The return-to-the-office trend backfires

I don’t know why they keep bringing “productivity” as the justification, it never was, never will, it’s about power dynamics, remote work shifted a lot of power back to employees, it also provided flexibility career wise. Another big reason why it got attacked quickly is it gave the people a window to escape the rat race and save money, when the employee doesn’t spend xyz on gas everyday, plus relocating outside of the crowded urban areas to cheaper smaller cities, rent/housing went down, landlords and banks had to lobby to end it, plus the government since less taxes are paid now as a result, all efforts made to bring back the status quo. It was fascinating to see how they gaslit the public, I was even talking to an employer before and the manager was trash talking wfh as “woke” and “real men” must grind 9hrs a day at least! Another employer was demanding a full camera on at least 6hrs a day if you wfh, or you are not “productive”.

Back in the 80s or 90s, working in the office or factory was the default and it made sense, no high speed internet, small town so not much commuting, cheap housing, and affordable life, so if the man worked in the office and the wife stayed home, they can live comfortably. That’s not the case now, wfh balanced that and increased the quality of life instead, so you can now stay with your kids saving the cost of daycare etc, while doing exactly the same work you would do at the office.

or was it capital becoming more expensive as that happened during the same period...

Do you understand how rig work or nursing is? These are very flexible jobs. There is demand for nursing everywhere. You can be a travel nurse and go find work in HI or CA or Las Vegas right now if you want. Temp agencies that place you so you don't even need to really hunt either.

Rig work it is weeks on weeks off sort of deal where you then get off that rig back to, quite literally, anywhere in the world where you live otherwise. You could live in the middle of the Amazon rainforest and make six figures a year on a rig in the middle of the ocean (well, maybe US jurisdiction is preferred from a tax perspective for employer payroll).

This is the culmination of short-term-profit thinking, and I'm shocked people like YC's @paulgraham support RTO.

What's the long term game plan? It's like hotels and taxis resisting uber and airbnb. there will always be the old way of doing things, but people don't want to work from the office unless they have to. You've become the disruptee instead of the disruptor at that point.

I've been both productive and unproductive while WFH as well as in the office. In either case it was a product of managerial decisions.

I think they expected people to "just be productive" on their own, and then they install surveillance crap on their devices, measure bullshit and deduce RTO isn't needed.

The older way of defining a couple of performance indicator metrics and using that to mange people no longer works, RTO or not. So now, most managers have resorted to a "vibes-based" management technique, where the numbers can be made to mean whatever you want them to mean, so long as the vibe feels right.

So if two people are just as unproductive, but you turn on one of their camera and see a person working from their bed in their pajamas, the vibe will such, so RTO makes sense in their mind.

I don't think RTO will backfire any time too soon, but in the long term, the US has bigger problems in terms a decline as a nation. But if we overcome that somehow, there really is only one game in town: competition.

Can your company be competitive while implementing RTO? Your competition that figures out how to make their people happy and WFH will beat you. not only that, they'll pay their people less money for that privilege.

Technology infrastructure is still a growing thing in most of the world, but i suspect in a decade or so, WFH would be ideal for most humans in the world.

I also speculate that remote-controlled automated things will become very popular. not just waymo support driving the care remotely as needed, but even things like janitors and manual labor jobs could be done via robots controlled remotely.

For office work, it requires a different style of management, in a generation the older people too used to office work will be out of the workforce, but that transition will mean companies with a younger management workforce (who gets paid a lot less typically) will have a competitive advantage.

Teams not performing well with WFH -- with a millennial or younger manager would be a real shocker to me.

Same question applies at home. Are you working, or just logged in to Slack/Teams (or whatever) and available if it pings?

I work from home quite a bit, but I'm expected to be available and working during business hours. So other than not commuting to the office, it's not a huge difference.