People who refused to go back to the office and lost their jobs | Hacker News Reader

People who refused to go back to the office and lost their jobs

wsj.com

15 pointsgame_the0ry47 comments

Archive: https://archive.is/TP7RP#selection-5697.0-5697.72

I hope this is generational thing. The traffic and travel is really unnecessary for most knowledge work.

I don't care about the productivity conversation, it's just logistically dumb and if there's a cost in making fewer widgets for getting rid of traffic than so be it. Dangerous, expensive, time and space consuming... It's a huge collective toll on society that robs us of quality of life and many thousands of hours.

We just shouldn't be doing it in the same way we don't toss the contents of chamber pots into the street anymore. Let's embrace the modern era.

Mandating daily travel unless it's genuinely needed to do the job is really unjustifiable.

>I don't care about the productivity conversation, it's just logistically dumb and if there's a cost in making fewer widgets for getting rid of traffic than so be it.

Exactly. The companies should stop ignoring the cost of commuting to society, the environment, and personal (from work-life balance, to family) just because they don't get to pay for it.

You see, optimizing the three factors you mentioned does not increase shareholder value. They don’t care about society, the environment or work-life balance.

I'd say the whole modern system of "shareholder value" should be the first to go...

I hope not. I owned a lot of shares in companies and it will fund my retirement (same as it will fund almost everyone's retirement).

The employee's welfare shouldn't exist at the employer's discretion. That's the conceit of feudalism and we've supposedly left that behind us.

> The companies should stop ignoring the cost of commuting to society, the environment, and personal (from work-life balance, to family) just because they don’t get to pay for it.

Why would a profit-maximizing firm not ignore externalities it creates?

The solution is that they should pay for them; the personal ones they do as long as there is competition for employees, but the social/environmental ones need to be internalized via Pigovian taxation.

it might be the way to transition towards a remote first economy - make them pay for the time and cost of travel within a certain distance, and if they prefer, they can instead fund the difference in housing cost to help you live closer to the office.

employers pay stuff like national insurance or health insurance, depending on where you are - this would just be a "commuting allowance" for jobs that really require it.

The evidence is that work from home is more economical for firms.

I see a study from Stanford (by Nicholas Bloom) that gets trotted to show lowered productivity due to WFH.

However, on the narrower issue of Hybrid, Bloom’s work doesn’t find any productivity loss, https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2024/06/hybrid-work-is-a-w...

Other studies show productivity losses from remote work, ranging from 4% to 18%.

Yet another study shows that commute time saved finds it way back to employers, resulting in increased productivity, or stable productivity.

However, firms which can manage WFH, based on current data, should have an economic advantage.

I could be wrong, and I will change my views if so.

Edit: Sources

NY FED: finds a 4% reduction. Adverse selection accounted for 2/3rd of the observed effect.

https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff...

Time savings:

https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/time-savin...

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2c -

I sincerely doubt most people who are in the workforce have ever handled a 40 person raid.

People are going to be better at remote work, the more you work in such an environment. So I suspect efficiency gains are lower than what they will be.

>I sincerely doubt most people who are in the workforce have ever handled a 40 person raid.

Managing 25+ people across multiple time zones ends up overlapping quite a bit with raids! Particularly the need to stay calm when things inevitably wobble a bit, dispute resolution, clear, concise and often repeated communication as well as a mental model of what everyone else understands about the situation and being able to quickly deduce what they don't understand and correct it.

I'm not refuting what you said; I'm agreeing with your implication they'd benefit from the experience.

It's about shifting the tax burden onto employees

I polled my network of about 30 people in tech to get a rough idea of who preferred hybrid vs. in-office. Almost all managers of people wanted it to be in-office. Not even hybrid. Bad survey, but still.

That matches what I'd expect. Individual contributors think about their own situation, managers are supposed to think about the bigger picture, about making something more than the sum of the parts.

It also matches the sad stereotype that middle management types with no real clue what their staff do, need to see bums on seats to have any concept of worker productivity because they're incapable of measuring the actual productivity of their reports.

Which raises a question that those middle managers don't want asked: What value do they actually add to the business?

>What value do they actually add to the business?

We bring the right people together at the right time to solve the right problem

how do you achieve that, and why do you think that the right people wouldn't be able to achieve the same with remote sync and upfront email exchanges without you?

That, Detective, is the right question.

Withing that is this implicit assumption that managers are correct that forcing people back to the office will make everyone more productive.

that's a non-sequitur. you have stated that a manager cares about the bigger picture and you have implied that in-office is better for the bigger picture, but you haven't provided any evidence/reasoning to link the two.

So strange. I’m a manager and me and my peers would never want that.

This is so true. I love wfh.

I'm entirely willing to reskill over this, tbh. Already played my hand once, WFH or I'm out. Will do it again

I was way productive at home, but often times I felt work from home was actually too intense and it was easier to go into work.

But here was always my problem, it is really hard to differentiate between the smart slackers at home and the hard working ones. And more than once, I was burned by really smart people who wanted to use their super powers to slack off.

Managers who don't know what their people are up to are the real problem. It's not hard, whether people are working remote or on site to track what they're doing. In my day job, we have lots of slackers who work full time on site. They rarely get anything done, but the remote workers get the scrutiny even though it's obvious they're producing.

At my last job we had many slackers who were masters at schmoozing. They were great at being seen around the office, but terrible at actually delivering anything.

The promotion process in that place was primarily a popularity contest. It tended to reward that behaviour.

> more than once, I was burned by really smart people who wanted to use their super powers to slack off.

I don't see a problem here, just envy. They did their work.

This feels like one of those "pieces of flare" situations.

Next: People who went back to the office and still lost their jobs. Film at 11.

It's the overemployment fraud. People have become too good at it. I bet most who work from home now, practice it and some make huge amounts of money by basically defrauding their multiple employers. Companies naturally want to put a definite end to this.

"Overemployment" is one of those things that people like to talk about, but where little evidence exists to suggest it happens on any significant scale.

Neat bogeyman, sounds like a problem for management. Hint: plenty manage, no pun intended

Is there any data to support this claim? Or, is this one of those "fraud" claims that are may be 1 or 2 cases being used to get rid of the entire process?

I’m so happy the wfh trend has ended. People don’t do good work from home, and all my friends who were into it liked it because it let them work less and/or work two jobs.

As someone who has productively worked from home for over 25 years, this is nonsense.

Deep work needs peace and quiet. This is getting hard to find in an open plan office, except late in the evening.

Some people like working in an office to escape home distractions.

Open plan offices tend to be productivity-destroying for technical work that requires concentration. I assume they were largely adopted to save money, as a status indicator vs. managers with private offices, for surveillance, and for appearance.

The only open plan approach that I have seen work is a library where noise is forbidden and private work carrels are provided.

Had a CEO who extolled how much better open plans were, how vibrant it made the workplace, and so on and so on... Years later she admitted it was just to save money. I refuse to call an open office an "office" - that vibrant office she described back then? Full of people wearing headphones to block out all the noise they otherwise couldn't escape.

Do they sit on just regular desk in middle of noisiest part? Outside the few times they happen to be visiting the some side office...

Has it? Other than some of the larger companies who desperately want to justify expensive commercial real estate, I'd say among my friends who are in IT that nearly 90% of them are all working remotely.

Also "Work less" doesn't convey the negative connotations you seem to think it does if they're meeting their contractual expectations.

This is a really good point. There is little advantage to taking more time ("working more") to produce the same output. (Not to mention other wasted time such as commute time.)

Unfortunately some managers seem willing to accept a productivity loss if it allows them to feel more important.

That just sounds like you have bad managers and a bad culture in the companies where it doesn’t work

> People don’t do good work from home

Unless they work from overseas for $15,000 salary.

I'm completely the opposite here. I'm easily 2x more productive at home than in an office simply because of the lack of distractions. Honestly, I've started asking my spouse to start occasionally interrupting me so I remember to take a break occasionally and drink water.

I think the quality of wfh really depends on the person and if they have enough integrity with their obligations to begin with. Sure it would be simple to get away with barely doing anything, but the people who do this are probably not who you would want to hire anyway.

The linux kernel is people doing good work from home.

I have to go into the office 2 to 3 times a week now, and i get far less "work" done on those days than when I work from home. Most of my office time is just meetings/conversation. The commute also disrupts my ability to sync up with colleagues in Europe and Asia.

The one day of home office at work is easily my most productive day by the objective numbers of tasks done. And that is because there are no random collegues or superiors wandering in with "urgent" requests, which could have been an email since I (A) read those and (B) usually there is enough time anyways.

At home I can structure the day around my own concentration and have uninterrupted flow for hours and actually get shit done.

Sometimes my feeling is that managers hate home office because that means they have to stop walking around and chatting with people.

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