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The return-to-the-office trend backfires

140 points by penguin_booze 7mo ago

deleted 7mo ago
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mikrl 7mo ago
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CivBase 7mo ago
For something to "backfire" you first have to account for why it was done. This article assumes performance and retention are the only considerations. It does not account for things like commercial real estate value, a buesiness's ability to monitor and control its employees, or excuses for layoffs.
- _bypa 7mo ago
  The article does say: > The better path is to raise the bar on management, not badge swipes. Real estate may play a role, but terrible management practices are also definitely a factor. And if every other company is doing it, it's safe to copy their behaviour and not stick your neck out.
- matchbok3 7mo ago
  What do you mean by "monitor and control"? Should an employer not be able to see what their employees are doing at work? What is an "excuse" for a layoff, exactly?
  - angiolillo 7mo ago
    > What is an "excuse" for a layoff, exactly? By "excuses for layoffs" I suspect what they meant was that there was an pre-existing desire to reduce headcount and RTO was used under the expectation that some percentage of employees would quit voluntarily so that the company can avoid going through the relatively more costly process of laying them off. Of course the downside of this approach is that the company has less control over which employees leave, which may result in them losing the employees who have the best alternatives.
    - matchbok3 7mo ago
      Gotcha. There was definite over hiring that happened during covid so some of this was a return to normal I think.
  - CivBase 7mo ago
    > What do you mean by "monitor and control"? Should an employer not be able to see what their employees are doing at work? I don't see any reason to get into a discussion about how much an employer should or shouldn't be able to monitor and control their employees. Some businesses are simply more trusting of their employees and allow a great deal of independence, while others aren't. Those that aren't will naturally face greater barriers to monitoring and controlling employees who are working remotely. > What is an "excuse" for a layoff, exactly? It's no secret that when the return-to-office movement began, many businesses used it as a means of achieving a headcount reduction. Employees who could not (or would not) return to the office were let go. Parting ways with difficult employees looks much better to investors than layoffs.
  - thewebguyd 7mo ago
    > Should an employer not be able to see what their employees are doing at work? There's a difference between visibility into work progress and just mass surveillance of all activity. The only metric that actually matters is the delivery of value. Monitoring isn't an effective way to lead. It only reinforces employees to optimize for "looking busy" rather than being effective. If you have to audit your employees daily actions to know if they are doing their job, you've failed as a manager at defining their role or hiring the right people. A good manager defines the what and the when, and leaves the how to the professional being paid to do it.
    - matchbok3 7mo ago
      I mean, maybe. But a company that spends all of it's time "surveilling" their employees rather than adding value will go out of business. So I'm not sure what the point really is when people bring this up when talking about WFH. If someone doesn't want to be surveilled at work they can quit, right?
      - DHPersonal 7mo ago
        Why continue the cycle of finding a job and quitting it for solvable problems instead of staying and solving the problem?
      - asadotzler 7mo ago
        Not really. Workers produce the thing the company sells. Those workers are mostly trapped so they deal with whatever nonsense management is up to. Management, mostly useless, maintains its control and viability by asserting that workers need policing and they're the ones to do it. If the policing is relatively easy with WFH, they'll do that. If it's much harder, or less demonstrative of their fake value, screw that, they'll just pass that burden on to workers with RTO mandates.
        matchbok3 7mo ago
        If management is useless then it should be trivial for you to replace them. I wish you luck!
  - cdrnsf 7mo ago
    Why is the company hiring people it doesn't trust? That sounds like a process failure.
    - CivBase 7mo ago
      Because they're cheap.
  - surgical_fire 7mo ago
    If you deliver all tasks in a timely manner, is productive and helpful in a team setting, contribute to discussions and initiatives beyond your immediate assignments... What exactly should I monitor? How many minutes per day your butt is in a seat? If you did a school run and woked a bit more after hours to compensate? If you had a headache and took a short nap after lunchtime? How does monitoring you contribute to anything?
    - matchbok3 7mo ago
      I agree. I don't really think "monitoring" is the reason for RTO. I think quality of work and collaboration is.
- themafia 7mo ago
  > commercial real estate value It's a little bit funny that 100% online businesses bought the most expensive and lavish real estate available. It's tragic they think their workers should throw good labor after bad investment to make a white collar feel justified.
isahers 7mo ago
This is interesting because it does not jibe at all with the people I know and how productive they are. The friends I know working big tech hybrid jobs work maybe 25 hours in a good week, whereas the friends I know in office 4/5 days a week are easily at double that. I'd imagine there are some confounding variables here. I wonder if a lot of those hybrid companies driving high revenue growth are just profit machines that don't really rely on employees being productive to grow (i.e. Google). Either way surprising findings to me!
- farisa_lives 7mo ago
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- graemep 7mo ago
  Do they do more work by working longer hours? People often do not. Output is not the same thing as hours worked. Productivity is output per hour, so its also possible for output to fall and productivity to rise. This will be the usual case with fewer hours.
  - red-iron-pine 7mo ago
    > Output is not the same thing as hours worked. factories would disagree. there are diminishing returns as people get tired and productivity dips, but there is still a direct, linear relationship. however its very different from knowledge- or social-based (e.g. sales) workers. there is often no direct 1-to-1
- wrs 7mo ago
  I think you may be confusing work with "work". It's easy to find yourself spending 40 hours in an office and accomplishing 6 hours of actual work, and conversely it's easy to spend 25 hours at home and do 20 hours of actual work. This obviously depends on what the work is. People whose job is to focus on building things for hours at a time have very different optimal work environment from people who meet with and coordinate other people in short bursts. So no one-size-fits-all top-down policy can be effective; local flexibility is required.
- 7mo ago
farisa_lives 7mo ago
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imcrs 7mo ago
RTO is about controlling labor, nothing else. Everything else is a smoke screen. Ask yourself the following questions and you'll understand what happened: - why did RTO happen seemingly right after salaries jumped and labor became scarce? - why did RTO happen virtually in lockstep across all of white collar employment? - why did RTO happen despite no evidence that productivity had anything to do with it? (and in fact, lots of evidence that it made employees more productive!) - why did RTO happen at the same time that critical equity/diversity viewpoints were increasingly being discussed at work? - why did RTO happen at the same time that outsourcing ramped up? If businesses are so opposed to remote work, why are they outsourcing so aggressively? It's not about AI. It's not about CRE. It's not about "synergy" in person. It's about disciplining labor. Businesses will happily tank productivity to prevent the power balance from tipping towards the employee. In that 2020-2023 period, people started talking seriously about how much value they bring to the table. They started making demands of their employers (especially around diversity, equity, inclusion). They started interviewing at multiple places, seeing their worth, demanding more, and giving only as much effort as strictly required to get the job done. The sudden, overnight, incredibly strong reaction to this period, the hard right turn, that is the whip cracking down on labor.
- thewebguyd 7mo ago
  Correct. Workers were starting to get power, people had seen through the fog at what was actually happening and were acting out against it. Agency is a direct threat to the owner class.
  - asdff 7mo ago
    It is amazing how much the constraints of working in the office shackle people to positions or locations. So many people working below their worth due to spouses ability to get a job in some location for example. Maybe you do land a job in your line of work in this little corner of the earth where your spouses jobs are more a plenty. Now you have to hold on for dear life to this company, do whatever the hell they ask of you and take whatever offer they give you because you have no leverage at all. The fact that people completely miss this fact and just go "well I like talking to people in person" I mean at a certain point belies ignorance that borders on stupidity with how hard people cling to the "ability to talk to people in the hallway" against even just the obvious negative externalities like the commute and limited home choices. No one ever talks about this career side and juggling a two body problem.
ventana 7mo ago
The article has so many "it's this, not that" contradictions – I counted seven! – that I seriously consider it to be written with a lot of assistance from LLMs. One thing not mentioned in the article is that now that many software engineers are back to their offices, we get the regular fall / spring viral infections spreading out between employees who feel obliged to go to the office even if they have mild cold symptoms. If RTO is about productivity, I wonder if anyone has accounted the productivity drop caused by viruses in workspace.
- nphardon 7mo ago
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- case_ratchet 7mo ago
  Not great in productivity terms, no: - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10269830/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10269830/ - https://www.covermagazine.co.uk/news/2344756/open-plan-offices-health-productivity-risk-canada-life https://www.covermagazine.co.uk/news/2344756/open-plan-offic...
deleted 7mo ago
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jmyeet 7mo ago
Any analysis that frames this as a productivity or talent-attraction issue is flawed from the start because that was never the point and still isn't. The point of RTO mandates is to suppress wages. It's to get people to quit rather than having to lay them off. It's part of the permanent layoffs culture we're now in where every year 5-10% of the workers at a company will be laid off. Remaining workers will do more labor for the same money and won't be asking for raises because they're thankful to still have a job. And someone quitting is much cheaper than paying them severance. Tech workers in particular saw massive wage growth in the 2010s due to tight supply. Companies are now in the business of clawing back thoat wage growth. It's why all these big tech companies started RTO mandates and layoffs at about the exact same time. It's a wink-and-nod collusion rather than overt collusion. We're a long way from the times when Google just hired all the engineers to deny them to their competitors. None of this is necessary. All of these companies are still insanely profitable. But profits have to keep growing and ultimately that comes down to cutting costs. There's nothing else you can do. Employers don't want you to be financially secure. They want you drowning in debt with declining real wages because then you're absolutely showing up to work and putting up with whatever they want.
- red-iron-pine 7mo ago
  easy mate the same people pushing those suppressions are the ones posting here. or having their bots post here. you're supposed to pretend capitalism is great. but yeah it's clearly body shedding with the goal of rehiring on the cheap. and/or buying time to see how AI plays out.
kelseyfrog 7mo ago
If RTO sacrifices a 1.7x revenue growth, where's the consequence for malfeasance or examples of the buck stopping with shareholders? If I owned a share of these orgs, I wouldnt want revenue left on the table because some VP had an attachment problem.
cheriot 7mo ago
I suspect there's a selection bias from poorly run companies using RTO to cut headcount. Now they can have layoffs and put a positive spin on it with AI.
productinventor 7mo ago
[flagged]
tamimio 7mo ago
I don’t know why they keep bringing “productivity” as the justification, it never was, never will, it’s about power dynamics, remote work shifted a lot of power back to employees, it also provided flexibility career wise. Another big reason why it got attacked quickly is it gave the people a window to escape the rat race and save money, when the employee doesn’t spend xyz on gas everyday, plus relocating outside of the crowded urban areas to cheaper smaller cities, rent/housing went down, landlords and banks had to lobby to end it, plus the government since less taxes are paid now as a result, all efforts made to bring back the status quo. It was fascinating to see how they gaslit the public, I was even talking to an employer before and the manager was trash talking wfh as “woke” and “real men” must grind 9hrs a day at least! Another employer was demanding a full camera on at least 6hrs a day if you wfh, or you are not “productive”. Back in the 80s or 90s, working in the office or factory was the default and it made sense, no high speed internet, small town so not much commuting, cheap housing, and affordable life, so if the man worked in the office and the wife stayed home, they can live comfortably. That’s not the case now, wfh balanced that and increased the quality of life instead, so you can now stay with your kids saving the cost of daycare etc, while doing exactly the same work you would do at the office.
tug2024 7mo ago
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notepad0x90 7mo ago
This is the culmination of short-term-profit thinking, and I'm shocked people like YC's @paulgraham support RTO. What's the long term game plan? It's like hotels and taxis resisting uber and airbnb. there will always be the old way of doing things, but people don't want to work from the office unless they have to. You've become the disruptee instead of the disruptor at that point. I've been both productive and unproductive while WFH as well as in the office. In either case it was a product of managerial decisions. I think they expected people to "just be productive" on their own, and then they install surveillance crap on their devices, measure bullshit and deduce RTO isn't needed. The older way of defining a couple of performance indicator metrics and using that to mange people no longer works, RTO or not. So now, most managers have resorted to a "vibes-based" management technique, where the numbers can be made to mean whatever you want them to mean, so long as the vibe feels right. So if two people are just as unproductive, but you turn on one of their camera and see a person working from their bed in their pajamas, the vibe will such, so RTO makes sense in their mind. I don't think RTO will backfire any time too soon, but in the long term, the US has bigger problems in terms a decline as a nation. But if we overcome that somehow, there really is only one game in town: competition. Can your company be competitive while implementing RTO? Your competition that figures out how to make their people happy and WFH will beat you. not only that, they'll pay their people less money for that privilege. Technology infrastructure is still a growing thing in most of the world, but i suspect in a decade or so, WFH would be ideal for most humans in the world. I also speculate that remote-controlled automated things will become very popular. not just waymo support driving the care remotely as needed, but even things like janitors and manual labor jobs could be done via robots controlled remotely. For office work, it requires a different style of management, in a generation the older people too used to office work will be out of the workforce, but that transition will mean companies with a younger management workforce (who gets paid a lot less typically) will have a competitive advantage. Teams not performing well with WFH -- with a millennial or younger manager would be a real shocker to me.
iberator 7mo ago
RTO because of Slackware faking while sleeping and walking dogs. Cheaters
heraldgeezer 7mo ago
What if I actually like the office? I have a 40min walk to it or 10min bus ride, so no American commute, lol. (Your society is done) I like my colleagues. Sometimes you want to meet and solve problems face to face, and not have it be planned. I have a shift schedule, sometimes I am the only one in the office, that is bliss :) But my work is 100% in office.
- surgical_fire 7mo ago
  > What if I actually like the office? Then work from the office. The problem starts of you demand those that don't want to be in the office to be there to satisfy your needs. Your loneliness is not my desire to be around others.
- joks 7mo ago
  Optional hybrid work is kind of the optimal setup for me IMO. I go in to the office (often carpooling) once a week (skipping occasionally) with a few folks I work with who live locally, and I work remotely the rest of the time. It keeps me from feeling too isolated and makes the work I do feel more tangible while still being flexible and allowing me to work from home when I want to. RTO would still be a dealbreaker for me.
- benterix 7mo ago
  > What if I actually like the office? We had this discussion like, forever? If you like the office, that's great - go to the office! Most people want the freedom of choice, RTO is exactly about taking away that freedom.
- genthree 7mo ago
  Good office with a short walkable or bike able commute is my preference. I've never had "good" plus that kind of commute. I've only had one of those at a time, and about half the time, neither. So skipping the commute—and having a private bathroom, and all my own food available for lunch without packing, and fewer infections per year, and being able to deal with kid-emergencies with far less disruption to my work day et c—easily wins. But yes I prefer a good office and a nice, active commute. I'm on track to literally never have that combo together ever in my life, but it'd be my favorite way to work.
mcs5280 7mo ago
My company gave us 3 months notice and said 100% RTO in January 2026. I warned them this was a dealbreaker for me. They said sorry, no exceptions. In January I submitted my two weeks notice, citing RTO. They accepted my resignation letter and then called me a few hours later saying they could make an exception. Now I'm back to 100% remote. I wouldn't consider myself to be an irreplaceable superstar employee, but they folded almost immediately. Not sure what the point of this dance was.
- 627467 7mo ago
  Most orders are issued assuming compliance, or they'd be more considered (and less of them) or costly to enforce. To say there's "no exception" it's to say "we've done NO analysis whatsoever to understand if there should be any exception so, we'll cross that bridge later". You did well, because someone with actual some skin in the game considered you irreplaceable at that moment.
- stronglikedan 7mo ago
  > Not sure what the point of this dance was. It's to reduce dance partners. Most people won't push back against "no exceptions", so they greatly reduce the number of exceptions they have to consider just by saying it.
- feznyng 7mo ago
  My extremely paranoid take is they might intend to replace you with someone who will RTO but need to keep you around for a while until they find that replacement.
  - mcs5280 7mo ago
    You might be right. We shall see.
  - bdangubic 7mo ago
    This is exactly it. I hope for the sake of OP that s/he's the exception but so far examples of this from my personal circles is that it is just "you are here for the continuity until suitable replacement is found."
GuB-42 7mo ago
Two possibilities: - There are some statistical biases in the article, correlation != causation, Simpsons paradox, etc... things like that - Company will return-to-the-office mandates will soon disappear or adapt as they will lose their competitive advantage, x1.7 is too big of an effect to ignore What is possible is that work from home benefit companies in the growth phase while office work is more appropriate for companies that are already well established. So many possible explanations. The usual narrative here is that work from home is just better and that management mandating return to office are control freaks, but I can't believe it is that simple. It wouldn't make economic sense, real estate is expensive, they would save a lot by not having offices, in addition to all the supposed benefits. Personally, I feel that I am really missing something by working 100% remotely, so much happens by the coffee machine and Slack/Teams/GMeet... doesn't replace that. Hybrid work is what I prefer personally. Office time for exchanging and socializing and at-home time for deep thinking and personal flexibility. Personal experience, but it shows that not just extroverts and managers want to go back to the office sometimes, because I am neither, but I still think some office time is good. In fact, I tend to be more of a lone wolf, but even as a lone wolf, I still need to know what to do, and daily calls often don't give the whole picture.
- bestouff 7mo ago
  > Company will return-to-the-office mandates will soon disappear or adapt as they will lose their competitive advantage, x1.7 is too big of an effect to ignore Lol the market magic hand. At that point it's more of a religious belief than a scientific fact.
diacritical 7mo ago
I will never go back to the office. There are enough jobs around, even if they pay less. Hell, to live a comfortable life I could work at a job that pays 5x less than what I get paid now (not that much), even though I'll have to sacrifice some stuff. But I'll have to sacrifice luxuries, not my time or mental health. Personally, I see it like this: Option 1 - at home: * stay in my comfortable air-conditioned room in my underpants on my comfortable chair at my comfortable desk or bed, * surrounded by foods and drinks I like (I a minifridge in my room, it's awesome), and being able to quickly put something in the oven, * picking my nose or scratching my ass wherever I want to, * going to the bathroom whenever I want to (maybe with the laptop if I have to be available), * listening to music on headphones or speakers, * being able to communicate to and pay attention to family and pets for a few minutes here and there (no, this doesn't mean I'll waste my work time walking the dog or talking with people, but it means I can actually take a minute or two break and have an actual life), * smoking on the balcony whenever I want to (a 4 second trip), * alternating between lying on my bed or sitting on my chair or standing or running in place or dancing, * having my breaks in my most comfortable place - home. -------- Option 2 - the office: * wasting time traveling - driving sucks and the public transportation sucks, for different reasons (and no, I won't relocate just to be close to the office, what the actual fuck, I love my house), * having to look presentable, * having to make idle boring chit chat with corporate drones who want to socialize, * sharing a bathroom, * having to choose between listening to the office background noise or wearing uncomfortable noise-cancelling headphones, * having my breaks... in the office (and no, the office PlayStation or ping pong tables don't cut it), * having to prepare food for the next X hours, then having to eat it or reheat it at the office, * being able to attend to my house in case of an emergency (fire, floods, robbers, family or pet health issues and so on - yes, they absolutely come first), * being subjected to cameras and other security theater, as if any employee couldn't wreck the company if they actually wanted to. If you want me in the office, prepare to pay me a lot more. You won't and I understand. It makes no sense. -------- As for productivity - I work hard because I feel obligated, because it's my work ethic and because I don't want to cheat or let people down. If I don't like what I'm doing, I quit instead of "quiet quitting" and doing the bare minimum. It's much, much easier to get "in the zone" at home, to not burn out, to have time for myself (traffic + actual breaks) and to be happy. Edit - just to sum it up - it's my only (AFAIK) life and I'm not spending 10-11 hours a day on work. That would leave me with 5-6 hours of "me time" and I'd be too tired to enjoy it. Edit 2 - similarly, I won't put up with bullshit like: * installing anything on my personal devices (except things like FOSS TOTP 2FA stuff I can control), * leaving the camera and mic in my work machines intact (we all know how secure stuff is and how much we can trust corporations), * taking drug tests. That said, if you're willing to pay me 50 times what I currently make, I might return to the office with a suit, smile under the cameras, take drug tests, sit on my chair all day and discuss the weather with coworkers on the elevator. I'd be happy to do it for 3 or 4 months.
RigelKentaurus 7mo ago
IMHO, the majority of companies have run out of high-value ideas to achieve growth. Having nowhere else to turn, executive leadership is clutching at straws and mandating RTO and similar "initiatives". These leaders think it's a productivity problem, while lack of strategy is the real culprit.
Esophagus4 7mo ago
Man, these stories are just crack for HN commenters. They eat it up, every time.
HostingSift 7mo ago
The data here matches what I've seen firsthand. Working remote I get roughly 30% more actual work done, mostly because deep focus is way easier to protect. The productivity argument for RTO always felt backwards to me.
StacyRawls 7mo ago
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Bishop197 7mo ago
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140 points by penguin_booze 7mo ago

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

mikrl 7mo ago

[dead]

CivBase 7mo ago

For something to "backfire" you first have to account for why it was done. This article assumes performance and retention are the only considerations. It does not account for things like commercial real estate value, a buesiness's ability to monitor and control its employees, or excuses for layoffs.

_bypa 7mo ago
The article does say: > The better path is to raise the bar on management, not badge swipes. Real estate may play a role, but terrible management practices are also definitely a factor. And if every other company is doing it, it's safe to copy their behaviour and not stick your neck out.
matchbok3 7mo ago
What do you mean by "monitor and control"? Should an employer not be able to see what their employees are doing at work? What is an "excuse" for a layoff, exactly?
- angiolillo 7mo ago
  > What is an "excuse" for a layoff, exactly? By "excuses for layoffs" I suspect what they meant was that there was an pre-existing desire to reduce headcount and RTO was used under the expectation that some percentage of employees would quit voluntarily so that the company can avoid going through the relatively more costly process of laying them off. Of course the downside of this approach is that the company has less control over which employees leave, which may result in them losing the employees who have the best alternatives.
  - matchbok3 7mo ago
    Gotcha. There was definite over hiring that happened during covid so some of this was a return to normal I think.
- CivBase 7mo ago
  > What do you mean by "monitor and control"? Should an employer not be able to see what their employees are doing at work? I don't see any reason to get into a discussion about how much an employer should or shouldn't be able to monitor and control their employees. Some businesses are simply more trusting of their employees and allow a great deal of independence, while others aren't. Those that aren't will naturally face greater barriers to monitoring and controlling employees who are working remotely. > What is an "excuse" for a layoff, exactly? It's no secret that when the return-to-office movement began, many businesses used it as a means of achieving a headcount reduction. Employees who could not (or would not) return to the office were let go. Parting ways with difficult employees looks much better to investors than layoffs.
- thewebguyd 7mo ago
  > Should an employer not be able to see what their employees are doing at work? There's a difference between visibility into work progress and just mass surveillance of all activity. The only metric that actually matters is the delivery of value. Monitoring isn't an effective way to lead. It only reinforces employees to optimize for "looking busy" rather than being effective. If you have to audit your employees daily actions to know if they are doing their job, you've failed as a manager at defining their role or hiring the right people. A good manager defines the what and the when, and leaves the how to the professional being paid to do it.
  - matchbok3 7mo ago
    I mean, maybe. But a company that spends all of it's time "surveilling" their employees rather than adding value will go out of business. So I'm not sure what the point really is when people bring this up when talking about WFH. If someone doesn't want to be surveilled at work they can quit, right?
    - DHPersonal 7mo ago
      Why continue the cycle of finding a job and quitting it for solvable problems instead of staying and solving the problem?
    - asadotzler 7mo ago
      Not really. Workers produce the thing the company sells. Those workers are mostly trapped so they deal with whatever nonsense management is up to. Management, mostly useless, maintains its control and viability by asserting that workers need policing and they're the ones to do it. If the policing is relatively easy with WFH, they'll do that. If it's much harder, or less demonstrative of their fake value, screw that, they'll just pass that burden on to workers with RTO mandates.
      - matchbok3 7mo ago
        If management is useless then it should be trivial for you to replace them. I wish you luck!
- cdrnsf 7mo ago
  Why is the company hiring people it doesn't trust? That sounds like a process failure.
  - CivBase 7mo ago
    Because they're cheap.
- surgical_fire 7mo ago
  If you deliver all tasks in a timely manner, is productive and helpful in a team setting, contribute to discussions and initiatives beyond your immediate assignments... What exactly should I monitor? How many minutes per day your butt is in a seat? If you did a school run and woked a bit more after hours to compensate? If you had a headache and took a short nap after lunchtime? How does monitoring you contribute to anything?
  - matchbok3 7mo ago
    I agree. I don't really think "monitoring" is the reason for RTO. I think quality of work and collaboration is.
themafia 7mo ago
> commercial real estate value It's a little bit funny that 100% online businesses bought the most expensive and lavish real estate available. It's tragic they think their workers should throw good labor after bad investment to make a white collar feel justified.

isahers 7mo ago

This is interesting because it does not jibe at all with the people I know and how productive they are. The friends I know working big tech hybrid jobs work maybe 25 hours in a good week, whereas the friends I know in office 4/5 days a week are easily at double that. I'd imagine there are some confounding variables here. I wonder if a lot of those hybrid companies driving high revenue growth are just profit machines that don't really rely on employees being productive to grow (i.e. Google). Either way surprising findings to me!

farisa_lives 7mo ago
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graemep 7mo ago
Do they do more work by working longer hours? People often do not. Output is not the same thing as hours worked. Productivity is output per hour, so its also possible for output to fall and productivity to rise. This will be the usual case with fewer hours.
- red-iron-pine 7mo ago
  > Output is not the same thing as hours worked. factories would disagree. there are diminishing returns as people get tired and productivity dips, but there is still a direct, linear relationship. however its very different from knowledge- or social-based (e.g. sales) workers. there is often no direct 1-to-1
wrs 7mo ago
I think you may be confusing work with "work". It's easy to find yourself spending 40 hours in an office and accomplishing 6 hours of actual work, and conversely it's easy to spend 25 hours at home and do 20 hours of actual work. This obviously depends on what the work is. People whose job is to focus on building things for hours at a time have very different optimal work environment from people who meet with and coordinate other people in short bursts. So no one-size-fits-all top-down policy can be effective; local flexibility is required.
7mo ago

farisa_lives 7mo ago

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imcrs 7mo ago

RTO is about controlling labor, nothing else. Everything else is a smoke screen. Ask yourself the following questions and you'll understand what happened: - why did RTO happen seemingly right after salaries jumped and labor became scarce? - why did RTO happen virtually in lockstep across all of white collar employment? - why did RTO happen despite no evidence that productivity had anything to do with it? (and in fact, lots of evidence that it made employees more productive!) - why did RTO happen at the same time that critical equity/diversity viewpoints were increasingly being discussed at work? - why did RTO happen at the same time that outsourcing ramped up? If businesses are so opposed to remote work, why are they outsourcing so aggressively? It's not about AI. It's not about CRE. It's not about "synergy" in person. It's about disciplining labor. Businesses will happily tank productivity to prevent the power balance from tipping towards the employee. In that 2020-2023 period, people started talking seriously about how much value they bring to the table. They started making demands of their employers (especially around diversity, equity, inclusion). They started interviewing at multiple places, seeing their worth, demanding more, and giving only as much effort as strictly required to get the job done. The sudden, overnight, incredibly strong reaction to this period, the hard right turn, that is the whip cracking down on labor.

thewebguyd 7mo ago
Correct. Workers were starting to get power, people had seen through the fog at what was actually happening and were acting out against it. Agency is a direct threat to the owner class.
- asdff 7mo ago
  It is amazing how much the constraints of working in the office shackle people to positions or locations. So many people working below their worth due to spouses ability to get a job in some location for example. Maybe you do land a job in your line of work in this little corner of the earth where your spouses jobs are more a plenty. Now you have to hold on for dear life to this company, do whatever the hell they ask of you and take whatever offer they give you because you have no leverage at all. The fact that people completely miss this fact and just go "well I like talking to people in person" I mean at a certain point belies ignorance that borders on stupidity with how hard people cling to the "ability to talk to people in the hallway" against even just the obvious negative externalities like the commute and limited home choices. No one ever talks about this career side and juggling a two body problem.

ventana 7mo ago

The article has so many "it's this, not that" contradictions – I counted seven! – that I seriously consider it to be written with a lot of assistance from LLMs. One thing not mentioned in the article is that now that many software engineers are back to their offices, we get the regular fall / spring viral infections spreading out between employees who feel obliged to go to the office even if they have mild cold symptoms. If RTO is about productivity, I wonder if anyone has accounted the productivity drop caused by viruses in workspace.

nphardon 7mo ago
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case_ratchet 7mo ago
Not great in productivity terms, no: - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10269830/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10269830/ - https://www.covermagazine.co.uk/news/2344756/open-plan-offices-health-productivity-risk-canada-life https://www.covermagazine.co.uk/news/2344756/open-plan-offic...

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jmyeet 7mo ago

Any analysis that frames this as a productivity or talent-attraction issue is flawed from the start because that was never the point and still isn't. The point of RTO mandates is to suppress wages. It's to get people to quit rather than having to lay them off. It's part of the permanent layoffs culture we're now in where every year 5-10% of the workers at a company will be laid off. Remaining workers will do more labor for the same money and won't be asking for raises because they're thankful to still have a job. And someone quitting is much cheaper than paying them severance. Tech workers in particular saw massive wage growth in the 2010s due to tight supply. Companies are now in the business of clawing back thoat wage growth. It's why all these big tech companies started RTO mandates and layoffs at about the exact same time. It's a wink-and-nod collusion rather than overt collusion. We're a long way from the times when Google just hired all the engineers to deny them to their competitors. None of this is necessary. All of these companies are still insanely profitable. But profits have to keep growing and ultimately that comes down to cutting costs. There's nothing else you can do. Employers don't want you to be financially secure. They want you drowning in debt with declining real wages because then you're absolutely showing up to work and putting up with whatever they want.

red-iron-pine 7mo ago
easy mate the same people pushing those suppressions are the ones posting here. or having their bots post here. you're supposed to pretend capitalism is great. but yeah it's clearly body shedding with the goal of rehiring on the cheap. and/or buying time to see how AI plays out.

kelseyfrog 7mo ago

If RTO sacrifices a 1.7x revenue growth, where's the consequence for malfeasance or examples of the buck stopping with shareholders? If I owned a share of these orgs, I wouldnt want revenue left on the table because some VP had an attachment problem.

cheriot 7mo ago

I suspect there's a selection bias from poorly run companies using RTO to cut headcount. Now they can have layoffs and put a positive spin on it with AI.

productinventor 7mo ago

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tamimio 7mo ago

I don’t know why they keep bringing “productivity” as the justification, it never was, never will, it’s about power dynamics, remote work shifted a lot of power back to employees, it also provided flexibility career wise. Another big reason why it got attacked quickly is it gave the people a window to escape the rat race and save money, when the employee doesn’t spend xyz on gas everyday, plus relocating outside of the crowded urban areas to cheaper smaller cities, rent/housing went down, landlords and banks had to lobby to end it, plus the government since less taxes are paid now as a result, all efforts made to bring back the status quo. It was fascinating to see how they gaslit the public, I was even talking to an employer before and the manager was trash talking wfh as “woke” and “real men” must grind 9hrs a day at least! Another employer was demanding a full camera on at least 6hrs a day if you wfh, or you are not “productive”. Back in the 80s or 90s, working in the office or factory was the default and it made sense, no high speed internet, small town so not much commuting, cheap housing, and affordable life, so if the man worked in the office and the wife stayed home, they can live comfortably. That’s not the case now, wfh balanced that and increased the quality of life instead, so you can now stay with your kids saving the cost of daycare etc, while doing exactly the same work you would do at the office.

tug2024 7mo ago

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notepad0x90 7mo ago

This is the culmination of short-term-profit thinking, and I'm shocked people like YC's @paulgraham support RTO. What's the long term game plan? It's like hotels and taxis resisting uber and airbnb. there will always be the old way of doing things, but people don't want to work from the office unless they have to. You've become the disruptee instead of the disruptor at that point. I've been both productive and unproductive while WFH as well as in the office. In either case it was a product of managerial decisions. I think they expected people to "just be productive" on their own, and then they install surveillance crap on their devices, measure bullshit and deduce RTO isn't needed. The older way of defining a couple of performance indicator metrics and using that to mange people no longer works, RTO or not. So now, most managers have resorted to a "vibes-based" management technique, where the numbers can be made to mean whatever you want them to mean, so long as the vibe feels right. So if two people are just as unproductive, but you turn on one of their camera and see a person working from their bed in their pajamas, the vibe will such, so RTO makes sense in their mind. I don't think RTO will backfire any time too soon, but in the long term, the US has bigger problems in terms a decline as a nation. But if we overcome that somehow, there really is only one game in town: competition. Can your company be competitive while implementing RTO? Your competition that figures out how to make their people happy and WFH will beat you. not only that, they'll pay their people less money for that privilege. Technology infrastructure is still a growing thing in most of the world, but i suspect in a decade or so, WFH would be ideal for most humans in the world. I also speculate that remote-controlled automated things will become very popular. not just waymo support driving the care remotely as needed, but even things like janitors and manual labor jobs could be done via robots controlled remotely. For office work, it requires a different style of management, in a generation the older people too used to office work will be out of the workforce, but that transition will mean companies with a younger management workforce (who gets paid a lot less typically) will have a competitive advantage. Teams not performing well with WFH -- with a millennial or younger manager would be a real shocker to me.

iberator 7mo ago

RTO because of Slackware faking while sleeping and walking dogs. Cheaters

heraldgeezer 7mo ago

What if I actually like the office? I have a 40min walk to it or 10min bus ride, so no American commute, lol. (Your society is done) I like my colleagues. Sometimes you want to meet and solve problems face to face, and not have it be planned. I have a shift schedule, sometimes I am the only one in the office, that is bliss :) But my work is 100% in office.

surgical_fire 7mo ago
> What if I actually like the office? Then work from the office. The problem starts of you demand those that don't want to be in the office to be there to satisfy your needs. Your loneliness is not my desire to be around others.
joks 7mo ago
Optional hybrid work is kind of the optimal setup for me IMO. I go in to the office (often carpooling) once a week (skipping occasionally) with a few folks I work with who live locally, and I work remotely the rest of the time. It keeps me from feeling too isolated and makes the work I do feel more tangible while still being flexible and allowing me to work from home when I want to. RTO would still be a dealbreaker for me.
benterix 7mo ago
> What if I actually like the office? We had this discussion like, forever? If you like the office, that's great - go to the office! Most people want the freedom of choice, RTO is exactly about taking away that freedom.
genthree 7mo ago
Good office with a short walkable or bike able commute is my preference. I've never had "good" plus that kind of commute. I've only had one of those at a time, and about half the time, neither. So skipping the commute—and having a private bathroom, and all my own food available for lunch without packing, and fewer infections per year, and being able to deal with kid-emergencies with far less disruption to my work day et c—easily wins. But yes I prefer a good office and a nice, active commute. I'm on track to literally never have that combo together ever in my life, but it'd be my favorite way to work.

mcs5280 7mo ago

My company gave us 3 months notice and said 100% RTO in January 2026. I warned them this was a dealbreaker for me. They said sorry, no exceptions. In January I submitted my two weeks notice, citing RTO. They accepted my resignation letter and then called me a few hours later saying they could make an exception. Now I'm back to 100% remote. I wouldn't consider myself to be an irreplaceable superstar employee, but they folded almost immediately. Not sure what the point of this dance was.

627467 7mo ago
Most orders are issued assuming compliance, or they'd be more considered (and less of them) or costly to enforce. To say there's "no exception" it's to say "we've done NO analysis whatsoever to understand if there should be any exception so, we'll cross that bridge later". You did well, because someone with actual some skin in the game considered you irreplaceable at that moment.
stronglikedan 7mo ago
> Not sure what the point of this dance was. It's to reduce dance partners. Most people won't push back against "no exceptions", so they greatly reduce the number of exceptions they have to consider just by saying it.
feznyng 7mo ago
My extremely paranoid take is they might intend to replace you with someone who will RTO but need to keep you around for a while until they find that replacement.
- mcs5280 7mo ago
  You might be right. We shall see.
- bdangubic 7mo ago
  This is exactly it. I hope for the sake of OP that s/he's the exception but so far examples of this from my personal circles is that it is just "you are here for the continuity until suitable replacement is found."

GuB-42 7mo ago

Two possibilities: - There are some statistical biases in the article, correlation != causation, Simpsons paradox, etc... things like that - Company will return-to-the-office mandates will soon disappear or adapt as they will lose their competitive advantage, x1.7 is too big of an effect to ignore What is possible is that work from home benefit companies in the growth phase while office work is more appropriate for companies that are already well established. So many possible explanations. The usual narrative here is that work from home is just better and that management mandating return to office are control freaks, but I can't believe it is that simple. It wouldn't make economic sense, real estate is expensive, they would save a lot by not having offices, in addition to all the supposed benefits. Personally, I feel that I am really missing something by working 100% remotely, so much happens by the coffee machine and Slack/Teams/GMeet... doesn't replace that. Hybrid work is what I prefer personally. Office time for exchanging and socializing and at-home time for deep thinking and personal flexibility. Personal experience, but it shows that not just extroverts and managers want to go back to the office sometimes, because I am neither, but I still think some office time is good. In fact, I tend to be more of a lone wolf, but even as a lone wolf, I still need to know what to do, and daily calls often don't give the whole picture.

bestouff 7mo ago
> Company will return-to-the-office mandates will soon disappear or adapt as they will lose their competitive advantage, x1.7 is too big of an effect to ignore Lol the market magic hand. At that point it's more of a religious belief than a scientific fact.

diacritical 7mo ago

I will never go back to the office. There are enough jobs around, even if they pay less. Hell, to live a comfortable life I could work at a job that pays 5x less than what I get paid now (not that much), even though I'll have to sacrifice some stuff. But I'll have to sacrifice luxuries, not my time or mental health. Personally, I see it like this: Option 1 - at home: * stay in my comfortable air-conditioned room in my underpants on my comfortable chair at my comfortable desk or bed, * surrounded by foods and drinks I like (I a minifridge in my room, it's awesome), and being able to quickly put something in the oven, * picking my nose or scratching my ass wherever I want to, * going to the bathroom whenever I want to (maybe with the laptop if I have to be available), * listening to music on headphones or speakers, * being able to communicate to and pay attention to family and pets for a few minutes here and there (no, this doesn't mean I'll waste my work time walking the dog or talking with people, but it means I can actually take a minute or two break and have an actual life), * smoking on the balcony whenever I want to (a 4 second trip), * alternating between lying on my bed or sitting on my chair or standing or running in place or dancing, * having my breaks in my most comfortable place - home. -------- Option 2 - the office: * wasting time traveling - driving sucks and the public transportation sucks, for different reasons (and no, I won't relocate just to be close to the office, what the actual fuck, I love my house), * having to look presentable, * having to make idle boring chit chat with corporate drones who want to socialize, * sharing a bathroom, * having to choose between listening to the office background noise or wearing uncomfortable noise-cancelling headphones, * having my breaks... in the office (and no, the office PlayStation or ping pong tables don't cut it), * having to prepare food for the next X hours, then having to eat it or reheat it at the office, * being able to attend to my house in case of an emergency (fire, floods, robbers, family or pet health issues and so on - yes, they absolutely come first), * being subjected to cameras and other security theater, as if any employee couldn't wreck the company if they actually wanted to. If you want me in the office, prepare to pay me a lot more. You won't and I understand. It makes no sense. -------- As for productivity - I work hard because I feel obligated, because it's my work ethic and because I don't want to cheat or let people down. If I don't like what I'm doing, I quit instead of "quiet quitting" and doing the bare minimum. It's much, much easier to get "in the zone" at home, to not burn out, to have time for myself (traffic + actual breaks) and to be happy. Edit - just to sum it up - it's my only (AFAIK) life and I'm not spending 10-11 hours a day on work. That would leave me with 5-6 hours of "me time" and I'd be too tired to enjoy it. Edit 2 - similarly, I won't put up with bullshit like: * installing anything on my personal devices (except things like FOSS TOTP 2FA stuff I can control), * leaving the camera and mic in my work machines intact (we all know how secure stuff is and how much we can trust corporations), * taking drug tests. That said, if you're willing to pay me 50 times what I currently make, I might return to the office with a suit, smile under the cameras, take drug tests, sit on my chair all day and discuss the weather with coworkers on the elevator. I'd be happy to do it for 3 or 4 months.

RigelKentaurus 7mo ago

IMHO, the majority of companies have run out of high-value ideas to achieve growth. Having nowhere else to turn, executive leadership is clutching at straws and mandating RTO and similar "initiatives". These leaders think it's a productivity problem, while lack of strategy is the real culprit.

Esophagus4 7mo ago

Man, these stories are just crack for HN commenters. They eat it up, every time.

HostingSift 7mo ago

The data here matches what I've seen firsthand. Working remote I get roughly 30% more actual work done, mostly because deep focus is way easier to protect. The productivity argument for RTO always felt backwards to me.

StacyRawls 7mo ago

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Bishop197 7mo ago

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