CEOs at Disney and Starbucks demand that workers start returning to the office | Hacker News Reader

CEOs at Disney and Starbucks demand that workers start returning to the office

finance.yahoo.com

23 pointsdekimir35 comments

Missing in a lot of discussion about “return to office” is that someone (maybe these same CEOs) had made offices completely intolerable even before the pandemic by introducing the “open plan” office layout where you can’t work because the constant noise makes it impossible and you have no personal space and no privacy.

Small wonder workers don’t want to return to the office when they’re treated like chickens in an industrial henhouse there.

Freakonomics had an interesting podcast on the open office predating the pandemic [1]. I like my current office, we have an open office but plenty of more private areas where I can think.

[1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/yes-the-open-office-is-terr...

I don't know about Starbucks, but there's plenty of resentment among manufacturing workers that their white-collar counterparts get to sit at home

White-collar counterparts sitting at home = much less traffic for the manufacturing workers ...

They typically commute during different times

A lot of people who are envious of WFH imagine it's lounging around watching Netflix, and likely would not be able to handle the actual work though.

How does the working environment of the white-collar employees affect the working environment of the blue-collar employees in this case?

It doesn't, it's just standard crab-bucket mentality

Is this meant to be an argument against remote work? If so, it's a strange one.

Some working conditions are better than others. Some jobs are better than others. Some jobs pay more than others, often a lot more. Should everyone who makes more money than manufacturing workers take a pay cut? Alternatively, should everyone who makes less money than manufacturing workers get a pay raise?

Inequality is a fact of capitalism. I'm not saying whether capitalism is good or bad, but if you have any resentment, it ought to be against the system in which inequality is inherent. Anyway, given this system, I see nothing wrong with workers seeking the best working conditions possible for themselves.

Workers seeking the best possible conditions for themselves can extend to white collar workers desiring to work from home.

If I’ve got to work a dozen or more weekends a year, and 50 nights a year when I can only deploy during non business hours (until 9pm), then by god I don’t need to suffer a commute in an expensive city to sit through my coworkers sharing YouTube videos and dad jokes nonstop.

> Workers seeking the best possible conditions for themselves can extend to white collar workers desiring to work from home.

Yes? That was obviously my point.

It’s not an argument, it’s just a positive claim. You’ve projected a bunch of normative angles on to it, but there are none.

The more interesting follow up questions are to what degree is this true, how do we know, and do we think this is a factor in back-to-office mandates.

> It’s not an argument, it’s just a positive claim. You’ve projected a bunch of normative angles on to it, but there are none.

You've projected an interpretation onto bluedino's words. I'd like to hear the OP explain why this alleged resentment was mentioned here.

"There is simply no way that true collective creativity can be consistently generated in not-so-splendid isolation.”

"I think every successful CEO, including myself, is tired of all the whining"

From the article - “While an agreement had been reached last year to work one to two days per week in the office, badge swipes indicated many employees “are not meeting their minimum promise,””

Reminded me of this quote from Office Space.

“Look, we want you to express yourself, okay? Now if you feel that the bare minimum is enough, then okay. But some people choose to wear more and we encourage that, okay? You do want to express yourself, don't you?”

I mean, employers are free to make whatever policies they want and employees are free to stay or leave. I think things have their own way of normalizing.

But these employees aren't meeting the bare minimum, which they apparently agreed to (as opposed to it being dictated to them).

Not sure you really understand the Office Space scene, it's entirely different. It's not funny if Jennifer Aniston was wearing only 3 pieces of flair and she was being reprimanded for not meeting the minimum. The humor comes from the fact that she was meeting the minimum of 15 (which she obviously thought was way too much), and the boss was still making her feel guilty about it.

Coerced into agreeing, perhaps. I cannot pretend for a moment that the playing field is level here.

Perhaps. However even in a worst-case scenario, the company simply mandating that employees must spend 2 days in office, on-site... some employees aren't doing it. And if 3 days at home aren't enough for you and you won't show up twice a week, I'm guessing the company won't miss you too much after they fire you.

> employees are free to stay or leave

“Free” as in “free to live without health insurance, shelter, food, or water”

I am not sure I would call that “free”

The assumption is they find another job (presumably, with similar salary/benefits), not that they quit working altogether.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/11/apple-and-meta-dropped-off-g... After several delays due to Covid, Apple hammered down on their return to office plans, requiring employees to be in the office three days a week effective Sept. 5, 2022.

Soon: CEOs at Disney and Starbucks struggle with understaffing, inability to attract workers

I know, right? I thought COVID proved definitively that remote work is not just possible but equal to in-office work. I really want to understand the counterarguments, but all I see is oblique assertions like "true creativity requires body language." I'm keeping an open mind, and I acknowledge that in-person chat features much higher comm bandwidth than video chat, but I'd like to see a well-reasoned explanation of what exactly a business loses by allowing its employees the freedom to manage their time and workstation setup.

I've been working from home since March of 2020. I mostly like it, but I would be willing to go in to an office for team meetings now and then. After almost three years, I have definitely come to see and desire some in-person interactions. But for CEOs to just demand that people be in the office for some arbitrary number of days per week on a vague assertion stinks. It also assumes that everyone's personality and working style matches the CEOs idea of employee productivity.

To be fair, the entire idea of 40 hours/week is arbitrary, despite being common and widely accepted. There are jobs (especially office jobs) which are more demanding, and others less so. More importantly, however, is that some people can complete all the tasks assigned in much less than 40 hours, while others struggle to do so. If I have a manual task that took the previous person an hour a day, every day (and yes, even in 2023 there are lots of tasks like these in HR, payroll and accounting depts especially) and automate it with a macro or script so it completes in seconds, should I get that hour back or should I be forced to find some other work to fill the hour? If so, what would be the motivation to write the script and increase efficiency?

> should I get that hour back or should I be forced to find some other work to fill the hour?

The benefits of the automation is reaped by the business (and ultimately, the shareholders), not you (as an employee).

Therefore, if after having done the automation, and there does not exist any other tasks that you could perform, you will get fired. Hence, it makes some sense to look for some other work to fill up your hour so as to remain employed.

> If so, what would be the motivation to write the script and increase efficiency?

i guess there isn't really any. Unless you're employed specifically to write such an automation, doing it might not get you any rewards.

However, in reality, because there's almost infinite things to automate, a smart business would continue to ask you to automate more and more of the work in the business, and would pay you big bucks to do so.

I think what most people that want some limited office time would really like would be the equivalent of an off-site somewhere with their team. Like 2-4 times per year the team meets up in some city, hacks together for a few days, does fun team building stuff, etc. It could probably be done for cheaper than the equivalent office space for that team.

Work-at-home or work-in-office, everybody would like an all-expenses paid trip to some retreat and spend days doing "fun team building stuff" rather than slogging another normal week at the office (or at home).

I think a better test would be, as a tradeoff for work-from-home, would you subject to one week a quarter locked in a hotel (room, restaurant, conference room, that's it) where you do nothing for 10 hours a day except in-person collaboration on the company's most difficult and challenging problems. Whiteboarding, programming sprints, strategy sessions, etc.

> I thought COVID proved definitively that remote work is not just possible but equal to in-office work.

That's an extremely strong claim. How do you think COVID proved it "definitively"?

Because remote work was the only work in 2020 and 2021, yet a large majority of businesses continued to function mostly well. Some even exceeded their average results.

Doubtful that people are going to start mass abandoning their jobs in a layoff wave.

That depends on the unemployment rate of white collar workers.

In the current market with tons of layoffs? not soon.

Well for Disney in particular, I see this as just a logical first move before layoffs. If you can drive a good bunch of employees to quit, then that's all the fewer layoffs you need to perform in the coming months.

Doesn't that ensure that the most desirable employees leave and the least desirable cling on?

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