Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

soatok.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 913 posts

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#171

Post by yanderekko »

I mean, yes it's bullshit to try to apply RTO policies on remote workers that were hired as remote workers. It's not even a "return" in that scenario, properly understood. And IANAL but I wonder if that could be considered a constructive dismissal that mandates severance rather than a "soft" one.

That said, this article flirts with the often-made argument that RTO is some sort of way of boosting commercial property prices or tax incentives. I've never bought this and would be curious to see the argument steelmanned, since I don't think large corporations are going to easily fall into this sunk cost fallacy style thinking. If remote work boosts productivity and allows them to lower the costs of having offices, companies should embrace this even if they made prior investments in having offices.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#172

Post by PsylentKnight »

grumblingdev wrote: post #31
TerrifiedMouse wrote: post #11

There are so many “habits” left over from industrial work. On an assembly line everyone needed to be in sync but this generally isn’t true for most office work. You need to be present at the factory to do the work, hasn’t been true for office work for awhile now. Yet we still operate synchronously. Everyone commutes through traffic/crowded public transport and risk catching the latest novel virus, to arrive at work a…

> an assembly line Now imagine working on an assembly line on your feet all day versus your office day job. The people on the assembly line would look at you like the most spoilt people in the world. I personally hated going into the office, but the morale effect is real. I think the main thing is people cannot be trusted to honestly tell you if they work better from the office. It's a nicer life working from home bu…

> The people on the assembly line would look at you like the most spoilt people in the world.

Ok, working standards and life in general have gotten better for people. Why is that a bad thing?

> It's a nicer life working from home

Again, why is people having a better life a bad thing?

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#173

Post by [deleted] »

SSJPython wrote: post #30

I don't understand why there can't be compromise on this? If you want to go to the office, go. If you want to work from home, then work from home. Why is it that remote workers never insist on everyone working from home, but RTO people want every single person to RTO? Just leave it up to the individual worker.

[deleted]

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#174

Post by kjkjadksj »

prosqlinjector wrote: post #117
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #53

I’ll know this “counter argument” isn’t bullshit when people finally admit they know full well a large portion of people abuse WFH. Until I see honesty on this, I am uninterested. No one ever admits: - I basically work 20-30 hours a week! - They have no idea when I’m actually working. - I was going to quit but I’m going to let them just keep paying me. - I have at least one side job and I won’t be able to do it if I…

Everyone was posting on twitter about all the "projects" and video games they were working on during the lock down, despite supposedly still having full-time remote jobs. They also had time to move all across the country.

Kind of on management for being so ineffectual than an indictment on the principle.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#175

Post by ghaff »

function_seven wrote: post #98
ledauphin wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

critique: (almost) no one wants to work 30 days a month. ;) more seriously: I assume you plan to pay for hotel rooms? also: why 2 hours max? If you're paying for one night in a hotel, then surely you could pay for 2 nights, making 3 or more hours feasible.

The 2 hours max is so no hotel room is needed. Two hours would be a hellish commute if it were every day, but it’s no big deal only two days a month.

It sort of is with the inevitable team dinner and social activity etc. Although I have a closer office I literally never go into, I do go into our urban office now and then for customer meetings. It's 90 minutes each way, it's barely doable, and if I have 2 days of meetings in a row, especially with a dinner in-between, I book a hotel room if at all possible.

2 hours each way is doable I guess. But I'd probably end up coming in late and passing on any after-5 activities.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#176

Post by SoftTalker »

mc32 wrote: post #75
x86x87 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not only about before pandemic remote workers. Once people enjoyed the flexibility they aren't going back.

Some or many people are just as productive working from home, but also many are not and are more productive in an office environment. There need to be better more reliable ways of measuring this and affording those who are able to be productive while remote the option. Those who aren’t as productive WFH don’t get the choice.

I'm more productive in the office, but I prefer working from home.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#177

Post by TrackerFF »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #53

I’ll know this “counter argument” isn’t bullshit when people finally admit they know full well a large portion of people abuse WFH. Until I see honesty on this, I am uninterested. No one ever admits: - I basically work 20-30 hours a week! - They have no idea when I’m actually working. - I was going to quit but I’m going to let them just keep paying me. - I have at least one side job and I won’t be able to do it if I…

Tbh, if you only work half of the time while at home, you're probably not working much more while you're at work. You probably spend more time pretending to work while at work, but I'd be amazed if the net productivity is any different.

That, at least to me, seems to be the big elephant in the room that no-one wants to address.

Office workers are not productive 100% of the time, every single minute at work. I've worked manual labor where we actually worked every single minute, sans 15 minute breaks every 3 hours, but never in an office setting. Even white-collar workers that are putting in 80 hour weeks are spending a good time of that just waiting, pretending to work, and just doing otherwise "unproductive" things.

A lot of employers simply want their "moneys worth" of your time. They'd rather you be unproductive at work than home.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#178

Post by OfSanguineFire »

lxe wrote: post #106

I was wondering why remote work didn't become the golden standard even in the 2000s. Imagine fully-remote Internet dot-com era companies that don't require any hardware, can hire from anywhere in the country or the world, don't need any real estate investment, and can pass the savings onto competitively hiring best talent. There hasn't been any compelling reason for most internet-only companies like yahoo, google, fa…

I suppose it is a cultural thing, and American or Western European firms simply expected people to come into the office. I was active in the Eastern European/former USSR backpacking and travel-as-lifestyle community, and eventually quite a few of my peers with programming skills managed to get remote positions already in the first decade of the new millennium. Some companies in the region didn't care whether the work got done from a beach in India or a resort town in the Andes, as long as it got done.

This was truly transformative for some Eastern European programmers' lives. Doing the work from a developing country where you could get by on 5-10€/day, but making a relatively elite salary, allowed them to begin investing in real estate, which has brought great prosperity and security.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#179

Post by tedivm »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #90
x86x87 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not only about before pandemic remote workers. Once people enjoyed the flexibility they aren't going back.

I enjoyed the flexibility of WFH but I still prefer working with local teams in the office. There are pros and cons to both, but it's silly to assume everyone has the same preference as you just because your preference is strongly held. This is my response to both your comment and TFA. There is less consensus on this topic than the very-vocal WFH crowd would have you believe. I know plenty of other talented engineers…

It's absolutely silly for the RTO people to force their preferences on everyone. The fact that RTO folks only consider it a win if everyone comes back, rather than trying to build out flexibile working conditions that make everyone happy, is the real problem.

People who want an office to work in are just as valid as people who want to work from home. It's the people who want to force RTO on everyone that are real assholes.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#180

Post by grogenaut »

bacza2 wrote: post #110
mc32 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some or many people are just as productive working from home, but also many are not and are more productive in an office environment. There need to be better more reliable ways of measuring this and affording those who are able to be productive while remote the option. Those who aren’t as productive WFH don’t get the choice.

Why it always need to be only about productivity and not what is better for people? I get that company need to make money but surly productivity is not dropping 50% and company makes significantly less

How do you objectively measure productivity? Same question for "better for people".

The former can be somewhat measured by in-effective methods such as lines of code produced, revenue per emp in division, and other measures. The latter via surveys.

A company's direct objective it to turn a profit. Their indirect objective is might be to do that via retaining productive workers, or they may take a churn approach. Is it surprising they'd put more effort and weight on the former (prod) than the latter (better for people)?

What math function allows you to strike the correct balance between the 2 measures. For some employees you might make them maximally satisfied by paying them a lot to do nothing. For others they might want little to no money for socially rewarding work. It's not going to be the same for every person.

So in your mind what's the right optimization function for this equation?

Post reply on HN