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The war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

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

#271

Post by bumby »

antisthenes wrote: post #257
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, maybe not. However, management bought 8 hours of your time and not 4 when they hired you.

> However, management bought 8 hours of your time and not 4 when they hired you. Nowhere in my employment contract does it say that. Realistically, I am allowed to spend up to 8 hours to work on goals that my employer says I should work on. It is also understood that if the goals are completed earlier, I am free to fill the "free" part of 8 hours with self-learning. There's also an implicit understanding that certain…

(If you have to fill out timecards): does your timecard reflect that implicit understanding? Or, alternatively, if your timecard doesn’t, could you be hit with timecard fraud?

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

#272

Post by consteval »

MiguelX413 wrote: post #270
consteval wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the leadership who makes decisions, or even just has the potential to voice their opinions and have them weighted, own real-estate. Better yet, those leaders maybe also love exerting control over their employees and find this more enjoyable in an office environment. Companies ARE NOT a democracy. In my mind, there's a huge overlap between being high company leadership and also being a self-serving narcissist.…

I think most people do understand that. It's just unintuitive that companies would prefer to pay rent for offices they don't need.

I think if you reframe company leadership as egotistical man children, then it becomes very intuitive. Most companies aren't that, but in my mind, there is serious overlap between being a career executive and having narcissistic tendencies.

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

#273

Post by sensanaty »

_zoltan_ wrote: post #46
rblatz wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve long suspected it’s a PR campaign/propaganda and talking points aimed directly at the c suite class. A lot of people with a lot of money stand to lose a lot. Banks, investors, retirement funds… Start circulating studies showing people working multiple remote jobs at once, steer thinking around company culture, normalize it through repetition, send out talking points. Eventually dominos will start failing.

If it would be bad for people's pension funds and such, shouldn't it be everyone's interest to actually keep showing up to prop up those real estate values?

As a young'un who probably won't live to see a pension judging by how things are going in the world, I'll take a QoL boost NOW instead of potentially maybe one day when I'm 65+ and retired being able to perhaps live off of the undoubtedly meager pension I accrued over a more miserable life.

I also suspect (but have nothing to prove this, just a gut feeling) that the effect of pension funds is minuscule compared to the amount of money the elite make. It's a very convenient excuse to not do anything disruptive ever, of course, because "Think of the pensions!!"

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

#274

Post by red-iron-pine »

chaostheory wrote: post #109
klodolph wrote: post #10

I’ve heard this argument before and I don’t buy it. By that, I mean it may be true (that people want to prop up real estate prices), but I don’t think that this is enough of an explanation. If it were just about real estate, then Amazon would not be calling for 5 days a week return-to-office. I don’t think real estate interests are powerful enough to push Amazon around and I don’t think they’re entrenched enough in A…

There are also tax incentives. Cities like big company offices because in theory their workers would become customers of local businesses, which would not be possible with remote work. Maybe cities have been threatening to take away the tax breaks unless leadership did a RTO? It's also highly likely that this is a soft layoff, trying to delay the real layoffs in 2025

yeah this isn't mentioned enough. cities desperate need the tax revenue and are pressing larger business -- doubly so if they're places like Texas, who offered sweetheart tax deals to businesses to attract them into the state.

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

#275

Post by red-iron-pine »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #229
sensanaty wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And if they're working an 8 hour work day it's because they're working two remote jobs at the same time. I'd love to see actual stats on this, because I hear it a lot on HN (pretty much exclusively from the pro-office side) but I can't imagine there's that many people doing this. Even if there was, why is this a problem? Presumably they're getting work done in those 4 hours that is satisfactory to the business, so…

> Who cares? Your manager, because your employment contract is about time spent, not works delivered.

my contract is about delivering value, not hours. is why i'm salary, not hourly.

cue the old saw about how an engineer gets hired back to fix a problem at his old company -- he bills them $2500, $50 for the hour, and $2450 for knowing how to fix the problem.

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

#276

Post by fragmede »

sensanaty wrote: post #273
_zoltan_ wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it would be bad for people's pension funds and such, shouldn't it be everyone's interest to actually keep showing up to prop up those real estate values?

As a young'un who probably won't live to see a pension judging by how things are going in the world, I'll take a QoL boost NOW instead of potentially maybe one day when I'm 65+ and retired being able to perhaps live off of the undoubtedly meager pension I accrued over a more miserable life. I also suspect (but have nothing to prove this, just a gut feeling) that the effect of pension funds is minuscule compared to th…

https://www.thinkingaheadinstitute.org/research-papers/globa... says pensions control $55 trillion. you'll have to define "the elites" a bit more to have a point of comparison, but the richest billionaire has "only" $200 B.

So at the very least it's not miniscule, but it depends on how you want to calculate the other side of the equation.

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

#277

Post by sensanaty »

jbverschoor wrote: post #140
JSDevOps wrote: post #135

The whole “remote work kills productivity” argument is outdated. Studies and real-world examples show the opposite: many people are more productive at home without the daily commute and office distractions. Plus, companies have tools and strategies to keep teams connected and engaged, so the idea that culture just dissolves over time isn’t based on reality. Culture isn’t about being in the same room; it’s about value…

Really? A workplace with no proper desk, chair, lighting, multi screen setup, isolation from domestic distractions, crappy phone lines due to bad internet, the hurdle of contacting someone who used to sit next to you, and the impossibility of scribbling something on a whiteboard etc? Sure, remote work can be productive for certain work, and for certain people. But people underestimate the value of an office. Working…

In my case my office offers: Horrifically uncomfortable chairs, desks that are fought over because the monitors aren't shitty or flickering or buggy on a select few of them, constantly breaking power bricks that we have to call facilities to fixup, not a single person is happy with the temperature, the internet is slow for the amount of people there, CONSTANT distractions by the people around me. I can go on and on about this. All of this for the sweet, amazing convenience of having to commute to the office either in crammed busses/trains or by cycling in shitty weather.

In contrast, at home I control my environment, have my hyper comfortable chair in which I can spend 48 hours sitting without complaints, my own monitor setup that is infinitely superior to the crap they have at the office, I can control my own AC, I can control my noise level, I don't get casually interrupted by someone wanting to contact me out of the blue with irrelevant questions, I have 8 gig symmetric fiber internet that is literally never down and it's entirely 100% dedicated to only myself and my machines rather than being shared with 100 other people, and who uses whiteboards still? You can just buy a pen and paper if you really need to scribble something down

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

#278

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

close04 wrote: post #156
slg wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels a lot worse to deliver a lame joke at the start of an all hands meeting to a bunch of muted zoom windows with their cameras off. How much of the return to office is leaders wanting that polite chuckle from that captured audience back? I'm barely being facetious. "That polite chuckle" is really a stand in for all the soft power they wield in person that evaporates with WFH. They have lost a degree of control…

I think we're looking for the unified theory of RTO. Soft power is definitely one of them. But every company and group of people have their own mix of reasons. I bet Amazon's exercise is a hidden layoff process. Other companies probably want to get their money's worth from the office buildings. The management of others wants to see the army of smiling minions that report to them. Others want to see people in the offi…

I’d think the reason would be relatively unified among a specific class of similar people, i.e. management everywhere probably wants roughly the same thing when they call for RTO and journalists probably want a different same thing when they trash remote work.

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

#279

Post by mike_hearn »

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #218
kwar13 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. When I was a junior investment banker we worked brutal hours, often 80-90 hours a week with most days ending at 1-2am. Yet the head of investment banking insisted we always make it to his Monday 8am meeting since he wanted a bigger crowd when he talked. Going from a Sunday all-nighter into this was quite painful.

Off topic question, but what do investment bankers even do for all those hours every week?

I talked once to an ex investment banker who quit to move into tech due to the hours. He had lots of stories about ridiculous hours.

He said most of the time was wasted. It was spent on things like preparing slide decks for executives who then didn't read them, but who insisted the work be done in massively compressed time windows and then delivered by taxi at 6am on a Sunday. He viewed it as very inefficient and mostly a matter of bad culture. The senior managers did it when they were young, so they weren't about to let the next generation get ahead without the same sacrifices.

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

#280

Post by Olreich »

kitsune_ wrote: post #49
klodolph wrote: post #10

I’ve heard this argument before and I don’t buy it. By that, I mean it may be true (that people want to prop up real estate prices), but I don’t think that this is enough of an explanation. If it were just about real estate, then Amazon would not be calling for 5 days a week return-to-office. I don’t think real estate interests are powerful enough to push Amazon around and I don’t think they’re entrenched enough in A…

My theory, which is kind of informed by what I saw it play out in my company: The reason is a psychological one. Most leaders derive their power from in-person interactions. Remote and video calls severely impact that. Those leaders also love having an audience that needs to listen to them whenever they are in the room and the lack of that kind of feedback and adulation shellshocked a lot of them.

Why not all three? Helping their feelings of power, Helping their bottom line with attrition, and Helping their real-estate buddies with big dumb investments in tall buildings.

There’s no reason it has to just be one thing

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