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Comment by logicalmonster | Hacker News Reader

What do people think that this push to get knowledge workers working back in the office mostly revolves around?

Is it big companies just have no way to really micro-manage hundreds of employees that are working at home so they want them in the office even if everybody doesn't like it?

Or is it they've invested into so much real estate and it looks dumb (and also kills its value) for large office parks to be sitting perpetually close to empty?

I can think of a few other reasons, but I'm interested in others on this one.

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It's not even a conspiracy that it's commercial real estate driving this... many large investors in these large tech companies have sounded the alarm over the risk to their commercial real estate holdings.

Heck, it doesn't help that recently a subsidiary of PIMCO dedicated to commercial office space in the bay area and NYC declared insolvency.

The cat's out of the bag already. Remote work (at least within a +/- 3 hour time zone) is here to stay. While the fed keeps jacking up rates and companies pretend to be hurting badly we'll see some pushback... but as soon as the economy is on an upward trajectory again they'll have no choice but to relent.

We've already started getting tons of amazing talent applying from amazon thanks to this decision. Good luck getting them back.

Facebook has even read the writing on the wall and started shrinking its commercial real estate footprint.

> It's not even a conspiracy that it's commercial real estate driving this... many large investors in these large tech companies have sounded the alarm over the risk to their commercial real estate holdings.

We see articles all the time with major investors demanding layoffs and all sorts of other operational changes. They almost never have an impact on the actual operations.

>What do people think that this push to get knowledge workers working back in the office mostly revolves around?

Well, the ugly topic that most workers really don't want to discuss is that management at Google/Meta/Apple/etc thought productivity severely decreased from remote work. It was interesting listening to the guys at the All-In Podcast saying too many remote employees were goofing off and/or secretly working for multiple employers (and bragging about it on TikTok).

COVID was the prime opportunity for workers to convince companies that zero productivity would be lost (or even higher productivity would be gained) by working from home ... but management didn't see that actually happen. This is the root cause of management forcing the employees back to the office at least 3 days a week.

Yes, you hear constant anecdotes from workers complaining, "how am I more productive at office with distractions?!?" , or "How am I more productive if I have to waste an hour commuting in traffic each way?!?" , and so on.

So how to reconcile the paradox of "less distracted at home" and "less time commuting" but management still sees less work getting done? The paradox is solved once you assume (some) employees used the extra "free time" saved from commuting to do things other than work.

Proving that was impossible during Covid because, well, you couldn't control for Covid and the lockdowns!

Normal remote work outside of Covid is nothing like remote work with kids screaming around the house (while homeschooling them), dealing with depression from lockdowns and working in an environment that was not yet ready for remote work. One coworker was coding from the cleaning supply storage closet at his family's restaurant because of a particular family situation!

So sure, CEOs have a ton of data about WFH, most of which is invalid due to improper controls.

> secretly working for multiple employers

I'm one of those who considers that if someone is performing their job duties at multiple companies, there's no problem, and people who aren't performing their job duties (at any job) should be fired. It's hard to think this is a problem that employees should be worried about; instead it's one that employers should deal with.

To your broader points it would be interesting to see evidence that productivity declined. So far I've only seen vague finger-pointing at something that a subset of workers do, which is being presented as a reason for why all workers' habits must change.

But yes, this description that "the paradox is solved" is rather apt; it helps a ton to consider this perspective even if one ultimately disagrees.

> I'm one of those who considers that if someone is performing their job duties at multiple companies, there's no problem, and people who aren't performing their job duties (at any job) should be fired. It's hard to think this is a problem that employees should be worried about; instead it's one that employers should deal with.

There seems to be a philosophical difference for a lot of people. I'm of the opinion I'm salary, so you're paying me to get the work done regardless of hours. Lots of people seem to think that being salary means you're getting paid to sit in a seat for 40+ hours.

Something I heard from a large company in Atlanta. Productivity didn't drop off a ton, but innovation did. People are effectively in silos at home and they couldn't figure out a way to recreate the collaborative effect that was seen when you have a bunch of loosely affiliated engineering teams working in close proximity with each other.

I'm not saying you can't get close to similar levels of collaboration remotely, but it's hard and it requires thought.

The biggest thing I was always pushing for was use of public channels in slack. If you silo all your questions in direct chats, you never get that "I overheard you talking about x" effect. Some companies just don't get it.

For Amazon, they have company offices all over the world. For many projects, there's a good chance you may need to work with people from several other offices, and may need to take early morning meetings to overlap with people from Dublin, as well as late night meetings to overlap with people from Sydney or Tokyo, and everything in between.

So, those meetings are going to be on Chime. Or Slack Huddles. And either way, once you're doing that because some of the people are remote (in another office), you might as well do that because people are remote (working from home, wherever home might be).

Indeed, I think this is the crux of the matter. A long time ago Marissa Mayer found out that her remotes were mostly goofing off and not logging into corporate while still claiming a paycheck.

Now, yes, there are people who are more productive working from home; however, it looks like the majority of people need structure to make them productive and keep them however blurrily focused at least somewhat focused on the job at hand. This is even more the case the people in the administrative and non tech areas.

But then you get pushback from both those who are unproductive without structure as well as those who are as or more productive working from home. Management is trying to reconcile these things and find a working balance.

Merissa "No one can work from home but I'm going to build a nursery for my kid, 'See? Working in an office is great!'" Mayer?

Yeah, forgive me if I don't believe her. In general I think that about 90% of companies stats/KPIs/etc to be complete bullshit.

Yes, I like to say that I was extremely productive while working at home. I actually completed a large home renovation project by working on it full time while also tending to my regular work as needed - meaning I answered IMs as they came up and attended scheduled calls and did little else. There were other issues with that job though. I'm actually not a fan of work from home as it feels incredibly stifling to be essentially homebound for the majority of the day; something I would not have thought myself saying a few years ago.

I don't think there's any shortage of managers who actually think people work better when able to collaborate in person. In addition to the ones that just want to see your butt in a chair. It does not help that there is also no shortage of people who used the remote-work opportunity to put in a whole lot less effort.

I love the "in person collaboration" line... only to show up to the office and be stuck on zoom calls all day with your distributed team. I DO think that in-person collaboration can happen with RTTO, but when everyone is on zoom all day, it makes me think there are other reasons and this is just smoke and mirrors.

Yep, and I absolutely "love" collaborating with a group of 10 people in the office, all of whom are trying to use a crappy singular microphone, while carrying side conversations that the rest of the remote workers can hear.

I suspect a lot of the diversity of opinions seen on HN is because everyone's office experience can be very different. My team survives well enough as remote developers, but that's only part of the story. For coding, the team is doing great. But as an internal tool team a lot of our customers are people in our own department, and that collaboration has definitely suffered. Technically we can do all the same communication with them via zoom, but as a practical matter it doesn't happen to nearly the extent.

For us it's a moot point for now, we dropped the lease on the office downtown and have not figured out what a replacement would look like. We can't go back in even if we want to.

It's also incredibly annoying trying to work in an open plan office where everyone is on a different call. I absolutely hate it.

There isn’t any shortage of ICs who genuinely think those things either. It often seems outside of the HN Overton Window to acknowledge that though.

Part of it is letting go of workers without paying severance or having to announce a layoff.

i think it can be most of those things.

but i definitely think layers of middle management suddenly were shown to be largely irrelevant and unnecessary in a remote work-centric environment. so for (especially extrovert) folks who made middle management their careers, i’d expect nothing less than them advocating for the good-ole days.

most people work harder when they have a boss watching over them in person, but nobody wants to hear that

spoken like a true middle manager :)

i don’t disagree that that’s one way to get some people motivated. some people prefer the carrot.

/shrug

No, most people put more effort into appearing to do work if there is some micromanaging ass spying on them. I would guess more time pretending to do work than doing anything actually productive (see people who love to schedule unending meetings)

This seems to be the thing that most (I can only assume managers) don't seem to realize - people were screwing around in the office too and it was harder there. They either hid it by staring at Outlook or code and the effort to pretend to be working prevents them from getting the mental energy they need to come back after lunch and be productive in the afternoon. WFH means you can step away for an hour and then come back and get the work done.

That's why us salary employees are there anyways, right? To get the work done? Not to just have our butts in seats for 40+ hours a week?

I have trouble believing it's to do with commercial real estate because these $1T companies are holding, what, ~$20B worth of real estate? Why would 2% of their value ever be worth changing the way their entire workforce works unless they've estimated that the productivity impact of RTO could be at worse -2%?

Personally, I look at the incentives. Companies are incentivized to maximize their value and they have the most internal metrics on productivity compared to HN commenters and IC WFH advocates. So if they see productivity slump while WFH, they'll advocate RTO. Meanwhile, IC's care more about their personal situation than the company's value. If they like WFH, they will advocate for it, even when overall it negatively affects the company.

I think some companies that are high-achieving and very intentional are able to full-remote and get an edge by recruiting high achievers that will only remote-work (open-source leaning like Vercel, Gitlab).

But I think for the majority, the negative value effects outweigh the positive, and there's a reason Sam Altman and OpenAI are in-office only.

The market valuation of a company ($N trillion) is not a measure of the assets that company has. The real estate may be 2% of their market cap but a much greater proportion of their actual assets.

Don’t get me wrong it’s all still BS though :)

Sure, but it doesn't make any difference. If your $1T valuation is based on your income, and a move will +5% your valuation but -50% your physical assets from $20B to $10B, that company should still make that move.

A company's decisions should be made based on ROI, profit margins, etc - not the impact on share price. Companies making decisions to aid short term market valuations at the cost of long term success is a canonical example of bad management in publicly traded companies.

I have been pretty convinced it is tied to commercial real estate. I'm sure shareholders are not happy knowing that some companies are sitting on tons of unused office space.

But recently, I've thought it also has much to do with middle management. I joined their ranks as an engineering lead this past year, and if there is one thing I have noticed, older managers are way too set in their ways. Not to play the generation card, but as someone born into Gen X at the last minute, I see a vast difference in attitude between Boomer bosses and younger generations. Boomers are obsessed with "ass-in-seat" time. Even more of them have created their whole social life around work and work relationships, so no office time means no social life.

These same Boomer bosses think it is ok to make younger, new employees suffer for their bad project planning. I've sat in way too many meetings where I have heard "Well, back in my day, developers would stay awake for days and work non-stop during crunch time... because that is just what you did..." Good luck getting anyone younger than Gen X to agree to that, especially in a situation they didn't create (and I'm completely on their side).

Capitalism has an answer for that: Getting people to put in the extra effort is a matter of incentives. It’s possible to get people to channel incredible efforts towards your goals, and it isn’t done by bitching how “nobody wants to work”. Name the right price and you’ll have no shortage of willing participants.

I haven’t read the book, so I assume this nugget of info is hidden somewhere in the least-read section, considering how little this seemingly obvious solution gets talked about.

I absolutely agree. Sadly, though, I see way too many companies making it harder and harder to negotiate. When I was brought in full time, I tried to counter and was told "This is the offer, take it or leave it." They even went as far as trying to convince me, someone with over a decade at that point, as an engineer that their offer was competitive with the location (I only accepted because I had been out of work for a while and had returned to school). I've been appalled at some of the offers my company has made new hires, then higher ups get frustrated with us because the candidates take other offers.

I learned later we had a "pay committee" that establishes all pay rates for the company based on black-box metrics. We can't offer incentives or anything, no way to reward folks.

But yeah, instead of adjusting the pay scale, or giving us the ability to do spot bonuses for the team pushing hard, I just get to hear how "young people just don't understand what hard work is and just want to coast on easy mode their whole life."

Beyond frustrating.

The public health emergency is ending in a few months and these jobs are not remote.

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