The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

But I feel like COVID situation triggered stuff that either accelerated existing trends or introduced new problems, and I don't think there's going back.

People quoting productivity drops from new hires during COVID omit insane hiring in tech - implying that remote work is to blame and not their structure inability to scale to utilize those unprecedented numbers of new hires productively. Especially since most of the hiring was aimless "we need to grow headcount to capture the market growth". People getting paid serious money to literally sit around. That's going to cascade in other ways - I feel like entire industry standard of acceptable delivery sinked

Getting people back to the office sounds like a nice narrative because it's relatively easy to fix and corelate.

It's also, conveniently, entirely not the fault of upper management for insane over hiring and underutilization.

As you say, this theory does not make much sense.

If productivity were the goal, then open plan offices would have been abandoned a decade ago after the nth study showing how poor they are for worker health, happiness, and productivity.

I agree, it sounds like a conspiracy theory. Not a lot of evidence.

In accounting terms, leases according to IFRS 16 are recognized as a lease liability and a contra right of use asset for the full term of the lease.

I'm not 100% certain on the rationale of an impairment (as it could be construed as no longer useful) but if these companies aren't using these properties, auditors may force them to impair their leases, meaning large write offs and accounting losses.

It requires no conspiracy: if you imagine that prestige and promotions for middle managers are more about appearances than data (true in my experience), bringing people back to the office is a way to improve one's own standing.

It's pretty easy to walk through a cube farm and observe the workers who report to you, and make the case that you are vital to their efforts. Looking at a list on Slack is just far more abstract.

But there is direct evidence that politicians are influencing corporations to alter return to office policies:

- Mayor of SF asking businesses to pledge to implement RTO policies: https://sfist.com/2022/03/03/mayor-breed-would-like-you-back...

- Mayor of NYC basically doing the same: https://archive.is/si6xd

I don't see how this is different from consensus among actors, or rather it looks the same.

The label or attribute conspiracy is a tool used to discredit findings or positive correlations.

I see now that you think elite is overloaded and programmed to have conspiracy relation. This is not true though according to m-w: "a group of persons who by virtue of position or education exercise much power or influence".

If you pay attention to main stream media, you will see almost all forms of dissent attributed to conspiracy.

A lot of financial news outlets have been pointing out the risk of corporate real estate risks.

Making the connection to back-to-office doesn't have to be a coordinated conspiracy.

It just has to be a few middle managers being like "Hey Bob in Dev, this is Steve from Operations, I'm in a real bind with the empty office on 5th, can you see about filling it. Sure Man."

However this article did not present any evidence of any given group of elites doing this, for this reason, so...

Those executives absolutely have an incentive to be pushing RTO because of their commercial real estate risk.

They also have an outsized bullhorn and the industry tends to watch what they do and report over what they do, and they have PR budgets which can get articles written the way they want. Bezos outright owns the WaPo.

Further down the ladder that PR will land on businesses where it just reinforces the attitudes of management towards RTO and gives them arguments to make in meetings. The people in those meetings don't necessarily have any skin in the commercial real estate game, but if they've spent the past 3 years reading articles about remote work and RTO published in the business press influenced by those who do have a whole lot of skin in the game, how do you attribute causality?

They way I'd look at it is that you can't take it in isolation and you need to step outside of naive root cause analysis that looks at the manager in the company who has no skin in the game and says that they can't possibly be influenced by the commercial real estate issues. For any individual "atom" of a manager in this analysis their own biases will more strongly influence what they're doing, but everyone in that room has been reading the same articles, and industrial propaganda and PR actually is effective at shaping attitudes. They are blowing on the dice, or turning up the temperature, or whatever analogy you like that draws a parallel to statistical mechanics and the bulk behavior of matter in the presence of individual randomness.

I have no idea if the reality is more that, or more the banal "nobody is organising anything like this and suggestions to the contrary are just conspiracy theories, the bosses genuinely believe what they're saying".

I currently have a boss who appears to sincerely want people back in the office; he doesn't want to be the CEO of a 100% remote company.

If venture funded companies actually wanted to run efficiently to maximize their investment, the the last thing many should do is setup offices in posh downtown areas, yet before all of this they often signed leases in high rent spaces. Why did you think that happened so often before this wave of remote work?

Perhaps the author missed "US inflation means families are spending $709 more per month than two years ago" here at HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37112604

Well, for one thing, the people who own real estate and the people who run Fortune 500 companies are the same people. What do you think the CxOs and board members do with their money after they cash out their outsized stock grants? Hide it under the mattress? No, they invest it, and often they invest it in whatever's "cool" that year - in this case commercial real estate. Even if the exact same person doesn't have feet in both camps, there are likely to be favors going back and forth between them. So, renting isn't the smartest move for chairperson X's company? That's OK, says building-owner Y. We'll make it up with deals from the other companies I own, or you can get a special bonus when you jump ship to join our other friend Z's company because they owe me a favor.

It's not a conspiracy theory when the possibilities are legion. No coordination is required; it's more of an emergent network-effect kind of thing. I've seen people I know[1] make these kinds of deals. In general they fall below the "breach of fiduciary duty" line, but even when they're clearly crooked they're unlikely to be prosecuted. Even the DAs and such who aren't hoping to walk through the same revolving door lack the resources to prosecute such complex and uncertain cases. They have more career-enhancing things to do. We could argue about how much it happens, or how much it's driving the push for RTO, but the ultra-dismissive tone of some commenters here smells just as fishy as anything coming from the other side of the discussion.

[1] No, not friends. I like my friends moral. But I'm not 100% in control of who moves into my neighborhood, who joins the clubs or engages in the activities I do, etc. Sometimes they mention these things directly, because I can pass as a business-savvy person and they don't even realize these things are wrong. Sometimes I overhear them, because braggarts tend to be loud. If you've never moved beyond the semi-rich techie circle and met people in the really-rich business circle, you might not appreciate just how bad these people tend to be.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-30/wall-stre...

> “All of our corporate leaders need to get in the room and say, let’s come up with a minimum,” Adams said in an interview with Bloomberg on Thursday, referring to how many days a week employees should be in the office. “If it’s four days a week, it’s four days a week.”

You must not have been long on this world if you don't realize by now that of course most CEOs make decisions based on the same cargo cult nonsense you follow to pick the ultimate in SPA build systems.

More content than you might expect, in a variety of “reputable” news outlets as well a veritable plague of blogs, is paid placement. Either through the outlet directly, or through a contributing writer that has (not all that) covert connections to PR firms.

PR pieces are often very subtle and difficult to detect because they tend to be on orthogonal subjects to the intended ”drive by” messaging.

After engaging PR and marketing firms for a few years now and seeing the kind of things that show up on their price lists, I have near zero marginal faith in media as a source of unbiased information. You end up seeing the fingerprints of priming, perverse incentive and commercialised bias in nearly everything.

Why do you think all those article writers write? Few of them are directly compensated.

In the future as the leases expire we may see shrinking and a slow return to more remote work as companies reduce the square footage of the leases.

Smart managers know that eliminating rent from balance sheets improves the bottom line.

Biden was told by elites this was about to become a trillion dollar shit sandwich for the economy during a rocky period of high inflation and stagnation. He symbolically called all the federal workers back into offices (already owned by the government) as a show of "the right thing to do" but otherwise any company outside the fortune 50 will absolutely use this as an opportunity to tell their landlord to pound sand.

There is nothing that can be done.

The author is either a straight up liar working to subvert what little is left of American capitalism. Or they're a conspiracy theory whacko who doesn't know the slightest thing about "the elite," or any of the people/factions that comprise it.

He’s just a myopic asshole.

Manager with be seen as the slur that it should in 50 years.

Most managers were people doing stuff who got promoted into 'managing' stuff with no obvious output or direct value. It's not really surprising that a chain of these people would knee-jerk react weirdly in a situation they felt exposed as not being that useful / have their limited people a management skills tested in a situation they themselves likely didn't experience.

Eh… do you have evidence for this, or is it just what you believe to be true? In general, if it _was_ true, you’d expect competition to provide you with cheaper bandwidth than them.

What a coincidence.

Less productive, compared to what though? In most offices I've seen cubicles and open-plan spaces reign supreme, along with flex-desk policies. Which means that even when all team members are in the office, they are not working face to face. So while you may be correct that teams could be more productive if they're all in the same space, the typical office is not optimized to achieve that.

Also, teams never need to be face-to-face for the entirety of the work: in my experience, only design and planning benefits from face-to-face coordination; for deep productive work the benefits of quick verbal checks is negated by the loss of focus from quick verbal checks from others.

Most of our interactions are messaging (Slack, IM, etc.), with occasional Zoom calls.

I T . I S . V E R Y , V E R Y , S L O W . I have never worked this slowly in my life. I literally cannot rush ahead, at my usual pace, because I make assumptions that are often wrong.

A few days ago, we had an in-person meeting, at a local diner, and talked about the app for a couple of hours.

I came out of that meeting with a very complete kanban list. I think it may have been our most productive meeting, ever.

I need to work on my own, at home, but I also need to have real (non-Zoom) facetime with my team.

But that's just me.

I can imagine this argument being true if and only if the team is all based in the same office, which isn't necessarily common. My team is spread across two countries and four cities, my being in the office means I'd be co-located with about 1/3rd of it currently. I think though if you are on a team that requires a lot of collaboration with people outside of where your office is (either a closely related team or people on your team) then you're better off WFH than in an open office, because calls are so much more painful in the office, especially if multiple people on the same call in the same office. The amount of managing muting your mic to prevent office noise and echoing and etc is such a drain compared from WFH

People lean heavily on anecdotes when it comes to worker productivity. But actual data is much more nuanced on the matter.

People seem to have completely forgotten how worker productivity actually went up a noticeable amount during a time when most people were working at home – and under some very unusual circumstances mind you – and actually began declining after restrictions ended and companies started asking people to return on a hybrid or full-time basis.

It's very fucking hard to take a relatively random group of people who are used to working together in person, throw them behind screens with little more support than Slack and Zoom, and try to manage them remotely.

It's much easier to take a group of people used to pro-active written communication, "if it's not monitored then it doesn't exist", async-first, https://nohello.net/en/ , actual remote work culture, and manage them remotely.

See, management is about alignment, and alignment is about 80% culture and politics, very little about what actually needs to be done. If you hire people who culturally fit into remote work, you'll have an easier time managing them. If you hire the opposite, it'll be hell. And you can do about as much to change someone's (work) cultural predisposition as you could change someone's (personal identity) culture.

I'm not sure why people are behaving like it's either 100% remote or 100% in the office, and they are locked in a cage.

There are PLENTY of companies who have decided to become fully remote and remain that way indefinitely. If remote opportunities are important to you and your lifestyle, there are plenty of options for you.

Otherwise, I haven't heard of any company requiring 100% RTO all 5 days of a week. Everyone, even Apple, a company notorious for requiring in-office work, has relented and moved towards hybrid.

I also agree that 100% remote work is not this panacea that's always better than going into the office at least some of the time. If my team were local we'd be getting together semi-regularly--especially with travel/in-person meeting budgets tight. While it's not universal, a lot of younger people just out of school seem to struggle with the lack of in-person connections.

Is corporate real estate price the primary driving force? Perhaps not, but it’s certainly a driving force. There’s no shortage of articles and opinion pieces expressly lamenting the state of corporate real estate and businesses that catered to 9-5 office worker.

I’d say the main thing that’s driving RTO is ego. THE FAANGs built multibillion dollar vanity offices right before the pandemic. It’s a personal insult to these CEOs that the monuments to their greatness are empty. This plays out at a smaller scale down the ladder. Many people want to see their “human resources” as an ego trip.

I heard of one tech exec say about RTO, it’s just easier to collaborate when you can grab someone after a meeting for a quick chat. “What am I supposed to do on a video call? Get on another video call?”

Yeah dude. That’s literally what everyone did if you couldn’t just wait for everyone to hang up on the current one.

Butts in seats, not the output is what feels right and is at least somewhat measurable.

Given the track record, a wager that there will be giant bailouts requested is almost a certain win, and that some portion of those bailouts will accompany graft-corruption under the covers. Lots of built infrastructure that was expensive to build in its' day, but not crucial now, will be lost to water.

Maybe this will spur innovation in building for buildings that can easily be converted between the two.

But it's not unreasonable to assume fear of loss as a motivation, at all. However, what's the link between the people that can actually re-implement work-from-office and those holding all those office buildings?

Leverage and derivatives completely turn this assumption on its head.

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/downtown-sf-office-bu... https://www.globest.com/2023/06/07/wells-fargo-sells-san-fra...

You can tear the buildings down and build new ones, but that will take a decade to get permitted, if you're in a construction permissive city.

I’m not justifying the for-back-to-work, but to point out the vested interests fighting against remote workers.

This is the other side of "I'm so much more productive with WFH". Everyone who values WFH should be asking themselves how they will help their company measure productivity. Over time companies will find new ways to manage productivity, possibly by restructuring work to make measurement easier even if the tasks have to change or by reducing labor costs to make unit productivity less important.

The arbitrage from offshoring is much narrower than most people think. You mostly get what you pay for and companies can easily waste a lot of money and time trying to go the low-cost more-employees route.

So why aren't all these companies cutting salary costs by 90%? That's a huge, huge amount of money. The stock price would go berserk. Dividends would soar. The C-suite would see incredible increases on their wealth. So if all these jobs can be done for 90% less, PLUS the savings of having no expensive office lease costs, why aren't they?

Further, timezone-friendly offshoring is about 70-80% of the cost and comes with larger organizational complexity. Good (not mythical 10x, mind you - I mean good by standard definitions) developers are expensive no matter where they live.

- Time zones - Security - Language barrier - Work culture - Employment laws

And the list goes on.

The devs themselves can be cheap, but by the time you've jumped through many of the hoops to actually get them employed for you - they might not longer be THAT cheap.

You think commercial real estate isn’t disproportionately owned, directly or indirectly, by the narrow haut bourgeoisie?