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Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

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Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#671

Post by nerevarthelame »

bjourne wrote: post #525

> By early 2021, I was considered to not only be a top performer, but also a critical expert for the cryptography organization. My time ended up split across three different teams, and I was still knocking my projects out of the park. But more importantly, junior employees felt comfortable approaching me with questions and our most distinguished engineers sought my insight on security and cryptography topics. Beside…

> If everyone knows that return-to-office is bullshit why is there no data? If remote work is a great idea then why did so few companies adopt it after being forced to implement it during the pandemic? Virtually every company with offices in one form or another required their employees to show up at the office regularly (including my place of work). I don't have any data, but I'm assuming that most of these companies must have seen some productivity decrease or something or else they would have closed their expensive offices for good and let everyone work from home.

You're right, no one is sharing that data. But I think it's a pretty significant assumption that the decision to return to the office must therefore be being made based on some secret data and informed analysis that supports it. There's a tremendous amount of momentum to maintain the pre-2020 in-office status quo. That's the world that the people making these decisions know. Every member of the C-suite at my typical Fortune 500 company instead cites vague concerns over spontaneous connections and corporate culture. It certainly doesn't seem like it's based on data, but rather their desire to keep thousands of people working in the environment they happened to have thrived in.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#672

Post by hef19898 »

zamalek wrote: post #124
hef19898 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the CEO, because everybody is replaceable. Heck, even Steve Jobs was.

> everybody is replaceable Usually at a higher cost: 1. Employees seek new employment in order to increase their compensation, usually for the same amount+type of work. The replacement will likely be negotiating higher than what the original employee achieved through regular promotions and pay raises. 2. Software - and many other cognitive industries - are not like an assembly line (another CEO fallacy). You can't ju…

Two observations:

Talent is one of the most overrated things I onow, and it nothing without preserverance and discipline. And being to function in a specific team. I say specific, because one teams toxic idiot can be another teams rockstar.

Assembly lines require much more skill and discipline than you may realize.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#673

Post by esoterica »

garciasn wrote: post #304
macksd wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because they are actually struggling to admit deeper problems with the company culture and processes that they don't know how to solve, and so they're trying RTO to see if it fixes things.

You give them entirely too much credit. They were told by others (primarily Wall Street) that they are to do this. It provides them with three things: 1. Real estate holding investment increases. 2. Control. 3. Silent layoffs. There's no reason for RTO. None. They're doing it to save money and regain control of their workforce.

(1) is a dumb conspiracy theory, the tech companies that pay rents care about their own profits, not the profits of their REIT counterparties. The idea that evil capitalists sacrifice their own profits in order to boost other companies’ profits in the name of class solidarity is one of the sillier things people on the left believe. According to your theory of how capitalism works companies work Amazon and Walmart should be volunteering to pay their suppliers as much possible in order to boost their suppliers profit margins. Obviously that is not how the world works.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#674

Post by bee_rider »

I really think some people are actually more productive in the office (myself included) (others are more productive at home, or lose enough productivity at home to make it a worthwhile trade off).

By now, though, a company has no excuse for not having sorted out who needs to be in the office in order to remain employed. It isn’t everyone, it needs to be handled on a case by case basis, and if a manager can’t figure out if their employees are producing anything after 3 years, what are they managing?

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#676

Post by IntelMiner »

hattmall wrote: post #409
KoolKat23 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Times change and so should companies. It's also not unreasonable for people to expect more from their job than a simple transaction. Before COVID, most places operated without tools such as Microsoft Teams and an assumption that remote work is untested and unproven to work in their setting. This is now not the case, and people are rightly questioning why a return is necessary. They've proven they can make it work and…

>They've proven they can make it work and that they know what works If that were the case there wouldn't be a push to return to the office. There is a difference between making it through an event like COVID vs making forward business progress. Certainly there's a place for remote work but the higher you go in management the more you see the holes remote work creates. Realistically, employees should push hard for ret…

>If that were the case there wouldn't be a push to return to the office

You're missing the inherent power dynamics of owners versus employees

The C suites at the top down to middle (mangle) management want RTO because their goals align with real estate value and tax incentives

Mangelement want it because acting as vague wardens for a bunch of people tied to desks for no reason means their jobs have meaning

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#677

Post by The_Colonel »

thinkharderdev wrote: post #577
tgma wrote: post #116

Remote "work" is fine (with pros and cons). The problem is lots of people don't "work" remotely. Also, inevitably remote/async work flips the priority such that employee would be much more responsive to interrupts/errands of their own life than to focus their full attention on the employer's concerns.

I mean, a lot of people don't "work" in the office either. You're either using some sort of concrete metrics to try and measure productivity or you're not. "Bob shows up to work every day" doesn't actually tell you much about whether Bob does anything useful while he's there. I don't think figuring out who is productive and who is not is substantially different for an in-office job vs remote job. One might even argue…

It's still much easier to gauge work in person. Like if a person complains about a difficult problem 5 times in a row in daily, it makes a big difference if I glance over and see them in the IDE/terminal/stackoverflow, discussing with colleagues, drawing on the whiteboard, cursing or even sitting in the chair, apparently in deep thought. In remote, all you see is their online status (maybe).

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#678

Post by gedy »

RandomLensman wrote: post #655
runako wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying people shouldn't go to the office. I'm just saying there are a number of downsides to encouraging walking over to someone's desk to ask a question as a primary mode of knowledge exchange. These downsides have been enumerated at length in The Discourse. On the other side of the ledge is mostly "qualitative" arguments lacking in specifics. The main thing is there are real trade-offs for the staff and org…

Do you think soldiers in battle should send well crafted emails instead of shouting or just acting on observations? Not sure things are just "qualitative"...

Let's get real, white collar tech work is nothing like battles. Even outages are not that dramatic.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#679

Post by ckbishop »

olah_1 wrote: post #120
ckbishop wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, as soon as I see that 2 days a month thing, I'm not applying for the position. That's my only critique.

And no one would care. It's been an employers market for a year and will continue that way for the foreseeable future.

I don't know. I just got hired on somewhere using this criteria, and I leave behind a remote-only position that I excelled in for the past four years. And I excelled in several more remote-only positions before that one.

I don't have a degree or any certifications either, due to the same disability that prevents me from going into an office.

It is an employers' market and the employers that create arbitrary barriers of entry for talent will find themselves recruiting from a pool of desperate talent, which may be by design because desperate talent also costs less.

However, I'm not desperate and the managers that hire me find out why that is pretty quickly.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#680

Post by seattle_spring »

cdchn wrote: post #506
reaperman wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon[0], for one. But they're not the only ones -- it does happen occasionally, mostly when a company makes a blanket policy "no more remote work, everyone back to the office!" (which makes less sense for those employees who were never at any point in an office to begin with). The author of the linked article for this HN post wrote: > I had been hired in 2019 for the cryptography team at a large tech company. I was…

So if we want to presume that the original linked article's author works for Amazon, we got 1: Amazon. Who else?

Google, Lyft, Facebook
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