It’s not about real estate, it’s about power. For a brief period, during the great resignation, executives felt the sting of at will employment, a weapon that was never meant to be used against them. RTO is about showing us all who is really in charge.
I've known some pretty rich and powerful people. None of them talk this way behind closed doors, or at least they haven't around me. Even the ones that denigrate social programs or support for workers or poverty don't frame it this way. They think - rightly or wrongly - that it's a more effective way to run their company, usually because they don't trust workers not to abuse remote work, or sometimes because they've bought into some hustle-culture narrative that wanting comfortable work means you're not a Scrappy Highly Motivated Self Starter or whatever.
So, it is about wanting to assert control. Because they think "abusing" remote work is when workers have more control of their circumstances and don't have to break their backs or brains for their salary.
You can say "well that's the sort of thing you should catch in a performance review", but that's more-or-less isomorphic to hiring anyone who applies to your job and relying on performance reviews to fire the bad ones. I think people can intuit that that approach would not work very well.
If you want to frame "being worried people will not do their jobs, or will do them worse than your expectations on hire" as "asserting control", I suppose you can do that. But surely an employer has at least some legitimate right to try to ensure that their employees are doing the job they pay them for (notwithstanding the broader economic undertones to the employer-employee relationship, which are a much larger issue that extends way beyond RTO).
Some work might be harder to quantify, but... for a lot of work, there's deadlines. If you need to get a UI screen working to some spec by Feb 1, and Feb 1 comes and goes and it's not done, isn't that some indication that work is getting done or not?
Do they really care if someone 'does the job' or 'delivers the results'? Sometimes there's not much difference, sometimes there's a huge difference.
And why Feb 1? Who decides what the reasonable timeline is? How sure are you that they aren't playing political games? How do you measure their performance? Did the engineer abandon some on-call thing to get it done? Did they pull a more senior person off of their job to help? Did the manager who gets blamed for all this choose who to hire?
Management isn't binary in this way, and when managers try to make it binary, a lot of people (rightly) complain. And I'd bet that many of the people who complain about that are exactly the same people who are here arguing for remote work (not least because I am in both groups).
Quantifying work to such an extent that you can detect any slacking or poor-quality work is one of the fastest ways to make it horrible for employees. Unscrupulous employees abuse Goodhart's Law to hell and back, scrupulous ones get punished for doing important work that didn't make it onto the quantified metrics, and work becomes more about covering your ass than it is about getting stuff done.
Feels like a fringe belief here, and only really feasible in flat, lean orgs with semi-technical stakeholders and no BSers. [So probably <0.001% of tech industry currently]
But it isn't. There's a reason that every company wants that top 0.001%. Employees who give a damn and can be trusted to get things done effectively without supervision or managerial pressure are rare. Even at the best organizations, they're often a minority. At weaker organizations, and (typically) at older and larger ones, they're somewhere between "very rare" and "totally nonexistent".
If you're the latest highly-funded startup, maybe you can pay enough and create a good enough work environment to attract that person. But what if you're a random 30-year-old contracting firm in Overland Park, Kansas, paying $85k a year for software engineers? Do you think you'll attract that vanishingly rare talent? Can you rely on the idea that all of your engineers are so motivated and so skilled?
If you want to argue for that level of managerial hands-off-ness, you can do that. It's a legitimate managerial philosophy, and it might even be the right one! But I think it's hard to deny that many people don't think that's the right managerial philosophy, and that's all that they need to believe to favor RTO without any particular malice.
My point isn't to argue for RTO. Again, I run a remote company, and if you ask me, I'll tell you your company should probably be remote, too (depending on exactly what you do). My point is to argue that people who are arguing for it need not be doing so out of any particular malice.
You don't have to take off all guardrails which prevent abuse. You can still have a rules based office fully remote
Sure. Lots of talk by executives about reining in the “sense of entitlement” in the post Covid era. Worked in middle management, heard it endlessly. I’m glad to hear it’s not universal, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real.
It was decidedly an org that felt like it resented the things it needed to do in order to compete for dev talent, and made very clear over time that it felt like it was overpaying us and other more "blue collar" roles in the company were more honorable and valuable.
Well sure. Just because they think it's a more effective way to run their company doesn't mean that their understanding of "more effective" isn't equivalent to exercising more control.
> But...like, do you think management actually thinks in these terms?
People are perfectly capable of thinking about things in terms that are inconsistent with their underlying motivations. Dog whistling in politics works and is necessary because explicit racism turns off a substantial part of the population that nevertheless remains open to more indirect forms of racist policy and language. Thus, dropping n bombs morphed into "welfare queens." While such voters may be uncomfortable with outright bigotry, dog whistling rhetoric still appeals to them because on some level they are not entirely comfortable with true racial equality and integration. i.e., they harbor racial animus that motivates racist beliefs.
Similarly, managers and executives may not feel comfortable speaking explicitly in terms of exercising power or control over their employees while still acting out of a subconscious need to exercise that very power or control. Almost certainly organizational leaders do not form a homogenous block here. Some of the leaders proposing these RTO policies are intentionally disguising their true motivations by using indirect language because they know their true beliefs are socially unacceptable and they do not want to incur the social cost of honestly representing their motivations. Others adopt similarly indirect language and comparable positions without being consciously aware of the emotional needs motivating their choices. Still others legitimately believe in their pro-RTO position without necessarily experiencing any ulterior motive.
> because they don't trust workers not to abuse remote work
Lack of trust in their workers is a failure of leadership. Rather than improve their accountability systems so that they can trust their workers more, they impose an extremely unwelcome cost on those employees. I don't see how that is any better than thinking about the problem in terms of raw power dynamics.
> or sometimes because they've bought into some hustle-culture narrative
Hustle culture itself encodes a sense of superiority that serves as emotional and philosophical justification for the power of business leaders over their employees. It's an example of attribute substitution. They don't know how to measure actual merit or hard work, so they measure visible, loosely correlated behaviors. Again, this is a failure of leadership, and a failure to establish systems of accountability that can function in a remote environment.
It is difficult to see any real moral difference between wanting to exercise power for its own sake and imposing uncompensated costs on employees to avoid doing the hard work of being a leader. Especially because an organization that cannot hold employees accountable in a remote environment will be unlikely to do so in the office either. So far, the overwhelming majority of the published data around remote work and the rigorous analyses based on those data strongly suggest RTO policies damage rather than improve productivity. Likely precisely because organizations with poor organizational mechanisms around accountability continue to perform poorly in office, whereas those with strong accountability perform even better remotely.
When leaders propose arguments for a policy that do not actually justify the policy, it makes sense to consider what their ulterior motives might be. Many ambitious leaders possess a deep psychological need to exercise power over others. That's what makes them ambitious. In the absence of any reasonable justification for RTO, it is thus not unreasonable to attribute their position to that need for control rather than accepting the insufficient and unconvincing excuses they explicitly offer for their position.
That's possible, yes. But I'm in as good as position as anyone to know, and as far as I can tell, that does not appear to be true of any of the people I'm interacting with. (I do agree with your preceding point, but that's a bit off-topic.)
> Rather than improve their accountability systems so that they can trust their workers more
Accountability trades off against other things, though. If it's by some objective standard, you run into Goodhart's Law almost immediately. If it's by subjective standards, you run into politics and personal biases (the exact biases you're concerned about, by the way!). It's this effect to "improve accountability" that leads to metrics on your git commits or programs that watch whether you're moving your mouse or stack-ranking or whatever else.
You could say "well they should improve their accountability to something not stupid" - sure, but organizational and managerial talent is limited. You don't run a business in an abstract ideal vacuum, you run it in a real world of human beings who are sometimes selfish, biased, petty, inattentive, stupid, egotistical, or any number of other things.
Given the practical fact that accountability has costs and is often done badly, avoiding the need for two much of it is not as unreasonable as it sounds.
> Hustle culture itself encodes a sense of superiority that serves as emotional and philosophical justification for the power of business leaders over their employees.
I agree with that, yes. Hustle culture is not a good thing. But buying into something dumb is different from malice or some deliberate effort to suppress workers.
> It is difficult to see any real moral difference between wanting to exercise power for its own sake and imposing uncompensated costs on employees to avoid doing the hard work of being a leader.
Even if there isn't a moral difference (and I think there is probably one, for reasons already described), there is a practical difference in the nature of the problem and the solutions to it.
> When leaders propose arguments for a policy that do not actually justify the policy
But I do think they justify it - or at least, that a reasonable person could think that they do. I think you're sort of assuming management of spherical cows on a frictionless plane here, without any of the extremely messy business than comes with any organization involving a large number of human beings.
This still seems a lot like RTO being used as a weapon. The only difference is they aren't being cruel for the sake of it (which is undoubtedly rare), but they have cruel intentions nevertheless.
Yes? I've been at the table to witness executives and presidents of companies openly talking about their disdain for their own employees. It's happened multiple times. At 3/5 of the employers that I've had over 20 years in technology. I firmly believe the only reason I didn't personally witness this at the other 2 was because I was too far removed from the halls of power in those organizations.
So have I, and they absolutely have talked and acted this way behind closed doors and at other times, felt no need to even hide it.
For Faangs it's about power, control and real estate.
For the yc startup crowd it's often about investor control forcing it and fake signalling (come to my trendy office and look at people working) and inexperienced management who needs to see what effects their poor decisions are having with their eyes so they can pivot.
All 7 of those people (in 3 different contracts) have failed to do so. At one point they said a variation of "because I say so" and that was that.
A lot of more liberal-leaning people don't understand the power-play games that many of the people on top love to play. One could argue some of them long stopped being there for the money and only do it for the power-play, even.