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CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

286 points by jonathankoren 3y ago

emayljames 3y ago
Case in point with UPS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39191723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39191723
potatolicious 3y ago
In a lot of ways RTO has put working conditions in a worse spot than they were pre-pandemic. In the Before Times occasional remoting was informal and casual - if you had a doctor's appointment at an odd time, you'd remote for the day, with no formal approval nor teeth-gnashing. Now even small everyday things like this are fraught. There are often formal approval chains now for what used to be entirely between you and your boss. Even where there aren't formal approval chains your boss now knows that these arrangement count against the team in some opaque metrics even they don't have access to. Likewise, hiring remote candidates has become a minefield - pre-pandemic it was often entirely discretionary on the part of the hiring manager. Sure, the default was in-office, but making exceptions to it was entirely between the people who needed to work with the candidate and whether they thought they can make the arrangement work. Now it has to be run up the flagpole - in some places all the way up the flagpole to the very top of the company. And at every rung along that ladder everyone knows - again - that allowing the exception will count against them in opaque and faceless metrics that are being scrutinized. A top performer has to move out of town because of family reasons? In the old days you talk to your manager, maybe your skip, they'd tell HR it's fine, and... it just goes. Now? 95% chance the person has to leave the company, because someone in the newly-installed approval chain is going to nix it because - again - it counts against them personally where it didn't before. Sigh. In so many ways we've regressed on this so much. The level of flexibility and discretion teams have on work locations has narrowed so dramatically, in exchange for yet another spreadsheet-driven bureaucracy.
- smoothjazz 3y ago
  Honestly it sounds like you work at a very poorly run company. There's plenty of companies thriving with RTO and cultures of trust.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Please provide examples and metrics used to evaluate as "thriving."
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - smoothjazz 3y ago
      Oh wow that was a typo! Too late to edit it apparently. I meant to say WFH not RTO. Oh well, my downvotes are well deserved.
      - toomuchtodo 3y ago
        Happens, upvoted.
- symfoniq 3y ago
  Wish I could give this more upvotes. I was fully remote for more than a decade before COVID, but now I’m seeing all the same things you’ve written about here. It’s a huge regression.
  - barbazoo 3y ago
    Except many more of us get to enjoy that benefit now. Before Covid where I was it was unheard of to work remotely for more than one day a week.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    Depends on the industry. In games you had to fight tooth and nail to be remote. Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft really, really did not want devkits to be in private residences. Pandemic comes and a lot more of that relaxes. Like the rest of tech, some studios are trying to revert but there's a lot less doctor's notes needed to justify remote now.
SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
Another WFH/RTO article. How many are we going to do? Has the argument changed in any way? Or are proponents of both going to use the exact same arguments as ever? Here… allow me… WFH: I will never admit any abuse on my part or on anyone else's ever. RTO: This is happening. And everyone agrees, so you will have no choice.
- mdip 3y ago
  I laughed at least a little when I read this because if I really think about the quality of comments on this subject the last few months, that is a relatively fair -- if sarcastic -- summary. But you bring up an interesting point about WFH: > I will never admit to any abuse on my part or anyone else's ever. I see this a lot, too. I think the problem stems from the different ways that companies operate. Many, many companies -- regardless of role -- are having employees work remotely much the same way they were working in the office. And that's not, necessarily, stupid. When I first flipped to remote work, I was was working for a global multi-national telecom that went through bankruptcy. My reporting structure had my boss in the UK, his boss in Green Bay, WI, and his boss (who, at that time, never directed my work) was ... two floors down. I worked in an office outside of a test phone switch outside of a legacy phone switch occupying a whole floor with three people in it, none of whom were on my team, only one of whom was even in IT (my organization). Moving from "coming in and sitting alone in this office working with people in other offices" to "staying home and sitting alone in this office working with people in other offices" was a no-lose transition. I'd gut-feeling a guess that all of the companies trying to bring employees back into the office are working that way or very close to that way -- some variant of "Be in front of your computer during your old office working hours". Well, except for coffee, several co-worker chats about Netflix/Sports/Nonsense. At the only job where I had this kind of schedule (for a period of time), our corporate policies allowed for checking personal e-mail, doing online banking and other personal activities on work time provided they weren't excessive (while signing off on them being monitored, of course). Is running a load of laundry between toilet breaks excessive? At what point does "doing non-work things during those working hours" count as abuse? How do organizations operating this way plan to catch the time thieves? These are all things that managers are panicking about, right now, because some of their employees basically stopped working[0], or they perceive the work being done would be done better if they could go back in time and put asses in chairs. For roles where this is possible -- and obviously some aren't (and those have bigger trade-offs with remote work, as well) -- performance should be based on the simple question "Is the work getting done in a suitable time-frame?" Isn't that what they paid for? And if performance of all remote employees across the board is unsatisfactory then you have at least two things going on -- you've hired wrong, or you're failing to onboard well. And some people are slacking off, or literally doing no work, remotely. Why are they still employed? Are these people super-productive in the office? I suspect remote work shakes out a lot of people who'd rather have a different job. Those are the people that do shoddy work "in the office" and no work "at home[1]." I've had coworkers do this -- on a couple of occasions we didn't notice because the mistakes stopped which resulted in the team completing more work! Where I'm currently employed, we have a few meetings, rarely before 10:00 AM, rarely after 3:00 PM. We're designing/building/adding new features to our product, together, and we all work radically different hours (despite most of us being down the street from one another). We're in a crunch time, now, so we're working radically long hours and spending more time on calls, but that will subside. I work from wherever in the heck I happen to be. I have an abundance of hardware/network setup so that I am never connecting to remote resources while developing. Outside of "I delivered what I said I would when I said I would" there's not a whole lot of oversight and I work between 40-50 hours a week like I did when I was in the office at my previous job. I start work between 5:00 and 8:00 -- sometimes I take a mid-day break and finish between 6 and "whenever." We have meetings every work-day so I work M-F, but it's common when someone didn't want to put something down and worked into the late evening to just leave a note and sleep through most of the following work-day. It's about "getting the thing done" and only about "how much time it's taking you to get it done" if you're burning out on 16 hour days when you shouldn't be. The intensity is no less -- probably more -- than it was when I was "in the office at my last job." But the impact of that intensity is a lot less when I have an abundance of control over when and where I work. [0] It's because they're lazy, right? Have you asked them? Do they know their performance is not adequate? I know of one person who nearly quit a job because he was working 15 hours a day coding boilerplate. He was hired because the team was overwhelmed, but he wasn't working out because he couldn't complete simple things on time. When someone shadowed him for the day, they discovered he wasn't using a handful of scripts and was spending hours writing ... boilerplate. [1] This happened "in the office" -- in my late teens I did desktop support for an organization with three offices/one main office. Two people usually handled "the non-main offices" working between them in various places. Over a month-long period, one employee stopped coming to work, completely. We discovered only when we rotated in new people to the "offsite offices" and the guy he was paired with said "that guy told him he was working at the main office." I guess he figured out we all kind of worked as an island and he only needed to tell one lie to collect free money.
un1xl0ser 3y ago
The thing that I keep coming back to, is that if a company is taking an action, it should be about reducing friction to go to and making the office space a better place to work. If the company is taking an action that makes it less likely for people to come to the office or enjoy it, then it's pretty clear what they are doing.
- acdha 3y ago
  Yes, I view it as an amplifier for the existing management culture. If your system is supportive and focused on shared goals, RTO falls naturally into a balance where people come in when it makes sense (e.g. meaningful meetings & collaboration) and stay home when it does not. If your system is distrustful and based on dominance displays, which is far too common, the mandate is inflexible and transparently based on things like not expecting managers to be effective at measuring productivity, and it will be unpopular for those reasons. Both dynamics existed before the pandemic but the change in what people were used to and the current business climate demanding performative layoffs really cranked the intensity up.
- politelemon 3y ago
  > If the company is taking an action that makes it less likely for people to come to the office or enjoy it, then it's pretty clear what they are doing. Cheaper staff reduction without redundancy payments! Except for the intangible domain knowledge loss, but that won't appear on a finance spreadsheet.
  - j4yav 3y ago
    And you get to target people with families who can’t move so easily, without explicitly targeting them, helping ensure whoever is left is really focused on the company mission and not any other less important aspects of their lives like being there for their kids or partner or whatever.
bolvyk 3y ago
People really want to push remote work as being great for businesses. The sad reality is that it’s not (at least for knowledge workers)… it kills productivity and the output is always lower quality.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  > The sad reality is that it’s not (at least for knowledge workers)… it kills productivity and the output is always lower quality. Is this actually a fact that you can prove, or simply a belief?
  - Ray20 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - CBarkleyU 3y ago
      Why dont I steal when I have the opportunity? Dunno maybe because I'm a decent human being? Why do you feel like you would steal from the company if given the opportunity?
      - lowbloodsugar 3y ago
        This. OP is probably a manager, and managers are often psychopaths who would absolutely steal if they could get away with it. Thus they assume that everyone else would steal if they could get away with it, and so WFH must not be allowed, because everyone will be slacking off and playing CoD.
      - Ray20 3y ago
        Why don't you try leaving your laptop on a park bench for a couple of days? Maybe because not all people are like you? And even more people, most people I would say, are not right-wing absolutists and they in all seriousness believe that it is the employer who robs them when they do the agreed work. So, in their minds, they don't even consider themselves doing anything wrong, they are just taking the opportunity to get a little compensation for what was stolen from them
j4yav 3y ago
Thus, having demonstrated powerful leadership by forcing return to office without actually making the office a place anyone wants to be, the CEO returns to his den to hibernate until interest rates reach 2%.
2c2c2c 3y ago
does anyone really find RTO surprising? I know several people personally who just blatantly don't work. it's more obvious in roles where the work is less quantifiable, but even in engineering roles everyone hears stories the alternative seems to be aggressively metricize and cut-- but that seems bad for different reasons
- cdchn 3y ago
  I know plenty of people who go into offices and blatantly don't work.
  - baq 3y ago
    I guess the point is to not work only one job at a time
  - Spivak 3y ago
    Yeah being in office doesn't make it any less difficult to scroll through Reddit.
    - otabdeveloper4 3y ago
      Yes it does. Working in the office necessarily forces you to structure your work in time and space.
      - Spivak 3y ago
        You do know you're just parroting RTO thought leadership propaganda, right? The phrasing of structuring your work "in time and space" is rather unique and comes most recently from business thinkfluencers trying sell RTO as "new paradigm at the workplace." The real point underpinning the CEO ball fondling is strategies for creating structure for people that need it originally assembled for students working async and remote. Moving between spaces can create structure, putting on a "uniform" creates structure, having blocks of time planned out ahead creates structure, having small incremental goals creates structure, having blocks of work with regular check-ins (cards/standup) creates structure. Like it's just your standard ADHD time/focus management but pretending that these two specific things are best for everyone.
LiquidSky 3y ago
The absolute psychosis of management around RTO is truly baffling. It’s very telling that in the face of no evidence whatsoever of negative effects of remote work even after several years their reasons for demanding return have become increasingly abstract and now they’ve reached the “because I said so” phase.
- barbazoo 3y ago
  I don’t get it. Isn’t remote a godsend for so many companies? Especially in our industry where half the orgs don’t even make any money. They get to save on rent, salaries. What am I missing here?!
crowcroft 3y ago
Is it possible for someone to 1. Be a really good 'in person' manager (able to foster a good in-office culture, motivate and coach people effectively in real time). 2. Be a really bad 'remote' manager. Not saying RTO mandates are a good idea, but to say it's masking poor management as a black and white statement lacks nuance.
- LiquidSky 3y ago
  Theoretically, sure, but in reality it's just that most managers are bad at their job. Knowing what your team is doing, knowing how to set priorities, knowing how to organize projects, making sure targets are being effectively met, etc. requires actual work. It's much, much easier to count butts in seats and glance at badge swipe times and pretend like you're managing your team that way.
  - MattGaiser 3y ago
    > Knowing what your team is doing, This one anecdotally seems to have been the biggest issue for some managers. Unless they are overhearing things (literally), they don't know what is happening.
    - Spivak 3y ago
      Which is silly. I have worked in infra my whole career and just one of my job duties is to know what every single team is working on and shipping to provide operations guidance/support and to anticipate and be ready for risky changes. It's so much easier now that we're remote-first. I'm in all their Slack channels, I can see and search every conversation the team has and I can teleport into all their stand-ups and read the transcript after if I miss it.
      - ebiester 3y ago
        Most of the RTO conversation is happening outside of tech. While some is (e.g. Amazon, Zoom), we all started off in IRC or email in college or before. This isn't true for all areas of the business.
devin 3y ago
RTO to me just seems like a cyclical bit of performance art. It doesn't solve actual business problems, and no one is actually measuring whether it does.
HumblyTossed 3y ago
I think it is retaliation. Employees started pushing for WFH, raises, better work/life balance. Employers (especially bad ones) like to have control and so this is to get employees back in line.
- rwaksmunski 3y ago
  Yep, it's all about power.
  - datadrivenangel 3y ago
    Assert dominance by forcing them to fire you for not coming in and arguing for constructive dismissal.
- barbazoo 3y ago
  I don’t know. Sounds good, but is there any data to back that up? “It’s all about power” or control sounds like such a cliche at this point.
  - pm90 3y ago
    Its cliche because its true. In a certain sense its not all that surprising: execs hang oit with other execs. They go to the same sports games, vacation at the same spots, attend conferences etc.
    - barbazoo 3y ago
      Ok, so they're at the same sports games, vacation (really?), conferences. So what, do they hang out and brag how many of their employees work from the office? Is it embarrassing for one exec of their company allows WFH? How does this "power" show?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
paulcole 3y ago
I mean, so what? It's hard to be a good manager and if it's easier and more consistent for these companies to extract acceptable performance in office vs. remote, why wouldn't they do it? People act like remote is right and in-office is wrong (or vice versa), but they're just choices with consequences. There's no objective right or wrong here.
mrweasel 3y ago
So research is finally coming to the same conclusion that a lot of people, myself included came to over a year ago. Well managed companies don't care where you work, it simply doesn't matter. The problem is that management is a lot harder than many thought, but you could sort of hide the fact that you're bad at it when everyone is at the office. There simply isn't enough talented managers around. We're not solving that by requiring everyone to return to the office, the terrible managers are still terrible. If anything companies could use this opportunity to identify people with poor management skills. If a team under-performed during the work-from-home period, then it's probably time get their manager some training.
- timmg 3y ago
  > The problem is that management is a lot harder than many thought, but you could sort of hide the fact that you're bad at it when everyone is at the office. There simply isn't enough talented managers around. I feel like this is true for so many jobs these days. Like I think that a lot of people (in high skill jobs) are really not good enough for their jobs. But we simply don't have enough good people for all the jobs. Just as a programmer, so many people that are paid to do it are... bad. Managers, same. PMs (I think) same. I wouldn't be surprised if others in other professions feel the same.
  - mrweasel 3y ago
    That's true, but at least most of the developers have some training. Many people are thrown into management or wants to be managers, but never put any effort into building the skill set required. There are remarkably few people who are just born as talented managers, probably the same number that are just naturally talented developers. All of the best managers I've had have all had some level of management training. Some got training while I worked on their teams and the improvement from no training to just a few months of training is pretty remarkably.
  - Keegs 3y ago
    Product management is tricky because the skills PM applicants are evaluated for are not necessarily the skills that make a good product manager. But I think this supports your point. Where it's hard to judge performance, actual talent will vary.
dpflan 3y ago
"Offices across the U.S. are at an all-time occupancy low, and commercial real estate is starting to see an all-time high of almost 20% of unleased space, according to the Wall Street Journal. The reduction in real estate spend has enabled companies to reduce their operating expenses, thereby positively impacting their financial health. This poses the question: Are return-to-work mandates better for the workforce or for business bottom lines?" Don't some real estate contracts require specific occupancy rates (measured at monthly levels?)? At level of detail that is affected by people not in office? How long are commercial real estate contracts usually for?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lysecret 3y ago
  Contracts are usually on the order of 10 years.
  - dpflan 3y ago
    Right, there we go. Breaking these contracts is expensive I imagine.
- bluedino 3y ago
  >> How long are commercial real estate contracts usually for? It depends. Amazone has a 17 year lease on space in Manhattan. 3-10 years is pretty common. https://www.geekwire.com/2014/amazon-inks-17-year-lease-470000-square-foot-space-manhattan/ https://www.geekwire.com/2014/amazon-inks-17-year-lease-4700...
- tonystubblebine 3y ago
  I think there is something to this. We have a long term lease for what is now an empty floor at 799 Market in SF and our landlord will not let us buy our way out of the lease, even at 100% of remaining rent. There are about 120 seats on our floor and about 1000 in the building. I’ve heard only sixty people use the building in a given day. So the usage rate is much much lower than the occupancy rate, i.e. we count as occupants even with zero usage.
cratermoon 3y ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again: if you want me to return to the office, give me an OFFICE. Not a bullpen, not an open workspace, not a folding table in a warehouse with 200 other people. Maybe also some support staff, for office management, travel arrangements, and other things that suck productivity.
datadrivenangel 3y ago
"Executives should focus on figuring out the right workforce model for their business while recognizing that there is not a one-size-fits-all solution. The key is to focus on implementing a model that is reflective of the nature of their own business model and stakeholder needs. This does not mean that hybrid work with mandating office attendance a few times a week is the only option." Actually thinking about the goal of your business and your operating model sounds like table stakes...?
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  Apparently not in modern management. So much easier to just spend all day in do-nothing meetings and cargo cult whatever Apple, Spotify, or Google do.
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
If you don't want RTO just leave and work somewhere where remote is the culture. I just don't get this whole thing where you're still trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Just better for everyone if the in office people work in office and the remote people go to remote companies.
- SantalBlush 3y ago
  There seems to be a common assumption that if workers don't like something, they have a moral obligation to keep their mouths shut and "just leave". This assumption is, of course, wrong.
  - whywhywhywhy 3y ago
    Company doesn’t owe them a job.
- TylerE 3y ago
  The problem is a lot of these proper were told a couple years ago that remote, or at least optional hybrid, WAS the culture.
- barbazoo 3y ago
  Many of us aren’t in a position to change jobs willy nilly, the job market isn’t like that anymore.
- ianlevesque 3y ago
  You act like they’re sorted into two distinct categories that never change. Why should the working agreement be upended at a whim with no data and then everyone sheep along? It’s the churn, with real consequences for where people live and socialize, send their kids to school, for the weakest of reasons.
macspoofing 3y ago
OK - let's say that's true. That's not an argument against the RTO Mandate. It's an argument for it because the case that is being made is that in-office management is easier.
programmertote 3y ago
I left Amazon a month ago (voluntarily) for a fully remote role because they asked me to move to Seattle/Arlington. When I joined them, I was already in a different state because of my wife's work. So I told them, I cannot join if they don't give me remote exception; it took them ~4-5 weeks to get the sign off for remote exception from the VP. I took the job and 9 months in, Jassy decided to force everyone back to the office. A few of my coworkers (3 out of ~15 people team) have/had left when RTO mandate was announced, and I know at least 4 people are thinking of leaving as soon as they have a chance. Since the RTO, a lot of my colleagues have started working at 9 am and log out at 5pm pronto. Before RTO, they would be working until 6-7 pm and will be logging in around 8 am. Sometimes, coworkers would even log in late because they were commuting. I wonder if Amazon would check the Slack+Chime logs to see how the activity drops before and after RTO mandate. Based on my observation, I would bet that the activity/productivity drops significantly more. Glad I left Amazon. I have been programming for 15+ years (have been in a managerial role for 6+ years), and I firmly believe I am (and my team are) more productive working remotely. I will never work for a non-remote companies even if they are big names.
- datadrivenangel 3y ago
  Anecdotally, I know a few other Amazon people who have decided to effectively quiet quit / just do their jobs and risk the pip because of senior management's lack of care.
  - diob 3y ago
    Honestly pretty smart. Sit around, collect paycheck, maybe work on resume / side hustles. And of course, marvel when you still get high performance marks.
  - StableAlkyne 3y ago
    > just do their jobs and risk the pip Absolutely bonkers that doing the job you were hired to do can get you canned
    - zdragnar 3y ago
dartharva 3y ago
I have seen poor management manifest more in WFH scenarios with work and official communications extending well past normal working hours, usual latency in tasks notwithstanding. Also, this is tangential but I would be interested in what proportion of employees actually have a good home workplace set up, because it seems highly dependent on income and many (including myself) aren't generally equipped to make it as complete and focused as an office.
- shortrounddev2 3y ago
  If I were to start up a company, I would allocate money for 2 things: 1. Employees to build their home office (get monitors, good chair, desk, etc.) 2. Employees to buy or build their own machine (buy a laptop, build a PC, etc.)
billy99k 3y ago
I would never rely on a company to allow me to work from home out of the kindness of their heart. I've been consulting for 12 years now and working remotely the whole time. I think I've only ever had to come to the office a handful of times during the past 12 years and it was because a manager wanted to take me out to lunch.
m3kw9 3y ago
Apple has poor Managment?
- p_l 3y ago
  From some stories, depending on the area, the management at Apple reached "horrible shitshow" levels that abused a lot of other reasons people stayed in the job. OTOH they infamously were very anti-WFH from start, so on this I'd say they didn't change
nickpinkston 3y ago
Fully agree with this post, and further think that a lot of execs have specific issues they feel from this: - They often got into their role because of their IRL presence including:loud/aggressive voices, tall/physical imposing stature, etc. - They like the feudal trappings of a big office with floors full of their reports, with a high end looking office, with assistants who get their coffee, etc. Now that they're working at home, they lose their IRL advantages and perks, and it's actually a more meritocratic environment where you have to manage to metrics/plans more than walk around and catch the vibes. This penalizes bullshiters, which make up a high proportion of the executive class (speaking as one).
- pm90 3y ago
  I tend to agree. Remote work done right encourages a data driven culture centered on documentation ( Notion, Slack as the communication hub of the company) vs meetings.
happytiger 3y ago
Return to office is part of the austerity doctrine. There is a concerted effort to rein in the newfound powers of workers, and bring back more traditional order to the worker / employer relationship. Plenty of CEOs and their ilk have been on the record talking about the need to rebalance the equation between workers and workplaces, pointing to the collapse in commercial real estate as one of the consequences of this imbalance. Remote work is just one facet of the overall idea that people need to be made hungry again and that the worker/workplace balance needs to move back towards the workplace and the needs of companies. As Clara Mattei said in an interview with Marketplace recently: > The idea here is that austerity is all about getting us all to have to depend more on having money in our pocket in order to make a living. Together with the precariousness that an economic downturn brings about has the political effect of silencing demands for better conditions or even demands for more radical social changes towards a society that is based on different principles, and not on the exploitation of wage work. https://www.marketplace.org/2023/02/08/does-austerity-have-a-hidden-agenda/ https://www.marketplace.org/2023/02/08/does-austerity-have-a... The protests against the squeeze in the food system in the EU and France is particularly enlightening, as central authorities seek to extract the “inflation” from the growers of food rather than the middle-men and retailers where study after study shows its where the majority of “excess profits” have occurred. https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20240130-french-agriculture-bartered-away-farmers-protest-free-trade-eu-regulations https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20240130-french-agricultu... There’s a tendency to be focused on bad management and bad managers, but the truth is that there’s a much larger movement here to rein in the power of workers. If this the theory proves correct, soon we will experience a push in editorial narrative towards national debts, crisis and money issues and the need for America and other countries in the west to live within their means, and how each of us needs to do our part. We are already experiencing broad labor problems. You can track, to some degree, the anti-austerity and anti-budget protests happening globally here: https://carnegieendowment.org/publications/interactive/protest-tracker# https://carnegieendowment.org/publications/interactive/prote... They do not get much media coverage. Just bear in mind that things are not quite so simple as “bad managers.” I will say there are plenty of them and finding people who really get how to manage a remote teams is extremely challenging. Most of the people who talk about managing remote teams don’t actually know how to do it effectively, and I can tell you as someone who’s been managing remote teams for 20 years it was kind of funny to watch everyone become an “expert” because managing large remote teams effectively is a different skill set than managing people in office environments. So yes, for sure the RTO mandates are definitely correlated with poor firm performance and a desire to blame workers for poor results: the study is right. But I’d also submit that it’s part of a larger trend to try to pin the economic consequences of irresponsible spending on the working classes (please note, if you make your money from a salary or RSUs and a salary you are effectively a member of the working class, not the same as socioeconomic classes). Any time I post on austerity it gets downvoted, but that’s fine. But I think it’s important to at least be discussing austerity principles and how they are being used in these important social changes, as they are profoundly powerful in understanding what’s happening. Do downvote if you think this has no value, but please leave a comment as to why. This is a place for intelligent discussion, and I hope it won’t become another Reddit-esque echo chamber as it does seem to be headed that direction at times. I deeply value the HN community and what I have learned from other smarter people here.
mataug 3y ago
> According to a recent research paper published by University of Pittsburgh, compelling evidence suggests that organizations are leveraging Return-To-Office mandates not to enhance firm value, but rather to reassert control and shift blame for poor performance onto employees. At the risk of sounding cyncial, this is to be expected. Management, especially C-suites have put themselves on a pedastal where they can do no harm. Its almost always blamed on the employees. Example, the recent Boeing fiasco is being portrayed as an employee failure[1] by giving employees safety lessons, while ignoring the years mismanagement and cost cutting. [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-737-workers-will-stop-building-for-a-day-to-take-lessons-on-quality-2024-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-737-workers-will-stop...
- q1w2 3y ago
  I think different companies use return-to-office mandates differently, sometimes even within the same company. One facet of this is companies using return-to-office mandates to simply do layoffs without having to pay severance.
gpapilion 3y ago
Remote management carries with it the same overhead as outsourced management. Outsourcing has slowed because the coordination costs are quite high and difficult to figure out. I think the backlash to remote is largely due to this being a very hard to solve problem.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ary 3y ago
I'll go one step further. RTO mandates are being used to mask how shockingly bad most manager's written communication and critical thinking skills are. When their ability to "manage by walking around" is taken away you very quickly notice how terrible their writing (and thus thinking) is. I've experienced this first hand at multiple companies and it's fairly cringe-inducing to hear the excuses made for simple asks like having a written meeting agenda, project specification, or high level feature descriptions. Work breakdown meetings with these types over video calls amount to them trying to tell other people what to write down and ending the meeting as quickly as possible (perhaps the only upside). Ascension to management appears to be a more extreme, self selecting version of the Peter principle for many. They can't make a living, or their desired income, in a role that has a well defined output and thus search for hiding places within organizations. Remote work puts them back into a role with expected outputs, and that's basically panic-inducing for someone who opted out of such things long ago. My verdict: too much pride to admit that whatever communication skills they ever had have atrophied in the cauldron of management-level in-office politics. More energy than is required to learn to write coherently will be expended protecting identity and status. Companies will have to die and be replaced by those with more sensible policies and hiring discernment.
hintymad 3y ago
I remember Stephen Wolfram mentioned that he managed Mathematica Products via email since it was founded in 1988. I was wondering how he could that so effectively.
darcwader 3y ago
i can assure you. the moonlighting by many employees and dishonest employees are one of the primary reasons which has no solution than WFO. same reason we get frisked and security at airports.

286 points by jonathankoren 3y ago

Case in point with UPS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39191723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39191723

In a lot of ways RTO has put working conditions in a worse spot than they were pre-pandemic. In the Before Times occasional remoting was informal and casual - if you had a doctor's appointment at an odd time, you'd remote for the day, with no formal approval nor teeth-gnashing. Now even small everyday things like this are fraught. There are often formal approval chains now for what used to be entirely between you and your boss. Even where there aren't formal approval chains your boss now knows that these arrangement count against the team in some opaque metrics even they don't have access to. Likewise, hiring remote candidates has become a minefield - pre-pandemic it was often entirely discretionary on the part of the hiring manager. Sure, the default was in-office, but making exceptions to it was entirely between the people who needed to work with the candidate and whether they thought they can make the arrangement work. Now it has to be run up the flagpole - in some places all the way up the flagpole to the very top of the company. And at every rung along that ladder everyone knows - again - that allowing the exception will count against them in opaque and faceless metrics that are being scrutinized. A top performer has to move out of town because of family reasons? In the old days you talk to your manager, maybe your skip, they'd tell HR it's fine, and... it just goes. Now? 95% chance the person has to leave the company, because someone in the newly-installed approval chain is going to nix it because - again - it counts against them personally where it didn't before. Sigh. In so many ways we've regressed on this so much. The level of flexibility and discretion teams have on work locations has narrowed so dramatically, in exchange for yet another spreadsheet-driven bureaucracy.

smoothjazz 3y ago
Honestly it sounds like you work at a very poorly run company. There's plenty of companies thriving with RTO and cultures of trust.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Please provide examples and metrics used to evaluate as "thriving."
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - smoothjazz 3y ago
    Oh wow that was a typo! Too late to edit it apparently. I meant to say WFH not RTO. Oh well, my downvotes are well deserved.
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      Happens, upvoted.
symfoniq 3y ago
Wish I could give this more upvotes. I was fully remote for more than a decade before COVID, but now I’m seeing all the same things you’ve written about here. It’s a huge regression.
- barbazoo 3y ago
  Except many more of us get to enjoy that benefit now. Before Covid where I was it was unheard of to work remotely for more than one day a week.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  Depends on the industry. In games you had to fight tooth and nail to be remote. Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft really, really did not want devkits to be in private residences. Pandemic comes and a lot more of that relaxes. Like the rest of tech, some studios are trying to revert but there's a lot less doctor's notes needed to justify remote now.

SV_BubbleTime 3y ago

Another WFH/RTO article. How many are we going to do? Has the argument changed in any way? Or are proponents of both going to use the exact same arguments as ever? Here… allow me… WFH: I will never admit any abuse on my part or on anyone else's ever. RTO: This is happening. And everyone agrees, so you will have no choice.

mdip 3y ago
I laughed at least a little when I read this because if I really think about the quality of comments on this subject the last few months, that is a relatively fair -- if sarcastic -- summary. But you bring up an interesting point about WFH: > I will never admit to any abuse on my part or anyone else's ever. I see this a lot, too. I think the problem stems from the different ways that companies operate. Many, many companies -- regardless of role -- are having employees work remotely much the same way they were working in the office. And that's not, necessarily, stupid. When I first flipped to remote work, I was was working for a global multi-national telecom that went through bankruptcy. My reporting structure had my boss in the UK, his boss in Green Bay, WI, and his boss (who, at that time, never directed my work) was ... two floors down. I worked in an office outside of a test phone switch outside of a legacy phone switch occupying a whole floor with three people in it, none of whom were on my team, only one of whom was even in IT (my organization). Moving from "coming in and sitting alone in this office working with people in other offices" to "staying home and sitting alone in this office working with people in other offices" was a no-lose transition. I'd gut-feeling a guess that all of the companies trying to bring employees back into the office are working that way or very close to that way -- some variant of "Be in front of your computer during your old office working hours". Well, except for coffee, several co-worker chats about Netflix/Sports/Nonsense. At the only job where I had this kind of schedule (for a period of time), our corporate policies allowed for checking personal e-mail, doing online banking and other personal activities on work time provided they weren't excessive (while signing off on them being monitored, of course). Is running a load of laundry between toilet breaks excessive? At what point does "doing non-work things during those working hours" count as abuse? How do organizations operating this way plan to catch the time thieves? These are all things that managers are panicking about, right now, because some of their employees basically stopped working[0], or they perceive the work being done would be done better if they could go back in time and put asses in chairs. For roles where this is possible -- and obviously some aren't (and those have bigger trade-offs with remote work, as well) -- performance should be based on the simple question "Is the work getting done in a suitable time-frame?" Isn't that what they paid for? And if performance of all remote employees across the board is unsatisfactory then you have at least two things going on -- you've hired wrong, or you're failing to onboard well. And some people are slacking off, or literally doing no work, remotely. Why are they still employed? Are these people super-productive in the office? I suspect remote work shakes out a lot of people who'd rather have a different job. Those are the people that do shoddy work "in the office" and no work "at home[1]." I've had coworkers do this -- on a couple of occasions we didn't notice because the mistakes stopped which resulted in the team completing more work! Where I'm currently employed, we have a few meetings, rarely before 10:00 AM, rarely after 3:00 PM. We're designing/building/adding new features to our product, together, and we all work radically different hours (despite most of us being down the street from one another). We're in a crunch time, now, so we're working radically long hours and spending more time on calls, but that will subside. I work from wherever in the heck I happen to be. I have an abundance of hardware/network setup so that I am never connecting to remote resources while developing. Outside of "I delivered what I said I would when I said I would" there's not a whole lot of oversight and I work between 40-50 hours a week like I did when I was in the office at my previous job. I start work between 5:00 and 8:00 -- sometimes I take a mid-day break and finish between 6 and "whenever." We have meetings every work-day so I work M-F, but it's common when someone didn't want to put something down and worked into the late evening to just leave a note and sleep through most of the following work-day. It's about "getting the thing done" and only about "how much time it's taking you to get it done" if you're burning out on 16 hour days when you shouldn't be. The intensity is no less -- probably more -- than it was when I was "in the office at my last job." But the impact of that intensity is a lot less when I have an abundance of control over when and where I work. [0] It's because they're lazy, right? Have you asked them? Do they know their performance is not adequate? I know of one person who nearly quit a job because he was working 15 hours a day coding boilerplate. He was hired because the team was overwhelmed, but he wasn't working out because he couldn't complete simple things on time. When someone shadowed him for the day, they discovered he wasn't using a handful of scripts and was spending hours writing ... boilerplate. [1] This happened "in the office" -- in my late teens I did desktop support for an organization with three offices/one main office. Two people usually handled "the non-main offices" working between them in various places. Over a month-long period, one employee stopped coming to work, completely. We discovered only when we rotated in new people to the "offsite offices" and the guy he was paired with said "that guy told him he was working at the main office." I guess he figured out we all kind of worked as an island and he only needed to tell one lie to collect free money.

un1xl0ser 3y ago

The thing that I keep coming back to, is that if a company is taking an action, it should be about reducing friction to go to and making the office space a better place to work. If the company is taking an action that makes it less likely for people to come to the office or enjoy it, then it's pretty clear what they are doing.

acdha 3y ago
Yes, I view it as an amplifier for the existing management culture. If your system is supportive and focused on shared goals, RTO falls naturally into a balance where people come in when it makes sense (e.g. meaningful meetings & collaboration) and stay home when it does not. If your system is distrustful and based on dominance displays, which is far too common, the mandate is inflexible and transparently based on things like not expecting managers to be effective at measuring productivity, and it will be unpopular for those reasons. Both dynamics existed before the pandemic but the change in what people were used to and the current business climate demanding performative layoffs really cranked the intensity up.
politelemon 3y ago
> If the company is taking an action that makes it less likely for people to come to the office or enjoy it, then it's pretty clear what they are doing. Cheaper staff reduction without redundancy payments! Except for the intangible domain knowledge loss, but that won't appear on a finance spreadsheet.
- j4yav 3y ago
  And you get to target people with families who can’t move so easily, without explicitly targeting them, helping ensure whoever is left is really focused on the company mission and not any other less important aspects of their lives like being there for their kids or partner or whatever.

bolvyk 3y ago

People really want to push remote work as being great for businesses. The sad reality is that it’s not (at least for knowledge workers)… it kills productivity and the output is always lower quality.

SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
> The sad reality is that it’s not (at least for knowledge workers)… it kills productivity and the output is always lower quality. Is this actually a fact that you can prove, or simply a belief?
- Ray20 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - CBarkleyU 3y ago
    Why dont I steal when I have the opportunity? Dunno maybe because I'm a decent human being? Why do you feel like you would steal from the company if given the opportunity?
    - lowbloodsugar 3y ago
      This. OP is probably a manager, and managers are often psychopaths who would absolutely steal if they could get away with it. Thus they assume that everyone else would steal if they could get away with it, and so WFH must not be allowed, because everyone will be slacking off and playing CoD.
    - Ray20 3y ago
      Why don't you try leaving your laptop on a park bench for a couple of days? Maybe because not all people are like you? And even more people, most people I would say, are not right-wing absolutists and they in all seriousness believe that it is the employer who robs them when they do the agreed work. So, in their minds, they don't even consider themselves doing anything wrong, they are just taking the opportunity to get a little compensation for what was stolen from them

j4yav 3y ago

Thus, having demonstrated powerful leadership by forcing return to office without actually making the office a place anyone wants to be, the CEO returns to his den to hibernate until interest rates reach 2%.

2c2c2c 3y ago

does anyone really find RTO surprising? I know several people personally who just blatantly don't work. it's more obvious in roles where the work is less quantifiable, but even in engineering roles everyone hears stories the alternative seems to be aggressively metricize and cut-- but that seems bad for different reasons

cdchn 3y ago
I know plenty of people who go into offices and blatantly don't work.
- baq 3y ago
  I guess the point is to not work only one job at a time
- Spivak 3y ago
  Yeah being in office doesn't make it any less difficult to scroll through Reddit.
  - otabdeveloper4 3y ago
    Yes it does. Working in the office necessarily forces you to structure your work in time and space.
    - Spivak 3y ago
      You do know you're just parroting RTO thought leadership propaganda, right? The phrasing of structuring your work "in time and space" is rather unique and comes most recently from business thinkfluencers trying sell RTO as "new paradigm at the workplace." The real point underpinning the CEO ball fondling is strategies for creating structure for people that need it originally assembled for students working async and remote. Moving between spaces can create structure, putting on a "uniform" creates structure, having blocks of time planned out ahead creates structure, having small incremental goals creates structure, having blocks of work with regular check-ins (cards/standup) creates structure. Like it's just your standard ADHD time/focus management but pretending that these two specific things are best for everyone.

LiquidSky 3y ago

The absolute psychosis of management around RTO is truly baffling. It’s very telling that in the face of no evidence whatsoever of negative effects of remote work even after several years their reasons for demanding return have become increasingly abstract and now they’ve reached the “because I said so” phase.

barbazoo 3y ago
I don’t get it. Isn’t remote a godsend for so many companies? Especially in our industry where half the orgs don’t even make any money. They get to save on rent, salaries. What am I missing here?!

crowcroft 3y ago

Is it possible for someone to 1. Be a really good 'in person' manager (able to foster a good in-office culture, motivate and coach people effectively in real time). 2. Be a really bad 'remote' manager. Not saying RTO mandates are a good idea, but to say it's masking poor management as a black and white statement lacks nuance.

LiquidSky 3y ago
Theoretically, sure, but in reality it's just that most managers are bad at their job. Knowing what your team is doing, knowing how to set priorities, knowing how to organize projects, making sure targets are being effectively met, etc. requires actual work. It's much, much easier to count butts in seats and glance at badge swipe times and pretend like you're managing your team that way.
- MattGaiser 3y ago
  > Knowing what your team is doing, This one anecdotally seems to have been the biggest issue for some managers. Unless they are overhearing things (literally), they don't know what is happening.
  - Spivak 3y ago
    Which is silly. I have worked in infra my whole career and just one of my job duties is to know what every single team is working on and shipping to provide operations guidance/support and to anticipate and be ready for risky changes. It's so much easier now that we're remote-first. I'm in all their Slack channels, I can see and search every conversation the team has and I can teleport into all their stand-ups and read the transcript after if I miss it.
    - ebiester 3y ago
      Most of the RTO conversation is happening outside of tech. While some is (e.g. Amazon, Zoom), we all started off in IRC or email in college or before. This isn't true for all areas of the business.

devin 3y ago

RTO to me just seems like a cyclical bit of performance art. It doesn't solve actual business problems, and no one is actually measuring whether it does.

HumblyTossed 3y ago

I think it is retaliation. Employees started pushing for WFH, raises, better work/life balance. Employers (especially bad ones) like to have control and so this is to get employees back in line.

rwaksmunski 3y ago
Yep, it's all about power.
- datadrivenangel 3y ago
  Assert dominance by forcing them to fire you for not coming in and arguing for constructive dismissal.
barbazoo 3y ago
I don’t know. Sounds good, but is there any data to back that up? “It’s all about power” or control sounds like such a cliche at this point.
- pm90 3y ago
  Its cliche because its true. In a certain sense its not all that surprising: execs hang oit with other execs. They go to the same sports games, vacation at the same spots, attend conferences etc.
  - barbazoo 3y ago
    Ok, so they're at the same sports games, vacation (really?), conferences. So what, do they hang out and brag how many of their employees work from the office? Is it embarrassing for one exec of their company allows WFH? How does this "power" show?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

paulcole 3y ago

I mean, so what? It's hard to be a good manager and if it's easier and more consistent for these companies to extract acceptable performance in office vs. remote, why wouldn't they do it? People act like remote is right and in-office is wrong (or vice versa), but they're just choices with consequences. There's no objective right or wrong here.

mrweasel 3y ago

So research is finally coming to the same conclusion that a lot of people, myself included came to over a year ago. Well managed companies don't care where you work, it simply doesn't matter. The problem is that management is a lot harder than many thought, but you could sort of hide the fact that you're bad at it when everyone is at the office. There simply isn't enough talented managers around. We're not solving that by requiring everyone to return to the office, the terrible managers are still terrible. If anything companies could use this opportunity to identify people with poor management skills. If a team under-performed during the work-from-home period, then it's probably time get their manager some training.

timmg 3y ago
> The problem is that management is a lot harder than many thought, but you could sort of hide the fact that you're bad at it when everyone is at the office. There simply isn't enough talented managers around. I feel like this is true for so many jobs these days. Like I think that a lot of people (in high skill jobs) are really not good enough for their jobs. But we simply don't have enough good people for all the jobs. Just as a programmer, so many people that are paid to do it are... bad. Managers, same. PMs (I think) same. I wouldn't be surprised if others in other professions feel the same.
- mrweasel 3y ago
  That's true, but at least most of the developers have some training. Many people are thrown into management or wants to be managers, but never put any effort into building the skill set required. There are remarkably few people who are just born as talented managers, probably the same number that are just naturally talented developers. All of the best managers I've had have all had some level of management training. Some got training while I worked on their teams and the improvement from no training to just a few months of training is pretty remarkably.
- Keegs 3y ago
  Product management is tricky because the skills PM applicants are evaluated for are not necessarily the skills that make a good product manager. But I think this supports your point. Where it's hard to judge performance, actual talent will vary.

dpflan 3y ago

"Offices across the U.S. are at an all-time occupancy low, and commercial real estate is starting to see an all-time high of almost 20% of unleased space, according to the Wall Street Journal. The reduction in real estate spend has enabled companies to reduce their operating expenses, thereby positively impacting their financial health. This poses the question: Are return-to-work mandates better for the workforce or for business bottom lines?" Don't some real estate contracts require specific occupancy rates (measured at monthly levels?)? At level of detail that is affected by people not in office? How long are commercial real estate contracts usually for?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lysecret 3y ago
Contracts are usually on the order of 10 years.
- dpflan 3y ago
  Right, there we go. Breaking these contracts is expensive I imagine.
bluedino 3y ago
>> How long are commercial real estate contracts usually for? It depends. Amazone has a 17 year lease on space in Manhattan. 3-10 years is pretty common. https://www.geekwire.com/2014/amazon-inks-17-year-lease-470000-square-foot-space-manhattan/ https://www.geekwire.com/2014/amazon-inks-17-year-lease-4700...
tonystubblebine 3y ago
I think there is something to this. We have a long term lease for what is now an empty floor at 799 Market in SF and our landlord will not let us buy our way out of the lease, even at 100% of remaining rent. There are about 120 seats on our floor and about 1000 in the building. I’ve heard only sixty people use the building in a given day. So the usage rate is much much lower than the occupancy rate, i.e. we count as occupants even with zero usage.

cratermoon 3y ago

I've said it before and I'll say it again: if you want me to return to the office, give me an OFFICE. Not a bullpen, not an open workspace, not a folding table in a warehouse with 200 other people. Maybe also some support staff, for office management, travel arrangements, and other things that suck productivity.

datadrivenangel 3y ago

"Executives should focus on figuring out the right workforce model for their business while recognizing that there is not a one-size-fits-all solution. The key is to focus on implementing a model that is reflective of the nature of their own business model and stakeholder needs. This does not mean that hybrid work with mandating office attendance a few times a week is the only option." Actually thinking about the goal of your business and your operating model sounds like table stakes...?

mrguyorama 3y ago
Apparently not in modern management. So much easier to just spend all day in do-nothing meetings and cargo cult whatever Apple, Spotify, or Google do.

whywhywhywhy 3y ago

If you don't want RTO just leave and work somewhere where remote is the culture. I just don't get this whole thing where you're still trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Just better for everyone if the in office people work in office and the remote people go to remote companies.

SantalBlush 3y ago
There seems to be a common assumption that if workers don't like something, they have a moral obligation to keep their mouths shut and "just leave". This assumption is, of course, wrong.
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  Company doesn’t owe them a job.
TylerE 3y ago
The problem is a lot of these proper were told a couple years ago that remote, or at least optional hybrid, WAS the culture.
barbazoo 3y ago
Many of us aren’t in a position to change jobs willy nilly, the job market isn’t like that anymore.
ianlevesque 3y ago
You act like they’re sorted into two distinct categories that never change. Why should the working agreement be upended at a whim with no data and then everyone sheep along? It’s the churn, with real consequences for where people live and socialize, send their kids to school, for the weakest of reasons.

macspoofing 3y ago

OK - let's say that's true. That's not an argument against the RTO Mandate. It's an argument for it because the case that is being made is that in-office management is easier.

programmertote 3y ago

I left Amazon a month ago (voluntarily) for a fully remote role because they asked me to move to Seattle/Arlington. When I joined them, I was already in a different state because of my wife's work. So I told them, I cannot join if they don't give me remote exception; it took them ~4-5 weeks to get the sign off for remote exception from the VP. I took the job and 9 months in, Jassy decided to force everyone back to the office. A few of my coworkers (3 out of ~15 people team) have/had left when RTO mandate was announced, and I know at least 4 people are thinking of leaving as soon as they have a chance. Since the RTO, a lot of my colleagues have started working at 9 am and log out at 5pm pronto. Before RTO, they would be working until 6-7 pm and will be logging in around 8 am. Sometimes, coworkers would even log in late because they were commuting. I wonder if Amazon would check the Slack+Chime logs to see how the activity drops before and after RTO mandate. Based on my observation, I would bet that the activity/productivity drops significantly more. Glad I left Amazon. I have been programming for 15+ years (have been in a managerial role for 6+ years), and I firmly believe I am (and my team are) more productive working remotely. I will never work for a non-remote companies even if they are big names.

datadrivenangel 3y ago
Anecdotally, I know a few other Amazon people who have decided to effectively quiet quit / just do their jobs and risk the pip because of senior management's lack of care.
- diob 3y ago
  Honestly pretty smart. Sit around, collect paycheck, maybe work on resume / side hustles. And of course, marvel when you still get high performance marks.
- StableAlkyne 3y ago
  > just do their jobs and risk the pip Absolutely bonkers that doing the job you were hired to do can get you canned
  - zdragnar 3y ago

dartharva 3y ago

I have seen poor management manifest more in WFH scenarios with work and official communications extending well past normal working hours, usual latency in tasks notwithstanding. Also, this is tangential but I would be interested in what proportion of employees actually have a good home workplace set up, because it seems highly dependent on income and many (including myself) aren't generally equipped to make it as complete and focused as an office.

shortrounddev2 3y ago
If I were to start up a company, I would allocate money for 2 things: 1. Employees to build their home office (get monitors, good chair, desk, etc.) 2. Employees to buy or build their own machine (buy a laptop, build a PC, etc.)

billy99k 3y ago

I would never rely on a company to allow me to work from home out of the kindness of their heart. I've been consulting for 12 years now and working remotely the whole time. I think I've only ever had to come to the office a handful of times during the past 12 years and it was because a manager wanted to take me out to lunch.

m3kw9 3y ago

Apple has poor Managment?

p_l 3y ago
From some stories, depending on the area, the management at Apple reached "horrible shitshow" levels that abused a lot of other reasons people stayed in the job. OTOH they infamously were very anti-WFH from start, so on this I'd say they didn't change

nickpinkston 3y ago

Fully agree with this post, and further think that a lot of execs have specific issues they feel from this: - They often got into their role because of their IRL presence including:loud/aggressive voices, tall/physical imposing stature, etc. - They like the feudal trappings of a big office with floors full of their reports, with a high end looking office, with assistants who get their coffee, etc. Now that they're working at home, they lose their IRL advantages and perks, and it's actually a more meritocratic environment where you have to manage to metrics/plans more than walk around and catch the vibes. This penalizes bullshiters, which make up a high proportion of the executive class (speaking as one).

pm90 3y ago
I tend to agree. Remote work done right encourages a data driven culture centered on documentation ( Notion, Slack as the communication hub of the company) vs meetings.

happytiger 3y ago

Return to office is part of the austerity doctrine. There is a concerted effort to rein in the newfound powers of workers, and bring back more traditional order to the worker / employer relationship. Plenty of CEOs and their ilk have been on the record talking about the need to rebalance the equation between workers and workplaces, pointing to the collapse in commercial real estate as one of the consequences of this imbalance. Remote work is just one facet of the overall idea that people need to be made hungry again and that the worker/workplace balance needs to move back towards the workplace and the needs of companies. As Clara Mattei said in an interview with Marketplace recently: > The idea here is that austerity is all about getting us all to have to depend more on having money in our pocket in order to make a living. Together with the precariousness that an economic downturn brings about has the political effect of silencing demands for better conditions or even demands for more radical social changes towards a society that is based on different principles, and not on the exploitation of wage work. https://www.marketplace.org/2023/02/08/does-austerity-have-a-hidden-agenda/ https://www.marketplace.org/2023/02/08/does-austerity-have-a... The protests against the squeeze in the food system in the EU and France is particularly enlightening, as central authorities seek to extract the “inflation” from the growers of food rather than the middle-men and retailers where study after study shows its where the majority of “excess profits” have occurred. https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20240130-french-agriculture-bartered-away-farmers-protest-free-trade-eu-regulations https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20240130-french-agricultu... There’s a tendency to be focused on bad management and bad managers, but the truth is that there’s a much larger movement here to rein in the power of workers. If this the theory proves correct, soon we will experience a push in editorial narrative towards national debts, crisis and money issues and the need for America and other countries in the west to live within their means, and how each of us needs to do our part. We are already experiencing broad labor problems. You can track, to some degree, the anti-austerity and anti-budget protests happening globally here: https://carnegieendowment.org/publications/interactive/protest-tracker# https://carnegieendowment.org/publications/interactive/prote... They do not get much media coverage. Just bear in mind that things are not quite so simple as “bad managers.” I will say there are plenty of them and finding people who really get how to manage a remote teams is extremely challenging. Most of the people who talk about managing remote teams don’t actually know how to do it effectively, and I can tell you as someone who’s been managing remote teams for 20 years it was kind of funny to watch everyone become an “expert” because managing large remote teams effectively is a different skill set than managing people in office environments. So yes, for sure the RTO mandates are definitely correlated with poor firm performance and a desire to blame workers for poor results: the study is right. But I’d also submit that it’s part of a larger trend to try to pin the economic consequences of irresponsible spending on the working classes (please note, if you make your money from a salary or RSUs and a salary you are effectively a member of the working class, not the same as socioeconomic classes). Any time I post on austerity it gets downvoted, but that’s fine. But I think it’s important to at least be discussing austerity principles and how they are being used in these important social changes, as they are profoundly powerful in understanding what’s happening. Do downvote if you think this has no value, but please leave a comment as to why. This is a place for intelligent discussion, and I hope it won’t become another Reddit-esque echo chamber as it does seem to be headed that direction at times. I deeply value the HN community and what I have learned from other smarter people here.

mataug 3y ago

> According to a recent research paper published by University of Pittsburgh, compelling evidence suggests that organizations are leveraging Return-To-Office mandates not to enhance firm value, but rather to reassert control and shift blame for poor performance onto employees. At the risk of sounding cyncial, this is to be expected. Management, especially C-suites have put themselves on a pedastal where they can do no harm. Its almost always blamed on the employees. Example, the recent Boeing fiasco is being portrayed as an employee failure[1] by giving employees safety lessons, while ignoring the years mismanagement and cost cutting. [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-737-workers-will-stop-building-for-a-day-to-take-lessons-on-quality-2024-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-737-workers-will-stop...

q1w2 3y ago
I think different companies use return-to-office mandates differently, sometimes even within the same company. One facet of this is companies using return-to-office mandates to simply do layoffs without having to pay severance.

gpapilion 3y ago

Remote management carries with it the same overhead as outsourced management. Outsourcing has slowed because the coordination costs are quite high and difficult to figure out. I think the backlash to remote is largely due to this being a very hard to solve problem.

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ary 3y ago

I'll go one step further. RTO mandates are being used to mask how shockingly bad most manager's written communication and critical thinking skills are. When their ability to "manage by walking around" is taken away you very quickly notice how terrible their writing (and thus thinking) is. I've experienced this first hand at multiple companies and it's fairly cringe-inducing to hear the excuses made for simple asks like having a written meeting agenda, project specification, or high level feature descriptions. Work breakdown meetings with these types over video calls amount to them trying to tell other people what to write down and ending the meeting as quickly as possible (perhaps the only upside). Ascension to management appears to be a more extreme, self selecting version of the Peter principle for many. They can't make a living, or their desired income, in a role that has a well defined output and thus search for hiding places within organizations. Remote work puts them back into a role with expected outputs, and that's basically panic-inducing for someone who opted out of such things long ago. My verdict: too much pride to admit that whatever communication skills they ever had have atrophied in the cauldron of management-level in-office politics. More energy than is required to learn to write coherently will be expended protecting identity and status. Companies will have to die and be replaced by those with more sensible policies and hiring discernment.

hintymad 3y ago

I remember Stephen Wolfram mentioned that he managed Mathematica Products via email since it was founded in 1988. I was wondering how he could that so effectively.

darcwader 3y ago

i can assure you. the moonlighting by many employees and dishonest employees are one of the primary reasons which has no solution than WFO. same reason we get frisked and security at airports.