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Comment by imcrs | Hacker News Reader

RTO is about controlling labor, nothing else. Everything else is a smoke screen. Ask yourself the following questions and you'll understand what happened:

- why did RTO happen seemingly right after salaries jumped and labor became scarce?

- why did RTO happen virtually in lockstep across all of white collar employment?

- why did RTO happen despite no evidence that productivity had anything to do with it? (and in fact, lots of evidence that it made employees more productive!)

- why did RTO happen at the same time that critical equity/diversity viewpoints were increasingly being discussed at work?

- why did RTO happen at the same time that outsourcing ramped up? If businesses are so opposed to remote work, why are they outsourcing so aggressively?

It's not about AI. It's not about CRE. It's not about "synergy" in person. It's about disciplining labor. Businesses will happily tank productivity to prevent the power balance from tipping towards the employee.

In that 2020-2023 period, people started talking seriously about how much value they bring to the table. They started making demands of their employers (especially around diversity, equity, inclusion). They started interviewing at multiple places, seeing their worth, demanding more, and giving only as much effort as strictly required to get the job done. The sudden, overnight, incredibly strong reaction to this period, the hard right turn, that is the whip cracking down on labor.

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When you also consider the nation as you know, a nation, and not a rat race of individual interest, the best thing the government could do is encourage working from home. Break the hell up these "hubs" of white collar industry and let's disperse this work and compensation across the country. I'm betting we would see quite a lot more growth anyhow if these jobs were distributed across the country vs just concentrated in like sf/nyc/boston. like there are limits to how much growth little old south san fransisco can sustain. there are finite amount of office space. only finite amount of housing accomodations in the bay area (forgetting for a moment the rampant NIMBYism).

And what else is that everyone loses in this present situation. People in the job hub in SF also lose, because they are operating in this fundamentally broken local economy, way too enriched for high income workers making their home cost 2.5m and their compensation actually pretty poor as far as what it can get in the local economy. West Atherton would be a 400k median home neighborhood in most of the midwest. Literally same floorplans, lot sizes, fit and finish. Same country club down the road. Same private school up the road. Boutique shopping and steak dinners still available.

WFH aside. Any company that hits a certain size, starts to be broken up into multiple offices, buildings, floors, etc. and becomes de-facto remote. Meetings all become phone calls. and the team itself is mostly co-located. I am always a big confused at that point, why have a 20k person campus and 2 10k person campuses. Why not have 40 1k campuses? They are all effectively remote anyways.

On our end COVID also turned every single meeting into a videoconference anyhow, because that is how IT set up the AV inputs for our conference rooms for slideshows. No more direct AV input, ipad in every room now and you start a video conference on it, join with your laptop and share your screen. Most of the time some people had to join in remote anyhow for various reasons. Still, pretty ironic using teleconference software to sit in the same room. 95% the way there, just got to get out of the building lease.

I work for a multinational corporation and I was remote also before the pandemic. It is very smooth and everybody's happy. Once a year we meet in person in a larger group, it if an interesting experience, and then everybody goes back home and continue working as usual. When I see people bending over backwards and doing strange things out of distrust and the desire to control their employees and make their life miserable for no real reason, I feel really sorry, it makes zero sense to me.

Except you can't get that year round perfect weather in the midwest.

We are talking about Bay area here, not San Diego. Much of the US experiences 40-50 degree grey bleak cloudy winters.

Really? Genuine question - I'd like to move there.

Keep in mind "year round perfect weather" does include summers that aren't preposterously hot.

I've found that everywhere else, certainly in the midwest, where I live, either gets too hot in summer or too cold in winter (or is extremely remote, i.e. Hawaii).

> I've found that everywhere else, certainly in the midwest, where I live, either gets too hot in summer or too cold in winter

Much of the midwest gets both. Stifling humidity and temps often in the 90s, sometimes topping 100, for (effectively) a horrid 5- to 6-month-long summer. "Arctic blasts" in the Winter for sustained highs under 10 for days on end, lots of ice storms (and, if you do get a real, good snow, nowhere to ski anyway). 3 months total shared between Spring and Fall when the weather doesn't suck.

> why did RTO happen virtually in lockstep across all of white collar employment?

This makes sense when you consider that all of these big companies are run by leaders who talk in similar networks and listen to the same consultants (McKinsey, BCG, etc). I know someone who is going through a McKinsey run structural re-org, that is identical to one they ran (and failed horribly) at a company I was in 8 years ago.

> why did RTO happen at the same time that critical equity/diversity viewpoints were increasingly being discussed at work?

There was a decent lag between the peak of equity nonsense and RTO, plus the evidence is that DEI/Equity/etc hurt workers and disrupt organizing tremendously.

> why did RTO happen despite no evidence that productivity had anything to do with it? (and in fact, lots of evidence that it made employees more productive!)

Company I was went from 1 quarter talking about the increases in productivity WFH brought to the next quarter town hall talking about RTO for the culture and productivity.

> This makes sense when you consider that all of these big companies are run by leaders who talk in similar networks and listen to the same consultants (McKinsey, BCG, etc

Yes, it certainly does! I'm sure they also talk to Pinkerton :)

> decent lag between the peak of equity nonsense and RTO

Just about the amount of time it would take for management to (1) realize what was happening and what it meant for their power over labor; and (2) align on a policy.

> Company I was went from 1 quarter talking about the increases in productivity WFH brought to the next quarter town hall talking about RTO for the culture and productivity.

Yes, exactly. That's how you know anything about "productivity" is all a load of shit.

Correct. Workers were starting to get power, people had seen through the fog at what was actually happening and were acting out against it. Agency is a direct threat to the owner class.

It is amazing how much the constraints of working in the office shackle people to positions or locations. So many people working below their worth due to spouses ability to get a job in some location for example. Maybe you do land a job in your line of work in this little corner of the earth where your spouses jobs are more a plenty. Now you have to hold on for dear life to this company, do whatever the hell they ask of you and take whatever offer they give you because you have no leverage at all.

The fact that people completely miss this fact and just go "well I like talking to people in person" I mean at a certain point belies ignorance that borders on stupidity with how hard people cling to the "ability to talk to people in the hallway" against even just the obvious negative externalities like the commute and limited home choices. No one ever talks about this career side and juggling a two body problem.

I would say that there was also a deliberate push to save the value of commercial real estate. If it were purely about management vs labor, letting people work from home was a great way to offer an attractive benefit for free (or even while saving money) and it made it easy to hire from lower cost of living areas. Wages were going up regardless because of high inflation rates, remote work if anything was tempering that. I'm sure there were some asshole bosses who just missed their petty kingdoms, but it would be too easy for those who could tolerate the remote work situation to gain an advantage. There had to be a smaller group, such as those heavily invested in real estate, that had an overwhelming incentive for demanding RTO and the pull to force their will on everyone at the same time.

What if I actually like the office?

It is a nice building in a nice area.

I have a 40min walk to it or 10min bus ride.

I like my colleagues. Sometimes you need to meet and solve problems face to face, and not have it be planned.

I like dressing up a bit, not a full suit but nice pleated pants and OCBD/sweater/blazer.

I have a shift schedule, sometimes I am the only one in the office, that is bliss :)

But my work is 100% in office. But not being shut at home is nice.

For me it's about choice. Forcing either isn't necessarily good, but why not just allow people to choose?

I sometimes go into the office, but maybe only once or twice per month. But I am allowed that choice, I can work from my house, any of the company's locations, a cafe, or anywhere else I feel like it on any given day.

I value the freedom and flexibility. I'd be miserable being told "You must be in the office" and I'd also equally hate to be told "you must work from a desk in your house only"

I like a full service espresso bar at the office. If I ask my employer for that, guess what they'll say? Fuck you, you're here to work. And I have to take it. I'm sure you can guess why.

> What if I actually like the office?

You should definitely go in to the office!

But why make everyone return? We're all workers, shouldn't we stick up for each other? A huge number of people, including me, way prefer to work remotely most of the week, for all the reasons you're already aware of.

It seems to me that we should all be looking to make workers lives better, rather than worse. I whole heartedly support your choice to work in the office or remotely.

> I have a 40min walk to it or 10min bus ride

Sounds like you are taking 80 minutes away from your family every day. I would not be so proud of that. And you'll likely regret it on your deathbed. #1 regret is not enough time with fanmily.

They'll likely have more time with the family because walking and being outside leads to a longer healthier life.

Most people do need time to shift focus from and to work. You can do groceries during that time, or administrative work like sending letters or going to the citizens office... .

True, but not everyone even has a family.

or was it capital becoming more expensive as that happened during the same period...

I can't speak to your sector, but from the perspective in my management role (in law) the explanation is quite simple: managing remote workers is more difficult and less pleasant than managing workers in the office. I actually hate it. And even granting that remote and in-office workers are "productive" in the sense that they bill hours (though not even this seems true in my anecdotal experience), we find that people with less in-office time tend to have qualitatively worse performance. At least in my field, being in the office, spending time with your co-workers, and getting to know them has value.

Of course, other things have value too. Often, our folks who prefer to work from home do so because they have small children who they want to spend time with, more fully share parental responsibilities with their partner, etc. I'm glad that they have the opportunity to do that, but it does generally seem to come at some professional cost.

>we find that people with less in-office time tend to have qualitatively worse performance. At least in my field, being in the office, spending time with your co-workers, and getting to know them has value.

I think you are confounded by the fact your most overeager overachievers are going to return to office no matter what.

I'm not persuaded that's the only thing going on here, but I'm sure that is part of it. Nonetheless, I think this is why many employers pushed for RTO.

I think RTO/WFH also kind of hits on a fundamental cultural divide that is beginning to emerge in our society. There is idea of who are we working for that I think people are starting to reckon with: in support of ourselves or in support of someone else, maybe even to the point of detriment to ourselves.

The arguments for and against fall along these lines. For RTO: in favor of the company over the self. It is more "productive" by some invented measure to work in the office, so it is the correct choice damned any other factor. A total trump card to those with this logic, like arguing the sky is blue.

And then what is the for WFH argument but the following: in favor of the self over the company. Perhaps if one pushed as hard as they could, they could get more done. They could sacrifice their sleep. They could grey their hair, increase cortisol, have an early heart attack and die. But in that time, they'd get a whole lot more done for the company certainly. WFH argues that affordances toward the employee ought to be made and even favored. Things like having choice in where one might live, not being saddled with a commute costly in time or money or both, being able to parallelize tasks such as taking the two minutes to start the laundry machine then returning to the desk, being able to see pets and loved ones for more than a few fleeting hours at the end of the day, better food, the list of benefits pretty much endless and also bespoke to the worker in question.

To be pro RTO, you have to be able to sacrifice the self like an ascetic, to deny all these tradeoffs and to grant the company control over you, your family and life outside of work (as where you live and how your family has to then live is a factor with RTO), all to benefit the company over yourself. The company that will never show you loyalty, that will use the same logic you are using to return to work to one day fire you.

Among my peers, on the younger side, no one really likes working in the office at all. They all are stuck with it and would desperately like to not work in the office. I expect over time, RTO will die as the generations that are culturally inclined to put the company over themselves retire from the workforce.

I think this is right. Of course, the trade-off has always been there for all to see between "work" and "life," but greater ability to WFH has rightly cause people to reassess the sacrifices they are willing to make for their careers. I hope I've been clear that, while I think there are real reasons RTO is valuable, they are not necessarily decisive at every margin.

Of course, another side of this is that some people like their workplaces and like to social aspect of going into the office. Not everyone has to, of course, but it also takes a certain critical mass of people in the office in order for anyone to get those benefits. So, on a certain level, this is also just about competing preferences.

I have the opposite experience (in tech at small or medium companies). Managing remote workers is much easier since outcomes (and outputs) are necessarily more visible.

Before working remotely (pre-2019) when managing teams in person, I found myself necessarily having discussions to get synced with folks. At my most recent role (and previous remote first roles), team members were excellent at providing updates on Github issues (the sources of truth for work items). Of course, this required buy in at all levels and trickling company objectives down through the program(s) and linking work items to OKRs etc. It was very obvious when folks weren't hitting objectives and easy to gather detailed written evidence of this.

And regarding getting to know folks. Most recent offsite was at a villa in Croatia where I got to both meet my team members and ended up getting to know them like friends. Now that I think about it this has happened at previous companies as well during remote offsites.

I wonder if it's field-specific. Sounds like there are multiple anecdotes across a wide distribution of outcomes.

> qualitatively worse performance

How does their quantative performance compare? Is there an opportunity in the differential?

It's worse in the sense that a more senior person has to spend more time fixing it. I guess that's an opportunity in the sense that it allows a firm to bill more hours, but there is generally a reason we wanted that more junior person to do the work originally. (Client cost sensitivity, teal workloads, training, etc.)

Interesting thanks!

No offense but this sounds like you need to level up as a manager. I’ve managed many teams, in-person and remote. Remote is superior in every way, and it’s not even close. One of the reasons it’s better is because it’s harder to hide bad management.

Get better or quit then, I don't give a shit about managers, do your job and let the dozens of people you manage live their fucking lives, we're not here to please you or make your job easier

> we're not here to please you or make your job easier

I don't mean to be a jerk but ... if you are one of the people I manage, you literally are employed (at least in part) to make my job easier. That's not the only thing that matters -- which is why we (like many employers) do still allow some remote work. But making management more difficult is absolutely an impact that a rational workplace would take into account.

Your employees are there to make your life easier? As their manager? Do you demand they make you coffee? Rub your feet?

I've been doing this for decades, and I've never seen that attitude work with any 'leader.' I'd hate to work for you. Ever hear of servant leadership? Or hear the line "My job is to clear the runway for you"

Managers are cost centers, 'your' employees are what keep you employed, give them the respect they deserve.

That's not at all what I mean. What I mean is that I am responsible for the output of my team. If someone I am supervising does a bad job, is hard to communicate with, etc. it means that one way or another I have to do more work, which reduces the total output of my team. It can also lead to inferior service, angry clients, adverse outcomes, etc.

It’s the exact opposite, managers are employed to make employees job easier. Employees get the jobs done, managers are there to coordinate that work, remove blockers, and enable workers.

The relationship is reciprocal. I lay the tracks so my supervisees can do their job (and, indeed, have a job to do!). They help me produce far more work for clients than I ever could myself.

Congratulations. You have outed yourself as the archetypal manager that every WFH/RTO thread ever complains about.

And you as someone I would never hire!

Though the truth is probably just that we're not seeing eye-to-eye because we're communicating through an imperfect medium that doesn't encourage a nuanced discussion.

https://code-cwa.org/organize

The more I read this thread the more it boggles my mind. How is it not completely obvious that part of your job, as an employee, is to not make life more difficult for your manager? (The reverse, of course, is true as well.) Managers cost money and tend to be there for a reason. If an employee makes their manager's job harder, that is a bad thing for the company.

Of course, that's not to say that making their manager's job easier is their only responsibility, or that they should ways do what makes their manager's life easier at any margin. Bot those are things I never said in the first place.

Somewhere I empathize with all the laid off coders and coders worried about the future. I'm not one myself but I know a lot of them, and I never know what to say. The nth refrain of "unionize" doesn't really help when the power to do it is in freefall.

But this is blatantly obvious to everyone, I'm not sure this aspect is a taboo in official conversation. People wanted WFH long before the pandemic, but it was a privilege of a few high bosses, the rest had to be packed in cubicles or open-plan offices (not sure which is worse). Then the pandemic came and it turned out most people can work remotely without abusing it. But the management never wanted to give the employees that freedom, it was just a question of time.

Lockstep? Once the major company did it, it was easy for others to follow. No conspiracy here. You are right, it is about controlling labor, watching the workforce, justifying the office expense. But I think a lot of your questions are just coincidental. As much as I enjoy working from home (been doing it for most of the last two decades) there are some advantageous to new hires working in the office.

I think these conspiracy theories about RTO are really unhelpful and actually harmful to the viability of hybrid work arrangements.

Please work in a day as a oil rig technician or a nurse. "I should be able to work anywhere and my employer must accommodate me" is an extremely privileged and elitist view of thinking.

A few of your notes are actually just wrong as well. Salaries jumped during covid due to over-hiring and software booming. "Productivity" is not a number, but a business-by-business decision. The vast, vast majority of people don't want politics at work, and it's exclusively the viewpoint of the laptop class who demand that stuff. (Again, people who work toiling jobs for 10 hours a day don't create petitions and demands like that)

At the end of the day, if you don't want to work in an office, you don't have to. But, believe it or not, many many people, including young people, like the office environment.

>Please work in a day as a oil rig technician or a nurse. "I should be able to work anywhere and my employer must accommodate me" is an extremely privileged and elitist view of thinking.

To highlight just how stupid this is, here it is from another angle:

"I have to work on site so everyone else must work on site"

What is the logical conclusion here? That the workforce should be equal in every sense? Come on

This point is directly aimed at those who view the RTO efforts as a class issue (owners vs workers). There is an entitled POV in many WFH debates.

“Someone has it worse than you” is always a stupid argument.

Solid contribution champ.

Poor in the US and around the world often don’t have access to the healthcare they need. If you get cancer, are you turning down chemotherapy so you don’t seem soft? Are you turning down your next raise because some teacher somewhere is getting underpaid?

If you want substantive rebuttals you should make a substantive argument first.

Do you understand how rig work or nursing is? These are very flexible jobs. There is demand for nursing everywhere. You can be a travel nurse and go find work in HI or CA or Las Vegas right now if you want. Temp agencies that place you so you don't even need to really hunt either.

Rig work it is weeks on weeks off sort of deal where you then get off that rig back to, quite literally, anywhere in the world where you live otherwise. You could live in the middle of the Amazon rainforest and make six figures a year on a rig in the middle of the ocean (well, maybe US jurisdiction is preferred from a tax perspective for employer payroll).

I'm not sure I understand the point. The vast, vast majority of jobs simply cannot be done remotely. So I have little patience for the entitlement of people thinking they "deserve" it or yell about conspiracy theories about why it is going away.

There is a reason YC is in person. There is a reason why the top companies are in person.

You say entitlement, but the reality is you have sour grapes about people who can have a flexible work arrangement. Some people pick jobs that are not able to be flexible, that’s a choice. Pick better. People work to live, not live to work, they should not tolerate how they should have to work because some manager or c-level is lucky to be in their position of power.

The UK provides by law the ability to seek and obtain flexible working arrangements on day one of a job [1]. Certainly, the US is behind as it always is, but it will catch up eventually, if only because of structural demographics and total fertility rate declines across the developed world creating perpetual labor shortages in various verticals. We’re just arguing window of time.

YC isn’t a good example, they simply sell lottery tickets to founders and early investors as a confidence play. You say top companies, but that’s an opinion without evidence. According to what metric?

[1] https://www.gov.uk/flexible-working

> As of March 2025, approximately 22.8% of U.S. employees worked remotely at least part of the time, equating to about 36 million individuals. This percentage has remained stable between 21% and 23% since early 2024, indicating that remote work has become a consistent component of the workforce.

> What this means: Remote work has stabilized at about one-fifth of the US workforce—this isn't a temporary trend but a permanent shift in how work gets done.

Source: https://wfhresearch.com/

> Approximately 90% of companies plan to maintain or increase remote work options moving forward, indicating a lasting shift despite some return-to-office mandates.

> What this means: The vast majority of companies recognize remote work as a permanent feature—even those mandating office returns are keeping some flexibility.

Source: https://www.gartner.com/en/human-resources/topics/future-of-...

https://www.breeze.pm/blog/remote-work-statistics

I work from home, champ. No sour grapes here. Try again, and please engage in the argument, don't throw personal attacks.

The UK? The UK has 0 innovative companies. No silicon valley. Nothing. If you want American to be like them, no thanks.

What say you to the fact that there are companies that work remote today and are competitive and doing fine? Anomalous? Or maybe your prior assumptions need adjustment?

I'd say they are outliers.

They have been setup like that from the start and have a management structure that is fully on board with remote work from top to bottom.

Most companies aren't setup like that and don't have the people to make it work.

Why can't they be? Chances are in 1989, most companies weren't set up to work well with computers either. 5 years later everyone had a desktop an email account.

Yes, they are outliers. Or they are coasting.

Again (and again). There is a reason why YC and the top, most innovative companies are in person.

A whole lot of outliers then. Top companies are in person? I only know a few people in FAANG but they all work remote. Maybe different for certain tasks like on site hpc work. They are in software engineering though.

YC in person doesn't mean anything to me. These bay area types often have a screw loose and do things like have people live on site maybe even in tents during sprints. Megalomaniac behavior, not a lesson to follow.

Again. If you think you can do your job remotely 100%, then there is no reason why someone in South America can do your job for 20% of your salary.

Think about it.

To expand upon a particular point; near as I understand WFH, or rather more broadly _not_ "RTO" (ie. endure office bound work) has a strong backbone of people wanting to maximise home/work life balance.

The point about rig work, FIFO mine work, nursing (again, FIFO) et al is these are jobs that are a priority choiice for many that are living that somewhat off-grid lives with a big home-life component dream .. and have been doing that for many decades now.

I'm over 60, have worked in a majority of countries across the globe (geophysical exploration field work), and have avoided offices like a plague for the entirity of my career - I enjoy 24/7 field work with weeks off at home to work projects there or to code / build for various projects from home.

We've even built up resource and energy intelligence services and sold them on to FinTech companies that way.

And met and talked to many people that way.

So, from some PoV's you chose the worst possible examples of jobs that supposedly tie people to an office grind.

What's actually really unhelpful and actually harmful to the viability of hybrid work arrangements is RTO.

> "I should be able to work anywhere and my employer must accommodate me" is an extremely privileged and elitist view of thinking.

Nope! You totally missed the point. "You must accomodate me" is a demand, that you can place on your employer, when you have labor power, as an employee. The acceding is what we're talking about here. That is not cultural; it is a matter of market power.

> At the end of the day, if you don't want to work in an office, you don't have to.

What are you talking about? Did you read my post? Yes, I have to! Because of RTO!

You do, in fact, have the agency to get another job.

So no, you are not "forced" to RTO at all.

Yes, these are some extreme beliefs in a grand, coordinated conspiracy.

As if a bunch of people in suits are sitting around a table in an evil villain’s lair shouting “we need more control over our workers” or needing to prop up commercial real estate prices.

RTO is also about forcing people in cities, the cities that have lost their factories to globalisation, because it was and still is cheaper to produce far away without the problems of density and then move things, rather than everyone staying close together. The cities that are losing their offices, their last economic engine, to remote working, and with them, the giant property owners who want everyone renting their buildings, not owning scattered homes and sheds.

Cities that serve the ruling classes as a means of ensuring conformity, because the closer you are to your neighbour, the more the herd effect is felt. Cities that themselves serve as a means of control: you consume food and water that doesn't come from the city itself; control these and the four main arteries, and the city is yours, no questions asked.

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