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Is this supposed to make remoters feel guilty? Go away... If corporate wanted to reduce the desire for remote - they would have smaller satellite campuses out

Is this supposed to make remoters feel guilty? Go away... If corporate wanted to reduce the desire for remote - they would have smaller satellite campuses outside the great automobile slums of America. The wealthy don't care about efficiency, they aren't being rational about this. They go into the office - see an empty building and say "this is wrong". But they put the cart before the horse - they should say "why is my company operating just fine without office space?" - that should say something about how horrible open offices are for productivity. The intangibles that come with in-office work could be addressed by augmented reality meetings (a headset costs a lot less than a year of gasoline). The ONLY problem I see that isn't addressed with remote work is junior development. This again could be addressed by much smaller campuses and augmented reality.

mettamage 3y ago
Junior development can be addressed with things like tuple.app and recorded screens when pair programming. That's how I learned a lot. Also, screen recordings of pair programming sessions are an advantage. The seniors I worked with would often go on tangents that I wouldn't remember, rewatching those sessions made me understand the tangents and have a much more complete context of what was said. Remote work is a competitive advantage when it comes to programming.
xangel 3y ago
You know, "operating just fine" is pretty relative. It the company lacked high-performance culture in the first place - yeah, it would continue to operate/decline just fine. Just a personal opinion.
Clubber 3y ago
I would guess this article is paid propaganda. So many articles about RTO/WFH in the last few years, it's obviously trying to manipulate people. If you consider news today as a paid propaganda machine for the wealthy, articles like this make more sense. The premise on it's face is wrong. A lot of big tech companies are forcing their employees to RTO, including Apple, Amazon and Google. If they aren't elite, I don't know who is. I suspect this article is designed to introduce class division into the RTO/WFH argument. Sadly, it will probably sway some people on that basis alone. Return-to-office mandates in select tech companies worldwide 2024, by number of days. As of January 2024, several major technology companies, including Google, Amazon, Meta, and Apple, have implemented return-to-office mandates requiring employees to be in the office at least three days per week.
api 3y ago
They could also get behind zoning reform to address housing affordability in major cities. For many people remote work is more about breaking real estate than not coming to an office.
pjc50 3y ago
Maybe people have been gaslit into thinking that being an ""elite"" is somehow a word of shame rather than something one should be proud of? Anyway, all this comes down to power, both in terms of market power and the social relations between manager and employee. The elite knowledge workers have something that is a critical factor of production for many businesses. Since this thing - knowledge, a form of fixed capital - exists inside the human mind and is extremely time-consuming to transfer, it has to be leased from the employees. Since it's in relatively short supply that commands a high price. But that scarcity also converts into other forms of market power: the ability to set non-monetary conditions of sale on the knowledge. This upsets the social relations of the office, because managers are used to being able to micromanage and physically surveil subordinates. The idea that an employee can set boundaries radically upsets American managers. Next people will be asking for holiday. The reverse of this is of course at the very bottom end of the market: if your boss can change your shift pattern at the last minute, if you're on a so-called "zero hours" contract, then that's because you're deemed utterly replaceable and have no market power.
- vidanay 3y ago
  And yet so many people practically worship the concept of elite athletes, or elite actors, or elite musicians.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    The concept, yes; the word? I've seen the phrase "elite athletes", but never "elite actors" or "elite musicians". For a different example of that split, there are a lot of proud religious fundamentalists in the USA, it was only the decade following 9/11 that "fundamentalist" seemed to be a dirty word (from my perspective, which at that point was going through university and my first job, both in the UK).
- pjc50 3y ago
  .. and another thing: although I work in an office some of the week, my boss^2 works in a different city and the parent company including people I work with frequently is in a different country in a different timezone. I can't not be remote from some people, because we're spread out. Building a massive office, getting visas, and paying staff enough to afford to live within commuting radius of a particular city in the western United States is very expensive.

mettamage 3y ago

Junior development can be addressed with things like tuple.app and recorded screens when pair programming. That's how I learned a lot. Also, screen recordings of pair programming sessions are an advantage. The seniors I worked with would often go on tangents that I wouldn't remember, rewatching those sessions made me understand the tangents and have a much more complete context of what was said. Remote work is a competitive advantage when it comes to programming.

xangel 3y ago

You know, "operating just fine" is pretty relative. It the company lacked high-performance culture in the first place - yeah, it would continue to operate/decline just fine. Just a personal opinion.

Clubber 3y ago

I would guess this article is paid propaganda. So many articles about RTO/WFH in the last few years, it's obviously trying to manipulate people. If you consider news today as a paid propaganda machine for the wealthy, articles like this make more sense. The premise on it's face is wrong. A lot of big tech companies are forcing their employees to RTO, including Apple, Amazon and Google. If they aren't elite, I don't know who is. I suspect this article is designed to introduce class division into the RTO/WFH argument. Sadly, it will probably sway some people on that basis alone. Return-to-office mandates in select tech companies worldwide 2024, by number of days. As of January 2024, several major technology companies, including Google, Amazon, Meta, and Apple, have implemented return-to-office mandates requiring employees to be in the office at least three days per week.

api 3y ago

They could also get behind zoning reform to address housing affordability in major cities. For many people remote work is more about breaking real estate than not coming to an office.

pjc50 3y ago

Maybe people have been gaslit into thinking that being an ""elite"" is somehow a word of shame rather than something one should be proud of? Anyway, all this comes down to power, both in terms of market power and the social relations between manager and employee. The elite knowledge workers have something that is a critical factor of production for many businesses. Since this thing - knowledge, a form of fixed capital - exists inside the human mind and is extremely time-consuming to transfer, it has to be leased from the employees. Since it's in relatively short supply that commands a high price. But that scarcity also converts into other forms of market power: the ability to set non-monetary conditions of sale on the knowledge. This upsets the social relations of the office, because managers are used to being able to micromanage and physically surveil subordinates. The idea that an employee can set boundaries radically upsets American managers. Next people will be asking for holiday. The reverse of this is of course at the very bottom end of the market: if your boss can change your shift pattern at the last minute, if you're on a so-called "zero hours" contract, then that's because you're deemed utterly replaceable and have no market power.

vidanay 3y ago
And yet so many people practically worship the concept of elite athletes, or elite actors, or elite musicians.
- ben_w 3y ago
  The concept, yes; the word? I've seen the phrase "elite athletes", but never "elite actors" or "elite musicians". For a different example of that split, there are a lot of proud religious fundamentalists in the USA, it was only the decade following 9/11 that "fundamentalist" seemed to be a dirty word (from my perspective, which at that point was going through university and my first job, both in the UK).
pjc50 3y ago
.. and another thing: although I work in an office some of the week, my boss^2 works in a different city and the parent company including people I work with frequently is in a different country in a different timezone. I can't not be remote from some people, because we're spread out. Building a massive office, getting visas, and paying staff enough to afford to live within commuting radius of a particular city in the western United States is very expensive.