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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> “The only thing a return to the office has given me is an hour of traffic while driving and a loss in efficiency,” said the worker, who requested anonymity for fear of job reprisals.

RTO in a nutshell.

As someone who chose my living location based on where my family wants to live first and jobs second, this sudden turn to RTO mandates is infinitely depressing. Most of my work involves talking to people in different offices, states and countries anyway, so RTO means doing the e-mail and video call work but from a different location that requires battling traffic both ways. It’s insane that this is being done in the name of “efficiency”

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> RTO in a nutshell.

I saw this a while ago on Mastodon and it's on point (https://toot.yosh.is/@yosh/114027906524929311):

---

In today’s “terminology matters”:

Return To Office policy: middle-management language that assumes “office” is a neutral position, we’re somehow “returning to”. This term has been carefully crafted by corporate strategists to sound as palatable as possible.

Mandatory Commute policy: centers the outcome for workers - spending hours each day on an unpaid commute to and from the office just so we can be on video calls all day.

We don’t just have to accept hostile framing.

---

> spending hours each day on an unpaid commute to and from the office

Reminds me of a NYC startup I was at (while hired living on the west coast). CEO was really big on in-person (well except for all the LATAM devs I had to manage...) so they required me to fly out frequently, and my boss was incredulous I would book the 6 hour flight during week days because it "ate into work time". Like WTF is sitting on JetBlue flights on weekends for me but "work time"... I'm on salary anyways

It's insane that anyone actually believes that it's being done for efficiency.

It's not, and never was.

It's being done a) to drive people to quit, so they don't have to lay them off, and b) to restore the power dynamic to the status quo ante, where your manager could just look over at your cubicle and see you in your seat, and know that whether or not you were working, you were still there to bow to them. (And many of them genuinely have zero metric for gauging "how much is Aurornis working?" besides measuring the amount of time a butt is in a seat, and are desperate to avoid having to admit that.)

> many of them genuinely have zero metric for gauging "how much is Aurornis working?" besides measuring the amount of time a butt is in a seat

This is a legitimate problem though. Obviously making people do all their work from a centralized office location is a horribly inefficient solution, but it is a solution, and if there really is widespread slacking happening it might still be more efficient than doing nothing.

But it's not a solution, that's the problem.

I am currently at my desk, in my office. Am I working?

For roughly two years during the pandemic, I was at home using my laptop. Was I working?

Furthermore, for most office work, there is more to working than a binary "are you doing it or not?" Being at your desk working says nothing about the quality of your work, which any competent manager should absolutely be capable of assessing from the work itself.

Finally, you're making a huge assumption:

> if there really is widespread slacking happening

Is there any evidence that this is happening? I guarantee you that the kind of manager who does this will not know, because they have no effective metrics.

It's also precisely the kind of thing that toxic management culture says workers are always doing (or trying to do): It perpetuates the idea that Managers, who are perfect, pure beings with only the Might Company's best interests at heart, are always at odds with Workers, who are lazy good-for-nothings only ever interested in getting the most money possible for the least amount of work possible, and who must always be treated as if they are trying to steal their time from the Mighty Company.

If a manager doesn't have any better way to judge if their employees are working than to check seat attendance then that manager is useless.

The pay for such a simple supervisory task that needs only attendance-taking skill should be near minimum wage.

It's an unsolvable problem, because any sufficiently complex job will therefore be complex to measure. I mean, if you could measure it, then you could just do it, no? Why spend all this time measuring how good an engineer is?

If you really want to know, you have to look at the code, sit in on the meetings, write the code and see the challenges with integrating with the existing system, submit a PR to see the pushback and... oh wait now you're just an engineer.

If we hire two engineers to act as one then maybe, maybe, we could measure performance. At the cost of the largest inefficiency imaginable.

It's not unlike using generative AI for coding. Writing code is the easy part! Making sure it works is another beast. Honestly, I'd much rather write code than read it. If it takes X time to write code and > X time to read it, which in my book it does, why bother with the reading?

"Unsolvable" in the sense that there's no one magic algorithm you can use, sure.

But every job has some ways to determine if the person in it is actually, y'know, doing it. And off the top of my head (and it's early, so YMMV), I'd say that remote jobs tend to have more easily-auditable products than many in-person-only jobs (particularly the type where the main purpose is direct interaction with the public).

> If we hire two engineers to act as one then maybe, maybe, we could measure performance. At the cost of the largest inefficiency imaginable.

And why should "efficiency" be our most important criterion?

"Efficiency" is why we have lean staffing that forces the "bus factor"[0] of nearly every position to 1. "Efficiency" is why we have stretched, fragile supply chains that break down the moment any one supplier or middleman experiences a crisis.

Efficiency is the enemy of resilience. The only people it really helps are shareholders.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

Efficiency is perhaps not the right word, but I was under the impression that attempting to measure performance is a cost saving tactic. I think you lose the cost saving if you just double your engineers while keeping the same amount of work.

I mean, from a certain perspective, nearly everything management tries to do is a cost-saving tactic, but I wouldn't say that measuring performance is primarily about "cost savings". It's more about making sure that people are doing the job they were hired to do—which, on the face of it, is definitely a valuable thing to be doing.

The problem is when it's being used as a whip to get people to work ever harder with no more pay and no more support than before.

Doubling engineers while keeping the same amount of work is something that can increase resiliency—both in the engineers themselves and in the business. Making sure you have at least, say, 125%-150% coverage of all duties makes a huge difference in everyone's stress levels, and makes sure that if someone gets sick, gets hit by a bus, or just goes on vacation, their duties neither stop getting done, nor get piled onto other people who are already at 100% (or more) capacity.

Also to make sure you were getting those TPS reports in.

At my former job the (then) CEO said outright that forced WFH mandated in 2020 actually brought some minuscule improvement in general process efficiency.

In addition to your points about managers (upper and middle) being bad at their jobs, the c-suite must consider that sometimes tax breaks for the company hinge on physically bringing workers to a specific place: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-t...

Don't want to be the cynical guy, but having talked to just such a ceo who gets-off by being hired to fire people. RTO is literally a badge, or at least an excuse to exercise authority. Often yes, to get rid of free loaders, but more specifically to shove it in the face of a lot of engineers that they are subservient. This guy actually would put it that they saw a gig as, and I'm recalling, a place to 'eat shit', until he moved on. Quite a different perspective than what I'd think most devs here would see their field as, something they love. There's also alot of pent-up indignation about how executives see engineering in general. They. Don't. Understand. It. and so they marginalize it. Its not at all surprising behavior , that of executives, from what you'd expect to come from a group more likely that most to be represented by those doing nothing more than winning a personality contest.

I think a lot of executives see engineers as uppity, well-paid factory workers, and absolutely hate that the gap between their own pay and engineering's pay is so small. In order to maintain their world view that they are better, higher-class people, they need to be making 10X-100X what their median worker makes and they need their median worker to be afraid for their jobs and subservient to them. Current software engineering comp. (and until recently, the ease of engineers to job hop) contradicts this world view. The last thing they want is to be seen as [ugh] PEERS to regular workers. That won't do at all. Workers need to be taken down a notch and shown their place on the totem pole.

Same situation. Going to the office and opening a Zoom call with colleagues in India and a city hundreds of miles away. Madness.

Harder to sell Teslas to people who work from home.

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