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Reading all of these takes stating WFH leads to poor productivity simply doesn’t make sense to me. If your employees cannot be trusted to fulfil their responsi

Reading all of these takes stating WFH leads to poor productivity simply doesn’t make sense to me. If your employees cannot be trusted to fulfil their responsibilities (whether in an office, their home or a tent in a woodland) that is not a geographical issue. It is a mentality issue and you are always going to face productivity issue from that employee regardless of from where they work. I’ve been told time and time again by an array of managers in a bunch of departments and companies that my productivity never changes. That is regardless of whether I am travelling or at home. This is including being in Sri Lanka during their worst economical crisis and facing power cuts of 8 - 12 hours everyday. As a responsible adult I prepared in advance. I bought power banks which could charge my laptop and ensured they were charged when the power worked. I bought SIM cards for all mobile networks and ensured I had data. It really is simply a matter of taking responsibility of one’s situation and having a sense of respect for, and from, your employer/employee. Forcing people into working conditions in which they are uncomfortable is only going to harbour resentment towards the company and if you are in a country where workers actually have real rights you will have a hard time firing them. I fear that this is all simply a smokescreen for the authoritarian shift which has occurred throughout the globe. It started pre pandemic and was exasperated during it. Scary times lay ahead.

rubenvanwyk 10mo ago
The core issue is like you said - responsibility.
- alsetmusic 10mo ago
  My previous employer ran an experiment. They had us come in two days per week for six weeks and ran the numbers. We ended up going 100% wfh with a downsized office. We been planning to double our office capacity before the pan. I’m convinced that more than half of orgs would see similar numbers if they cared to look. I bet a bunch of the ones mandating RTO see them but do it anyway.
  - solumunus 10mo ago
    The market will solve this problem eventually. In industries where WFH is more efficient, eventually the companies that go that route will outperform their peers. It’s inevitable really. It will take time because companies feel the need to use their offices while they have an ongoing lease, but when it comes time to renew the savings are difficult to ignore.
    - IAmBroom 10mo ago
      Ah, the Efficient Market Hypothesis, applied to labor.
      - solumunus 10mo ago
        That doesn’t seem correct to me. Explain?
kaliqt 10mo ago
As Office Space says: it is a question of motivation. If you care, it'll get done. If you don't, you'll find a way to slack off, even if you're at the office.
- notnaut 10mo ago
  Is it not likely that people are more motivated to collaborate, talk about their work, plan together, feel a sense of excitement about work, etc. when they are communing in person? The ol watercooler mindset or whatever. I mean - there’s this popular topic of the issue of loneliness lately. People are less motivated to do things that would maybe normally bring them social joy and get them out of their own homes and bring them together with others in the flesh. You’d expect people to be motivated to do that kind of thing, maybe? But it’s hard. And it’s harder every day when there’s a zeitgeist of growing isolationism. I certainly don’t think the inflexibility of a 5 day in person work week with a hellish, uncompensated commute is the answer to the loneliness issue, nor the lack of motivation to do good work. But maybe there is some middle ground that would serve as a kick in the pants of sorts, without making us all miserable little ants going to and fro once again, that could help people get back out there in a way that helps. I mean, at least, it doesn’t seem like the metaverse or whatever else is filling that gap as the techno-seers foresaw… but maybe future generations will prove that to be more realistic than bringing people back out together in meatspace. Or maybe we just stoop deeper into this new reclusiveness without any real stand ins for grabbing lunch together at all.
  - p_l 10mo ago
    Maybe if the office was not a hellscape? Not just the commute, the offices themselves. I didn't work in a properly colocated team since 2017, and that was mostly by accident. The norm is zoom/teams calls, often taken from the desk (which is 3-4 in a row with rows densely packed) because there's never enough space for meeting rooms so it becomes norm to not give a fuck that nobody can concentrate because someone is talking loudly on a work meeting. And the watercooler is either office politicking or discussing how much the place sucks
    - 10mo ago
imcrs 10mo ago
It's not about productivity at all. These same companies were commissioning studies during Covid that told their analysts "look how productive our employees are now that they are working from home!" It's about crushing labor. WFH forces employers to compete. It gives a lot of power to employees, because they can apply for far more roles, work fewer hours, moonlight for multiple companies, etc, apply for other jobs during work hours, etc. These companies know that white collar workers are not fungible. Their intellectual workers are genuinely very difficult to replace and produce a lot of value. For talent that isn't fungible, it's RTO. For talent that is fungible, offshoring.
- imcrs 10mo ago
  For your comment about the turn towards authoritarianism, yeah, there's a reason every DEI program at every large corporation was pulled back within a few months, and it's not because the C suite all reads the same Musk tweets on X. Employees started making demands of management to actually look at some... structural issues. Those demands had teeth because employees acted and organized as a bloc. Only a matter of time before other lines of questioning besides race and sex were explored at work. Yeah.
  - raxxorraxor 10mo ago
    With DEI you had to care about the same "structural issues®". It wasn't exactly employee representation and much more of a HR tool to sanction mostly low level employees. Usually I don't care about race and sex at work and I am not sad that DEI is gone. Creates room for issues much more relevant to work. Like working hours, salaries, holidays, health insurance and general work benefits. Stuff that matters.
    - mathw 10mo ago
      Applying those things equally to people regardless of skin colour, gender identity, sexuality or any other line along which people have historically been discriminated against isn't important?
rustystump 10mo ago
I am pretty sure that 99% of the anti rto is exclusively due to the god awful soul crushing commute. 5 days a week an hour each way 10 hours of death each week. There is no authoritarian “shift” this has been business as usual for the last 100 years. Stupid business but business nonetheless
- nodoodles 10mo ago
  Only a 100 years — the whole history before that was working in the vicinity of a home, it does feel natural to return to that. Instead of anvils, we hit keyboards and instead of swords produce alignment, but either way it brings food to the table and allows flexibility in work-life?
  - 2b3a51 10mo ago
    Not in tech but was a teacher for decades. My first teaching job in early 80s of the last century had a requirement that teachers live within 5 miles of the building. In general; perhaps a return to guilds? Apprentices? In an area of my city that has a lot of small craft workshops (and, yes, a few have anvils) there are 'work-live' units being built that have workshops on the ground floor and living accommodation above.
  - angoragoats 10mo ago
    What the heck does “produce alignment” mean? I don’t produce alignment, I produce software which solves problems for people.
- Krssst 10mo ago
  Noisy open spaces with many people talking at the same time and people coming in sick with contagious respiratory infections is not really a recipe for productivity independently of commute.
amrocha 10mo ago
Good thing for you that you’re productive anywhere. I’m not. I much prefer working from an office. I’m way more efficient and happy in an office than working from home. It’s not a matter of mentality. It’s a matter of being in an environment conducive to work. You would benefit from not assuming that everyone is the same as you.
- stavros 10mo ago
  Whenever I'm in the office, I get zero work done. It's great for socialising and catching up with colleagues, but abysmal for productivity.
  - amrocha 10mo ago
    That’s only because you go to the office once in a blue moon. If it was your daily routine you’d get used to it and be productive there too, just maybe not as much as when you’re home. Did you work in an office before covid? I’m sure your productivity wasn’t abysmal or you wouldn’t still be working in tech
    - stavros 10mo ago
      I go to the office around one week out of every four, it's not that rare. Sure, there's some catching up, but not that much. Mostly it's the continuous interruptions that are never time boxed, the way they are when remote.
      - amrocha 10mo ago
        That’s odd, in my experience most engineers know to at least send a slack message first before talking to a fellow engineer in person, unless it’s an emergency.
        stavros 10mo ago
        I guess it's very culture-dependent, we don't have many engineers in the office so I don't know.
BrenBarn 10mo ago
There is a middle ground though between "employees can't be trusted" and "all is well". It's possible for there to be a genuine difference in affordances such that people are more productive in some places than others. I think many people would be less productive in a dank basement than in a pleasant office, but then again maybe you don't want it to be too cushy or productivity may go down. I don't think it's realistic to expect everyone to be equally productive in all environments. That said, I share your fear that all such considerations are just a smokescreen. In a larger sense the entire issue of "productivity" is a smokescreen. We don't need "more productivity". What we need is for people to be happy, and potentially that may be achieved by reducing productivity in some ways.
- chii 10mo ago
  > What we need is for people to be happy that is irrelevant to company management - in so far as that happiness has negligible effect on productivity. However, from anecdotal evidence i've gathered (only sample size of 5-7 or so), in office has been more productive, but they (with the exception of one, who lives 5 mins from their office) all dislike RTO and would've preferred WFH; but not enough to quit over it as it's not a 5 day mandate, but a 3-4 day mandate.
  - BrenBarn 10mo ago
    > that is irrelevant to company management That's right, that's why a lot of company management needs to be smacked down and if necessary fined and jailed. That laser focus on productivity is a cancer on society.
    - psunavy03 10mo ago
      So policy disagreements now deserve jail time. And this is why modern discourse is in the toilet.
      - BrenBarn 10mo ago
        The problem we have is precisely that we consider things like this "policy disagreements" even when they're happening on a massive scale and causing enormous harm to society. If we're talking about some small company where the manager decides to push a bit harder, okay. But when it comes to multibillion dollar companies shoving their profiteering mindset out on everyone, it's no longer just a matter of internal company policy. Poisoning society with a single-minded focus on money is in its way as bad as pollution, and it needs to be stopped.
prmoustache 10mo ago
> Reading all of these takes stating WFH leads to poor productivity simply doesn’t make sense to me. I don't think it is related to poor productivity. I think it is related to a combination of these 3 points: 1) perceived less of control from the management perspective. 10-15years ago companies were all in on "we need metrics on work being done". Let's face it, process induced metrics have often very little relevance to the success of your products. So without being able to pin point what is wrong from the metrics, upper management feel they are managing an invisible structure and they have no idea what they do. They don't have much more idea when they are at the office but they can see them peering at their screen or talking to their colleagues so they must be doing something right? It is reassuring for upper management. 2) Pretending to do something. This RTO decisions are ofen all about making changes for the sake of making changes. All my career I have seen upper management doing restructuration every 6 months to every 2 years with often very little change in the actual efficiency of the whole company or the quality of the products being done. More often than not they just throw shit at the wall and see hat sticks. Other times they just copy what competitors have just done. Once in a while they will maybe observe an improvement. 3) It also give a visible signal to the employees thast something is being done by the management so in a sense it can boost motivation a little bit even though major changes are often disruptive. If it wasn't for these kind of changes and announcement, most employees wouldn't even know/remember who their CEO is. Having said that, I don't work at Meta/Instagram but I work in a company where the meeting culture is crazy and I think I can agree with him on that point.
- rob74 10mo ago
  The RTO decisions are about making changes to prove that you have power over your employees, and also about attrition: if you don't like the soul-crushing routine of having to come to the office three or five days a week when you could do your job just as well or better working from home, there's the door!
  - angoragoats 10mo ago
    I wish more people working for these companies with short-sighted RTO mandates would explore suing their employer for promissory estoppel. There were real guarantees along the lines of “in-office work is never coming back” made verbally by CEOs when COVID began. If employees made financial/legal decisions based on these false promises, the company should be held liable.
billy99k 10mo ago
"Forcing people into working conditions in which they are uncomfortable is only going to harbour resentment towards the company and if you are in a country where workers actually have real rights you will have a hard time firing them." They are forcing them back into the office, which was pretty much the norm pre-covid. Having hard to fire employees isn't a good thing for the company or the well-being of other employees, when dealing with a bad employee. If you want to work from home forever, contract with a company, and put it in your contract. This is what I've done for over a decade now.
- a96 10mo ago
  Being a one person company with one client is circumventing employment laws. Sensibly illegal in many countries.
  - billy99k 10mo ago
    Who says I only have one client? It's also one of the reasons that it's so difficult to actually start a company in many of these countries, and the economic landscape consists of large multi-national corporations and the government. It's also not illegal (at least in the US), if you have your own LLC/company. This kind of thinking is why I've had steady work while working remotely for many years and we see articles like this crying about companies taking away remote work.
jmyeet 10mo ago
It's a mistake to view this from the perspective of productivity and whether or not someone can do their job at home or not. Clearly they can. We kept these companies alive by WFH during the pandemic. But they simply don't care. RTO mandates are nothing more than soft layoffs. People have moved. People may not be able to come back. People may simply not want to. Some of those people will quit. And that's cheaper than a severance package. We are in permanent layoff culture now. Why? To suppress wages and get more work for no extra compensation. 5% of the staff gets fired? The other 95% has to do their work for no extra money AND they're not demanding pay raises. Win win. Over time profits have a tendency to shrink and the only way to maintain the insatiable appetite for increasing profits is, ultimately, by raising prices and cutting costs. I wish more people realized this is all that's going on.
redhale 10mo ago
Congrats on your work ethic. But consider that this may simply not be the case for every working adult on earth, and may not even be true for every working adult in your company. Not everyone is like you. I am, but I know people (some of whom are former and current coworkers) who are much more easily distracted, and are meaningfully less able to compete their work in a timely manner when they work from home. I'll probably be downvoted, but I just don't think most of these execs are engaging in some larger "authoritarian" play with these moves (maybe some are, but I think incompetence is more likely than malice in most cases). But maybe I'm naive. As one point, consider the case of Tokyo's "Manuscript Cafe" [0] where patrons intentionally visit to have a cafe owner "force" them to compete a task they may have been procrastinating on. I read this as: being in a "work" location surrounded by other working people is conducive to productivity for some people. [0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/manuscript-cafe-japan-remote-work-writing-productivity/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/manuscript-cafe-japan-remote...
- IAmBroom 10mo ago
  You raise an interesting point. No downvote from me, although I'm firmly in the WFH camp.
- QuiEgo 10mo ago
  Body doubling is a thing! The crux of this is the way everyone is at their best is different per person. Work from office is the brute force solution - if it’s the hammer, flexible work is the scalple. Not every org has managers capable of welding a scalpel instead of a hammer, or who have time to be surgical even if they have the ability. I accept this reality.
- duskdozer 10mo ago
  I think it's only a small portion of WFH advocates who say that everyone should be forced to work remotely. Most want each person to have the ability to work the way that's best for them.
- davidjytang 10mo ago
  Measured for a year, my team overall shipped 60% of issues WFH than when in office. WFH was nice for some colleagues but clearly not working for the team. We promptly change back to in office when able.
xzjis 10mo ago
The reality is that middle managers are completely useless, but to justify their usefulness they have to force people to come to the office, to reprimand them if they don't strictly follow the schedule, to hold meetings to pretend they're useful by knowing what their team is doing, etc. They have to act as control agents: checking, monitoring, producing unnecessary reporting (a legacy of slavery) just to prove they exist in the organizational chart. The office is a theater where everyone pretends to be busy (especially them), but that's hard if the offices are empty. It's a system where we try to convince ourselves of their usefulness, which pushes them to fill the void in order to maintain a hierarchy that serves more to prevent people from working peacefully than to organize anything.
port11 10mo ago
It's the middle managers. They're the unproductive ones in a remote setup.

rubenvanwyk 10mo ago

The core issue is like you said - responsibility.

alsetmusic 10mo ago
My previous employer ran an experiment. They had us come in two days per week for six weeks and ran the numbers. We ended up going 100% wfh with a downsized office. We been planning to double our office capacity before the pan. I’m convinced that more than half of orgs would see similar numbers if they cared to look. I bet a bunch of the ones mandating RTO see them but do it anyway.
- solumunus 10mo ago
  The market will solve this problem eventually. In industries where WFH is more efficient, eventually the companies that go that route will outperform their peers. It’s inevitable really. It will take time because companies feel the need to use their offices while they have an ongoing lease, but when it comes time to renew the savings are difficult to ignore.
  - IAmBroom 10mo ago
    Ah, the Efficient Market Hypothesis, applied to labor.
    - solumunus 10mo ago
      That doesn’t seem correct to me. Explain?

kaliqt 10mo ago

As Office Space says: it is a question of motivation. If you care, it'll get done. If you don't, you'll find a way to slack off, even if you're at the office.

notnaut 10mo ago
Is it not likely that people are more motivated to collaborate, talk about their work, plan together, feel a sense of excitement about work, etc. when they are communing in person? The ol watercooler mindset or whatever. I mean - there’s this popular topic of the issue of loneliness lately. People are less motivated to do things that would maybe normally bring them social joy and get them out of their own homes and bring them together with others in the flesh. You’d expect people to be motivated to do that kind of thing, maybe? But it’s hard. And it’s harder every day when there’s a zeitgeist of growing isolationism. I certainly don’t think the inflexibility of a 5 day in person work week with a hellish, uncompensated commute is the answer to the loneliness issue, nor the lack of motivation to do good work. But maybe there is some middle ground that would serve as a kick in the pants of sorts, without making us all miserable little ants going to and fro once again, that could help people get back out there in a way that helps. I mean, at least, it doesn’t seem like the metaverse or whatever else is filling that gap as the techno-seers foresaw… but maybe future generations will prove that to be more realistic than bringing people back out together in meatspace. Or maybe we just stoop deeper into this new reclusiveness without any real stand ins for grabbing lunch together at all.
- p_l 10mo ago
  Maybe if the office was not a hellscape? Not just the commute, the offices themselves. I didn't work in a properly colocated team since 2017, and that was mostly by accident. The norm is zoom/teams calls, often taken from the desk (which is 3-4 in a row with rows densely packed) because there's never enough space for meeting rooms so it becomes norm to not give a fuck that nobody can concentrate because someone is talking loudly on a work meeting. And the watercooler is either office politicking or discussing how much the place sucks
  - 10mo ago

imcrs 10mo ago

It's not about productivity at all. These same companies were commissioning studies during Covid that told their analysts "look how productive our employees are now that they are working from home!" It's about crushing labor. WFH forces employers to compete. It gives a lot of power to employees, because they can apply for far more roles, work fewer hours, moonlight for multiple companies, etc, apply for other jobs during work hours, etc. These companies know that white collar workers are not fungible. Their intellectual workers are genuinely very difficult to replace and produce a lot of value. For talent that isn't fungible, it's RTO. For talent that is fungible, offshoring.

imcrs 10mo ago
For your comment about the turn towards authoritarianism, yeah, there's a reason every DEI program at every large corporation was pulled back within a few months, and it's not because the C suite all reads the same Musk tweets on X. Employees started making demands of management to actually look at some... structural issues. Those demands had teeth because employees acted and organized as a bloc. Only a matter of time before other lines of questioning besides race and sex were explored at work. Yeah.
- raxxorraxor 10mo ago
  With DEI you had to care about the same "structural issues®". It wasn't exactly employee representation and much more of a HR tool to sanction mostly low level employees. Usually I don't care about race and sex at work and I am not sad that DEI is gone. Creates room for issues much more relevant to work. Like working hours, salaries, holidays, health insurance and general work benefits. Stuff that matters.
  - mathw 10mo ago
    Applying those things equally to people regardless of skin colour, gender identity, sexuality or any other line along which people have historically been discriminated against isn't important?

rustystump 10mo ago

I am pretty sure that 99% of the anti rto is exclusively due to the god awful soul crushing commute. 5 days a week an hour each way 10 hours of death each week. There is no authoritarian “shift” this has been business as usual for the last 100 years. Stupid business but business nonetheless

nodoodles 10mo ago
Only a 100 years — the whole history before that was working in the vicinity of a home, it does feel natural to return to that. Instead of anvils, we hit keyboards and instead of swords produce alignment, but either way it brings food to the table and allows flexibility in work-life?
- 2b3a51 10mo ago
  Not in tech but was a teacher for decades. My first teaching job in early 80s of the last century had a requirement that teachers live within 5 miles of the building. In general; perhaps a return to guilds? Apprentices? In an area of my city that has a lot of small craft workshops (and, yes, a few have anvils) there are 'work-live' units being built that have workshops on the ground floor and living accommodation above.
- angoragoats 10mo ago
  What the heck does “produce alignment” mean? I don’t produce alignment, I produce software which solves problems for people.
Krssst 10mo ago
Noisy open spaces with many people talking at the same time and people coming in sick with contagious respiratory infections is not really a recipe for productivity independently of commute.

amrocha 10mo ago

Good thing for you that you’re productive anywhere. I’m not. I much prefer working from an office. I’m way more efficient and happy in an office than working from home. It’s not a matter of mentality. It’s a matter of being in an environment conducive to work. You would benefit from not assuming that everyone is the same as you.

stavros 10mo ago
Whenever I'm in the office, I get zero work done. It's great for socialising and catching up with colleagues, but abysmal for productivity.
- amrocha 10mo ago
  That’s only because you go to the office once in a blue moon. If it was your daily routine you’d get used to it and be productive there too, just maybe not as much as when you’re home. Did you work in an office before covid? I’m sure your productivity wasn’t abysmal or you wouldn’t still be working in tech
  - stavros 10mo ago
    I go to the office around one week out of every four, it's not that rare. Sure, there's some catching up, but not that much. Mostly it's the continuous interruptions that are never time boxed, the way they are when remote.
    - amrocha 10mo ago
      That’s odd, in my experience most engineers know to at least send a slack message first before talking to a fellow engineer in person, unless it’s an emergency.
      - stavros 10mo ago
        I guess it's very culture-dependent, we don't have many engineers in the office so I don't know.

BrenBarn 10mo ago

There is a middle ground though between "employees can't be trusted" and "all is well". It's possible for there to be a genuine difference in affordances such that people are more productive in some places than others. I think many people would be less productive in a dank basement than in a pleasant office, but then again maybe you don't want it to be too cushy or productivity may go down. I don't think it's realistic to expect everyone to be equally productive in all environments. That said, I share your fear that all such considerations are just a smokescreen. In a larger sense the entire issue of "productivity" is a smokescreen. We don't need "more productivity". What we need is for people to be happy, and potentially that may be achieved by reducing productivity in some ways.

chii 10mo ago
> What we need is for people to be happy that is irrelevant to company management - in so far as that happiness has negligible effect on productivity. However, from anecdotal evidence i've gathered (only sample size of 5-7 or so), in office has been more productive, but they (with the exception of one, who lives 5 mins from their office) all dislike RTO and would've preferred WFH; but not enough to quit over it as it's not a 5 day mandate, but a 3-4 day mandate.
- BrenBarn 10mo ago
  > that is irrelevant to company management That's right, that's why a lot of company management needs to be smacked down and if necessary fined and jailed. That laser focus on productivity is a cancer on society.
  - psunavy03 10mo ago
    So policy disagreements now deserve jail time. And this is why modern discourse is in the toilet.
    - BrenBarn 10mo ago
      The problem we have is precisely that we consider things like this "policy disagreements" even when they're happening on a massive scale and causing enormous harm to society. If we're talking about some small company where the manager decides to push a bit harder, okay. But when it comes to multibillion dollar companies shoving their profiteering mindset out on everyone, it's no longer just a matter of internal company policy. Poisoning society with a single-minded focus on money is in its way as bad as pollution, and it needs to be stopped.

prmoustache 10mo ago

> Reading all of these takes stating WFH leads to poor productivity simply doesn’t make sense to me. I don't think it is related to poor productivity. I think it is related to a combination of these 3 points: 1) perceived less of control from the management perspective. 10-15years ago companies were all in on "we need metrics on work being done". Let's face it, process induced metrics have often very little relevance to the success of your products. So without being able to pin point what is wrong from the metrics, upper management feel they are managing an invisible structure and they have no idea what they do. They don't have much more idea when they are at the office but they can see them peering at their screen or talking to their colleagues so they must be doing something right? It is reassuring for upper management. 2) Pretending to do something. This RTO decisions are ofen all about making changes for the sake of making changes. All my career I have seen upper management doing restructuration every 6 months to every 2 years with often very little change in the actual efficiency of the whole company or the quality of the products being done. More often than not they just throw shit at the wall and see hat sticks. Other times they just copy what competitors have just done. Once in a while they will maybe observe an improvement. 3) It also give a visible signal to the employees thast something is being done by the management so in a sense it can boost motivation a little bit even though major changes are often disruptive. If it wasn't for these kind of changes and announcement, most employees wouldn't even know/remember who their CEO is. Having said that, I don't work at Meta/Instagram but I work in a company where the meeting culture is crazy and I think I can agree with him on that point.

rob74 10mo ago
The RTO decisions are about making changes to prove that you have power over your employees, and also about attrition: if you don't like the soul-crushing routine of having to come to the office three or five days a week when you could do your job just as well or better working from home, there's the door!
- angoragoats 10mo ago
  I wish more people working for these companies with short-sighted RTO mandates would explore suing their employer for promissory estoppel. There were real guarantees along the lines of “in-office work is never coming back” made verbally by CEOs when COVID began. If employees made financial/legal decisions based on these false promises, the company should be held liable.

billy99k 10mo ago

"Forcing people into working conditions in which they are uncomfortable is only going to harbour resentment towards the company and if you are in a country where workers actually have real rights you will have a hard time firing them." They are forcing them back into the office, which was pretty much the norm pre-covid. Having hard to fire employees isn't a good thing for the company or the well-being of other employees, when dealing with a bad employee. If you want to work from home forever, contract with a company, and put it in your contract. This is what I've done for over a decade now.

a96 10mo ago
Being a one person company with one client is circumventing employment laws. Sensibly illegal in many countries.
- billy99k 10mo ago
  Who says I only have one client? It's also one of the reasons that it's so difficult to actually start a company in many of these countries, and the economic landscape consists of large multi-national corporations and the government. It's also not illegal (at least in the US), if you have your own LLC/company. This kind of thinking is why I've had steady work while working remotely for many years and we see articles like this crying about companies taking away remote work.

jmyeet 10mo ago

It's a mistake to view this from the perspective of productivity and whether or not someone can do their job at home or not. Clearly they can. We kept these companies alive by WFH during the pandemic. But they simply don't care. RTO mandates are nothing more than soft layoffs. People have moved. People may not be able to come back. People may simply not want to. Some of those people will quit. And that's cheaper than a severance package. We are in permanent layoff culture now. Why? To suppress wages and get more work for no extra compensation. 5% of the staff gets fired? The other 95% has to do their work for no extra money AND they're not demanding pay raises. Win win. Over time profits have a tendency to shrink and the only way to maintain the insatiable appetite for increasing profits is, ultimately, by raising prices and cutting costs. I wish more people realized this is all that's going on.

redhale 10mo ago

Congrats on your work ethic. But consider that this may simply not be the case for every working adult on earth, and may not even be true for every working adult in your company. Not everyone is like you. I am, but I know people (some of whom are former and current coworkers) who are much more easily distracted, and are meaningfully less able to compete their work in a timely manner when they work from home. I'll probably be downvoted, but I just don't think most of these execs are engaging in some larger "authoritarian" play with these moves (maybe some are, but I think incompetence is more likely than malice in most cases). But maybe I'm naive. As one point, consider the case of Tokyo's "Manuscript Cafe" [0] where patrons intentionally visit to have a cafe owner "force" them to compete a task they may have been procrastinating on. I read this as: being in a "work" location surrounded by other working people is conducive to productivity for some people. [0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/manuscript-cafe-japan-remote-work-writing-productivity/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/manuscript-cafe-japan-remote...

IAmBroom 10mo ago
You raise an interesting point. No downvote from me, although I'm firmly in the WFH camp.
QuiEgo 10mo ago
Body doubling is a thing! The crux of this is the way everyone is at their best is different per person. Work from office is the brute force solution - if it’s the hammer, flexible work is the scalple. Not every org has managers capable of welding a scalpel instead of a hammer, or who have time to be surgical even if they have the ability. I accept this reality.
duskdozer 10mo ago
I think it's only a small portion of WFH advocates who say that everyone should be forced to work remotely. Most want each person to have the ability to work the way that's best for them.
davidjytang 10mo ago
Measured for a year, my team overall shipped 60% of issues WFH than when in office. WFH was nice for some colleagues but clearly not working for the team. We promptly change back to in office when able.

xzjis 10mo ago

The reality is that middle managers are completely useless, but to justify their usefulness they have to force people to come to the office, to reprimand them if they don't strictly follow the schedule, to hold meetings to pretend they're useful by knowing what their team is doing, etc. They have to act as control agents: checking, monitoring, producing unnecessary reporting (a legacy of slavery) just to prove they exist in the organizational chart. The office is a theater where everyone pretends to be busy (especially them), but that's hard if the offices are empty. It's a system where we try to convince ourselves of their usefulness, which pushes them to fill the void in order to maintain a hierarchy that serves more to prevent people from working peacefully than to organize anything.

port11 10mo ago

It's the middle managers. They're the unproductive ones in a remote setup.