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Comment by thegrim22 | Hacker News Reader

There's obviously two sides to the issue, right? Or else there wouldn't be any debate. Or else no companies would do RTO. Why is it that in multiple years of reading HN I've never once seen an article that covers the other side's position? Why is it that the reporting is 100%, completely, always biased in one direction? It's like this across whole swaths of topics, not just about RTO.

Wouldn't we prefer forums of communication that were unbiased and which fairly discussed the props/cons of each point of view? Or do we really just prefer the echo chamber / propaganda / dogpile approach?

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The other side is all over companies’ announcements, emails, and LinkedIn posts. The debate is not between equal peers, but between the few who want to bring back the pre-pandemic norms because they need to: fill the void in their lives as their lives revolve around work, and/or satisfy the need to control others and feel it face to face, and/or justify the commercial building rents, and/or help landlords pay their debts, among other reasons. On the other side, you have the average person who discovered that they can do the same job perfectly well while saving on commute costs, time, and even rent by being far from crowded hubs, and spending more time with family, especially since they still produce the same outcome. This is not your typical debate, this is a typical power exchange dynamic between different classes, the greed versus the need.

Why are those reasons for RTO any less valid than the ones presented by employees?

Breach of social contract. For years these companies pretended that their corporate culture was all about going out of their way to make employees happy and fulfilled. The massive WFH brought forth by the pandemic has exposed that corporate culture actually clashes with employee fulfillment and is not focused on supporting it. The rationale with their RTO mandates may have merits, the problem is this broader context. This is making an about face without ever openly admitting the longstanding hypocrisy, and this is what makes the arguments brought forth difficult to hear for most people, and I personally think that their feeling is legitimate.

Also big tech companies tend to have their offices in locations that are supply-constrained hellholes.

I. Will. Never. Go. Back. To. New. York.

+1 I'm very happy in a rural LCOL area.

I wouldn't live in SF proper even with a $500k salary increase.

Satisfying the need to control others (and feel it face to face) and justifying commercial rents are not good reasons. Commercial buildings are owned by the upper wealthy class. Are you saying the unreasonable needs of the few to have power and wealth outweigh the needs of the many to live happy, fulfilling lives?

Here are the reasons you wish to portray as being valid.

* Fill the void in their lives as their lives revolve around work,

* satisfy the need to control others and feel it face to face,

* justify the commercial building rents,

Out of the three, only the investment in real estate is valid and has a concrete business value. However, it's also a short-term business decision to increase operational cost that was proven a failure by short- to mid-term trends. WFO fixes this mistake by eliminating the need to pay an operational cost that you don't need to pay.

To me this means you really have no argument supporting RTO.

It's a bit like when a union forms. The employer's excessive demands eventually fall flat in the face of mass revolt and a steady state is found.

“Why is sociopathy less valid than not sociopathy?”

Really?

"argue against yourself for me"

Like, this isn't wrong, it's just entirely useless coming from outside/someone else

Anyone making an argument should try to attack it from another side, but this is weird

But surely there's a middle ground! Sociopathic "tendencies."

But surely it's nuanced. There are plenty of reasons someone might use to explain away their sociopathy and unless we fully explore all of those, we're just not being fair!

> Drilling down, the data indicated that RTO mandates were linked to firms with male CEOs who had greater power in the company. Here, power is measured as the CEO’s total compensation divided by the average total compensation paid to the four highest-paid executives in the firm.

Here's your explanation. They're compensating for something.

all the men ruining the world have tiny dicks!

Go find some research that shows the opposite effect. Submit it. Join in the conversation.

Complaining that the research doesn't support your side doesn't really seem like a useful approach.

A few papers I found when trying to actually look into this:

Software engineers give substantially less code review feedback when not colocated (either remote or just in different buildings);

https://www.nber.org/papers/w31880

People are less productive WFH, and those who self select into remote work take an even bigger hit than those who prefer the office:

https://www.nber.org/papers/w31515

Previous pre-pandemic papers that I didn't save links to also found negative selection effects into WFH were significant.

If you believe the mythical man month, which all software engineers seem to, then productivity hits to engineers are very bad for the project since outcomes are not linear in inputs.

Anecdotally, CTOs I have talked to were all uniformly negative about remote work at their companies, basically all feeling that their teams were less productive than before the pandemic.

I’ll bite. Your first linked study does not say what you hope it does. In fact, it’s hopelessly lost and irrelevant. Here’s a passage that makes it clear “remote” is conflating multiple unrelated concepts and that the quantitative metrics are like Elon asking me to print out my code to determine “programs written per month”. A remote New Zealand vs Seattle worker is very different than a 1000 head site deeming two people organizationally distinct enough to plop in separate campuses.

We find that distant teammates impose negative externalities on the mentorship of teammates sitting together. These externalities can explain about a third of proxim- ity’s impact. Furthermore, before COVID-19, adding a new hire in another building reduces feedback among proximate teammates (who predate the new hire), while adding a new hire in the same building has no such impact. Teams’ attempts to ac- commodate distant teammates by, for example, moving in-person meetings online, have substantial negative externalities.7 Our findings indicate that additional mentorship has an opportunity cost: engi- neers who sit near all their teammates write fewer programs. Our difference-in- differences estimate suggests that proximity reduces programs written per month by 23 percent (p-value = 0.008), with similar effects on total lines of code and total files changed. The effects on output are present for both junior and senior engineers but are particularly pronounced for senior engineers, who do most of the mentoring.

Are you surprised that a majority of people would favour having the freedom to work in the environment that best suits them and their team?

RTO mandates are simply a way to curtail freedoms that we’ve established; freedoms that we demonstrably didn’t abuse.

Why would anyone (except a commercial real estate investor, or an authoritarian senior manager) defend RTO mandates, given the data shown in this study?

>> There's obviously two sides to the issue, right?

This is false.

Thank you. I'd like the option to work from work or home and I don't want to schedule it.

So there’s literally no example, anywhere on this wide planet, of a company that would be more successful with its team working together in an office?

From my experience, companies are more concerned with "in an office" than "working together".

Yes, when the whole team is working from a single location, there can be advantages. But that situation is uncommon. In fact, the only time I can recall being in that situation during the last 20 years is a short stint I had at a startup; about 10 people, from CEO to intern, in a single open office. And even then, they only _required_ in-office three times a week.

More common, teams are split over two or more cities/states/countries. I'm currently in Colorado. I'm never going to have a water cooler chat with my colleague in Budapest.

This is not what the study concludes or even suggests.

Numerical advantage.

Most ICs prefer working from home.

Most managers prefer teams to work in office.

There are more ICs than managers.

Good kuck getting ICs to unionize. Otherwise it's 'there's more miners than mine bosses'.

This is the both sides fallacy

"...examined a sample of firms on the S&P 500 list—137 of which had RTO mandates and 320 that clearly did not between June 2019 and January 2023."

There are samples of both types of RTO policies in the study. So the study itself deals with the supposed bias in your question.

"Overall, the analysis, released as a pre-print, found that RTO mandates did not improve a firm's financial metrics, but they did decrease employee satisfaction."

Though I cannot speak to the quality of the study or its conclusion, because the damn crap is behind a login/paywall.

Link to the actual study: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4675401#...

Well it's the third time this article has been posted here in the last 6 weeks.

Which is the other side? It’s only in the past few days that I have seen 2 articles cover the same study that suggested that RTO isnt all that great.

Otherwise it’s generally been about how RTO is needed or necessary.

> Why is it that in multiple years of reading HN I've never once seen an article that covers the other side's position?

If there were one, why didn't you submit it?

>omg omg french literature forum is not discussing japanese welding equipment. so biased toward one thing

You don't see the other side because I think mostly the media is pro labor. If company says return to the office, the media is going to say no, I side with the laborer, who does not want to return to the office. That kind of decision I think shapes the reporting. I guess you could chalk it up to general media bias and issue advocacy.

The media is pro wealth. It's no pro labor. They operate as a clickbait factory with nothing of value desperate for eyes on ads and nothing else.

HN is full of entrepreneurs, which by and large are more experienced, more senior people. A total beginner/junior would not be running a startup (I hope). Someone who struggles to write a function or a for loop isn't going to be hired by startups that have like... three developers total, and the success or failure of the entire company hinges upon their output!

The real world is full of juniors, especially in IT and software development, where the continuing growth of the industry means that juniors can outnumber more experienced staff.

I have no problem working from home solo, but I've noticed that juniors will flounder. Even if they find something useful to do, they don't get to "look over my shoulder" to see how I do things.

It's the little things too, things you might not even consider to be a skill because it's so automatic for you.

    Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V

Yes, really. Really!

I've lost count of the number of times I've stopped some kid typing something (with typos) and told them to do it again using the clipboard to avoid that.

Tab

It's not even watching someone type out each and every character one painful keystroke at a time. It's that not using tab-complete means they don't get the implicit spell-check. They also don't get to rotate through the variants of the function names (or whatever), so there isn't that implicit act of "discovery" as they see what else is up for grabs.

Etc, etc...

There's a thousand things like that a junior can pick up by being present physically next to a senior. Zoom or Teams is just not the same, especially because by default these systems don't show the keyboard shortcuts used.

> Even if they find something useful to do, they don't get to "look over my shoulder" to see how I do things.

This is your fault. I work remote, and have an open video call when I’m coding. Lots of people drop in for that. The keyboard is neither here nor there: I promise you can’t tell what I’m typing from looking at my keyboard, yet jetbrains solved this decades ago with the shortcut presentation mode.

Can’t agree more. Mob programming alternatives to Zoom like Multi are also superior to in person because they generate summaries with files edited, branches, websites viewed so the junior / new employee can relax and focus on what’s important. If you aren’t actively sharing “how to work” tips with colleagues, particularly juniors, it’s your fault not an office’s. The whole point of being an engineer is to be clever and find solutions where others couldn’t to make the world a better place.

I’m a consultant working for a 15K user enterprise. I don’t get to choose the collaboration platform and the developers wouldn’t be permitted to install anything not reapproved anyway.

This is the reality for many people.

Presumably they have some video conferencing software. If not, that’s probably not an organization that can succeed regardless of where people are located.

The other side of the issue is extroverts wanting to extrovert, managers worrying about losing out on the watercooler aspect of career advancement, and the collective will of companies with commercial real estate holdings not wanting to crash that particular market. Cities want it because there are plenty of businesses that rely on office workers buying food etc in downtown cores.

None of those have anything to do with the quality of life of employees or benefit to the company productivity wise. That’s why nobody cares.

there's also the soft-layoff side. You can encourage those pesky mothers or child caretakers to quit as well as those that don't live very close or can't stand the office for any myriad of reasons..

>The other side of the issue is extroverts wanting to extrovert,

I *really* wish people would stop with this overly simplified take. I'm an introvert. WFH was something before the pandemic I thought I wanted. It was miserable. Turns out that when you're an introvert, you don't have great "maintaining a social relationship" skills and things that happen naturally when you're forced by proximity to work and interact with other people now require dedicating specific effort towards. If trying to maintain a good social relationship with my co-workers was a drain on my energy levels before, having to do the things necessary to do that AND also having to put extra effort into making it happen was even more draining.

And that doesn't even get into the other more subtle "anti-introvert" consequences of WFH. Like requiring extensive use of chat systems, leading to extreme self-consciousness over the fact that every "hey I'm sure I'm being stupid here, can you help me find the obvious thing I'm missing" or "I swear I've seen this documented before but confluence is awful, can someone point me at the instructions for Foo" moment is now a part of the permanent company record. And more than that, it's no longer a simple call over the cube wall to my immediate co-workers, it's in a public channel broadcast to everyone who happens to be there.

Or the number of times we'd be discussing something and then have to deal with a micro-manager butting in the next day after they'd read half the thread and mis-interpreted everything was massively increased. And yes, in theory you can have a separate channel for every combination of people you might want to be talking to at any given time, but in practice you often need to share things or bring in outside people from time to time and having to copy context to an entirely new channel every single time is a waste of time and energy and simply broken compared to being able to just include people in the channel.

Or the fact that because all communication now has to happen via text medium, if you want to keep an eye on something, you literally have to stop and context switch to keep that eye on it. It's no longer possible to work on one thing and listen with half an ear to your teammates on something else unless everyone wants to be on headsets and in an open mic call all day long.

Or the incessant pings of notifications all day long. Yes you can mute notifications, but you very quickly find out that if you're not at least then dedicating specific times in the middle of your day to again stop and context switch, you'll be missing things you probably didn't want to miss, or be failing to respond to requests and questions. It's like all the worst parts of coming back from vacation to a fully loaded inbox, but every day. Made even worse because people know you're not on vacation so now you have to balance reducing your context switching against not delaying responses too long so you don't start looking like an ass or a flake. And sure, your co-workers are probably in the same boat and get it just fine, but again remember that all of this is public and timestamped and someone just might decide to take an interest in how long it takes you to respond.

Or the fact that now every meeting is probably recorded, and you need to be eternally vigilant about an open mic and camera.

Or the lack of physical and mental separation of your work space and your home. Not everyone is blessed enough to live in a house where they can dedicate one whole room to an office space. A number of my "unwind after work" hobbies were on permanent hiatus because the space they would have occupied was instead my office space. Turns out when you're not getting any of the already limited social interaction you normally get as an introvert and mix in not being able to engage in your preferred hobbies, things get miserable really quickly.

To be clear, I prefer a flexible policy. There are absolutely benefits to being able to work from home when needed or wanted. But I came out of the pandemic STRONGLY preferring to be in the office as often as I could. And yes I know things will be different for different people; some folks won't be bothered by the things that bothered me. But that's also my point. We're all different, and just because I'm an introvert doesn't mean I'm a misanthropic hermit either.

You seem to think if your company is offering WFH that you still can't come into the office. I don't see why that has to be the case. It it work from ANYWHERE in the world, including your office, vs work ONLY in your office. Every other point you make no longer holds.

As an introvert who does understand those points you make, society should pick up the slack with third spaces. What's holding those third spaces back? Lack of cheap access to space. Once the offices are sold they will become third spaces, and we will get the best of both worlds.

These days more big companies are implementing anti-workcation policies limiting your freedom to travel, allegedly due to tax/immigration liabilities.

The model they’re pushing for is that your primary residence address is your “Home Office” and you have to keep your butt in your seat there, just like the RTO employees have to badge in at the office.

And yes they can enforce this whenever they decide to, especially if you have a corporate issued laptop.

>These days more big companies are implementing anti-workcation policies limiting your freedom to travel, allegedly due to tax/immigration liabilities.

It's at least in some part a very valid concern. There are a number of regulations that are based on you having >=X number of employees in a given location. The WARN Act and FMLA being two very notable examples. Employers are obligated to withhold taxes from your pay checks. If you're working in another state for an extended period of time (usually ~30 days or more), they both need to know that and now have to work out new tax withholding for you. Indeed, a vast number of labor laws apply specifically to the employee in the state they are working, regardless of the home office of the company. As an easy example, California reasonably would not be happy if a company chose to pay all their CA based employees minimum wages from Kansas just because that's where the company office is. So just the very fact that you're working in a different state can dramatically change how you are required to be compensated.

Obviously any or all of these things can be worked around and through, but it's pretty clear that it will require work and for any large enough employer, it will require policies and hard rules on what is and isn't allowed.

I don't think anything other than I'm tired of being used as a symbol for other people who don't want to go back to the office. This whole discussion around RTO is (and has been) full of a lot of people pontificating about other people's motives rather than just talking about individual preferences and the pros and cons in a constructive manner. If a given situation works well for an individual, that's something we can talk about. If a given situation has negative effects on a group, that's something we can talk about. But just blindly declaring the the "other side" is just "extroverts wanting to extrovert" or "introverts wanting to introvert" as if they're some monolithic group without individual preferences is both unfair in that it's wrongly stereotyping "your side" and it's equally dismissing all the possible valid concerns the "other side" has for reductive, cutesy sound bites that do nothing to further understanding or compromise.

That said, there are a number of perfectly valid reasons why "everyone can just do what they want" isn't necessarily true.

For example, I worked with a junior developer who absolutely needed to be in the office. They personally preferred WFH, and while I sympathize, they were also the sort of developer that gets deeply sucked into rabbit holes and would disappear for DAYS at a time coming up for air only occasionally at which point you discover they've spend the last week solving for a 0.0000001% edge case that was completely unnecessary to solve for and have made no real progress on what you actually needed them to work on. What needs to be understood is that they were a good developer. And when we worked from the office, it was much easier to catch them going sideways and re-direct them. But now we're faced with a developer who does not want to come to the office, thinks they're doing just fine from home, but whose individual (deliverable) productivity is definitely waning because of it. Some people really don't have the self awareness or introspection necessary to correctly gauge their WFH vs WFO productivity levels.

Or there's the fact that an office requires some minimal number of people for the benefits of being in the office to take hold. Otherwise it just becomes remote work with more steps. Early on when we first started going back to the office, there were days I was one of 3 developers on a whole floor. That did nothing to improve any of my prior concerns other than freeing up the space at home.

Related to this is that even if you split things up, a number of the concerns I spoke about absolutely continue to hold. If you still need to log all your conversations with your co-workers into the permanent chat system so that your remote team members aren't being left out, you're still dealing with all the negatives that come from that. If every meeting still requires a video camera and conference call, the concerns about recordings still remain. How much or little these concerns affect you and your team largely depends on how much of your team is remote, and how much or little you were doing with this tech before.

As for selling offices for third spaces, if offering WFH means that I'm still allowed to come to the office, it means the company still needs an office, so it's unlikely the office is getting sold. Beyond that, why would any third spaces want to be setting up in a dead business district if no one goes there anymore?

Again, I think a flexible policy is probably best overall. I certainly benefit from having flexibility and I largely believe in hiring smart people and getting the heck out of their way and letting them decide how they accomplish the mission to give them. As I said, I'm just really tired of being used as a symbol for other people to dismiss very valid concerns about the negatives of a WFH culture.

> And when we worked from the office, it was much easier to catch them going sideways and re-direct them.

I regularly work with people on my team who need to go into an office, but it's a different office than mine. RTO does not solve this issue.

> why would any third spaces want to be setting up in a dead business district if no one goes there anymore?

SoHo, Manhattan in the 1970's matches this description. That environment is a perfect breeding ground for communities to flourish.

> so it's unlikely the office is getting sold

Sure. Some will, some won't. Still means less demand and cheaper prices. Still means some workplaces will use a shared model with other companies.

Recording is visibly opt-in and retention is limited by default for the same reasons as chat and email—the US legal discovery process is a big burden even for the innocent. The only time I see it happen is a planned presentation to a group where future reuse makes sense. Some of our all-hands org meetings even take anonymous questions.

Not to be that guy but companies aren't gonna stop offering offices to their employees, clearly. If you wish for RTO, then do it, but TFA clearly states that advocating for everyone to RTO is useless.

This is gonna sound far fetched but actually: this is the same argument as the abortion debate. Pro-choice people want you to be able to work from your office or your home, anti-choice people want you to return to the office. The argument is the same, the stakes are just higher in one instance.

> Cities want it because there are plenty of businesses that rely on office workers buying food etc in downtown cores.

So casually dismissing the fact that this provides a HUGE amount of employment and revenue and, in turn, encourages face to face socialisation which builds communities and social cohesion.

Like... what's your plan for these people, this huge proportion of the population that can't work remotely, won't enjoy working remotely, don't want to work remotely etc.

People enjoy socialising. That's why so many TV programs are made about work and the office environment. People enjoy the social aspect of it. It's not all 'the office' - that's a massively cynical viewpoint. Most people get something out of going to the office, date co-workers, play golf with their colleagues, you know.

Society is not going to change to revolve around shut-in people haters. You're a minority. You're not normal.

> this provides a HUGE amount of employment and revenue

Sounds like an opportunity for businesses to open near where people live rather than where they work.

> encourages face to face socialisation which builds communities and social cohesion

Every time I've commuted to an office, I haven't been a part of the local community. I've been part of the community where I live. Working remotely I spend more time building actual social cohesion in my community.

> Society is not going to change to revolve around shut-in people haters. You're a minority. You're not normal.

Making small talk while the coffee is brewing is not a real relationship, if anything it sounds like you're the one advocating "people-hating." Maybe if you didn't spend so much time at the office you'd be able to socialize for real (you know, like a normal person).

> Society is not going to change to revolve around shut-in people haters. You're a minority. You're not normal.

I like my coworkers and several of them are my friends but even before COVID I still spent around 90% of my time at the office working - because that was my job. I basically got to socialize during lunch and maybe had a quick chat here or there but nothing meaningful.

I get that certain roles probably allow more socialization but that hasn't been my experience working in tech. I had stuff to get gone, people expected me to deliver things in a timely manner, so I couldn't just blow off work to shoot the shit with my colleagues. Believe me, I would have enjoyed that but it wasn't fair to the company or good for my career.

Breaking a bunch of windows will provide just as much value to the window repair workers.

> So casually dismissing the fact that this provides a HUGE amount of employment and revenue

At this point just tax the remote workers and pay those folks to work on social or community programs, or dig holes and fill them in again, which is net positive because it means their health and fitness improves.

Why force people to give up their valuable family and personal time to pollute the air and clog up roads, create more accidents, and clog up transit? Time is the one thing in life that you can never get back. You're also ignoring the fact that remote work results in stores and restaurants closer to home getting more business.

> Like... what's your plan for these people, this huge proportion of the population that can't work remotely, won't enjoy working remotely, don't want to work remotely etc

Here's a plan, let them... work in the office? I don't see remote advocates insist that everyone work remotely, but I do see RTO advocates like you wanting to force everyone back to the office. Why?

> Society is not going to change to revolve around shut-in people haters. You're a minority. You're not normal.

Yet people like you seem to be unable to socialize without forcing people to hang out near you against their will to the point of threatening their livelihood. That's not normal. I can socialize fine with people around and near me. And hang out with coworkers outside the office too.

Ignoring the rest of your ridiculous comment,

>That's why so many TV programs are made about work and the office environment. People enjoy the social aspect of it.

Attempting to equate the appeal of some TV entertainment with the reality of travelling to and spending 40 hours a week in an office environment is laughable. That's like saying people enjoy war movies cause they like war. Plain idiotic.

nice black and white thinking there.

it's not an either-or situation. people who want to go into an office should. people who don't want to, shouldn't have to.

and hell, with the way you seem to think, why would anyone want to go into an office and be around people like you all day.

> That's why so many TV programs are made about work and the office

Ah yes, beloved British comedy The Office, whose subject is how nice it is to work in one.

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