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The return-to-the-office trend backfires

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Re: The return-to-the-office trend backfires

#91

Post by bonesss »

thewebguyd wrote: post #15
isahers wrote: post #5

This is interesting because it does not jibe at all with the people I know and how productive they are. The friends I know working big tech hybrid jobs work maybe 25 hours in a good week, whereas the friends I know in office 4/5 days a week are easily at double that. I'd imagine there are some confounding variables here. I wonder if a lot of those hybrid companies driving high revenue growth are just profit machines…

> The friends I know working big tech hybrid jobs work maybe 25 hours in a good week, whereas the friends I know in office 4/5 days a week are easily at double that. But are they actually more productive, or are they just spending additional hours "looking busy"? When I worked in office I "worked" 40 hours/week because I had to. Most of that wasn't actually work, maybe about 20-30 hours of actual work, sometimes less…

And what about frequent chats with work friends?

No, not work, just hey how ya doin, and then someone brings coffee, then there’s a quick gab about the game, then a half baked question before a little catchup about that show. 2-4x salaries and minutes being burnt in small untracked chunks.

Hours clocked and hours worked are not the same.

Re: The return-to-the-office trend backfires

#92

Post by jjk166 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #50
croes wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they work or is that just their at the office?

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.

If you are working from home, you are judged solely by your productivity. If you work in an office, there is productivity and there is also attendance. Someone can show up every day and appear to be working hard, yet get nothing done. You just can't do that working from home (not for very long anyways).

For most professionals, attendance shouldn't really matter. You're not creating value by merely being present. There are exceptions - customer service for example - but even in those cases being just logged into Slack/Teams is perfectly cromulent.

Re: The return-to-the-office trend backfires

#94

Post by Esophagus4 »

matchbok3 wrote: post #35
imcrs wrote: post #13

RTO is about controlling labor, nothing else. Everything else is a smoke screen. Ask yourself the following questions and you'll understand what happened: - why did RTO happen seemingly right after salaries jumped and labor became scarce? - why did RTO happen virtually in lockstep across all of white collar employment? - why did RTO happen despite no evidence that productivity had anything to do with it? (and in fact…

I think these conspiracy theories about RTO are really unhelpful and actually harmful to the viability of hybrid work arrangements. Please work in a day as a oil rig technician or a nurse. "I should be able to work anywhere and my employer must accommodate me" is an extremely privileged and elitist view of thinking. A few of your notes are actually just wrong as well. Salaries jumped during covid due to over-hiring a…

Yes, these are some extreme beliefs in a grand, coordinated conspiracy.

As if a bunch of people in suits are sitting around a table in an evil villain’s lair shouting “we need more control over our workers” or needing to prop up commercial real estate prices.

Re: The return-to-the-office trend backfires

#95

Post by joks »

heraldgeezer wrote: post #53

What if I actually like the office? I have a 40min walk to it or 10min bus ride, so no American commute, lol. (Your society is done) I like my colleagues. Sometimes you want to meet and solve problems face to face, and not have it be planned. I have a shift schedule, sometimes I am the only one in the office, that is bliss :) But my work is 100% in office.

Optional hybrid work is kind of the optimal setup for me IMO. I go in to the office (often carpooling) once a week (skipping occasionally) with a few folks I work with who live locally, and I work remotely the rest of the time. It keeps me from feeling too isolated and makes the work I do feel more tangible while still being flexible and allowing me to work from home when I want to.

RTO would still be a dealbreaker for me.

Re: The return-to-the-office trend backfires

#96

Post by toomuchtodo »

matchbok3 wrote: post #57
asdff wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

I'm not sure I understand the point. The vast, vast majority of jobs simply cannot be done remotely. So I have little patience for the entitlement of people thinking they "deserve" it or yell about conspiracy theories about why it is going away. There is a reason YC is in person. There is a reason why the top companies are in person.

You say entitlement, but the reality is you have sour grapes about people who can have a flexible work arrangement. Some people pick jobs that are not able to be flexible, that’s a choice. Pick better. People work to live, not live to work, they should not tolerate how they should have to work because some manager or c-level is lucky to be in their position of power.

The UK provides by law the ability to seek and obtain flexible working arrangements on day one of a job [1]. Certainly, the US is behind as it always is, but it will catch up eventually, if only because of structural demographics and total fertility rate declines across the developed world creating perpetual labor shortages in various verticals. We’re just arguing window of time.

YC isn’t a good example, they simply sell lottery tickets to founders and early investors as a confidence play. You say top companies, but that’s an opinion without evidence. According to what metric?

[1] https://www.gov.uk/flexible-working

> As of March 2025, approximately 22.8% of U.S. employees worked remotely at least part of the time, equating to about 36 million individuals. This percentage has remained stable between 21% and 23% since early 2024, indicating that remote work has become a consistent component of the workforce.

> What this means: Remote work has stabilized at about one-fifth of the US workforce—this isn't a temporary trend but a permanent shift in how work gets done.

Source: https://wfhresearch.com/

> Approximately 90% of companies plan to maintain or increase remote work options moving forward, indicating a lasting shift despite some return-to-office mandates.

> What this means: The vast majority of companies recognize remote work as a permanent feature—even those mandating office returns are keeping some flexibility.

Source: https://www.gartner.com/en/human-resources/topics/future-of-...

https://www.breeze.pm/blog/remote-work-statistics

Re: The return-to-the-office trend backfires

#97

Post by awepofiwaop »

asdff wrote: post #82
oaweoifjwpo wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except you can't get that year round perfect weather in the midwest.

We are talking about Bay area here, not San Diego. Much of the US experiences 40-50 degree grey bleak cloudy winters.

Really? Genuine question - I'd like to move there.

Keep in mind "year round perfect weather" does include summers that aren't preposterously hot.

I've found that everywhere else, certainly in the midwest, where I live, either gets too hot in summer or too cold in winter (or is extremely remote, i.e. Hawaii).

Re: The return-to-the-office trend backfires

#98

Post by croes »

SoftTalker wrote: post #50
croes wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they work or is that just their at the office?

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.

Exactly.

It’s rather useless to just look at the clocked hours.

Re: The return-to-the-office trend backfires

#99

Post by case_ratchet »

ventana wrote: post #17

The article has so many "it's this, not that" contradictions – I counted seven! – that I seriously consider it to be written with a lot of assistance from LLMs. One thing not mentioned in the article is that now that many software engineers are back to their offices, we get the regular fall / spring viral infections spreading out between employees who feel obliged to go to the office even if they have mild cold sympt…

Not great in productivity terms, no:

- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10269830/

- https://www.covermagazine.co.uk/news/2344756/open-plan-offic...

Re: The return-to-the-office trend backfires

#100

Post by 000ooo000 »

pdabbadabba wrote: post #64
lm28469 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get better or quit then, I don't give a shit about managers, do your job and let the dozens of people you manage live their fucking lives, we're not here to please you or make your job easier

> we're not here to please you or make your job easier I don't mean to be a jerk but ... if you are one of the people I manage, you literally are employed (at least in part) to make my job easier. That's not the only thing that matters -- which is why we (like many employers) do still allow some remote work. But making management more difficult is absolutely an impact that a rational workplace would take into account…

Congratulations. You have outed yourself as the archetypal manager that every WFH/RTO thread ever complains about.
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