Ask HN: Why do companies want us “back in office” despite productivity costs? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do companies want us “back in office” despite productivity costs?

23 pointsbutterNaN40 comments

I might be too 'junior' to grok what goes behind the curtains. When I did a quick survey amongst my software friends, all of their workplaces have been pushing for bringing people back in offices. Some are a bit soft and coy about it ("From November, we will allow you to choose WFH for half the week!"), And some are straightforward "you have to".

In my workplace, the management itself reported high remote productivity. Despite this, we will be asked to work remotely only half the time. They even have a big new building in city center location.

Is it simply something cynical, e.g. Trying to hold on to prime real estate, or somplyyabout control? Or is there indeed legitimate net benefit to working in offices?

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In my conversations with my higher-ups, they really believe that productivity is better in office. They often doubt the measured productivity improvements of WFH, and either believe that the metrics are inflated or that they are temporary, and as in-person connections fade then so will productivity.

There isn't some kind of conspiracy or hidden beliefs around real estate. That would be a massive prisoners' dilemma, where as soon as some companies "defected" the real estate prices would fall anyways.

Certainly we can debate whether they are right about whether WFH is better or worse. Certainly some of their feeling of "this is working" probably comes from their sense of having more direct control and visibility over people rather than real measure of productivity. However, I think they are being honest about their motives: They believe that in-person connections lead to better work output.

I agree

> They often doubt the measured productivity improvements of WFH, and either believe that the metrics are inflated or that they are temporary, and as in-person connections fade then so will productivity.

> However, I think they are being honest about their motives: They believe that in-person connections lead to better work output.

We that is how belief works, thinking something without any data to back it up. It's a little more gross in this case since the places that do have data are writing it off (funny how that works, it's almost as if they only collected the data to use it when it agreed with their gut, don't get me started on KPIs and the like).

I have no doubt that some people do work better in an office environment but forcing everyone back because some subset want to go back to the office is just insanity. In the end the companies pushing people back to the office that don't want to go back will suffer as talent that doesn't want to work in the office leaves for greener pastures. They will be left with the people who can't switch jobs (for whatever reason) and the people who do like being in a office.

> "It's a little more gross in this case since the places that do have data are writing it off..."

Any examples you're willing to share? The only study I'm aware of is MSR's which news sources like https://www.zdnet.com/article/remote-work-is-making-producti... summarize as "... the organization-wide switch to remote working in 2020 damaged communication and collaboration between different teams – while driving up working hours."

They are writing it off though, as you say, since I have heard that MS has not required staff to return to the office.

I was responding directly to this line:

Specifically "believe that the metrics are inflated or that they are temporary".

Though it wouldn't be the first time I saw first hand a company reject the will of the employees or what the data is telling them because it doesn't match their "gut" (speaking of pre-pandemic things at a company I used to work at).

To me it comes down to control. They want to own you for the 8 hours a day (and often more if you let them).

There are upsides and downsides to working in a office, something I'll readily admit as a WFH proponent. For me the upsides of being in a office are outweighed (greatly) by the upsides of WFH such that I can work around the few downsides of WFH and still be a "net positive". This calculus is different for every individual person but businesses want to paint with a broad brush, ignore that, and just have 1 policy for everyone. As other have mentioned I've sure there is plenty of middle-managers that are particularly interested in getting back to the office as some of their jobs have probably been (rightfully) called into question.

There are a TON of companies hiring remote/WFH so at this point it's almost completely up to your preference what you choose to pursue. For myself I only intend on taking WFH jobs going forward, I've seen the light and have interest in going back.

> Or is there indeed legitimate net benefit to working in offices?

Yes there absolutely are benefits to working in an office, there are also benefits to WFH. In-person meetings are the best medium we have available to us but video calls are good enough for me (and the team I work on) and the technology is only going to continue to improve as more people WFH. On the flip side nothing can beat the comfort of my house. I have my office furniture, my monitor setup, my kitchen for meals/snacks, my bed/couch for breaks, and my dog. Not to mention how easy it is to throw in a load of laundry, take the dog on a walk, start dinner prep, have tradespeople come do work, etc. I won't pretend there are no advantages to the office but like I said before, the WFH advantages are far greater for me.

> To me it comes down to control. They want to own you for the 8 hours a day (and often more if you let them).

In terms of an interpretation with explanatory power across organizations, the idea that these organizations are uniformly populated by power hungry managers eager to control you, and put you in your place…

This is either sloppy exaggeration or assuming a level of stupidity on manager’s part which goes beyond the bounds of hanlon’s razor. It is especially clear when you notice that

> There are a TON of companies hiring remote/WFH so at this point it's almost completely up to your preference what you choose to pursue.

There are N classes of people working at companies but lets be reductionist here and say theres a Value Producing Category and a Value Measuring Category. Lets call theses Developers and Managers. If all is going swimmingly well with Devs and Managers working from home ... it wont be long before someone who pays the managers starts asking the question of why managers are needed at all. The devs seem to be producing just fine without any face time from management. They're clearly not adding much in the way of eyes on supervision or the occasional chair kick.

Developers and others with a demonstrable skill set that produces measurable output want to continue to work from home. Those with the inverse of this situation want everyone to return to the office such that they can continue to demonstrate their value proposition and continue vesting and cashing paychecks.

Thats how it seems to me - Middle management is scared.

Unless you can literally walk across the street to your job from your front door, you are going to blow at least 1/2 hour a day commuting, and maybe more.

Also, and nobody seems willing to say this out loud, you (and your boss and your CEO) may be done with COVID, but COVID is not done with you.

Plus commuting is terrible for the environment. Nobody discusses that either.

Especially in America, where the push for a return to office work seems to be the strongest.

Plenty of internet commenters discuss it.

For anybody who needs the citation for the above, UT Southwestern posts the “r” value trend chart on the last slide. Just under 1 is bad, 1.0 and over is in layman’s terms “still active transmission hopping to multiple people from 1 infected / potentially asymptomatic individual.

Every time r makes progress, it recedes. This does not please management because they can’t fire a virus or human herd stupidity as a collective.

In the city I live in, it is 90+ minutes of driving on average. Per employee. Per day.

I've had five mile commutes push toward 1/2 hour each way. Let's not forget the five minutes at each end walking from/to the parking lot. In the evening maybe even an extra 5 minutes or more to get out of the lot, depending on the job.

Execs are human and fallible like the rest of us. And this is a situation where simply isnt a single right answer. WFH is great for some and hell for others. Digital collaboration is great for some and hell for others. Then you layer on complicated exec level issues, like: what do you do if a WFH person works with an office based team and complains their career is not advancing as fast as the former? How do you gently unwind your positions in millions of dollars of real estate without causing a giant mess? HR has no idea, but they can smell ghe lawsuits coming. Legal has no idea, but they agree. Finance has no idea, but they surely love the idea of dumping some of that real estate. The execs are split themselves. There is no single solution to this equation.

I suspect that most companies will end up in a hybrid mode where teams WFH 3/5 of the week say and are in office for 2 days. A compromise that makes no one happy but no one truly unhappy either.

You're looking at it as though optimising your individual productivity is the ultimate goal. Companies are trying to optimise for the entire companies productivity which is not the same thing.

As someone in a role that has this as a goal, you've nailed it on the head.

Developers can be super productive at home but will miss out in the random discussions and water cooler topics discussed with other teams, even their immediate supervisors. It leads to building the wrong thing which frustrates everyone.

If lack of watercooler talk is a reason to build the wrong thing, there are bigger problems in a company to fix before focusing on forcing people to work in the office.

More recently than not I’ve proven to myself “trust my gut” when it comes to work versus career mindset, 2022 now proved the career in the US is dead for high skilled professionals. We are now in a mercenary environment and I love it. I seated and slogged underpaid and viewed as a tiny cog for a decade. Others must have as well - the way to get real raises was jump every 2-3 years. Never get a cut of sales bonus anyways, greedy bunch of course.

Now post reorganization I believe a large percentage of workers with my skill set and more longevity found different work with the free time with WFH. Can actually BE BUSY applying for things instead of double grinding. Employers want people like me available now, and there is a supply gap. A significant one. Nobody really wanted to do the kind of thing I do but it was never going anywhere in large business deals. The work is still there but maybe a quarter threw up their hands and said “f-this I’m out” and wow 20% market rate raises across the board and now 60% of postings are 100% remote.

It’s like my union went on strike or took the early buyout and now the sharks are tearing each other apart instead of me and my compatriots. Welcome to the new normal.

Whenever I had serious programming work to do I got OUT of the office.

When my last employer decided to go to shared cubes to reduce real estate costs, my cube mate was a gregarious massively distracting personality.

Shared cubes = one employee for the price of two.

Later on I saw open tabletops with rows of employees - works for call centers - not for devs.

Easier to enforce culture and policies. Also easier for managers to look busy.

Burnout is caused by lack of community. If they fail to create at least some sense of community, they end up hearing stories of employees burning out or just getting really jumpy and distrustful. These stories stick in their mind and they feel ashamed to be doing a poor job as leaders. They are trying to control what they can to minimize their own sense of shame.

They also don’t want to fire someone after paying 2 months salary to an engineer working 60-hour weeks writing useless code. They’d rather pay someone to spend 7 hours a week coordinating with their team and 30 hours a week writing useful code.

In theory they could hire leaders who have spent years running WoW guilds. In practice, that would redefine their own jobs into ones that they were years away from being qualified for.

> Burnout is caused by lack of community.

As someone who suffered burnout multiple times, 'lack of community' was never the reason. If anything my caring about my fellow coworkers got me putting in the overtime so things didn't slip or get behind, to the point where I got burnt out.

Like the time a transition to a different data center didn't go so well, and I worked 60 hours in three days helping the department fix all the fires that happened, including one literal 24 hour day (then four hour break, then a 20 hour day, then a 6 hour break, then a 16 hour day). There continued being various issues for months afterwards, and I ended up too tired to even look for a new job, so I was pretty stuck unless I quit (which in retrospect I should have).

But I did it because it needed to be done, I had some knowledge that helped me figure out what changes needed to be made, my department wasn't making any money without these things being fixed, my boss was a nice guy and doing most of the overtime along with me.

I have been thinking a lot about this. I htnk there are different motivators at different levels of management.

Workers, devs, support engineers, admins, whoever is doing non managerial taskas seem to be split pretty much 50/50 with some minorities wanting to absolutley never go in to the office (like myself) and others who are dying to go in to the office being ca 15%-ish from the numbers I've seen.

Im an introvert and what immediately struck me by this is that this corresponds very much to the ratio of Extroverts to Introverts in any given cohort and organisation in the West.

It gets further more interesting when you realise that management tend to be over represented by extroverts to about 65-70% in middle and upper management. Leadership in c-suite and founders is a bit different though and the stats on it is not very good from what I have seen. But it seems to me that hired CEO's tend to be extroverts, but founder CEO's tend to be introverts.

Now Extroverts thrive and want social interaction and are generally convinced that this is the only way to manage and to teamwork. Introverts on the otherhand would disagree.

Now that combined with the FAANG/FAANG-like orgs having in many cases made HUGE campus investments (Apples UFO doughnut building, Google Campus, Facebook Campus, Salesforce collection of "towers") have been built as a way to basically warehouse money. They are assets, and it's a prestige thing to have built a giant HQ and have it filled with people. So much so that they have gotten tax breaks since there has been an understanding that having a giant building with X thousands commuting would meant small businesses would thrive from all the shopping.

Which is why everyone during the first 6-8 months of the pandemic were freaking out about the economy, as so many small companies died due to no customers.

My theory is that its because the people in charge of making that decision (management and higher ups) are the people who most benefit from in person work

So naturally that would be the decision

I've never been a manager but I'd guess that managing a team remotely sucks more than being a remote IC since the whole job is communication

With some anecdotal exceptions of teams and persons that are more effective remotely (though I haven’t yet met ones personally), on average remote _team_ work is considerably less productive for the whole range of reasons.

Whether you like it or not, but we people are wired to work better in an organized group with tight physical proximity to each other.

And most of the hi tech companies deal with large multi team projects.

It’s a different story that many managers like waste in-person time on pointless meetings and thus making remote work look better because developers can finally have some focus time and deliver on complex tasks.

So remote team work can definitely be better than poorly organized onsite one.

But be careful to generalize such observations.

Here's my thoughts:

Companies think they will see a higher turnover when people are WFH. This is because the job is just a job - it's no longer making friends at the office or having a personal space or routine. In my job, some people have worked together for 15 years. That makes it hard to leave because you're not just leaving the day-to-day work but all the relationships that have grown over the years.

Getting new joiners up to speed takes more effort when WFH and companies think these people won't integrate as well. And if they don't integrate they will more likely leave for another job. GOTO first paragraph.

The belief is that people are not as productive at home (with distractions etc).

WFH 100% may not necessarily be a win for workers. It might consolidate to short-term project-based contracting that can be stressful to deliver. When you work from office, if it doesn’t work, well, at least you are at work trying! Of course, you might still be responsible, but perhaps that’s slightly better than assuming responsibility at home (if it doesn’t work, you are not working on it).

For top management, its 'more people less computer' that they work with, but for IC's, its 'more computer less people'.

It doesn't matter where the 'computer' is (Home or Office), but for top management 'people' in-person is what they all got to work with and people in general are difficult to manage remotely. Also this will help them keep anyone from moonlighting, so they prefer them in office.

Its kind of vague but I for one feel like I am relying on a lot of know how and relationships from before WFH. Things like being able to lean over to the person next to you and getting a sense of what they would do. I mean I can now effectively simulate what that person would say from long experience, which is what allows WFH, but if I started post WFH I would have no idea how to do a lot of things.

Commercial real estate values.

See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32740071>

(My comment on thread: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32746966>)

> They even have a big new building in city center location.

Does that fact not answer your question. They have costs related to lease/upkeep on that "big new building" which they can't get out of and if no one is working in the new building, those costs just appear to be wasted.

But if they force people back, then there's an excuse for incurring those costs.

I guess I do get that, but I feel there must be something more than just that - it looks doubly stupid if that's the sole reason.

As an old guy, who has run an engineering business with a large office, I suspect that the cost of the lease is not really that important (maybe 5% of opex) as long as productivity (labor + resources -> income) is maintained.

Therefore, I suspect that the real concern is that there are no trusted management schemes, business processes or work cultures in place to keep up productivity (and quality) when the entire staff is working remotely.

Management fears that the result will be less control and lower productivity. In short, they want to be able to walk into someone’s office or workspace and look someone in the eye.

I don't understand why a "hybrid" mode of working is viewed as a compromise between full WFH and full work from office. The difference between full WFH and hybrid mode is pretty significant because if you're in hybrid mode you can no longer work from anywhere in the world as you see fit.

Foosball is not going to play itself. Kombucha goes bad after a while. Think about how your co-workers feel when they don’t get a birthday card signed by everyone. I think you aren’t seeing the big picture of all the benefits you get working in an office.

I work for a remote only company. I’ve never met most of the people I speak to daily. Do I feel strong bonds with them? I don’t. Do we work well together? Absolutely!

And I think that contrary what I’d expect, not bonding strongly with coworkers makes for a better workplace.

Instead of a hierarchy of friendships and relationships, you focus on communicating information to each other.

Since there is no body language to read in wfh, contentious discussions don’t feed off our instinctive reactions to say an eye roll or a quick glance at the laptop screen while you are talking to someone.

If a conversation has reached its natural end, you have to explicitly say it in wfh.

Discussions have much longer shelf life in wfh since everything worth remembering is put into a confluence/Google doc. For example, I’ll get forwarded docs or KT videos from early 2021 explaining the state of a certain product.

Is detecting slackers and “weak links” easier in wfh? Since everything worth doing quickly needs a doc to act as central repo for the project, a quick glance at the document can tell a manager whatever they need to know about whether someone is doing their job or not.

In all, remote only work has less drama and social jostling. E.g., if you’ve never seen a coworker casually chat with the ceo about their shared interest in (say) sudoku, you’re unlikely to feel “less close” to the ceo and make that a factor in how you work.

What about team culture? Intangibles like water cooler chat?

Tbh, I wouldn’t recognize team culture if it smacked me in the face. Your team culture is literally the water you swim in. Only someone outside the can tell you that you have a team culture.

As social animals, we anyway gravitate towards forming bonds with people over some obscure commonality and it’s no different in wfh.

Water cooler chats don’t happen as much. Still, sidebar conversations find their way to the shared doc because without documenting the conversation, no one else is going to know what was decided in the sidebar conversation.

All this said, wfh does leaves a void in my life which used to be filled with friendships with coworkers. The only way to fill that void is by proactively building relationships with neighbors or parasocially.

Do I love it? Wfh makes ideas like love obsolete, imho - with wfh, I’m far more outcomes focused so my relationships with coworkers or work assigned to me doesn’t seem very relevant.

I do appreciate the zero commute but since I wfh, I end up doing more around the house.

All in all, wfh isn’t at all like the traditional norm of work - your work is fully integrated with your day. There’s no obvious clock-in and clock-out.

Busy work is low. Dead times when you’re waiting for people to talk to you are frequent.

I like all this but I’m still not able to decide whether I prefer wfh over in-person.

Wfh checks all the boxes for the ideal job environment - low drama, less office politics, outcome based performance reviews - but you’re also alone for huge parts of the day.

HN should have stickies about this so that all articles, Ask HN's, and other prompts to spark the same debate that's been raging for three years now about WFH should be relegated to that thread. Same goes for like four or five other topics.

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