Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg might be right: Remote workers are less productive

These kind of articles are sooo dumb. Those tech CEO's are acting like complete idiots.

1. You can measure productivity in a precise way only in some mindless repetitive jobs e.g. are Twitter employees more productive now that they are in the office. How do you measure that (if you measure it in profits, app quality etc. I'd say that they are much less productive)

2. Each person is different. I may be 10% more productive at home than in the office, and my coworker may be 20% less productive. Why do I have to be in the office because of some stupid statistic?

3. Fine, let's say people who work at home have lower productivity. But working from home enables you to hire people from all over the world as well as people who cannot go to the office for various other reasons. I'm not a big tech CEO, but somehow it seems to me that the best candidate in the world, working at 90% of their capacity will still perform better than the best candidate who happens to live in your city and is willing to travel.

4. Working from home is also linked to a better well-being, which means less turnover, better working environment etc.

5. Most importantly: the fucking planet is dying, because of carbon emissions and you want to just dismiss the obvious and already implemented solution for reducing those by letting people not travel to work, just because of some 10% profit increase.

Reminder that there is a solvency problem in Commercial real estate now that a lot of companies have not renewed their leases post pandemic.

Reminder that for the past 2 quarters there has been a steady stream of opinion pieces coming out of Fortune, WSJ, and FT. All with more or less the same message, remote bad, RTO good.

They somehow found a study that agrees with their agenda, and disregard all the previous body of evidence that doesn't support their opinion. Take this piece with a giant pinch of salt.

Another article pushed by banks and commercial landlords. Remote work isn’t going away anytime soon, the pandemic was the reality slap for a lot of employees, they found that the work indeed can be done remotely in efficient and effective ways, without the compromises on all office shenanigans, commute troubles, wasted time, bad launch in a short launch break, and for some even being away from their families and barely seeing their kids on the weekends. Remote work simply shifts the power back to the employees, not entirely but at least it balances thing out, and that’s something corps do not want, they want to treat employees like kindergarten kids and when you achieve something the reward is something cheap and humiliating like this:

https://twitter.com/fuckyouiquit/status/1611910606885638144

Using Musk as an authority to be trusted is a very interesting decision in August of 2023.

This is just desperate propaganda to try to save banks and other entities exposed to dying commercial real estate. It won't work!

The experiment is well-designed to have statistically sound sample sizes all performing directly comparable and quantifiable work. BUT maybe at the cost of relevance to knowledge work in the US:

The researchers observed data entry workers in Chennai, India, who were working either in an office or at home, and found that those randomly assigned to working from home were 18% less productive than office workers.

Yes, that's a little unfair to a study in a field where sound experiment design often is hard to have. But only a little.