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I am fully remote and have been for a long time but I don't trust productivity studies, especially if they just find what everyone wants to hear anyway. If the

by jvmboi 3y ago

I am fully remote and have been for a long time but I don't trust productivity studies, especially if they just find what everyone wants to hear anyway. If the market can do anything then it that has to be optimizing productivity. Every single company has a weighty incentive to work out what works best and so I fully expect that after a bit of churn the optimal remote/on-premise balance will be found on a job-by-job basis.

advael 3y ago
I can't help but read this as a severely pessimistic take on the capabilities of markets, since we can trace trying to "optimize productivity" back to essentially the earliest things even remotely resembling the modern economy and most of the enormous amount of research, money, and effort that has been poured into this endeavor has been at best occasionally better than chance at consistently improving any kind of "productivity" in the long term through labor practices, unless we directly define the suffering of workers as "productivity." Most meaningful gains in productive capacity come from either resource windfalls or technological progress, and general theories of how to reproducibly increase worker productivity via policy are more akin to sacred rituals than settled science. To be clear, I personally do think that markets function as optimizers, though as with any optimizer this tends to function in a very narrow scope. Most extant companies, for example, are driven by capital markets, not consumer ones, which means that ROI for shareholders - even when that's driven by essentially marketing stocks or goosing metrics - is the main thing being optimized. Hypothetically, markets could optimize for organizational productivity in some other sense, but I think it's even pretty unclear whether there's a way to subdivide that usefully into any kind of apples-to-apples comparison of individual workers within organizations.
kraftman 3y ago
If that were the case, it seems like it wouldnt have taken covid to tip the balance so much, and it would have tipped back much more quickly. I've never worked at a company that would come anywhere being classed as optimizing for productivity, there has always been a huge amount of wasted time and resources.
knallfrosch 3y ago
Yeah, measuring productivity is a complex topic. You probably don't even know the productivity yourself, or by story points or whatever. But saying "the market will fix it" doesn't really help you when you're a business owner. You're telling him to just go with any approach, and if his company tanks, the market is working as intended. Not that much guidance. I understand that employees don't have to care, they can switch to a surviving employer.
- jvmboi 3y ago
  That's a good point. For a business owner that has to decide right now, it's little comfort to know that the market will sort it out. I'd guess that big corps are most affected here. SMB owners probably know exactly what they need.
BeFlatXIII 3y ago
> If the market can do anything then it that has to be optimizing productivity. Except if margins from the company's commercial real estate holdings are higher than the gains of remote productivity.
- jvmboi 3y ago
  Real estate is alluded to throughout this thread. I don't really get it. Is the theory that companies do RTO so they can rent out real estate to themselves via a holding? Just looking at profits I don't understand how that would be beneficial. Every dollar that the holding gains comes out of the coffers of the parent company.
  - BeFlatXIII 3y ago
    It's a shell game to increase property value to pump the nominal asset holdings of the company. "See, this office is in demand and worth $50 mil" (WFH price: $5 mil)

by jvmboi 3y ago

advael 3y ago

I can't help but read this as a severely pessimistic take on the capabilities of markets, since we can trace trying to "optimize productivity" back to essentially the earliest things even remotely resembling the modern economy and most of the enormous amount of research, money, and effort that has been poured into this endeavor has been at best occasionally better than chance at consistently improving any kind of "productivity" in the long term through labor practices, unless we directly define the suffering of workers as "productivity." Most meaningful gains in productive capacity come from either resource windfalls or technological progress, and general theories of how to reproducibly increase worker productivity via policy are more akin to sacred rituals than settled science. To be clear, I personally do think that markets function as optimizers, though as with any optimizer this tends to function in a very narrow scope. Most extant companies, for example, are driven by capital markets, not consumer ones, which means that ROI for shareholders - even when that's driven by essentially marketing stocks or goosing metrics - is the main thing being optimized. Hypothetically, markets could optimize for organizational productivity in some other sense, but I think it's even pretty unclear whether there's a way to subdivide that usefully into any kind of apples-to-apples comparison of individual workers within organizations.

kraftman 3y ago

If that were the case, it seems like it wouldnt have taken covid to tip the balance so much, and it would have tipped back much more quickly. I've never worked at a company that would come anywhere being classed as optimizing for productivity, there has always been a huge amount of wasted time and resources.

knallfrosch 3y ago

Yeah, measuring productivity is a complex topic. You probably don't even know the productivity yourself, or by story points or whatever. But saying "the market will fix it" doesn't really help you when you're a business owner. You're telling him to just go with any approach, and if his company tanks, the market is working as intended. Not that much guidance. I understand that employees don't have to care, they can switch to a surviving employer.

jvmboi 3y ago
That's a good point. For a business owner that has to decide right now, it's little comfort to know that the market will sort it out. I'd guess that big corps are most affected here. SMB owners probably know exactly what they need.

BeFlatXIII 3y ago

> If the market can do anything then it that has to be optimizing productivity. Except if margins from the company's commercial real estate holdings are higher than the gains of remote productivity.

jvmboi 3y ago
Real estate is alluded to throughout this thread. I don't really get it. Is the theory that companies do RTO so they can rent out real estate to themselves via a holding? Just looking at profits I don't understand how that would be beneficial. Every dollar that the holding gains comes out of the coffers of the parent company.
- BeFlatXIII 3y ago
  It's a shell game to increase property value to pump the nominal asset holdings of the company. "See, this office is in demand and worth $50 mil" (WFH price: $5 mil)