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There’s what I view as a common misperception embedded in the article. RTO isn’t about empty real estate, or not mostly. Leases can be broken, everything is sub

There’s what I view as a common misperception embedded in the article. RTO isn’t about empty real estate, or not mostly. Leases can be broken, everything is subject to negotiation. Sure, there’s a cost, but it could be paid. It’s not about real estate, it’s about power. For a brief period, during the great resignation, executives felt the sting of at will employment, a weapon that was never meant to be used against them. RTO is about showing us all who is really in charge.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago
Yeah, well, see, if you're an exec and you didn't like feeling "the sting of at will employment", forcing RTO is a great way to feel it again.
ipaddr 2y ago
For smaller companies yes leases can be broken but for others spending billions building college like campuses where they sublease space to businesses to sell to employees part of their worth is connected to real estate value. Others getting tax breaks by having people in an office in a downtown core. For Faangs it's about power, control and real estate. For the yc startup crowd it's often about investor control forcing it and fake signalling (come to my trendy office and look at people working) and inexperienced management who needs to see what effects their poor decisions are having with their eyes so they can pivot.
rachofsunshine 2y ago
I run a remote company, so I don't have skin in trying to convince anyone that RTO is a good idea. And there might be some truth to this in a wider, more systemic sense, in that employers and employees are always in some degree of zero-sum negotiation. But...like, do you think management actually thinks in these terms? I've known some pretty rich and powerful people. None of them talk this way behind closed doors, or at least they haven't around me. Even the ones that denigrate social programs or support for workers or poverty don't frame it this way. They think - rightly or wrongly - that it's a more effective way to run their company, usually because they don't trust workers not to abuse remote work, or sometimes because they've bought into some hustle-culture narrative that wanting comfortable work means you're not a Scrappy Highly Motivated Self Starter or whatever.
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  > usually because they don't trust workers not to abuse remote work So, it is about wanting to assert control. Because they think "abusing" remote work is when workers have more control of their circumstances and don't have to break their backs or brains for their salary.
  - rachofsunshine 2y ago
    The kind of abuse I (and they) are thinking of are things like "working four different jobs and half-assing all of them" or "outsourcing your job to some guy in the Philippines". You can say "well that's the sort of thing you should catch in a performance review", but that's more-or-less isomorphic to hiring anyone who applies to your job and relying on performance reviews to fire the bad ones. I think people can intuit that that approach would not work very well. If you want to frame "being worried people will not do their jobs, or will do them worse than your expectations on hire" as "asserting control", I suppose you can do that. But surely an employer has at least some legitimate right to try to ensure that their employees are doing the job they pay them for (notwithstanding the broader economic undertones to the employer-employee relationship, which are a much larger issue that extends way beyond RTO).
    - lowercased 2y ago
      > But surely an employer has at least some legitimate right to try to ensure that their employees are doing the job they pay them for Some work might be harder to quantify, but... for a lot of work, there's deadlines. If you need to get a UI screen working to some spec by Feb 1, and Feb 1 comes and goes and it's not done, isn't that some indication that work is getting done or not? Do they really care if someone 'does the job' or 'delivers the results'? Sometimes there's not much difference, sometimes there's a huge difference.
      - rachofsunshine 2y ago
        Okay, and does your UI screen have some quiet bug that won't come up for a year? Does it introduce some unnecessary tech debt? Did the engineer implementing it notice some accessibility or consistency issue that wasn't caught by the product team? Does it account for some weird edge case? Is it performant? Does it handle IE6 or whatever? Did it incorporate some package with a security vulnerability? And why Feb 1? Who decides what the reasonable timeline is? How sure are you that they aren't playing political games? How do you measure their performance? Did the engineer abandon some on-call thing to get it done? Did they pull a more senior person off of their job to help? Did the manager who gets blamed for all this choose who to hire? Management isn't binary in this way, and when managers try to make it binary, a lot of people (rightly) complain. And I'd bet that many of the people who complain about that are exactly the same people who are here arguing for remote work (not least because I am in both groups). Quantifying work to such an extent that you can detect any slacking or poor-quality work is one of the fastest ways to make it horrible for employees. Unscrupulous employees abuse Goodhart's Law to hell and back, scrupulous ones get punished for doing important work that didn't make it onto the quantified metrics, and work becomes more about covering your ass than it is about getting stuff done.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
It’s also a way to cut your labor costs without having to fire people which seems to be the latest trend.
pdimitar 2y ago
Yep, noticed the same. I and others have pressured executives to give exact argumentation with data and motivation. All 7 of those people (in 3 different contracts) have failed to do so. At one point they said a variation of "because I say so" and that was that. A lot of more liberal-leaning people don't understand the power-play games that many of the people on top love to play. One could argue some of them long stopped being there for the money and only do it for the power-play, even.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago

Yeah, well, see, if you're an exec and you didn't like feeling "the sting of at will employment", forcing RTO is a great way to feel it again.

ipaddr 2y ago

For smaller companies yes leases can be broken but for others spending billions building college like campuses where they sublease space to businesses to sell to employees part of their worth is connected to real estate value. Others getting tax breaks by having people in an office in a downtown core. For Faangs it's about power, control and real estate. For the yc startup crowd it's often about investor control forcing it and fake signalling (come to my trendy office and look at people working) and inexperienced management who needs to see what effects their poor decisions are having with their eyes so they can pivot.

rachofsunshine 2y ago

I run a remote company, so I don't have skin in trying to convince anyone that RTO is a good idea. And there might be some truth to this in a wider, more systemic sense, in that employers and employees are always in some degree of zero-sum negotiation. But...like, do you think management actually thinks in these terms? I've known some pretty rich and powerful people. None of them talk this way behind closed doors, or at least they haven't around me. Even the ones that denigrate social programs or support for workers or poverty don't frame it this way. They think - rightly or wrongly - that it's a more effective way to run their company, usually because they don't trust workers not to abuse remote work, or sometimes because they've bought into some hustle-culture narrative that wanting comfortable work means you're not a Scrappy Highly Motivated Self Starter or whatever.

aprilthird2021 2y ago
> usually because they don't trust workers not to abuse remote work So, it is about wanting to assert control. Because they think "abusing" remote work is when workers have more control of their circumstances and don't have to break their backs or brains for their salary.
- rachofsunshine 2y ago
  The kind of abuse I (and they) are thinking of are things like "working four different jobs and half-assing all of them" or "outsourcing your job to some guy in the Philippines". You can say "well that's the sort of thing you should catch in a performance review", but that's more-or-less isomorphic to hiring anyone who applies to your job and relying on performance reviews to fire the bad ones. I think people can intuit that that approach would not work very well. If you want to frame "being worried people will not do their jobs, or will do them worse than your expectations on hire" as "asserting control", I suppose you can do that. But surely an employer has at least some legitimate right to try to ensure that their employees are doing the job they pay them for (notwithstanding the broader economic undertones to the employer-employee relationship, which are a much larger issue that extends way beyond RTO).
  - lowercased 2y ago
    > But surely an employer has at least some legitimate right to try to ensure that their employees are doing the job they pay them for Some work might be harder to quantify, but... for a lot of work, there's deadlines. If you need to get a UI screen working to some spec by Feb 1, and Feb 1 comes and goes and it's not done, isn't that some indication that work is getting done or not? Do they really care if someone 'does the job' or 'delivers the results'? Sometimes there's not much difference, sometimes there's a huge difference.
    - rachofsunshine 2y ago
      Okay, and does your UI screen have some quiet bug that won't come up for a year? Does it introduce some unnecessary tech debt? Did the engineer implementing it notice some accessibility or consistency issue that wasn't caught by the product team? Does it account for some weird edge case? Is it performant? Does it handle IE6 or whatever? Did it incorporate some package with a security vulnerability? And why Feb 1? Who decides what the reasonable timeline is? How sure are you that they aren't playing political games? How do you measure their performance? Did the engineer abandon some on-call thing to get it done? Did they pull a more senior person off of their job to help? Did the manager who gets blamed for all this choose who to hire? Management isn't binary in this way, and when managers try to make it binary, a lot of people (rightly) complain. And I'd bet that many of the people who complain about that are exactly the same people who are here arguing for remote work (not least because I am in both groups). Quantifying work to such an extent that you can detect any slacking or poor-quality work is one of the fastest ways to make it horrible for employees. Unscrupulous employees abuse Goodhart's Law to hell and back, scrupulous ones get punished for doing important work that didn't make it onto the quantified metrics, and work becomes more about covering your ass than it is about getting stuff done.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

It’s also a way to cut your labor costs without having to fire people which seems to be the latest trend.

pdimitar 2y ago

Yep, noticed the same. I and others have pressured executives to give exact argumentation with data and motivation. All 7 of those people (in 3 different contracts) have failed to do so. At one point they said a variation of "because I say so" and that was that. A lot of more liberal-leaning people don't understand the power-play games that many of the people on top love to play. One could argue some of them long stopped being there for the money and only do it for the power-play, even.