Return-to-office policies are leading to increased brain drain in the U.S. | Hacker News Reader

Return-to-office policies are leading to increased brain drain in the U.S.

venturebeat.com

46 pointsthis_weekend13 comments

> "We think a very substantial number of people will not show up to work, and therefore our government will get smaller and more efficient"

How is a smaller government "therefore" more efficient? It's only "more efficient" if you can demonstrate that the people leaving were redundant.

ETA:

To my point, if I yank out the GPU from my desktop computer, it's not magically "more efficient" just because it has less hardware in there. You need to demonstrate that I can get comparable results without the GPU for that statement to make any sense. It's possible that it will be more efficient, but it's also possible that forcing all the graphics to be rendered on the CPU in addition to its normal tasks makes stuff less efficient, since the CPU isn't as optimized.

Obviously humans are not computers, it's an analogy and I'm not claiming it's a perfect one, but what bothers me about this entire thing is it's going to selection-bias towards workers who can't get jobs elsewhere. The people who can easily get higher-paying jobs in private industry are likely to take the seven months of free pay and then go get a cushy corporate job that pays better.

As such I think it's going to leave behind the people who can't get easily get another job, meaning that we will have fewer people and these people might not be the most efficient at doing it.

The goal is to underfund after "needed" cuts, to prove it is worthless, then they can have someone create a business and pay that same amount in tax money to a company instead. The CEO will take most of the money and use H-1B visa workers, contracts and so forth and pay them less, whereas the original government jobs paid better, had benefits and possibly a retirement.

Yeah, I don't really dispute that, but I would like to hear the nominal explanation of this, from the people who support it.

It's possible that there are parts of the federal government that really could be cut, I'm happy to acknowledge that, but what I really hate is how the entire Trump administration is sort of using logical implication incorrectly.

It's like they're saying cutting workers implies more efficiency, but that actually isn't implied. They're roleplaying as being "logical" by misusing logic.

Also, backing up, efficiency is not the only metric we should care about. We learned the hard way at the start of the pandemic that our efficient supply chains were fragile due to lack of redundancy. A government agency may benefit from continuously staffing "redundant" roles in order to have capacity available when unforeseen events occur! Nobody needs FEMA until a natural disaster occurs.

It also boils down to the fact that it's not immediately clear what "efficiency" actually means in this context.

Like, I'm a software person so forgive the analogies, but even within software, I can think of three basic (but related) forms of efficiency: execution speed, energy, and memory. Sometimes something will be extremely fast and CPU efficient but at the cost of a ton of memory.

"Efficiency" is a term that is relative to the thing that you are measuring, and doesn't actually make much sense without that.

To your point, having some redundancy can be efficient, if you're optimizing for uptime. This applies to computers and people, I think.

Institutional knowledge often plays a huge role here, but can be difficult to measure. A team member whose experience allows them to quickly provide needed context that would otherwise take hours/days/weeks to obtain might significantly boost their team's productivity without generating any metrics that demonstrate their contributions.

You can't expect Elon Musk and the kids running DOGE (a fake "department" named after a meme coin) to think like you do.

True, but I think it’s important to call these things out when they happen.

Whether or not Musk is dumb, he still has a lot of power, and when people use faulty reasoning for decision making, that leads to inefficiencies.

What are the consequences for you if you are wrong? Enough apes making bad predictions will occasionally make a correct one.

I mean, I'm not sure how I'm wrong on this; it's possible that Elon's stuff will work out, but that doesn't change the fact that the logical reasoning suggested here doesn't work; it is not implied that firing a lot of people in the government will make it more "efficient".

The amount of bureaucracy cannot be measured in "number of bureaucrats".

It's like reducing the number of employees at a restaurant and expecting the food to come out quicker.

Being on zoom calls all day is way more brain draining for me, than RTO.

It would be for me as well, but why would you/your company do that? Or is it needed for your position? I do at most 1 zoom / week, the rest is slack, if not ok, then I leave.

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