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Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

I’ve heard this argument before and I don’t buy it. By that, I mean it may be true (that people want to prop up real estate prices), but I don’t think that this is enough of an explanation.

If it were just about real estate, then Amazon would not be calling for 5 days a week return-to-office. I don’t think real estate interests are powerful enough to push Amazon around and I don’t think they’re entrenched enough in Amazon leadership to make it happen. As an alternative contributing factor, I suggest that Amazon wants employee attrition, and five day return-to-office is a convenient tool for that. One of the things that makes return-to-office such a convenient tool for employee attrition is that it’s a deniable tool.

In cities like New York, it’s pretty clear that commercial real estate interests are in bed with the city government. I just don’t think that real estate has enough power to push through a return-to-office agenda at the scale that we’re seeing. Don’t get me wrong, I think commercial real estate interests have a ton of influence. I just don’t think it’s enough influence to explain RTO at this scale (but it can explain RTO policies in some specific cases).

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My theory, which is kind of informed by what I saw it play out in my company: The reason is a psychological one. Most leaders derive their power from in-person interactions. Remote and video calls severely impact that. Those leaders also love having an audience that needs to listen to them whenever they are in the room and the lack of that kind of feedback and adulation shellshocked a lot of them.

It feels a lot worse to deliver a lame joke at the start of an all hands meeting to a bunch of muted zoom windows with their cameras off. How much of the return to office is leaders wanting that polite chuckle from that captured audience back?

I'm barely being facetious. "That polite chuckle" is really a stand in for all the soft power they wield in person that evaporates with WFH. They have lost a degree of control and power, it is basic human nature to look for a way to claw that back.

new rituals for video-calls and remote interactions are being evaluated by gamers and nerds for decades now, but the application to diversely motivated workers is difficult

I think we're looking for the unified theory of RTO. Soft power is definitely one of them. But every company and group of people have their own mix of reasons.

I bet Amazon's exercise is a hidden layoff process. Other companies probably want to get their money's worth from the office buildings. The management of others wants to see the army of smiling minions that report to them. Others want to see people in the office for control (make sure they're not enjoying too long breaks, or working from the beach, or working double jobs in parallel, etc.). And some believe that people will interact better, easier if they're in physical proximity. Or a mix of this even between managers from the same company.

And sometimes I think some cities push employers to get people back in office because they have no better idea how to keep those centers of activity vibrant, alive, and contributing financially. I remember reading some city authorities complaining that RTO means the death of the city center and the businesses tied to it.

I don't see why there would be one reason to rule them all.

I’d think the reason would be relatively unified among a specific class of similar people, i.e. management everywhere probably wants roughly the same thing when they call for RTO and journalists probably want a different same thing when they trash remote work.

The soft power aspect of jokes, who laughs at what, and when is fascinating. There is even some research on it:

From https://www.thehrobserver.com/indepth/laughing-at-the-bosss-...

>You mentioned that humour and power is intertwined – what is the social impact of this?

>If a boss is trying to be funny, they are automatically trying to get a response, so the use of humour is never neutral or irrelevant. People have a split second to decide whether or not to fake a laugh, or even how much to laugh – trying to figure out if the boss thinks a particular joke is a little funny or a lot funny. At the same time, they are trying to decide what the consequences of not laughing might be.

original paper https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/amj.2022.0195

Alas, it's a nuclear option.

People are going to stay or leave based on random criteria. Your company is going to be left with various deficits and it will take a long while to sort out the hiring mess.

This feels more like it's about power. Those with the power leave, likely to competitors.

The good people always have other options. The bad ones don't.

Immediate supervisors usually know who is good and should be empowered to decide who can WFH. And who they don't want to lose.

Diktats from god are a sign of a disfunctional org.

I am not sure why not more people are not considering that to be the reason. In my last job, it actually made sense to have an in-office audience and yet management was opposed to it due to costs. When we had a round meeting, it kinda transpired to me that upper-management didn't really like to interact with the tech team much. They had a liaison person and that was as much as they wanted to interact with tech people.

To follow on from your premise; I suspect it comes from a misunderstanding of authority. In my experience most leaders have a visceral understanding of authority, but not an actual understanding. Authority comes from submission; anything you submit to has authority over you. The corollary of course is that the submissive person has the power in the relationship; at any time they can say I don't want this any more. Obviously in a work context this means quitting.

So if a leader wants, requires, needs, is addicted to that feeling that people are submitting to them, then things will eventually go downhill as in the end the only people who will work for them will be "yes men".

    "That polite chuckle" is really a stand in for all 
    the soft power they wield in person that evaporates 
    with WFH. They have lost a degree of control and power, 
    it is basic human nature to look for a way to claw 
    that back.

That's an interesting angle and I really mean "interesting" in the literal sense.

My hunch is that the corporate executive's thirst for power generally works a little differently than that, in ways I find it difficult to express.

Why do people want those executive jobs? Quite honestly I don't feel the primary appeal for them lies in the minutia of those in-person interactions -- the polite chuckles and such.

I do not think they typically care about Cubicle Slave #58332 enough to be gratified when they (either individually, or in aggregate) give up that polite chuckle for an unfunny joke. For them, that would be like caring about whether or not an insect laughed at their jokes -- and caring about your token genuflections, about your small personal humiliations, is still caring.

So what is the appeal for them? Well, money and status, occasionally with some loyalty and/or core belief in the company added to the mix.

I think the chuckle serves as a reminder of that status. And if there is no chuckle, it is considered rude, not giving you what your status deserves.

I really wonder if there's a tribal / psychological effect of this kind and if not having to play the submissive / adoration dance made people more interested in practical information passing. Saying this because a few articles mentioned that some full remote teams were much much more effective at actual work, spreading data so that everybody could find solutions or continue work right away.

This is the conclusion I have come to as well. So much of what happens in society can be best explained (imo) by human psychology and our relationship with ego, desire, perceived success etc.

And that goes up to every levels of the hierarchy.

It's definitely about power and control.

I'd add that it is also a question of geography. The work place is the place where power exists. And so having you inside the company's walls means you are under control.

Yeah I think this is a huge part of the primitive gratification many people get from workplace “power”. You can often get a glimpse of it in-between the lines in more charged situations: some people essentially have a mental model where they are the sovereign of the office space, or speaks directly for the sovereign. It can get very interesting when that model meets reality (where they are in fact not the sovereign, but just another loyal subject under the law of the land).

Totally agree. Add to that the fact that in many cases, businesses ran fine without the in-person interactions of these managers… which could mean that we actually don’t need them, the managers I mean. And they are very scared of that.

thou, leaders are more dependent on it, imho it impacts all human interaction and mostly for the worse.

we need to adjust our recipe/theory for coherent/functional constellations of humans unless heightened denial of humanity is in our collective interest

Exactly this. When I was a junior investment banker we worked brutal hours, often 80-90 hours a week with most days ending at 1-2am. Yet the head of investment banking insisted we always make it to his Monday 8am meeting since he wanted a bigger crowd when he talked. Going from a Sunday all-nighter into this was quite painful.

Off topic question, but what do investment bankers even do for all those hours every week?

I talked once to an ex investment banker who quit to move into tech due to the hours. He had lots of stories about ridiculous hours.

He said most of the time was wasted. It was spent on things like preparing slide decks for executives who then didn't read them, but who insisted the work be done in massively compressed time windows and then delivered by taxi at 6am on a Sunday. He viewed it as very inefficient and mostly a matter of bad culture. The senior managers did it when they were young, so they weren't about to let the next generation get ahead without the same sacrifices.

Sounds like rush week in college

This column had some good insight: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-09-12/banker...

Obviously this is a multi-causal issue. RTO policies spring up for a variety of reasons, often a mix. All those negative narratives sure have some founding in reality, but maybe you can think of benevolent reasons why companies call for RTO?

Here is an example. Ms. Follett [1] made a good case a century ago that value is not created by people but between people. So you need interaction to add value -- something companies are imminently interested in, even if some employees are not. Some interactions, actually anything with more than 3-4 participants, break down over Teams and require face-to-face contact to be effective. Cutting everything down to 4 participants is to put the tool above the people and, to add insult to injury, will create a new pyramid of management levels, which we chucked for good reasons in the last century. So just get together in the office, which you have anyway to set up your football table. Does this mandate a 5-day RTO policy? No, but it shows that there is at least one good reason to get into the office once or twice a week.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Parker_Follett

All these "face-to-face meetings are better" arguments are predicated on the fact that all your teammates are on the same campus. That is just no longer true in a lot of companies these days.

Even with mandatory, 5-day-per-week RTO, you may have 2 team members in the US, 2 in Europe and one in Bangalore, all in their respective offices in their respective timezones. The meetings are still happening over Zoom.

> All these "face-to-face meetings are better" arguments are predicated on the fact that all your teammates are on the same campus.

True. People need to be at least in the general vicinity, yes.

> you may have 2 team members in the US, 2 in Europe and one in Bangalore, all in their respective offices in their respective timezones

Also true, but even before COVID and 24/7 home office we knew that this kind of team setup sucks and we complained -- loudly -- whenever we had to work this way. And while technology improved the main reasons why we complained haven't changed. In short, that's not an argument for or against RTO, it is one against bad work organization.

> Most leaders derive their power from in-person interactions.

I think that this is the heart of the issue. Everything else is relatively meaningless.

I agree with the basis of this, but it assumes that a significant portion of people derive their influence and motivation by in-person interaction. Once you take that at face value, there are going to be things you can get done with that tool, that you can't otherwise. It's not a requirement for 5 day RTW, but it also speaks to the challenge of remote only work.

There's a reason people do LAN parties even when you have to lug your rig around, and it's not just food and drink.

nostalgia?

In addition to what you mentioned, most of today's corporate leaders rose through the ranks in 2010's or even before. They have thrived in offices and hence have habits and cultural norms more suitable for in-office work. No wonder they think offices are a better setup.

In addition, a lot of people facing functions (Sales, Management etc) were done in person. There might be a world where those are possible on Zoom, but the workforce has to be trained for that. Why should a company train their 35+ management stack about online people management, when they can just force the RTO?

It's a fair theory and I agree it is one motivator.

But, I also know non-leader individual contributors who firmly believe that in person is better for collaboration, design, and problem solving. Yes, they prefer to be at home, but they believe they need to be in person to do their best work. So, I wouldn't be surprised if many managers believe this too. I disagree with this personally, but I recognize that different things work for different people.

I also believe there are some CEOs who don't own any real estate investments, but feel some responsibility to uphold certain economic values that they believe will help prevent a massive recession that may impact their business down the line.

In other words, I believe there are several factors that are influencing different people to believe in-person is right for their business.

Why not all three? Helping their feelings of power, Helping their bottom line with attrition, and Helping their real-estate buddies with big dumb investments in tall buildings.

There’s no reason it has to just be one thing

I talked to an acquaintance who ran a startup that went remote during the pandemic. His view was that the self-motivated conscientious employees were just as productive remote as they were in the office, if not more. The problem was that when they left the office the people in the office became less productive.

To me that makes a lot of sense and aligns well with my experience of office life. Some people depend on seeing others around them working, or they can’t get much done.

I asked him if he thought it was fair that his self-motivated employees essentially had to provide this service for free to the company, and spend time commuting to do it. Don’t think he could fully grasp the question, didn’t see a problem with that at all.

(This was in Sweden, which has a more collectivist work culture than the US.)

EDIT: But to be honest I think there might be more truth to @kitsune_’s sibling comment.

I think a lot of this comes down to perception of ROI for management. If the employment market is giving you qualified candidates at the price you seek in-office, why would you expose yourself to risk? I'm in this situation now where I'm hiring early employees and looking to grow, and about 90% of the decisions is how well can I derisk this hire.

I don't need elite developers; I need competent, conscientious "75%" developers. It doesn't make sense to spend time interviewing, onboarding, and hiring, just to expose myself to another risk factor.

Your friend was probably not thinking "fair" or "unfair", rather, what is the employment market bringing him.

> Your friend was probably not thinking "fair" or "unfair", rather, what is the employment market bringing him.

In a relatively free labor market (like e.g. California’s) that perspective is fine with me, because you probably have to pay more for the conscientious “75%” developers you need. But Sweden has a heavily regulated and unionized labor market where differences in pay are typically motivated by the collectively agreed “fairness”.

I can assure you that your argument would have been just as foreign for my acquaintance.

If I'm being totally honest, I am not sure it would be totally foreign. Entrepreneurship in Sweden (at least according to a quick google search) is relatively rare. Most of the entrepreneurs coming from the nordics I have interacted with have been decidedly less social contract oriented than even I am to the point where they seem almost like Gordon Gekko caricatures as though they are attempting to behave in a manner they think someone attempting to operate in a market-driven context would act. I am not sure that this argument would be totally foreign to your acquaintance, at least based upon the entrepreneurs coming from that region of the world in the USA.

> If I'm being totally honest, I am not sure it would be totally foreign.

I think I simply have more information than you do in this case. :)

(Because I know the person we’re talking about, and because I’ve worked in Swedish startups for 20 years, my own and other’s.)

If getting the best developers for your budget isn't a priority, hiring remotely allows you to stretch your runway further.

I wanted to reply to your comment re:Nordics but it seems it reached a limit to comment depth, your experiences are probably related to interacting with a biased sample, a quick google tells me that on average only a couple hundred Swedes immigrate to the US per year.

> If getting the best developers for your budget isn't a priority, hiring remotely allows you to stretch your runway further.

If I wanted to stretch my budget, I would go to LATAM. Developers marketing themselves as "go remote, stretch your budget further" will see just how far it can stretch.

I'm hiring in the USA because my business requires knowledge of the US business environment (benefits management) and require in-person because it's easier to prevent mistakes which can attract the ire of regulators when you are small and don't have formal review processes.

> I wanted to reply to your comment re:Nordics but it seems it reached a limit to comment depth, your experiences are probably related to interacting with a biased sample, a quick google tells me that on average only a couple hundred Swedes immigrate to the US per year.

Possible, and I didn't interact with only Swedes; I interacted with mostly Norwegians and a few Swedes, so I may be generalizing somewhat. But it really seemed like there was a collective sense of "I need to act as ruthless as possible to run a business here". I don't think American business customs are well understood in practical application.

> If the employment market is giving you qualified candidates at the price you seek in-office

Is the employment market actually giving you that?

Anecdotally, I knew a handful of FAANG engineers with 10+ years experience who had gone full remote before the pandemic, and dozens more during/since. Those are the creme-de-la-creme of the employment market, and they are all hanging out at startups who are willing to play ball on full remote, to get access to talent they otherwise couldn't remotely afford...

> Is the employment market actually giving you that?

Yes. Not all applications benefit from FAANG experience. There is a lot of work to be done that pays in the 130-200 range that isn't necessarily cutting edge. I should add, benefits are excellent (major medical) and it's a private office.

> Anecdotally, I knew a handful of FAANG engineers with 10+ years experience who had gone full remote before the pandemic, and dozens more during/since. Those are the creme-de-la-creme of the employment market, and they are all hanging out at startups who are willing to play ball on full remote, to get access to talent they otherwise couldn't remotely afford...

I can believe it. Sometimes, you just need technical excellence to bring a product to market, otherwise you fail. But other times, you can simply apply well understood paradigms to well understood markets and have excellent financial returns.

It's the difference between an excellent business and an excellent product. When you have a choice, choose the excellent business.

> Is the employment market actually giving you that?

Yes, because the employment market is not a free market. You can find (virtually) any employees your heart desires, because workers are highly motivated to not die. In addition, they have no bargaining power, meaning they take what they can get. They don't have visibility either - hiring is a perfect black box to them.

The scales are not only not balanced, they're almost completely tipped. This is why companies can pay below market and still get a constant supply of (shitty) employees. If you simply lower your standards, you can get infinite employees. They could hire children if they wanted, and it would be easy. They could pay 50 cents an hour if they wanted. Luckily, the laws prevent this - but it's most certainly NOT an issue of demand. There's a high demand among children to work and there's a high demand among laborers to work for poverty wages.

I'm not sure of the relevance - we're not talking about child labour here.

We're talking about highly-skilled software engineers and product specialists who are used to being able to command high 6-figure salaries with considerable additional perks (RSUs, bonuses, 3 meals a day on campus, free laundry...)

Those are the folks Meta/Amazon/Google are mandating return to 5 days a week in office. The folks stuck doing manual labour in their fulfilment/data/moderation centres... those ones mostly never were allowed to go remote in the first place.

Of course it's relevant because it's all the same. Software engineers have merely deluded themselves into believing they command things. Without a union, you have no bargaining power.

Everyone likes to believe they're mama's special little laborer. But you're not, you're a cog like the rest of us and the only thing you command is a shitty drip coffee machine in a cramped break room.

This is a matter of class, not a matter of profession. You, and I, are being bullied by our employers because we have absolutely 0 say in how we work our jobs. That's no different than any manual laborer - minus the ones who are unionized.

In a matter of irony, mechanics and such that operate in a union have much more control over their workplace. If their job allowed it, they could trivially strike for the benefit of WFH. That's not a power you have, you're too busy bending over and then later justifying how you wanted to take it all along.

What you say is certainly true in general, but there are a surprising number of specialists kicking around big tech companies who are not particularly fungible, and replacing them means likely poaching their counterpart from another firm. Those are the ones you really don't want to decide they'd have more fun working remote for a startup...

That's kind of normal so I only pick up companies that offer remote only positions with no strings attached.

That's fine? It's a market. Work for whoever is offering mutually agreeable terms for as long as that remains the case.

Of course. That basically divides the market into 3 segments: (1) companies that fully enforce RTO, (2) those that partly enforce RTO ("hybrid"), and (3) those that give you a choice - full WFH or coming to the office when you wish.

Based on what I observe in my niche, (3) have an enormous advantage when it comes to both hiring and maintaining senior talent.

That's a problem that can be encountered by companies that don't think through how remote work is supposed to work at their workplace. It's easier to craft processes when everyone is remote (i.e. if the company is remote-first).

> Don’t think he could fully grasp the question, didn’t see a problem with that at all.

Ask him if he ever considered actually asking the self-motivated conscientious employees their opinion and preferences - and watch his mind boggle.

Basically, employers hate a power imbalance in favour of employees.

A significant majority of the total wealth in the US is in real estate (~$90T of ~$150T). Most of that is residential, but about a third of it is commercial.

So about 10-20% of the total wealth in the US is in the form of commercial real estate, a significant amount of which is offices or office-adjacent-services that lose value if offices are not occupied.

Is there a metric like PPP for real estate ? It might be a reality check for wealth vis-à-vis other nations.

I think cap rates are a decent proxy for that kind of thing, and they're not too bad recently in commercial office space, as far as I can tell. It seems that office buildings are selling at a discount to what they were a few years ago. But I suspect that many buildings have not yet changed hands, and thus have debt based on their old values.

I wonder how many underwater office buildings there are in the US right now, and who owns their commercial paper?

Edit: looks like about half of all office mortgages are underwater. Welp, there it is.

But the mortgage is fixed. Bringing people back in won't change the contract.

The value of the building is as a multiplier of the net operating income, that's what a cap rate is. If people come back in and companies expand and renew their leases, that increases the value of the building and reduces the capital needed to recapitalize the mortgage.

And, bringing people back in, especially in the context of e.g. Amazon with thousand of workers, also has lots of knock on effects on other businesses, and there are plenty of copycats who follow the big seven tech companies.

What is the motivation for the companies? They're not saving any money moving workers back in. They can just let the lease run out and not renew.

The Fed’s estimates thru 2022 say real estate makes up 46.8% of net US wealth ($83.5 trillion of $178.4 trillion) [0].

0. Readably summarized at https://www.barrons.com/amp/articles/net-wealth-is-over-135-... .

Appreciate the more accurate figures, I didn't want to have to break out a spreadsheet to read an inflammatory blog article.

I’ve long suspected it’s a PR campaign/propaganda and talking points aimed directly at the c suite class. A lot of people with a lot of money stand to lose a lot. Banks, investors, retirement funds…

Start circulating studies showing people working multiple remote jobs at once, steer thinking around company culture, normalize it through repetition, send out talking points. Eventually dominos will start failing.

If it would be bad for people's pension funds and such, shouldn't it be everyone's interest to actually keep showing up to prop up those real estate values?

No.

Pension indexes wouldn't be in a volotile industry as real estate.

> shouldn't it be everyone's interest to actually keep showing up to prop up those real estate values?

not if you're getting a large benefit from WFH. And the loss from commercial real estate devaluation won't hit everyone equally.

Productivity would grow the amount of value in real-estate + some i guess. Should be a little spike starting at covid where new value is generated, but old losses are not priced in.

Pensions are, in general, well diversified. The tiny loss you'd get in your pension, diluted over decades of management, is practically homeopathic in strength as a concern.

No? My impression of US (and by extension) global finance state of things is, pension funds are holding the society hostage, preventing positive changes in some sectors of the economy, real estate being particularly blatant case. "Propping up those real estate values", in general, works for the benefits of "haves" at the expense of hoping to have when they get older - i.e. it works against the interest of younger generations.

As a young'un who probably won't live to see a pension judging by how things are going in the world, I'll take a QoL boost NOW instead of potentially maybe one day when I'm 65+ and retired being able to perhaps live off of the undoubtedly meager pension I accrued over a more miserable life.

I also suspect (but have nothing to prove this, just a gut feeling) that the effect of pension funds is minuscule compared to the amount of money the elite make. It's a very convenient excuse to not do anything disruptive ever, of course, because "Think of the pensions!!"

https://www.thinkingaheadinstitute.org/research-papers/globa... says pensions control $55 trillion. you'll have to define "the elites" a bit more to have a point of comparison, but the richest billionaire has "only" $200 B.

So at the very least it's not miniscule, but it depends on how you want to calculate the other side of the equation.

You miss a part: it's not just real estate. If we WFH, we own homes, not in dense cities. If we own homes we start having maybe a shed with p.v. and storage, a homelab, which with modern FTTH connections could be a small machine room alike datacenter, which with modern tech could be a part of a decentralized network so the SME/startup instead of buying someone else resources in the cloud buy their employees resources in their home at similar rates and equal reliability but with much more balance of power and much less private censorship possible (like arbitrary PayPal and co blocking of payments for Wikileaks or porn-producers). In such setup who will rent a Waymo? Who wont a more shiny macrobug aka smartphone? Who want JustEat or Uber?

We will came back quickly in a real modern "StrongTown" economy, of many SMEs fighting with their dynamism, instead of creating slaves with taxes and rents to keep people moving. We will really implement the Green New Deal because we can't in a modern dense city without rebuild it from the ground, but we can for small buildings. We re-create the middle class society instead of the neofeudal society of giants and neoproletarian poor.

Real estate is the most immediate threat for the giants, but not the only.

There are also tax incentives. Cities like big company offices because in theory their workers would become customers of local businesses, which would not be possible with remote work. Maybe cities have been threatening to take away the tax breaks unless leadership did a RTO?

It's also highly likely that this is a soft layoff, trying to delay the real layoffs in 2025

yeah this isn't mentioned enough. cities desperate need the tax revenue and are pressing larger business -- doubly so if they're places like Texas, who offered sweetheart tax deals to businesses to attract them into the state.

Amazon RTO has a very simple explanation. If Amazon fired a bunch of people they'd lose access to bringing replacements in via H-1B, EB-1, et cetera.

If they chase them out via RTO, they can be replaced with H-1B's.

Can you please explain what you mean by employee attrition to a non-native English speaker?

They're hoping a bunch of people quit (instead of complying with the mandate) to reduce headcount/the negative PR of layoffs.

I think he means that some companies would like employees to voluntarily quit

Employees quit for all sorts of reasons. When a company gets big enough, it's just resource management, like a board game. Employee attrition is getting employees to quit without firing them, which is usually cheaper for the company.

That's too obvious of an explanation and probably the likeliest one. It is common knowledge that almost every big corp is trying to downsize now, and RTO announcement does force a lot of employees to reevaluate their situation.

If we oversimplify everything, yes... it's all about prop up real estate prices. But if we want to talk about this, we need to have in mind the capital amortization. The value of every business goes up or down if their fixed capital gets old or unused. For example, if you have 100 computers and every computer costs 1000, your company has that value as capital. But if they lose value in the next years and those same computers have a value of 50 in the market, then your company's value is halved (oversimplifiying it). The same happens with buildings and offices, if they lose values the company loses value too. Forcing workers to move to the office gives value to the area and the building, and the buildings around, and that's one of the main reasons why they are forcing the back to office thing.

Aren’t most companies leasing their office space?

Not all, and even that, leasing is a cost in their accounts, which is good. Those companies that have huge ammounts of benefits need huge costs to maintain a propper balance.

If a company leases their building (and I think most do) then the capital value is of little interest to them and won't influence these sort of decisions. The businesses that are struggling through all this are their landlords.

I think there could be legit reasons for RTO, such as improved mentoring opportunities, and developing deeper productive relationships with co-workers. I'm in my 50's and have worked fully remote for 15 years, but most of my business comes from past coworkers with whom I formed close relationships via working late nights in the office, going to happy hours, grabbing a coffee at the break room, etc. So, while I agree the companies are pursuing their own agendas, I think workers (especially young workers) could benefit from RTO.

There is no conspiracy theory here. Most people will work 4 hour work days when working remotely. (And if they're working an 8 hour work day it's because they're working two remote jobs at the same time.)

"No loss of productivity" is a flat out lie.

Maybe most people can get all their work done in 4 hours so sitting in an office for 8 is pointless

Maybe, maybe not.

However, management bought 8 hours of your time and not 4 when they hired you.

So it's up to management to fill my time with work. If I finish my work in 4 hours, then it's not my problem.

Untrue. It's entirely their business how they use the time they bought. You don't get to renege on your contract just because you "feel" like they could have used their investment better.

Tech jobs, especially in California, usually hire you for all your time. If your work requires overtime, you work overtime without getting paid overtime. This is called an “exempt” job.

So the times you’re off on the weekends doing no work is valuable to the company because you’re recharging your mind and possibly also thinking about problems subconsciously.

I went to check my job offer, and it doesn’t mention anything about 40 hour weeks or 8 hour days.

Your "usually" is untrue, most countries have 40 hours per week enshrined into their labor laws.

> However, management bought 8 hours of your time and not 4 when they hired you.

Nowhere in my employment contract does it say that.

Realistically, I am allowed to spend up to 8 hours to work on goals that my employer says I should work on. It is also understood that if the goals are completed earlier, I am free to fill the "free" part of 8 hours with self-learning.

There's also an implicit understanding that certain life activities may happen/overlap with that free time, e.g. eating/picking up kids.

Only in the most pedantic bad take world would your statement be correct.

(If you have to fill out timecards): does your timecard reflect that implicit understanding? Or, alternatively, if your timecard doesn’t, could you be hit with timecard fraud?

How much of your 8 hours at the office is productive work? In my experience, half the day is spent on coffee breaks and lunch anyway.

In my company we decided to go to the office 1 day every week. It´s completely optional and most of the people come. For us, that day is almost 100% lost. You spend the morning in some calls, dailies and things like that, and ofcourse taking some coffees and talking to people that you didnt see in 1 week. I even send myself notes for the next days when i work from home where im more productive.

> How much of your 8 hours at the office is productive work?

That's your management's problem, not yours. Your labor contract says that you owe the company your time, how they use it is not your business.

This sounds like you're focused more on punishment than on outcomes. If the outcome is the same in or out of office (that is, hours of unproductive time a day), then it seems to me you're upset that people are able to enjoy that time.

Requiring and taking time for purposes other than creating value for the company is nothing more than punishment. I understand being angry that you're sitting in the office twiddling thumbs while others are at home cooking. The solution here is not to punish those people for your own, and everyone's, in-office woes. The solution is to demand better for yourself.

I work in an office 5 days a week. I'll say right now - close to half of my time is wasted. However, I am still here in the office. Yes that absolutely sucks to know I could work 20 hours a week and achieve the same outcome. However, I am not "better" because I have enjoyed the punishment of spending that time. I am not more loyal nor more proficient. I am not less lazy. Pain IS NOT gain - that's a lie told by people with the intention of manipulating you to argue in favor of your own exploitation.

It's typical for salaried positions in tech to be exempt. I was last paid hourly by a body shop nearly 20 years ago.

How do you know this "most" stat?

And if there are people working 4 hours a day remotely, how productive do you think those same people are just because they're sat in an office?

Nutshell: I think this is a nonsense argument.

It's not a nonsense argument.

If you're sitting in an office twiddling your thumbs for 4 hours a day you're not defrauding your employer.

If you're at home working a second job (or mowing your lawn) for 4 hours a day then you're committing fraud and violating your contract with your employer.

Fundamentally it's a legal issue about fraud.

If you want remote work then you need a very different kind of employment contract. (One that specifies concrete deliverables, not time owed.)

> If you're sitting in an office twiddling your thumbs for 4 hours a day you're not defrauding your employer.

So you just want to lord over the minions, even if they're not actually doing anything for half the day? You don't actually care about productivity, you just care that you can exert your power over them and have them rot in a cubicle doing nothing, even if they were doing equal amounts of work in both situations.

They bought your time, and you signed that contract.

Complaining that they're not properly using the time they bought is like claiming you can joyride your neighbor's expensive sports car because he's not using it most of the time anyways.

> If you want remote work then you need a very different kind of employment contract. (One that specifies concrete deliverables, not time owed.)

We're a remote heavy company and we don't have that type of contract, and it all works really well.

So no, you don't need it.

You don't actually "need" legal contracts and other boring ugly things, as long as everybody plays nice.

We are now past that point where everyone plays nice working remotely.

Maybe you are. We're not.

> And if they're working an 8 hour work day it's because they're working two remote jobs at the same time.

I'd love to see actual stats on this, because I hear it a lot on HN (pretty much exclusively from the pro-office side) but I can't imagine there's that many people doing this. Even if there was, why is this a problem? Presumably they're getting work done in those 4 hours that is satisfactory to the business, so what if they do some work on the side as well? Who cares?

I do hybrid (2 times a week in the office) and don't mind it, but I know for a fact that pretty much every single person in my team does much less work on the office days than when they're remote, because we're mostly socializing, taking coffee breaks and taking full advantage of our 1-hour lunch break (rather than the 15 minutes it takes at home to just eat the meal). Most of us will even opt out of office days when we have a big deadline.

Hell, I'm much less productive at the office simply because the chairs & monitors suck. At home I've got a quad 4K monitor setup in an extremely comfortable chair, my own desk, my own food & beverages of choice, my own music blasting as loud (or quiet) as I want it. How could I be more productive in the office?

Turns out most people aren't mischievous children that have to be under constant supervision to get work done, and in fact they were better when given the freedom to approach the work in a way that suits them best.

> Who cares?

Your manager, because your employment contract is about time spent, not works delivered.

Maybe yours is... they aren't all like that.

My contract mentions nothing about time spent.

You seem very presumptuous.

my contract is about delivering value, not hours. is why i'm salary, not hourly.

cue the old saw about how an engineer gets hired back to fix a problem at his old company -- he bills them $2500, $50 for the hour, and $2450 for knowing how to fix the problem.

Psychological projection?

Amazon wants retention? That seems very strange and counter-intuitive. When did this happen?

I wrote that Amazon wants “attrition”, which means the opposite.

Sorry I don't know how I made that mistake.

Its about socio pathic no life loners with power wanting company,the company be damned.

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