There's More Proof That Return to Office Is Pointless
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
Anecdotally this has been pretty clear. Even the language management coaches RTO in is more stick than carrot. More and more it's announced alongside layoffs, in terms of "you better do it, because", rather than "we want the collaborative environment fostered by RTO" kind of phrasing.
Cool stuff, can't wait for the employment market to turn again and the ego trip ends.
Reminds me again of Josh Wolfe posting twitter chants of "suits! suits! suits!" as the RTO wave started 12-18 months ago. Clearly if thats the mindset, its a punishment & capital re-asserting power over labor.
In their defense, it's hard to take the latter seriously when the entire office is still on Zoom calls for every single meeting.
I remember being on an all-hands call announcing 4 day RTO where the big boss was literally in a rural satellite office either in his own home or with like 5 desks for whatever personnel he stationed there for himself. The office is not even on the company intranet site.
Similarly to my prior company picking an HQ2 based on where the CEO wanted to move due to his preferences & spouses job.
This isn't I think a bad state of affairs. If remote is more productive then companies will eventually switch over. If remote isn't more productive then they won't. If it's a wash then the people who earn the right to be remote will do so. The rest will go into the office. Life is full of earned rights like this. No sense in getting worked up about it. If you want to be remote then earn the right to be so.
I think your faith in companies acting rationally is about ten orders of magnitude higher than my own.
I think it does matter to you and many others in terms of your possible opportunities. If less companies have a policy that allows remote work, the companies that are even able to hire you are less and your opportunities are more limited than they otherwise would be. Fishing in a larger pond is in your best interest.
I worked remote for years before covid, but I believe the way I earned that opportunity was by working in the office with those same people for a few years to earn their trust. Asking new potential employers who don't know me to trust me like that I think would result in fewer opportunities.
They are, and they don't have longevity because of it. A company listed on the S&P 500 in the 1950s had an average lifespan of 61 years. By 2016, that had fallen to just 18 years. You can hide inefficiencies for a while, but the piper needs to be paid eventually. Productivity matters.
The companies may not literally switch to a particular mode of work, but the market will eventually cull any company that is falling behind in productivity. The net result is the same.
The first will RTO. The second will permit WFH with good compensation. The last will be offshored. We’re presently figuring out the divides, with a strong bias on the coasts towards domestic layoffs and offshoring experimentation in software development.
The missing category, jobs where WFH is a clear win, continues to elude. From what I’ve seen, it’s dominated by niche groups of ultra-elite workers providing unique services within otherwise mixed work environments. (Disclaimer: I do this.)
Which applies to most people on HN.
Sure? The point is WFH provides a working template that expands where it works, and where it’s worth trying.
There have to be companies where the C-suite people can look at the rental expense and see "money that could go straight to the bottom line, and make us look good for doing it", right? If WFH/RTO is a draw, those companies ought to financially out-compete companies with power-tripping or incompetent managers that demand RTO, right? Smart leaders (don't laugh; there are a few) have to figure this out eventually, don't they?
It’s honestly a bit disheartening seeing all of our older peers working from home all the time whilst simultaneously pushing an agenda of “network network network”. Of course we all see the benefits of a WFH / hybrid workplace but I’m sure everyone can admit that a conversation on Teams just isn’t as effective as in person.
People pushing the WFH agenda tout its benefits on productivity, but I argue that it’s detrimental in the long run because the lack of cohesion in teams will lead to more and more sticking points and blockers.
It’s all wonderful if you’re retiring in 10 years and you’ve already built your network, but for us younger people it’s definitely taking its toll.
The point is you don't need to be physically present together to create a solid *professional* network. If your aim are more about building personal network (like making friends), then yes you need an in-office job. To me, I draw a very distinct line between professional and personal life, and in my 15+ years of professional life, I never got into sour relationship with my coworkers because of that.
Since I've returned to office back in September, I've talked to other human beings in person precisely 3 times for a total of 45 minutes all together. And only one of those conversations was actually related to my job. And, that one in person meeting later caused a problem because the meeting was not recorded so we could not refer back to it when we needed to (all of our zoom meetings are auto recorded and stored in a place we can easily refer back to them).
I know that there are some jobs where people do need to collaborate in person, but for those of us who do not need to do so, return to office is so stupid.
Machining as a general practice is quite well suited to working from home. Living in an agricultural community, which as an industry demands a fair amount of machining services, I have several neighbours who make their living as machinists working from home.
I think this part of the problem deserves a lot more attention. There is a social contract aspect to employment and that only works when all the players think things are fair.
It simply cannot be good for the health of the economy if lots of important jobs are undesirable because they can't be done remotely and, meanwhile, the remote workers are sitting on the beach.
I suppose the invisible hand can correct for this to some extent but I think WFH and work-life balance is probably more valuable to most than higher salary.
If roles were reversed, maybe a programmer would quit to go flip burgers in order to be at home, but would a burger flipper quit to program at home where they otherwise would not quit to program in an office?
I suspect if the burger flipper had an inclination towards programming, they would quit to become one either way. So the social contract may not be impacted all that much.
1) Most people want to work from home, enough that they would feel significant envy of those who do even if their own job is one that cannot logistically do that (eg, plumber).
2) The people working from home are doing so in such opulent luxury that it creates more envy on top of that. ("...sitting on the beach")
It's quite plain from this forum alone—a forum which is heavily skewed toward knowledge workers of various types, and especially computer programmers, a job which, in terms of its basic requirements, can unquestionably be done from home—that if #1 is true, it is not by a vast margin. Many people clearly like going into the office. Many people with jobs involving in-person manual labor clearly love their jobs.
I think that the kind of "fairness" you mention in your second line is, indeed, very important—but I think that it's more about "you could be letting me do XYZ, like they are, but you're preventing me for arbitrary or selfish reasons," not "they're doing XYZ, but due to something fundamental about my circumstances, that's impossible for me." That is to say, it's more important for everyone whose job can be reasonably made remote to have the option to do so, than for every job in the world to have that option, including the ones where it's physically impossible. People are generally pretty good at understanding the inherent tradeoffs in such things, especially when they come to them after the initial transition has taken place and make an informed choice (obviously there's going to be more friction in the transition time—I don't think that's avoidable).
In short, I don't think there's more to worry about here than the already-existing (and likely permanent, at least until we get true UBI or something) state of things, that some people who have fewer options in the career they can choose to go into feel resentful of those who have more such options.
Anecdotal, but whenever the topic of work comes up among my friends and neighbors, and I disclose to them that I work from home, 100% of them say things like "Wow, good for you!" and "You're so lucky!" and 0% of them so far have said "Sorry to hear that... you must really miss your commute and face to face meetings!"
If you, instead, told that you were locked in your bedroom from 9-5 and if you so much as stop moving your mouse you will be instantly fired, "I'm sorry" would assuredly follow. It is not the "from home" part that you are being congratulated on.
Human contact... at least some people miss that. No, Teams is not the same.
But I'm surprised to hear that you think "nobody misses face-to-face meetings". At least in my office that seems to be the only reason anyone shows up -- people pop by the office when they have discussions, presentations, collaborative design sessions, etc and WFH otherwise. In several cases someone has explicitly polled the group chat the day before to find out who is thinking about to coming in -- if enough attendees plan to join remotely then we typically switch the whole meeting to be a dial-in only so it doesn't end up being one person calling in from an empty conference room and everyone else at home.
They'd say things like "That's great for you—I would never want that," or "Man, I could never work from home—our place is too small," or one of the various other perfectly legitimate reasons people have for preferring in-office work (that I don't happen to share, but still understand).
Again: the problem is with people whose jobs could allow them to work from home, who want to work from home, but who are not permitted to work from home.
That's not a problem with the people who work from home, and the solution isn't mandating office work for everyone. That's a problem with the employers who won't permit it, and the solution is unions.
A union is only a solution where workers are trying to screw over each other to get a leg up. The classical example is where a worker accepts lesser pay to ensure that they get the job over the guy beside him who wants more money. A union sets up a 'brotherhood' where the workers mutually agree to not undercut each other like that, allowing them to maximize their benefit.
Unions are not effective where the company is driving the bus. Going back to the classical example, a company that has decided that the work is worth $x and not a penny more, no union is not going to eke out more than $x. If a company is hell bent on the office being strictly necessary, there is nothing a union can do to change that.
Only if a worker is trying to screw over another worker by dutifully showing up to the office, where the company would otherwise be lenient towards WFH if that were their only choice, might a union be effective. Granted, perhaps you misspoke and this is what you really meant?
But that questions how effective the 'brotherhood' is when people are isolated from each other. It is one thing to honour your promise to other workers when you have to see them every day and face their scorn if you break the promise and continue to be an asshole. It is quite another when you have no connection to the other 'brothers' whatsoever – where you have probably never met, and may not even know that they exist. Unions are usually quite protective to ensure that doesn't happen. There is good reason why a software developer isn't normally welcome into a teachers union, for example.
What successful WFH-focused unions that have stood the test of time can we look at?
The various farmer unions fit the bill, perhaps, but I'm not sure they have proven to be all that effective. Farmers are quite good at screwing each other over and there isn't much reprisal when they do. The farmer unions that are enshrined by government rule fare better, but no doubt only because of a third-party (the government) holding the 'brotherhood' together. That is not quite the same as a 'brotherhood' by first-party accord.
Then find an owner/employer who gives you what you want. However an owner/employer has the right to want their work force in the office. I guess the staff that want WFH are not a large enough body to have employers accommodate them or warrant a union. AI and an increasing skilled temp worker pool probably dilute it even further. From someone who has had both manual labor and tech jobs, I am hoping the manufacturing sector revitalizes in the US. We need real things being made and the people with the skills to make them, repair airplanes and the other stuff we depend uoon, buy or make, and a more balanced work force.
Just one more thing to make those people unfortunate enough to find themselves in certain ruts to feel defeated by.
There are, of course, a myriad of variables that come into play for whether or not working physically near someone is more efficient than not.
Hyperbole is a bad thing in almost every case, in my opinion. And it is primarily used in the modern era to incite rage and misunderstanding between parties.
I don't think articles like this should be on HN.
Setting aside a possible uninteresting conversation about the semantics of the word proof and discussions of the nature of falsifiable hypotheses that were last interesting when we were in junior high, zero average change in stock price or negative average change in stock price would be a strong signal that return to office is pointless. If the statistical significance of the result were strong enough, I would absolutely consider such a result "proof" that "return to office" is "pointless." This research may or may not clear that bar (it's hard to tell from the linked summary).
My hypothesis is that for many employees, the commute distances are long, relocation requirements onerous, not to mention costs like childcare, etc that pile up.
I suspect thought that the management / exec class doesn't feel these pressures. They can afford to live downtown with minimal commute and may already be paying for many of the services that allow them greater mobility
On the development side, I also think there are benefits to being in the office. I sit right by my bosses, bosses, boss. He's very busy, but we still have small talk. When it comes time to promotion, there is very real benefit to having that relationship, whether you like it or not. Now I am more goal oriented where I see promotions as a sign of success for myself. Not the case for everyone, and there is nothing wrong with that.
Now the thing I hate about the conversations of working in the hybrid/remote world is the emphasis on making remote workers feel included. I have nothing against people who choose to work fully remote, but a benefit to being in the office is that its easier to connect with people. That's why I do it. Just like there are benefits to working from home, this is one of the benefits of working in office. I feel like this often gets overlooked and people are surprised that they feel disconnected when they aren't in the office. I have become good friends with my coworkers who also go into the office, and barely talk to the who don't.
Also: My wife was actually from Rotterdam so each office visit is combined with a trip to my in-laws. I stay for one night so my travel is purely outside of the daily commute hours.
I only pick companies where I am allowed to work from home.
Nobody thinks that 90 minutes “is not a long drive”.
Second, even in large campuses (HQ of the company), many buildings, most people can't find a conference room to meet (they are almost always booked), and lot of them just webex from their desk because meetings are back to back, you won't have the 5 minutes it takes to walk to the conference room in the next building. Rarely do people work with just a few people around them. People work with others in different buildings, locations, countries, timezones. When this is ok, WFH is perfectly ok.
It isn't that companies want RTO at all costs -- if they can lower labor costs by at least 30% then executives seem to get over their antipathy for remote work quickly.
Whereas in my experience, most of the employees who wanted to work remotely expected comparable salaries and employment benefits to what they earned when they were in the office. Ultimately most of them ended up complying with the RTO mandate without even demanding a raise.
Commute plus office rhythm is rarely as efficient a WFH. In Office does enforce some rhythm, makes you change your mind a bit more, but you're now forced to endure the bad sides of toxic people. Warning, online streaming platform means that the same toxic people can now torture you via WebRTC.. stay strong :)
> Your manager may suggest that returning to the office is imperative for the company’s success, workplace culture, and overall productivity. However, there’s a growing body of evidence suggesting that’s bullshit.
The link under “growing body of evidence” is to a study of a 4 day work week and has nothing to do with WFH or RTO.
> studies that have shown remote work is very productive
The link under “remote work is very productive” says:
“A study comparing productivity before, during and after an extended stint of remote work suggests information worker productivity isn't negatively impacted by remote working.”
which is very different from what is implied in the text.
> and RTO mandates could be causing a productivity slump
This is referring to a drop in labor productivity figures post pandemic which shot up during the pandemic. It’s well known that the spike at the beginning of the pandemic and the subsequent reversion is a statistical artifact resulting from the fact that the labor force working in person jobs such as restaurant and retail workers which are lower paying reduced drastically pushing up the average productivity by reducing the number of people in the below average jobs. Once retail and restaurant workers started working again the average dropped again.
The most likely reality is that we simply don’t know what works well and what doesn’t. It will take time to sort it out. But misleading screeds like this from someone whose clearly invested on one side do not help at all.
> we do not find significant changes in firm performance in terms of profitability and stock market valuation after the RTO mandates.
THEN LAYOFF
ELSE REWARD
WFH is the biggest equalizer of geographic opportunity, decreases physical disability impact, decreases carbon footprint, improves meritocracy, decreases opportinities for bullying and mobbing and other power play. Increases chances of mothers being able to work. You name it, this ticks all boxes.
Why haven't they already??
Do you lock the doors to the office once everyone has arrived?
If the employee is underperforming it's totally unrelated consideration. If not, this is a discussion of why you are employing one. To do a job for you or to sit in 8 hours for you?
You need to start thinking on why you are paying. If someone can fill in 10 jobs' requirements at the same time, none of the employers should be concerned. Or only be concerned why they need only 1/10th of that employee?
Being in the office or being remote does not really change the fact.
Edit: wfh also means an office ( if you have kids at home it’s the only viable option ) now so a bigger house /flat but I won’t get the corresponding pay rise.
I’ve seen some or all of the above apply to various people. It doesn’t apply to everyone obviously, some people are perfectly happy with wfh.
I personally need a bit of both !
I grant that some people might experience those things, but I reject that we should expect all, most, or even many people to experience these things. I know it can't possibly be all, because I personally experience none of them. Moreover, it's easy to see counterarguments or mitigation strategies for every one of these.
Remote comes with benefits. Naturally, it also comes with costs. The same is true for onsite and hybrid as well, of course. For me, the questions are:
- What is the cost benefit comparison for these models?
- Can the costs be mitigated?
In my view, the cost benefit ratio is far more advantageous for remote and the costs can all be mitigated.
My background is I have a short commute, my home is small (with 3 kids with my wife who stays home with them), and my office space is great (I have my own personal office but also freedom to work anywhere on the campus via laptop). My work is about half physical and half computer normally, but mostly has been computer lately.
The workforce has a median age past 50. They (especially senior staff) do not use the collaboration tools. When I write a document for review, some of the reviewers will literally print it off to make markup on it, then email the scanned document. They’re not responsive to the online chat, they are available only occasionally when in the office. People are usually working multiple projects at a time, critical review work is not given an explicit time budget (supposed to be “white space”) and often whether they decide to get to your issue depends on how they’re feeling at the moment. This increases the latency of the review/fix cycle to one or two days at least.
Recently, I had a rush job on a paper, & my strategy to finish it quickly was to camp outside the reviewer’s office and catch them as they were coming in or out. Issues that were taking about 2 days to fix before got addressed in a short 5 minute conversation.
On another couple projects involving physical work, we had some team members who insisted on not coming in to run their code on physical equipment, and they insisted that the other people on-site do it, in spite of those people having other work to do. The on-site people were therefore forced to carry a much greater workload than those who were remote as they had to be the hands and eyes of those remote. Not only that, but because of this disconnect, the level of abstraction the remote people were working on was much higher than the physical hardware required… they were building mathematical models and hadn’t ever tried seeing how the code worked on physical avionics; they had no knowledge of the avionics software compiling tool chain as they never used it & expected that work to be handled by other researchers (who had their own time constraints). So the project basically didn’t succeed because of this.
At some point, the physical world has to come into play.
Management is also a harder problem. I know this is cast as a power struggle, but you have to actually solve the management problem. If remote work doesn’t affect isolated worker productivity but does make management less effective, that clearly makes the organization as a whole less effective.
I am a big fan of remote work and with proper collaboration tools, this can be just as effective. But lack of real-time communication makes this fail. Lack of physical context for software implementation can make this fail. Lack of camaraderie between workers who never see each other can make this fail.
If the alternative is 90 minute commutes, it seems clear remote is probably better most of the time, but inability to actually talk to people in person ever is a potentially huge barrier in some instances.
I’m not a manager. I have no commercial real estate interests. I have a compact home with no home office and three children, two of which spend most of the day at home. Focused work is nearly impossible during the day, so most of my remote work is done at night. I cherish the ability to go into the office for focused work and for low-latency communication with fellow workers and management as well as ability to do physical technological and experimental work where the software meets the hardware. The quality of much of the discussion of this is terrible on HN.
The putative ways in which poorly organized remote/hybrid work are supposed to affect a company -- culture, creativity, and the other things that come out of personal interaction and long-term proximity -- are things that operate on a multi-year timescale. No half-ass study on a few short term productivity metrics, looking at an RTO process that barely spans one year, are going to surface that. OTOH it's likely to be obvious to people actually in the environment long before it has a measurable impact on any kind of balance sheet
I think it's because it affects people here disproportionately. Let's be honest. I'm guessing a lot of people here are software developers or work in a technical role in general. People in these roles tend to be introverts. Introverts are unlikely to prefer the office.
On top of that, people here are only thinking about their own role - but not all of the company. For example, it could be that software development can be done with 100% remote, but what about the company's marketing, finance, HR, operations departments? What if those departments function better in person? Will the company let all the software developers and product managers work remotely and then demand the other departments to come into the office? How does it look if the company only lets their software developers work remotely but everyone else must come in, including retail/factory workers if there are any?
I think people here don't consider everything when it comes to RTO. So we keep hearing conspiracy theories here about how executives/companies own real estate so they want employees back.
I've always said this. If you are a software developer in the US, you should definitely advocate against remote work. Sooner or later, the company is going to realize they can hire the same developer for 15% of the salary that the company is paying you.
CEOs see remote/hybrid as an employee benefit that is at best slightly positive to them, probably neutral, so they are cutting it. Your office lunch and generous health care plans are next.
Only if there is some kind of downturn in the software developer market that frees up those developers from the jobs they are currently doing. Otherwise, the companies will get into bidding wars, and the price will quickly return – at which point it's a lot cheaper to keep you.
It's not like companies didn't figure that out in the 1990s. It was on the news like every single day.
Granted, there are signs that we may be in the midst of that downturn. But if that's the case, an office isn't going to save you. You won't be needed regardless of where you happen to be sitting.
But I also until last year “worked for a FAANG” remotely without having to leave my medium cost of living area and a year in, I was able to move to an even cheaper area with no state income tax where the local job market sucks for my specialty.
It’s a big tourist area.
As far as the company outsourcing somewhere cheaper, if after all of these years I’ve been in the industry all I can do is “codez real gud” and I’m that easily replaceable, I’ve done something remarkably wrong.
If you have an org capable of doing that, amazing, sounds great.. I've not seen it once, anywhere, in 20 years.
So given how real orgs actually work, the problem with the outsourcing model is - Good luck turning tasks around quickly, or changing directions on a dime, or course correcting devs who do most of their work while you are asleep.
If companies really wanted to save money without all the pain, they'd hire nearshore US dev talent for 1/3 the cost of NYC/SF and eliminate most of those issues.
But really for most businesses given the margins on software, dev costs end up being tolerable.
See, this is where Latin America comes in! There are lots of excellent devs all over Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, etc.
Yes and no. Admittedly, I'm a full time SD in the US and I do make a decent salary, but offshoring and outsourcing don't worry me. There are many anecdotes of companies being burned by outsourcing as there is almost no accountability.
So the question there too is - do you want to offshore your IP?
This relies on a pretty common mistake, that software can really only be made in American offices. It's at least less horrific than only Americans can make good software but it's still wrong. There is no reason why a lot of software can't be made in India. There's nothing magical about Lahore than stops this from happening.
Offshoring tends to fail pretty badly because companies focus exclusively on the bottom line in a globally competitive market place. If you're hiring a software engineer for $10/hr it's because their work product isn't worth $15/hr.
Am I worried that my high compensation will trend downwards over time? Yeah, it's probably going to happen.
Is all or most software engineering going to move to Bangalore? Not a chance.
HN is way better than other forums but has never been paragon of objectivity. Many sensitive topics will get you heavily downvoted if you go against the grain.
So its commercial success is a reminder of the poor state of technology for most and the business forces that drive it, veering closely to going off yet another cliff.
Meanwhile, the “it’ll take a few years to wash out” and “it’ll be obvious to the people in the environment before then” are both correct and both applicable to either side of this argument, thus you get the fairly invested/high-conviction but “low rigor” argumentation.
But obviously the “what do you see here” discussion is pointless.
"OTOH it's likely to be obvious to people actually in the environment long before it has a measurable impact on any kind of balance sheet."
And with any luck it will remain so for years and years to come.
This difficulty is what levels the playing field in the office. It's what enables untalented-but-hardworking employees to still have a seat even though they have to burn the midnight oil to do so.
True meritocracy is a slippery slope I pray we never have to travel down.
What's the HR method that can parse untalented and hardworking vs untalented and putting in normal hours?
What's the cost of untalented? It's probably not just their salary.
Which I acknowledged by describing it as a slippery slope.
> What's the HR method that can parse untalented and hardworking vs untalented and putting in normal hours?
One does not exist AFAICT and, with any luck, one will never exist.
> What's the cost of untalented? It's probably not just their salary.
By untalented I did not necessarily mean stupid. I meant non-"rockstar" or whatever the mythical 10X programmer is called nowadays.
In most cases there is no cost at all of the untalented, employers make profits on their work as well. Just look at salaries compared to profits.
If a talented worker makes her company a profit of 10 million dollars just because of her work, she'll be lucky to get 100 000 dollars out of that. So there's plenty of money left for paying the untalented. And they are sure to also get less than they deserve.
What?
If you earn $1000 and then you go buy a TV for $990, is it true that the TV had "no cost at all," since you now have $10?
If you get a free TV, but you have to drive 8 hours one way to pick it up then 8 hours back the other way, is it true that the TV had "no cost at all?"
An untalented employee might however only make the company 5000 dollars of profit each month, while costing the same 1000 salary.
The company still makes money on the untalented employee, so it's not right to talk about cost. This is how things work in most companies.
The COVID vaccines are novel in a lot of ways, and we know a lot more now than we knew two years ago. And we're still learning. Keeping up with the science, however flawed the rigor is at this stage of minimal datasets, is what that learning is about. Keeping discussion bubbling so that the community has a general idea of what the latest reports are saying.
Of course, all of that is true of RTO (and work from home) as well. As we get more data on companies that are implementing it, we can get better views of how it affects people individually, and at a macro scale from companies on up to populations. And as more companies interpret the reported effects and try similar schemes or variations thereof, all divorced from the pandemic, we'll get even better data which will, undoubtedly, show fracture lines across various demographics ranging from company output, to location, to employee cultural approval, etc.
Put simply: it's dismissive to assume that discussing the latest data about a newer phenomenon is a wholehearted acceptance or tacit approval of that data. Practical academics worth with the tangible material they are given. And so long as you're discussing things on a forum rather than, say, putting plans into action, it's perfectly reasonable to take the data as given and discuss the implications of said data.
The return to office argument is very hand wavy. None of the advocates have come out with hard data as to why it's better.
edit: And the study from this article is one data point in favor of RTO having no productivity benefit.
OP claims that the benefits of RTO cannot be easily assessed, and while the benefits of WFH are easily quantifiable, without further knowledge of the benefits of RTO you can't come to a rational, rigorous conclusion on which is better. You can make guesses, but it's "less rigorous" as OP says.
Forcing hundreds of thousands of people to upend their lives and move back to large cities so that they can drive to the office again is irrational when there is no concrete evidence that it will make companies perform any better.
Next, I don't see how anyone can generalize these conclusions when company specifics are specific.
Last, being unemployed also eliminates the harmful externalities of the fundamental task of commuting. The only reason that managers require for RTO is that they want to see your face. The manager role exists to make human decisions as to what will be best for their specific company. As far as I know, random uncritiqued research doesn't yet manage companies.
Can you elaborate on what exactly isn't rational? I laid out a chain of thought that can be attacked link by link, you've just made a sweeping claim with no backing arguments.
Turn on your webcam next time.
Better for whom?
I don't think this subject's treatment is any "less rigorous" than anything else that gets discussed here. I believe you will find a mix of personal anecdote, opinions that are objectively contrary to best available evidence, and "rigorous" comments in most discussions here. This topic is not unique.
Given that your post sentiment rests on the concept of "best evidence".
I'm not trying to call you out nor embarrass you (nor assuming that I could). I'm trying to examine, and highlight if warranted, how terms are being thrown around.
Understand that claimed status as best evidence, generally speaking, hasn't a direct relationship to whether or not research is quality evidence.
OTOH it's likely to be obvious to people actually in the environment long before it has a measurable impact on any kind of balance sheet
in a comment complaining about other people being unscientific. Personally, that's enough for me to discount the whole thing.
I did not claim there was no evidence for RTO.
If there is any evidence of benefit of RTO, due to lack of ability to measure it it has to be highly discounted against the easily measurable benefits of WFH.
If I'm saving $1 million a year on real estate because of WFH and someone comes and tells me about his gut feeling that RTO is better because of a bunch of reasons that have no quantifiable measure it would be absolutely braindead of me to assume that those benefits outweigh the literal $1million in savings I'm getting.
But if your hypothesis remains unproven, you can't prove it by hand waving and saying that the absence of evidence is proof of its validity...your hypothesis is just unproven.
One has solid proof (WFH), one does not (RTO). The logical, putative thing to do is to respect the solid proof, not the hand-wavy argument.
> The return to office argument is very hand wavy. None of the advocates have come out with hard data as to why it's better.
IMHO, the real problem is priorities. Everything you say about WFH is true, and from first-hand experience I know the benefits of RTO are true as well (at least in a reasonably designed office, which is not a given nowadays). RTO prioritizes the interests of the company and management, WFH prioritizes the interests of most employees, families, the environment, etc.
The trend over decades (in the US at least) has been for families to sacrifice more and more on the altar of corporate control. Literally, children are being separated from their families for most of the day starting at a very young age (with well-documented negative consequences) so the company can take more and pay less.
Personally, I think the RTO CEOs should go cry in their soup while I eat lunch with my kids everyday.
Maybe management. I do not think it prioritizes the interests of shareholders and the company. It seems like management severely undervalues the easy cost savings from real estate.
I think this is also part of the problem—people are comparing the best designed offices to the worst designed remote work structure. In practice, most offices are not well designed, and many people and companies have good remote work structures. The heart of the problem is that companies are bad at designing either one of those things, so many employees prefer work from home because it places control of their work environment firmly in their own hands.
Yup.
I am not sure the current data we have is enough to say there is like flat out no productivity benefit anywhere, ever.
What's wrong with having evidence-based opinion on WFH?
As a trivial example, if your uninterrupted periods of work are stonewalling 15 stakeholders who need something from you, that’s locally good for you but globally bad for the org.
That said I think normal office setups are way, way past “collaboration” and well into “distraction” territory and if RTO’ers really cared that much about productivity they’d have addressed these years-old complaints (which have been extremely well-substantiated in research even prior to COVID).
No. Lack of commute is concrete and tangible. Even just from an emissions standpoint.
Decreased spending on office space is not anecdotal, but again concrete.
Reduced office costs are real. You would have to pay more per employee just for the office costs alone.
This then demands concrete proof that productivity is higher in office -- which has never been provided.
All of these have material impact on productivity, but more importantly healthy and happiness of employees themselves. The effects are not uniform, but there are tradeoffs and it's not clear to me that wfh is better for everyone.
We have known this for a long time. Covid forced the tech companies to acknowledge that as well. These short term studies back up that consensus.
I think the evidence is overwhelming in favor that remote teams can build high quality software, not just short term but over a long term horizon.
This is not at all incompatible with WFH. Getting the team together for a week once every 6 months or once every quarter for these exercises is very reasonable.
Everyone continued to work _really, really, well_ together online during Covid quarantine - and we successfully onboarded incredible new hires. But something was missing. Individuals were productive, but collective decision making took longer in so many small hard-to-measure ways. Arguments took a little bit longer to resolve.
I have no measurements on any of this. You’d have to measure full product lifecycle for hundreds of products to get it. Even ‘how long does a design take’ or ‘how long do arguments take to resolve’ would need to be measured for years to get anything objective. Conversely, I’ll admit, the answer to ‘do people get more individual work done more efficiently at home’ was probably ‘yes’ - although collecting data for that would also be basically impossible over a time frame lower than years.
I _feel_ like work at home hurt the overall organization in ways that _really mattered_ - innovation, maintainability, shared knowledge - even just in ‘soft’ relationships (Does your manager know that other manager well? Does the one individual engineer have a (or any!) relationship with that other engineer working in a similar, but on-the-org-chart-disconnected system? Do your engineers get along with your designers?).
To debunk it would take literal decades to see how the organization was really affected. And even then, economic trends, market competition, even just quality of product _ideas_ - all the stuff that can affect the success or failure of a company or product - would make it really hard to tell how much work-from-home affected things.
So all I think it’s _possible_ to go on is ‘feelings’. And it sure felt to me that when we were all WFH something was ‘missing’. Novel innovation was a little ‘less’. I didn’t get to know designers or people in HR like I used to. That new hire, though they were doing _great_ remotely, was _so happy_ to finally meet people for real after a year, and the team so pleased to meet them. I think they were slightly more productive, and the team trusted them better, after they finally worked ‘in person’ together.
Maybe I’m just not ‘feeling’ the productivity gains from WFH because of my own bias, and maybe they are so large that they’d overwhelm the added ‘informal collaboration and personal relationships’ friction, but I don’t think so. I think the company would just slowly, over a timeframe of years - decades perhaps - get less ‘innovative’ and slower to react in a way that, from the outside, would just look like a company ever-so-slowly losing it’s edge.
I guess the proof of all of this will just have to come from future results. In twenty years, do the most successful, innovative tech companies tend to be the ones that work remote, or the ones with in-person offices? But I know the answer I’d bet on.
I commute every day and I take 1h and 15 min one way due to bad public transportation. I could, technically, do everything I do via WFH. But I'm not doing it, and I get pretty annoyed when people tell me "why don't you do it?"
Well, it's my personal experience and in no way is meant to act as a judgment towards others. Simply put, WFH reminds me of when I was locked inside my house for 70 days. I was and still am an introvert but I found the experience down right horrible. On top of that I had a very stressful work period with often daily tense situations. And there was no real way to "escape" (I did, mentally, but I was close to a breakdown).
Ever since I was able to RTO I never did a single day WFH and I'm making sure that in no way work can get inside my house. If I ever had to remote work in the future I'm thinking of renting some co-working space.
Well, long winding post to say that yes, some tightening of WFH rules may be not justified, but IMO it's one person's experience and attitude that makes WFH worthwhile or not.