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Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

soatok.blog

811–820 of 913 posts

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not infer any contempt from the author towards everyday people who are forced to capitulate. The author empathized with the hardest hit victims in this target: h1b workers. Those who cannot simply 'play chicken' without risking deportation. There was no contempt or hate in these words or I feel like the sentiment would have been 'they are getting what they deserve... ' I agree completely with this author about…

> forced to capitulate There it is again. As if it isn't possible for people to just, you know, decide that it is fine and move on with their lives? Are they really "forced to capitulate"? I recall working in an office building for a small software company. Due to the growth, the company had people working in hallways. Soon after I joined the company moved offices so they could have more space. The new building was o…

You may be interested in the addendum the author posted.

https://soatok.blog/2023/10/02/return-to-office-is-bullshit-...

""" Addendum

After I posted this, it made the front page of Hacker News and was subsequently posted in quite a few places. After reading some of the comments, I realize a few subtleties in my word choice didn’t come across, so I’d like to clarify them.

When I say “RTO is bullshit”, I don’t mean “office work is bullshit” or anything negative about people that prefer in-person office work. I mean “the forced relocation implementation of transitioning a whole company to never-remote (a.k.a. RTO) is bullshit”.

If working in an office is better for you, rock on. I don’t have any issue with that. The bullshit is the actions taken by company’s leadership teams in absence of (or often in spite of) hard data on remote work versus in-person work. The bullshit is changing remote worker’s employment agreements without their consent and threatening “voluntary resignation” as the only alternative (even though that’s pretty obviously constructive dismissal).

When I discussed ultimatums above, I’m specifically referring to actual ultimatums, not colloquial understandings of the word. If you can talk with the person and negotiate with them, it’s not a goddamn ultimatum. What I was faced with was an actual ultimatum: Comply or suffer. I chose freedom.

Hope that helps. """

I still agree completely post-addendum. I'm not sure if you've been faced with RTO/RTT, but I have, even though I had exclusively negotiated with my employer for full remote. They've done nothing but coerce compliance to their new RTT/RTO mandates and it's absolutely dehumanizing. The corporate overlords demand full and total capitulation or else you are fired. It doesn't matter I negotiated specifically to be full remote prior, have RSUs vesting part of my compensation, or that I pivoted my entire life and career to be here! In essence, 'capitulation' is the perfect word to use for this nonsensical regression of workplace flexibility because people are being coerced. So what, you had a successful in-office experience prior to covid, its irrelevant here in all honesty. This greater discussion at hand has little to do with workers indifferent to or in favor of returning to office workspaces.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#812

Something I never see mentioned is that business leadership is rarely just in it for the money. For some people, power over others isn't a responsibility. For some people, the power they feel from managing people is THE goal of work. So yeah, of course corporate politicians want RTO. Exercising power in a WFH company, even when they still hold power over someones life, is an abstract, intellectual thing. But the peop…

Honestly surprised I haven't heard that reasoning before now that you mention it:

Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, and Steve Ballmer all married subordinates, and Elon Musk had children with an employee

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#813

Isn't it interesting that the millions and millions of people with the opposite opinion never get their thoughts shared via articles like this? If there was legitimate, rational, discussion on the topic, wouldn't you expect to see people with differing opinions on the topic get their thoughts promoted in a similar way?

There is absolutely nothing stopping them. In fact, the dominant view of the people most willing to exercise their power (employers) is in their favor. All incentives align toward sharing! If they exist in such numbers, they should be all over the business press.

And yet...

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#814

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then COVID happened and companies worked fine for three years with WFH. I don't think we have good data on that "worked fine" part. Personally I saw a significant degradation of our team performance during COVID remote. Some people slacked a lot (difficult to catch, though), many people worked hard (perhaps even harder than in office), but the bad communication reduced the overall team productivity a lot.

Not saying that you're wrong, but I'm interested in how you're able to measure "overall team productivity." I've found that to be a near-impossibility at any organization that I've worked at.

For many people it’s really just a gut feeling. That’s the issue with this debate; there isn’t really any data on either side of the aisle. Regardless, team productivity is both more important, and easier to measure than individual productivity; and most proponents of remote work are only focused on the latter.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#815

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh come on. Are you seriously saying that someone with a full-time job shouldn't have time for personal projects and fun? If you can do your job in 30 hours, you should be able to.

Nope, I'm saying that people advertised that the lockdown allowed them to work less.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#816
post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the company has no obligation to keep an employee working in a remote context that the company doesn't favor anymore. Some people who were hired in as permanent remote, now are being demanded to sell their homes and move to cities they’ve never been to before. Companies have no obligation to keep any USA-based employee working (other countries may have different laws), but some reasonable severance payouts would be…

This was always a risk at every company due to re-orgs, buyouts, or the whim of executives. Are employees right to be angry? Yeah. Do companies have the right to demand it? Yeah. Severance, etc. is always nice. In some cases it may even be required by contract or law, but that is rare. It seems like the knives are coming out now, and we’ll see who is left standing.

Companies can do a lot of things that are morally reprehensible without fear of legal consequences. It doesn’t make it OK, and it certainly doesn’t mean that they have “a right” to behave that way.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#817

Something I never see mentioned is that business leadership is rarely just in it for the money. For some people, power over others isn't a responsibility. For some people, the power they feel from managing people is THE goal of work. So yeah, of course corporate politicians want RTO. Exercising power in a WFH company, even when they still hold power over someones life, is an abstract, intellectual thing. But the peop…

Honestly surprised I haven't heard that reasoning before now that you mention it: Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, and Steve Ballmer all married subordinates, and Elon Musk had children with an employee

Erm, which subordinate was the one Bezos married?

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#818

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talking to lots of middle and upper management, the primary complaints I hear are hard to measure - poorer communication, less alignment, less innovation, etc. None of this reduces the number of tasks being done, but reduces the utility of those tasks. Measuring directly is hard, but ultimately you'd expect it result in lower growth - which many companies are seeing (but it's hard to disentangle this from the macro s…

These are also hard to measure: * Employee happiness * Less sick employees since they don't spread their germs in an office * Much lower attrition and retention of institutional knowledge * Lower rent costs or possibly zero rent costs for office (actually this one is very easy to measure) * Able to hire from outside local metro area None of these was enough to move companies even an inch towards WFH pre-COVID. And ye…

Love your argument! Nailed it on the hypocrisy.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#819

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly surprised I haven't heard that reasoning before now that you mention it: Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, and Steve Ballmer all married subordinates, and Elon Musk had children with an employee

Erm, which subordinate was the one Bezos married?

Mackenzie worked for Jeff at D.E. Shaw

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#820
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ass…

Yep. And mind you "flexible" here means fully remote. None of that 3 days at office BS.
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