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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 system

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.
    - intelVISA 2y ago
      If someone can do a day's work in an hour and disappear for the rest of the day: good on them, assuming it's not rushed I'd prefer that to somebody useless but glued to a desk 9-5. Feels like a fringe belief here, and only really feasible in flat, lean orgs with semi-technical stakeholders and no BSers. [So probably <0.001% of tech industry currently]
sevensor 2y ago
> But...like, do you think management actually thinks in these terms? Sure. Lots of talk by executives about reining in the “sense of entitlement” in the post Covid era. Worked in middle management, heard it endlessly. I’m glad to hear it’s not universal, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real.
- noirbot 2y ago
  Yea, the company that I left due to RTO a while ago laid it out very clearly as about a sense of "fairness" towards the jobs that had to be done in person. That they couldn't allow the developers to keep working from home because it wouldn't be "fair" to the other teams that they didn't get the "perk" of WFH. It was decidedly an org that felt like it resented the things it needed to do in order to compete for dev talent, and made very clear over time that it felt like it was overpaying us and other more "blue collar" roles in the company were more honorable and valuable.
stult 2y ago
> They think - rightly or wrongly - that it's a more effective way to run their company, Well sure. Just because they think it's a more effective way to run their company doesn't mean that their understanding of "more effective" isn't equivalent to exercising more control. > But...like, do you think management actually thinks in these terms? People are perfectly capable of thinking about things in terms that are inconsistent with their underlying motivations. Dog whistling in politics works and is necessary because explicit racism turns off a substantial part of the population that nevertheless remains open to more indirect forms of racist policy and language. Thus, dropping n bombs morphed into "welfare queens." While such voters may be uncomfortable with outright bigotry, dog whistling rhetoric still appeals to them because on some level they are not entirely comfortable with true racial equality and integration. i.e., they harbor racial animus that motivates racist beliefs. Similarly, managers and executives may not feel comfortable speaking explicitly in terms of exercising power or control over their employees while still acting out of a subconscious need to exercise that very power or control. Almost certainly organizational leaders do not form a homogenous block here. Some of the leaders proposing these RTO policies are intentionally disguising their true motivations by using indirect language because they know their true beliefs are socially unacceptable and they do not want to incur the social cost of honestly representing their motivations. Others adopt similarly indirect language and comparable positions without being consciously aware of the emotional needs motivating their choices. Still others legitimately believe in their pro-RTO position without necessarily experiencing any ulterior motive. > because they don't trust workers not to abuse remote work Lack of trust in their workers is a failure of leadership. Rather than improve their accountability systems so that they can trust their workers more, they impose an extremely unwelcome cost on those employees. I don't see how that is any better than thinking about the problem in terms of raw power dynamics. > or sometimes because they've bought into some hustle-culture narrative Hustle culture itself encodes a sense of superiority that serves as emotional and philosophical justification for the power of business leaders over their employees. It's an example of attribute substitution. They don't know how to measure actual merit or hard work, so they measure visible, loosely correlated behaviors. Again, this is a failure of leadership, and a failure to establish systems of accountability that can function in a remote environment. It is difficult to see any real moral difference between wanting to exercise power for its own sake and imposing uncompensated costs on employees to avoid doing the hard work of being a leader. Especially because an organization that cannot hold employees accountable in a remote environment will be unlikely to do so in the office either. So far, the overwhelming majority of the published data around remote work and the rigorous analyses based on those data strongly suggest RTO policies damage rather than improve productivity. Likely precisely because organizations with poor organizational mechanisms around accountability continue to perform poorly in office, whereas those with strong accountability perform even better remotely. When leaders propose arguments for a policy that do not actually justify the policy, it makes sense to consider what their ulterior motives might be. Many ambitious leaders possess a deep psychological need to exercise power over others. That's what makes them ambitious. In the absence of any reasonable justification for RTO, it is thus not unreasonable to attribute their position to that need for control rather than accepting the insufficient and unconvincing excuses they explicitly offer for their position.
PeeMcGee 2y ago
> They think - rightly or wrongly - that it's a more effective way to run their company, usually because they don't trust workers [...] This still seems a lot like RTO being used as a weapon. The only difference is they aren't being cruel for the sake of it (which is undoubtedly rare), but they have cruel intentions nevertheless.
- rachofsunshine 2y ago
  "Companies want to maximize output from their employees while minimizing costs" is kind of a truism - if your position is that that's "using it as a weapon" then fine, but you have way bigger problems than RTO in that case. (And if you do, I happen to agree with you on both counts.)
scruple 2y ago
> But...like, do you think management actually thinks in these terms? Yes? I've been at the table to witness executives and presidents of companies openly talking about their disdain for their own employees. It's happened multiple times. At 3/5 of the employers that I've had over 20 years in technology. I firmly believe the only reason I didn't personally witness this at the other 2 was because I was too far removed from the halls of power in those organizations.
theshackleford 2y ago
> I've known some pretty rich and powerful people. None of them talk this way behind closed doors So have I, and they absolutely have talked and acted this way behind closed doors and at other times, felt no need to even hide it.

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.
  - intelVISA 2y ago
    If someone can do a day's work in an hour and disappear for the rest of the day: good on them, assuming it's not rushed I'd prefer that to somebody useless but glued to a desk 9-5. Feels like a fringe belief here, and only really feasible in flat, lean orgs with semi-technical stakeholders and no BSers. [So probably <0.001% of tech industry currently]

sevensor 2y ago

> But...like, do you think management actually thinks in these terms? Sure. Lots of talk by executives about reining in the “sense of entitlement” in the post Covid era. Worked in middle management, heard it endlessly. I’m glad to hear it’s not universal, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real.

noirbot 2y ago
Yea, the company that I left due to RTO a while ago laid it out very clearly as about a sense of "fairness" towards the jobs that had to be done in person. That they couldn't allow the developers to keep working from home because it wouldn't be "fair" to the other teams that they didn't get the "perk" of WFH. It was decidedly an org that felt like it resented the things it needed to do in order to compete for dev talent, and made very clear over time that it felt like it was overpaying us and other more "blue collar" roles in the company were more honorable and valuable.

stult 2y ago

> They think - rightly or wrongly - that it's a more effective way to run their company, Well sure. Just because they think it's a more effective way to run their company doesn't mean that their understanding of "more effective" isn't equivalent to exercising more control. > But...like, do you think management actually thinks in these terms? People are perfectly capable of thinking about things in terms that are inconsistent with their underlying motivations. Dog whistling in politics works and is necessary because explicit racism turns off a substantial part of the population that nevertheless remains open to more indirect forms of racist policy and language. Thus, dropping n bombs morphed into "welfare queens." While such voters may be uncomfortable with outright bigotry, dog whistling rhetoric still appeals to them because on some level they are not entirely comfortable with true racial equality and integration. i.e., they harbor racial animus that motivates racist beliefs. Similarly, managers and executives may not feel comfortable speaking explicitly in terms of exercising power or control over their employees while still acting out of a subconscious need to exercise that very power or control. Almost certainly organizational leaders do not form a homogenous block here. Some of the leaders proposing these RTO policies are intentionally disguising their true motivations by using indirect language because they know their true beliefs are socially unacceptable and they do not want to incur the social cost of honestly representing their motivations. Others adopt similarly indirect language and comparable positions without being consciously aware of the emotional needs motivating their choices. Still others legitimately believe in their pro-RTO position without necessarily experiencing any ulterior motive. > because they don't trust workers not to abuse remote work Lack of trust in their workers is a failure of leadership. Rather than improve their accountability systems so that they can trust their workers more, they impose an extremely unwelcome cost on those employees. I don't see how that is any better than thinking about the problem in terms of raw power dynamics. > or sometimes because they've bought into some hustle-culture narrative Hustle culture itself encodes a sense of superiority that serves as emotional and philosophical justification for the power of business leaders over their employees. It's an example of attribute substitution. They don't know how to measure actual merit or hard work, so they measure visible, loosely correlated behaviors. Again, this is a failure of leadership, and a failure to establish systems of accountability that can function in a remote environment. It is difficult to see any real moral difference between wanting to exercise power for its own sake and imposing uncompensated costs on employees to avoid doing the hard work of being a leader. Especially because an organization that cannot hold employees accountable in a remote environment will be unlikely to do so in the office either. So far, the overwhelming majority of the published data around remote work and the rigorous analyses based on those data strongly suggest RTO policies damage rather than improve productivity. Likely precisely because organizations with poor organizational mechanisms around accountability continue to perform poorly in office, whereas those with strong accountability perform even better remotely. When leaders propose arguments for a policy that do not actually justify the policy, it makes sense to consider what their ulterior motives might be. Many ambitious leaders possess a deep psychological need to exercise power over others. That's what makes them ambitious. In the absence of any reasonable justification for RTO, it is thus not unreasonable to attribute their position to that need for control rather than accepting the insufficient and unconvincing excuses they explicitly offer for their position.

PeeMcGee 2y ago

> They think - rightly or wrongly - that it's a more effective way to run their company, usually because they don't trust workers [...] This still seems a lot like RTO being used as a weapon. The only difference is they aren't being cruel for the sake of it (which is undoubtedly rare), but they have cruel intentions nevertheless.

rachofsunshine 2y ago
"Companies want to maximize output from their employees while minimizing costs" is kind of a truism - if your position is that that's "using it as a weapon" then fine, but you have way bigger problems than RTO in that case. (And if you do, I happen to agree with you on both counts.)

scruple 2y ago

> But...like, do you think management actually thinks in these terms? Yes? I've been at the table to witness executives and presidents of companies openly talking about their disdain for their own employees. It's happened multiple times. At 3/5 of the employers that I've had over 20 years in technology. I firmly believe the only reason I didn't personally witness this at the other 2 was because I was too far removed from the halls of power in those organizations.

theshackleford 2y ago

> I've known some pretty rich and powerful people. None of them talk this way behind closed doors So have I, and they absolutely have talked and acted this way behind closed doors and at other times, felt no need to even hide it.