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RTO: WTAF

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Re: RTO: WTAF

#71

Post by cjs_ac »

Everyone has their own explanations for why businesses do these things, and I see merit in many of them. Here's my contribution to the list.

All these complaints about poorly-thought-out RTO policies come from big corporations. If you're a senior leader in a organisation with tens or hundreds of thousands of employees, it's very difficult to keep in touch with the people who actually do the work in making or providing the product or service that the business brings to the market. As a consequence, leaders come to believe that the routine of their work day - ingesting reports, engaging in discussions, and communicating decisions - is representative of what's going on in the organisation. Ultimately, I think it's a limitation of human psychology: the organisation is larger than Dunbar's number, and so starts to become opaque to its members.

My solution is to only work for businesses that are small enough for everyone to know everyone else.

Re: RTO: WTAF

#72

Post by mtrovo »

000ooo000 wrote: post #31
EmilStenstrom wrote: post #18

Sigh This debate has been going on for years now. Remote is good for: People who work alone & People that don't like commuting Remote is bad for: People who work together with other people & People who like socializing IRL (including managers) Too many developers think they are working alone, while in fact they are part of a team and they would be better off working closer to that team.

>Too many developers think they are working alone, while in fact they are part of a team and they would be better off working closer to that team. Sounds like you think software development is like one of those stock photos with 8 people smiling and high-fiving around a whiteboard. Devs are (mostly) nerds. Nerds have been collaborating in the online world for decades. They somehow managed to achieve things and build…

In the end it's all about friction, communicating IRL is much easier and less constrained. You can make online work but you have to adjust your expectations of how much time something takes and optimise for a split between focus time and comms, which you don't have to worry too much in IRL, that works but you have to adjust your expectations of how many people are working together and how long it takes to cooperate and adjust course. So I guess you better find a team that makes this mindset work?

The main pet peeve I have is with the hybrid approach of having a single person remote where you have a constant battle of negotiating interactions between folks who hate interruptions and those who hate scheduling a meeting for a 10-minute chat.

Also taking a junior stance, a lot of us learned by just being around senior devs, when you just started you don't even know what you don't know, and learning by osmosis is huge.

Re: RTO: WTAF

#73

Post by notadrian »

yladiz wrote: post #3

If the tone of the article wasn’t so flippant I’d maybe have read all the way through it. I’m not going to read an article that sounds like it’s written by a petulant child.

[dead]

Re: RTO: WTAF

#74

Post by roenxi »

> “We don’t think people do their best work from home”: Prove it.

It isn't the corporations job to prove it, they're paying the salary because of their own internal calculations about what is valuable to them. It really in't that much of a stretch to say companies are serious about their motivations here - there are much easier ways to do layoffs than moving everyone into an office.

"Your company didn't collapse during COVID" isn't much of an argument. It is like saying someone didn't die of COVID so they can handle being sick 24x7 for the rest of their life. Just because something is survivable or even tolerable doesn't mean it is desirable.

Re: RTO: WTAF

#75

Post by sublimefire »

These are weak arguments in the post. It is not the commute which is the problem. In my experience (tech specifically) office is unnecessary because I do less work, and it is more depressing because you still talk with the same people over the chat and calls. There are issues with the shortage of phone booths, and listening to every conversation does not help concentrate. Then there is poor old hardware, not many will buy Herman Miller for their subordinates. Another thing not mentioned is the total show of appearances over outcomes. Not to mention geographically distributed teams.

At the end of the day it is the product and its perception by the paying customer that matters.

Re: RTO: WTAF

#76

Post by oytis »

deviation wrote: post #15
gabesullice wrote: post #9

I'm genuinely interested in why RTO is trending. I searched Harvard Business Review, Gartner, and other sources just last week trying to find the rationale, but I wasn't successful. In fact, I found those sources to be a little cautionary. E.g., they say "if you do switch to in-office or hybrid, make sure you actually have metrics to evaluate the effects" and "ensure it makes sense for the actual work to be done by e…

I feel that companies still misunderstand how to evaluate these metrics they're collecting on the efficacy of RTO. IMO, RTO efficacy should be measured on a team-by-team basis. There are no doubt zero "one size fits all" approaches for entire orgs, or entire companies (and if there are, then the metrics should /strongly/ reflect that)

To actually measure efficacy of any measures, you need to implement them in isolation. It is really hard to evaluate how working from home is affecting productivity while simultaneously doing mass layoffs and pushing people to replace their fired collagues with AI

Re: RTO: WTAF

#77

Post by hshdhdhj4444 »

franticgecko3 wrote: post #28
gabesullice wrote: post #9

I'm genuinely interested in why RTO is trending. I searched Harvard Business Review, Gartner, and other sources just last week trying to find the rationale, but I wasn't successful. In fact, I found those sources to be a little cautionary. E.g., they say "if you do switch to in-office or hybrid, make sure you actually have metrics to evaluate the effects" and "ensure it makes sense for the actual work to be done by e…

I've long suspected it's got to do with office real estate. You spent $10m or $100m on a building that's now half empty. Either you downsize or commit to enterprise scale sunk cost fallacy and enforce RTO so your real estate investment isn't "wasted". City centres also thrive on RTO, with high street shopping on a generational decline it's up to office workers and their employers to prop up the economy of the CBD one…

Most companies, at least in the U.S., don’t own their offices. They lease them.

In fact, a whole bunch of office leases were supposed to be expiring in 2024/2025. If this was the reason RTO wouldn’t be picking up right now since they would be cutting back and ending their leases.

Re: RTO: WTAF

#78

Post by sublimefire »

mft_ wrote: post #13

I think there are three alternative hypotheses the article misses from its list: * Ego: senior people need to be seen and respected in person; being reduced to equally-sized thumbnail videos on Teams doesn't feed this need. * Real estate: some companies have financial commitments (e.g. long-term leases, owned buildings) to large office buildings which need to be justified; selling or ending the lease early might refl…

The missing one is: “Poor managers - do not base the decisions on data, and are not qualified to deal with the remote/spread out/async processes”

Re: RTO: WTAF

#79

Post by hshdhdhj4444 »

EmilStenstrom wrote: post #18

Sigh This debate has been going on for years now. Remote is good for: People who work alone & People that don't like commuting Remote is bad for: People who work together with other people & People who like socializing IRL (including managers) Too many developers think they are working alone, while in fact they are part of a team and they would be better off working closer to that team.

The arguments people make here are so strange. They could be true, but they pretend that (1) life before 2020 didn’t exist and 99% of companies from startups to large companies didn’t constantly work in a single location, (2) companies weren’t already paying premiums not just to hire in areas where their offices were but to pay people to relocate from cheaper areas to where their offices were instead of just paying them a lower salary to work out of the LCOL place, (3) that there isn’t a massive amount of economic literature on agglomeration effects and the advantages of being colocated while working.

If the agglomeration effects don’t exist, SF and Silicon Valley as the center of the tech world wouldn’t be a thing.

I guess part of the reason people don’t want to believe working colocated to your colleagues plays a role in your productivity is because it punctured the idea that the reason you’re being paid the high salary you are is completely merit based, and dismiss that your fortune in either being born in or being able to relocate to a city like SF played a huge role in your success.

Re: RTO: WTAF

#80

Post by sublimefire »

_petronius wrote: post #27
EmilStenstrom wrote: post #18

Sigh This debate has been going on for years now. Remote is good for: People who work alone & People that don't like commuting Remote is bad for: People who work together with other people & People who like socializing IRL (including managers) Too many developers think they are working alone, while in fact they are part of a team and they would be better off working closer to that team.

I would add to this that in my experience, many teams actually perform better when co-locating, even if individual people on that team would prefer (or feel they individually perform better) remote. Covid normalized remote working, but also didn't necessarily make companies and teams _good_ at it; I suspect RTO is easier than fixing the fact that your org sucks at remote work. It is hard to do well! it requires diffe…

> many teams actually perform better

the reality is that nobody knows how to measure performance, and nobody does. it is all based on feels and a simple confirmation bias, rather than being backed by the research

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