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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

By summer of 2021, just after that "We all know how excited you are to be back in the office" email, I made my exit from AWS.

The senior leadership have survey after survey saying that their employees mostly prefer remote work. They have data showing they're still doing just as well as ever. They don't care. They just like it better that way, and fuck all y'all who don't agree.

Meanwhile, my new employer literally sold off most of their offices and has contracts saying no one ever has to work from an office again.

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This sounds very like open plan offices. Survey after survey after study all the support the idea that they are, on average, vastly less productive. Yet, management simply goes ahead and makes everyone sit in one huge cattle pen.

Sure, there are the odd person who pipes up and says 'I like open plan', or 'I prefer to work in the office' (I kind like the commute myself). But it's just a bunch of ignorant tools who just say the opposite is, on average, what people want or best serves the company.

People jump on bandwagons. This is no different from how developers decided a few years ago “microservices because microservices” and microserviced everything because microservices.

We need to return to the office because office and other people are doing it.

Very few people look at data or reason about things from first principles.

It shocks me so much that management loves open offices, despite the data and just plain logic making it worse than individual offices.

"We don't like / are too cheap to pay huge offices to house you properly for work, so we are going to open floor plans"

"Employees: Because covid, we'll all work from home, your offices aren't needed at all. Hey this works great!"

"Please come back to our offices"

"Will you go back to proper office housing, like, I'm just talking cubes here"

"No."

"Why come back?"

"Because."

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Ok, so here are things that I liked about working in office:

- free food / drinks if it was there

- escape wife / kid constant distraction

- a bit of social interaction (like, does that even happen at AWS/Amazon?)

Things I hate about in-office:

- open floor plan bullshit

- commuting

- dehumanizing/gross shitters

I can only imagine the overhead expenses saved by a company embracing the full wfh option in this manner.

Of course, so many large companies were in the process of building large new buildings / campuses as the pandemic hit, so I can also see this as a way to ensure those large investments aren't seen as a waste.

I wonder how the math works for the financial aspect of this. Building an office is an investment in the sense of it being good for your staff to go there and work well yadayada. It's probably also an investment in the sense of the value of the land and the surrounding areas which the probably own a chunk of too. Kinda like how McDonald's is more a real estate company that is good at finding renters (aka the people who run the fast food joints).

I've been interested in learning more about the financialization of housing lately and this isn't exactly the same but it feels similar.

Most companies rent their offices, they are not in the real estate business

You buy less offices, but likely need more managers and spend more time in zoom. It’s not as clear cut as most people assume.

I’m curious why you think you’d need more managers.

Whether meetings are in Zoom or in person doesn’t necessarily change how much effort is expended. It really depends on the team from my experience, not the medium of the meeting.

An unproductive team will have unproductive meetings whether in person or on Zoom.

I have run both in person and fully remote startups. It takes way more time and effort to manage a remote team well.

(FWIW we are 100% remote right now, but there are for sure drawbacks)

Would be happy to chat about this or learn more. I am a manager of a remote team, and have not been a manager of an in-person team, and I can't quite envision how much more challenging my work is compared to if my team was co-located each day.

It reminds me of the time when Microsoft ditched individual offices and switched to open floor. It was also pitched strictly as being about productivity, and they claimed that most employees wanted it. If you actually asked others, though, it was obviously very unpopular.

I'm really growing to hate this performative bullshit. Regardless of the advantages and disadvantages of our present socioeconomic system, can we at least drop the pretense about the rationales and the motives? It would actually make me feel less angry if they openly said, "we're going to do it because that would maximize profits".

> Meanwhile, my new employer literally sold off most of their offices and has contracts saying no one ever has to work from an office again.

What's the name of the company?

Sounds like GitHub but I’m sure there are plenty others

It's in my profile.

It would be interesting to know why are C-level executives acting to the detriment of the company (by wasting $ on unnecessary office rentals/purchases/maintenance)? Isn't that illegal? Shareholders will not be amused.

Are y’all hiring? :-)

Sadly we did layoffs first (last summer) and have frozen hiring ever since.

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