I think Work From Home vs Return To Workplace is now a pendulum. I wonder if it will swing back and forth, spurred on by radicals in both sides, until it goes out of control, or if it will come to rest at a central location?
80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans
471–480 of 630 posts
Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans
#472I have a new conspiracy theory on RTO in Big Tech. Much has been said about commercial real estate. But I think getting highly capable people to work hard for you is a difficult problem & something tech executives put a lot of thought into. If you don't pay people enough, someone else will. But if you pay them too much, they'll become financially independent. Mid six figures is an objectively life-changing amount of…
https://www.barbaraehrenreich.com/titles/barbara-ehrenreich/...
Fear of Falling by Barbara Ehrenreich.
Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans
#473Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it funny that when people were required to be home, employers talked about what great productivity they were getting with people at home. Then when it isn't required anymore, they want everyone back in the office for...productivity. My guess is that most employers really have no way to measure if an employee is being productive or not so managers are just reporting what makes them look good...and now we are ba…
> My guess is that most employers really have no way to measure if an employee is being productive or not so managers are just reporting what makes them look good...and now we are back to where managers will look better with lots of people running around the office. My guess is that CEOs and VCs have some obscure reason to force people back into the office. Perhaps related to real estate, especially considering how h…
HN keeps telling me it’s sunk cost and it’s not real estate so stop saying that. Then this article also mentions it’s real estate. Guess what HN? It’s partly real estate costs and having few people fill those spaces.
Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
100%. And don‘t forget about the useless standup meetings which are nothing more than a complete waste of time.
Why do you think standup meetings are useless? Maybe they are not run properly? I find them to be a pillar of our workday, within our team.
I don’t find mine useless, but I focus a lot on prioritizing and un-blocking people. The tasks we have are usually very different between engineers though so I can see why someone would find that useless time.
Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans
#476Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it funny that when people were required to be home, employers talked about what great productivity they were getting with people at home. Then when it isn't required anymore, they want everyone back in the office for...productivity. My guess is that most employers really have no way to measure if an employee is being productive or not so managers are just reporting what makes them look good...and now we are ba…
> My guess is that most employers really have no way to measure if an employee is being productive or not so managers are just reporting what makes them look good...and now we are back to where managers will look better with lots of people running around the office. My guess is that CEOs and VCs have some obscure reason to force people back into the office. Perhaps related to real estate, especially considering how h…
I heard a story of high up executives stepping into an Uber, only to discover that the driver was actually an employee for their firm.
Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a conspiracy theory, it's how the system works. You are taxed on pretty much all of your income either from the state, the landlord, the credit card company or the lifestyle obligations that stems from the area you are living in. > And that's right where they want you. This is the part where we diverge, and I think where people confuse emerging phenomena for conspiracy. There is no one orchestrating this.
> There is no one orchestrating this. There wasn’t before. There is now. Lobbyists are pushing for it. Big investment firms like Vanguard and Blackrock that have a lot to lose if the commercial real estate market collapses are pushing companies to mandate RTO policies if they want to keep getting investments. Makes sense.
source?
Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans
#478I don't think that return-to-office is driven by executives, I think it's driven by owners. They simply have a religious belief that a slave you can't see is an indolent slave.
They think that WFH is an "obvious" inefficiency that they can pull back from and be rewarded with "free" productivity. The scare quotes around "free" are because they know that returning to work is done at the worker's expense rather than the company's, so they're running literally no risk even if it doesn't improve a thing.
Return-to-work is essentially giving everyone a pay cut based on an ideologically-based wager that it might help the bottom line. It's gambling for yourself, staked with employees' personal time and money, because you can.
Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open offices are the literal reason (after commuting/traffic) that I no longer want to go into the office. My work doesn't require a ton of person:person engagement and it's much easier for me to just zone out in my own headspace to do it. When I was required in the office, I would just wear headphones to avoid distractions, but I would have to deal with 2-3hrs of driving/day on top of it. This meant that my employer…
Open offices are terrible. Management knows they are as well because Sr. leadership almost always have their own offices. The peons sit in the pit. Until the CEO is sitting next to everyone else they are all speaking lies when preaching the benefits of an open office. The only benefit is that its cheaper and they can keep an eye on you.
Open office look great! Just like TV. I don't think I've ever seen an office environment that has not been open on TV. A TV show with everyone in a private office would not work, no drama!
But to work in them is a noisy hell. I had a lawyer friend talk about how great these open offices must be to work in. So productive and dynamic he would say. But of course this is coming from a profession where having a private office is an absolute requirement.
Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans
#480Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you think standup meetings are useless? Maybe they are not run properly? I find them to be a pillar of our workday, within our team.
Discussions that should be 1:1 become 1:N, wasting the time of (N-1) people.
Discussions, yes, but discussions aren't for the standup meeting. Those are for informally updating everybody on what you're working on and whether you're stuck on anything. They lead to 1 on 1 meetings to solve those issues.