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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Asshole asking everybody but himself to do a hard thing, because he feels like it.

This tone-deaf entitled management bullshit is so, so exhausting. There's no way to answer his empty argument - "I just know its right". Well, good for him.

The real reason I believe? He's worried his bonus will be impacted, so he makes the easy call - casually screw everybody so he can sleep easier about his $1M christmas check.

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Management makes decisions without data all the time. I understand people are personally invested, but sometimes it feels like people can't think about it, and it's all just motivated / wishful thinking.

It's a bet in a way, if they're wrong, they will be "punished" by market forces.

> they

== Everybody who does not want to go to the office, the shareholders and others involved but NOT the one making the decision based on nothing.

> if they're wrong, they will be "punished" by market forces

we live in age of monopoly, market forces no longer punish. in 1990's there were twice as many companies registered on the stock exchange as today

Disappointed this was downvoted initially, you got my +1. Corporate reality in 2023 is creeping ever closer to a Weyland-Yutani plutocratic government where "market forces" are unable to put a dent in shitty corporate behavior.

I have to fly Delta home. They cancelled my connecting flight, moved it to a day later and say "sorry, you can sleep at JFK!" The next time I fly, I've got 1/3 odds Delta will be the only one flying where I need to go.

Rinse and repeat for online merchants. This will have ZERO effect on Amazon's ability to function because employees have ZERO clout in management meetings.

What are you, a communist? The free market will fix that, any day now!

Unironically, millions of people still hold that viewpoint pretty strongly.

Many Libertarians make a point of stating it in discussion as some kind of flex even. I have no idea why, as it is basically a declaration of one's own economic ignorance, but there you have it.

People forget how much it's changed but I think that's spot on.

No I think we’ve seen clearly that management making bad decisions ends up with regular employees getting laid off.

There is no punishment for the individuals making bad bets.

Reminds me about how India 2016 demonetization https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonet... where the argument was this will curtail black money with no data to support over a decision that affect billions of people. There were deaths related to this “I think so” moments

This is exactly what it is in some cases. Bonus. I know about a company where execs bonuses are now based also around how many people they can get back to the office. Of course they are pushing for it.

OK I'm being naive here so educate me - surely the company wants people to produce more, so they need to create those conditions. If they bring people in, some will leave and impact productivity. So management should be careful about pissing off workers - especially with language like this exec has used - they should be doing what works and letting people have flexibility and choices.

As I said I'm being naive, so I am missing something from their way of thinking.

The deep Twitter cuts were a prime example of number of employees / productivity being orthogonal metrics. Sure, they lost a lot of advertisers and suffered some technical issues because of the transition, but it wasn't nearly as bad as everyone had predicted (myself included).

The advertiser loss might turn out to be fatal, but I would argue that was more due to a change in the direction of the company (and leveraging it up with much more debt) rather than personnel loss, per se.

They are cooking the frog. First 1 to 2 days, then as long as you're in 50% in a month. Now 3 days. Most of the people rant but give up at the end and some go elsewhere. The ones who do what they want and work from home do just that. Execs are happy when they can show 50% compliance overall so they get the bonus.

Some execs feel their employees are less productive when remote. There isn't a non-gameable way to measure productivity. I can tell you with certainty who on my team is getting the most stuff done any given week or across a year, but I can't provide data as to why.

If you can't actually show it from concrete evidence, then your certainty may actually be an illusion. I have worked with busy-beaver devs who created as many issues as they fixed, in effect making no impact to the quality of the product, and with three-toed sloth types as well, who took a while to get the work done but after it was done, it stayed done.

I can show you what they got done and walk through my reasoning, but again that isn't data. The busy-beaver's metrics will probably look better despite doing nothing useful.

I think we should bid hours on tasks. If you want to undercut your teammate because they are a sheister, then you can bid it down and call their bluff. You'd need buy-in to automate the obvious stuff so sheister isn't doing make work. And you'd need buy-in to veto bad projects that shouldn't be done to begin with, aka sheister bait projects.

You can't have a team function this way normally, because everything you do relies at least indirectly on your teammates cooperating.

For me it's very easy to measure. When working remotely, I do all my tasks, and if I finish before the en of sprint, I sometimes add something from the backlog I planned to do anyway. When working from the office, I do zero tasks, because the moment someone mentions RTO I change jobs.

For you, yes. For most of my team, they're required to RTO, and they do it. Only a few people (myself included) were allowed to stay full remote, and we were told it's because we're the most productive members and also have shown no "decrease in presence" while WFH.

lol FOR NOW

they RTO and then they polish their resumes, and fill seats while they look for a new job. That's what I'd do. Office Space 'bare minimum' mode.

They already have houses with families in the Bay Area sorta near the office. They aren't going to quit just to be remote. I'm in a different situation, looking to start a family elsewhere.

there's a simple solution to this: pay more for in-office. If it is really more productive, you'll get your money's worth.

I DO NOT CARE if I am theoretically more productive in the office. My price is my WFH price, and you're paying for the amount of productivity you get when I work from home.

If you need more productivity at my depressed WFH wages and nobody will come into the office, enjoy the discount on labor and hire more bodies to make up the difference.

I am mortal and my company is not, therefore, -I- get to decide how productive I am, and the market can set an appropriate price. If you don't like the price, don't hire me! I won't be losing sleep.

Worker productivity isn't simply some fungible resource they can pay per cycle for, and there's no "I" in team. They want FTE teammates working 8/5, that's why they aren't interested in a pay-less-get-less arrangement. I've asked before why I can't take 3mo unpaid leave per year.

Last time I was looking for a job (almost exactly a year ago now) that's pretty much what I told recruiters:

"My expected salary is X; add 20% if they expect me in the office".

It's purely a question of competition: I knew I could land a remote job paying X, and did, so I had no incentive to incur extra costs and lost time to go into an office unless I was paid extra for it. I ended up turning down several offers where people didn't get the memo and thought they could talk me around. In the end I was right about my market rate WFH.

That sounds about right and similar to what I experienced last time I was looking for backup offers. You won't convince an in-office team to take a new remote employee, but you can find partially-remote teams (sometimes even within the same company), only they will offer less money.

Also, my pay was automatically reduced 10% when I went remote, not because they expect less work from me but because the market rate is different now. Not bad actually.

I'm my case I found a company where almost everyone in including the C-suite is almost entirely remote and is spread everywhere. I'd be very cautious about taking a job where being remote isn't the norm because it makes it a lot of extra effort to avoid being sidelined. In that case I might prefer going in.

Yeah, if most are in an office then you can't even trust them saying your job will remain remote. It's mixed where I am. C-suite is partially remote. Some higher-ups aren't remote, but they're in a separate city from my team. Managers on my team used to never come to the office, but lately they have been. And even in-office people are only there 2-3 days a week.

I think the biggest thing reducing my risk is the mix of office locations at this point.

WFH lets you escape crazy high real estate markets. Asking people to RTO in the Bay Area or Seattle should come with a much higher salary to make up for the gigantic housing cost difference.

Even further-out suburbs and small towns near those places can be half the cost or less, not to mention going to the Midwest or the inland West like loads of people have done.

Looking at what pay cut you get moving to each place, it mostly correlates with cost of living like you said, but not exactly.

It’s hard to measure productivity in a non-gameable way at scale no matter where people are. Manipulative social climbers excel at faking productivity in person.

Right, but they can tell how productive their workforce is overall.

Something is very wrong with Amazon management.

They have an employee who has been with them for years, currently kidnapped by Hamas to Gaza[1]. They won't even acknowledge it.

It's a crazy thing not to acknowledge, not even in internal forums.

1: https://www-geektime-co-il.translate.goog/amazon-aws-employe...

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