Expecting return to office will boost worker productivity is 'magical thinking' | Hacker News Reader

Expecting return to office will boost worker productivity is 'magical thinking'

fortune.com

97 pointspg_123436 comments

The coordinated RTO push is about tax breaks that these companies receive for bringing workers into the city. Just another way for the wealthy to not pay their fair share of taxes on the backs of the workers who use their own time and money commuting.

>New Jersey and Texas are states that stand out for spelling out exactly how often employees must work from the office to qualify for tax breaks. Before the pandemic, several New Jersey tax programs required workers to show up at least 80% of the time, and one Texas program set the threshold at 50%.

>Provisions like these were designed to ensure that the jobs boosted local revenue from income, sales and property taxes, and bolstered downtown economies.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-t...

You know - no companies - no employees- no taxes. It is better to get 20% of taxes than 0% and have people move out to places where jobs are.

In the Texas case, they make no property taxes.

^Texas has property tax on individuals and businesses (in fact it’s one of the highest in the nation)

Texas does not have income tax

I think magical thinking gets too bad a rap these days.

When systems get complex enough, data or logic driven decisions aren't really any more reliable than gut feeling. They're just easier to rationalise.

Either this will work, and the companies that resisted Return To Office will be at a competitive disadvantage, or it won't and the companies who advocated for Return to Office will be behind.

Either way, Darwin will punish whoever is wrong.

Magical thinking is a manifestation of the mind's desire for clarity beyond its reach. Instead, we should become comfortable with not knowing. That's the path of honest humility. Not all realities can be knowable and we should accept it rather than making up a false reality to make us feel more comfortable. We're better than that.

Sure, but sometimes you have to make a decision.

> Either this will work, and the companies that resisted Return To Office will be at a competitive disadvantage, or it won't and the companies who advocated for Return to Office will be behind.

Only if there is a competitor making a different choice. This is why I believe RTO decisions will vary by market, as all competitors will eventually follow the efficient choice for their market.

Unless there are network effects involved, and return to office works or not for a particular firm depending on if most other firms returned or not. For example, if firm A forced return, but everybody else not, it is labeled a shitty employer, and gets worse workers on average. If everybody else returns as well, at least it's not left behind on this metric.

Another possibility is that it doesn't matter, and we're only talking about it because someone thinks they can get a few more clicks out of the story.

We received confirmation of rumors at my company that they are pushing for a mandatory 50% RTO on a week.

This came after weeks of the company publishing news, asking for feedback, about our current hybrid working scheme, where most people replied they only go to the office to socialize and it's not a bad thing. Then they posted an announcement that they would try to encourage people to socialize more often at the office.

The first problem? Our office barely has enough space to fit 50% of our workforce (about 2000 employees). And then now I'm being forced to return to the office.

I spoke to some colleagues that we've seen how this was received in big-tech companies. Meta, Google, all lost key figures that decided to quit after RTO was forced on them. The same will happen with my company, very important seniors will leave and now we'll be on a tech debt and forced to find a replacement for those key figures.

Now, this decision wouldn't affect me either way because I go to the office every day. But I go to the office because I like it, because it's a fun environment, I like sitting next to my teammates and other colleagues, talking, going out together for lunch, socializing. The moment I am forced to come to the office to meet some stupid metric and help higher management avoid taxes and get a big paycheck which won't even be shared with the other employees (like me), I will stop going to the office. Because it won't be fun anymore. And that's where I ask, is higher management even fulfilling the stupid metric they are forcing on their employees?

As the article said, it's about choice. It doesn't mean employers can force a RTO only because their employees are happy with the hybrid work scheme and turn out to go to the office 5 days a week. They are happy about having a choice.

So are COLA raises that don’t match actual inflation. Too many and your experienced staff are forced to get a new job salary bump to get back to the buying power you hired them at.

My job directly interfaces with a client that directly sets budgets adjusted for inflation and I directly pointed this out to my boss and they still ignored local inflation.

Most companies are on cruise control and don't care.

Because they don't need to pay based on inflation they need to pay based on the cost of labor.

You guys get raises?

My last raise was before the pandemic.

You didn’t get the 0.75% adjustment last year? ;)

Getting tired of the RTO argument. It's not about productivity.

Bottom line is that some companies/management aren't comfortable with remote work, even if it comes with an efficiency gains/cost savings. Maybe it sounds stupid, but it's their decision to make.

Half their decision.

Workers can obviously decide to make their own decisions WRT RTO if their employer demands it vs seeking new employment.

Serious question - why have we acknowledged that remote schools are bad but remote work is good. I know there are some major differences between school and work but communication and sharing knowledge is fundamental to both. What am I missing here ?

You're not missing anything. You've said that there are some major differences between school and work.

Those major differences are probably why remote schools are bad and remote work is good.

As sibling comments have pointed out, a very important aspect of education is the socialization - to turn someone into a rounded human being. From an Aristotelian point of view this is actually pretty much the primary purpose of education. It should be obvious that socialization happens much more readily when you are in a group in person without technology intermediating everything.

The assumption is by the time you're in the world of work this process has already happened.

A large aspect of school is the social aspect. Learning is secondary, you can learn pretty much anything you want for free, now.

The main reason people work is to make money. The social aspect will always be secondary. Given the choice of remote or in person, most workers will choose remote.

However, many businesses absolutely benefit from work done in person. So it’s up to leadership to decide if their business fits in this category or not.

I've brought this up that 2 days is where I see a benefit with myself and my team. With us 50/50 the weeks where we come in three times everybody is just tired and demoralised.

Anything more than 3 days and we're all essentially spending an extra work day every week just commuting.

Senior management doesn't care. They have strategy objectives and KPIs to hit, and they're not going to hit them if they have to write down their commercial property

Remote work is better for a certain type of worker who has a lot of time to post, so they post a lot about how bad it is. It is worse for another type of worker who’s more likely to make decisions about work from home

When I worked exclusively in the office, I posted online just as much as I do now. Perhaps more, as I was younger with less responsibilities. I highly doubt this has any significant effect on the distribution of pro WFH versus pro RTO posts.

And if you're really that busy in the office (there has been maybe 2 years in my entire career when that was true, and that was while working at a gaming app startup as lead developer with only two developers on the team) that you have no time to post anything, you can always post before or after work, which I did.

children != adults

colleges have all gone back to in person. When they were remote, students were livid about the fact that they were being charged the same amount for remote learning as in person learning

Students get outraged about stuff all the time.

I could understand feeling like part of your tuition is paying for access to stuff on campus and not getting those things though.

I could understand the upset if a university is charging you tuition plus room and board, for remote.

Tuition covers the cost of running the university, classes, support services, and everything else you still need as a remote learner.

Did they really not fire anyone or close any buildings (reducing wear and tear)? It seems like their fixed costs do decrease significantly. Facilities upkeep is incredibly expensive and needs a lot of staff to make happen.

Upkeep has to happen whether or not the building is in use. The supposed decrease in fixed cost is not significantly reduced as a result. Otherwise, the building in question will fall into disrepair.

https://archive.ph/mfZeZ

Remote work is more productive. Office work is more valuable.

I’ll explain. Remote management is a lot more one-way and top-down tasking. It’s possible, but very hard to do it any other way. In-person teams do not require explicit tasking, and they will find consensus on good and bad directions much faster, but the actual work goes slowly.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

You can’t have both. Measuring productivity of individual in-person employees will fail, and measuring value output of remote teams will also fail.

my days in the office are hands down the least productive. First off there’s 3+ hours of driving now - none of which is compensated - so, the frequent interruptions because the pro office folk consider the office a place to socialize, and the less pleasant working environment.

The driving is also incredibly interruptive as now it doesn’t matter if I’m in the flow/mid problem, I have specific times I have to hit the road by or I add another hour to my drive.

All because a bunch of people think their desire to socialize and/or see their ability to control the plebs is more important than getting work done.

Business types will always choose an extreme but simple action over hard but targeted actions. RTO won't fix a bad process. You need to fix your process. Only then will RTO become valuable.

Well so working in office is like a performance improvement plan now?

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