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Comment by troupe | Hacker News Reader

I find it funny that when people were required to be home, employers talked about what great productivity they were getting with people at home. Then when it isn't required anymore, they want everyone back in the office for...productivity. My guess is that most employers really have no way to measure if an employee is being productive or not so managers are just reporting what makes them look good...and now we are back to where managers will look better with lots of people running around the office.

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> I find it funny that when people were required to be home, employers talked about what great productivity they were getting with people at home. Then when it isn't required anymore, they want everyone back in the office for...productivity.

The decades of evidence that open office plans are utter shit for productivity already proved that the emperor wears no clothes and they have no idea what makes for better productivity.

Open offices are the literal reason (after commuting/traffic) that I no longer want to go into the office. My work doesn't require a ton of person:person engagement and it's much easier for me to just zone out in my own headspace to do it.

When I was required in the office, I would just wear headphones to avoid distractions, but I would have to deal with 2-3hrs of driving/day on top of it. This meant that my employer generally only got those 8hrs out of me, period; because I had none of my personal time to spare. Working from home, on the other hand, gives me more flexibility for meetings, to work at different hours, to be on later in the evening, to put in more time (when needed), etc; and I'm happier.

The headphones thing reminds me of a big events ticketing company I worked for that, when people complained about noise, distractions, etc they came up with the amazing solution of using your health and wellness budget to buy noise cancelling headphones.

Most full of bullshit company I’ve ever worked for.

I’d be outraged.

Reminds me of one job, my boss was looking to leave, and was handing over portions of her job to the rest of us. I said I don't have time to do more additional work... she said they can send me on a course to better manage my time. haha.

"You guys had a health and wellness budget?!"

Yeah, used for noise cancelling headphones and therapy. :thisisfine:

Hahahaha same as my work - they said we understand concerns you have about coming back to the office - as a solution to these concerns we decided to buy everyone noise cancelling headphones.

>they came up with the amazing solution of using your health and wellness budget to buy noise cancelling headphones. >Most full of bullshit company I’ve ever worked for.

At least they bought you NC headphones; that's a LOT more than I can say about most companies. And the fact that you had a "health and wellness" budget at all.

> When I was required in the office, I would just wear headphones to avoid distractions

That doesn't work for everyone. Some offices are louder than headphones and some people come around tapping your shoulders regardless.

> That doesn't work for everyone. Some offices are louder than headphones

Depending on your budget, you can block out anything short of jackhammers with either IEMs or earbuds+noise reduction earmuffs.

> and some people come around tapping your shoulders regardless

Do they expect to continue living? What monsters.

> Depending on your budget, you can block out anything short of jackhammers with either IEMs or earbuds+noise reduction earmuffs.

Perhaps more a personal thing but it induces a dizziness/ drowsiness with extended use. It’s fine when watching say a movie but I could never work for long periods with my ears blocked. Wonder if I’m the only 1 but I have heard of similar cases.

I wear them all day during work and also then a couple hours in the evening without any issue. Pure bliss

I get pain from the hears not being in their natural position.

That problem went away for me once I found headphones that are actually over-ear and not only marketed as such. I can wear them all day every day because they're large enough to not even touch my ears, very light because of a plastic case and open headphones so they don't feel as "pressurized". Bad for noisy environments, though.

My hears are perpendicular from my head

It’s quite common. I own only open headphones due to this

Totally agree. It is also bad for your hearing to have to wear loud headphones all the time to drown out a loud work environment. Your ears do wear out.

Good active noise cancelling headphones mean you can listen to music at quieter volumes than you normally would.

Open offices are terrible. Management knows they are as well because Sr. leadership almost always have their own offices. The peons sit in the pit. Until the CEO is sitting next to everyone else they are all speaking lies when preaching the benefits of an open office. The only benefit is that its cheaper and they can keep an eye on you.

Ahh my employer does this. The founding CEO had his desk over by the front door, and back in those days we all sat in the same big room.

We have multiple big rooms now but the current CEO still has his desk out in the open. Last time I was in the office we talked about anime lol.

There is one model even worse: when leadership claims that they too sit in the open office like everyone else … only to take up a big meeting room all day as if it is their personal office, causing the actual meetings booked there to have to move to the middle of the open space, making everyone an unwilling meeting participant.

There is an exception to this observation about senior management: Andy Grove used to sit in a cubicle. It was a big cubicle in a labyrinth of his assistants' cubicles.

It didn't make cubicle farms any better though.

There's an exception to almost everything. Intel was a famous exception on cubicles for upper management; the CEO had a cubicle just like normal employees (except the CEO's was bigger and not accessible from the aisle of course). The CEO also didn't have his own special floor, special bathroom, special elevator, etc.

it's a millennial thing. they grew up working on laptops and their dream office is to make the workplace look like starbucks. Open seating, no cubicles, a barista. It's a knee-jerk reaction to the old office place standard of 'cubes'. Managers hire out to consultants that hype this type of office layout because it will supposedly attract a talent.

To be fair, cubes weren't any better. I remember having a guy slerping tea sitting across from me. I couldn't see him but I could sure hear him and there was no way for me to get up and move.

I don't know. I'm certainly not a millennial and I've never had any real issue with ambient coffee shop or equivalent background when reading/working/etc. and I'm rarely putting earphones/headphones on or playing music in general. People probably just have different tolerances and types of tolerances for distraction--not sure how generational it is.

As I've said before, people here pine for private offices a lot but, in my experience, typical workplace private offices have tended to be door open by default absent private meetings/phone calls/some urgent deadline thing.

Even with the door open, it still blocks a lot of ambient sound. Sound also isn’t the only problem with open offices. The other problem is with visual distractions. It’s hard not to interrupt your work whenever the constant stream of people pass by, especially when they greet you

It’s more a new way to cut costs further. Plenty of boomer leadership hopped on the open office trend despite plummeting employee productivity and satisfaction

Rigghht... It's the millenials, not like corpos haven't been doing this for decades. As soon as there were cubicles, there were people rejecting them.

See SC Johnson HQ for one of the most famous versions of this. (https://youtu.be/yb-kYt1lpnI)

For sure, and like he says near the beginning of that video, "Most employees have moved to other buildings." I've been in some of those other buildings and guess what, they're almost entirely private offices... no open office plan.

They learned their lesson from the Frank Lloyd Wright building. It's a wonderful piece of architectural history, but it's not wonderful for productivity.

He doesn't mention one of the most interesting things about that building -- the building has no square corners, everything is round (even the elevator).

> To be fair, cubes weren't any better.

Cubes, with hot-desking, is pretty great actually. IBM has it in their drop-in “business centers” for WFH employees.

I unironically miss my cube. They were natural sound breaks and sound absorbing so you could talk and not intrude horrifically on people adjacent. I had a place for my things so I didn't have to shuttle them in and out every day. I had a phone that worked, an Ethernet jack that was not temperamental, and a whiteboard that was ready to go. I also had a few different ways I could sit at my cube so I wouldn't get the same pains I get sitting in an open office plan because there is no way to customize anything for comfort in many cases. I have seriously considered packing a drill and a set of bits to tear off idiot things like keyboard trays (when nobody has an external keyboard) but I am resisting only just.

In a moment of clarity the real thing about open office plans is that most times when you show up it has the vibe of a floor being fired and everyone's desk wiped clean. There are no remnants of those who are there, no photos of family or the odd dollar store fun thing that kicks around a desk, every desk is wiped clean more austere than a hospital room.

Speaking as a millennial: open offices were there when we got there! If we did anything it was to keep hybrid/WFH arrangements where we could.

It has absolutely nothing to do with millennials.

I would definitely prefer good cubicles over open assigned desks. (I mean, with open desks or cubicles, I would ask the other person to stop slurping loudly.)

But "good" is the key there. I worked at an office in 2001 which had a cubicle system that was probably only a year or two old. The desks were wood (probably veneer) with nice big keyboard shelves, as was the style at the time. The panels were either grey metal or red fabric, and they stepped up and down so that beside your close coworker there might be only a 4' wall, and then a 6' wall to the "hallway".

Immediately after that, through an acquisition, we were in an office whose cubicles were probably from the 80s, and they were all 6' well-worn beige fabric panels, which despite being private and relatively quiet were just so ugly and energy-draining.

Hmm, I think it’s more a managerial thing than a millennial thing. I don’t know a single millennial that wants to sit in open floorplan offices. Just because something happened when our generation entered the workforce doesn’t mean we were the driving force for it. Maybe millennials also caused climate change, as far as I know that started becoming a recognized problem around the time we were born. Expensive housing is on us too.

The open office trend happened before millennials started having careers, open offices are always an economic choice. It's cheaper to cram more people into less space.

Open office look great! Just like TV. I don't think I've ever seen an office environment that has not been open on TV. A TV show with everyone in a private office would not work, no drama!

But to work in them is a noisy hell. I had a lawyer friend talk about how great these open offices must be to work in. So productive and dynamic he would say. But of course this is coming from a profession where having a private office is an absolute requirement.

> When I was required in the office, I would just wear headphones to avoid distractions

Sometimes I just want silence. Not music, not $color noise. I also get itchy ears after wearing headphones for hours on end, and noise canceling headphones give me a headache… or, you know, I could work wherever I prefer, with little to no commute, and an office arranged how I like it.

Yup, this too. Half the time I had headphones on, I didn't even have them playing anything. I just had ANC turned on to muffle the background noise (and deter people who didn't actually needy assistance with anything). But I definitely had ear stink/itch at the end of most days.

Ear stink... I never knew my ears smelled so bad before I started using airpod pros!

Started getting chronic ear infections after using headphones for long hours.

In my anecdotal experience, it’s important to take of headphones every now and then to prevent moisture from accumulating in the ear canal. That moisture is unnatural and id probably very nice for various germs.

The worst place I worked I needed industrial earplugs, then chuck white noise on top of that to get almost distraction free. The way to get the desired peace was to leave

I used to do that but then every 15 minutes some coworker would tap me on the shoulder to ask some inane question, and I would spend 5 minutes taking things out of my ears before I could hear them. Fun (not).

I see it as a fairness and reasonableness issue. It’s unfair and unreasonable that the ones polluting the space with noise are the ones that get to enjoy the freedom to use the space without restrictions, while the victims of the noise are the ones that suffer the restriction of the full use of the same space. The same with smoking, which fortunately has been recognised to some extent in recent years.

Cheaper noise cancelling headphones would make me nauseous, however I got the Sony WH-1000XM5 headphones with 8 external mics to sample the surrounding noise and it was a game changer, super high quality, no more nausea.

I tried the Bose something something and it gave me pressure headaches and a feeling of having a clogged nose.

I think specific problem is high density open plan offices. At about 20sqm per person, and keeping quiet and noisy professionals in separate rooms, it is not too bad.

I remember the first time I was in an open office. I was flabbergasted. We'd all get on a call so we could talk to some remote vendor. Other people would have their mics on, so I'd hear my own voice repeated and delayed through the Zoom call. I could barely talk, and barely hear anyone. It was a self-evidently terrible decision that everyone was just going along with. Sometime later we were moved to a different open office space. It was deafeningly loud in there, and I eventually discovered that there was a white noise machine on the ceiling above every single employees head. Apparently this was meant to help with the open office design, but it did the opposite: much like a busy cafeteria, everyone had to shout over top the all the extra noise in the room. (the combined sound of about 100 white noise speakers + the sound of about 100 employees talking or working) Again, such a stupid decision I can barely understand how someone could set it up this way. I eventually just waited 'til no one was around and unplugged most of the speakers. It was a huge improvement, and no one complained.

This is both hilarious and terrifying at the same time. Thanks for being a hero.

Paradoxically the only person thanking the parent for going through this shit might be an anonymous commenter on an Internet forum...

>> Open offices are the literal reason

Bumping this up a notch, I have co-workers who work together 4hrs/day on the same meeting but cannot sit together because our Zoom calls all collide when any one person is speaking. Core issue is the lack of conf rooms in a zoom-centric organization.

The only real reason for open offices is cost saving. Everything else is just an excuse to make it not seem like it is.

And you know what's a bigger cost savings than open office? No office!

Actually, the employers should really pay us rent for WFH because they are using our own facilities to make profits.

My last job did give me a stipend that more or less covered my internet bill. That was nice.

Same here, add to that some office equipment at a huge discount, when they had to close the office during the pandemic, a one-time fair amount of cash for spending in home office equipment, and a smaller but nice yearly amount for the same.

In Germany you can tax deduct your rent for an office room with a door and a proportion of your utilities for the office

Only if you don't use the room for anything except work.

You've got a computer in there that you're also using for private stuff? Not tax-deductible anymore.

Private books on the bookshelf? Not tax-deductible anymore.

You've got a wardrobe with some clothes you're only accessing once per season (to store off-season clothes)? Not tax-deductible anymore.

Like you will declare those...

Sure, many don't. And many people have found that the tax office does inspections from time to time. That's not a pandemic issue, the laws and the jurisprudence have been in place for decades.

But you just have to love how HN endorses tax fraud.

It is not nearly handled so strictly anymore, in my experience. Of course, it could vary by tax office.

This is correct and I'm not sure why it's been downvoted. In Germany, you'd better only every use the work-room for work only. As people have pointed out, you're not likely to get audited for this but often, with apartments, it can be quite obvious that you're using the space for non-work stuff too (for eg, if you're living in a 50 sqm apartment, it's pretty easy to say that you can't possibly have a dedicated work only room).

In the US, my accountant always (and as I understand it, the rules have gotten stricter) recommended against taking a home office deduction unless you really had dedicated space for equipment etc. and didn't have an office you could reasonably commute to. The way more typical "office space you often use for doing work" was long seen as a red flag for a deduction and, in the typical case, as you say, truly dedicated space is rare absent a large place and/or specialized needs.

I could make a room a dedicated day-job office but it would cost me way more to do so than I would ever get as a deduction and it would almost certainly be inferior to the mixed-use setup I use.

This is such a perverse rule. You don't have enough living space? You can't possibly claim compensation for being forced to also use that as a workspace.

Depending on the state they allow to deduce a room partially and during corona they were a lot more tolerant.

That might work if the job is fully remote and doesn't have a physical office for you to work at, as most companies will simply say "you can come to the office and use the facilities there for free".

Most decent companies will give you some money though for WFH or let you borrow stuff from the office like chairs and monitors.

While I'd love to have the financial burden of commuting/WFH be imposed on the employer instead on the workforce, that would require another labor revolution, so far I'd just be happy to have 100% WFH possibly. Internet I use anyway, and I can pay for the extra water, energy and heating by myself, the extra difference is insignificant compared to the time I save commuting to the office.

Why not just 1099 everyone at that point? Oh because then you can't bullshit people with career carrots and establish sunk costs and healthcare anxiety to retain people.

Some sort of do. Mine pays for my wifi and cell bill.

Debatable, a full HQ brings sizeable direct and transitive economic influence over city politics that typically cannot be countered by residents.

Empire builders love to see and display their footsodiers. Nothing like sweeping a gaze over a big plateau with a few 100 serves to affirm your confidence.

Yeah, I think people often underestimate the role of ego in this kind of stuff. Hell, it can even be used as a philosophical razor: Never attribute to necessity that which is adequately explained by egomania.

Trouble is, one's superior's egomania is one's necessity. By the time it reaches lowly me, it's a bunch of arbitrary stuff I had to conform to that I can't even understand fully.

It do be like that sometimes :)

That makes sense but the ultimate in cost savings is… WFH, which they hate.

When we returned to the office, my boss decided even a single day WFH was frowned upon. Having to beg to stay home for a dentist appointment became a big ordeal. But my boss was a bit unhinged before covid.

I found it funny that my lockdown productivity suddenly counted for nothing.

I have friends at other companies who have been 3 days per week WFH for 2 years and really appreciate the flexibility.

I hope the past tense means you're not working at that hell hole anymore

Yeah I did in fact quit that place.

My main gripe was that my manager seemed to be having mental health issues (manic over-talking and occasional hints of psychosis). WFH was what helped me last through the covid years as I could avoid her being sat near me.

I was good friends with many people there, some of us still occasionally meetup. And I hear of a steady stream of other developers leavings because they can't work from home any more. Usually it's the younger guys who just had a kid or people with long commutes.

Our team is still fully WFH even tho the corp expects us to come in 3 days min. My manager (and his manager) know we are waaaayyy more productive at home and don’t want to upset the apple cart so we don’t need to come in.

And I gotta say stuff like that gets me even more motivated to do work cuz I know they’re catching heat from the higher ups but we’re just producing too much work for them to really complain too much.

100%. And don‘t forget about the useless standup meetings which are nothing more than a complete waste of time.

Why do you think standup meetings are useless? Maybe they are not run properly? I find them to be a pillar of our workday, within our team.

depends on the place of work. mine is also useless. the manager is clueless so some team members just tells every single thing they did for 15 minutes for clout with the manager.

Just my experience. A work culture where people approach each other without somebody telling them to do so is much better. Respect of each others time is also crucial. Get the motivating factors right and you dont need to bore the x out of everyone.

Indeed, and I would even say that this applies to any meeting you can think of.

However if you get the purpose of the meeting straight and somehow manage for everyone to properly collaborate, you'll get a 3-5min daily meeting that easily enables efficient collaboration and awareness.

Discussions that should be 1:1 become 1:N, wasting the time of (N-1) people.

Discussions, yes, but discussions aren't for the standup meeting. Those are for informally updating everybody on what you're working on and whether you're stuck on anything. They lead to 1 on 1 meetings to solve those issues.

That’s the problem. Most teams don’t have stand-ups. They have gigantic status meetings on a daily basis, which is rarely valuable.

Give me a meeting every day to get people to talk about blockers, but it should be 15-30 seconds per person at most, and it should be scheduled outside of productive hours (easier said than done).

Anyone who cares what you’re working on can look at Jira. And if you’re stuck you shouldn’t be waiting for a meeting to tell people this. Standup are a total waste of time.

Many are. But I've been in more than a few that resulted in discussion that ultimately saved many many hours of time that would otherwise have been spent on something that wasn't necessary.

Actually the only thing I dislike about stand-up is struggling to remember everything I did the previous day, then realising I've forgotten to mention one or two key things after the meeting's ended, and wondering what everyone thought about the fact I apparently did so little... (which is silly, I know, but we're all human).

Jira never tells the entire story. And of course you can also reach out to people outside of the standup meeting, but that doesn't make them a waste of time. They can be quite effective, and they really do not take much time.

> Discussions, yes, but discussions aren't for the standup meeting.

What actually happens in a standup meeting tends to be a mix of:

(1) What theoretically belongs in a standup meeting, which is a meeting that should have been a kanban board plus identification of blockers that have been deferred for the standup rather than properly addressed when encountered and,

(2) tangents into discussions which should be 1:1 (this especially happens when blockers are discussed, because people want to help get them unstuck.)

As others have pointed out, that's not what a standup should be for. Any tool, process or structure that is not being used properly tends to be annoying and useless.

The problem is therefore not with the concept of a standup, but rather with how they are usually run.

Running efficient standups, or any sort of meeting at that, is a skill.

I don’t find mine useless, but I focus a lot on prioritizing and un-blocking people. The tasks we have are usually very different between engineers though so I can see why someone would find that useless time.

Mine are also useless. Communicating with your team is super important but the mandatory status checkin when team members are working on unrelated things is pointless and draining.

That's a definition of "team" I've never heard before - "people working on unrelated things".

Pretty common in “DevOps” teams, in my experience. Some people are working on some autoscaling CI runner server initiative, some are working on writing code, some are fixing issues in CI pipelines, some are hardening the security of kubernetes clusters, etc. Their goals are completely unrelated to the others but is all work that falls under their team’s umbrella, and needs doing.

Equally common in operations roles for the same reasons. Lots of servers and networking gear. You might be changing failed hard drives in a RAID array while someone else is patching servers while somebody else is upgrading some 20 year old Cisco firewall. None of these three people rely on the work the other is doing. Especially if they’re working in different server cabinets.

Why even call it a team then, and what would be the point of stand-ups for such a group?

Because it is a team. And, exactly, now tell that to our managers.

Exactly. I work in a team that has multiple products so different team member can be working on different products, different priorities, different deadlines and for different stakeholders.

Sure, my own team work on multiple products, but it's all the same codebase and all of us share the work for all products between ourselves. There is another team in the company that works on an entirely separate product with a very different codebase (different tech stack entirely) and upper management seem to have this idea we would work better as one big "team" - thankfully so far we've managed to persuade them it would make little sense. I'd probably be looking for alternative job options if we had to do daily stand-ups with that many other coworkers, half of whom I'd never have reason to engage in actual teamwork with.

Because it is a team in the sense that it made no difference (or little difference) who on the team picked up a specific work item off the kanban board. Theoretically, we should all be able to fill in for each other if we’re absent. But most of the time we’re all present and working on our individual tasks that don’t rely on other individual tasks. It might be hard to imagine if you’ve never been in devops or a traditional operations role, I suppose.

And exactly, ask that to our managers.

If you're all picking unrelated tasks off the same kanban board I would think a quick daily stand-up would still be worthwhile then. Just needs to be sensibly run so individuals don't get bogged down in describing every little detail of what they'd been working on.

Group of people == team because all report to same manager.

Manager in charge of multiple different projects because "success in organisation" == "number of people managed" regardless of whether they are being managed well or not.

Manager needs daily updates of all things going on his "team", because otherwise not have fucking clue about what manager is "managing" and clearly far too difficult for manager to read JIRA board, look at commit histories etc. Much more efficient for everyone to sit around for an hour during which they maybe have ten minutes of productive discussion.

> team because all report to same manager

That's actually not been the case in many teams I've worked on - but we have all been working on the same set of related products (or subset of a product). Actually the managers often weren't even in the teams. I foolishly assumed that's how most people used the term "team"...

I have to admit I like these meetings. Yes, today I work on an autoscaling runner but tomorrow I'll be working on CI pipelines so it's (mildly) interesting to hear what is going on and specifically what kind of problems my colleagues are dealing with. And, last but not least, usually I can cover a few miles on my stationary bike before the meeting ends.

Oh, l@@k:

"Meta ditches open plan office structure to bring back cubicles"

https://www.chargedretail.co.uk/2023/02/21/meta-office-space...

What's old is new again. From your link:

>Mark Zuckerberg’s firm says it is attempting to avoid returning to the cubicle culture of the 70s and 80s by introducing its own design.

>The Cube helps to asorb sound instead of reflecting and echoing it around colleague’s workspaces.

>Meta claims that its new design reduces sound levels by approximately 20 decibels.

This is BS. Either Meta is actively lying, or they really are SO clueless they've never seen cubicles in the 90s and 00s (when they were really phased out, not the 80s), and really believe somehow that cubicles were made of sound-reflecting materials. They weren't. They were made of cloth, with what I think was cardboard behind it. The cloth worked very well to absorb sound and keep the ambient noise level down. (The cardboard was to give some structure, and also so you could use push-pins/thumbtacks on them to hold things in place.)

The only thing "new" here is maybe using some kind of recycled plastic material to make the cloth. BFD.

90s/00s cubicles were a dream to work in, compared to the open offices of today. Everyone complained about them at the time because they sucked compared to walled offices with doors, but in reality, most workers never had those in the decades before. You can see photos online of engineers working in the 1950s: it was all open offices with a bunch of big desks in a grid.

I worked in cubicles up until 2011. Then I joined "trendy" startups. I only started hearing about open-plan offices around that time. In the 90s it wasn't even remotely a thing.

It's so frequent and so bizarre that people are getting paid by an employer, and they spend their work hours constantly thinking "I wish this employer would allow me to do the job they pay me to do".

It feels like I'm thinking the Earth is the center of the universe, then watching Mars go retrograde. Something's profoundly wrong with my understanding of the world. I see two options:

1. Graeber's Bullshit Jobs. Which says that a lot of jobs are in large part about making the boss feel important, not about the assigned work.

2. Communication between leaders and workers is so bad that leaders have no idea what workers really experience in their working conditions.

> My guess is that most employers really have no way to measure if an employee is being productive or not so managers are just reporting what makes them look good...and now we are back to where managers will look better with lots of people running around the office.

My guess is that CEOs and VCs have some obscure reason to force people back into the office. Perhaps related to real estate, especially considering how hard to sell it is and how much higher the interest rates are. Middle management will typically eat up whatever narrative C-level feeds them.

I honestly think it's mostly a huge ego boost to flex with. "Look at how GIANT our new billion dollar HQ is, and look at all of these people working for ME!"

> I honestly think it's mostly a huge ego boost to flex with. "Look at how GIANT our new billion dollar HQ is, and look at all of these people working for ME!"

This may sound like a joke but having gleaming, globally distributed offices is absolutely is a matter of great pride and ego for the C-Suite. They absolutely fantasize about how they are jet setting from one office to another and how all the employees roll a red carpet for them.

And of course the mountains of deductions and balance sheet games you can play with a lot of real estate.

We already know the C-suite is oligarchical in nature with wage suppression in Silicon Valley, so we know they meet and communication. And things like corporate real estate is garden variety MBA stuff that these guys can freely talk about at the get-togethers.

Not having employees in buildings means those buildings aren't really worth anything. A collapse in the value of office space is something none of these companies want. It would impact share price, options, and executive pay, because these things are 30-50 year investments at a minimum.

Don’t forget that a lot of offices are leased for many years or even purchased/built.

Do you know what looks REALLY bad? A giant fancy office with five people in it.

Better force people to fill it up. We are stuck, we spent the money, can’t have it look bad.

Who cares what it looks like. Sunk cost fallacy

Executives who dream of big fancy offices?

Workers certainly don’t.

Maybe they could hire all these movie extras who will soon be replaced by AI generated alter egos and be out of work?

Everybody wins: extras get to not be homeless and pay their bills, companies look busier than ever, extras can act whatever fantasy management wants to show off, offices have some kind of purpose again, we get to work wherever we like and do actual work… What’s not to like?

That would totally be a thing in Japan where you can pay people to act like they are your family.

Bernie Madoff staged busy trading floors to fool auditors and investors, so this is not far off the mark

Even if your firm isn’t exposed to real estate, its probable that a lot if its shareholders are and are interested in ending the slump in commercial real estate.

Plus, while the overall employment situation is strong, the tech downsizing wave may not be over and if you can get people to self-select out, you can maybe avoid having to officially have layoffs.

> Plus, while the overall employment situation is strong, the tech downsizing wave may not be over and if you can get people to self-select out, you can maybe avoid having to officially have layoffs.

Are you sure announcing layoffs hurts share prices? I mean, companies only recently were doing it while still being highly profitable.

> Are you sure announcing layoffs hurts share prices?

I'm relatively sure losing people without severance and without WARN Act and similar notice issues, is easier on the financials for the same number of positions cut than the alternative.

So why did SV companies fire a lot of employees recently, if the severance and WARN act outweigh the positive impact on the share prices?

> So why did SV companies fire a lot of employees recently, if the severance and WARN act outweigh the positive impact on the share prices?

I didn’t say they did.

I said that if you can get people to leave voluntarily, that’s better for the financials.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t conditions where the best available option (from a serving the shareholders perspective) is layoffs. Just that, ceteris paribus, its better to shed the headcount without the added costs imposed by layoffs; the benefit (when there is a benefit) of layoffs is reducing the headcount, not bearing the severance, WARN Act compliance, and other costs particular to layoffs.

Well, my impression regarding the latest rounds of layoffs is that they are intentionally trying to create headlines about those layoffs. The C level is more interested in higher share prices than they are interested in costs for the layoffs themselves. But, admittedly, it is hard to prove the truth of such an impression.

Yeah pretty sure the opposite is true.

I doubt that very much. Most likely it's because unlike before, in WFH when nothing is happening it feels like there's nothing they can do about it.

In my company’s case, RTO is because of tax cut deals with the city/state. They need butts in seats to maximize profit after taxes, so they are passing the cost onto their employees.

That's one of the few non-productivity/collaboration/etc. rationales that may actually make some sense. States (e.g. NH and MA) have had tiffs because workers living out of state are no longer commuting into an office and are no longer paying income tax to the state they used to commute to as a result. I'm sure there are many local cases where there was some agreement about creating jobs in some town which have been essentially thrown out the window now that very few people are actually working in that town except maybe on paper.

I’ve heard this “tax impact / tax break” idea floated as a theory about what’s going on, but if municipalities are putting that type of pressure on companies, shouldn’t we see some concrete evidence of it? What is the actual mechanism by which such force is being applied? I have a little bit of a hard time believing that such large company policies are frequently being set based on deals that we have no actual evidence of. Is there actual evidence that I just haven’t seen?

That and wouldn’t the saved rent expenses offset those taxes anyway? Second companies would have the freedom to move the main location freely to cities/states with lower taxes.

Not obscure at all. They are also invested in all the other lucrative service businesses that feed and clean and move and supply all those offices. And then there's the leases on the office buildings they own that are under threat etc etc.

The article mentions "sunken cost [fallacy]" as a driver to fill the offices again. Where office space is paid for, and hence has to be filled or else this investment is wasted.

HN keeps telling me it’s sunk cost and it’s not real estate so stop saying that. Then this article also mentions it’s real estate. Guess what HN? It’s partly real estate costs and having few people fill those spaces.

I heard a story of high up executives stepping into an Uber, only to discover that the driver was actually an employee for their firm.

> My guess is that most employers really have no way to measure if an employee is being productive or not so managers are just reporting what makes them look good

My money would be on that being half right. They have no way to really measure productivity, but they were very afraid that productivity would drop to zero—and that is something they would be able to see.

Before COVID I don’t know how many times discussions around WFH basically stopped at “we can’t know that people aren’t just watching TV all day”. I think in a lot of places that was a genuine fear—nobody will be working.

So seeing productivity not go near enough to zero to be noticeable was… really good productivity compared to some people’s initial expectations.

Honestly, when I work from home, I watch TV all day. Not literally -- I mostly read HN and other sites, do personal email, do household tasks, walk the dogs, do a load of laundry. I still get my work done, to a "meets expectations" level, which takes me a few hours, normally right after lunch, and that's good enough for me.

I start work around 6:00 AM and frequently am still at it at 8:00 PM. I've always been a top performer, but I still worry I'm not productive enough and that I'll get laid off. I still prefer this arrangement to going to the office.

Is this satire? If not I don't think that's a sustainable lifestyle.

You've never met a workaholic... it's sustainable for quite a while, for some.

Much as many people here have a deep abiding dislike for executives, that's probably a pretty typical lifestyle for successful executives at a large company (or a startup) to which you can probably add months of every year on the road.

I know enough people in real life who are doing that regularly to know that isn't satire.

Some of them never seem to get much accomplished, though, so I've often wondered if there is something else at play.

I encourage you to visit Japan. With enough alcohol and caffeine, you would be astounded what the human body can sustain.

The people two rungs up the ladder from me in my consulting job work like this, if not more so.

They all have families and are PTA presidents and things so def not absentee parents or spouses. Some people just have a seemingly unending source of energy and ambition.

No, I'm sorry that's just not possible. I think they've done an excellent job tricking you and others into their ever present productivity.

This used to be me until I burned out for the second time about 4 years ago. Got a new job and now for the most part I "work" from 9 - 5 but in reality a solid 3 hours of that is just surfing the web. Still get good reviews but I'm not on the verge of collapse so thats pretty good. I just genuinely don't care so much anymore and its worked wonders for my outlook on life.

>I still worry I'm not productive enough and that I'll get laid off

that's the neat part; you get laid off anyway. Layoffs are rarely actually about keeping the most productive people on board. If they want your wing of work to be marked as a redundancy, there's not much you can do from a purely productive standpoint.

And supposedly, layoffs aren’t legally allowed to be performance or merit-based! You’re supposed to lay off only for eliminating a position. When projects are shut down, that’s a natural one, but when it’s a X% cut of all engineering staff, for instance, it’s meant to be almost random, on paper at least. Of course in real life nobody would lay off the absolute most genius 10x developer, but nobody’s supposed to be laid off because they’re slackers. If they’re slackers that should be a separate issue and a PIP.

>>And supposedly, layoffs aren’t legally allowed to be performance or merit-based!

Where is that? Even in the EU where employee protections are very strong you can absolutely let go of someone because of poor performance, you just have to do the whole dance of giving them enough warnings, then a PIP, then you can terminate their employment as they are failing their contractual duties. It's not super simple but it is legal and it does happen.

Then it's not a layoff at that point.

What's the difference?

A layoff is a reduction in force, ie we need to lower headcount by 10% so bring me 10 names at this 100 person company. Firing someone for performance/attitude/don't-like-you-anymore reasons isn't a layoff.

I don't think that's right. I know as a fact that when Facebook did their layoffs here in UK they got rid of their lowest performing employees, going through the proper multi-month process, but at the end of the day they got rid of a large percentage of their staff purely based on merit/performance. I literally don't see how that's not a layoff.

> Before COVID I don’t know how many times discussions around WFH basically stopped at “we can’t know that people aren’t just watching TV all day”.

Before COVID I’ve seen plenty of people shop online, chat to friends or play games all day in the office.

What difference does it make? Those that do will anyway. It’s pretty delusional to think sitting in-office = working. If that’s the case all the kids at school should pass, right?

It’s because meetings and full calendars of check ins and touch bases is constant and actually is the productive work for an executive. They are the ones wanting productivity for themselves. The byproduct of this executive productivity is it causes the busy work for the people who are lower in the org chart. Busywork for them is a big source of their nonproductive time and what was freed up during mandatory WFH generating the productivity boost.

Then what happened was a lot of the pending and backlog of projects and busyness got moved over to a completed status. But the lack of productivity at the executive levels meant that the project funnel wasn’t keeping up. So the company was at risk of having a ton of people with not enough to do.

This is purely my personal anthropological perspective of the situation having been an active participant working closely with executives making these decisions the past few years as well as talking with colleagues that do the same. I’m aware it’s probably completely BS.

Whatever management’s current whim is represents not only a reasonable but the only effective way to serve shareholder interests, amd to do anything differently would be a irresponsible and anyone disagreeing is objectively working against the interest of the firm, and any prior contrary statements about what is best for the firm are nonoperational and any reference to them is a bad faith distraction.

Oceania, Inc., has always been at war with EastAsia, LLC.

Management and entrepreneurism is incredibly cult-like and I find it increasingly difficult to quietly sit through all their ridiculous sermons.

> I find it funny that when people were required to be home, employers talked about what great productivity they were getting with people at home.

In our case, we do have good, long-standing metrics: we measure how happy our customers say they are with our service. Since the whole point is to have happy, repeat customers and they have no reason to lie about being happy, we can trust this. That went up significantly and sustained itself during the pandemic.

While my employer did initially want to bring people back to the office, they relented after the push back and have been relatively soft and flexible about this, actually opening up a dialog to talk to everyone about what they need and want.

It doesn't hurt that they're looking at some significant cost savings by significantly downsizing our office footprint.

One point to remember is that during the pandemic, customers were much more sympathetic to everyone. The overall quality of customer service has gone done since the pandemic (even in companies that returned to office) and we, the customer, are forgiving of that. Pre-pandemic, we were not nearly as forgiving.

That doesn't seem to have regressed much, though. I do feel like people are more forgiving of home office interruptions since they became more common, but I don't think it makes that much difference. At the end of the day they still need their stuff fixed quickly and want good advice. And at least the current management believes in human capital and keeps good people for a long time, so people generally get that and turnover is rather low.

Yeah, thankfully they weren't trying to play Jack Welch by renting from themselves or some other distracting financial "strategy" involving your office space.

I think the definition of "productivity" is part of the problem. Managers view "productivity" as the ability to bounce ideas off each other and working collaboratively to get traction on hard problems.

This isn't how most engineers write software at the ground level though. Engineers need quiet concentration, free from distraction. Yes, there are hard problems that need collaboration to solve, but that type of interaction can be scheduled when needed. Far from needing to "bounce ideas" off other engineers, most senior engineers are pretty self-sufficient.

There is a different issue at play with junior engineers. They need supervision and that's hard to do unless your on a zoom call with them all day long. This isn't a new problem - it's simply a problem exposed by being remote. When we were in the office, all these junior engineers, were pulling productivity away from your senior engineers. Moving everything back to the office didn't increase productivity, it's actually decreasing it. Commute + sidebar conversations + mentoring junior engineers = less productivity out of your senior engineering staff.

There's definitely a "managers are from mars and engineers are from venus" sort of vibe happening here. Managers need that interaction and collaboration in order to provide oversight and provide direction. Senior engineers need a place to concentrate - and typically that isn't in the office where we have noisy open floor plans.

You can't "manage" people who work remotely the same way you manage people in the office. That's the issue.

Also, you shouldn't have to watch newer employees like a hawk if you've given them clear tasks / projects and expectations. No need to micromanage people.

It's not about managing. It's about the friction to reaching out for help and lost productivity from having to schedule meetings combined with inexperience making it hard to decide which problems are worth the friction of reaching out and which ones aren't. There's also the sense of isolation that being remote gives, because asking for help over a private message makes it look like you're the only one that needs help. All of this is still a problem regardless of clarity of expectations and tasks.

My preferences are likely going to change once I get more experience under my belt but I absolutely feel there are some facets of remote work that benefit senior engineers at the expense of junior engineers.

There can be friction scheduling and holding meetings, absolutely. Starting a meeting friction can be overcome through tools like Slack huddles which basically require one click to join if people are around fairly predictably, but scheduling friction can be reduced with some techniques.

Our remote-first company has a daily standup everyday which shifts everyone’s brain into talking/collaboration mode for that bit. If someone - especially newer or junior engineers - have a question, that is a great opportunity to either have an impromptu discussion, or to have scheduled a discussion about it the previous afternoon jf it wasn’t particularly urgent.

I wonder how much of is just about getting local cities tax breaks, or even state taxes in some cases.

Governments are not ready for the majority of people having the freedom to work anywhere.

The whole foundation of our local and state governments control is based on manageable demographics, we are red or blue, we embrace the old or the new ways, etc., they are not ready for a sudden change in the mix, every local government had worked really hard to keep the status quo.

Our company is mandating a 3-day in office starting soon.

I’m a bit of an exception because I’m in a city that only has a couple hundred employees, but when I do return to the office, it won’t be to collaborate with teammates: I will be joining zoom calls with people in other cities (which was my day-to-day pre-pandemic). Pre pandemic I would travel every 2-weeks to company HQ to be in-person for demo with stakeholders and sprint planning, but even then many people would join via zoom anyway.

I don’t think return for office has anything to do with productivity and more about anxiety around investments in commercial real estate.

The few times I’ve been back it’s worse. Since everyone is on zoom meetings anyway, everyone is just talking all day long making it hard for the other people on zoom meetings at the office to hear what they’re doing. So productivity actually goes down.

All of which makes things worse for the people at home on the zoom meetings.

As soon as a significant fraction of your employees aren’t in office, it starts to become a productivity problem to force people to stay! Well, unless you gave everyone their individual offices with doors. But you can’t do that can you. Because then what would make the senior people special? So you have to use cubes so everyone can hear each other on zoom calls.

Public statements about productivity are rarely negative. No one wants to hire a business with lazy workers who might not fulfill their contract. So public statements have to be positive.

It's reasonable to think in retrospect that, even assuming companies had reasonable measures of productivity and related metrics (which is by no means a given), OF COURSE during the pandemic, they were going to make statements to the effect that "everything is fine/better than we expected."

And, even from a somewhat less cynical perspective, it's reasonable to see a more complicated picture where many things, but not all things, are indeed more or less OK. Overlaid on this is that a lot of companies have cut back on travel etc. budgets so one of the alternatives to people getting together in local offices is at least somewhat off the table.

Changing to work-at-home increases productivity.

Changing to work-at-office increases productivity.

Maybe the Hawthorne Effect actually is real?

I think that there's something else at play - mostly two major factors:

- real estate agencies push for return to office(as they own a lot of office space that's now empty)

- Turns out.. you don't need so many middle managers - without their direct oversight everything just kept working fine. So now you have internal vested interest in return to office for people in power.

I’ve started talking about crystals to attract hot chicks that are already into crystals. Many are, or want to believe, just like researchers want to believe in a room temperature superconductor.

The alpha is that pedantic and over-analytical guys dismiss crystal energy at the expense of their reproductive opportunities, and the way around it is literally just not doing that.

One thing I quickly noticed is that the purpose of all crystals are expected to be the same.

“It absorbs energy and gives out good energy”

So I same the same thing everytime.

Employers must be encountering something similar from some form of stakeholder, such as the board for an analogous self preservation or reproductive opportunity, so the answer is always “increase productivity” every time.

Not sure I follow the logic.

It's because you are over-analyzing it.

It's all about PR to keep stock prices up.

Which employer would ever say: "ah man it's all fucked up. Our productivity is completely gone. We're not getting anything done"

Imagine what that would do the stock prices

The conditions aren't the same. When COVID caused many workplaces to go full WFH, most employees had nothing to do except work and hang out with those in their household. A lot of the increased productivity came from working instead of doing other things. Once things opened up, in aggregate they stopped working as many hours. Ultimately, it was never sustainable.

Satisfied employees are more productive, unsatisfied ones are less productive.

Consult complete, that will be $10000

One aspect is company culture. Where there is no trust, people feel the need to micromanage just to feel in control. Where there is trust, people do what they know best and managers intervene only at say critical moments if needed.

Maybe that's what they said but they were also on the hook for rents or big real estate assets collecting dust.

It's not about productivity just like it's never about "the children."

It's about the desire to control thier investments. They want their investments to work out, so they try to force people back into the office.

Conflict of interest.

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