Return to Office Is a Mistake
infoworld.com
infoworld.com
Be it that they don't trust them to have the right idea, or trust them to do the work. Nearly all business practises we hate are caused by a measure of overt control over your daily time and a strict measuring of your time and tasks.
Unfortunately: there's about 10-20% of people who genuinely shouldn't be working because they are untrustworthy, and things like remote work just enabled them to take multiple jobs or slack-off massively.
So these practices mostly exist to deal with those people and the rest of us just suffer.
Loosely related anecdote why I feel so:
For a while right after Apple started its mandatory RTO and ramped up Caffe Macs, the soda "grab n go" sections had an honor system - you paid your $1.25 for a coke and went on your way. Apparently there was a _lot_ of petty theft of drinks, so they have a person with an iPad check you off now, and I assume theft has basically plummeted since there's far less employees brazen enough to just barge off with one without checking off their name.
So maybe the RTO is effective in someway? Or maybe the real lesson is that the soda should have been free to begin with.
Even my first job out of college as a boilerroom MSP sysadmin earning $40k in manhattan gave us free soda (the only benefit lol)
I mean, even if you work as a mechanic at a body shop, there is often free coffee in an old pot in the break room, it's not that crazy.
But outside of that context, no of course I don't expect/care if my employer provides me with free soda. I don't even drink it.
It just seems weirdly cheapskate for a supposed FAANG-class employer.
But most of all, it's just the message. All the other "nice" employers do it, even some pretty "basic" employers do (not surprising, this is a very cheap perk, only a little more expensive than breakroom coffee), so if you don't, it you look like a cheapskate. Like what else are you cheaping out on?
I also don't drink much coffee, but would see it as a red flag if they cut costs by getting rid of the coffee in the break room, and that's a red flag that would hold even if I was working as a retail cashier (that's not an industry where free break room coffee is standard, but it's not unusual, so while I wouldn't care if a company never offered it, if I was a cashier at a company that had it, and then they took it away, the message would be obvious -- we are preparing to cut costs at the expense of your work life, our company is no longer growing, jump ship if you can)
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-free-cafeteria-lun...
In short, when a company starts to pay attention to such petty details as the cost of soda, which must be a rounding error in the cost of running an office of a decent engineering company, it's a signal that the culture has changed. With that change, best engineering talent often leaves towards places where priorities are still aligned with lofty goals, not bean-counting.
(Disclaimer: of last 10 companies I've worked for, only two did not offer free soda, due to being 100% remote.)
[1]: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
My current place has free instant coffee (until it runs out) and everyone who wants to push for more than that is viewed with 'tall poppy syndrome'.
About 3 years before I left they removed the soda machines. My understanding was that it only cost about $30k / year and most of that was for cups & lids. We even had an executive that was willing to pay for it out of their budget. No go.
It turns out that the catering company that supplied food to the building didn't like losing out on the soda money. So they told KFC/YUM! to remove the free soda option, and they did. It really was the beginning of the end.
It's not so much that the soda was gone it was the thought of it. That free soda actually solved quite a few programming problems, or at least allowed us to solve them on our way downstairs. It also let us work harder/later than we normally would by giving us that afternoon journey. It's positive effect was much greater than it's financial cost.
Ever worked in an office? At any corporation size no one works 8 hours a day and if you want to slack, there are plenty opportunities in the office as well. Hell, you can spend the whole day there without doing ANYTHING.
So that is a non-point for me, slackers gonna slack.
9:25 - Arrival (cafeteria stopped serving breakfast at 9:30.
9:30-10:15 - Breakfast
10:15-11:30 - A lot of walking around the office, having business-sounding conversations with others but really getting nothing done.
11:30-1:00 - Out for lunch.
1:00-3:00 - Sneak out to car in the parking lot for a nap.
3:00-3:30 - Daily standup. Vaguely talk about how he’s “merging code” or “updating library dependencies” this week.
3:30-4:00 - At desk working.
4:00-5:30 - Doing his walk-around-talk-arounds through the office hallways again.
5:30-6:00 - At his desk again!
6:00 - Cafeteria starts serving dinner. Grabs a bunch of food, throws it in his backpack, and heads to the parking lot.
This went on for years. The other teammates joked that he must have blackmail dirt on the boss because it was obvious to everyone that he wasn’t doing anything and nobody seemed to care. He was there when I joined the company and was there when I left, years later. He may very well be still there today, merging code.
09:25 - arrive.
09:30 - 10:00; breakfast
10:00 - 10:30; standup
10:30 - 11:00; Coffee after standup
11:00 - 11:30; checking emails before lunch
11:30 - 13:00; lunch
13:00 - 13:30; food coma, better just check some emails
13:30 - 14:00; coffee and a chat
14:00 - 15:00; maybe some actual work
15:00 - 15:45; someone needs help, they come over and have a chat
15:45 - 16:30; maybe some more work
16:30 - 17:00 wrap up, go home, urgently write some emails and expect a response before you arrive 09:25 tomorrow.
I've seen this, a lot of this.
If someone is slacking, it is immediately visible. Can you abuse the system by providing fake explanations for why one task takes so long? Of course, but you can do the same whether you work remotely or not, and this can also be easily verified in both cases.
So they need to be visibly watched.
Of course ascending the hierarchy means visibly larger and larger numbers of underlings. Zoom phantoms don't count in that swinging duck contest.
There are better ways to deal with those people. I'm not convinced that is the reason for RTO.
The real reason, IMO, is there is all this office real estate that needs a justification to exist.
https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/the-art-of-simple-sabotage...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/id-governance/privil...
Ironically, a high-transparency, high-trust environment is exactly what makes teams of remote workers efficient. But it greatly helps in the office, too.
Many of these people suffer from chronic procrastination. They don't want to slack off, but they do it anyway. They want to work, but they're not capable of working in a remote environment. These might be the people who have ADD/ADHD, people who suffer from depression, extroverts, etc. For some of them, the fix is surprisingly easy: put them in an environment where there are people around them. It can be a coffee shop, library, or whole-day video call.
Source: I'm a co-founder of a body-doubling platform for remote workers.
On WorkMode you work with our employee (Productivity Partner), and their only job is to ensure that you stay productive throughout the day. You always work with the same Productivity Partner. They'll call you 15-30 minutes before your session starts to remind you about it and to make sure you prepare for work. They will notice if you don't show up, and they'll call you to find out what happened. They'll call you if you disappear mid-day or your lunch break takes more than you planned.
They'll keep track of your to-do list and help you break down tasks into manageable pieces. They pay much more attention to what you do and how you do it (perfectionism/productive procrastination/detrimental context switching). They know when you might procrastinate and what may trigger it. You can do 30, 60, or 4-hour sessions - it's up to you. The focus is on you.
Now, should you try WorkMode? If you already use Focusmate, Flown, or Focus101 and it works for you - keep doing that; you're doing great! If, however, it's hit-and-miss, you have zero days or need extra accountability, definitely try WorkMode :-)
It doesn't help you. Merely going to a coffee shop works for some people (me included). This is exactly what allowed me to finish my master's thesis two decades ago.
When discussing procrastination, it's important to remember that it's just a result of something else. Many things may cause procrastination, and everyone is different. It's like a headache. You might have the flu, a hangover, too high blood pressure, cancer, or be overly sensitive to external stimuli. You might also suffer from thousands of other causes. The result is that you have a headache, but there's no single cure for it.
In the office there's too many things that either distract me directly or are distractions for me indirectly. (people coming up to me to ask questions vs overhearing a problem and thinking I need to listen or step in).
Oh we still have the leverage of being a big mass then. AI won't beat physical violence in case of a revolution.
On a long enough time scale it beats everything.
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where user = ‘steve1977’;With your reasoning I should definitively support immigration policies which bring more people to my country, since that will make the hiring pool smaller and my leverage will go up. Is that what you meant?
I'd like to have a conversation with an executive at a company about that. The logical somersaults I'd likely hear would be something else.
If a company dictates that their employees return to the physical office but their competitors do not, there is a likelihood of losing valuable talent to companies with remote-friendly working conditions.
If both the company and all their competitors allow work-from-home to continue, then all of them, as industry decision-makers, must adjust policies, expectations, and operations to reflect this shift. While this scenario does not lead to a talent exodus, it does entail some other costs. Potential costs to this mutual “defection,” the acceptance of a “new office normal,” could include investors pointing out the wasteful operational expense of unused office space. Additionally, investor pressure from commercial real estate interests may also oppose such leadership decisions.
If the company “cooperates,” such that they insist on RTO while all of their competitors simultaneously insist that their employees need to work in-the-office, then no one has to adjust company policies to operate in a remote company environment. The effect of this will be employees open to recruitment finding their choices for alternative, more accommodating employers scarce and in low supply.
In this multi-player, game-theoretic landscape, where CEOs want to avoid the costs (real or potential) of allowing their people the ability to work remotely, cooperating companies need as few “defector” companies in their industrial sector as possible. With their other choices few and far-between, employees seeking the freedom to continue working from home will eventually give up on their WFH-oriented job hunts and decide to stay on in their current positions.
That could be the official slogan of any successful ruling class.
They ARE losing talent to remote-friendly companies, actually.
It's just that retaining talent isn't their priority. They overhired and don't want a PR issue so they'd rather make it as miserable as possible so that some people leave on their own.
In my experience, a lot of the compelling arguments I’ve heard are actually complaints about poor North American city design, rather than necessarily anti-being in a reasonable office.
Thankfully, I no longer work for a company that mandates in-office work and even the telco (!) I used to work for had unlimited home office even before the pandemic, which worked beautifully and saved them lots of money.
Having an office to go to helps the more socially inclined employees, but doesn't boost productivity uniformly, especially when everyone is on calls all day anyway.
Just like home office, full in-office work needs a very special setup to be truly effective and given global hiring, may be harder to achieve that a remote culture.
I agree that RTO makes no sense if you’re going to spend your entire day in calls. That said, I would actually go a bit further, and argue that distributed teams themselves are a bad idea for that reason.
I used to live right next to the office, but I wouldn't go today even if I still lived that close. Also, living in a more rural environment is pretty great.
> I think it’s pretty lazy to crank out a vibes based article describing specific grievances and generalizing to an entire population.
In that the article doesn't even describe _specific_ grievances, really; we get three quotes in this order:
- A Paul Graham tweet where he says "multiple founders" have changed their minds; the _personal_ opinion he expresses is that "he doubts things will go all the way back to the way they were before Covid, but it looks like they will go most of the way back." Nothing specific mentioned about why the founders changed their minds.
- A truly stripped-of-context quote from Keith Rabois that gets closest to saying something specific i.e. 'that younger workers “learn by osmosis,” which requires in-person interaction' (false as presented, and if this is a genuine reflection of his opinion then he doesn't actually understand training) and 'supervisors discover hidden talent by watching [younger employees]' (true enough, but presented as a problem with remote work when it's actually not)
- Absolute banger from Sam Altman: “I think definitely one of the tech industry’s worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody could go full remote forever, and startups didn’t need to be together in person and, you know, there was going to be no loss of creativity ... I would say that the experiment on that is over.” - the implied grievance here is that "remote work makes startups less creative" which is, to its' credit, an actual position for which one can make a coherent argument. He may even have gone to the trouble of doing this at some point, for all I know. The rest is pure sophistry, though - "one of the tech industry's worst mistakes ... was that everybody could go full remote forever" is just not an accurate reflection of what actually happened, and if he's exaggerating for effect, then I'd be interested to know what effect he was going for; he's also really softballing the reason why remote work happened in the first place: it wasn't an "experiment," it was a forced response to a world crisis with existential implications!
There's significant overgeneralizing happening here too, as you suggested; at best, you can say that these guys are referring to what's true of _startups specifically_, where they're at least domain experts, but even if their arguments ARE true of startups (and I am deeply skeptical that this is the case) you can't assume that they'll be true of OTHER organizational types.
I find commuting both annoying and nice. It allows me to clear my head and switch over to the other mindset.
Almost everyone on my team comes in 2 or 3 times a week. We have some meetings, great (free) lunch, work together on some things, crack lots of jokes and get to informally chat about things you don't easily schedule a call for (how you're doing, how you feel things are going in the team, in the company, in life in general - the under current that doesn't get visible easily).
It of course helps that my commute is 25 minutes and that our office space is only for our team. There is a natural ebb and flow to when people get loud and active, and when we're burried in our screens cracking a problem, so you also get to be productive.
I do work from home as well. I really like that I have the freedom to balance wfh and wfo.
I worked from home for years, on and off, so I can definitely compare.
I didn't believe it and when I started going in to scope things out, I started believe it. I think what happens here is the author of each individual article will have had a specific set of experiences and that's the assumption they make for everyone. IME I don't see how the incidental conversations happen remotely, everyone is eager to get off calls, as there can be so many it becomes draining. So clearly me and my colleagues are missing some key ingredient that's probably obvious to everyone else.
When I want to do actual work, I stay at home.
If I couldn't decide how to best do my job, I'd have a chat with my manager, and change jobs if we couldn't agree on something so basic.
If your job is highly collaborative, being in one place is so much better. Videoconferencing sucks, if your work requires collaborating with teams that do not share the same context as yours.
If your job requires long periods of sustained focus, working from home is better.
What I do agree with is that most companies and their leaders have no f*cking idea about how to think about remote or in-office work properly. They got with their own personal preferences, anecdotal evidence and authorative bullshit (if I don't see you working, I don't think you're working).
The conditions for successful work from home are: hire well experienced back office employees, have relaxed yet firm deadlines, conduct daily meetings, keep your middle management busy with more important work than helicoptering over their team, use your office space for more than just a place to sit, etc.
Businesses with multiple offices have been doing "remote" work for decades. This is more about company scale than policy. Too small or too large and you'll struggle keeping people organized. Mid-sized businesses are the majority and few have required returning to the office.
Not only has my company been increasingly pressuring RTO, they are getting rid of offices and even cubicles. You can now hotel in an open office hellscape. Return to office and double down on miserable working conditions.
It feels like the execs just want to reinforce who is in charge.
I work for this company because I am remote. I wouldn't work for them if I wasn't. These employers are either don't grasp that, don't want to, or are happy for the attritution.
I'm in a long distance relationship and I'm okay with going into the office 4-5 days a week for 6 out of 8 weeks as long as I can be full remote for 2 out of 8 weeks.
But I am NOT okay with 2 days every week.
Show HN: Return To Office Mandates suck
Never understood Dilbert poking fun of cubicles so much till I realized what they replaced was widespread private offices! For most or all engineering staff, not just the executives!
What really confuses me is -- isn't corporate america in 2025 way way way way more profitable than in 1980? So why can't we afford private offices or even cubicles anymore?
I'd say most industries do not match this description, and that most of the increase in the S&P500 over the last 40 years was due to real revenue growth, not cost cutting
- https://nypost.com/2024/03/19/us-news/less-than-one-in-three...
- https://mishtalk.com/economics/half-of-downtown-pittsburgh-o...
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-20/baltimore... and https://buyintobmore.baltimorecity.gov/
Well... It's clear that the modern city, the modern Fordlandia, today named Telosa, Prospera, Arkadag, Innopolis, ... is just a farm of humans that works just to pay services they can't live without, ending up in owning nothing and NOT being happy except happy in the Canon idea of happiness: https://petapixel.com/2021/06/17/canon-uses-ai-cameras-that-... RTO policies are because of that.
If we start en masse to realize that we can live in homes, spread enough to have the ideal density for today sane economy of scale, modern surveillance capitalism, modern "sharing economy" fails. The biggest that have craft them and profit on them will fail. A new economy will emerge and they can't switch quick enough.
Money in the modern world are extractors of value from the 99%, given it to a small cleptocracy, this cleptocracy need humans like Ford model workers in Fordlandia. People who live to work in a factory they do not own, in a hierarchy not a democracy, trapped by economic genital lace, conformism, habits.
That's why most try to push RTO and SOME "slaves" help them fearing the change, unable to realize that changes happen anyway and try avoiding them means suffer them letting others decide and direct the change.
Also, non-IT stuff can also keep office rental businesses up and running.
[1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/paul-graham-says-remote-does-...
After over three years WFH now, I know that my performance has improved. Anyone asking me to move around town every day will simply have to pay for that additional task now.
I think I have a job like that where we're building a new product, and very often we have ideas or realise issues that I don't think we would if we didn't have in person communication.
But there are a lot of jobs where your won't get rewarded for that and where in person interactions don't actually produce that much value.
Forcing everyone into offices is only about control and bad managers not being sure how to show their job is actually worth anything at all. Hint; it very often isn’t. Their jobs can often be replaced by a trivial piece of saas software.
> Like many HNers
Show of hands please as I don’t know if this is the case; I haven’t seen it. Like said; it’s mostly more nuanced and almost no one here I have seen claiming that ‘everyone RTO’ is a good plan, at all.