Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

Well, basically you then need to chase them as a dev manager. And not just one person, but most of the team, because you can't really get the information passively. I bet the devs love that. In practice this doesn't really happen and the dev manager is quite blind to what's happening.

And it's not just the dev manager, but generally all team members get this information passively when co-located. It's much easier to read the room when people are in the same place, and you see how they interact. When remote, devs often have no idea about other devs, unless they again chase the information (which usually doesn't happen).

> I basically work 20-30 hours a week!

More like 15-20 for me personally, and it's usually around 5-10 hours of actual work if I'm forced to come to the office on the other hand! Also why is this a bad thing, assuming all the work gets completed as it should? Is there something magical that happens once you've hit that arbitrary 40 hour limit where it suddenly counts as real work, or do you just get your rocks off by wasting your employee's lives on frivolous, mind-numbing thumb twirling?

> They have no idea when I’m actually working

They have no idea when I'm in the office either. Hell, my team is way less productive on our mandatory team days than we are when we're each at home, since we spend the majority of the day just chatting and not actually getting work done (my manager included).

Being physically present in the office != working, and anyone who thinks they can detect the people slacking off in person but not online are just delusional.

> I was going to quit but I’m going to let them just keep paying me

Not sure what this one is even implying?

> I have at least one side job and I won’t be able to do it if I need to go back in

I don't personally, but again why does it matter if they're getting all their work done as is expected of them? Maybe pay them more than peanuts and they'll be happy to pretend to work for 40 hours for you, instead of being forced to take a sidegig to pay the bills.

I don't think the free-market-solves-all-ails response really works here. The issue is that the CEOs of these companies act together, essentially as a cartel. Sometimes formally [1], other times informally [2]. Labor (at least in the US) does not have anywhere close to such a level of organization, and so top-down mandates like this can impact a whole sector, without a clear place for you to go.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

[2] "You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge." - George Carlin

If everyone is honest/genuine it could probably work.

If the in-person team doesn't like working remotely because they prefer to communicate and make decisions in-person, those conversations/decisions will have to be propagated to the remote team, for the company to function.

My gut feeling is that at some point, an important decision will be made in-person and not propagated, leading to confusion, lack of coordination, etc. Then, politics will ensue because the in-person team might feel like they're making concessions to the remote-team, and that the remote-team is always lagging behind, that the bulk of the decision-making responsibility are on the in-person team's shoulders, etc.

I'm 100% speculating, but I can see it happen.

>* Here's another article from 2014 that showed a 13.5% increase at a different call center https://hbr.org/2014/01/to-raise-productivity-let-more-emplo... So study vs study, which one is correct or better? This isn't good evidence either way for software engineers.

1. The article in question cites 5 other studies that also found negative results for remote work.

2. The Ctrip study mentioned in your hbr.org link is probably the Trip.com study mentioned in the economist article. The article mentions issues with that study:

"Call-centre workers for a Chinese online travel agency now known as Trip.com increased their performance by 13% when remote—a figure that continues to appear in media coverage today. But two big wrinkles are often neglected: first, more than two-thirds of the improved performance came from employees working longer hours, not more efficiently; second, the Chinese firm eventually halted remote work because off-site employees struggled to get promoted. In 2022 Dr Bloom visited Trip.com again, this time to investigate the effects of a hybrid-working trial. The outcomes of this experiment were less striking: it had a negligible impact on productivity, though workers put in longer days and wrote more code when in the office."

>* The discussion here is about tech workers, not call center employees

>The data and evidence we need is from the loud RTO companies (Google, Amazon, etc.) in the software industry pushing for RTO. These supposedly heavily data and metrics driven organizations have NO DATA supporting their RTO efforts. Some random study about call centers is irrelevant here.

1. Some data is no data. Sure, maybe doing the study with office workers will show different results, but until then assuming the positive unless there's evidence to the contrary is just intellectually dishonest.

2. Call center productivity is far easier to objectively measure than tech workers. Given issues above with studies on call center workers, I suspect that even if there were a study showing negative results for tech workers, there's going to be some many ways you can wriggle yourself out of that one that it's not going to meaningfully change the conversation.