Amazon corporate workers plan walkout next week over return-to-office policies
cnn.com
cnn.com
Do we really need to make the conversation be about the upper middle class being “lazy” and completely ignoring the fact that these RTO orders come from billionaires?
Especially when those exact papers spilt a lot of ink telling people to “get back to work” despite the fact those people were always working during the pandemic.
It seems natural that whoever owns the “most widely circulated print media” would be rich, no?
Sometimes, I think about the phrase "human resource" and how it's a nice linguistic nod toward "natural resources", which obviously are meant to be exploited. It makes it easier when you think about laying off thousands of people, or making thousands commute needlessly simply to boost someone's ego.
It's the words people hear based on their own particular biases determine if those words associate with anything particularly positive, neutral, or negative.
The problem with creating abstract business jingo is it's typically viewed as an artificial "thieves' cant" between managers. A sublanguage meant to obscure and hide meaning.
Worse would be something like Vanguard of the Revolution or Organization for the Workers, etc.
The strata who should be rightfully derided are the chauffeured-and-business-jet-class who have an embarrassingly-low tax rate while concentrating and keeping vast amounts of profits. Nearly 60% of the post-pandemic inflation was due to the profit price spiral. The "wage spiral" is a delusion and layoffs aren't actually necessary. They're business theater belying boosting corporate profits to keep up with the proverbial Jones' in other stocks.
"Laptop class" is more than a colorful metaphor, it implies a set of values by the speaker.
Any chance you have a source for this? I haven't seen that stat before and an not quite sure how we'd know that, or if the profit spiral was itself a side effect of monetary policy throwing new money into the system.
If there’s anything standing in the way of more economically redistributive policies in this country, it’s the laptop class. They would take a huge and material hit in their standard of living in a more equal society such as Canada or Germany. Everyone from programmers to lawyers to HR administrators make a third to half as much as their counterparts in those countries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5OHFt8QyiU
I was on a bicycle ride listening to this interview when he said it and I literally pulled my bike over and sat for a half hour or so thinking about what I think about the idea, I'm still not sure what I think. (Intellectual dishonesty or a valid view point?)
At least he got me thinking I suppose, heh.
Also the idea of a ruthless capitalistic multibillionaire invoking morality as a defense is just kafkaesque.
What happens to us doesn't matter, remember? We're all just NPCs.
But I expect that may not be a popular opinion here on HN, though.
He’s famous for buying distressed commercial properties and for gaslighting, it just makes sense and the whole moral argument was a great way to get people talking about it.
If I were to refuse to pay my rent. My landlord would post an eviction notice and if I refused to comply, I would likely be arrested or forcibly removed.
Why can’t the landlord “evict” twitter? Does the process look significantly different for commercial real estate? Does twitter provide value to the landlord in some form other than rent? Maybe they’re afraid of bad PR?
The reason this wouldn’t apply to you is that residential real estate vacancies are usually easy to fill, especially nowadays.
That remains to be established. People often have no idea what renter protections are like. If he's in California, he might find that he can't be evicted without the landlord going through a multi-year process.
Remote work => less demand for transportation.
Commercial properties are some of the most valuable assets a company owns, of course the guy wants to keep CRE values up. Just because he owns some transportation companies doesn’t mean he’s allergic to CRE, that’s kinda naive.
That’s like arguing guys at his level don’t donate to both political parties when they clearly do. Because by doing that, you get to own the whole system, not just a piece.
Commercial real estate is foundational in corporate finance. I guess I just don’t this argument that these huge companies aren’t somehow exposed. I guarantee you that if the CRE market tanks, Berkshire is gonna feel it too.
We should assume any public statements on morality from powerful people out of the blue are motivated by a secondary factor.
This is an excellent way to put it and a great observation. I was never able to put my finger on it even though the BS meter was off the charts. Here it is. Thanks.
Without "morally" it's dismissable nonsense (ie. bullshit). With "morally" it requires pulling at strands that make up our world-view.
It's not necessarily a bad thing to question one's world-view on occasion, but causing that level of fundamental questioning, for a comment that would otherwise be easily dismissable, is gaslighting.
(by my opinion of the definition)
If I make a statement that killing is not justifiable even in self defense, and that causes you, who believes that killing is justified as a measure of self defense, to question your worldview, I'm not gaslighting you into believing me, I'm simply sharing a viewpoint. If I repeatedly show you propaganda where innocent people regularly die because they are not allowed to defend themselves, and where people who do are punished, perhaps by being put in mental hospitals, etc. then I'm gaslighting you. Generally gaslighting refers to using lies and other statements that do not reflect reality, repeatedly, to manipulate someone into a false worldview.
I actually think it's dangerous to throw gaslighting as a term around so casually. Gaslighting, very specifically, means to repeatedly question someone's worldview, while ignoring their anecdotal experience, and that of general reality assuming they roughly align, in order to emotionally abuse them into submission or indoctrination. It's pretty serious and ugly. I know it's fun on HN to throw the term around, but Elon (regardless of how much you dislike him, and how many people follow him) arguing that WFH is morally wrong, is not an instance of Musk gaslighting the public at large. Not even really by a fun shot.
For example, repeatedly arguing that you think the idea of unchecked ownership of assault weapons is a stretch too liberal of an interpretation of the 2nd amendment, and that it's crazy to think it's okay for anybody to own one without training, and that you think it'd be a good idea to limit gun ownership and require mental health checks and registered firearms lists of trained individuals, and even that you think it's immoral to allow such easy access to acquire devices that make killing trivial, because it puts too much responsibility in the hands of civilian organizations to protect people from maniacs, which they clearly can't do at scale, and even to go so far as to argue they're insane to think otherwise, is not an instance of gaslighting gun owners or rights advocates into thinking their worldview is broken and in need of an update. But by the casual interpretation, it is, since you're arguing to oppress the liberty of some group of people on practical and/or moral (designation doesn't matter, anything that causes them to question their worldview) grounds.
The morality argument is just him rationalizing what he already believes. This isn't the "first principles" thinking that he demands from others.
Tech company profits are declining. Management (especially Boomer management) needs to be seen as "doing something" or they're the ones on the chopping block. So they force everybody back into the office so they can be seen to be managing.
God forbid the cause of declining profits be things like national monetary policy or years of short-term decision-making that propped profits up to unsustainable highs.
No. It must be that Andy works from home. Better bring everybody in to keep an eye on them (to read their faces and find out for sure just how much shit they'll take from you before they quit).
I suspect there are managers panicking about losing relevance in a post-office world, but those will be middle-managers, not CEOs. Much of the panic is from owners of commercial real estate and their flying monkeys in the media who are seeing empty office blocks and declining property values and rents.
As for Musk, who knows. He's in his own very weird bubble of long-terminism or cosmism or whatever it is he believes in. Maybe he thinks if everyone works from home it will lead to a drop in birth rates or decline in Western society or something.
But I also refer to the boards and investors. We'd love to think it's all a young person's VC game, but behind all that money is still, more often than not, someone who panics in Boomer.
Maybe it's just me, but I feel like the use of "boomer" as a derogative to be reductionist and ageist, not to mention most of the time incorrect, as I've seen it applied all the way to Millennials.
To be fair, I criticize them for the shit they did when they were my age too, so I'm criticizing them as a cohort, not because of their current age.
Are you sure that the people doing the criticizing are the same people giving out the trophies?
> so I definitely mean it in a derogatory way against people their age
The way you had used it, as commentary on middle managers, seem to include people from Baby Boomers all the way to Millennials.
> I'm criticizing them as a cohort, not because of their current age
In which case it sounds like using the age identifier would be incorrect.
I criticize them as a generational cohort for being the most entitled, wasteful, short-sighted generation that has ever lived, and has done more to screw up the entire world they are handing on to their children than anyone in history.
They have done this at every stage of their lives, but especially once they were old enough to be having children.
I don't mean as a cohort, I mean as individuals. I have my doubts that the exact same person who has given out participation trophies is the one who criticized. I think you are mixing two separate groups into one, by using their birth years as a commonality.
Also, I suspect that participation trophies is a Western creation, perhaps even an American phenomenon, and the Boomers who are not part of those cultures did not participate in those actitivities.
To quote the Princess Bride, "you keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means".
Those are filled with people who are clinging to their roles well past their usefulness, because even though they're ruining social supports like Medicare and Social Security by pulling out multiples more funds than they ever contributed, they also failed to save anything of their own or are otherwise refusing to retire and leave the workforce (even though they've already started receiving "retirement" benefits).
FYI, people don't get to "pull out" funds from social security. You get paid what the government computes you'll get.
> they also failed to save anything of their own or are otherwise refusing to retire and leave the workforce
So which is it? They failed to save therefore they can't retire, or they could retire but are "refusing to"?
The man sells cars. He's invested in people commuting.
In his case, it could be solar lighting or else he is not about renewables as he claim to be :)
1. Every job has different requirements, and you can't arbitrarily apply the same standards to every one. It's no different from saying that "Cooks have to de-grease the grill, so desk workers have to de-grease their desks at the end of the day as well." You'd think that someone so ruthlessly focused on productivity and efficiency would acknowledge this.
2. He speaks as if the current hierarchical capitalist structure with all its particular corporate idiosyncrasies is a fundamental aspect of reality rather than a very specific and arbitrary social construct. We should be fighting to move away from it rather than submit to it further.
3. He does not apply these standards to himself, flying around in his corporate jet and rarely "in the office" himself. So apparently he does believe some roles are not bound by the same rules and requirements, which is inconsistent.
Realistically he likely understands all this, but just can't say the truth directly because it's not so palatable.
Even in a hybrid work environment, the vast majority of the miles I put on my car are commuting to and from the office. And if a household has 2 adults who need to commute, they're more likely to want 2 fuel-efficient vehicles.
Remote work affords me that opportunity and I work as hard as anyone. It's fun to wear the blue and white collar at the same time to be honest. I have survivalist friends, guys who work on cars, tech folks where wee discuss AI, etc.
I think Musk is wrong here, but do agree people need to roll up their sleeves and do legit work. You should always be contributing to your community, family, etc.
As an example, every day my basic schedule: 6-8am with family, 8am-12pm [farm] work, 12pm-4pm [collaborative] work, 4-7pm chores & family, 7-9pm [emails / focus work] work, 9-10pm family, 10-12pm [focus] work.
Then the day before, I will break out individual events. There are times, for instance, I have to take a kid to the doctor so I'll block that out, put in all my meetings and adjust the 4-7pm family time to say 5-7pm (take an hr from work & family time).
It's all about being disciplined and trying to ensure you are organized and maximize time for me. Gotta keep focused
I find it mostly interesting how different successful people can be with wildly varied takes on what works for them lifestyle-wise as well as what they value in life. Not to mention how we prioritize (and focus) our limited time on earth.
Kudos to you for making your life work well. We’re wired differently, and that’s okay.
what about hobbies? alone time? being lazy & purposefully wasting time? culture & entertainment? sports? etc. where exactly is your "me" fitting in here?
my european free spirited mind boggles
I agree with them. To me it isn't about the color of one's collar or the location they work from. It is about being productive. Productive workers should have flexibility, where possible. Unproductive ones shouldn't.
Why should people work so hard all the time? In the US, we are already insanely productive compared to almost every other worker in every other country and even compared to ourselves a few decades ago.
We work hard to bring value to our employer who wouldn't waste a minute for sympathy when they lay us off to increase their margins for a quarter, but you feel that we have to be productive all the time or else, what? We are immoral?
I contend that the worker owes nothing but fulfilling their job description. If you don't have work to do, then why find it?
There is no need to 'be productive' every working hour of every day if you don't have to be. To do so is insanity in my opinion. Go be with your family. Kids grow up way too fast and you are missing it.
Edit: I also want to be clear that I don't really think about productivity as an instantaneous measure, but more of an average over time. Someone (at home or at work) who is "coasting" in my opinion is someone who is rarely, if ever, productive. Someone who is productive is someone who gets good work done every week or month or whatever unit of time is relevant to the job at hand. What you do with this 5 minutes or that hour isn't really as important, IMO.
I don't like this kind of Calvinist attitude toward work. Increasing productivity via technological advancement should free us all up to do more of what we want.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
full text: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsd...
That used to be standard reading in my high school. Elon is full of deepity. And high school reading.
Not to mention, his main consumer would be exactly that white collar worker who'd rather not drive to the office.
It's a sort of sick inversion of Henry Ford's
> "I want my employees to be able to buy my car"
to...
> "I want all employees to be forced to own one"
This is not quite the Marxist definition of communism, but it is a lot closer than I would expect to find on HN. I am surprised.
That's true for a decent number of people...but definitely not all.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/opinion/elon-musk-remote-...
And another thing -- the "morally wrong" is remarkably selective. Musk is clearly saying that it's "morally wrong" for white collar workers to be remote while insisting that blue collar workers be fully present.
In a CNBC interview this week, speaking about service and manufacturing workers, Musk said “it's messed up to assume that, yes, they have to go to work, but you don't. It's not just a productivity thing, I think it's morally wrong,” suggesting “the laptop class is living in la-la land.”
What if the headline was "CEO phones in 20 hours/week from Hawaii while threatening to fire workers who clock < 60 hours/week"?
That’s unusual, though. Usually getting to/from work takes at minimum of an hour (30m both ways), either due to traffic or from being pushed out way from where the office is located in order to be able to afford the rent/mortgage. You’re also usually stuck with an open office where maintaining focus for any period of time is impossible, as opposed to cubicles or private offices.
1. Fewer people commuting would make commuting faster / more bearable
2. Employee's who's work requires physical presence at a specific place could / should demand higher pay because of the new convenience differential
(#2 is fraught with assumptions and state / country based situational sensitivities)
If that is his justification then it's just as silly. Does Musk think it's morally wrong that white collar workers live in bigger homes than blue collar workers? That they send more of their kids to private school? Has Musk gone full communist?
Also Elon Musk accusing anyone of being in "La La Land" is hilarious.
Are you? Have you tried seriously considering his position instead of watching 1 second sound bites OBVIOUSLY taken out of context?
> I was on a bicycle ride listening to this interview when he said it and I literally pulled my bike over and sat for a half hour or so thinking about what I think about the idea
Oh? This musk interview was the first time you learned about unfairness in the world? I'm glad he "got you thinking". Heh.
It is not some extreme, radical position that shutting down your company by staging a strike because you _deserve_ to work from the comfort of your own home is morally tenuous. You can disagree, but acting like musk is a raving lunatic for sympathizing with minimum wage workers who bus to work is nothing short of supreme stupidity.
Honestly the anti musk sentiment around here is so braindead and reactionary its beginning to feel like an astroturfed psyop.
It’s called concern trolling
Why? This is just a negotiation. Striking is one bargaining chip that labor has that they can play. Striking isn't morally tenuous.
> You can disagree, but acting like musk is a raving lunatic for sympathizing with minimum wage workers who bus to work is nothing short of supreme stupidity.
How is Musk sympathizing with minimum wage workers? Did the minimum wage workers ask for the "laptop class" to comeback to the office? Do they even care? What about people in other lines of work where remote isn't an option? Do they care? It seems more likely that Musk is just using this false comparison as a way to pit labor classes against each other.
> Honestly the anti musk sentiment around here is so braindead and reactionary its beginning to feel like an astroturfed psyop.
Come on...
Capital class tries to pit working class against itself, part N
0: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/elon-musk-says-he-is-sleepin...
1: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/03/musk-tesla-was-about-a-month...
Is it moral to fly around the US and the world while the guy that's hiring the chef that cooks your food stays grounded?
> "It's like, really, you’re going to work from home and you're going to make everyone else who made your car come work in the factory? You're going to make the people who make your food… that they can't work from home? The people that fix your house — they can't work from home? But, you can? Does that seem morally right?" the billionaire asked. "That's messed up."
https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/elon-musk-working-from...
He exploited tax incentives intended to reduce carbon emissions, sure, but that's not the same thing as focussing on reducing carbon emissions
By being a selfish individual and wanting to work remotely you are devaluing a wealthy investor's commercial real estate all because you didn't want to waste a tenth of your day pointlessly commuting to the office to do something that could have been done at home
The isolation of being at home is countered by how many people are at home
That number has little to do with WHF. WHF might have increased it but it certainly isn't the root cause or even a major driver of the rise.
e.g.https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2022/02/04/3-new-...
Wealth doesn't automatically give credence to valuable perspective. Further, I tend to just disregard Elon for what he is.
Meta comment, but seriously? A comment from Elon made you pause your commute for 30 minutes? I can't imagine ever being this affected by a podcast.
Half the fun of this life is exploring and questioning new ideas and podcasts are a great way to do that.
I don't think I pulled over, I've definitely spent some time sitting and thinking once I get to my destination
He owns a car company and a space ship company - both of which have assembly lines with tons of workers. A majority of his employees will need to be working in a factory or with physical equipment/prototypes. Therefore they must be at the office or at the plant.
In that environment - allowing a small percentage of people to have the flexibility to work from home all the time, actually can seem amoral as that will create two classes of workers - the in-office class and the laptop WFH class - within the same company.
Friction could be generated if for instance the laptop class is making decisions/mistakes from the comfort of their PJs which negatively impacts the production line class. Its much easier to just make that 8% laptop class of the company RTO and experience the impact of their decisions.
Similar issues would be apparent at Amazon (distribution center workers versus AWS staff) and possibly Apple (i.e. HW Apple engineers have to be in office, but iCloud workers can WFH).
I think it'd be hard/impossible that a small cloud first company or small remote only startup like GitLabs would be amoral for being WFH.
Twitter could probably be WFH, but in order to make statement that would not possibly be construed as hypocritical he unfortunately can't make such a distinction.
This is kind of absurd, though, since they are already two classes of workers. Information workers and factory workers are different.
But also, the deciding factor on whether you can work from home should be: can you do your job from home? Look at nurses. They have to be in a hospital, walking into rooms and tending to patients, right? Not phone nurses and poison control center nurses. They work from home nowadays.
Should they be, in terms of work-life balance?
I’ve never met a factory worker who resents the existence of cushy WFH jobs. On the contrary, many aspire to have such a job.
Just because our kind of people thinks of it as the dream job does not mean every type of person shares that ideal!
Park rangers get to perform their jobs out amongst the majestic beauty of nature. Should we make it "fair" by forcing them to go sit in a cubicle under fluorescent lights too?
100% remote work was a thing before the pandemic and it will continue to be a thing in the future. Companies that don't learn how to adapt to this will be at a disadvantage on this point. This cuts both ways, of course. If I can do my job "anywhere" and I live in an expensive place like Seattle, I should worry that I have to compete with people in very low CoL places, and that likely pushes my own market value down. That's life. But pretending we need information worker's butts in seats downtown to operate servers thousands of miles away from them is not going to fix the problem.
I tthink the way you overcome it is by paying a premium to in office staff. In your scenario - onsite nurses likely get paid a very significant premium to the salary of a remote, phone nurse.
But in the "Elon" case its going to hard to show how your are paying a premium for onsite factory techs when the design engineers are making $$$ plus RSUs.
From an emotional standpoint, sure, but not from a moral standpoint, which is what your previous post was saying. There is no moral case for punishing an advantaged class if that punishment does nothing to help the other class.
That said I could for see cases where the laptop class could be isolated from pain when a separate class has to do the physical work. Imagine a scenario where the laptop class engineer does some sloppy work in order to pick up the kids for soccer. The goof up requires 100 production line people to redo step 8 of 30 steps for 3 additional hours.
That goof up will be less visible there - buried in the timesheets of 100 workers - than at a company that has outsourced production line work. At the outsourced production company the goof up will show up as the additional change order which will have a directly mappable line item on the quarterly accounting that the responsible engineer will need to answer for.
Take a morning standup with your coworkers about supply chain/scrum, head to the factory floor to show the technicians how to flash the latest firmware to the infotainment system, do some heads down work, go home, eat dinner and then take a phone conference late at night with your Tesla China/Berlin counterpart.
Probably impressions matter on the factory floor and when you scale up operations. You don't want a situation where the people on the factory floor just refer to the design team as "corporate" (i.e. "corporate" wants us to do this, guys we have to redo X over again on all 10,000 cars we produced today because "dude in corporate" thinks its not going to work otherwise).
Some workers have shifts, some have to work outside in the rain.
It's only fair that everyone works outside in the rain in shifts?
There are people whose jobs involve abseiling from the side of a building.
Therefore it's only fair that we should all be doing our jobs while abseiling from the side of a building.
The challenge for Elon (and Bezos/Jassy) is that his two of his companies rely on physical labor and can't outsource the physical part but still need tech talent that could otherwise WFH.
I don't envy him or Bezos/Jassy...
If you don't say stuff like this you have folks even on the tech side who will protest (i.e. TBray of AWS VP).
"I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of COVID-19," he wrote.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-engineer-resigned-tre...
They want Tesla to maintain that original "Elon sleeping under desks", all hands on deck, Tesla hunger of yore. To them - they probably were concerned about the design teams getting to soft from WFH and getting uppity.
A star worker for them is someone who works 16 hours a day, adds 10K lines of code and sleeps under their desk. Not someone who goes for a long walk in the park while thinking deeply about the problem, and then spends half an hour at the keyboard refactoring to remove 1000 lines of code and clear a major performance bottleneck.
Elon may be performing for his shareholders, but if he was actually smart he'd be informing them. It's notable how many of the actually-smart rockstar CEO's didn't seem to care what their shareholders thought.
"People are getting annoyed by these implicit class differences in our organisation, what do we do?"
"Let's encode them explicitly in the contracts. Then we can blame it on the contracts and pretend it's out of our control!"
No, you've now created an even "lower" class within the company.
If you think it's "unfair" that some people have to commute into work then pay them accordingly.
This could be true for Tesla, there’s no morality to this. The fact Musk brings morality in suggests he’s talking out his arse.
Twitter is a different company. If he doesn’t bring morality into it, he doesn’t have to be a hypocrite. He could easily say “working on site is necessary for Tesla, not for Twitter.” Being dogmatic is not good business.
According to the dictionary, morality is simply “ principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior.”
> they’re productivity issues
Some would say that choosing being unproductive when you could be productive IS immoral. Not only does Benjamin Franklin jump to mind, but the entire Protestant-informed culture of “the West”. Japan’s culture is also infused with a productivity mindset.
Right/wrong in this case are meant in the sense of "it's wrong to murder people" as opposed to "saying 2 + 2 = 5 is wrong." The former is a statement of morality, the latter is a statement of correctness. This does not link productivity / morality.
> Some would say that choosing being unproductive when you could be productive IS immoral.
Therefore it's not an axiom. Most people would only consider it immoral if you chose to be unproductive for the sake of being unproductive. For example, refusing to do your job while expecting to be paid is something many people would consider immoral.
This is different from choosing a path you prefer, that happens to be less productive. For example, doing something more slowly but more safely may be less productive but also something many would not consider immoral.
In the context of one's life, I agree fully. However, once you choose to work in a collective, choosing to be less productive without a positive tradeoff to the system, harms the ones around you.
I think you may have missed the issues they intended to bring up. The moral issues I see could be that you might have one class of worker ("knowledge worker") who is able to work from home and another class of worker who is unable to work from home. It's along the lines of the difference between paid catering for the executive suite but not the rest of the office.
Paid catering isn’t an intrinsic part of the work, so it has absolutely nothing to do with this discussion.
Here's just some of the benefits to on-site workers in role XYZ of other workers being able to WFH:
* Quicker commutes (less congestion from people needlessly traveling) and thus more free time.
* If a partner is WFH, they haven't wasted time commuting and thus have more time and energy to assist with the household.
* Higher salaries as the jobs requiring a commute become less desirable vs. WFH jobs.
* Higher salaries as the business wastes less money on having unnecessary office facilities and (theoretically at least) workers could demand these savings be reflected in their salaries.
* Improved health from reduction in pollution caused by commuting.
* Reduced cost of living from less wasted land used for offices that are only used 30% of a week.
* Lower taxes or improved government services as less money needs to be wasted on infrastructure that is overwhelmingly built to cater for the 12% per week that it is used to needlessly shuffle everyone around.
* Increased productivity from reduction in illnesses transferred on public transport and within office facilities.
* Improved happiness and productivity resulting from workers being able to setup a workspace/home office that is most productive for their needs. Fresh air, lighting, seating, etc are all controllable by the worker at home.
* Households could switch to having a single car.
If one were to debate against WFH, more sensible arguments would be things like:
* Greater heating / cooling efficiency to cram more people in a single cramped building than to have those same people heat / cool their homes individually. Passive houses largely solve this.
* More efficient access to some services such as getting a haircut, buying goods from a specialist retailer, etc if they're all centralised in a CBD as opposed to requiring individuals to travel all across a city. Increased deliveries to home negates this.
* Forced exercise (on average) due to workers needing to walk between transport options and an office building, whereas at home they don't have to walk anywhere unless they are motivated to do so.
* Larger population to recruit from, because distance to office does not matter.
* More diverse workforce, because people with some physical and/or mental disabilities, will be able to work remote.
If you watch his interview you see him say WFH is morally wrong for almost everyone in the "laptop class" and not just his companies.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-work-from-home-morall... "You're going to make people who make your food that gets delivered [that] can't work from home; the people that come fix your house, they cant work from home, but you can?"
"Does that seem morally right? That's messed up," Musk said.
Harm the victim in some way, when victim complains about it, turn it around so as to frame it as the victim doing the wrong thing all along, and the victim should feel like a bad person.
He, unlike others, can afford to be extremely close to the office. There's all benefits and no detriments for his statements.
I used to think he was eccentric but did some cool stuff too.
I now have a very negative opinion of him as a person.
Everyone is different, and flexibility should be a recognition of that.
If anything the arbitrary denial of flexibility is much more of a moral argument.
It's obviously not. The fundamental differentiator is what is the nature of the job? What are the needs to accomplish the work being performed? If it's typing on a computer and talking to people, it can be done from home. It's not morally wrong to do it that way.
As someone who generally likes what Musk has to say, this one threw me for a loop. He's smarter than that and I don't think for one second he truly believes that. I think it's a public position he is taking on the subject, moralizing to dismiss criticism, he has other motivations. I don't think they're "his ego" but I don't think he genuinely believes it's morally wrong to sit down while typing.
Would that make having a desktop job morally wrong?
I get Elon's point that manufacturing often requires some people to report to site, particularly in a company like Tesla.
But generalizing and saying that all positions require to report to office because of moral and ethical reasons is ridiculous.
How about incentives for commuting to work? Not flashy offices with free snacks and meditation rooms, how about money?
Companies usually reallocate to remote suburban areas to pay less taxes, and they expect people to spent over 40 hours per month, a full week of additional work, for free, to commute to the office.
That's morally wrong from all angles.
Cui bono?
If it becomes overwhelmingly obvious that AI is the more cost-effective employee, then it won’t come to that; employers will just replace their employees with AI. Office presence is completely unrelated.
- If a job can be outsourced, it will be outsourced.
- If a job can be eliminated, it will be eliminated.
- If a job can be replaced by AI, it will be replaced by AI.
I'm a big proponent of "I don't care where you work as long as your work gets done" and have been since before covid, but I haven't come across anything that actually proves that, so... source?
If there's a good study out there that shows that that is true, I'd love to see it so I can use it as evidence, but so far every study I've seen that claims this tends to either have some very narrow definition of productivity (like number of emails sent) or fails to take overall impact on the organization into account (more work completed, but less coordination between teams may not be a net positive).
I say this as a remote worker who wouldn’t want to RTO—because I feel like I am more productive at work from home. However, I wouldn’t bet the farm on that if there was a reliable way to measure it.
However there may be less tangible benefits, even if overall productivity is a wash, to having the WFH times. 1) Is the obvious work/life balance. Everything that comes with the convenience of not having to commute, freedom to intersperse everyday household chores during the workday even when it means extending working hours a little later, etc. 2) Is that when I'm WFH I seem to be a little less concerned with the immediate work issues and more likely to drift off into peripheral & speculative projects, things that may yield less results in the short term but might (too soon to really say) yield more in the long term.
Overall I think my general output is about the same, but I'm more content, and perhaps (though not definitively) doing things that will be more productive in the long term.
But there are countless different jobs and responsibilities and personalities that intersect in a way that doesn't lend itself to a single one size fits all rule. But unfortunately, "One rule for all" tends to be the top down approach in most work environments.
I can be much more productive at home when it is about my individual contribution (me coding to deliver something unambiguous), but xxx individuals doing this does not necessarily align into a great product: that does not scale.
It's really unfortunate that it seems so many people are in the "you can pry remote work from my cold dead hands" camp that it's hard to even have a conversation that doesn't devolve into "I feel more productive remote, so you shouldn't care where I work".
I’m pragmatic. I’d rather have a job than look for one. So if my company decides to RTO, I am going to RTO.
It’s simply not the same thing as safe working conditions, ADA accommodations, etc… it’s a preference…and one mostly born out of the pandemic.
However, last week we had a happy hour to all meet in person, and I had a 20 minute conversation with someone about a work topic, and it was amazing how much productive information we were able to share with each other in such a short time. It was just easier to work through things in person than on slack or zoom.
I have absolutely no problem shooting the shit over text, voice, or video chat, and since I went mostly-remote, I have had a number of highly productive conversations over Zoom that looked a lot like a typical casual interaction resulting in good brainstorming. In fact, some of those times, it was even easier to communicate what we needed because one or another of us could share our screens (which is fine in person when you happen to be at someone's desk, or carrying your laptop with you, but if you just run into each other at the water cooler, it often requires a "hey, I'll send you that thing when I get back to my desk and we can continue this over email" or whatever).
I think the biggest thing that far too many RTO proponents fail to understand is that different people work differently, have different experiences, and need different environments to be most effective. This has been hidden to a large extent by the fact that (nearly) everyone has been required to work in an office, but now that we've all experienced something different, many of us have seen firsthand that we can do just as well or even so much better if we're not forced into a particular box.
The other problem is that people advocating WFH over RTO tend to focus on the individual benefit to them rather than the holistic benefit to the organization.
And frankly, there's been way too much prioritization of "benefit to the organization" across all sectors these past few decades, very much at the expense of the individuals who do the actual work.
The really dumb thing is there's also a lot of evidence that doing things that make individuals happier, healthier, and more comfortable is a net benefit to the organization. This leaves the logical conclusion, given the fact that we still do all these things that hurt regular people, being either that a) the people making the decisions actively want to hurt us, or b) they are doing these things to benefit themselves over the organization (in short-term profit, in feelings of control, in feelings of superiority over others, etc).
That may be a logical conclusion given the perspective of a certain set of knowledge workers but how about the employees who are pissed that their roles don’t get that WFH option? Does their unhappiness get a voice with the organization? As an organization how do you reconcile that disparity? Just belaying their fairness concerns with a “learn to code” kind of answer seems a bit more evil than just resetting knowledge workers back to 2019 work environments in my opinion.
So it’s not always a decision to actively hurt, it’s possible that the decision is one of a more holistic fairness for the organization’s employees…which benefits everyone to a degree including the organization.
The idea that no one should be allowed to work from home because some people can't has nothing to do with "fairness". It's the same mentality that says "you kids should have to suffer the same things I did when I was your age", despite the fact that conditions have changed.
I am genuinely sympathetic to people who work jobs that cannot be made remote, but want to work from home. I hope that they will be able to find a way to achieve that desire. But no one gains anything when they force other people to stop working from home just to prevent a "disparity" like that.
There have always been, and will always be, differences in the conditions that different jobs require. As some others have commented, some people have to work shifts; some people have to work outside in bad weather—yet we don't see a clamoring to make everyone work shifts, outside, in bad weather. This is just a very unusual time when some of those differences are changing in a very visible and very widespread way.
No, not exactly. RTO efforts now are simply taking things back to the pre-pandemic normal. The pandemic was the excuse to go remote, if it’s no longer the excuse and if you can’t argue the benefits from a position of strength successfully to your organization…it comes off as a selfish benefit only available to a select few.
Here's one anecdata: I have never in any job coordinated as much with my team mates and other teams as I have in the past ~3 years of working remotely.
The trick wasn't that we're remote or on-site, what increased our level of coordination was how we work. As a team instead of as a random grouping of individuals.
A 10min chat with a colleague remotely feels like a thing. A 20min chat in the office feels like “yeah of course I was coding this whole time”.
I think this effect is also why people like async meetings via documents. They don’t realize it’s still a meeting and is taking waaaay more of their time than just sitting down synchronously for 10min to hash things out. They’d rather do it in 10x 2min bursts between other things.
Calling a conference room from another conference room is strictly worse than a laptop to laptop call
But the thing that tech companies are the most worried about is a long term slide in innovation and competitiveness, and the effect of WFH on that has definitely not been proven one way or the other.
Its fine once in a while but I don't wanna get back to WFO again.
That’ll show ‘em.
There was no traffic. Even in LA!
How does one not yearn for that. I don't get it.
Also screw the office, coworkers are so distracting. I don't know how anyone gets anything done. Any amount of chit-chat throws me off and gives me a headache.
• Remote work was the thing that kept the economy going during the pandemic and now phrased as morally wrong
• Flying Private is morally wrong in that it creates so much pollution from a small group of people
The USA has shown very little interest in the first two.
Most folks don't have the privilege of just up and qutting their jobs. Especially in tech right now.
Sure, FAANG salaries are high, but many people have mortgages, kids, etc.
Change my view.
The remote working genie is out of the bottle. Trying to push it back in is pointless.
This is not about in office productivity and they are not exactly hiding who and what the real goal of RTO is.
... though reading the article, it sounds like it is really motivated by a desire to see certain climate change action taken by Amazon.
Offices = commute time and expense + noisy distractions - declining perks.
Butt-in-seat mentality (BISM) is antiquated.
Long answer is effectively things will go back to how they were pre-pandemic. Except you now have to average 3 days a week in the office instead of the 5 that it was before. Some people can get exceptions, but it's basically going back to 2019 rules where the default is office.
The funny part for me is that if they had of announced these new rules in 2019, they would have been heralded as forward thinking employee first visionaries... but because it is a step back from the temporary COVID rules, it's all pitchforks and walkouts.
Work from home farming the fields, then
Work from factory away from home, then
Work from home away from factory,
(We are here)
It would obviously be career suicide to do something like turn off S3 for an hour, but it would definitely make a point.
It isn't a strike if you aren't inconveniencing others.
I could guess, but I don't know for sure.
I want to work from home. And while I understand warehouse workers cannot wfh, I think they should get paid regular wage for their commute time.
Don’t go back in time.
Do you trust all of the workers to accurately report when they left home?
How do you handle a person who carpools and has an extra 30 minutes of diversion for that carpool drop off route?
When I was in Eau Claire, one of my coworkers commuted from Minneapolis (for various reasons) - 1.5h each way. As we were not exempt workers (and I suspect that warehouse workers aren't exempt either) should he get time and a half for working 6h in a day? When we had a blizzard one day and he decided to not take a day off and ended up with a 5h trip in (and I suspect a at least 2h on the way back) should he be getting time and a half for that?
Can I get fired for moving further away from the place of employment even if I show up on time for work each day? This year my commute is 30 minutes each way, and then I move another 15m further away next year... and another 15m away the next year...
Alice and Bob are neighbors. Alice drives in (30 min commute) while Bob takes the bus (2h with transfers).
Those crazy SF2G people commute in on bike ( https://sf2g.com ). The half moon bay route is about 4.5h...
Charlie bikes to work in the summer (and drives in inclement weather). Biking to work is 2h while driving is 20 minutes. Does he get paid 2h if he shows up on a bike (and then needs to take a shower and change) vs only paid for 20 minutes if he drives? Could the employer mandate that he drives to work?
David drives through McDs each day for breakfast (adding 7 minutes to the commute in). Does he get paid for that additional (unnecessary) time? Today the drive through is broken so he stops, gets out, orders in and eats breakfast in (15 min). Does he get paid for the entire "left house" to "arrived at office"? Only in the car (+7 min drive through)? Or did it reset when he got out of the car at McDs?
Edward normally has a 20 minute commute. Today, his kids missed the school bus today and so he drove his kids 20 minutes in the other direction resulting in 1h total commute time. Does he get paid for 40 more minutes (turns out it pays better to drive the kids to school rather than the bus pass!)
Freddie normally drives in (it's a short commute - only 10 min), but today is a nice day and the shift doesn't start until later this afternoon and decides to walk to work instead (1.5h).
George lives up north and in the winter snowmobiles in to the warehouse rather than taking a car. It's another 15 min because he can't take the highway (and yes, I've seen snowmobile parking at a distribution center up north).
---
I'm not going to say that it is wrong to compensate someone for commute time. I will say that compensating someone for commute time will create things that other people regard as profoundly unfair and may incentivize things that we would rather not have be the case.
Really, the issue is that housing costs have gotten so extreme that there are places where a certain advertised or minimum wage is much less once you account for how far you'd have to live.
But it would be nice of the minimum wage was adjusted for location, and advertised and negotiated wages had to automatically include location differentials, as it would make comparing and negotiating wages a lot easier.
Another unrelated and actually much larger issue this would help a lot with is the phenomenon of low wage service hours being forced to work many small shifts, 2 hours here, 3 hours there. Office workers are used to commuting once per day, 5 days a week, for a full day's pay each time, but a Starbucks worker might be forced to have a much higher ratio of commute to paid work, and the company is getting a free ride there-- this would disincentivize that significantly, regardless of whether the worker chooses to live nearby or far.
Ok, my job is in Seattle? I live in San Francisco and commute 30 hours a week. Pay me.
Were they really? No Amazombies I know felt that way. You're going to need a source for such a claim.
The pandemic demonstrated that WFH works.
The pandemic made people realize how bad America's world life balance is.
Can work.
“Works” isn’t correct as it’s obvious that it doesn’t just work. Some people don’t work well remotely. Collaboration is much harder remotely.
If you have clear work outlined working from home for some* people can be great cos they can focus well and get shit done and be super productive.
Other people cannot focus as well in a non work environment no matter how worky you make it. Being in the office gives them more focus.
Wouldn’t that fix both groups ?
I think in some cases a hybrid approach is best.
Like 3-4 days at home and 1 day in the office or bi-weekly day in the office. If live within range.
But it all depends on the business and individuals.
I just think forced remote or forced in-office is wrong. It should be flexible.
My 2c
So, when are you going back to 7 days in the office, friendo?
Worker rights came from events that you call “people feeling entitled”.
Where can I find these mythical Central and South Americans that are "just as qualified as US engineers" and 1/4 of the price?
I keep hearing about them, but the only devs I've met who would match that description were very much charging US rates.
I agree, the end game for remote work for non-specialists isn't an obvious positive for those in HCOL countries
The issue here is that, while code is easy to write for these tasks, the hard part is understanding the requirements and engaging with stakeholders.
There's a good level of business/domain expertise required. Of course, someone else could do that and just the coding part could be offshored. But at that point how is that different than the US analyst/offshored programmer business model of the 90's?
We worked for companies that had a lot of extra cash but didn’t want to hire for these roles out of stubbornness. We were basically there to clean up messes and attempt to build/handoff AI backed solutions to off shore teams… the generalists just were not good and were drowning in work.
We even assumed that in a few cases we were typically not talking with the person on teams and instead got a random employee of their own consulting place. Face to face meetings were RARE.
I guess my point is that people working these “quarter of the price” roles are not great and the companies hiring them aren’t trying to build anything of quality.
Healthcare companies trying to get their piece of the govt money without providing any real value
The market has otherwise already decided their shitty approach didn’t work.
This was all a fully predicted outcome of international free trade. US-based manufacturers simply can't compete with unregulated labour pools of people willing to work capably in toxic and dangerous conditions for most of their waking lives just to survive. It's the same reason we have to import enormous amounts of agricultural labour.
Depending on your political leanings you may take this as a cry to deregulate labour, or to increase tariffs. The status quo however dooms most domestic manufacturing to be noncompetitive.
On-shoring, in-sourcing, are the trends, from a country perspective anyway.