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Comment by tschellenbach | Hacker News Reader

I think it's funny how HNews is filled with this type of content. While there are also many posts about people not working at all remotely or working multiple jobs. I think we all have friends who work multiple roles or do nothing remotely.

So it's not exactly surprising that companies are stopping with remote work, or at least are becoming careful with remote work.

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> I think we all have friends who work multiple roles or do nothing remotely.

I have a hard time believing this take. I work at a fully remote company. Our calendars are public so everyone can see what everyone elses meeting schedule is. We have GitHub so you can certainly see the activity of others. We have CI systems so you can see deploys kick off. We have OKRs so you can see business objectives being met.

It would have to be a pretty extraordinary set of circumstances, maybe outright reckless laziness that would also provide cover for people in the office who do nothing, in order to cover for someone doing absolutely nothing. I think the idea that there are remote workers sitting around soaking up beaucoup bucks while doing nothing is a projection of incredible levels of insecurity.

In my own experience, companies that do RTO mandates fall into one of two categories:

- They have outstanding investments in real estate that act as collateral for other debts that they do not know how to cover yet.

- They have extreme dysfunction in their middle management arm, to the extent that peoples productivity is almost entirely based on presence rather than the merit of metrics.

> maybe outright reckless laziness that would also provide cover for people in the office who do nothing, in order to cover for someone doing absolutely nothing.

Yep, we all know that would never happen. Not in tech. Never!

My point was that the condition of not knowing how to grade performance will not change when you bring people back into an office. It will just reinforce the belief that butt-in-seat is productivity for the companies that already believe that.

Lets just be real - it's way easier to coast on full remote and for management to hide that or maintain plausible deniability that they didn't know it was going on.

> They have outstanding investments in real estate

This argument has never made sense to me. Businesses don't want offices and most lease them for the long-term. It's a cost of doing business they begrudgingly pay for so employees have a space for equipment, away from family, etc.

Aside from the fact that everyone wants to be away from their family is fundamentally flawed, here's some articles specifically talking about the relationship between tech companies and real estate:

https://fortune.com/2023/10/12/atlassian-rto-hybrid-work-rea...

https://fortune.com/2023/11/12/return-to-office-hybrid-work-...

> The survey also found that 80% of companies have already downsized their office since the pandemic, and 82% are worried about being able to keep their current one, whether that’s due to a recession or an underutilization of space.

> everyone wants to be away from their family is fundamentally flawed,

I didn't say that. Whether we want to be with our family or not, the business believes it's a distraction.

How does downsizing contradict anything I said? The logic that they want to force people to the office to justify the payment doesn't make sense. Employees are the cost they they are trying to optimize by having the office in the first place.

You’ve been out of the office too long if you think bringing back employees fixes the problem of freeloaders

People literally can't agree on anything. Meanwhile, roughly 100% of companies are cutting back on remote work. It's not a cult or some conspiracy, it just has real problems and companies are responding to that. Does it work for some people, yes. Will it work better in the future, probably. Does it cause massive problems for large parts of the workforce today: definitely.

100%? Is gitlab still remote? I know there are many others.

In my view and experience it works great for many companies. No massive problems.

I don’t think anyone is seriously suggesting it’s a cult or a conspiracy (though I’m sure there is some coordination), but that doesn’t mean it’s not mostly fad or trend driven vs data driven.

IME I’ve worked in offices where at least 20% if not more did absolutely nothing. I mean literally nothing, not that they were doing things that just weren’t visible to me. It has a lot more to do with company culture and performance management than onsite/offsite. I’m not against the idea that the proportion of people who can succeed with remote work is lower, but most of the RTO push seems to be more to do with current management fads than anything else.

Even in this thread there are comments saying it’s some sort of scheme to prop up failing real estate and similar nonsense. So yes, it is in fact a moderately common belief.

The idea that RTO is tied to real estate in a multitude of ways is not nonesense:

https://fortune.com/2023/10/12/atlassian-rto-hybrid-work-rea...

https://fortune.com/2023/11/12/return-to-office-hybrid-work-...

So two articles written by one dude that literally contain a few words that speculate some nonsense. No hard data. Did you even read this yourself? Who is losing space because it's underutilized and why?

This is an a bandwagon fallacy with no reason or justification given

So you do acknowledge they exist?

I personally miss the air cover working from the office provides for doing nothing. Way easier to seem productive just by existing.

Freeloaders aside, can’t employers see which companies you’re employed by with a simple background check? If employees are working multiple jobs, would that not be the fault of the employer?

What about the people in office that were net drains on development? You know the types: the water cooler camper. The constant small conversation maker. The hovering micromanager.

They all are on slack and can't wait to jump on a video call with you

Not in my experience. And in the now-smaller number of cases where they do bother you, it's much easier to say "not now" in polite wording than in person. WHO allows much more control of your schedule and priorities and how much time and effort you spend on each request.

*WFH

Not sure where I got 'WHO' from.

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