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As a worker, I don’t care about squeezing the last drop of productivity that’s in me. I care about wasting time commuting, paying insane rents for tiny small apartments in the city, not having lunch with my loved ones.

I understand the topic of productivity if it’s brought up by some ceo, founder or investor (for them, we workers are less than working ants. They only care about how much money can they extract from us). So, either you are one of them, or you don’t have the priorities of life clear.

> I care about wasting time commuting, paying insane rents for tiny small apartments in the city

Easily solvable by not locating your company HQ in overpriced trendy coastal cities. This is usually met with "but people WANT to live there!" If this was true, walking to work wouldn't be an issue.

Easily solvable for whom? It's not easily solvable for the worker.

Perhaps it is easily solvable: imagine a distributed network of office locations, such that each employee is able to work a reasonable distance from where I want to live. We could even hyperscale this concept, to the point where every employee has an office within their own home. I call it "edge officing."

Hire this person!

> Easily solvable by not locating your company HQ in overpriced trendy coastal cities.

The trouble is that if you require in-person work, you're already artificially limiting your talent pool by 1000x. You just can't risk adding on another 1000x limiter onto that.

Ultimately yes, you could HQ in Ponder, Texas and pay people 100K and say that's the same as san fran. But then you're gathering talent in Ponder, Texas. Good luck!

If you reinvest the money you save on office buildings into employee salary, you might find that people are willing to move to Ponder for the combination of low-CoL and high salary.

Probably not enough to entirely offset the fewer local workers, but it's not nothing.

The problem is that the venn diagram of executives willing to cut office costs and executives willing to stomach paying "above market rate" is two completely distinct circles. There's many ways companies could make it work, but the number of ways they're willing to consider is dramatically smaller.

The problem is that then you have to make sure workers feel secure about moving to work for you. So good pay, good local environment and most importantly a secure job because if they get laid off they'll have to move their whole family somewhere else.

Some companies do it (Walmart I believe) but most tech companies tend to base themselves in relatively large cities with other tech firms.

I remember a couple of years ago that people were saying Amazon had trouble hiring because even in tech-hubs they had run out of qualified people who would want to work for them.

Epic the EMR company requires very nearly all employees to work in Verona, Wisconsin and they somehow get people to move there.

Madison has a well-earned reputation as a great city to live in. Epic is able leverage their location in the Madison metropolitan area to attract talent that they couldn't attract in a more rural or less well-known city.

So true. Jamie Dimon can bear being in the office 5 days a week because he has private limos and helicopters ferrying him around.

I mean you can read what I said in the worst possible faith, totally ok!

I point out how I:

- recognize there are people who do as well (or better) at home

- emphasize it's significantly worse work I'm referring to

- point out cases where it can work (and these are cases that any motivated person can find mind you, not every company has Amazon-sized)

I guess it'd be really boneheaded to conflate all that with "squeezing the last drop of productivity that’s in a human"... but that's the beauty of discourse for some folks: they can take any point in as silly a way as they want.

I can't relate to that though, just like I can't relate to "wanting to have reliable, motivated coworkers means you don't have your priorities straight". What a truly baffling level of mediocrity to aim for.

What point are you making then? Someone stuck their gun under the desk so the school banning gum is entirely fair and reasonable?

What if, and this is crazy, you fired them for bad performance the same way you would if they started slacking coming into work.

This smells like middle manager puedo justification so bad I can't stand it.

> This smells like middle manager puedo justification

Feel free to read up on my path so far, but you'll be disappointed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45134398

> Someone stuck their gum under the desk so the school banning gum is entirely fair and reasonable?

Assume you mean gum, and yes if we're scraping gum off the underside of desks every night, please for the love of Christ ban the gum: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32090420

> What if, and this is crazy, you fired them for bad performance the same way you would if they started slacking coming into work.

I don't know if you're in the Bay Area and talk to people in tech, but they're increasingly doing that.

But firing is disruptive and expensive, and it's not like all these people are inherently incapable of doing their jobs. It just turns out some aspect of the office thing everyone (even myself if you read the first post) thought was unimportant turned out to matter a bit more than expected.

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Honestly it's crazy this is even contentious 5 years post-COVID: saying WFH works for some people, works for orgs where there's good alignment-and works better at smaller scale while properties inherent to larger organizations cause WFH to break down specifically in large orgs really shouldn't be controversial.

But if the mentality that thinking about more than collecting a check makes you a middle-manager is as common as these replies imply, it makes sense.

> firing is disruptive and expensive, and it's not like all these people are inherently incapable of doing their jobs.

Do you even hear yourself?

I'm done. You are so completely entirely missing the point it's not funny.

You can say that about ALMOST ANYTHING!!!! But somehow WFH is the line where businesses should put their foot down, give up on actually managing people (at all!), and then treat every employee like a child, because "firing is disruptive"? But hey, instead, if we acted like they were conscripted property, we can force them into the office, and... Then... manage them into compliance... Right.

Regular alcohol and marijuana use directly affect employee behavior. As you say, firing is disruptive. We should probably piss test every employee, right?

This is not a serious conversation. I can't believe this is how you doubled down.

Have a good one.

I hope your mediocre manager ass gets canned.

I'd be upset too after seven years at AWS. Brush up on that leetcode!

> the number of people who work as well (or even better!) from the home is not zero, but the number of people who claim there's no difference and then end up doing significantly worse work, become a massive pain to get a hold of, become less motivated, etc. is way way higher

For me the reverse thought always comes into mind: "The amount of tangible work achieved when in the office is close to zero". Countless chats, interruptions, distractions, meetings you can't easily get out of, getting in late due to traffic, having to leave early due to childcare, etc. Even if a person spends half a day WFH not doing any work, it will still be more productive than being in the office.

When I say work, I mean actually producing tangible assets.

Brainstorming, design, anything that requires high collaboration, works much better in the office when everyone is in attendance.

The end result of this is that the most productive environment for software engineers is a mostly WFH schedule with anchor days in the office to hash out the collaborative tasks in big blocks. This translates into 1-2 days in the office depending on the team and the current phase of the development lifecycle they are in.

If you have a person in your team who consistently does not perform any work when working from home, then that is a performance management issue that should be dealt with like every other performance management issue. I do not really see why 'wfh' makes this special.

I should have realized that my comment relies on too much nuance for the average person who's crying themselves sick over RTO to engage with in any reasonable semblance of what it actually says.

If you want to try reading it again with a clear head and not engage with the strawman you're building, you'll notice it doesn't make any claims to the effect of:

- why offices work

- that offices work for everyone (it claims the opposite)

- that no one does better at home (it claims the opposite)

- that no org can make WFH work (it claims the opposite)

- that performance issues shouldn't be dealt with

All it says it that empirically (and of course, limited to my experience and experiences shared with me), a lot of people, specifically in large companies, perform worse with significant WFH.

"WFH" makes this special because it's organization wide, in massive orgs: like I specifically mentioned "significant WFH" and "large headcount" in the same sentence, can I really spoon feed this any harder?

I think WFH can work for some people, but when it's significant amounts in large headcount companies, it starts to fall apart.

> who's crying themselves sick over RTO to engage with in any reasonable semblance

Wow, please let me go ahead and double down on thinking your stance is some middle managers hand-wavey (almost surely unjustified) smug attitude towards IC devs.

> think WFH can work for some people, but when it's significant amounts in large headcount companies, it starts to fall apart.

And I think you're a blowhard with your head up your quester and I'm going to justify it the same way you justified your conclusion: (space left intentionally blank).

No seriously, have you even ever worked at a big and or small companies? (I've worked at, well, the biggest, and the damn near the smallest possible, and your conclusion is 1000% just you handwaving and asserting an assumption)

Immigrant who started programming in middle school, self-taught without a degree and started at a <20 person company by emailing my code samples to their support email address.

Made it to FAANG within a decade of that, and worked at companies the entire range of between those two sizes across the 14? 15? years since I first got paid to code?

I left my most recent role specifically because I was getting increasing amounts of pressure to play manager vs focus on mixed TL+IC priorities (and I had already communicated I was joining on primarily as an IC vs a TL to start).

tl;dr: another swing and a miss

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It's funny that this is the 2nd comment to imply I'm not an IC because I'm bluntly stating not all ICs can handle WFH.

It's like some people can't fathom you'd be invested in how well your team or larger organization executes unless you're a manager.

Maybe I can't relate because I wouldn't have learned anything or gotten anywhere with that mentality coming from the start I had.

And frankly if others around me at the start of my career had that mentality, it would have been lethal to my own opportunity: so I certainly won't ever adopt it.

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People act like working hard at things only gets your boss a bigger boat... and for most of the population it's true.

But we're knowledge workers in one of the highest paid industries with the closest thing to a meritocracy as society/capitalism will allow: you're plain doing it wrong if you can't convert hard work into any sort of personal enrichment.

> It's like some people can't fathom you'd be invested in how well your team or larger organization executes unless you're a manager.

Bro it's not that complicated. You hand waved ("wfh is somehow fine for small companies but breaks down for large companies") and *offer zero explanation for why that would be the case, or how that makes any sense*. For what size does it break down? What org structure? Is it 20 people? 200? 2000? 20000?

And no, me saying that you can manage employees, remote or not, is certainly fking not me being "unable" to "fathom you'd be invested in how well your team or larger organization executes unless you're a manager". It's actually what I said in my comment, it's me calling out a made-up, unsubstantiated, hand-wavey claim, that you sure keep dancing around to reassert that devs are lazy and stealing and need to be babysat in an office.

Whatever. Idgaf, I'll never work in an office again, and anyone that you ever manage will leave soon enough anyway before that's even the issue.

I think you're not doing so ok, and I hope you get better.

And that's not an insult. I mean it.

I hope you leave the workforce so some younger, less brainwashed folk can clean up the crock of shit you left behind.

I started freelancing at 16, graduated high school at 17, started my first "real job" later that year.

If you graduated at 18, went to college for at least 4 years, and have already spent 7 years at AWS... you odds are you're pretty much my age if not older lol (31)

Big yikes

I asked you to clarify your bullshit condescending handwaving and you reply with "u mad bro?", actually, an even more condescending version of it. You're exactly the piece of shit I clocked you for.

> People act like working hard at things only gets your boss a bigger boat... and for most of the population it's true.

> But we're knowledge workers in one of the highest paid industries with the closest thing to a meritocracy as society/capitalism will allow: you're plain doing it wrong if you can't convert hard work into any sort of personal enrichment.

Haha oh my god, what? Whatever bro, you go for it. Lick That Boot!

Also what in the actual universe are you even talking about? I guarantee my net worth is more than yours was at my age. Also tech workers have been serially conspired against from a wages standpoint. Again, effectively you saying ~"ICs should kiss our asses they have it so good salary wise". One of the most obnoxious people I've ever talked to.

> a lot of people, specifically in large companies, perform worse with significant WFH.

Better to give them the choice to start coming to the office more and see if it helps their performance, and fire them if not, than force everyone else to suffer, no?

I think companies see WFH as a huge employee benefit and expect that they'll reduce their wage expectations accordingly.

I think most employees see WFH as the only logical solution in a society with high speed internet readily available.

It's a bummer these corporations spent so lavishly on their campuses in the 2010s. Now they want to throw good money after bad trying to save face on this strategic blunder.

It's similar how Bill Gates wrote a book in 1996 and barely mentions or foresees the massive changes about to happen because of the Internet. It took him a decade to admit the mistake and his company a further decade to rectify it.

Here's a quote from that book, 'The Road Ahead':

> Corporations will redesign their nervous systems to rely on the networks that reach every member of the organization and beyond into the world of suppliers, consultants and customers."

I don't think that's far off from anticipating (in incredibly broad terms) what's in view in this discussion?

care deeply enough about the mission? Talk about drinking the kool aid.

Most people are motivated by keeping their job and salaries, bearable interactions at work and maybe getting a promotion. Most of the tech world’s actual mission nowadays is generating addiction in people to trick them into watching ads anyway, who is passionate about that?

Just measure people by outcomes rather than worked hours, it’s not that difficult. If they were fooling around for 5 of the 8 hours but the job is done who cares.

And reduced oversight in tech is a joke, are you going to be watching people’s screens over their shoulders? They can check Reddit at the office just as much as they do at home.

Amazon isn’t that great and Oracle especially OCI isn’t that bad.

Amazon isn't great and Oracle is typically worse. For AI, I'd go to IBM before Oracle.

What a bootlicking moron.

They did it and it worked fine.

Do you have any evidence for this or is it just you trying to justify what you want?