Return-to-office policies are leading to increased brain drain in the U.S. • Hacker News Board

Re: Return-to-office policies are leading to increased brain drain in the U.S.

#11

Post by tombert » Wed, Feb 05, 2025, 1:57 AM UTC

postalrat wrote: post #10

tombert wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but I think it’s important to call these things out when they happen. Whether or not Musk is dumb, he still has a lot of power, and when people use faulty reasoning for decision making, that leads to inefficiencies.

What are the consequences for you if you are wrong? Enough apes making bad predictions will occasionally make a correct one.

I mean, I'm not sure how I'm wrong on this; it's possible that Elon's stuff will work out, but that doesn't change the fact that the logical reasoning suggested here doesn't work; it is not implied that firing a lot of people in the government will make it more "efficient".

Re: Return-to-office policies are leading to increased brain drain in the U.S.

#12

Post by alberth » Wed, Feb 05, 2025, 4:32 AM UTC

Being on zoom calls all day is way more brain draining for me, than RTO.

Re: Return-to-office policies are leading to increased brain drain in the U.S.

#13

Post by anonzzzies » Wed, Feb 05, 2025, 11:46 AM UTC

alberth wrote: post #12

Being on zoom calls all day is way more brain draining for me, than RTO.

It would be for me as well, but why would you/your company do that? Or is it needed for your position? I do at most 1 zoom / week, the rest is slack, if not ok, then I leave.

Re: Return-to-office policies are leading to increased brain drain in the U.S.

#14

Post by anemoiac » Wed, Feb 05, 2025, 1:21 PM UTC

tombert wrote: post #5

bqmjjx0kac wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, backing up, efficiency is not the only metric we should care about. We learned the hard way at the start of the pandemic that our efficient supply chains were fragile due to lack of redundancy. A government agency may benefit from continuously staffing "redundant" roles in order to have capacity available when unforeseen events occur! Nobody needs FEMA until a natural disaster occurs.

It also boils down to the fact that it's not immediately clear what "efficiency" actually means in this context. Like, I'm a software person so forgive the analogies, but even within software, I can think of three basic (but related) forms of efficiency: execution speed, energy, and memory. Sometimes something will be extremely fast and CPU efficient but at the cost of a ton of memory. "Efficiency" is a term that is…

Institutional knowledge often plays a huge role here, but can be difficult to measure. A team member whose experience allows them to quickly provide needed context that would otherwise take hours/days/weeks to obtain might significantly boost their team's productivity without generating any metrics that demonstrate their contributions.