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Comment by brigadier132 | Hacker News Reader

We have concrete, quantifiable knowledge of the benefits of WFH. We can measure the cost savings from not needing to pay for real estate and we can directly point to quality of life and time savings for employees. We can also point to lower carbon emissions.

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.

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> We have concrete, quantifiable knowledge of the benefits of WFH. We can measure the cost savings from not needing to pay for real estate and we can directly point to quality of life and time savings for employees. We can also point to lower carbon emissions.

> 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.

> RTO prioritizes the interests of the company and management

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 know the benefits of RTO are true as well (at least in a reasonably designed office, which is not a given nowadays).

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.

>Personally, I think the RTO CEOs should go cry in their soup while I eat lunch with my kids everyday.

Yup.

Well, as the employee I now have to pay for real estate because I need an office at home ! And my company is clearly not going to pay for that.

This is the classic fallacy of treating absence of evidence as evidence of absence (especially when you're biased towards the conclusion).

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.

In the absence of evidence that RTO is better for productivity and given the mountain of evidence that WFH eliminates the many harmful externalities of commuting, the rational course of action is to maintain the status quo of WFH until more information is obtained about productivity.

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.

That conclusion isn't rational. Neither in terms of the framing of the evidence that supports it, nor in terms of the logic that follows.

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.

> That conclusion isn't rational. Neither in terms of the framing of the evidence that supports it, nor in terms of the logic that follows.

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.

>The only reason that managers require for RTO is that they want to see your face.

Turn on your webcam next time.

> ... without further knowledge of the benefits of RTO you can't come to a rational, rigorous conclusion on which is better.

Better for whom?

Is there a classic fallacy for dismissing the best available evidence as a "classic fallacy?" It is impossible to prove a negative; the best we can do is repeatedly fail to find evidence. So far all evidence points that way. GP's statement is reasonable and measured.

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.

Non-sarcastic question: do you have a graduate science degree, in any field, and therefore were you taught how to evaluate evidence?

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 the OP makes unscientific claims like

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.

> This is the classic fallacy of treating absence of evidence as evidence of absence (especially when you're biased towards the conclusion).

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.

If you have solid evidence that WFH is worse, then sure maybe you have a point.

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.

Do you think that these studies are maybe too shallow though, and that some industries operate very differently and that for some industries there is a productivity benefit?

I am not sure the current data we have is enough to say there is like flat out no productivity benefit anywhere, ever.

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