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The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

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Re: The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

#31

Post by kubb »

lumost wrote: post #18

I’ve been called back to the office a few days a week now. It took 4 trips back to realize the things I dealt guilty about while working remote were non issues. Saw 4 managers literally walking by their employees desks watching them work. To add insult to injury, there were 4 managers for 12 employees doing this.

Sounds about right, my manager enjoys tennis, frequent coffee breaks, one or two light meetings, and he activates with out of touch "ideas" in the last hour of the day. It's ridiculous.

Re: The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

#32

Post by brentm »

Bad take. There are plenty of dumb reasons people are wanted back at the office but the most predominant one is probably that it just "feels like" it will make your company better.

I'd think people would be happy that at least some remote work will never go away at this point. To argue that you should never ever even have to consider going back into an office for any amount of time is just silly. But to also argue you can never ever work from home is also silly.

Re: The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

#33

Post by stanleydrew »

CPLX wrote: post #15

This article makes no sense. I mean I'm all for a little elite run the world consipiracy theory but really, I'm supposed to think that a diffuse group of corporate leaders are upending companies so they can spend more on real estate going forward, for class solidarity reasons? The reason people running companies want to end or curtail remote work is because it's very fucking challenging to run a group of people remot…

Yes, this reads exactly like it was written by someone who's never had a leadership role, and probably doesn't want to hold such a role, but deigns to know exactly the motivations of people in those roles.

Re: The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

#34

Post by progbits »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #9

I don’t really buy the argument. If commercial RE crashes, that means what, people take a 20% haircut on converting the buildings to condos and/or just selling for the value of the land? We are still seeing unprecedented housing shortages, which puts a pretty high floor on how much l “downtown” land values will crash.

Office space is very expensive to convert to residential, you have large rectangle with windows on the perimeter only, weird elevator/stair layout, insufficient plumbing for many individual bathrooms, and poor ventilation for kitchens.

Re: The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

#35

Post by jonathankoren »

TrackerFF wrote: post #5

Re-zoning commercial buildings to residential use should be a realistic option, no?

The problem isn’t the zoning. That can be fixed with literally a stroke of a pen. The problem is that the buildings were never designed for habitation, and so you run into issues with plumbing and windows. Sometimes these things are fixable, but usually at great cost, especially for newer construction.

Re: The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

#36

Post by sveme »

CPLX wrote: post #15

This article makes no sense. I mean I'm all for a little elite run the world consipiracy theory but really, I'm supposed to think that a diffuse group of corporate leaders are upending companies so they can spend more on real estate going forward, for class solidarity reasons? The reason people running companies want to end or curtail remote work is because it's very fucking challenging to run a group of people remot…

I run a hybrid team while working remotely. The only thing that is considerably more difficult remotely is getting a feeling for how the team members feel. Are they doing okay? Are they bored/annoyed? But that‘s more of a problem for insecure managers. I trust my teams, talk to each regularly and all is fine so far.

Re: The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

#39

Post by roncesvalles »

jpollock wrote: post #7

If your job can be done remote, it can be done offshore for 1/10 the cost.

If your job isn't remote, it can also be offshored for 1/10 the cost - just get an office building.

The arbitrage from offshoring is much narrower than most people think. You mostly get what you pay for and companies can easily waste a lot of money and time trying to go the low-cost more-employees route.

Re: The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

#40

Post by jackmott42 »

stanleydrew wrote: post #23

This isn't particularly well-argued. Just a lot of handwavy grievance about "elites" as though there's some kind of coordinated conspiracy.

A the top end there is a lot of coordination, big money conservatives get together at CPAC and other venues to make plans, each political party is a powerful coordinated force of elites, they are all on each other's boards, etc.

However this article did not present any evidence of any given group of elites doing this, for this reason, so...

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