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It's good to see the broad but anecdotal sentiment backed up by data. The RTO/WFH struggle is clearly about money (what else could it be about in a corporate w

It's good to see the broad but anecdotal sentiment backed up by data. The RTO/WFH struggle is clearly about money (what else could it be about in a corporate world?), and it's fascinating to watch some companies chew their own limbs off (metaphorically speaking) to appease investors-at-large. Here I speculate, but the pattern seems to be that board members are involved with multiple organizations, and are stakeholders in even more - and those with ties to commercial real estate (and all the funds heavily invested into it) will do whatever it takes to push for higher office occupancy. At the same time, they're doing this (arguably) to a disadvantage to the companies they're supposed to steward - forcing best talent out, paying a premium for half-empty office space, and generally eroding morale by this display of duplicity. At the same time, I love seeing the quiet resistance by the rank-and-file and even some middle management. The new reality is here, and there's no going back. The % of days WFH has flatlined, and I imagine over time it will begin to slowly but steadily trend back up.

matchbok 3y ago
I love how it has to be some massive conspiracy, not the well-known fact that junior employees and productivity both take a hit with full-time remote work. A lot of these orgs are coasting and the impact won't be known for a while.
- EA-3167 3y ago
  If that's a "well-known fact" then could I trouble you for some sources to that end?
  - johnfn 3y ago
    Just talk to a few? I know plenty of junior developers who've told me that their professional life suffered during remote work over covid.
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      I know plenty who said the reverse. Uh oh!
      - johnfn 3y ago
        Why is it surprising that different people could have different reactions to WFH? Some people liked it. Other people hated it.
        ethanbond 3y ago
        The original claim that’s being supported is: > the well-known fact that junior employees and productivity both take a hit with full-time remote work Not “some people were less productive, others were more productive,” which is obviously the actual truth.
    - llogiq 3y ago
      So professional work during a worldwide pandemic with all the hardship that entailed suffered...from working remotely? I don't buy that.
    - red-iron-pine 3y ago
      you mean the pandemic that completely upended the entire global economy and society? the one that made entire industries basically vanish? the one that no one was prepared for? like, I been 100% remote since 2015 for orgs that were already equipped for that, and life went on just fine when COVID hit. Jr. Devs at orgs that weren't equipped for remote definitely suffered, in the same way that not having winter tiers or chains would screw you when a sudden blizzard hits Texas.
      - johnfn 3y ago
        > in the same way that not having winter tiers or chains would screw you when a sudden blizzard hits Texas. Doesn't this just prove the point, though? You seem to be saying it takes additional resources and time to make WFH work as effectively as normal, in-office work. Many workplaces are resource-constrained and may not be able to implement those practices.
  - Kiro 3y ago
    Let's be real. The reason we all love WFH is because we can slack off. It's so easy to game the system and make it look like we're working when we're not.
    - SantalBlush 3y ago
      The three big reasons for me are: 1. No more commute. 2. No need to move for a new job. 3. Way more real estate options. No longer needing to live inside a major metropolitan area near my job means I can save hundreds of thousands on a house, or pay much cheaper rent. It's a no-brainer.
    - taylodl 3y ago
      Stop projecting your personal failings onto the rest of us. My productivity has never been greater - and I started this career journey in the 80's. Add in the new AI tools and productivity is getting another bump. I guess you're just getting left behind. We won't miss you.
    - ksenzee 3y ago
      If you’re justifying this to yourself because you think everyone else is slacking off at home, you might want to rethink. I am not slacking off—my productivity is at least as good at home as it was in the office, even on days when I’m not at the computer a full eight hours. Judging from what we get done, other people on my team are also not slacking off. But if someone were regularly slacking off, I’d be able to tell—and I’m not even a manager, just a principal who listens at standup. At least wait for a better job market if you insist on playing roulette with your career.
    - ubercow13 3y ago
      I don't think it's any easier, it's just less unpleasant because you don't have to pretend to be working as actively while slacking off. And if this is true it just proof of the merits of WFH. If everyone is 'slacking off' and productivity is basically unchanged, it just shows what a waste of everyone's lives working in the office was.
    - zarathustreal 3y ago
      Sorry to have to be the one to throw ice water on you here: most of your colleagues are in fact working hard and enjoy WFH because they enjoy spending time with their family and working from a comfortable work environment. If we want to talk about conspiracies, let’s talk about management’s belief that everyone producing value is secretly trying to game the system
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  ~$120B in enterprise value of remote first or full remote companies indicates this isn’t accurate. Remote may pose development and pipeline challenges, but they’re clearly surmountable.
- vidarh 3y ago
  The comment you replied to didn't suggest any conspiracy. They merely suggested that board members on the boards of multiple organisations sometimes will do things that favour one of the companies but is detrimental to the others. As for your "well known fact", I'm not convinced it's either well-known, nor necessarily a fact (I can buy it happens some places, but would question whether it's an inherent limitations or an issue with management in organisations who don't know how to handle remote work)
- ctoth 3y ago
  It's more than three years since most people started working from home. Can you estimate when you expect these impacts to start showing up?
  - Filligree 3y ago
    Speaking for myself, I’m getting the hang of training people remotely. It takes more structure, and it took a year to learn how, but it’s totally doable.
    - duckmysick 3y ago
      Can you share what worked and what didn't when it comes to training people remotely?
      - Filligree 3y ago
        Checklists are the big one. We've got a big spreadsheet of general areas that people should know, each with a lecture attached, but those are for self-study; I go over each one in detail with each new hire in a series of sessions typically lasting ~3 months, at 2-3 sessions per week. Separately, I hold what amounts to office hours 3 times per week, where anyone who feels like it can show up to ask questions—but new hires are encouraged to do so until absolutely certain they don't need to, and also to keep track of questions between sessions. There's more, but this is the part that's easy to explain. What didn't work... crucially, waiting for newbies to ask questions doesn't work; they won't. You need to actively go looking, and also bring up areas they might not even know they ought to ask about.
        duckmysick 3y ago
        Thanks for the answer. I see the theme is you have to be proactive instead of passively dump info hope for the best. It makes total sense.
  - cm2012 3y ago
    Seriously. GDP and productivity are super high right now.
- usefulcat 3y ago
  Why do you seem to think that those two things are mutually exclusive?
- monkmartinez 3y ago
  The "well-known" fact you speak of is what my wife's boss uses to justify return to office. It's definitely not the massive investment in office furniture, office remodel, and meeting spaces that have been gussied up for impressions of success. No way it's that! /s The fact that senior employees are leaving for remote work ensures junior people are all they have left! Junior people are, shockingly, not as productive as senior people... who would have thought?
  - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
    I moved to a new role in my company a year and a half ago, and it's taken me this long to be confident enough to take responsibility for things that I'm not told explicitly to do. That's really the line between junior and senior in my opinion, both feeling like you have the power to make changes in addition to permission to do so. That transition is hard no matter if you are in the office or not (in the office, for my example) but it really can't happen if a junior is suddenly the senior tech because the real seniors all left.
  - smith7018 3y ago
    Those investments in office furniture, remodels, etc. are already sunk costs though. Why would they be used to justify RTO? If anything, it's more expensive to have people come in and use (read: destroy) furniture and equipment. This is a genuine question. The RTO push has befuddled me for awhile because the money that's already gone into the offices (like the leases) were decided on awhile ago and will be paid out regardless if people come in or not. Perks like free lunch and snacks also cost more when you force people to come in. So I don't really understand the financial aspect of it. Maybe it's management needing people in office to justify their jobs for some reason? I don't know. Edit: I'm staff-level for what it's worth. I've also noticed that this article doesn't actually reflect reality; nearly every job listing I saw this year said that the applicant will have to be in the office 1-5 days a week.
    - tessierashpool 3y ago
      Those investments in office furniture, remodels, etc. are already sunk costs though. Why would they be used to justify RTO? you answered your own question. sunk costs fallacy.
- wongarsu 3y ago
  A conspiracy would involve people working together, conspiring, towards some secret goal. What GP stipulates works just as well if you assume everyone is working on their own in their own best interest. Going by the principles of capitalism or game theory it would be more surprising if this wasn't true and board members overwhelmingly worked for the good of the company instead of their personal wealth
- aerhardt 3y ago
  Well-known facts eh.
- tnel77 3y ago
  I didn’t know it wasn’t possible to mentor junior employees remotely. It’s impossible to assign a mentor, actively check-in on their progress, encourage collaboration, etc. over a computer. I guess I’ll have to tell the junior I’m mentoring that we are doomed. Annnnnnyways, I’ve been having a great time mentoring a junior engineer at my company. We regularly meet to discuss his work and I constantly stress “please bother me if you have questions.” I reach out once a day to ensure he’s good to go and he often reaches out a few times a day for questions. We assign him work that is challenging, but within his skill set and abilities. In summary, anyone saying juniors will suffer either has no idea how to mentor remotely or are just lazy. Adapt or die. Edit: I will add that my company flies all remote employees into the office once a year for the sole purpose of team building. We did our hackathon in person and focused on building those bonds that can help people work better together. It’s technically optional, but who wants to turn down a free mini-vacation?
  - concordDance 3y ago
    > I didn’t know it wasn’t possible to mentor junior employees remotely. Might be possible, but most can't do it from what I've seen. So if you go full wfh your pool of people who can mentor shrinks by a large factor (4x is my bet).
    - no_wizard 3y ago
      IMO most people can't mentor effectively to begin with, its simply a little more obvious when its remote. This is solved by having a structured mentorship program and guidelines, and really good onboarding. Of course, this means businesses have to invest in this sort of thing, and of course, they don't, because they implicitly got it for free by having seniors covering for juniors for so many decades it obfuscated the problem
  - randomdata 3y ago
    The lessons from academia suggest that some students thrive in a remote environment, while others completely fall to pieces. It could be that teachers fear losing their jobs to technology if they are not a prominent fixture in an in-person classroom, thus making that up, but it is also quite plausible that different people are actually different. Finding a student/junior who is able to do well in your business environment at a distance does not imply that it is scalable across all workers businesses need to hire.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
matthewmcg 3y ago
Great point on potentially overlapping board membership. More broadly, there's also a theory that growing common ownership by index funds and others with significant commercial real estate exposure is driving this pressure.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  also why the housing bubble won't burst -- too many stakes invested across the entire market
- atomicfiredoll 3y ago
  If interests were making themselves rich on real estate and other supporting industries by wasting productivity on commuting, office lunches, etc, it makes me think the current [impact on commercial real and affected industries] may just be the "bezzle" coming due. Now that the cards are laid out flat, in retrospect it's easier for everyone to see and discover that the productivity and value may have been stolen. I'd love to see some investigation into showing the potential connections more concretely.
ActionHank 3y ago
This is on point, but I think it can also be simpler. Many execs and upper management would have read or watched the movie about MacDonalds and how they make loads of cash through owning the property and renting it back. Board member or not, they try to use it to boost earnings.
DrBazza 3y ago
In broad strokes, it's just old vs new, and an age thing. I'll pick '40' as the mid-point: Old = over 40s (myself included) who are senior, their careers have been in offices and commuting, and still believe that 'managing people' means real-life first person interaction, and are completely invested in offices, and the cost of paying for them, rather than downsizing. Young = under 40s - have grown up with the internet, github, working/studying remotely and so on. I've worked in companies where the CEO and senior management are all 50 something, and in a couple of companies where they're all approaching 40. Can you guess which company used PCs and which one used Macbooks? Going back further, I can remember working on Sun boxes, because management was reluctant to use that 'new fangled NT3.51 or even NT4.0'. The point being, as the workforce demographic changes, so will the opinions and approaches. And the cycle will repeat.
- ghaff 3y ago
  I'm not sure it's that simple. I've been effectively remote for a long time and have zero interest in going into an office for the most part. (Though I'd do it more if it were easy, I'm a 2 hour commute to the only office it makes any sense for me to go into.) Anecdotally, I hear it's more younger employees who like going into an office for the social interaction.
  - xkqd 3y ago
    My observations agree with your anecdote, but in my experience it was the youngest employees who go into the office for social interaction. Meaning, fresh grads to ~26 year olds. They openly admitted they didn’t want to sit in their 600 sqft apartments all day and that they didn’t have anyone to talk to otherwise. This sounds more like a way deeper loneliness and community problem than a workplace problem.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    That's the same thing I thought: it was the younger people who yearned for the office. Junior employees tended to do worse with WFH, especially those who were onboarding, whereas more senior folks were more comfortable working without much supervision. Younger people also don't tend to have larger homes, with dedicated, quiet office space. Younger employees pinned more of their social life on workmates than older employees who might already have established families and community ties. Anecdotally, I know that on my team, the younger teammates were the most eager about returning to the office. I'm nearly 50 and wouldn't go back in if you held a gun to my head.
RandomLensman 3y ago
Have you checked this to be true by looking at the involvements of board members? Cost reductions from facilities are nothing unusual.
- btbuildem 3y ago
  Yes at some point I've cross-referenced the board members of where I work to see where else they sit. It's obviously much harder to track their investments (unless it's insider buys/sells) but if they used to be C-suite or sit on the board of some company that's majority owned by a REIT, it's hard not to draw conclusions. It's definitely a rabbit hole that goes deep and one runs the risk of ending up with a spiderweb of red threads on their wall :)
danaris 3y ago
> The RTO/WFH struggle is clearly about money (what else could it be about in a corporate world?) Oh, it's definitely not only about money, any more than the other "treat your employees well and you will provably make more money" things are. It's about power, ego, and classism. It's about an entire category of management that has no actual ability to manage people beyond eyeballing whether their butts are in seats. It's about execs who can only feel good about that corner office when there's a whole floor of people in a cube farm to see that they have the corner office. It's about avoiding ever having to question the assumption that the only reason regular plebeians ever actually do work is because they have the boss breathing down their necks every 5 seconds (and, of course, the ever-present threat of being fired and left destitute), because if people did start questioning it, they might realize it also disproves the assumptions underlying the most common objections to things like UBI. Which would shatter the upper class's power over the lower classes for good. This is not to say that it's not about money, of course. The commercial real estate angle is a real one, for sure. But an awful lot of the assumptions that lead to calling for RTO have much less to do with money, and much more to do with maintaining a neofeudal power dynamic between bosses and workers.
- btbuildem 3y ago
  I agree - it's much more nuanced than my initial take. I guess I oversimplify it, in the spirit of "money is power", but you're right, we could say "money is proxy for power" and acknowledge all the other power plays that are as old as humanity.
- khazhoux 3y ago
  > It's about power, ego, and classism. It's about an entire category of management that has no actual ability to manage people beyond eyeballing whether their butts are in seats. It's about execs who can only feel good about that corner office when there's a whole floor of people in a cube farm to see that they have the corner office. I take it you're not a manager. Reducing people to "power", ego, corner offices... that's all very simplistic and (sorry that this offends) naive. I've been fortunate to work in places where management is involved, technical, and impactful. It sets direction, identifies bad plans and wastes of time where work should be cut, identifies places where work can be combined, it resolves (and asks) difficult queries, and it works to grow the individual team members and make the workplace a good environment. The cartoonish Clueless Idiot Manager Villain has just not been my experience. Sure, I've seen bad managers, but also bad individual-contributors.
red-iron-pine 3y ago
Not just investors and commercial holdings, but many states & localities have offered big tax breaks to businesses to get or keep them in town -- Texas (Austin, esp.) come to mind. Idea being that a lot of big developments translated to a lot of workers, who bought houses, commuted, purchases gas+coffee+lunches, etc. With those workers leaving the city loses revenue, on top of downtown areas dying off, which exacerbates the tax base problem further. Anecdotally, my org mandated 3 days back but has pretty slide, across the entire org, back to 2 days. The genie is out of the bottle and there is widespread, if quiet, resistance from everyone, to include senior managers.
jayd16 3y ago
The real estate thing seems like a conspiracy theory to me. Is there evidence that it's wide spread? A significant amount of the pro-office comments here are influenced by real estate? Seems unlikely.
JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
> > The RTO/WFH struggle is clearly about money It's the opposite actually. WFH is more efficient, but efficiency is not the reason why we work. Every self respecting man needs friends and enemies. The more watered down a man's life is, the less intense the friendships and rivalries are going to be. WFH is just the last step in a long process watering everything down, where the commoditification of every experience is making us dull and full of apathy. The problem is that a disease like that becomes endemic in society, so people's beliefs become weaker and weaker, but not having strong beliefs closely correlates with people having next to no belief in themselves, which again closely correlates with WFH preference because people think they don't have what it takes to thrive in an office environment because they are scared of the strong sentiments of friendship, rivarly, love and revenge on the workplace and in life in general.
- potta_coffee 3y ago
  I don't know what you're on about. WFH saves me so much time and energy that I can commit a lot more to things that are way more interesting and fulfilling than work. Now I can hang out with people I care about, focus on my Jiu Jitsu and guitar playing and spend more time chipping away at my massive queue of unread books. Work is just something I have to do so I can feed and house my kids.
- ge0ffclapp 3y ago
  Spoken like a true type A personality. Lots of people don't need their ego fed constantly at the expense of others and are happy just being creative and thoughtful.
- danbolt 3y ago
  I’d really love to hear you describe more of this WFH desert devoid of fulfilment, and the living water of communal work. It’s kinda fascinating.
- OfficeChad 3y ago
  JumpinJack_Chad more like, saying it how it is.
khazhoux 3y ago
> The RTO/WFH struggle is clearly about money (what else could it be about in a corporate world?) Many people genuinely believe that collaboration is qualitatively better and easier in person. Regardless of where you stand, you can't deny that there are pros and cons: * The bandwidth of typing on Slack is slower than talking in person. Also, one winds up spending a lot of time on Slack correcting small misunderstandings that are easier clarified quickly in conversation. And two people typing full-paragraphs back and forth often at the same time, can be clunky. * On the other hand, Slack leaves a good paper trail and you can easily reference what you discussed. And it's low-effort and doesn't immediately interrupt the other person. * But no good alternative to whiteboards, etc. Also, as much as everyone hates it, management does have to deal with low performers -- a nd cases you can't really tell if that person is actually working through tough eng problems all day that take a long time, or are they just watching youtube videos all day. So as ugly as it is, "butts in seats" is a sort of proxy for at least eliminating that variable. I know this is controversial ("Boo, only a bad manager cares about how much time someone is putting in!"), but I offer that viewpoint as an alternative to "clearly about money."

matchbok 3y ago

I love how it has to be some massive conspiracy, not the well-known fact that junior employees and productivity both take a hit with full-time remote work. A lot of these orgs are coasting and the impact won't be known for a while.

EA-3167 3y ago
If that's a "well-known fact" then could I trouble you for some sources to that end?
- johnfn 3y ago
  Just talk to a few? I know plenty of junior developers who've told me that their professional life suffered during remote work over covid.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    I know plenty who said the reverse. Uh oh!
    - johnfn 3y ago
      Why is it surprising that different people could have different reactions to WFH? Some people liked it. Other people hated it.
      - ethanbond 3y ago
        The original claim that’s being supported is: > the well-known fact that junior employees and productivity both take a hit with full-time remote work Not “some people were less productive, others were more productive,” which is obviously the actual truth.
  - llogiq 3y ago
    So professional work during a worldwide pandemic with all the hardship that entailed suffered...from working remotely? I don't buy that.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    you mean the pandemic that completely upended the entire global economy and society? the one that made entire industries basically vanish? the one that no one was prepared for? like, I been 100% remote since 2015 for orgs that were already equipped for that, and life went on just fine when COVID hit. Jr. Devs at orgs that weren't equipped for remote definitely suffered, in the same way that not having winter tiers or chains would screw you when a sudden blizzard hits Texas.
    - johnfn 3y ago
      > in the same way that not having winter tiers or chains would screw you when a sudden blizzard hits Texas. Doesn't this just prove the point, though? You seem to be saying it takes additional resources and time to make WFH work as effectively as normal, in-office work. Many workplaces are resource-constrained and may not be able to implement those practices.
- Kiro 3y ago
  Let's be real. The reason we all love WFH is because we can slack off. It's so easy to game the system and make it look like we're working when we're not.
  - SantalBlush 3y ago
    The three big reasons for me are: 1. No more commute. 2. No need to move for a new job. 3. Way more real estate options. No longer needing to live inside a major metropolitan area near my job means I can save hundreds of thousands on a house, or pay much cheaper rent. It's a no-brainer.
  - taylodl 3y ago
    Stop projecting your personal failings onto the rest of us. My productivity has never been greater - and I started this career journey in the 80's. Add in the new AI tools and productivity is getting another bump. I guess you're just getting left behind. We won't miss you.
  - ksenzee 3y ago
    If you’re justifying this to yourself because you think everyone else is slacking off at home, you might want to rethink. I am not slacking off—my productivity is at least as good at home as it was in the office, even on days when I’m not at the computer a full eight hours. Judging from what we get done, other people on my team are also not slacking off. But if someone were regularly slacking off, I’d be able to tell—and I’m not even a manager, just a principal who listens at standup. At least wait for a better job market if you insist on playing roulette with your career.
  - ubercow13 3y ago
    I don't think it's any easier, it's just less unpleasant because you don't have to pretend to be working as actively while slacking off. And if this is true it just proof of the merits of WFH. If everyone is 'slacking off' and productivity is basically unchanged, it just shows what a waste of everyone's lives working in the office was.
  - zarathustreal 3y ago
    Sorry to have to be the one to throw ice water on you here: most of your colleagues are in fact working hard and enjoy WFH because they enjoy spending time with their family and working from a comfortable work environment. If we want to talk about conspiracies, let’s talk about management’s belief that everyone producing value is secretly trying to game the system
toomuchtodo 3y ago
~$120B in enterprise value of remote first or full remote companies indicates this isn’t accurate. Remote may pose development and pipeline challenges, but they’re clearly surmountable.
vidarh 3y ago
The comment you replied to didn't suggest any conspiracy. They merely suggested that board members on the boards of multiple organisations sometimes will do things that favour one of the companies but is detrimental to the others. As for your "well known fact", I'm not convinced it's either well-known, nor necessarily a fact (I can buy it happens some places, but would question whether it's an inherent limitations or an issue with management in organisations who don't know how to handle remote work)
ctoth 3y ago
It's more than three years since most people started working from home. Can you estimate when you expect these impacts to start showing up?
- Filligree 3y ago
  Speaking for myself, I’m getting the hang of training people remotely. It takes more structure, and it took a year to learn how, but it’s totally doable.
  - duckmysick 3y ago
    Can you share what worked and what didn't when it comes to training people remotely?
    - Filligree 3y ago
      Checklists are the big one. We've got a big spreadsheet of general areas that people should know, each with a lecture attached, but those are for self-study; I go over each one in detail with each new hire in a series of sessions typically lasting ~3 months, at 2-3 sessions per week. Separately, I hold what amounts to office hours 3 times per week, where anyone who feels like it can show up to ask questions—but new hires are encouraged to do so until absolutely certain they don't need to, and also to keep track of questions between sessions. There's more, but this is the part that's easy to explain. What didn't work... crucially, waiting for newbies to ask questions doesn't work; they won't. You need to actively go looking, and also bring up areas they might not even know they ought to ask about.
      - duckmysick 3y ago
        Thanks for the answer. I see the theme is you have to be proactive instead of passively dump info hope for the best. It makes total sense.
- cm2012 3y ago
  Seriously. GDP and productivity are super high right now.
usefulcat 3y ago
Why do you seem to think that those two things are mutually exclusive?
monkmartinez 3y ago
The "well-known" fact you speak of is what my wife's boss uses to justify return to office. It's definitely not the massive investment in office furniture, office remodel, and meeting spaces that have been gussied up for impressions of success. No way it's that! /s The fact that senior employees are leaving for remote work ensures junior people are all they have left! Junior people are, shockingly, not as productive as senior people... who would have thought?
- I_Am_Nous 3y ago
  I moved to a new role in my company a year and a half ago, and it's taken me this long to be confident enough to take responsibility for things that I'm not told explicitly to do. That's really the line between junior and senior in my opinion, both feeling like you have the power to make changes in addition to permission to do so. That transition is hard no matter if you are in the office or not (in the office, for my example) but it really can't happen if a junior is suddenly the senior tech because the real seniors all left.
- smith7018 3y ago
  Those investments in office furniture, remodels, etc. are already sunk costs though. Why would they be used to justify RTO? If anything, it's more expensive to have people come in and use (read: destroy) furniture and equipment. This is a genuine question. The RTO push has befuddled me for awhile because the money that's already gone into the offices (like the leases) were decided on awhile ago and will be paid out regardless if people come in or not. Perks like free lunch and snacks also cost more when you force people to come in. So I don't really understand the financial aspect of it. Maybe it's management needing people in office to justify their jobs for some reason? I don't know. Edit: I'm staff-level for what it's worth. I've also noticed that this article doesn't actually reflect reality; nearly every job listing I saw this year said that the applicant will have to be in the office 1-5 days a week.
  - tessierashpool 3y ago
    Those investments in office furniture, remodels, etc. are already sunk costs though. Why would they be used to justify RTO? you answered your own question. sunk costs fallacy.
wongarsu 3y ago
A conspiracy would involve people working together, conspiring, towards some secret goal. What GP stipulates works just as well if you assume everyone is working on their own in their own best interest. Going by the principles of capitalism or game theory it would be more surprising if this wasn't true and board members overwhelmingly worked for the good of the company instead of their personal wealth
aerhardt 3y ago
Well-known facts eh.
tnel77 3y ago
I didn’t know it wasn’t possible to mentor junior employees remotely. It’s impossible to assign a mentor, actively check-in on their progress, encourage collaboration, etc. over a computer. I guess I’ll have to tell the junior I’m mentoring that we are doomed. Annnnnnyways, I’ve been having a great time mentoring a junior engineer at my company. We regularly meet to discuss his work and I constantly stress “please bother me if you have questions.” I reach out once a day to ensure he’s good to go and he often reaches out a few times a day for questions. We assign him work that is challenging, but within his skill set and abilities. In summary, anyone saying juniors will suffer either has no idea how to mentor remotely or are just lazy. Adapt or die. Edit: I will add that my company flies all remote employees into the office once a year for the sole purpose of team building. We did our hackathon in person and focused on building those bonds that can help people work better together. It’s technically optional, but who wants to turn down a free mini-vacation?
- concordDance 3y ago
  > I didn’t know it wasn’t possible to mentor junior employees remotely. Might be possible, but most can't do it from what I've seen. So if you go full wfh your pool of people who can mentor shrinks by a large factor (4x is my bet).
  - no_wizard 3y ago
    IMO most people can't mentor effectively to begin with, its simply a little more obvious when its remote. This is solved by having a structured mentorship program and guidelines, and really good onboarding. Of course, this means businesses have to invest in this sort of thing, and of course, they don't, because they implicitly got it for free by having seniors covering for juniors for so many decades it obfuscated the problem
- randomdata 3y ago
  The lessons from academia suggest that some students thrive in a remote environment, while others completely fall to pieces. It could be that teachers fear losing their jobs to technology if they are not a prominent fixture in an in-person classroom, thus making that up, but it is also quite plausible that different people are actually different. Finding a student/junior who is able to do well in your business environment at a distance does not imply that it is scalable across all workers businesses need to hire.
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matthewmcg 3y ago

Great point on potentially overlapping board membership. More broadly, there's also a theory that growing common ownership by index funds and others with significant commercial real estate exposure is driving this pressure.

red-iron-pine 3y ago
also why the housing bubble won't burst -- too many stakes invested across the entire market
atomicfiredoll 3y ago
If interests were making themselves rich on real estate and other supporting industries by wasting productivity on commuting, office lunches, etc, it makes me think the current [impact on commercial real and affected industries] may just be the "bezzle" coming due. Now that the cards are laid out flat, in retrospect it's easier for everyone to see and discover that the productivity and value may have been stolen. I'd love to see some investigation into showing the potential connections more concretely.

ActionHank 3y ago

This is on point, but I think it can also be simpler. Many execs and upper management would have read or watched the movie about MacDonalds and how they make loads of cash through owning the property and renting it back. Board member or not, they try to use it to boost earnings.

DrBazza 3y ago

In broad strokes, it's just old vs new, and an age thing. I'll pick '40' as the mid-point: Old = over 40s (myself included) who are senior, their careers have been in offices and commuting, and still believe that 'managing people' means real-life first person interaction, and are completely invested in offices, and the cost of paying for them, rather than downsizing. Young = under 40s - have grown up with the internet, github, working/studying remotely and so on. I've worked in companies where the CEO and senior management are all 50 something, and in a couple of companies where they're all approaching 40. Can you guess which company used PCs and which one used Macbooks? Going back further, I can remember working on Sun boxes, because management was reluctant to use that 'new fangled NT3.51 or even NT4.0'. The point being, as the workforce demographic changes, so will the opinions and approaches. And the cycle will repeat.

ghaff 3y ago
I'm not sure it's that simple. I've been effectively remote for a long time and have zero interest in going into an office for the most part. (Though I'd do it more if it were easy, I'm a 2 hour commute to the only office it makes any sense for me to go into.) Anecdotally, I hear it's more younger employees who like going into an office for the social interaction.
- xkqd 3y ago
  My observations agree with your anecdote, but in my experience it was the youngest employees who go into the office for social interaction. Meaning, fresh grads to ~26 year olds. They openly admitted they didn’t want to sit in their 600 sqft apartments all day and that they didn’t have anyone to talk to otherwise. This sounds more like a way deeper loneliness and community problem than a workplace problem.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  That's the same thing I thought: it was the younger people who yearned for the office. Junior employees tended to do worse with WFH, especially those who were onboarding, whereas more senior folks were more comfortable working without much supervision. Younger people also don't tend to have larger homes, with dedicated, quiet office space. Younger employees pinned more of their social life on workmates than older employees who might already have established families and community ties. Anecdotally, I know that on my team, the younger teammates were the most eager about returning to the office. I'm nearly 50 and wouldn't go back in if you held a gun to my head.

RandomLensman 3y ago

Have you checked this to be true by looking at the involvements of board members? Cost reductions from facilities are nothing unusual.

btbuildem 3y ago
Yes at some point I've cross-referenced the board members of where I work to see where else they sit. It's obviously much harder to track their investments (unless it's insider buys/sells) but if they used to be C-suite or sit on the board of some company that's majority owned by a REIT, it's hard not to draw conclusions. It's definitely a rabbit hole that goes deep and one runs the risk of ending up with a spiderweb of red threads on their wall :)

danaris 3y ago

> The RTO/WFH struggle is clearly about money (what else could it be about in a corporate world?) Oh, it's definitely not only about money, any more than the other "treat your employees well and you will provably make more money" things are. It's about power, ego, and classism. It's about an entire category of management that has no actual ability to manage people beyond eyeballing whether their butts are in seats. It's about execs who can only feel good about that corner office when there's a whole floor of people in a cube farm to see that they have the corner office. It's about avoiding ever having to question the assumption that the only reason regular plebeians ever actually do work is because they have the boss breathing down their necks every 5 seconds (and, of course, the ever-present threat of being fired and left destitute), because if people did start questioning it, they might realize it also disproves the assumptions underlying the most common objections to things like UBI. Which would shatter the upper class's power over the lower classes for good. This is not to say that it's not about money, of course. The commercial real estate angle is a real one, for sure. But an awful lot of the assumptions that lead to calling for RTO have much less to do with money, and much more to do with maintaining a neofeudal power dynamic between bosses and workers.

btbuildem 3y ago
I agree - it's much more nuanced than my initial take. I guess I oversimplify it, in the spirit of "money is power", but you're right, we could say "money is proxy for power" and acknowledge all the other power plays that are as old as humanity.
khazhoux 3y ago
> It's about power, ego, and classism. It's about an entire category of management that has no actual ability to manage people beyond eyeballing whether their butts are in seats. It's about execs who can only feel good about that corner office when there's a whole floor of people in a cube farm to see that they have the corner office. I take it you're not a manager. Reducing people to "power", ego, corner offices... that's all very simplistic and (sorry that this offends) naive. I've been fortunate to work in places where management is involved, technical, and impactful. It sets direction, identifies bad plans and wastes of time where work should be cut, identifies places where work can be combined, it resolves (and asks) difficult queries, and it works to grow the individual team members and make the workplace a good environment. The cartoonish Clueless Idiot Manager Villain has just not been my experience. Sure, I've seen bad managers, but also bad individual-contributors.

red-iron-pine 3y ago

Not just investors and commercial holdings, but many states & localities have offered big tax breaks to businesses to get or keep them in town -- Texas (Austin, esp.) come to mind. Idea being that a lot of big developments translated to a lot of workers, who bought houses, commuted, purchases gas+coffee+lunches, etc. With those workers leaving the city loses revenue, on top of downtown areas dying off, which exacerbates the tax base problem further. Anecdotally, my org mandated 3 days back but has pretty slide, across the entire org, back to 2 days. The genie is out of the bottle and there is widespread, if quiet, resistance from everyone, to include senior managers.

jayd16 3y ago

The real estate thing seems like a conspiracy theory to me. Is there evidence that it's wide spread? A significant amount of the pro-office comments here are influenced by real estate? Seems unlikely.

JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago

> > The RTO/WFH struggle is clearly about money It's the opposite actually. WFH is more efficient, but efficiency is not the reason why we work. Every self respecting man needs friends and enemies. The more watered down a man's life is, the less intense the friendships and rivalries are going to be. WFH is just the last step in a long process watering everything down, where the commoditification of every experience is making us dull and full of apathy. The problem is that a disease like that becomes endemic in society, so people's beliefs become weaker and weaker, but not having strong beliefs closely correlates with people having next to no belief in themselves, which again closely correlates with WFH preference because people think they don't have what it takes to thrive in an office environment because they are scared of the strong sentiments of friendship, rivarly, love and revenge on the workplace and in life in general.

potta_coffee 3y ago
I don't know what you're on about. WFH saves me so much time and energy that I can commit a lot more to things that are way more interesting and fulfilling than work. Now I can hang out with people I care about, focus on my Jiu Jitsu and guitar playing and spend more time chipping away at my massive queue of unread books. Work is just something I have to do so I can feed and house my kids.
ge0ffclapp 3y ago
Spoken like a true type A personality. Lots of people don't need their ego fed constantly at the expense of others and are happy just being creative and thoughtful.
danbolt 3y ago
I’d really love to hear you describe more of this WFH desert devoid of fulfilment, and the living water of communal work. It’s kinda fascinating.
OfficeChad 3y ago
JumpinJack_Chad more like, saying it how it is.

khazhoux 3y ago

> The RTO/WFH struggle is clearly about money (what else could it be about in a corporate world?) Many people genuinely believe that collaboration is qualitatively better and easier in person. Regardless of where you stand, you can't deny that there are pros and cons: * The bandwidth of typing on Slack is slower than talking in person. Also, one winds up spending a lot of time on Slack correcting small misunderstandings that are easier clarified quickly in conversation. And two people typing full-paragraphs back and forth often at the same time, can be clunky. * On the other hand, Slack leaves a good paper trail and you can easily reference what you discussed. And it's low-effort and doesn't immediately interrupt the other person. * But no good alternative to whiteboards, etc. Also, as much as everyone hates it, management does have to deal with low performers -- a nd cases you can't really tell if that person is actually working through tough eng problems all day that take a long time, or are they just watching youtube videos all day. So as ugly as it is, "butts in seats" is a sort of proxy for at least eliminating that variable. I know this is controversial ("Boo, only a bad manager cares about how much time someone is putting in!"), but I offer that viewpoint as an alternative to "clearly about money."