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Comment by chis | Hacker News Reader

Title continues “…future of work experts predict”

I wonder if HN will ever consider the possibility that return to office DOES increase productivity. These companies probably understand the massive trade off they’re making when they force RTO - lose a decent percentage of workforce due to attrition, but get the remaining workforce in person. Maybe they are just betting on the right side of that equation to have more value.

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Gist of the article seemed to be:

- top concern for CEOs when remote = productivity

- top concern for CEOs the coming year following RTO = productivity

So, not HN news, but the sample set polled by Atlassian to gauge that CEO sentiment.

The implication of wanting people to RTO for efficiency, and to then still be concerned about efficiency is interesting

If something is a top concern it's not particularly interesting more than one action is taken about it.

Good point, nonetheless the RTO is clearly not a silver bullet. Necessary but not sufficient at least, arguably not necessary

In a world where software developers stopped writing any code at all you could make the same exact statement about how software developers writing code again isn't a silver bullet to productivity and therefore maybe not necessary while also still ignoring any actual consideration of the productivity impact of the change or actual necessity of it in achieving the overall amount of needed change. Sure, it gives no guarantee the developers are going to be productive as the business needs because of this one change... but that isn't actually say anything about how necessary it was or wasn't to get them to write code again as part of that path.

To be clear, I'm firmly against RTO myself and I think there are plenty of data points when it comes to actual measured productivity that back that view. In accordance, it's the measures of productivity and notes like "Only one in three executives with an in-office mandate are convinced that their in-office policies have had a positive effect on productivity." which carry the meaning from this article. It's completely unrelated to the test of the straw man argument "the only thing a business needs to do is have workers in an office and it will have no other concerns to address" as the measure of either the success or necessity of RTO policies.

Please correct me if wrong, if I understand you correctly, you are essentially saying that managers/executives are effectively 'flailing' in the name of increasing productivity - they're trying anything/everything*. Because of this, it is expected for productivity to remain a top concern.

* Though, that anything/everything is perhaps more largely classical productivity techniques, like RTO rather than some other novel strategy. (So, it's not really anything/everything, I'm more thinking techniques that one would learn in a MBA school how to increase productivity)*

I am positively surprised to see this as the top comment. For subjective topics, people have a bias to believe in what they would like to be reality, discarding all negative evidence.

I am all for the freedom of WFH, I see many positive aspects to it, if given the choice I will pick “flexible”, but it’s crystal clear to me that, when people are not working in particularly exciting projects, productivity will take a hit. Creative brainstorm is worse remotely and it’s easier for people to isolate themselves socially.

Tbh it’s mainly the large companies that can’t figure out what they need to do to diversify.

You mean gain market share.

At some point the problem is how do these entities play nicely with other entities.

What is a "future of work expert"? How can anyone be an expert on the future?

Experts who are predicting on the future of work.

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