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Comment by ThrowawayR2 | Hacker News Reader

> "Yeah, fuck off. Why are we trusting executives' opinions on day-to-day lives of their line workers anyway?"

'cause executives are the ones whose neck is on the line for success of their business division so they are extremely motivated to keep a close eye on profitability and progress on business goals, particularly when the economy looks wobbly. [mic drop]

(Yes, there are examples of executives who are incompetent and/or just plain dumb, but they are the minority.)

And, of course, before I get attacked as pro-RTO, I myself WFH and only go to the office when circumstances require it.

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This is a very naive take. I'm guessing you haven't spent much time in large organizations with multiple levels of management where politics, synthetic KPIs and incentives are completely misaligned with What's the best for the organisation.

Middle management are focused on building their own personal power pyramids, and damned the cost to the organization.

Articles like this are just the effect of a parasite class buying off 2nd rate "news" outlets to postpone their demise.

But the status-quo is gone, and it's a positive delight to be able to tell these jumped up flunkies that they are redundant.

Not necessarily. I have spent nearly four decades with a good portion of that working for very large orgs. Those politics, KPIs, and incentives are not always misaligned with what is best for the organization, but may be misaligned with what some people lower in the org think is what’s best for the organization.

You know what you think you know, but you don’t know what you don’t know.

Which is why we always hear about all the executives being the first to go during layoffs.

> 'cause executives are the ones whose neck is on the line for success of their business division so they are extremely motivated to keep a close eye on profitability and progress on business goals, particularly when the economy looks wobbly.

...so? What is the conclusion? You force people to do what they hate and hope for better results? It really makes no sense.

You can definitely hate stuff and be more productive when it occurs.

Imagine how high productivity would be if managers were allowed to literally crack the whip at engineers who slow down after working for 10 hours a day.

We don’t allow that because it’s inhumane. I think a similar principle applies to WFH. Even if it’s less productive it’s still better for society.

Are you serious or just trolling?

> Imagine how high productivity would be if managers were allowed to literally crack the whip at engineers who slow down after working for 10 hours a day.

I'll tell you what would happen. The engineers would quit on the spot and you'd end up with a sea of empty desks.

Why are some managers so dense? Is this an ego thing?

It's hyperbole.

OK, so if you reduce this hyperbole to a normal statement, the parent says you can make people work harder by using negative reinforcement such as harsh words, for example.

Well, it might work for some people, but I guess only short term and they will leave at the first opportunity.

Sure, but just like return to office rhetoric, executives will conspire to make sure there is no opportunity to opt out because all workplaces use the same abusive system.

It’s not really just a thought experiment.

Terrible things like slavery and indentured servitude aren’t wide spread because they are illegal… not because they wouldn’t be wildly popular with the class of people who could actually buy slaves and hire overseers to whip them.

In the past scheme, it may have been indentured servants getting the whip, but today it may be undocumented immigrants and H1B1 workers tethered to their current job.

Sure, but fortunately we have competition and as long as there are companies willing to hire remote workers, they will have a strong advantage over those who don't, and employees will have a choice.

Yeah I saw people trying this on me and on others in various forms, especially in the 90s. It failed or backfired every time.

I think its a good idea to turn this example around to try and understand the executive perspective in this.

If your financial livelihood and the financial livelihoods of many other people are dependent upon you delivering a highly complex block of code—would you want to rely on a brand new production method or tool to deliver it that you don’t trust? A method that departs from successful methods of historical code production that have worked well for you for decades. A method that your peers, whose opinion you trust, advise against? A method that successful industry leaders are publicly moving away from rapidly?

Seems like there isn’t a WFH preaching engineer that is going to willfully move away from their set of tools and comfortable knowledge base to deliver something critical, I am not sure why we should expect something different from these leaders either.

I understand these CEOs might think this way (although I'm not sure if all do, and for sure most have a mix of different reasons), but there is a fault in this reasoning in the sense that working remotely is not in any way novel. I had been working in an international team delivering decent quality code for years that brought my company tons of money long before the pandemic. So you might say these CEOs are afraid of what is new for them, not in general.

Moreover, this line of reasoning completely ignores the influence of employee satisfaction on productivity. They had something they valued a lot, now you take it away. I witnessed it several times and every time CEOs did that, productivity plummeted significantly and people were starting to take photos for LinkedIn.

WFH at scale only really started happening in 2020 because of the pandemic. I realize that there were a growing number of orgs experimenting prior and some were successful with it. I worked (partially) remotely from 2008-2011, then full remote again since March 2020 and have been since.

So we have WFH at scale for 3 years balanced against in-office work that has decades and decades of successful history behind. Also consider that the global catalyst that drove WFH at scale is now no longer a factor.

So when presented with a choice of what’s comfortable vs uncomfortable, people will opt for the comfortable unless forced to the uncomfortable. What’s happening now is simply a restoration to a comfortable business state…from the executives POV because there is no longer a pandemic forcing them to be operating in an uncomfortable business state.

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