Reading all of these takes stating WFH leads to poor productivity simply doesn’t make sense to me.
If your employees cannot be trusted to fulfil their responsibilities (whether in an office, their home or a tent in a woodland) that is not a geographical issue. It is a mentality issue and you are always going to face productivity issue from that employee regardless of from where they work.
I’ve been told time and time again by an array of managers in a bunch of departments and companies that my productivity never changes. That is regardless of whether I am travelling or at home. This is including being in Sri Lanka during their worst economical crisis and facing power cuts of 8 - 12 hours everyday. As a responsible adult I prepared in advance. I bought power banks which could charge my laptop and ensured they were charged when the power worked. I bought SIM cards for all mobile networks and ensured I had data. It really is simply a matter of taking responsibility of one’s situation and having a sense of respect for, and from, your employer/employee.
Forcing people into working conditions in which they are uncomfortable is only going to harbour resentment towards the company and if you are in a country where workers actually have real rights you will have a hard time firing them.
I fear that this is all simply a smokescreen for the authoritarian shift which has occurred throughout the globe. It started pre pandemic and was exasperated during it. Scary times lay ahead.
It's not about productivity at all. These same companies were commissioning studies during Covid that told their analysts "look how productive our employees are now that they are working from home!"
It's about crushing labor.
WFH forces employers to compete. It gives a lot of power to employees, because they can apply for far more roles, work fewer hours, moonlight for multiple companies, etc, apply for other jobs during work hours, etc. These companies know that white collar workers are not fungible. Their intellectual workers are genuinely very difficult to replace and produce a lot of value.
For talent that isn't fungible, it's RTO. For talent that is fungible, offshoring.
For your comment about the turn towards authoritarianism, yeah, there's a reason every DEI program at every large corporation was pulled back within a few months, and it's not because the C suite all reads the same Musk tweets on X.
Employees started making demands of management to actually look at some... structural issues. Those demands had teeth because employees acted and organized as a bloc. Only a matter of time before other lines of questioning besides race and sex were explored at work.
With DEI you had to care about the same "structural issues®". It wasn't exactly employee representation and much more of a HR tool to sanction mostly low level employees.
Usually I don't care about race and sex at work and I am not sad that DEI is gone. Creates room for issues much more relevant to work. Like working hours, salaries, holidays, health insurance and general work benefits. Stuff that matters.
That's because you are not impacted I assume. If you are from the DEI bucket then there is nothing more important. Every few years they come out with a study where all they do is change the name on resumes. Having a black sounding naming still, in modern day, greatly reduces your chances of getting an interview. Except, during the most current rendition of this study found that wasn't true at all at companies that had DEI policies. That is huge if people can determine your ethnicity based on your name.
All your "more important" issues are predicated on the idea that you can get a job. For those who are unfairly discriminated against, they don't even get to your point. Who cares about employer healthcare when you have no employer?
I am an ethnic minority, not visibly though and not from any DEI bucket. But that doesn't matter. Some DEI proponents perhaps meant well, but the way the went about was simply the wrong one. Criticism wasn't welcomed at all, even treating everybody the same regardless of sex or race was looked down upon. Words like racism were redefined and you had to adhere to certain dogmata.
The classic approach to treat everyone equally is still better, even if there is some prejudice left. And that doesn't preclude any program that helps those in need. And here the same thing is true: Race and sex are irrelevant.
Some proponents of DEI had their own problems with prejudice to solve in my experience. So perhaps the onus should be that everyone works on their own personal prejudices for now.
Some things will be unfair, but introducing more unfairness doesn't solve any problems. And here DEI simply failed in its approach. A bad job market doesn't mean we can discriminate those that might have been more lucky regardless of reasons. The task would be to fix the job market.
To propose two groups of minorities against some diffuse ethnic majority is simply childish, comes with multiple problems and it doesn't provide tangible benefits to anyone in the long run. I would argue it even entrenches prejudices and pits people against each other.
My experience of DEI was as ideological cover to offshore jobs to India.
While the executive team performed sweeping layoffs to push up the stock price and increase their own compensation, they paid lip service to DEI as if engaged in a karmic balancing act and that was their cheat code.
And the company culture degraded as a result. Far more inter-group fighting, more politicking, more backstabbing, less cooperation.
I’m not there anymore, but I hear they are trying to revert things back, slowly. Basically every project since then has been a failure and they’ve been coasting on their original success.
Good people don’t need three letter acronyms to treat others fairly, and if someone is selling you new holier-than-thou rules, it’s worth asking what moral cost they no longer feel they need to pay.
Applying those things equally to people regardless of skin colour, gender identity, sexuality or any other line along which people have historically been discriminated against isn't important?
DEI explicitly took ‘we don’t do that’ off the table, by proactively discriminating based on those factors.
And at first, when the pie is growing, that doesn’t threaten entrenched groups as much, so it mostly can happen.
In a zero (or negative) sum game world (layoffs, hiring freezes), what do you think is going to happen?
People with power will use the same tools to protect themselves or even acquire more power, and those without power will be ground under the same gears.
I’ve seen it happen in every major society - from India to Chile to Europe to the US.
In the US it’s getting particularly out of control (in both directions) for a number of factors - and very high publicity - but it’s way more blatant almost everywhere else in fact.
> WFH forces employers to compete. It gives a lot of power to employees, because they can [...] work fewer hours, moonlight for multiple companies, etc
Probably "working fewer hours" and "moonlight for multiple companies" has negative effects on productivity that employers would like to avoid.
I doubt it, productivity is an equation that's very complex for knowledge workers.
For example, is 80 hours of work a week more productive than 40? If you're working an assembly line, probably.
If you're a programmer, definitely not. You will write more bugs, make more mistakes, and churning out code doesn't mean much. Any monkey can write code, but writing maintainable code is hard, and reading that code and actually choosing to maintain it is harder.
Again, it depends. Maybe they have more pride in their job or despise their company less, who knows.
And I don't mean productivity per hour. Lol. No, I mean absolute.
An employee working like a dog will get less work done than one just working normally, probably. Because most of the work is negative, so it doesn't add to the work done pile, it chips away at it.
Eventually, I would think, you reach a point where an employee is less productive than no employee at all. Seems impossible to be working 100 hours a week and be getting less than nothing done, but if you're actively making the product worse or creating debt, that's how I would classify that.
I've already kind of made it clear here where I stand on this, but I gotta tell you, you really do sound a lot like management.
Do you really think your superstar programmers are well and truly doing intellectual work, the kind of work that produces business value, from the time they hit the coffee machine at 9AM to the time they grab their briefcase to go home at 5PM?
If you believe this, I think you might be interested in bringing the Bobs in to discuss making our T.P.S. reporting process more efficient. They have thoughts on coversheets.
In Deep Work, Cal Newport posits that even the most disciplined, high performers can do work that requires really focused attention for a max of four hours per day. He's a computer science professor, not exactly "management."
And these days, for a lot of knowledge workers there's a pretty strong case that anything which isn't this "deep work" can probably be automated.
So yeah if I'm paying you a full time salary I want those four hours. Without necessarily rendering judgment on what a moonlighting clause should or shouldn't look like, if I'm not getting those four hours, I don't want you on my payroll.
And you think you're more likely to get those four hours in an open office environment with distractions aplenty, as opposed to my effectively noise-proofed home office where I can actually focus?
It really depends. I believe and apply a lot of Cal Newport advice, and benefit greatly from it. But I also see in my daily life how just being close to people you work with, and (crucially) being a short walk away/floor from people in other groups, creates immense value by helping unclog processes and especially by creating new ideas and products that wouldn‘t otherwise exist.
Bullshit. When I'm in the office most of my time is spent on making sure it looks like I'm working and obsessing about if someone is standing/sitting behind me and looking at my screen or not, because I'm in a panopticum. There is no time for deep work.
First, nobody cares what you want. Second, do you pay for those 4 hours adequately, guess what if you don't? Even if you do, are you OK with 2 hours today and 6 hrs tomorrow? How about a year of 1 hour days and then a 24 hour period that fixes all the problems for last 2 years?
The Internet tough guy strikes again, as if employment is not a voluntary contract between two consenting adults. This militant attitude is always good for a laugh... hate management if you like, but if you think no employee ever worries about what their manager wants, sounds like you've never held a job.
Not really sure why I am even responding to this amazingly stupid line of discussion. I mean if you absolutely hate the idea of having a boss (I know I did) then there is a solution for that - start your own company! It's not as easy as being a badass on the Internet, sure, but you might have to look at both sides of the argument and you might even end up getting rid of that chip on your shoulder.
Let me quickly go count my years of experience, will have to use all my digits and extremities, might be a minute.
I don't think you got the point behind the comment. We do not have a good way to quantify effort, thus we ask for a fixed set of time in chairs, tickets closed, etc that's the best we can come up with.
I’ll attempt a steelman and say, no, employees are not doing deep work from 9–5, but I could see being in an office 9–5 setting the stage for a lot of deep work to be done. Moonlighting for another company I could especially see as detrimental to focus at work.
The nature of modern offices pretty much prevents deep work.
You're not going to get deep work when you pack people like sardines into neat rows of desks, where pretty much at any time someone within one row away is going to be in a meeting - conducted of course over teleconferencing software. Or some people will talk (honestly, being in the office mostly translated to chit-chat for me).
Deep work with an open office? Dont make me laugh. Please for the love of god bring back cubicles.
The steel man is that in the office you get cross team pollination organically. Team lunches, talking about an idea with another team on how to do something better as in that moment the idea came up. This happens more often in person than remote.
Does it need 5 days a week in the office? Absolutely not. 1-2 is plenty.
> Deep work with an open office? Dont make me laugh. Please for the love of god bring back cubicles.
Or doors.
25 years ago, Microsoft Redmond had a slogan: "Every dev a door".
In early 2000s, it began to be two devs per room. We all know what happened since. Open offices save facilities concrete money per seat. Productivity lost from lack of deep work is not a line item anyone knows how to track.
The "every dev a door" plus "pair programming" was shown by studies from groups like Pivotal Labs as being optimal for working code, but ... and a big but ...
Companies intentionally optimize for things other than working code. You get what you measure and they measure what's easy instead of measure what matters.
I don't expect someone to do deep focused work from 9am to 5pm.
But at the same time, I don't expect them to spend their 9-to-5 working for another company at the same time.
As a founder, who respects the 9-to-5 and supports WFH, if I'm paying for 8 hours of work, I want 8 hours of output. Not 4 hours of output, and then you working 4 hours for another job.
If multi-jobbing becomes a thing, then WFH becomes untenable because at least in the office you can be monitored.
To be fair, you're either paying for hours or for output, because I assure you you are not paying staff accurately for their output. You can of course sack someone who outputs notoriously little, but if you get output exceeding your average "8 hours of output", you shouldn't care if someone made it in 1 hour or 16, or at least you wouldn't be able to tell.
I'm using "output" as quoted in context, it's such a nebulous measure unless you're specifically buying a product.
To be clear I'm having a lot of fun being snarky here.
Like everything it's a mix.
In seriousness, I do find the labor perspective sorely and quite conspicuously lacking in these discussions, both discussions about remote work and about DEI backlash.
I’ve hired remote employees, made them come, offered stimulating work, 5% above their requested pay with mentions that I could double it in one year, but I could never get them to the smartness and clarity of analysis they had during the interview. After 6 months they were clearly winging it in <1hr a day and exhausting my team lead, who didn’t think they were moonlighting for several companies. I did: Their progress had entirely stalled and their performance was negative.
I fired both the employees and the manager. This “remote employees don’t moonlight” is a union trope.
Not enough to move the needle. 25% would move the needle.
> with mentions that I could double it in one year
They didn't believe you, or didn't after a short time working there. So it didn't move the needle.
More so if they're experienced. Similar mentions of prospects are common in interviews, and rarely followed through. You eventually learn to be skeptical of them, while rolling with it, just in case.
Also, if you might be willing to pay double their requested salary, they start realising their value on the open market is much higher than they'd previously thought, or could be with a little presentation and experience.
On the other hand, if you'd put it in the contract that their salary will double after 1 year, subject to well-defined criteria and a history of actually doing it with existing employees, then they'd believe you, and that would move the needle a lot.
From your story I speculate you were right to fire them, but you never figured our how to get the best out of them. In recent years it's possible you were subject to employment fraud, as clarity of analysis can disappear if it's a different person doing the work than the person answering interview questions.
Progress that's entirely stalled or negative can happen for many other reasons than moonlighting, and many other reasons than not putting enough time.
I've been fully remote for 5 years, partially remote for 15. Being remote removes many sources of stress for me. I don't moonlight.
The one thing that decreases my productivity, in some positions, is bad management. Of course, that was already the case when I was fully office-based.
Atlassian is a dumpster fire, they run shit engineering since about 3 years.
Give me the secret sauce to being productive with remote employees. Maybe some have found it, but apparently paying above the employee ask, offering to double the salary in case of success, sending them to conferences and spending a lot of human time with them gives me the “evil employer” category on most forums.
Yeah, I know “Treat them even better!” is, again, the word of the union guy, but in most cases, the employer has to eat a shit sandwich.
have you doubled anyone's salary? if not, it can come across as an empty promise you won't fulfill
>sending them to conferences and spending a lot of human time with them
do they want and benefit from these things? or do they distract them from their productive work?
>in most cases, the employer has to eat a shit sandwich.
not really, you were able to fire who you wanted to fire easily. it also seems that you didn't consider other factors for why the employee didn't work out. does your interview process poorly select for people who will do well in the role? are there other possible explanations for low productivity than the employee having a second job?
I don't know you and you aren't my current employer anyways but a good first step to requiring me to go back to the office would be actually giving me an office!!
Wild that anybody thinks simply being in the office makes employees work. I have a colleague who sits within 2m of me who keeps their (personal) phone on their desk all day. They literally prop it up against the bottom of their computer monitor. They're not even subtle about it.
They get distracted every 2-3 minutes and spend upwards or 2-3 hours on it. It distracts me when it vibrates 100+ times per day.
Boss walks in, phone is down.
Boss walks out, phone in hand.
Is it not likely that people are more motivated to collaborate, talk about their work, plan together, feel a sense of excitement about work, etc. when they are communing in person? The ol watercooler mindset or whatever.
I mean - there’s this popular topic of the issue of loneliness lately. People are less motivated to do things that would maybe normally bring them social joy and get them out of their own homes and bring them together with others in the flesh. You’d expect people to be motivated to do that kind of thing, maybe? But it’s hard. And it’s harder every day when there’s a zeitgeist of growing isolationism.
I certainly don’t think the inflexibility of a 5 day in person work week with a hellish, uncompensated commute is the answer to the loneliness issue, nor the lack of motivation to do good work. But maybe there is some middle ground that would serve as a kick in the pants of sorts, without making us all miserable little ants going to and fro once again, that could help people get back out there in a way that helps.
I mean, at least, it doesn’t seem like the metaverse or whatever else is filling that gap as the techno-seers foresaw… but maybe future generations will prove that to be more realistic than bringing people back out together in meatspace. Or maybe we just stoop deeper into this new reclusiveness without any real stand ins for grabbing lunch together at all.
Maybe if the office was not a hellscape? Not just the commute, the offices themselves.
I didn't work in a properly colocated team since 2017, and that was mostly by accident. The norm is zoom/teams calls, often taken from the desk (which is 3-4 in a row with rows densely packed) because there's never enough space for meeting rooms so it becomes norm to not give a fuck that nobody can concentrate because someone is talking loudly on a work meeting.
And the watercooler is either office politicking or discussing how much the place sucks
Exactly this, its great that the person next to me can stand and talk to someone 2 desks down, over my shoulder while I'm on a teams call with someone from the other side of the floor, as there are only 3 conference rooms, and managers have priority. If you want people back in the office, redesign the whole space to small working areas where people can actually focus. Open office environments are the worst office experience possible, but i guess it makes the C-suite feel powerful or something having all these people sitting outside their office.
Well yeah, and that's actually the point: if you don't like it, you're free to leave! Headcount reduction without severance payment and getting rid of an unmotivated employee, win-win! At least for federal employees they had the decency of spelling it out clearly: https://traumaawareamerica.org/2025/04/28/deliberate-strateg... - the rest of us have to keep listening to the "it's all for your best" BS...
Sure, if you feel lonely and want the company of your co-workers, you're free to come to the office as often as you want. It's being forced to come to the office 3/5/whatever days that is actually decreasing motivation...
...and being forced back to the office for first three and then five days (as Elon Musk said years ago, you can work from home all you want, you just have to work 40 hours per week in the office) is not really going to improve your motivation.
> Reading all of these takes stating WFH leads to poor productivity simply doesn’t make sense to me.
I don't think it is related to poor productivity. I think it is related to a combination of these 3 points:
1) perceived less of control from the management perspective. 10-15years ago companies were all in on "we need metrics on work being done". Let's face it, process induced metrics have often very little relevance to the success of your products. So without being able to pin point what is wrong from the metrics, upper management feel they are managing an invisible structure and they have no idea what they do. They don't have much more idea when they are at the office but they can see them peering at their screen or talking to their colleagues so they must be doing something right? It is reassuring for upper management.
2) Pretending to do something. This RTO decisions are ofen all about making changes for the sake of making changes. All my career I have seen upper management doing restructuration every 6 months to every 2 years with often very little change in the actual efficiency of the whole company or the quality of the products being done. More often than not they just throw shit at the wall and see hat sticks. Other times they just copy what competitors have just done. Once in a while they will maybe observe an improvement.
3) It also give a visible signal to the employees thast something is being done by the management so in a sense it can boost motivation a little bit even though major changes are often disruptive. If it wasn't for these kind of changes and announcement, most employees wouldn't even know/remember who their CEO is.
Having said that, I don't work at Meta/Instagram but I work in a company where the meeting culture is crazy and I think I can agree with him on that point.
The RTO decisions are about making changes to prove that you have power over your employees, and also about attrition: if you don't like the soul-crushing routine of having to come to the office three or five days a week when you could do your job just as well or better working from home, there's the door!
I wish more people working for these companies with short-sighted RTO mandates would explore suing their employer for promissory estoppel. There were real guarantees along the lines of “in-office work is never coming back” made verbally by CEOs when COVID began. If employees made financial/legal decisions based on these false promises, the company should be held liable.
In addition to your 1.) It's also a power demonstration as in: no matter how far you have to travel/commute, we're the ones paying, so you come when called. Since commutes are rarely paid for, that makes clear who's king. Same goes for open office spaces: the conditions and their effect on you don't really matter to the king.
There's a 4. in that these measures sometimes serve the purpose of reducing headcount without having to publicly announce layoffs.
It's a mistake to view this from the perspective of productivity and whether or not someone can do their job at home or not. Clearly they can. We kept these companies alive by WFH during the pandemic. But they simply don't care.
RTO mandates are nothing more than soft layoffs. People have moved. People may not be able to come back. People may simply not want to. Some of those people will quit. And that's cheaper than a severance package.
We are in permanent layoff culture now. Why? To suppress wages and get more work for no extra compensation. 5% of the staff gets fired? The other 95% has to do their work for no extra money AND they're not demanding pay raises. Win win.
Over time profits have a tendency to shrink and the only way to maintain the insatiable appetite for increasing profits is, ultimately, by raising prices and cutting costs. I wish more people realized this is all that's going on.
There is a middle ground though between "employees can't be trusted" and "all is well". It's possible for there to be a genuine difference in affordances such that people are more productive in some places than others. I think many people would be less productive in a dank basement than in a pleasant office, but then again maybe you don't want it to be too cushy or productivity may go down. I don't think it's realistic to expect everyone to be equally productive in all environments.
That said, I share your fear that all such considerations are just a smokescreen. In a larger sense the entire issue of "productivity" is a smokescreen. We don't need "more productivity". What we need is for people to be happy, and potentially that may be achieved by reducing productivity in some ways.
that is irrelevant to company management - in so far as that happiness has negligible effect on productivity.
However, from anecdotal evidence i've gathered (only sample size of 5-7 or so), in office has been more productive, but they (with the exception of one, who lives 5 mins from their office) all dislike RTO and would've preferred WFH; but not enough to quit over it as it's not a 5 day mandate, but a 3-4 day mandate.
That's right, that's why a lot of company management needs to be smacked down and if necessary fined and jailed. That laser focus on productivity is a cancer on society.
The problem we have is precisely that we consider things like this "policy disagreements" even when they're happening on a massive scale and causing enormous harm to society. If we're talking about some small company where the manager decides to push a bit harder, okay. But when it comes to multibillion dollar companies shoving their profiteering mindset out on everyone, it's no longer just a matter of internal company policy. Poisoning society with a single-minded focus on money is in its way as bad as pollution, and it needs to be stopped.
Only a 100 years — the whole history before that was working in the vicinity of a home, it does feel natural to return to that. Instead of anvils, we hit keyboards and instead of swords produce alignment, but either way it brings food to the table and allows flexibility in work-life?
Not in tech but was a teacher for decades. My first teaching job in early 80s of the last century had a requirement that teachers live within 5 miles of the building.
In general; perhaps a return to guilds? Apprentices? In an area of my city that has a lot of small craft workshops (and, yes, a few have anvils) there are 'work-live' units being built that have workshops on the ground floor and living accommodation above.
Noisy open spaces with many people talking at the same time and people coming in sick with contagious respiratory infections is not really a recipe for productivity independently of commute.
"Forcing people into working conditions in which they are uncomfortable is only going to harbour resentment towards the company and if you are in a country where workers actually have real rights you will have a hard time firing them."
They are forcing them back into the office, which was pretty much the norm pre-covid. Having hard to fire employees isn't a good thing for the company or the well-being of other employees, when dealing with a bad employee.
If you want to work from home forever, contract with a company, and put it in your contract. This is what I've done for over a decade now.
Who says I only have one client? It's also one of the reasons that it's so difficult to actually start a company in many of these countries, and the economic landscape consists of large multi-national corporations and the government.
It's also not illegal (at least in the US), if you have your own LLC/company.
This kind of thinking is why I've had steady work while working remotely for many years and we see articles like this crying about companies taking away remote work.
Congrats on your work ethic. But consider that this may simply not be the case for every working adult on earth, and may not even be true for every working adult in your company.
Not everyone is like you. I am, but I know people (some of whom are former and current coworkers) who are much more easily distracted, and are meaningfully less able to compete their work in a timely manner when they work from home.
I'll probably be downvoted, but I just don't think most of these execs are engaging in some larger "authoritarian" play with these moves (maybe some are, but I think incompetence is more likely than malice in most cases). But maybe I'm naive.
As one point, consider the case of Tokyo's "Manuscript Cafe" [0] where patrons intentionally visit to have a cafe owner "force" them to compete a task they may have been procrastinating on. I read this as: being in a "work" location surrounded by other working people is conducive to productivity for some people.
I think it's only a small portion of WFH advocates who say that everyone should be forced to work remotely. Most want each person to have the ability to work the way that's best for them.
Measured for a year, my team overall shipped 60% of issues WFH than when in office. WFH was nice for some colleagues but clearly not working for the team. We promptly change back to in office when able.
The crux of this is the way everyone is at their best is different per person.
Work from office is the brute force solution - if it’s the hammer, flexible work is the scalple.
Not every org has managers capable of welding a scalpel instead of a hammer, or who have time to be surgical even if they have the ability. I accept this reality.
The reality is that middle managers are completely useless, but to justify their usefulness they have to force people to come to the office, to reprimand them if they don't strictly follow the schedule, to hold meetings to pretend they're useful by knowing what their team is doing, etc. They have to act as control agents: checking, monitoring, producing unnecessary reporting (a legacy of slavery) just to prove they exist in the organizational chart. The office is a theater where everyone pretends to be busy (especially them), but that's hard if the offices are empty. It's a system where we try to convince ourselves of their usefulness, which pushes them to fill the void in order to maintain a hierarchy that serves more to prevent people from working peacefully than to organize anything.
At work, we have the opportunity to choose. Many people are like you and find that going to the office helps their productivity and mental health. Most of us (including me) visit the office only a few times a year.
I think having the choice is great. Although it comes with its own challenges, it works really well when you establish the right culture.
Luckily that's what's happening here, just at a company level. Plenty of companies are remote only or remote friendly. Hopefully people who prefer remote work can leave here and find work at one of those companies, and maybe people who prefer in person work will find their way here.
I put this in the same bucket as the horrifying "996" trend, or even consultancies that require 80-100% travel. If you want to broadcast that you have a toxic work culture, all I can do is applaud your honesty and look elsewhere for work.
That’s what my company does, and none of the engineers ever come in. My manager comes in when he has meetings, and I’ll go in sometimes, but I’m usually alone. None of the benefits of collocation with all the of downsides of an office.
I find that office days work a lot better. Everyone comes in Tuesdays and Thursdays or something.
Your initial post was about there being choice. Now it appears that the upside of the office is the others being there.
I can understand that some people like the physical distinction between "work" and "home". My boss is like that, and he would actually go to the office during covid when no one else would be there. He lived alone in a comfortable apartment, so there wasn't even a question of loud kids / no space for a desk. It obviously never came up that we should also show up. He sometimes wants us to come in the office, all the at the same time, for some form of all-hands meetings, but he doesn't just drop them out of the blue: we plan these together, and they don't happen on a fixed, tight schedule.
The company has now moved to a "flex office" scheme. I was already not very happy having to go in, but you can imagine I now abhor it. Having to share desks with people who don't give a shit about office equipment, having to clean up the screens because they figure it's fine to stick their fingers on them and having to use shoddy peripherals... And it goes on and on, you've read it on every HN post on the subject.
Luckily for me, they don't really enforce this, and I can still spend most of my days WFH and still have a semi-dedicated desk.
But your post is the reason why many people are up in arms against this whole "the office is better". Apparently, it's only better if you force everybody back in. So it's not really about "choice", but about having one's preferences be the "right" ones.
Yes, offices have downsides, but they also have benefits. To get the benefits the majority of a team needs to be in the same office. Having tried both, I prefer working in an office with coworkers around. The growing consensus seems to be that large companies agree with me. Are you saying you know more about employee productivity than Meta and Amazon among others?
If you’re unhappy and want to work remotely feel free to quit and go work in a remote company.
And on your comment about your office being disgusting, your coworkers being terrible, and your commute being awful: that’s a skill issue friend. My office is great, always clean and stocked with snacks; my coworkers are awesome, very thoughtful people and i consider some of them to be my friends and we hang out outside of work; my commute is a 15 minute bicycle ride that gets my day started with some exercise. I might change jobs to somewhere that has more office days though.
I’m sure you can also find a company with a great office culture. I wouldn’t want to work from your company’s office either. That’s why I specifically look out for that when job hunting.
> If you’re unhappy and want to work remotely feel free to quit and go work in a remote company.
Couldn't this equally apply to you? Feel free to quit and go work in a fully office present company?
Your commute is a 15 minute bicycle ride, you want to force everyone else back to the office because you have a nice easy commute and you personally prefer it. And you're glad that this is now happening across the industry, again, because you prefer it.
Yes, I have quit a remote company because it wasn’t for me. I deliberately live somewhere with a good commute.
These are choices I made for myself. If you can’t make the same choices that’s fine, but don’t come in to every thread about RTO and start saying that I’m a lazy irresponsible disrespectful person because I prefer to work in an office.
I’m not saying every company needs to be like this, but that companies like this should be allowed to exist without you remote work zealots belittling everyone who works there. Go work somewhere else!
> I was already not very happy having to go in, but you can imagine I now abhor it. Having to share desks with people who don't give a shit about office equipment, having to clean up the screens because they figure it's fine to stick their fingers on them and having to use shoddy peripherals... And it goes on and on, you've read it on every HN post on the subject.
The company I work for has a reservation system for desks.
More than not the desks are disgusting. I'm talking about some suspicious matter that might be food or nose bigger on the greasy keyboard. Keyboard and mouse are flimsy office staple crapware and we have to use Citrix even though we are within the company network.
For fuck sake either go back to the old days where a person had their own desk they can personalize or let me work from my place.
I feel what you are proposing is the worst of both worlds.
The company still needs to pay a full office (decreasing chances that money will be used for home office benefit or raises), people are still forced to live somewhat close to the office, not realizing the biggest benefit of remote work: living where you want, close to the people you care and freeing up money and time.
If working together really helps, it's enough that those who think that coordinate and agree on days to go to the office. If nobody agrees, than maybe the benefits are only perceived or subjective?
I will be honest, I believe that lots of people go to the office because their 9-5 (+ commute) job made it impossible for them to maintain and cultivate social relationships outside work, which means they see the office as their attempt to escape loneliness.
I am not saying that's everyone, but that for many people is the case and that explains people non-stop interrupting, walking in on others, chatting etc., which is quite common in office environments.
That said, I think that remote work needs also a few key elements to succeed:
- a remote culture in the company (e.g., everyone understands flexibility in terms of working time, meetings are online-first, documentation and async work culture, etc.)
- a good space to work at home. I can't imagine working on a stool and a laptop like some people were forced to do during covid.
- discipline (e.g., not let work time bleed into personal time, blocking time etc.)
- good social relationships with friends/family. It can be very alienating otherwise.
It's snowing outside right now and I'm in the middle of a cubicle "bullpen" unable to see the outdoors. I bring up a camera view from home or one of the webcams around town. I hate it.
That’s only because you go to the office once in a blue moon. If it was your daily routine you’d get used to it and be productive there too, just maybe not as much as when you’re home.
Did you work in an office before covid? I’m sure your productivity wasn’t abysmal or you wouldn’t still be working in tech
My current job used to be fully in the office before covid. That was some 5 years, so yeah, I was pretty "used" to it. After covid, it stayed "flexible", where I mostly WFH. Before this job, I also used to work one where it was "flexible", with multiple WFH days.
Sure, I didn't do "nothing" while in the office, there was some productivity. I still manage to get stuff done when I go there. But the difference in productivity between when I'm home and when I'm in the office is abysmal.
I don't have to put up with my colleagues being on the phone all the time. I don't have to put up with a chair that gives me back pain, or with contorting myself to reduce the glare on my screens. I don't have to endure being squished in the metro for half an hour each way or get up at absurd hours to avoid that. I don't have to eat at random times or in front of my computer because the lunch corner is already full.
Could I "get used to that" all over again? I guess. People who need to take the local public transit "get used" to it being unreliable and a general PITA. Do they enjoy it? Would they be happier if they wouldn't have to put up with that? What do you think?
I think the general issue, as I alluded in an answer to another of your posts, is that there indeed are people with differing preferences. And we could have people do what they prefer. But problems arise when we each try to impose our approach to others. Want to go to the office because for some reason you prefer that? Enjoy! But then, don't turn around and say "yeah, but going at the office and being alone (presumably because the others hate going) is all downside without any upside, so everybody should come in".
I go to the office around one week out of every four, it's not that rare. Sure, there's some catching up, but not that much. Mostly it's the continuous interruptions that are never time boxed, the way they are when remote.
That’s odd, in my experience most engineers know to at least send a slack message first before talking to a fellow engineer in person, unless it’s an emergency.
> You would benefit from not assuming that everyone is the same as you.
I’m sorry if it came across that this was the point I was making. I was not. I acknowledge and understand everyone is different.
The point I was making was about trusting people to be responsible adults and do what is right for the productivity without dictating a binary decision.
People who are more productive at home should not be punished because others are not and likewise for the inverse.
I think this is a situation where you can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Network effects mean that the more people are in the office the better. On the other hand, if even a single team member is remote then the entire team must adapt to that. If half the team is remote then I might as well stay home too.
I don’t want to have an office to go into. If that was the issue I could just get a shared office to work from.
I want to work at a company where most of my direct coworkers come to the office regularly.
I should get to have that. Not every company needs to be a remote or a flex company. If you don’t like RTO you can quit. Likewise for me, I’m not too happy with my current office situation, so I’m looking for a new job.
I disagree, and clearly most companies opting for some kind of RTO are on my side.
The biggest benefit of an office is collocation. People need to be forced to come to an office or they won’t do it, and team efficiency will go down.
Even if you think you’re performing well, the entire team suffers for it. Miscommunication happens. People get blocked for longer. Juniors can’t get the mentoring they need.
If you disagree that’s fine, go work for a remote company. But clearly the tide is turning against you with more and more companies enforcing RTOs.
The people that do the actual work dont want to be in the office surrounded by the slackers that for some reason 'require' other people around them to work. Theyre leaches. They drain energy me.
Then they are also not responsible enough to work at the office, you can't pay a nanny who sith with them and tells them to keep working 8 hours a day at the office anyway. Those people need to be let go because you can't trust them.
Actually, having people at the office often works like peer pressure in that people at least pretend to work around their co-workers. Something which doesn't exist at home.
A lot of people who prefer remote work have a superiority complex over their peers. They’re usually hard to work with and unreliable, and think that as long as they’re performing their individual tasks they’re allowed to be awful communicators.
I don’t know what you mean by today’s because most companies I’ve worked at have had pretty nice offices. Even the open space ones were quiet and spacious. The one exception was a startup at an incubator.
My last office job was in an old converted garment factory. Lots of space, we had our own desks. It was really nice. Sharing a table with someone is not as nice, and office mates are rarely tolerant of my model M keyboard.
Since I've been WFH for last 5 years I'm probably not the reason, although I get criticism on video conferences when I start typing without muting my microphone first.
My previous employer ran an experiment. They had us come in two days per week for six weeks and ran the numbers. We ended up going 100% wfh with a downsized office. We been planning to double our office capacity before the pan.
I’m convinced that more than half of orgs would see similar numbers if they cared to look. I bet a bunch of the ones mandating RTO see them but do it anyway.
The market will solve this problem eventually. In industries where WFH is more efficient, eventually the companies that go that route will outperform their peers. It’s inevitable really. It will take time because companies feel the need to use their offices while they have an ongoing lease, but when it comes time to renew the savings are difficult to ignore.
If your employees cannot be trusted to fulfil their responsibilities (whether in an office, their home or a tent in a woodland) that is not a geographical issue. It is a mentality issue and you are always going to face productivity issue from that employee regardless of from where they work.
I’ve been told time and time again by an array of managers in a bunch of departments and companies that my productivity never changes. That is regardless of whether I am travelling or at home. This is including being in Sri Lanka during their worst economical crisis and facing power cuts of 8 - 12 hours everyday. As a responsible adult I prepared in advance. I bought power banks which could charge my laptop and ensured they were charged when the power worked. I bought SIM cards for all mobile networks and ensured I had data. It really is simply a matter of taking responsibility of one’s situation and having a sense of respect for, and from, your employer/employee.
Forcing people into working conditions in which they are uncomfortable is only going to harbour resentment towards the company and if you are in a country where workers actually have real rights you will have a hard time firing them.
I fear that this is all simply a smokescreen for the authoritarian shift which has occurred throughout the globe. It started pre pandemic and was exasperated during it. Scary times lay ahead.