9 ms·

Remote work won, don't let anyone gaslight you to believe otherwise

157 points by rwmj 3y ago

nimbius 3y ago
you arent being gaslit, but you also take the time to understand the rules of the game you were trying to "win." there is a 1.2 trillion dollar corporate real estate debt bubble caused by speculative investing during COVID that absolutely cannot be allowed to crash in 2024. its so monumentally important the president of the united states even threw his weight behind it in symbolic gesture (arguably because he and his friends have investment portfolios they dont want to see take a haircut in a recession) https://www.hrdive.com/news/mandatory-return-to-office-400k-federal-workers-jan-2024/701619/ https://www.hrdive.com/news/mandatory-return-to-office-400k-... remote work means the death of major cities and a cascade failure of major economic sectors that are barely back after covid as it is. once office space cant be leased the property holders will declare bankruptcy. states then get hit with budget shortfalls as tax revenue is lost, small businesses and service industries in the cities fall apart and the unemployment rate rises, urban blight sets in and an entire legion of major real estate spends 20 years moribund and zombified, with bankrupt property holdings and trusts owning most of the decayed ruins as crime rises. Think cabrini green and watts during the mid eighties. All those Erewhon, whole foods and trader joes will turn into boarded window crack houses and garrisons for gang warfare. make no mistake, your relative comfort will be exchanged for the status quo, its just a matter of when not if. the president even earmarked 10bn dollars as a sign of goodwill to the landed gentry in order to "remodel" downtown high rises from commercial to residential, although anyone with even a cursory understanding of how real estate and development works (including the biden administration) understands this will almost certainly be pocketed to pay near-term creditors and stave off immediate foreclosures of properties instead. to prevent something like this you'd have to have an administration that could act against its vested interests as a ruling class in order to secure a more verdant employment for you (and you probably wont find that in the gerontocracy.) the current fight isnt remote-vs-office, its a fight to get a handful of major companies still "hybrid" and "remote" to toe the line. Whether this happens in time to avert a real estate crisis is yet to be seen, but it hasnt made much headway in 2023, so theres not a lot of incentive to think 2024 will differ.
- madsbuch 3y ago
  This is why we can't have nice things – and also anti-capitalistic behavior. If the market see no need for commercial real-estate in cities, it ought to bankrupt. That is the free market. Forcing people to work from an office in order to plan for economic outcomes could be deemed plan-economy - the US communism (How ironic).
- chasd00 3y ago
  > there is a 1.2 trillion dollar corporate real estate debt bubble caused by speculative investing during COVID that absolutely cannot be allowed to crash in 2024 Total BS. Total.bs. Forcing people back to the office won’t make bad investments good. The bank bailouts of 2008/9 are still fresh enough wounds that another one is not on the table. Inflation finally going down also underlines that point. No money printing is on the table either. The bubble will pop and the investors will lose their money and the stone will continue to roll.
- lsy 3y ago
  > All those Erewhon, whole foods and trader joes will turn into boarded window crack houses and garrisons for gang warfare. This seems a little hysterical. Cities functioned extremely well, perhaps even better, before the advent of lengthy car commutes, office work, and mass commercial real estate. The businesses you mention - grocery stores - aren't even usually patronized by commuters, and their recent appearance in city centers has been precipitated by downtowns shifting from commercial-only blight to round-the-clock mixed use, something that will only accelerate as downtowns are liberated from massive buildings that sit empty 2/3 of the day, small businesses that have to shut down at 6pm and all weekend, and peaky congestion that requires all facilities to overinvest in capacity to handle a couple of hours on weekdays with much lower usage otherwise. Anyone who has walked around the ghost town of SF's financial district on a Sunday should know CRE is not conducive to vibrant city life.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  Vore for a different president.
  - 3y ago
fullshark 3y ago
The economics are undeniable. I also think it means wages will not grow meaningfully for knowledge workers in urban locales, so you almost have no choice but to go remote and move to a LCOL area to increase your real income.
- quonn 3y ago
  Unless you want to live in an area where entertainment and restaurants and specialized healthcare and all the other good things are plentiful.
  - skrebbel 3y ago
    Yep, that stuff only exists in New York, London and the SF Bay Area. St Louis, Eindhoven and Bordeaux do not have hospitals, good restaurants and entertainment.
    - refulgentis 3y ago
      no
    - voidwtf 3y ago
      Metro areas are more expensive than rural areas. No reason to jump to extremes.
      - skrebbel 3y ago
        Fair. But in the context of remote tech work, SFBA salaries & costs of living is usually what’s being compared to, and you can get all that stuff in places that are not rural at all (such as the cities I mentioned) at a way lower cost of living.
  - keenmaster 3y ago
    I don’t know why you’re being downvoted, this is true. However, as a suburbanite, I have no problem “commuting” to entertainment in the city once every weekend, when previously I had to commute 5 times a week for work. And when I go to the city, it’s a day full of fun/activities because I know I’m not coming back for a week. You can get the best of both worlds that way.
Solvency 3y ago
No one is being gaslit. They're being forced to return against their volition. Everyone is aware of the ruse.
- mlhpdx 3y ago
  Many people are being told “you work better in the office“ by their leadership. If that’s not gaslighting I’m not sure what it is.
  - Solvency 3y ago
    I'm saying they're not falling for it. They're returning because they have to. Not because they believe they're more productive there.
    - mlhpdx 3y ago
      I think of the word in the context of the attempt, rather than the outcome. We agree on the situation, but I do think folks are “falling for it” as they are the storyline of job scarcity (also pure BS as we sit, though it may become true).
  - boredemployee 3y ago
    yep. A few of us meet once a week in a shared office, and those who can't always attend are somehow ridiculed by one of the founders. I think this is idiotic, why hire people from hundreds of kilometers away then?
  - voidwtf 3y ago
    I think you’re both right, they’re attempting to gaslight people but everyone actually on the ground knows the truth. They’re saving time and money while accomplishing all the same goals.
- voidwtf 3y ago
  All the commercial real estate “gurus” are looking quite foolish now with all the assets they can’t unload or refinance. If someone tells you the party is going to last forever, they’re a fool. Look at Airbnb “gurus” too, they priced themselves out. It’s cheaper to stay at a hotel now.
seydor 3y ago
Office work is weird
- xbar 3y ago
  This might be a matter of perspective.
nextlevelwizard 3y ago
No doubt. But at least bow people can drop the “working hard act”. We all know how little you guys work. Previously people would take new tasks on weekly basis, now every single task takes the whole sprint. And no, there is nothing that can be done since labor laws haven’t been updated and most likely won’t be before we hit AGI. I just wish I could coast like my colleagues or had the balls to start another job on the side
- teaearlgraycold 3y ago
  I’m good at asserting myself at work. I’m no workaholic and no company man. But I like to get a lot done and move quickly. Like how some people actually enjoy running. So I went to a seed stage startup.
  - nextlevelwizard 3y ago
    I wouldn’t call myself a workaholic either. I do my 38 hours and be done, but often it feels like there is couple people who do all of the work and then bunch of free loaders who struggle with any task for weeks just because they know they can get away with it
    - teaearlgraycold 3y ago
      You shouldn’t envy people who are slacking. If it’s causing you trouble then it sounds like a management issue. Or maybe you just want to slack off, in which case you should.
      - nextlevelwizard 3y ago
        Just more that when you get replaced by AI it should not come as a surprise
- echelon 3y ago
  I really got this sense at my last job. Folks became emboldened to do way less work. Or take on busy work and proclaim it as important. Previously you'd see lots of people hanging around at the office at 8 and 9 PM still working, often even white boarding solutions and having meetings. In WFH, you'd never see folks online and responses would take time. Sprint productivity definitely dropped. I think WFH == work 20 hours or less for a whole lot of people. We had hundreds of people tenured 6 - 10 years at the place, and they immediately started dropping and finding other work. I'm now at a startup and we're working nights and weekends. It's a much better environment. WFH is going to calcify and sink a lot of companies.
Galanwe 3y ago
"Remote won", but I did not know there was a war? Am I being gaslighted? I do prefer in-office work by a huge margin, to the point where working remotely or having more than a few colleagues remote would be a no go for me.
- nextlevelwizard 3y ago
  You can’t be having those opinions! It is illegal to nit like full remote work around these parts
- malux85 3y ago
  I think the whole thing is working out great, people with bad attitudes and/or outdated views of the world are self filtering!
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  The issue is the amount of money spent on commercial restate leases and maintaining space is quite high. Once upon a time people thought “hey if we could let people use their phones instead of a corporate blackberry we could save like $5mm a year!” BYOD was born. Now, as passions cool and leases come up for renewal, they’ll look quite hard at the hundred million spent on real estate per year. Most companies compute a per head occupancy cost. I know for banks on walls street it was $30,000/person/year before 2020. With hybrid that’s becoming nearly $60,000/person/year because the people only occupy the seat half the time. Thats eye watering numbers. It’s going to be increasingly hard to justify without concrete returns on investment. “I prefer,” “serendipity,” “corporate values,” “think of the children’s careers,” etc only have weight for so long. Right now there are enterprising finance directors preparing slides to help secure their next promotion proposing eliminating most office space once tax agreements and leases expire. Boards will see a nice uptick in EPS as the conclusion of that deck, and when the almost retired CEO starts lamenting the loss of the way they grew up, they’ll buy them a horse and buggy whip and shut down the office. This will pale compared to the wage savings they’ll reap when they level the wage distribution nationally. There’s no reason to pay inflated rates for Bay Area or New York City employees, beyond the very few that are genuinely differentiated. It has nothing to do with preference at the end of the day. And there will likely be some much smaller offices for people who really insist on working in an office. But for most people it’ll just be a thing of the past
hasty_pudding 3y ago
Remote work to Asian and Latin American subsidaries won.
- srackey 3y ago
  This is the real answer. Hope you guys like competing with folks making $30k!
  - seydor 3y ago
    or they re competing with folks making $150k
- xbar 3y ago
  This. The looming commercial real estate economic catastrophe aside, everyone who fought to keep work remote fought for the opportunity to compete directly in a global wage market. BuzzFeed-journalists enjoy sniping middle managers-as-petty-autocrats from the peanut gallery in a "fight the power!" attitude using gender-war headline bait, but I expect zoomer MBAs still living in their grandparents basements into their 40s, overseeing the cheapest possible globally remote gen alpha ICs and AIs, are going to do just fine.
david927 3y ago
What this means though, is that a financial apocalypse is looming in commercial real estate and it will be followed by contagion in residential.
- rwmj 3y ago
  Definitely agree on the first point (although maybe not "apocalypse"), but why would that affect residential?
  - voidwtf 3y ago
    Property taxes will have to skyrocket to compensate for the lost tax revenue in many cities. Whether we like to admit it or not, the infrastructure costs are a shared cost and if we lose a lot of commercial tax revenue that was indirectly gathered from residents, it will have to be gathered directly from residents. Increased property taxes will push people on the margins out and compound the issue while also decreasing real-estate value.
    - chasd00 3y ago
      You’re trying to scare people into thinking another real estate crisis on the scale of 2008/2009 is looming. Stop. The commercial real estate market is a fraction of the residential real estate market. Further, actual local businesses in communities are benefiting from WFH workers.
      - voidwtf 3y ago
        I didn’t say that. I don’t see how businesses in these commercial areas do not suffer, and I don’t see how that does not translate into job losses, and I don’t see how this combination does not result in lost tax revenue. WFH likely means people spend less on gas and eating out. This is one of the benefits touted by WFH proponents, myself included. I am spending at least $300 less a month since WFH. Yes I’m certain some tax revenue shifted to the city I live in, but it definitely shifted away from the city my office was in.
      - 3y ago
lopkeny12ko 3y ago
Employee productivity is at an all time low. Low performers are being laid off left and right (see: Google, Discord, Etsy, Salesforce, ...). Tell me again how remote work is "winning"?
- brigadier132 3y ago
  There were people that weren't doing shit at google even when they went into the office every day.
- jmac01 3y ago
  "Employee productivity is at an all time low" is quite the statement without facts and figures. Do you have any proof?
  - lopkeny12ko 3y ago
    Yes. See: https://layoffs.fyi https://layoffs.fyi
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      Did you really prescribe to the narrative that these companies that doubled, tripled, or more in size over the pandemic are laying off people because "no one wwants to work anymore?" That website shows that it's easier to find a company that did NOT layoff in the last 12 months. Seeing all these company statements on "focusing on core products" as justification as they cancel products and entire product lines suggests fear in the market instead of complaints about their labor.
- the_gastropod 3y ago
  You’re probably being downvoted here because you’re ascribing to remote work what is more sensibly ascribed to interest rate hikes. As far as I know, most evidence points to there being no difference in productivity between remote and in-office workers.
- chasd00 3y ago
brigadier132 3y ago
My biggest problem with the RTO argument is that it's not quantitative. Give me the numbers not the feels. If you are a massive company, by allowing full remote you could be saving hundreds of millions of dollars on real estate, office upkeep, electricity, etc. You can recruit employees from all over the country so your access to talent is superior and you can afford to pay talent less. These benefits are easy to analyze, it's just a massive amount of money and time being saved. Now to go to the less tangible benefits that don't necessarily positively impact the business itself, employees can live in cheaper cost of living areas and actually have the ability to one day own property. Massive reductions in carbon emissions because of 0 commute. Massive time savings for employees because of 0 commute that they can then use to spend more time with family or friends, exercise, or sleep more (all of which could lead to healthier employees). Oh, and they will actually be able to live close to family since they will not need to move to a different state / city. There will be much more efficient use of space, office space is basically redundant when employees can work from home. This freed up space could be used for housing which we desperately need. I'm sure I could come up with a million more benefits of wfh. To advocate for return to office you need to make all these logical leaps that somehow being together in person will result in us making more money than what we save from being remote and is better for employees somehow.
- voidwtf 3y ago
  The number of companies with a large holding or commercial real estate is staggering. Entire buildings were built as investments for companies who are not in the real estate/development business.
  - madsbuch 3y ago
    I think this is the joker. If enough companies have vested interests in keeping real-estate prices high in the cities it will happen.
    - mech422 3y ago
      Also, tax breaks... Notice how many jobs in Texas are on-site only? Texas is aggressively enforcing the tax deals they had with companies to have XX% of their workforce on site, spending money locally to keep the tax benefit.
deleted 3y ago
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chasd00 3y ago
Listened to an episode of the “The Daily” podcast on what they called hybrid malaise about 15 min ago. It was so obviously biased toward RTO I was yelling at the radio and my wife had to tell me to calm down. Gaslighting was exactly what they were doing with things like “you’re not going to get promoted unless you go back to the office” and “when looking for workers to layoff the ones remote are the first to go “ etc. really pissed me off because some people will take the podcasters seriously and not see the manipulative motive behind them.
- 0l 3y ago
  And what exactly is the manipulative motive behind them?
  - rwmj 3y ago
    (1) RTO can be used as an excuse to fire employees, especially the older, higher paid ones who moved away from city centres or are reluctant to move back. (2) People have investments in commercial real-estate, and forcing RTO is a way to profit from those investments even if it immiserates the workers (article discusses this point). (3) Cities offer tax breaks to encourage businesses to move, on the basis that the workers will use ancillary services (transport, restaurants, shopping, etc). If the tax breaks go that will negatively affect the companies. If the ancillary service businesses go that will negatively affect the city's revenues. (4) Bad middle managers feel they lack control if a worker isn't present.
    - 0l 3y ago
      Good points, but I thought OP was saying that the NYT had a manipulative motive, and not the employers.
1propionyl 3y ago
Reading about this subject on this site feels like having fallen into the twilight zone. No one I know working outside of tech is even close to this in their attitudes towards remote work. Nowhere else is anyone who disagrees "gaslighting". Nowhere else is this all a "plot by commercial real estate". Most want the flexibility to work remotely when they need to (or a few days a week), but prefer working alongside their coworkers for a variety of reasons. The complaints about entire divisions or floors being ghost towns and it being impossible to find the person for help with something are perennial. I know there's some selection bias in who comments on the topic, but I think there's more to it: most people here work in a context where they take a ticket, work on it, etc with ideally minimal synchronization points or meetings. Of all forms of work it's among the most well suited (there are others) to working remotely. Not to mention the absolutely horrific Bay Area commutes. I don't blame you all. But have some humility. You don't represent the norm in work.
- seydor 3y ago
  > Most want the flexibility to work remote I think it's because the tech people are young and single/live alone. Many people need the office to separate life from work and dont prefer remote. It has a lot to do with the fact that lives are built around tiny real estate.
- xbar 3y ago
  I hope you mean on "this site" you mean on the author's site, because it is complete twilight zone, even relative to HN.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  I mean, its not much different on general communities. It may be a bubble, but it's much larger than HN. May be one of the bigger generational divides. if you grew up with the internet and are used to navigating it to fill technical, social, and personal gaps, you can see RTO as a waste of efficiency. Regardless of the industry. Meanwhile if you work with folk who struggle to plug something into a USB, you may be more inclined to simply be there in person, for multiple reasons. But of course, any online discussion will be full of somewhat tech saavy users, at the very least ones comfortable enough to browse and post on social media.
jmyeet 3y ago
I really hope people let what happened in the last few years sink in. We had a global pandemic. Government spending had a massive impact on eviscerating poverty, raising some 11.2 million Americans out of poverty [1]. To keep companies afloat and to avoid the healthcare system collapsing, people stayed indoors and worked from home. Many took pay cuts or loss of benefits to do this. A lot of people realized they didn't need to go into the office at all and they could have a substantial improvement in the quality of life by not wasting hours a day in a car and/or moving somewhere more affordable. Demand did drop in 2020/2021 but it came roaring back and companies saw an ppportunity to recoup lost profits with predatory price incresaes. They saw massive profits and inflation shot through the roof as a result [2]. To compare to the oil shock of the 1970s, Nixon instituted price and wage freezes to stave off shock inflation [3]. The Fed responded to inflation by raising interest rates. They government had a far more effective tool available: corporate taxation. Some countries like Spain instituted a windfall profits tax. Taxes fill government coffers. Interest rates enrich bankers. Certain workers gained wage increases in the pandemic as they were essential. Inflation eroded much of this and employers took further opportunity to suppress or claw back wage incresaes through layoffs. Layoffs increase the workload of those workers who remain and reduce the ability for workers to demand wage increses, even cost-of-living adjustments. Return to office mandates are soft layoffs. They're cheaper too since if people quit they don't get a severance payout. The only effective wage increases gained during the pandemic were through labor organization, such as with the UAW and the Big Three automakers. So here are the lessons to draw: 1. Government policy exists almost entirely to transfer wealth from the poor to the already wealthy; 2. Employers are not your friends. You owe them absolutely no loyalty. In fact, given the trend to rescinding job offers, I would strongly advise people not to quit their job before starting their new one. Just don't show up. Two weeks notice is a courtesy not a legal or even contractual requirement. "At will" employment goes both ways. 3. Government spending is a way to redistribute wealth from the ultra-wealthy to the poor and it is incredibly effective. Post-GFC we've had many countries operate with austerity measures. This is simply propaganda to stop this wealth transfer. 4. Greed is the primary driver in inflation. Taxation would at least allow the government to help those worst affected; 5. Companies use layoffs and return to office mandates to suppress your wages; and 6. The only effective counter to wage suppression is labor organization ie unions. [1]: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/09/who-was-lifted-out-of-poverty-by-stimulus-payments.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/09/who-was-lifte... [2]: https://thehill.com/business/economy/4057722-greedflation-is-the-new-inflation-as-corporate-profits-balloon-report/ https://thehill.com/business/economy/4057722-greedflation-is... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock#:~:text=Nixon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock#:~:text=Nixon
photochemsyn 3y ago
Did worker bees escape from the corporation's office-based system of control, or did they just bring the corporation into their home? > "First, a little background. Monitoring software programs entered the workplace a decade or so ago and initially were popular in call centers and warehouses. Fast forward to 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the monitoring industry exploded as employers in nearly every sector saw an urgent need to monitor employees who were suddenly working from home." https://www.ourmidland.com/opinion/voices/article/Opinion-Employee-surveillance-software-can-be-17671757.php https://www.ourmidland.com/opinion/voices/article/Opinion-Em... Saving time and energy on commuting is an undeniably positive benefit, but IMO the optimal remote-work situation is in a separate space from one's home, ideally a walkable local office space with its own dedicated network and power.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
I've grown pretty tired of these kinds of missives that are so one-sided that they don't even attempt to do an honest "pros/cons" look at widespread remote work. For me, I certainly agree with all of his noted pros: less time wasted in traffic, more flexibility especially for working parents, and even some things he didn't mention, like fewer distractions when you need "heads down" time. Even before the pandemic I always preferred working from home when I knew I just needed a long stretch of coding time, and things like huge open-plan offices terrified me. I also agree that RTO plans are largely useless; you often just get the "people come in and then just spend half their time on Zoom because some colleagues are still remote" dynamic. But I do worry about the long-term effects of so much remote work, primarily: 1. When I was new in my career, I learned a ton just "through osmosis" by being around more experienced colleagues. I also built good relationship and friendships early in my work career (to be honest, I always felt kind of sad for people who took the "colleagues aren't your friends" mindset. Perhaps not all of them, but why not make friends with people you spend a lot of time with?) I certainly understand married people with kids and with well-developed friend groups being much more happier with remote work, but I think it's much harder to develop those relationships in the first place if you start out remote from the get go. 2. I really worry about overall isolation, and also an increase in polarization. We used to talk about the loss of "third spaces" when countries became much less religious, and now we're seeing the loss of that "second space" (the office) as well. I go into the office multiple times a week just because I get stir crazy staying in my house all the time. The average number of people I have contact with in any week is way, way down, and that doesn't help my tendency toward depression. In other words, yes, I agree that remote work has won, but given that, I think it's a good time to focus on ameliorating the negatives.
- smarmgoblin 3y ago
  Totally agree that these are issues worth thinking about and mitigating. One thing I’ve started doing at work is documenting workflows in various ways: not just docs but talks and screencasts where a new engineer could see my workflow. (I also give new engineers advice to keep a digital notebook! I still learn tons by doing this.) For the isolation bit I just wonder what we will see replacing that. It’s possible we never see anything and everyone just deals with it but I hope shared office spaces or something similar picks up. I get plenty of socialization elsewhere but little breaks in the workday to not focus on productivity and just chitchat were nice and maybe important some days.
fuzzy2 3y ago
And yet technology surrounding remote work has failed us, curious. Bad internet, bad software, bad hardware, the holy trinity of communication enshittification. I can code anywhere and I can text anywhere just fine. 1:1 calls work more often than not. But boy do I abhor remote workshops. They suck in every way possible, and even in some previously thought impossible!
- rwmj 3y ago
  Yup, no one has really solved the virtual conference yet. It's a massive opportunity for whoever figures it out.
- madsbuch 3y ago
  In all honesty, in person workshops are also not very good...
  - fuzzy2 3y ago
    I'm sorry to hear you feel that way. I participated in many "offline" workshops and most of them were great. They allow for real debate by offering the full range of human communication. I never once had the same experience in a remote or hybrid workshop.
heads 3y ago
Well if you were working in “endless cubicle farms” and “wasting your lives in traffic” then, yes, removing those two things from your life is a smart thing to do. Being socially isolated from the other members of your team and only having VC is, in my mind, just as poor of an alternative. Imagine instead if you and (the majority of) your colleagues came to work by cycling for 20 minutes through green pastures, parks, under willow trees along the river, and through the centre of one of the most famous historic towns in England. That’s what we do here in Cambridge. We also do not operate a cubicle farm. Our office is spacious, filled with breakout spaces, relaxation spots, a library (aka quiet room), VC equipped rooms of all sizes, with a mini- and a maxi-kitchen and free snacks and meals. We come and go as we please with two days a week all together and frequently other in-office days for sub teams too, agreed by consensus not fiat. I often work at home in the morning or go home after lunch for the afternoon if I need uninterrupted focus / maker time. We have a personal IT budget for our home offices so I don’t need to cycle with my laptop (which btw is an Ubuntu Dell XPS, because our IT team know what they’re doing — you can have a MacBook if you insist.) Cambridge has gigabit fibre which is handy when pushing and pulling models from the A100 machines in our remote data centre. We still allow people to be as remote as they want and we also have a satellite office in London. It is rare though for the core eng team to not see each other in person for more than five days on the trot. It’s just so much more productive to build and plan stuff in person around a whiteboard, with pair programming, or in a war room.
- ToxicMegacolon 3y ago
  [dead]
wombatpm 3y ago
Back in the 00’s I worked for a fortune 300 company. My day consisted of working with sales (always remote), executives (always traveling), and operations (distributed across the country). My day consisted of conferences calls, emails and accessing files on the network. The only reason needed to be in the office was to answer the phone and use the network. One cellphone and vnc running on a spare desktop I really didn’t need to be there. In office is a waste of time and money.
legitster 3y ago
Unrelated, can we stop using the term "gaslight" so much? It hit out collective lexicon so hard and has been rubbed of any meaning. Just use lie, mislead, or any other more accurate but less trendy words.
- maximus-decimus 3y ago
  It's not the same though. Saying "I have a girlfriend, she just lives in Canada" is a lie. Pointing at a blue pen and saying "this is a red pen" is gaslighting.
  - caddemon 3y ago
    That's his point though, 95% of the time people say "gaslighting" now it's not the right term.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      I see it mostly used correctly, though? But I don't browse Twitter nor Tiktok. So that may be a factor I am spared from.
    - maximus-decimus 3y ago
      I only really browse here and I feel like it's used correctly. Either the bosses know you know they're lying about RTO or they just think we're idiots. When they kill people's teams and say "you're not fired, you just have to find another job yourself in the same company. You have 3 months." or "we're not firing you, we're just moving your job to the other side of the country and you have to work at the office." that's gaslighting. They're just trying to make you believe you're not fired so they don't have to pay you.
- prepend 3y ago
  I think it’s used correctly. I’ve asked this same question when leaders have had entire webinars about how awesome the office is and how nice it is to be back to work. I’m still not sure if their work life is just that different from mine, or they are super stupid, or they are gaslighting. It’s made worse as they interview 20 employees and every one of them talks about how much better the office is than remote. And then me and every coworker I know feels differently.
kamefrede 3y ago
I'm on team "it should be up to the employee to decide". I like the flexibility that remote work gives me, but at the same time I also enjoy going to the office because it forces me to get out of the house, and interact with people at the office. Admittedly, if I were full remote, I'd probably rent a desk at a co-working space, so I could get that office-like feeling.
- madsbuch 3y ago
  I think society converges to you last proposal: People get local co-working spaces. That is also for the employees advantage. Your social circles are not bound to your employment anymore and will outlive new jobs. However, this will also commoditise jobs even more as the main thing you need to change is the Zoom like you login to work weekly meetings, which is to a detriment for the employer.
chasing 3y ago
What won? There are different scenarios that work best for different people and organizations. Maybe remote work won as an option on the table, but it’s like saying “hamburgers won.” They’re a dinner option, one of a variety of solutions to the problem. The notable change is simply the expanding set of options available to employers and workers depending on their jobs, personal needs, costs, etc. Which is great!
jsyang00 3y ago
Great. Guess my manager is just trying to get one over on me. Let me stay home and see how it goes.
ta113500 3y ago
out of something like 20 year IT career, i only worked in office for 2 out of those 20. early in the career i definitely traded income for wfh option, but it was my choice, i also had to structure my life significantly around the requirements of wfh: i've never documented my home setup, but if you've read accounts of elaborate remote work setups, that people like stephen wolfram have, mine's pretty much the same. i have _lights_ for my conference calls. i never advocated for wfh though, and the last few years have convinced me that it is not an option that should be available to everyone: i have data to support the argument that for a certain type of worker productivity dropped somewhere between 20 and 40%. i've extracted that data out of repositories of the various companies i'm contracting for, so this is all obviously non publishable, but that's a research that anyone can do. my experience is with small to medium size business, 9-90 developers, where COVID essentially forced wfh, that was never corrected. and the productivity drop correlates with the overall initial productivity of the respective person. type-A developers, remote developer specialists had almost no perceptable drop. but the space fillers, the 9 to 5-ers, entire teams of them, who also account for the bulk of contributors, that is the main body of the company's workforce drop by 20-40%. there are also interesting outliers, people whose productivity dropped by something like 80-90%, i guess that's the silent quitter types. (i tried to control for as many things as possible, but of course you can't account for, for example, stylistic changes.)
Doomed2Repeat 3y ago
Winston, where did you go? The Telescreen can't see you now, and we need to monitor your every activity. Time for your exercises! I enjoy the present freedom snd flexibility of telework, but seriously this is a case of careful what you ask for, as some years into the near future you may be wishing you had never been allowing your corporate / government overlords into your once private spaces. And sure, we will be able to control all of that, just like the Goongles of the world would never be prying into every personal aspect of our lives, to their advantage. Utmost caution warranted!
mawadev 3y ago
I think we need a global register of home office friendly companies so we know which places to avoid, just to get the message across.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
"... don't let anyone gaslight you to believe otherwise" states website called "hottakes.space". Funny.
kledru 3y ago
It also won in places where it should not have won, as managers copy the practices across geographical locations. So, there are people who have chosen to live in the walking distance of office premises and never prepared for being forced to work from home...
hnarn 3y ago
I don’t like absolutes when talking about remote work. Multiple things can be true at once; for example that RTO is used by poor leadership to make it less obvious how badly they are managing operations and leading people, while accepting that four people working in the same room against a common goal is materially different and more efficient than four people in a remote meeting. The most obvious example to me when remote work is simply unsuitable is when it comes to onboarding. Being able to ask lots of low effort questions quickly to many different people and building an esprit de corps through eating and laughing together matters for long term success.

157 points by rwmj 3y ago

you arent being gaslit, but you also take the time to understand the rules of the game you were trying to "win." there is a 1.2 trillion dollar corporate real estate debt bubble caused by speculative investing during COVID that absolutely cannot be allowed to crash in 2024. its so monumentally important the president of the united states even threw his weight behind it in symbolic gesture (arguably because he and his friends have investment portfolios they dont want to see take a haircut in a recession) https://www.hrdive.com/news/mandatory-return-to-office-400k-federal-workers-jan-2024/701619/ https://www.hrdive.com/news/mandatory-return-to-office-400k-... remote work means the death of major cities and a cascade failure of major economic sectors that are barely back after covid as it is. once office space cant be leased the property holders will declare bankruptcy. states then get hit with budget shortfalls as tax revenue is lost, small businesses and service industries in the cities fall apart and the unemployment rate rises, urban blight sets in and an entire legion of major real estate spends 20 years moribund and zombified, with bankrupt property holdings and trusts owning most of the decayed ruins as crime rises. Think cabrini green and watts during the mid eighties. All those Erewhon, whole foods and trader joes will turn into boarded window crack houses and garrisons for gang warfare. make no mistake, your relative comfort will be exchanged for the status quo, its just a matter of when not if. the president even earmarked 10bn dollars as a sign of goodwill to the landed gentry in order to "remodel" downtown high rises from commercial to residential, although anyone with even a cursory understanding of how real estate and development works (including the biden administration) understands this will almost certainly be pocketed to pay near-term creditors and stave off immediate foreclosures of properties instead. to prevent something like this you'd have to have an administration that could act against its vested interests as a ruling class in order to secure a more verdant employment for you (and you probably wont find that in the gerontocracy.) the current fight isnt remote-vs-office, its a fight to get a handful of major companies still "hybrid" and "remote" to toe the line. Whether this happens in time to avert a real estate crisis is yet to be seen, but it hasnt made much headway in 2023, so theres not a lot of incentive to think 2024 will differ.

madsbuch 3y ago
This is why we can't have nice things – and also anti-capitalistic behavior. If the market see no need for commercial real-estate in cities, it ought to bankrupt. That is the free market. Forcing people to work from an office in order to plan for economic outcomes could be deemed plan-economy - the US communism (How ironic).
chasd00 3y ago
> there is a 1.2 trillion dollar corporate real estate debt bubble caused by speculative investing during COVID that absolutely cannot be allowed to crash in 2024 Total BS. Total.bs. Forcing people back to the office won’t make bad investments good. The bank bailouts of 2008/9 are still fresh enough wounds that another one is not on the table. Inflation finally going down also underlines that point. No money printing is on the table either. The bubble will pop and the investors will lose their money and the stone will continue to roll.
lsy 3y ago
> All those Erewhon, whole foods and trader joes will turn into boarded window crack houses and garrisons for gang warfare. This seems a little hysterical. Cities functioned extremely well, perhaps even better, before the advent of lengthy car commutes, office work, and mass commercial real estate. The businesses you mention - grocery stores - aren't even usually patronized by commuters, and their recent appearance in city centers has been precipitated by downtowns shifting from commercial-only blight to round-the-clock mixed use, something that will only accelerate as downtowns are liberated from massive buildings that sit empty 2/3 of the day, small businesses that have to shut down at 6pm and all weekend, and peaky congestion that requires all facilities to overinvest in capacity to handle a couple of hours on weekdays with much lower usage otherwise. Anyone who has walked around the ghost town of SF's financial district on a Sunday should know CRE is not conducive to vibrant city life.
shrimp_emoji 3y ago
Vore for a different president.
- 3y ago

fullshark 3y ago

The economics are undeniable. I also think it means wages will not grow meaningfully for knowledge workers in urban locales, so you almost have no choice but to go remote and move to a LCOL area to increase your real income.

quonn 3y ago
Unless you want to live in an area where entertainment and restaurants and specialized healthcare and all the other good things are plentiful.
- skrebbel 3y ago
  Yep, that stuff only exists in New York, London and the SF Bay Area. St Louis, Eindhoven and Bordeaux do not have hospitals, good restaurants and entertainment.
  - refulgentis 3y ago
    no
  - voidwtf 3y ago
    Metro areas are more expensive than rural areas. No reason to jump to extremes.
    - skrebbel 3y ago
      Fair. But in the context of remote tech work, SFBA salaries & costs of living is usually what’s being compared to, and you can get all that stuff in places that are not rural at all (such as the cities I mentioned) at a way lower cost of living.
- keenmaster 3y ago
  I don’t know why you’re being downvoted, this is true. However, as a suburbanite, I have no problem “commuting” to entertainment in the city once every weekend, when previously I had to commute 5 times a week for work. And when I go to the city, it’s a day full of fun/activities because I know I’m not coming back for a week. You can get the best of both worlds that way.

Solvency 3y ago

No one is being gaslit. They're being forced to return against their volition. Everyone is aware of the ruse.

mlhpdx 3y ago
Many people are being told “you work better in the office“ by their leadership. If that’s not gaslighting I’m not sure what it is.
- Solvency 3y ago
  I'm saying they're not falling for it. They're returning because they have to. Not because they believe they're more productive there.
  - mlhpdx 3y ago
    I think of the word in the context of the attempt, rather than the outcome. We agree on the situation, but I do think folks are “falling for it” as they are the storyline of job scarcity (also pure BS as we sit, though it may become true).
- boredemployee 3y ago
  yep. A few of us meet once a week in a shared office, and those who can't always attend are somehow ridiculed by one of the founders. I think this is idiotic, why hire people from hundreds of kilometers away then?
- voidwtf 3y ago
  I think you’re both right, they’re attempting to gaslight people but everyone actually on the ground knows the truth. They’re saving time and money while accomplishing all the same goals.
voidwtf 3y ago
All the commercial real estate “gurus” are looking quite foolish now with all the assets they can’t unload or refinance. If someone tells you the party is going to last forever, they’re a fool. Look at Airbnb “gurus” too, they priced themselves out. It’s cheaper to stay at a hotel now.

seydor 3y ago

Office work is weird

xbar 3y ago
This might be a matter of perspective.

nextlevelwizard 3y ago

No doubt. But at least bow people can drop the “working hard act”. We all know how little you guys work. Previously people would take new tasks on weekly basis, now every single task takes the whole sprint. And no, there is nothing that can be done since labor laws haven’t been updated and most likely won’t be before we hit AGI. I just wish I could coast like my colleagues or had the balls to start another job on the side

teaearlgraycold 3y ago
I’m good at asserting myself at work. I’m no workaholic and no company man. But I like to get a lot done and move quickly. Like how some people actually enjoy running. So I went to a seed stage startup.
- nextlevelwizard 3y ago
  I wouldn’t call myself a workaholic either. I do my 38 hours and be done, but often it feels like there is couple people who do all of the work and then bunch of free loaders who struggle with any task for weeks just because they know they can get away with it
  - teaearlgraycold 3y ago
    You shouldn’t envy people who are slacking. If it’s causing you trouble then it sounds like a management issue. Or maybe you just want to slack off, in which case you should.
    - nextlevelwizard 3y ago
      Just more that when you get replaced by AI it should not come as a surprise
echelon 3y ago
I really got this sense at my last job. Folks became emboldened to do way less work. Or take on busy work and proclaim it as important. Previously you'd see lots of people hanging around at the office at 8 and 9 PM still working, often even white boarding solutions and having meetings. In WFH, you'd never see folks online and responses would take time. Sprint productivity definitely dropped. I think WFH == work 20 hours or less for a whole lot of people. We had hundreds of people tenured 6 - 10 years at the place, and they immediately started dropping and finding other work. I'm now at a startup and we're working nights and weekends. It's a much better environment. WFH is going to calcify and sink a lot of companies.

Galanwe 3y ago

"Remote won", but I did not know there was a war? Am I being gaslighted? I do prefer in-office work by a huge margin, to the point where working remotely or having more than a few colleagues remote would be a no go for me.

nextlevelwizard 3y ago
You can’t be having those opinions! It is illegal to nit like full remote work around these parts
malux85 3y ago
I think the whole thing is working out great, people with bad attitudes and/or outdated views of the world are self filtering!
fnordpiglet 3y ago
The issue is the amount of money spent on commercial restate leases and maintaining space is quite high. Once upon a time people thought “hey if we could let people use their phones instead of a corporate blackberry we could save like $5mm a year!” BYOD was born. Now, as passions cool and leases come up for renewal, they’ll look quite hard at the hundred million spent on real estate per year. Most companies compute a per head occupancy cost. I know for banks on walls street it was $30,000/person/year before 2020. With hybrid that’s becoming nearly $60,000/person/year because the people only occupy the seat half the time. Thats eye watering numbers. It’s going to be increasingly hard to justify without concrete returns on investment. “I prefer,” “serendipity,” “corporate values,” “think of the children’s careers,” etc only have weight for so long. Right now there are enterprising finance directors preparing slides to help secure their next promotion proposing eliminating most office space once tax agreements and leases expire. Boards will see a nice uptick in EPS as the conclusion of that deck, and when the almost retired CEO starts lamenting the loss of the way they grew up, they’ll buy them a horse and buggy whip and shut down the office. This will pale compared to the wage savings they’ll reap when they level the wage distribution nationally. There’s no reason to pay inflated rates for Bay Area or New York City employees, beyond the very few that are genuinely differentiated. It has nothing to do with preference at the end of the day. And there will likely be some much smaller offices for people who really insist on working in an office. But for most people it’ll just be a thing of the past

hasty_pudding 3y ago

Remote work to Asian and Latin American subsidaries won.

srackey 3y ago
This is the real answer. Hope you guys like competing with folks making $30k!
- seydor 3y ago
  or they re competing with folks making $150k
xbar 3y ago
This. The looming commercial real estate economic catastrophe aside, everyone who fought to keep work remote fought for the opportunity to compete directly in a global wage market. BuzzFeed-journalists enjoy sniping middle managers-as-petty-autocrats from the peanut gallery in a "fight the power!" attitude using gender-war headline bait, but I expect zoomer MBAs still living in their grandparents basements into their 40s, overseeing the cheapest possible globally remote gen alpha ICs and AIs, are going to do just fine.

david927 3y ago

What this means though, is that a financial apocalypse is looming in commercial real estate and it will be followed by contagion in residential.

rwmj 3y ago
Definitely agree on the first point (although maybe not "apocalypse"), but why would that affect residential?
- voidwtf 3y ago
  Property taxes will have to skyrocket to compensate for the lost tax revenue in many cities. Whether we like to admit it or not, the infrastructure costs are a shared cost and if we lose a lot of commercial tax revenue that was indirectly gathered from residents, it will have to be gathered directly from residents. Increased property taxes will push people on the margins out and compound the issue while also decreasing real-estate value.
  - chasd00 3y ago
    You’re trying to scare people into thinking another real estate crisis on the scale of 2008/2009 is looming. Stop. The commercial real estate market is a fraction of the residential real estate market. Further, actual local businesses in communities are benefiting from WFH workers.
    - voidwtf 3y ago
      I didn’t say that. I don’t see how businesses in these commercial areas do not suffer, and I don’t see how that does not translate into job losses, and I don’t see how this combination does not result in lost tax revenue. WFH likely means people spend less on gas and eating out. This is one of the benefits touted by WFH proponents, myself included. I am spending at least $300 less a month since WFH. Yes I’m certain some tax revenue shifted to the city I live in, but it definitely shifted away from the city my office was in.
    - 3y ago

lopkeny12ko 3y ago

Employee productivity is at an all time low. Low performers are being laid off left and right (see: Google, Discord, Etsy, Salesforce, ...). Tell me again how remote work is "winning"?

brigadier132 3y ago
There were people that weren't doing shit at google even when they went into the office every day.
jmac01 3y ago
"Employee productivity is at an all time low" is quite the statement without facts and figures. Do you have any proof?
- lopkeny12ko 3y ago
  Yes. See: https://layoffs.fyi https://layoffs.fyi
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    Did you really prescribe to the narrative that these companies that doubled, tripled, or more in size over the pandemic are laying off people because "no one wwants to work anymore?" That website shows that it's easier to find a company that did NOT layoff in the last 12 months. Seeing all these company statements on "focusing on core products" as justification as they cancel products and entire product lines suggests fear in the market instead of complaints about their labor.
the_gastropod 3y ago
You’re probably being downvoted here because you’re ascribing to remote work what is more sensibly ascribed to interest rate hikes. As far as I know, most evidence points to there being no difference in productivity between remote and in-office workers.
chasd00 3y ago

brigadier132 3y ago

My biggest problem with the RTO argument is that it's not quantitative. Give me the numbers not the feels. If you are a massive company, by allowing full remote you could be saving hundreds of millions of dollars on real estate, office upkeep, electricity, etc. You can recruit employees from all over the country so your access to talent is superior and you can afford to pay talent less. These benefits are easy to analyze, it's just a massive amount of money and time being saved. Now to go to the less tangible benefits that don't necessarily positively impact the business itself, employees can live in cheaper cost of living areas and actually have the ability to one day own property. Massive reductions in carbon emissions because of 0 commute. Massive time savings for employees because of 0 commute that they can then use to spend more time with family or friends, exercise, or sleep more (all of which could lead to healthier employees). Oh, and they will actually be able to live close to family since they will not need to move to a different state / city. There will be much more efficient use of space, office space is basically redundant when employees can work from home. This freed up space could be used for housing which we desperately need. I'm sure I could come up with a million more benefits of wfh. To advocate for return to office you need to make all these logical leaps that somehow being together in person will result in us making more money than what we save from being remote and is better for employees somehow.

voidwtf 3y ago
The number of companies with a large holding or commercial real estate is staggering. Entire buildings were built as investments for companies who are not in the real estate/development business.
- madsbuch 3y ago
  I think this is the joker. If enough companies have vested interests in keeping real-estate prices high in the cities it will happen.
  - mech422 3y ago
    Also, tax breaks... Notice how many jobs in Texas are on-site only? Texas is aggressively enforcing the tax deals they had with companies to have XX% of their workforce on site, spending money locally to keep the tax benefit.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

chasd00 3y ago

Listened to an episode of the “The Daily” podcast on what they called hybrid malaise about 15 min ago. It was so obviously biased toward RTO I was yelling at the radio and my wife had to tell me to calm down. Gaslighting was exactly what they were doing with things like “you’re not going to get promoted unless you go back to the office” and “when looking for workers to layoff the ones remote are the first to go “ etc. really pissed me off because some people will take the podcasters seriously and not see the manipulative motive behind them.

0l 3y ago
And what exactly is the manipulative motive behind them?
- rwmj 3y ago
  (1) RTO can be used as an excuse to fire employees, especially the older, higher paid ones who moved away from city centres or are reluctant to move back. (2) People have investments in commercial real-estate, and forcing RTO is a way to profit from those investments even if it immiserates the workers (article discusses this point). (3) Cities offer tax breaks to encourage businesses to move, on the basis that the workers will use ancillary services (transport, restaurants, shopping, etc). If the tax breaks go that will negatively affect the companies. If the ancillary service businesses go that will negatively affect the city's revenues. (4) Bad middle managers feel they lack control if a worker isn't present.
  - 0l 3y ago
    Good points, but I thought OP was saying that the NYT had a manipulative motive, and not the employers.

1propionyl 3y ago

Reading about this subject on this site feels like having fallen into the twilight zone. No one I know working outside of tech is even close to this in their attitudes towards remote work. Nowhere else is anyone who disagrees "gaslighting". Nowhere else is this all a "plot by commercial real estate". Most want the flexibility to work remotely when they need to (or a few days a week), but prefer working alongside their coworkers for a variety of reasons. The complaints about entire divisions or floors being ghost towns and it being impossible to find the person for help with something are perennial. I know there's some selection bias in who comments on the topic, but I think there's more to it: most people here work in a context where they take a ticket, work on it, etc with ideally minimal synchronization points or meetings. Of all forms of work it's among the most well suited (there are others) to working remotely. Not to mention the absolutely horrific Bay Area commutes. I don't blame you all. But have some humility. You don't represent the norm in work.

seydor 3y ago
> Most want the flexibility to work remote I think it's because the tech people are young and single/live alone. Many people need the office to separate life from work and dont prefer remote. It has a lot to do with the fact that lives are built around tiny real estate.
xbar 3y ago
I hope you mean on "this site" you mean on the author's site, because it is complete twilight zone, even relative to HN.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
I mean, its not much different on general communities. It may be a bubble, but it's much larger than HN. May be one of the bigger generational divides. if you grew up with the internet and are used to navigating it to fill technical, social, and personal gaps, you can see RTO as a waste of efficiency. Regardless of the industry. Meanwhile if you work with folk who struggle to plug something into a USB, you may be more inclined to simply be there in person, for multiple reasons. But of course, any online discussion will be full of somewhat tech saavy users, at the very least ones comfortable enough to browse and post on social media.

jmyeet 3y ago

I really hope people let what happened in the last few years sink in. We had a global pandemic. Government spending had a massive impact on eviscerating poverty, raising some 11.2 million Americans out of poverty [1]. To keep companies afloat and to avoid the healthcare system collapsing, people stayed indoors and worked from home. Many took pay cuts or loss of benefits to do this. A lot of people realized they didn't need to go into the office at all and they could have a substantial improvement in the quality of life by not wasting hours a day in a car and/or moving somewhere more affordable. Demand did drop in 2020/2021 but it came roaring back and companies saw an ppportunity to recoup lost profits with predatory price incresaes. They saw massive profits and inflation shot through the roof as a result [2]. To compare to the oil shock of the 1970s, Nixon instituted price and wage freezes to stave off shock inflation [3]. The Fed responded to inflation by raising interest rates. They government had a far more effective tool available: corporate taxation. Some countries like Spain instituted a windfall profits tax. Taxes fill government coffers. Interest rates enrich bankers. Certain workers gained wage increases in the pandemic as they were essential. Inflation eroded much of this and employers took further opportunity to suppress or claw back wage incresaes through layoffs. Layoffs increase the workload of those workers who remain and reduce the ability for workers to demand wage increses, even cost-of-living adjustments. Return to office mandates are soft layoffs. They're cheaper too since if people quit they don't get a severance payout. The only effective wage increases gained during the pandemic were through labor organization, such as with the UAW and the Big Three automakers. So here are the lessons to draw: 1. Government policy exists almost entirely to transfer wealth from the poor to the already wealthy; 2. Employers are not your friends. You owe them absolutely no loyalty. In fact, given the trend to rescinding job offers, I would strongly advise people not to quit their job before starting their new one. Just don't show up. Two weeks notice is a courtesy not a legal or even contractual requirement. "At will" employment goes both ways. 3. Government spending is a way to redistribute wealth from the ultra-wealthy to the poor and it is incredibly effective. Post-GFC we've had many countries operate with austerity measures. This is simply propaganda to stop this wealth transfer. 4. Greed is the primary driver in inflation. Taxation would at least allow the government to help those worst affected; 5. Companies use layoffs and return to office mandates to suppress your wages; and 6. The only effective counter to wage suppression is labor organization ie unions. [1]: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/09/who-was-lifted-out-of-poverty-by-stimulus-payments.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/09/who-was-lifte... [2]: https://thehill.com/business/economy/4057722-greedflation-is-the-new-inflation-as-corporate-profits-balloon-report/ https://thehill.com/business/economy/4057722-greedflation-is... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock#:~:text=Nixon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock#:~:text=Nixon

photochemsyn 3y ago

Did worker bees escape from the corporation's office-based system of control, or did they just bring the corporation into their home? > "First, a little background. Monitoring software programs entered the workplace a decade or so ago and initially were popular in call centers and warehouses. Fast forward to 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the monitoring industry exploded as employers in nearly every sector saw an urgent need to monitor employees who were suddenly working from home." https://www.ourmidland.com/opinion/voices/article/Opinion-Employee-surveillance-software-can-be-17671757.php https://www.ourmidland.com/opinion/voices/article/Opinion-Em... Saving time and energy on commuting is an undeniably positive benefit, but IMO the optimal remote-work situation is in a separate space from one's home, ideally a walkable local office space with its own dedicated network and power.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

I've grown pretty tired of these kinds of missives that are so one-sided that they don't even attempt to do an honest "pros/cons" look at widespread remote work. For me, I certainly agree with all of his noted pros: less time wasted in traffic, more flexibility especially for working parents, and even some things he didn't mention, like fewer distractions when you need "heads down" time. Even before the pandemic I always preferred working from home when I knew I just needed a long stretch of coding time, and things like huge open-plan offices terrified me. I also agree that RTO plans are largely useless; you often just get the "people come in and then just spend half their time on Zoom because some colleagues are still remote" dynamic. But I do worry about the long-term effects of so much remote work, primarily: 1. When I was new in my career, I learned a ton just "through osmosis" by being around more experienced colleagues. I also built good relationship and friendships early in my work career (to be honest, I always felt kind of sad for people who took the "colleagues aren't your friends" mindset. Perhaps not all of them, but why not make friends with people you spend a lot of time with?) I certainly understand married people with kids and with well-developed friend groups being much more happier with remote work, but I think it's much harder to develop those relationships in the first place if you start out remote from the get go. 2. I really worry about overall isolation, and also an increase in polarization. We used to talk about the loss of "third spaces" when countries became much less religious, and now we're seeing the loss of that "second space" (the office) as well. I go into the office multiple times a week just because I get stir crazy staying in my house all the time. The average number of people I have contact with in any week is way, way down, and that doesn't help my tendency toward depression. In other words, yes, I agree that remote work has won, but given that, I think it's a good time to focus on ameliorating the negatives.

smarmgoblin 3y ago
Totally agree that these are issues worth thinking about and mitigating. One thing I’ve started doing at work is documenting workflows in various ways: not just docs but talks and screencasts where a new engineer could see my workflow. (I also give new engineers advice to keep a digital notebook! I still learn tons by doing this.) For the isolation bit I just wonder what we will see replacing that. It’s possible we never see anything and everyone just deals with it but I hope shared office spaces or something similar picks up. I get plenty of socialization elsewhere but little breaks in the workday to not focus on productivity and just chitchat were nice and maybe important some days.

fuzzy2 3y ago

And yet technology surrounding remote work has failed us, curious. Bad internet, bad software, bad hardware, the holy trinity of communication enshittification. I can code anywhere and I can text anywhere just fine. 1:1 calls work more often than not. But boy do I abhor remote workshops. They suck in every way possible, and even in some previously thought impossible!

rwmj 3y ago
Yup, no one has really solved the virtual conference yet. It's a massive opportunity for whoever figures it out.
madsbuch 3y ago
In all honesty, in person workshops are also not very good...
- fuzzy2 3y ago
  I'm sorry to hear you feel that way. I participated in many "offline" workshops and most of them were great. They allow for real debate by offering the full range of human communication. I never once had the same experience in a remote or hybrid workshop.

heads 3y ago

Well if you were working in “endless cubicle farms” and “wasting your lives in traffic” then, yes, removing those two things from your life is a smart thing to do. Being socially isolated from the other members of your team and only having VC is, in my mind, just as poor of an alternative. Imagine instead if you and (the majority of) your colleagues came to work by cycling for 20 minutes through green pastures, parks, under willow trees along the river, and through the centre of one of the most famous historic towns in England. That’s what we do here in Cambridge. We also do not operate a cubicle farm. Our office is spacious, filled with breakout spaces, relaxation spots, a library (aka quiet room), VC equipped rooms of all sizes, with a mini- and a maxi-kitchen and free snacks and meals. We come and go as we please with two days a week all together and frequently other in-office days for sub teams too, agreed by consensus not fiat. I often work at home in the morning or go home after lunch for the afternoon if I need uninterrupted focus / maker time. We have a personal IT budget for our home offices so I don’t need to cycle with my laptop (which btw is an Ubuntu Dell XPS, because our IT team know what they’re doing — you can have a MacBook if you insist.) Cambridge has gigabit fibre which is handy when pushing and pulling models from the A100 machines in our remote data centre. We still allow people to be as remote as they want and we also have a satellite office in London. It is rare though for the core eng team to not see each other in person for more than five days on the trot. It’s just so much more productive to build and plan stuff in person around a whiteboard, with pair programming, or in a war room.

ToxicMegacolon 3y ago
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wombatpm 3y ago

Back in the 00’s I worked for a fortune 300 company. My day consisted of working with sales (always remote), executives (always traveling), and operations (distributed across the country). My day consisted of conferences calls, emails and accessing files on the network. The only reason needed to be in the office was to answer the phone and use the network. One cellphone and vnc running on a spare desktop I really didn’t need to be there. In office is a waste of time and money.

legitster 3y ago

Unrelated, can we stop using the term "gaslight" so much? It hit out collective lexicon so hard and has been rubbed of any meaning. Just use lie, mislead, or any other more accurate but less trendy words.

maximus-decimus 3y ago
It's not the same though. Saying "I have a girlfriend, she just lives in Canada" is a lie. Pointing at a blue pen and saying "this is a red pen" is gaslighting.
- caddemon 3y ago
  That's his point though, 95% of the time people say "gaslighting" now it's not the right term.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    I see it mostly used correctly, though? But I don't browse Twitter nor Tiktok. So that may be a factor I am spared from.
  - maximus-decimus 3y ago
    I only really browse here and I feel like it's used correctly. Either the bosses know you know they're lying about RTO or they just think we're idiots. When they kill people's teams and say "you're not fired, you just have to find another job yourself in the same company. You have 3 months." or "we're not firing you, we're just moving your job to the other side of the country and you have to work at the office." that's gaslighting. They're just trying to make you believe you're not fired so they don't have to pay you.
prepend 3y ago
I think it’s used correctly. I’ve asked this same question when leaders have had entire webinars about how awesome the office is and how nice it is to be back to work. I’m still not sure if their work life is just that different from mine, or they are super stupid, or they are gaslighting. It’s made worse as they interview 20 employees and every one of them talks about how much better the office is than remote. And then me and every coworker I know feels differently.

kamefrede 3y ago

I'm on team "it should be up to the employee to decide". I like the flexibility that remote work gives me, but at the same time I also enjoy going to the office because it forces me to get out of the house, and interact with people at the office. Admittedly, if I were full remote, I'd probably rent a desk at a co-working space, so I could get that office-like feeling.

madsbuch 3y ago
I think society converges to you last proposal: People get local co-working spaces. That is also for the employees advantage. Your social circles are not bound to your employment anymore and will outlive new jobs. However, this will also commoditise jobs even more as the main thing you need to change is the Zoom like you login to work weekly meetings, which is to a detriment for the employer.

chasing 3y ago

What won? There are different scenarios that work best for different people and organizations. Maybe remote work won as an option on the table, but it’s like saying “hamburgers won.” They’re a dinner option, one of a variety of solutions to the problem. The notable change is simply the expanding set of options available to employers and workers depending on their jobs, personal needs, costs, etc. Which is great!

jsyang00 3y ago

Great. Guess my manager is just trying to get one over on me. Let me stay home and see how it goes.

ta113500 3y ago

out of something like 20 year IT career, i only worked in office for 2 out of those 20. early in the career i definitely traded income for wfh option, but it was my choice, i also had to structure my life significantly around the requirements of wfh: i've never documented my home setup, but if you've read accounts of elaborate remote work setups, that people like stephen wolfram have, mine's pretty much the same. i have _lights_ for my conference calls. i never advocated for wfh though, and the last few years have convinced me that it is not an option that should be available to everyone: i have data to support the argument that for a certain type of worker productivity dropped somewhere between 20 and 40%. i've extracted that data out of repositories of the various companies i'm contracting for, so this is all obviously non publishable, but that's a research that anyone can do. my experience is with small to medium size business, 9-90 developers, where COVID essentially forced wfh, that was never corrected. and the productivity drop correlates with the overall initial productivity of the respective person. type-A developers, remote developer specialists had almost no perceptable drop. but the space fillers, the 9 to 5-ers, entire teams of them, who also account for the bulk of contributors, that is the main body of the company's workforce drop by 20-40%. there are also interesting outliers, people whose productivity dropped by something like 80-90%, i guess that's the silent quitter types. (i tried to control for as many things as possible, but of course you can't account for, for example, stylistic changes.)

Doomed2Repeat 3y ago

Winston, where did you go? The Telescreen can't see you now, and we need to monitor your every activity. Time for your exercises! I enjoy the present freedom snd flexibility of telework, but seriously this is a case of careful what you ask for, as some years into the near future you may be wishing you had never been allowing your corporate / government overlords into your once private spaces. And sure, we will be able to control all of that, just like the Goongles of the world would never be prying into every personal aspect of our lives, to their advantage. Utmost caution warranted!

mawadev 3y ago

I think we need a global register of home office friendly companies so we know which places to avoid, just to get the message across.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

"... don't let anyone gaslight you to believe otherwise" states website called "hottakes.space". Funny.

kledru 3y ago

It also won in places where it should not have won, as managers copy the practices across geographical locations. So, there are people who have chosen to live in the walking distance of office premises and never prepared for being forced to work from home...

hnarn 3y ago

I don’t like absolutes when talking about remote work. Multiple things can be true at once; for example that RTO is used by poor leadership to make it less obvious how badly they are managing operations and leading people, while accepting that four people working in the same room against a common goal is materially different and more efficient than four people in a remote meeting. The most obvious example to me when remote work is simply unsuitable is when it comes to onboarding. Being able to ask lots of low effort questions quickly to many different people and building an esprit de corps through eating and laughing together matters for long term success.