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Comment by thegrim22 | Hacker News Reader

So about WFH, the conspiracy theory is that all of these leaders across all of these businesses across the country are either incapable of measuring productivity, or they measured it and see that people are more productive when WFH and yet for reasons unknown want to bring them back into the office so they're less productive again, and make the business worse? They have years of data from before WFH, and years of data of WFH, and with all of that data, all of these companies across the country think what's best for their business is to bring workers back in. It just seems so outrageous to claim all of these companies have no idea or no data that justifies what they're doing.

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If there's data supporting RTO then why do they justify it with vague appeals to "company culture" and "watercooler moments" rather than just explaining the data?

Control. They want to fucking own you and every aspect of your life.

Why would they want that? That seems delusional to me. What they want is all the normal things corporations are criticized for: short term returns, growth, employee productivity, etc.

Why would my organization VP want to "fucking own you and every aspect of your life"? That is extremely strong language, and I'm having a hard time taking it seriously.

Nah.

In a corporation 80℅ of the work is done by 20% of the people and by design there is a lot of redundancy aroud. The worst thing that can happen is for the drones to figure out just how badly they are getting screwed.

Productivity? If you can figure out how to measure it let me know.

Here:

https://issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems.html

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

https://libcom.org/article/phenomenon-bullshit-jobs-david-gr...

The data is in the attrition reports they run - more often than not, it's a soft layoff, while still justifying the rent cost and investments they've put into their office space.

Probably because saying "some employees in WFH are playing videogames all day instead of doing any work" is not a politically correct answer so then corpo-speak about culture and values it is.

They don't even need to say that though, just present some evidence to make me believe this is something other than an arbitrary management cultural preference and I'll feel much less imposed upon and bitter about it.

Anecdotally, when Cyberpunk dropped during covid winter of 2020, all the big gamers on the team had nothing to show for over a couple of weeks in terms of output.

I'm pro WFH, but it was obvious the productivity of some people had dropped significantly after the switch to WFH and were actively avoiding dodging work due to no more in-office oversight and being too close to many fun distractions at home, like their gaming rigs.

You want proof, well obviously the management or company has no proof that those employees were playing cyberpunk all day on their gaming rigs at home, since they don't have CCTV in your living room, but the guys were admitting it themselves during some calls with other colleagues, which correlated with the major drop in their productivity.

Again, I'm pro WFH, but let's not pretend that there are no slackers in this racket who would abuse every bit of trust and privilege to do very little work. I'm sure everyone met some.

For most office roles, employers have almost no data on productivity. The limited data they do have is very noisy.

Consider a developer: what data does an employer have? Number of lines of code committed? Number Commits? Maybe if they are very diligent in collecting data the bugs found son after those commits? You know nothing about quality of code, nothing about speed, nothing about complexity, nothing about bugs avoided, nothing about value added, nothing about mentoring others or managing tasks.

You can do the same analysis for almost any role, from Sales to SecOps.

And that's without getting into Goodhart's law...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

This “data” aspect may be overthinking things.

Developers get assigned tasks. A guesstimate is made by the dev over the time/effort required, which is approved as plausible by a senior dev/manager. Then the task is done or not done on time. If done, good, next task. If not, the explanation ought to be reasonable.

That’s all you really need to know.

That's great unless they were pulled off that task to work on something else. Plus now we know estimates will be used to punish all estimates just doubled. And what does Done mean? I can do a pretty terrible job but still commit "something"...

People have this idea that modern jobs are like factory work: you can measure how many widgets I made and mine are the same as every other operator. But it wasn't even like that in factories, let alone now no two jobs are the same and output cannot be measured in any meaningful way...

> the conspiracy theory is that all of these leaders across all of these businesses across the country are either incapable of measuring productivity, or they measured it and see that people are more productive when WFH and yet for reasons unknown want to bring them back into the office

I would argue that the real conspiracy theory is that those leaders have a conflict of interest - they have a stake in the real estate game either: by directly holding interest in real estate that will plummet in value if it goes unused, or by receiving kickbacks or other incentives for leasing certain office space.

WFH tends toward commoditizing employers.

It makes perfect sense for business leaders, as agents of the owner class, to continue doing as much as possible to minimize and undermine labor power.

X% less productivity is more palatable to such creatures than the risk of workers gaining a real seat at the table.

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