10 ms·

The absurdity of the return-to-office movement

109 points by DebtDeflation 3y ago

DebtDeflation 3y ago
>The internet and cell phones obviate so much of what was once done at the office, which is, after all, largely an artifact of the 20th century thanks to the rise of mass transportation, the ability to build tall office buildings and the previous immovability of the “work” telephone, which was stuck to a desk. All this, thankfully, is going the way of the dodo. This seems to me to have been forgotten as technology evolved over the last 2-3 decades. There was a time when you HAD to be in the office, because that was where your desk phone was, your desktop PC (including local software) was, the physical access point for your corporate network/applications was, etc. With laptops, smartphones, the internet, VPNs, SaaS applications, that hasn't been the case for a long time, Covid was just the CATALYST that forced people and companies to actually utilize the capabilities they already had.
- ghaff 3y ago
  I sometimes like to ask provocatively "What would have happened had COVID happened 25 years ago?" (Don't sweat the exact timeline. I'm about right.) Yes, vaccines/medical issues but that's somewhat orthogonal. I think the answer was that most office workers would have struggled to work. Yes, we could have mapped home phones to office numbers, bought people cell phones and paid for their plans, subsidized a second phone line, etc. But it would have been hard and difficult; most people would have been nowhere near prepared. I suspect at the end of the day, we'd mostly have made do for a month or three, said screw it, and reopened offices even if we knew more people would probably get sick. Oh, and forget things like grocery delivery or streaming TV (Netflix DVD barely existed) for the most part.
  - imgabe 3y ago
    We know what did happen 100 years ago with the Spanish Flu. People mostly had to keep going about their lives and millions got sick and died.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Oh, I agree. At one point I did try to research how much good the various (non medical) mitigations did 100 years ago but didn't come up with a lot of good information. Admittedly I'm not sure how much better our handle is on that today around COVID. But we'd have almost certainly done what we had to do even if significantly more people died as a result.
      - throwaway-blaze 3y ago
        Sweden is the counter example to this, they mostly didn't shut down, just took precautions with the elderly and those who came in contact with them, and did not have excess deaths compared to their nordic neighbors who did lock down....
        ghaff 3y ago
        I think you're making my point to at least some degree. There were a lot of different policies and behaviors around the world and across large countries that seem to have not made the degree of difference as a general rule that people might have hypothesized depending on their priors. In the case of Sweden, people will counter-argue that Swedes aren't overly social anyway and people did take precautions so the end result was sort of the same for all the hubbub. Is that true? Don't know.
        ethanbond 3y ago
        It’s extremely hard to draw any conclusions from this. The Nordic cultural tendency to remain physically distant from strangers is so pervasive as to have been a meme long before COVID. You wouldn’t expect as strong a comparative effect between countries. Not to mention the general collectivist attitude which almost certainly yielded different baseline behaviors than, say, Florida’s culture did, regardless of top-down mandates.
        graemep 3y ago
        In the UK people's behaviour changed significantly changed significantly before lockdown. The same in other countries - even places with very little concept of personal space (e.g. friends in Sri Lanka shared pictures of long, socially distancd, orderly queues).
  - Sharlin 3y ago
    I mean, a large fraction of people of course had to continue working in situ through the pandemic because it's physically impossible to do their job remotely. Office workers had the privilege of being able to go remote, but in these discussions it feels like people believe non-office jobs don't even exist and that the entire world just started working from home. 25 years ago everyone would have simply done the same as teachers and nurses and store clerks in fact did have to do.
    - midasuni 3y ago
      It was far better going into an office with no traffic, being able to drive there rather than a crowded train and tube, having an office with maybe 90% of the normal occupants missing, and plenty of room for those of us who were in. WFH is great for those who commute to an office, it’s quieter than working on a Sunday.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Oh, I agree. WFH would have been a blip that mostly didn't work very well for the relative handful of people not already able to do it. Everyone else would have been back in their offices pretty quickly.
  - DebtDeflation 3y ago
    Yes. Prior to 1995/1996 WFH would have been effectively impossible for 99% of office workers. From around then to around 2007 it would have still been fairly difficult for probably the majority of people. Since then, however, it became more and more feasible for more and more people every year. By the time Covid hit, the real question was why most office workers WEREN'T working remotely.
    - wcunning 3y ago
      Entertaining to compare that 2007 mark (what I would have naively assumed) to the sibling comment talking about during Hurricane Sandy, which was ~5 years later and people still couldn't reasonably work from home. In many ways that was a lack of preparedness by IT departments, but to some degree it was also a lack of generally available and well developed services. Skype worked pretty well for phone calls in 2007, but it wasn't a MS product yet, so it would have been much more of an adventure to conference call a bunch of people for all hands meetings an the like.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        I think by the time I joined my current company we were using Bluejeans but it wouldn't have been around in 2007 and not sure what was in place before. 2007 you'd presumably have mostly been using an audio conference solution and emailing files around. So it would have been clunky but the enterprise software company I work for could have presumably made things work but with more friction. Certainly I was mostly working from the road or at home by then. I wouldn't have been out of commission for 4 months assuming working physical IT infrastructure.
      - DebtDeflation 3y ago
        WebEx was founded in 1995 and I recall using it at work long before Cisco acquired them in 2007. Even back in the late 1990s where I worked all managers were given a (voice) conference bridge number to use to set up conference calls. Outlook Web Access was first released in 1997. The first iPhone came out in 2007 and the first Android in 2008. WiFi was becoming fairly ubiquitous by 2003 and 3G by 2008. If people were unable to work from home during Sandy (late 2012) it was either due to an incompetent IT department or the fact that the hurricane knocked out power and internet.
  - mistersquid 3y ago
    > I sometimes like to ask provocatively "What would have happened had COVID happened 25 years ago?" This is not nearly, to my mind, as interesting as the question "Was COVID the direct beneficiary of 21st-century technology?" That is, would COVID have had the chance to spread intercontinentally without the benefit of affordable air travel which itself is the byproduct of workers enabled by cell phones, computers, and global economic trade? Furthermore, had mRNA vaccines been available 25 years ago, many more millions of people exposed to the first virulent strains of COVID would have died. The idea that workers would have been forced to RTO because WFH would not even be an option does not even rise to the level of fantasy, much less meaningful speculation.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Yes, there was more air travel than 25 years prior. Looks like a little under 2x. That's not nothing but's certainly not an order of magnitude. And mRNA vaccines were presumably not going to be available 25 years ago. So I don't see the evidence that, had COVID emerged from China in about 1996 (which it may not have done but see other related diseases), it would have had so much less impact. (And if that were really the case, we'd just have ignored it in the West and you'd still be working in an office.)
  - TuringNYC 3y ago
    >> I think the answer was that most office workers would have struggled to work. I worked at a large asset management company during Hurricane Sandy's arrival in NYC. Ocean water was dumped into lower manhattan and many buildings' elevators shorted out from the salt-water. Also, so many buildings had the same issue at the same time that we had a 3-mo queue for replacement parts. We didnt go to the office for 4 months. No work was done. At the time, most of the staff didnt have VPN. Virtual jump boxes were tried but the latency was too low. Ultimately almost all staff except accounting/etc were "off"
  - lesuorac 3y ago
    I think one thing missed by most comments is the night-shift. Some people I knew that had to use tools that were not available at home did so "off-hours" so that there was a smaller cohort of people in a confined space at the same time.
  - Cacti 3y ago
    20 years ago most of us would be dead.
- Spivak 3y ago
  And invest in them for the whole office instead of them being limited to specific departments. Like it used to be that only sales got Zoom licenses because they were on calls with remote customers, only devs got access to Slack everyone else was on Teams/Outlook. The pandemic made everyone build out the infrastructure for work anywhere. It's got to be in the top 5 advancements in the information age that obviates so much waste moving people back and forth to office buildings and execs desperately want to go back for some strange reason.
wcunning 3y ago
It's been a "fun" time in Detroit lately. The Big 3 have been forcing people back into the office some, with increasingly shrill demands. Last year, GM required us to come back 3 days a week, you pick the days. Managers looked at that, listened to employees and it was quickly 2 days, then they weren't enforcing it at the HR level at all, so it was no days. Until suddenly in December, after a bit of a struggling year, we got an email (at the same time as our managers and senior managers, make of that what you will) that they had actually been tracking badge swipes in aggregate and that we would all be returning to the office 3 days a week, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday starting the second week in January. Then it got delayed two weeks because there literally weren't enough seats for everyone, much less seats in the building you were assigned to, much less parking, much less parking for the building you were assigned to. And wouldn't you know it, about 6 years ago, GM had moved to "hoteling" or "hot desking" with an intentional 90% capacity for the number of people assigned to the building, but the COVID hiring binge hit us too, so now there were main buildings with as low as 60% capacity for the number of people assigned. Then, we got an updated email, some teams were going to come back a few weeks later, so that IT and facilities would have enough time to fix problems as they arose and get desks setup, etc. Then we had an ugly winter storm. Then it got delayed another two weeks. Now it's the second week in February. Order, followed by counter order, equals disorder. Isn't RTO fun guys?
- Liquix 3y ago
  > Now it's the second week in February. They're even trying to force time travelers back into the office? Grim
  - wcunning 3y ago
    No, my bad for the phrasing, they've pushed the first day you have to RTO out to the second week in February due to the lack of seats in my building. Should have been tomorrow for me, but we got the update today at 4:30.
  - FalconSensei 3y ago
    It's kinda obvious what they meant if you have some reading comprehension and basic logic
Zacharias030 3y ago
This article simply doesn’t reflect my personal experience. I‘m rather at the beginning of my career, but feel like personal growth, enjoyment and satisfaction with the work is much higher when I go to the office and when my colleagues do the same (we have full freedom to never do though).
- ghaff 3y ago
  Onboarding, new hires, even teams getting together when possible/practical some of the time are the things I hear even from execs who are generally supportive of letting people continue to work from home whenever they want to. I happen to be on a very distributed team and the person I'm mentoring lives in a different city anyway, so it's impractical for me. But I'd actually go into an office now and then if it were convenient and I'd know people there.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  I'm also at the beginning, and I started right when COVID hit. :D To me, it seems like an intense gray. There are upsides and downsides to both in-person and remote, and they balance each other out almost perfectly. I have a great home situation, though (it's better than my office physically), and most of my coworkers are older than I am, so they're less keen on interpersonal connection and rarely ever go to the office.
  - sonya-ai 3y ago
    I'm the same as you, having the option is necessary for those like me who prefer remote
- Spivak 3y ago
  And that's what WFA's whole thing is. We have an office, come in if you like -- we have snacks, high speed internet, and (hopefully) fewer distractions. It's where it's forced everyone in some fixed days a week 1-5 that eliminates most of the benefit of actually working anywhere.
  - 3y ago
pdimitar 3y ago
Here's what the ever-so-helpful CNN is giving me when I visit it: Browser Blocked We apologize, but your web browser is configured in such a way that it is preventing this site from implementing required components that protect your privacy and allow you to view and change your privacy settings. This functionality is required for privacy legislation in your region. We recommend you use a different browser or disable the “EasyList Cookie” filter from your “Content Filtering” settings (found under “Settings” -> “Shields” in the Brave Browser). How sleazy can their language get?
- fulladder 3y ago
  "We can't protect your privacy because you are using one or more privacy extensions..."
  - pdimitar 3y ago
    "We can't violate your privacy while lying to you that we're protecting it, because you are using one or more privacy extensions". Fixed. :P Using sleazy language should be punishable by hanging at the end of the same day.
  - shrimp_emoji 3y ago
    Hahaha. Hey, we're supposed to be in charge of "protecting" your privacy (i.e., deciding how much we want you to have). You can't take it into your own hands; our shaky profit motive will tank!
- brycewray 3y ago
  How about this one? Same problem? https://lite.cnn.com/2024/01/22/opinions/remote-work-jobs-bergen/index.html https://lite.cnn.com/2024/01/22/opinions/remote-work-jobs-be...
  - pdimitar 3y ago
    Oh, that one actually works. Thank you!
fulladder 3y ago
This subject has been discussed to death, especially on this site. There's no new information about this debate. The first issue seems to be that front line managers see WFH making them irrelevant, and this is bubbling up to senior management as "company can't do X because no one is in the office." Separately, you have a large contingent of workers who really prefer working in the office at least some days. Lastly, senior management came of age in a pre-Internet era and it's hard for them to imagine any work getting done if people are not physically in the office. These factors together seem to be conspiring to cause companies to try to solve a non-problem related to the physical location of the work activities. This will gradually sort itself out as companies come up with better ways to measure performance, but the transition period has been a bit rocky so far.
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  Also, don't forget the trillions in real estate $ that are tied to increasingly less valuable assets as people don't RTO.
- DylanBohlender 3y ago
  I think it's interesting to see an article like this every couple of weeks. The way I view it is that we're watching the five stages of grief (with regard to the "death of the office") play out in real time, at population scale. At first it was denial - "everyone will be back in the office eventually!" Then it was anger - "you will RTO or you will lose your job!" Now it seems like we've finally hit bargaining - "you'll come in 3 days per week, wait, 2 days, wait, special exception for the last week of every month". I wonder how long it goes on until we get to depression and acceptance?
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    Well, you may be waiting a while. Those "stages" models are fake news. Great myths have been built up around them, but they've never been validated. Anyone who works with grief can tell you, it won't work like that.
    - 3y ago
infotainment 3y ago
It’s interesting that remote schooling is generally viewed as a failure, but remote work is viewed the opposite way. Personally, I think the benefits of in-person apply equally to both.
- bitcharmer 3y ago
  Why would you even compare the two?
  - infotainment 3y ago
    Why not? Both are things that are traditionally done in-person, but went remote during the pandemic.
    - isilofi 3y ago
      For kids, there is the necessity to learn to socially interact with other kids. Adults either do not have to learn that anymore, or are hopeless anyways and won't learn it ever.
      - infotainment 3y ago
        The second someone graduates college (usually around 22ish), they no longer need any social interaction? That strikes me as a fairly bold claim.
        Covenant0028 3y ago
        Social interaction is not synonymous with the office. Adults can choose to socially interact with any group (family, friends, shared interests) that they want to. In theory kids can do the same too, but in practice, you'd need some set of adults to get all those kids into the same place somehow, another set of adults to supervise them so they are safe etc... at which point it becomes more efficient to combine this with schooling. Also with working adults, there is an explicit expectation of delivery. Both the employer and the employee knows of the consequences for performance or non-performance, and part of being an adult is that you are aware of those consequences and choose to behave accordingly. With kids, such expectations aren't realistic.
blueferret 3y ago
One of the services my current job provided during COVID was enabling remote work operations for client businesses. They still provide this. In 2022, they started talking about RTO. Then they tried to enforce it. People quit. They didn't let up.
rfwhyte 3y ago
The people pushing for "Return-to-office" are by and large people who have substantial portions of their personal wealth invested in commercial real estate. Most wealthy individuals hold at least some real estate in their portfolios, and commercial is much easier to invest in at scale than residential, so the wealthiest folks often have a sizeable chunk of their portfolio wrapped up in commercial real estate. This whole "Return-to-office" thing is a bare-faced lie, as it has absolutely nothing to do with "Productivity," "Creativity" or whatever other BS these people are spewing, and EVERYTHING to do with shoring up the value of their commercial real estate holdings. It's a lot less PR friendly for them to be honest and say to their employees "You need to spend 2 hours a day in a car in traffic, whilst not being compensated for that time, so the office building I own doesn't lose value" though.
- librish 3y ago
  Do you have any source for this? It does not match my experience at all.
  - throwaway-blaze 3y ago
    It may be less about personal wealth than decisions made about corporate real estate by the execs before the pandemic...T-Mobile US decided to renovate its corporate campus for north of $100mm just before the pandemic...the work completed during the pandemic and so starting last Sept it was RTO 3 days per week ... and your manager did get "badge swipe" reports, as did the chain up to the CEO.
tamimio 3y ago
The whole push back to the office was primarily from commercial landlords pushing these companies back, CEO pushed middle managers, middle managers pushed the workers. It was never about productivity or anything, it’s all about money, not for the companies but for the landlords.
adingus 3y ago
I constantly see people say RTO is driven by landlords but Ive never seen any data to back this up. Is there really any proof to this or is it just an opinion that's restated over and over? For context, I work remotely and will never return to an office unless I'm at risk of losing my house.
- CapstanRoller 3y ago
  RTO is driven by the inertia of economies of cities themselves. What happens when office workers no longer have to be in the office? What happens to the physical buildings, the people who maintain them, the local businesses who serve the office workers (e.g. lunch), etc? There are many knock-on effects. WFH, on a large scale, is forcing us to rethink the concept of cities, suburbs, infrastructure, housing, transit, telecom, etc. The fact that WFH has been shown to be viable on a large scale indicates that we are probably going to experience a massive societal shift at all levels. A shift to where? No one knows yet.
qgin 3y ago
There are companies that hired distributed teams over the past few years. When everyone was remote, the geographic makeup of the team didn't matter. But now many of those same companies are forcing employees back "the office" which ends up being the employee's local office. Where they proceed to work remotely with their distributed team from "the office". They've badged in, they're in an official office space, but the actual mechanics of work are still just as remote as they ever were.
guilhas 3y ago
Most companies would save money getting reducing, or rid of the office space, as some did after covid Most companies advertising jobs, have remote positions now I don't see a RTO movement, I think they are experimenting what works best, trying to get a balance. But their processes have not evolved enough to include remote workers Software development tasks are hard to estimate. How can a company, without being too invasive, make sure a employee is not underworked or overworked?
- insane_dreamer 3y ago
  > Software development tasks are hard to estimate. How can a company, without being too invasive, make sure a employee is not underworked or overworked? how do you do it when in person other than walking around and checking that people aren't playing minesweeper instead of coding? (OK, there is the social pressure to at least look like you're coding in case someone glances at your screen, but that doesn't mean you're actually getting anything done. Of course for people who slack off, WFH is a great enabler -- and that indeed is a problem.)
  - guilhas 3y ago
    Not by what they're doing. But you can definetly try access their mental state, stressed, relaxed.. Water cooler talk "hey everything alright with you?"
exodust 3y ago
This in particular: "to say nothing about the reduced pollution and energy consumption that comes from fewer commuters" In my case the office is a 50 min drive away and my car is a 6 cylinder petrol engine. I've been WFH since 2020 so 4 years worth of car fumes prevented. Savings on fuel, tolls and commute time. 100 minutes driving per day x 250 work days x 4 years = 1,666 driving hours prevented. I like driving but driving to work is the worst kind of driving.
incomingpain 3y ago
Return to the office is a funny one. These big corps spent ridiculous amounts of cash building and furnishing a massive office building just to have it empty? What about their vanity of their business' shrine? But worse, if they decided to sell. Who in the world can buy their vanity building? Everyone else has the same problem. Governments also came in and restrict you from using the building for other purposes. So you cant sell to someone who might make use out of it. So you might as well try to force people back into the building, but go softly because the last people you want to lose are the first to leave.

109 points by DebtDeflation 3y ago

>The internet and cell phones obviate so much of what was once done at the office, which is, after all, largely an artifact of the 20th century thanks to the rise of mass transportation, the ability to build tall office buildings and the previous immovability of the “work” telephone, which was stuck to a desk. All this, thankfully, is going the way of the dodo. This seems to me to have been forgotten as technology evolved over the last 2-3 decades. There was a time when you HAD to be in the office, because that was where your desk phone was, your desktop PC (including local software) was, the physical access point for your corporate network/applications was, etc. With laptops, smartphones, the internet, VPNs, SaaS applications, that hasn't been the case for a long time, Covid was just the CATALYST that forced people and companies to actually utilize the capabilities they already had.

ghaff 3y ago
I sometimes like to ask provocatively "What would have happened had COVID happened 25 years ago?" (Don't sweat the exact timeline. I'm about right.) Yes, vaccines/medical issues but that's somewhat orthogonal. I think the answer was that most office workers would have struggled to work. Yes, we could have mapped home phones to office numbers, bought people cell phones and paid for their plans, subsidized a second phone line, etc. But it would have been hard and difficult; most people would have been nowhere near prepared. I suspect at the end of the day, we'd mostly have made do for a month or three, said screw it, and reopened offices even if we knew more people would probably get sick. Oh, and forget things like grocery delivery or streaming TV (Netflix DVD barely existed) for the most part.
- imgabe 3y ago
  We know what did happen 100 years ago with the Spanish Flu. People mostly had to keep going about their lives and millions got sick and died.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Oh, I agree. At one point I did try to research how much good the various (non medical) mitigations did 100 years ago but didn't come up with a lot of good information. Admittedly I'm not sure how much better our handle is on that today around COVID. But we'd have almost certainly done what we had to do even if significantly more people died as a result.
    - throwaway-blaze 3y ago
      Sweden is the counter example to this, they mostly didn't shut down, just took precautions with the elderly and those who came in contact with them, and did not have excess deaths compared to their nordic neighbors who did lock down....
      - ghaff 3y ago
        I think you're making my point to at least some degree. There were a lot of different policies and behaviors around the world and across large countries that seem to have not made the degree of difference as a general rule that people might have hypothesized depending on their priors. In the case of Sweden, people will counter-argue that Swedes aren't overly social anyway and people did take precautions so the end result was sort of the same for all the hubbub. Is that true? Don't know.
      - ethanbond 3y ago
        It’s extremely hard to draw any conclusions from this. The Nordic cultural tendency to remain physically distant from strangers is so pervasive as to have been a meme long before COVID. You wouldn’t expect as strong a comparative effect between countries. Not to mention the general collectivist attitude which almost certainly yielded different baseline behaviors than, say, Florida’s culture did, regardless of top-down mandates.
        graemep 3y ago
        In the UK people's behaviour changed significantly changed significantly before lockdown. The same in other countries - even places with very little concept of personal space (e.g. friends in Sri Lanka shared pictures of long, socially distancd, orderly queues).
- Sharlin 3y ago
  I mean, a large fraction of people of course had to continue working in situ through the pandemic because it's physically impossible to do their job remotely. Office workers had the privilege of being able to go remote, but in these discussions it feels like people believe non-office jobs don't even exist and that the entire world just started working from home. 25 years ago everyone would have simply done the same as teachers and nurses and store clerks in fact did have to do.
  - midasuni 3y ago
    It was far better going into an office with no traffic, being able to drive there rather than a crowded train and tube, having an office with maybe 90% of the normal occupants missing, and plenty of room for those of us who were in. WFH is great for those who commute to an office, it’s quieter than working on a Sunday.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Oh, I agree. WFH would have been a blip that mostly didn't work very well for the relative handful of people not already able to do it. Everyone else would have been back in their offices pretty quickly.
- DebtDeflation 3y ago
  Yes. Prior to 1995/1996 WFH would have been effectively impossible for 99% of office workers. From around then to around 2007 it would have still been fairly difficult for probably the majority of people. Since then, however, it became more and more feasible for more and more people every year. By the time Covid hit, the real question was why most office workers WEREN'T working remotely.
  - wcunning 3y ago
    Entertaining to compare that 2007 mark (what I would have naively assumed) to the sibling comment talking about during Hurricane Sandy, which was ~5 years later and people still couldn't reasonably work from home. In many ways that was a lack of preparedness by IT departments, but to some degree it was also a lack of generally available and well developed services. Skype worked pretty well for phone calls in 2007, but it wasn't a MS product yet, so it would have been much more of an adventure to conference call a bunch of people for all hands meetings an the like.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      I think by the time I joined my current company we were using Bluejeans but it wouldn't have been around in 2007 and not sure what was in place before. 2007 you'd presumably have mostly been using an audio conference solution and emailing files around. So it would have been clunky but the enterprise software company I work for could have presumably made things work but with more friction. Certainly I was mostly working from the road or at home by then. I wouldn't have been out of commission for 4 months assuming working physical IT infrastructure.
    - DebtDeflation 3y ago
      WebEx was founded in 1995 and I recall using it at work long before Cisco acquired them in 2007. Even back in the late 1990s where I worked all managers were given a (voice) conference bridge number to use to set up conference calls. Outlook Web Access was first released in 1997. The first iPhone came out in 2007 and the first Android in 2008. WiFi was becoming fairly ubiquitous by 2003 and 3G by 2008. If people were unable to work from home during Sandy (late 2012) it was either due to an incompetent IT department or the fact that the hurricane knocked out power and internet.
- mistersquid 3y ago
  > I sometimes like to ask provocatively "What would have happened had COVID happened 25 years ago?" This is not nearly, to my mind, as interesting as the question "Was COVID the direct beneficiary of 21st-century technology?" That is, would COVID have had the chance to spread intercontinentally without the benefit of affordable air travel which itself is the byproduct of workers enabled by cell phones, computers, and global economic trade? Furthermore, had mRNA vaccines been available 25 years ago, many more millions of people exposed to the first virulent strains of COVID would have died. The idea that workers would have been forced to RTO because WFH would not even be an option does not even rise to the level of fantasy, much less meaningful speculation.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Yes, there was more air travel than 25 years prior. Looks like a little under 2x. That's not nothing but's certainly not an order of magnitude. And mRNA vaccines were presumably not going to be available 25 years ago. So I don't see the evidence that, had COVID emerged from China in about 1996 (which it may not have done but see other related diseases), it would have had so much less impact. (And if that were really the case, we'd just have ignored it in the West and you'd still be working in an office.)
- TuringNYC 3y ago
  >> I think the answer was that most office workers would have struggled to work. I worked at a large asset management company during Hurricane Sandy's arrival in NYC. Ocean water was dumped into lower manhattan and many buildings' elevators shorted out from the salt-water. Also, so many buildings had the same issue at the same time that we had a 3-mo queue for replacement parts. We didnt go to the office for 4 months. No work was done. At the time, most of the staff didnt have VPN. Virtual jump boxes were tried but the latency was too low. Ultimately almost all staff except accounting/etc were "off"
- lesuorac 3y ago
  I think one thing missed by most comments is the night-shift. Some people I knew that had to use tools that were not available at home did so "off-hours" so that there was a smaller cohort of people in a confined space at the same time.
- Cacti 3y ago
  20 years ago most of us would be dead.
Spivak 3y ago
And invest in them for the whole office instead of them being limited to specific departments. Like it used to be that only sales got Zoom licenses because they were on calls with remote customers, only devs got access to Slack everyone else was on Teams/Outlook. The pandemic made everyone build out the infrastructure for work anywhere. It's got to be in the top 5 advancements in the information age that obviates so much waste moving people back and forth to office buildings and execs desperately want to go back for some strange reason.

wcunning 3y ago

It's been a "fun" time in Detroit lately. The Big 3 have been forcing people back into the office some, with increasingly shrill demands. Last year, GM required us to come back 3 days a week, you pick the days. Managers looked at that, listened to employees and it was quickly 2 days, then they weren't enforcing it at the HR level at all, so it was no days. Until suddenly in December, after a bit of a struggling year, we got an email (at the same time as our managers and senior managers, make of that what you will) that they had actually been tracking badge swipes in aggregate and that we would all be returning to the office 3 days a week, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday starting the second week in January. Then it got delayed two weeks because there literally weren't enough seats for everyone, much less seats in the building you were assigned to, much less parking, much less parking for the building you were assigned to. And wouldn't you know it, about 6 years ago, GM had moved to "hoteling" or "hot desking" with an intentional 90% capacity for the number of people assigned to the building, but the COVID hiring binge hit us too, so now there were main buildings with as low as 60% capacity for the number of people assigned. Then, we got an updated email, some teams were going to come back a few weeks later, so that IT and facilities would have enough time to fix problems as they arose and get desks setup, etc. Then we had an ugly winter storm. Then it got delayed another two weeks. Now it's the second week in February. Order, followed by counter order, equals disorder. Isn't RTO fun guys?

Liquix 3y ago
> Now it's the second week in February. They're even trying to force time travelers back into the office? Grim
- wcunning 3y ago
  No, my bad for the phrasing, they've pushed the first day you have to RTO out to the second week in February due to the lack of seats in my building. Should have been tomorrow for me, but we got the update today at 4:30.
- FalconSensei 3y ago
  It's kinda obvious what they meant if you have some reading comprehension and basic logic

Zacharias030 3y ago

This article simply doesn’t reflect my personal experience. I‘m rather at the beginning of my career, but feel like personal growth, enjoyment and satisfaction with the work is much higher when I go to the office and when my colleagues do the same (we have full freedom to never do though).

ghaff 3y ago
Onboarding, new hires, even teams getting together when possible/practical some of the time are the things I hear even from execs who are generally supportive of letting people continue to work from home whenever they want to. I happen to be on a very distributed team and the person I'm mentoring lives in a different city anyway, so it's impractical for me. But I'd actually go into an office now and then if it were convenient and I'd know people there.
shrimp_emoji 3y ago
I'm also at the beginning, and I started right when COVID hit. :D To me, it seems like an intense gray. There are upsides and downsides to both in-person and remote, and they balance each other out almost perfectly. I have a great home situation, though (it's better than my office physically), and most of my coworkers are older than I am, so they're less keen on interpersonal connection and rarely ever go to the office.
- sonya-ai 3y ago
  I'm the same as you, having the option is necessary for those like me who prefer remote
Spivak 3y ago
And that's what WFA's whole thing is. We have an office, come in if you like -- we have snacks, high speed internet, and (hopefully) fewer distractions. It's where it's forced everyone in some fixed days a week 1-5 that eliminates most of the benefit of actually working anywhere.
- 3y ago

pdimitar 3y ago

Here's what the ever-so-helpful CNN is giving me when I visit it: Browser Blocked We apologize, but your web browser is configured in such a way that it is preventing this site from implementing required components that protect your privacy and allow you to view and change your privacy settings. This functionality is required for privacy legislation in your region. We recommend you use a different browser or disable the “EasyList Cookie” filter from your “Content Filtering” settings (found under “Settings” -> “Shields” in the Brave Browser). How sleazy can their language get?

fulladder 3y ago
"We can't protect your privacy because you are using one or more privacy extensions..."
- pdimitar 3y ago
  "We can't violate your privacy while lying to you that we're protecting it, because you are using one or more privacy extensions". Fixed. :P Using sleazy language should be punishable by hanging at the end of the same day.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  Hahaha. Hey, we're supposed to be in charge of "protecting" your privacy (i.e., deciding how much we want you to have). You can't take it into your own hands; our shaky profit motive will tank!
brycewray 3y ago
How about this one? Same problem? https://lite.cnn.com/2024/01/22/opinions/remote-work-jobs-bergen/index.html https://lite.cnn.com/2024/01/22/opinions/remote-work-jobs-be...
- pdimitar 3y ago
  Oh, that one actually works. Thank you!

fulladder 3y ago

This subject has been discussed to death, especially on this site. There's no new information about this debate. The first issue seems to be that front line managers see WFH making them irrelevant, and this is bubbling up to senior management as "company can't do X because no one is in the office." Separately, you have a large contingent of workers who really prefer working in the office at least some days. Lastly, senior management came of age in a pre-Internet era and it's hard for them to imagine any work getting done if people are not physically in the office. These factors together seem to be conspiring to cause companies to try to solve a non-problem related to the physical location of the work activities. This will gradually sort itself out as companies come up with better ways to measure performance, but the transition period has been a bit rocky so far.

JohnMakin 3y ago
Also, don't forget the trillions in real estate $ that are tied to increasingly less valuable assets as people don't RTO.
DylanBohlender 3y ago
I think it's interesting to see an article like this every couple of weeks. The way I view it is that we're watching the five stages of grief (with regard to the "death of the office") play out in real time, at population scale. At first it was denial - "everyone will be back in the office eventually!" Then it was anger - "you will RTO or you will lose your job!" Now it seems like we've finally hit bargaining - "you'll come in 3 days per week, wait, 2 days, wait, special exception for the last week of every month". I wonder how long it goes on until we get to depression and acceptance?
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  Well, you may be waiting a while. Those "stages" models are fake news. Great myths have been built up around them, but they've never been validated. Anyone who works with grief can tell you, it won't work like that.
  - 3y ago

infotainment 3y ago

It’s interesting that remote schooling is generally viewed as a failure, but remote work is viewed the opposite way. Personally, I think the benefits of in-person apply equally to both.

bitcharmer 3y ago
Why would you even compare the two?
- infotainment 3y ago
  Why not? Both are things that are traditionally done in-person, but went remote during the pandemic.
  - isilofi 3y ago
    For kids, there is the necessity to learn to socially interact with other kids. Adults either do not have to learn that anymore, or are hopeless anyways and won't learn it ever.
    - infotainment 3y ago
      The second someone graduates college (usually around 22ish), they no longer need any social interaction? That strikes me as a fairly bold claim.
      - Covenant0028 3y ago
        Social interaction is not synonymous with the office. Adults can choose to socially interact with any group (family, friends, shared interests) that they want to. In theory kids can do the same too, but in practice, you'd need some set of adults to get all those kids into the same place somehow, another set of adults to supervise them so they are safe etc... at which point it becomes more efficient to combine this with schooling. Also with working adults, there is an explicit expectation of delivery. Both the employer and the employee knows of the consequences for performance or non-performance, and part of being an adult is that you are aware of those consequences and choose to behave accordingly. With kids, such expectations aren't realistic.

blueferret 3y ago

One of the services my current job provided during COVID was enabling remote work operations for client businesses. They still provide this. In 2022, they started talking about RTO. Then they tried to enforce it. People quit. They didn't let up.

rfwhyte 3y ago

The people pushing for "Return-to-office" are by and large people who have substantial portions of their personal wealth invested in commercial real estate. Most wealthy individuals hold at least some real estate in their portfolios, and commercial is much easier to invest in at scale than residential, so the wealthiest folks often have a sizeable chunk of their portfolio wrapped up in commercial real estate. This whole "Return-to-office" thing is a bare-faced lie, as it has absolutely nothing to do with "Productivity," "Creativity" or whatever other BS these people are spewing, and EVERYTHING to do with shoring up the value of their commercial real estate holdings. It's a lot less PR friendly for them to be honest and say to their employees "You need to spend 2 hours a day in a car in traffic, whilst not being compensated for that time, so the office building I own doesn't lose value" though.

librish 3y ago
Do you have any source for this? It does not match my experience at all.
- throwaway-blaze 3y ago
  It may be less about personal wealth than decisions made about corporate real estate by the execs before the pandemic...T-Mobile US decided to renovate its corporate campus for north of $100mm just before the pandemic...the work completed during the pandemic and so starting last Sept it was RTO 3 days per week ... and your manager did get "badge swipe" reports, as did the chain up to the CEO.

tamimio 3y ago

The whole push back to the office was primarily from commercial landlords pushing these companies back, CEO pushed middle managers, middle managers pushed the workers. It was never about productivity or anything, it’s all about money, not for the companies but for the landlords.

adingus 3y ago

I constantly see people say RTO is driven by landlords but Ive never seen any data to back this up. Is there really any proof to this or is it just an opinion that's restated over and over? For context, I work remotely and will never return to an office unless I'm at risk of losing my house.

CapstanRoller 3y ago
RTO is driven by the inertia of economies of cities themselves. What happens when office workers no longer have to be in the office? What happens to the physical buildings, the people who maintain them, the local businesses who serve the office workers (e.g. lunch), etc? There are many knock-on effects. WFH, on a large scale, is forcing us to rethink the concept of cities, suburbs, infrastructure, housing, transit, telecom, etc. The fact that WFH has been shown to be viable on a large scale indicates that we are probably going to experience a massive societal shift at all levels. A shift to where? No one knows yet.

qgin 3y ago

There are companies that hired distributed teams over the past few years. When everyone was remote, the geographic makeup of the team didn't matter. But now many of those same companies are forcing employees back "the office" which ends up being the employee's local office. Where they proceed to work remotely with their distributed team from "the office". They've badged in, they're in an official office space, but the actual mechanics of work are still just as remote as they ever were.

guilhas 3y ago

Most companies would save money getting reducing, or rid of the office space, as some did after covid Most companies advertising jobs, have remote positions now I don't see a RTO movement, I think they are experimenting what works best, trying to get a balance. But their processes have not evolved enough to include remote workers Software development tasks are hard to estimate. How can a company, without being too invasive, make sure a employee is not underworked or overworked?

insane_dreamer 3y ago
> Software development tasks are hard to estimate. How can a company, without being too invasive, make sure a employee is not underworked or overworked? how do you do it when in person other than walking around and checking that people aren't playing minesweeper instead of coding? (OK, there is the social pressure to at least look like you're coding in case someone glances at your screen, but that doesn't mean you're actually getting anything done. Of course for people who slack off, WFH is a great enabler -- and that indeed is a problem.)
- guilhas 3y ago
  Not by what they're doing. But you can definetly try access their mental state, stressed, relaxed.. Water cooler talk "hey everything alright with you?"

exodust 3y ago

This in particular: "to say nothing about the reduced pollution and energy consumption that comes from fewer commuters" In my case the office is a 50 min drive away and my car is a 6 cylinder petrol engine. I've been WFH since 2020 so 4 years worth of car fumes prevented. Savings on fuel, tolls and commute time. 100 minutes driving per day x 250 work days x 4 years = 1,666 driving hours prevented. I like driving but driving to work is the worst kind of driving.

incomingpain 3y ago

Return to the office is a funny one. These big corps spent ridiculous amounts of cash building and furnishing a massive office building just to have it empty? What about their vanity of their business' shrine? But worse, if they decided to sell. Who in the world can buy their vanity building? Everyone else has the same problem. Governments also came in and restrict you from using the building for other purposes. So you cant sell to someone who might make use out of it. So you might as well try to force people back into the building, but go softly because the last people you want to lose are the first to leave.