago
Open offices are the literal reason (after commuting/traffic) that I no longer want to go into the office. My work doesn't require a ton of person:person engagement and it's much easier for me to just zone out in my own headspace to do it. When I was required in the office, I would just wear headphones to avoid distractions, but I would have to deal with 2-3hrs of driving/day on top of it. This meant that my employer generally only got those 8hrs out of me, period; because I had none of my personal time to spare. Working from home, on the other hand, gives me more flexibility for meetings, to work at different hours, to be on later in the evening, to put in more time (when needed), etc; and I'm happier.
- 0xblinq 3y ago
  The headphones thing reminds me of a big events ticketing company I worked for that, when people complained about noise, distractions, etc they came up with the amazing solution of using your health and wellness budget to buy noise cancelling headphones. Most full of bullshit company I’ve ever worked for.
  - ornornor 3y ago
    I’d be outraged.
  - stevezsa8 3y ago
    Reminds me of one job, my boss was looking to leave, and was handing over portions of her job to the rest of us. I said I don't have time to do more additional work... she said they can send me on a course to better manage my time. haha.

Natsu 3y ago

> I find it funny that when people were required to be home, employers talked about what great productivity they were getting with people at home. In our case, we do have good, long-standing metrics: we measure how happy our customers say they are with our service. Since the whole point is to have happy, repeat customers and they have no reason to lie about being happy, we can trust this. That went up significantly and sustained itself during the pandemic. While my employer did initially want to bring people back to the office, they relented after the push back and have been relatively soft and flexible about this, actually opening up a dialog to talk to everyone about what they need and want. It doesn't hurt that they're looking at some significant cost savings by significantly downsizing our office footprint.

mattw2121 3y ago
One point to remember is that during the pandemic, customers were much more sympathetic to everyone. The overall quality of customer service has gone done since the pandemic (even in companies that returned to office) and we, the customer, are forgiving of that. Pre-pandemic, we were not nearly as forgiving.
- Natsu 3y ago
  That doesn't seem to have regressed much, though. I do feel like people are more forgiving of home office interruptions since they became more common, but I don't think it makes that much difference. At the end of the day they still need their stuff fixed quickly and want good advice. And at least the current management believes in human capital and keeps good people for a long time, so people generally get that and turnover is rather low.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
datavirtue 3y ago
Yeah, thankfully they weren't trying to play Jack Welch by renting from themselves or some other distracting financial "strategy" involving your office space.

HWR_14 3y ago

Public statements about productivity are rarely negative. No one wants to hire a business with lazy workers who might not fulfill their contract. So public statements have to be positive.

ghaff 3y ago
It's reasonable to think in retrospect that, even assuming companies had reasonable measures of productivity and related metrics (which is by no means a given), OF COURSE during the pandemic, they were going to make statements to the effect that "everything is fine/better than we expected." And, even from a somewhat less cynical perspective, it's reasonable to see a more complicated picture where many things, but not all things, are indeed more or less OK. Overlaid on this is that a lot of companies have cut back on travel etc. budgets so one of the alternatives to people getting together in local offices is at least somewhat off the table.

nucleardog 3y ago

> My guess is that most employers really have no way to measure if an employee is being productive or not so managers are just reporting what makes them look good My money would be on that being half right. They have no way to really measure productivity, but they were very afraid that productivity would drop to zero—and that is something they would be able to see. Before COVID I don’t know how many times discussions around WFH basically stopped at “we can’t know that people aren’t just watching TV all day”. I think in a lot of places that was a genuine fear—nobody will be working. So seeing productivity not go near enough to zero to be noticeable was… really good productivity compared to some people’s initial expectations.

SoftTalker 3y ago
Honestly, when I work from home, I watch TV all day. Not literally -- I mostly read HN and other sites, do personal email, do household tasks, walk the dogs, do a load of laundry. I still get my work done, to a "meets expectations" level, which takes me a few hours, normally right after lunch, and that's good enough for me.
- throw__away7391 3y ago
  I start work around 6:00 AM and frequently am still at it at 8:00 PM. I've always been a top performer, but I still worry I'm not productive enough and that I'll get laid off. I still prefer this arrangement to going to the office.
  - eulgro 3y ago
    Is this satire? If not I don't think that's a sustainable lifestyle.
    - Tempest1981 3y ago
      You've never met a workaholic... it's sustainable for quite a while, for some.

renecito 3y ago

I wonder how much of is just about getting local cities tax breaks, or even state taxes in some cases. Governments are not ready for the majority of people having the freedom to work anywhere. The whole foundation of our local and state governments control is based on manageable demographics, we are red or blue, we embrace the old or the new ways, etc., they are not ready for a sudden change in the mix, every local government had worked really hard to keep the status quo.

mathewsanders 3y ago
Our company is mandating a 3-day in office starting soon. I’m a bit of an exception because I’m in a city that only has a couple hundred employees, but when I do return to the office, it won’t be to collaborate with teammates: I will be joining zoom calls with people in other cities (which was my day-to-day pre-pandemic). Pre pandemic I would travel every 2-weeks to company HQ to be in-person for demo with stakeholders and sprint planning, but even then many people would join via zoom anyway. I don’t think return for office has anything to do with productivity and more about anxiety around investments in commercial real estate.
- MBCook 3y ago
  The few times I’ve been back it’s worse. Since everyone is on zoom meetings anyway, everyone is just talking all day long making it hard for the other people on zoom meetings at the office to hear what they’re doing. So productivity actually goes down. All of which makes things worse for the people at home on the zoom meetings. As soon as a significant fraction of your employees aren’t in office, it starts to become a productivity problem to force people to stay! Well, unless you gave everyone their individual offices with doors. But you can’t do that can you. Because then what would make the senior people special? So you have to use cubes so everyone can hear each other on zoom calls.

yieldcrv 3y ago

I’ve started talking about crystals to attract hot chicks that are already into crystals. Many are, or want to believe, just like researchers want to believe in a room temperature superconductor. The alpha is that pedantic and over-analytical guys dismiss crystal energy at the expense of their reproductive opportunities, and the way around it is literally just not doing that. One thing I quickly noticed is that the purpose of all crystals are expected to be the same. “It absorbs energy and gives out good energy” So I same the same thing everytime. Employers must be encountering something similar from some form of stakeholder, such as the board for an analogous self preservation or reproductive opportunity, so the answer is always “increase productivity” every time.

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logical_ferry 3y ago
Not sure I follow the logic.
- datavirtue 3y ago
  It's because you are over-analyzing it.

tbrownaw 3y ago

Changing to work-at-home increases productivity. Changing to work-at-office increases productivity. . Maybe the Hawthorne Effect actually is real?

conductr 3y ago

It’s because meetings and full calendars of check ins and touch bases is constant and actually is the productive work for an executive. They are the ones wanting productivity for themselves. The byproduct of this executive productivity is it causes the busy work for the people who are lower in the org chart. Busywork for them is a big source of their nonproductive time and what was freed up during mandatory WFH generating the productivity boost. Then what happened was a lot of the pending and backlog of projects and busyness got moved over to a completed status. But the lack of productivity at the executive levels meant that the project funnel wasn’t keeping up. So the company was at risk of having a ton of people with not enough to do. This is purely my personal anthropological perspective of the situation having been an active participant working closely with executives making these decisions the past few years as well as talking with colleagues that do the same. I’m aware it’s probably completely BS.

ulfw 3y ago

It's all about PR to keep stock prices up. Which employer would ever say: "ah man it's all fucked up. Our productivity is completely gone. We're not getting anything done" Imagine what that would do the stock prices

Xelbair 3y ago

I think that there's something else at play - mostly two major factors: - real estate agencies push for return to office(as they own a lot of office space that's now empty) - Turns out.. you don't need so many middle managers - without their direct oversight everything just kept working fine. So now you have internal vested interest in return to office for people in power.

ascotan 3y ago

I think the definition of "productivity" is part of the problem. Managers view "productivity" as the ability to bounce ideas off each other and working collaboratively to get traction on hard problems. This isn't how most engineers write software at the ground level though. Engineers need quiet concentration, free from distraction. Yes, there are hard problems that need collaboration to solve, but that type of interaction can be scheduled when needed. Far from needing to "bounce ideas" off other engineers, most senior engineers are pretty self-sufficient. There is a different issue at play with junior engineers. They need supervision and that's hard to do unless your on a zoom call with them all day long. This isn't a new problem - it's simply a problem exposed by being remote. When we were in the office, all these junior engineers, were pulling productivity away from your senior engineers. Moving everything back to the office didn't increase productivity, it's actually decreasing it. Commute + sidebar conversations + mentoring junior engineers = less productivity out of your senior engineering staff. There's definitely a "managers are from mars and engineers are from venus" sort of vibe happening here. Managers need that interaction and collaboration in order to provide oversight and provide direction. Senior engineers need a place to concentrate - and typically that isn't in the office where we have noisy open floor plans.

josephd79 3y ago
You can't "manage" people who work remotely the same way you manage people in the office. That's the issue. Also, you shouldn't have to watch newer employees like a hawk if you've given them clear tasks / projects and expectations. No need to micromanage people.
- frostiness 3y ago
  It's not about managing. It's about the friction to reaching out for help and lost productivity from having to schedule meetings combined with inexperience making it hard to decide which problems are worth the friction of reaching out and which ones aren't. There's also the sense of isolation that being remote gives, because asking for help over a private message makes it look like you're the only one that needs help. All of this is still a problem regardless of clarity of expectations and tasks. My preferences are likely going to change once I get more experience under my belt but I absolutely feel there are some facets of remote work that benefit senior engineers at the expense of junior engineers.

datavirtue 3y ago

It's not about productivity just like it's never about "the children." It's about the desire to control thier investments. They want their investments to work out, so they try to force people back into the office. Conflict of interest.

gdilla 3y ago

Maybe that's what they said but they were also on the hook for rents or big real estate assets collecting dust.

doktorhladnjak 3y ago

The conditions aren't the same. When COVID caused many workplaces to go full WFH, most employees had nothing to do except work and hang out with those in their household. A lot of the increased productivity came from working instead of doing other things. Once things opened up, in aggregate they stopped working as many hours. Ultimately, it was never sustainable.

bentt 3y ago

Satisfied employees are more productive, unsatisfied ones are less productive. Consult complete, that will be $10000

ExoticPearTree 3y ago

One aspect is company culture. Where there is no trust, people feel the need to micromanage just to feel in control. Where there is trust, people do what they know best and managers intervene only at say critical moments if needed.