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Comment by maxharris | Hacker News Reader

This reads more like consultants writing their FUD into a press release than actual news. I know that people and companies invested heavily in real estate are disappointed by this, but no amount of astroturfing is going to re-create the world of 2019.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nonfarm business labor productivity rose by over 10% over the course of 2020, despite the fact that most of us are working from home. (Source: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/prod2.pdf)

Companies that want to waste huge sums of money on offices are going to have to compete with companies that don't abuse their employees, doing the same thing for less. We're obviously not going back to how things were before.

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> According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nonfarm business labor productivity rose by over 10% over the course of 2020, despite the fact that most of us are working from home.

I’d push back on this claim with another piece of relevant data: employee mental health has plunged [1][2]. While it’s true that productivity has increased, it’s not obvious that this is sustainable.

[1] https://www.hibob.com/blog/covid-19-employee-wellness-survey...

[2] https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/both-remote-and-on-site-wor...

So employers get a productivity boost and cost savings if they sacrifice their employee's mental health? I'd love to believe we live in a world where that would stop them.

I mean, the technology industry (especially FAANG) aren’t exactly known for sacrificing long-term growth for the sake of short-term penny-pinching in the context of employee happiness.

Any company that (pre-COVID) had a proclivity to sacrifice short-term profits by providing free food and other generous onsite perks is probably also a company that might choose to scrap plans to cut back on offices if doing so has a positive impact on their employees’ mental health.

Also, it is possible that employees were putting in extra effort so that they won't be one getting laid off in case their company decides to do a layoff. It was a scary environment in the beginning with a layoff being announced almost every day.

I'm not sure that I'd correlate remote work with that during a year like this last one.

>employee mental health has plunged [1][2].

I wonder how much of that is due to Working from Home, and how much of that is due to Covid-19 with hundreds of thousands of people dying, weddings, funerals, churches, celebrations, etc being closed.

In an alternative world of working from home, but you are free to go the coffee shop to work, meet with extended family, and now have to worry about catching a potentially deadly disease, I would bet mental health would be much better.

I think not being able to look forward to doing anything new on a weekend is the reason mental health is plunging...not the fact that the commutes have been eliminated.

It's nuanced and different for everyone. The isolation has been brutal for a couple of my single friends in tech. Being able to mingle at the office was a big portion of their social interactions pre-covid.

Also not everyone has a living setup that works for WFH.

WFH is great for someone with a big house where they can convert some part of a room into a study. It’s less great for someone living in a studio or apartment with limited space.

Why a studio? If you WFH you can choose anywhere in the world with the space.

I re-upped my lease just after WFH and they didn't raise the rent. So I'm not going anywhere and it seems like we'll be back to normal-er by the time it comes up again.

Lots of people have rent terms or leases, which can’t be changed amidst corona. Especially without knowing what post COVID life will look like.

Moreover, some people like being in the heart of the city and as such, can only afford a studio.

Why do people live far from big cities or in rural areas? With a cushy enough job you could downsize to a studio right by work.

People have different preferences on where they want to live. I don't really see how shaming one choice is supposed to be better than shaming another.

I've heard people say commutes are helpful for their mental health.

If you live in a rural place and commute into a suburb your commute is probably like an hour of forced meditation. If you like driving it might actually be good for you.

If, on the other hand, either end of the commute is in a city/you don't like driving it probably wears on you every day.

> I've heard people say commutes are helpful for their mental health.

I'm sure that for any drudgery out there, you can find someone to extoll their positive aspects. In my case my commute was rather pleasant, a comfortable 30 min bicycle ride. However most of my colleagues had to endure crowded public transport.

it's very possible that mental health is dropping due to the rest of society being closed down as well. if everything other than "office life" opened up, i imagine mental health would go up too.

> employee mental health has plunged

Just an anecdote of this one guy, but I really would love to go back to office right now. WFH has killed my enthusiasm and I really don't think my overall productivity has gone up.

Anecdote of a second one guy: you're not alone to feel like that.

Why the hell is this downvoted?

Because WHO/WFH has become a zero-sum political game rather than an actual debate.

Mental health has plunged despite people being freed from forced commute working conditions, not because of. This is easily explained by the pandemic.

This is too broad of a stroke to be brushing with.

Personally, my mental health has gone worse for non-COVID reasons. I live in an apartment and the limited real estate means that it’s hard to dissociate work space from living space. I’m not the only person who lives in an apartment.

I've been remote for three years.

My favourite way to solve that dilemma used to be going to a cafe for a few hours. Guess what I haven't been doing since the pandemic started?

At the moment I'm blessed with plenty of space, and the office is the office. But still fewer social outlets than I would like. Summer can't get here soon enough.

Different strokes for different folks.

I don't really like cafes either. I tried it during a brief period when full lockdowns hadn't started yet but we were allowed to work from home.

- Cafes are noisy. If you need to have a conversation, it's hard to hear the other person, and it can be hard to hear you, and you have to be mindful to not disturb you.

- You have to pay your way at a coffee shop, and I enjoy supporting local business, but I don't need to consume all the calories and caffeine of a new drink every 1-2 hours.

- Cafe seating isn't office seating, and if you sit too long in it you can tell. An aesthetically pleasing cafe chair isn't necessarily good for the back.

I can attribute my mental state change (to the worse) to the stress caused by stupidity of the COVID-19 mitigation measures.

> employee mental health has plunged

I can only speak for myself, but not being to work out at the gym or do anything outside of my home is the problem, not the god damn office.

Yeah, it's weird how the narrative is that mental health has plunged because people can't sit in traffic and go to the office while completely ignoring we've been in a pandemic for over a year.

I miss pre-pandemic WFH, and want to get back that ASAP.

Covid Lockdown - and almost complete absence of ability to visit relatives, travel (especially internationally), go to restaurants, participate in group activities - has been much harder than simply WFH.

Your cited source also shows 10.9% more hours worked and only 0.8% more hourly compensation (and -1.6% real compensation) comparing Q4 2019 to Q4 2020. Does the data show whether people are more productive because they are happier living more flexible lives at home, or because they simply have worse work life balance? Does it show whether these changes are roughly homogenous, or if there are pockets swinging up (down) the mean hours worked (compensation)? What's the variance?

You can levy a dozen counterfactuals at the use of BLS data like this to support permanent WFH. The analysis needs to be way more holistic and BLS figures aren't nuanced enough.

Yeah, but they're surveying CEO's.

CEO's want all the little people back in the office so they can have their minions back.

You look at a multi-day Slack discussion with big architects and PMs without any progress... In the old days it would be a series of important meetings where those important people would be making important face and saying important sounding words. There would still be no progress, yet there would be the feeling like the progress is being made. Slack makes it so obvious. We're definitely going back to offices :)

> You look at a multi-day Slack discussion with big architects and PMs without any progress...

This. Written communication makes it obvious that some people have nothing meaningful to say it have trouble with reading comprehension.

and even more important aspect - without offices there isn't jet-setting across the world nor fat expense accounts. The only thing left for CEOs and all the other execs is to actually do their job which is their least favorite activity and which they usually are hardly capable at performing.

CEO's want all the little people back in the office so they can have their minions back.

Management have no idea as noted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26547499

It’s not most trustworthy when you accuse someone of lying and then proceeded to cherry pick single statistic, that’s not even from carefully controlled study designed to answer those questions.

The productivity numbers, unlike inflation, don't compensate for basket shifts. So if people stop putting on low productivity things like plays productivity rises but it isn't real.

It reminds me of how large suit retailers funded "research" regarding 'casual Fridays'.

According to them it was just a fad that would soon die.

Companies that were quick to embrace open concept office space and cubicles to save expenses are surely going to take advantage of this new paradigm.

There arent any real study on work place transition, productivity, and overall AVERAGE health of employees had been conducted.

Even on the smallest scale of sample size, I thrived during the work from home year, yet my SO can't wait to get back to office work where they can socialize with coworkers face to face.

Any call for either OR are dramatically overweightted.

One question though. Tools to work fully remote have been around for at least 20 years now. Want to work from Montana in 2001? Webex, messengers, version control, DSL internet, everything has been there for decades. We also have precedents of major projects (say, open source) shipped by distributed teams since that long, too. Yet, pre-Covid very, very few companies have actually figured out remote. Why? Is it because companies are slow and stupid? Google doesn't seem stupid. Why have they been paying $500k comp in the Bay Area all this time when Tennessee or India were right there all along? Maybe they took special pleasure in pointlessly overpaying and abusing their employees, as you call it?

Tools to work fully remote have been around for at least 20 years now. Want to work from Montana in 2001?

Longer. Guy I know was perfectly happily WFH running X11 over dual-bonded ISDN a decade before that!

> Want to work from Montana in 2001? Webex, messengers, version control, DSL internet, everything has been there for decades

I started WFH the moment DSL became available in my area in 2003. Was switching to WFH at every work place over commute became unbearable.

I think it's hard to use FAANGs for general trends like this. Google for example in part hires people to keep them from going elsewhere or building a competing company. One of Google's big perks to lure these people is all of the onsite amenities. Google and the other big tech companies are unique in a lot of ways, and in no way represent the average company in the US or even in tech though.

What will be interesting is if WFH (I like to say Freedom of Work) continues to take hold, will companies like Google have to adjust or be ok missing out on employees?

First thing I thought was "press hit." (http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

I've been expecting that certain groups (people who own commercial real estate, for example), were going to want to us all back in our cubicles.

Not sure I'm right, of course, but it'll be interesting to see how this plays out over the next couple of years.

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