My "evidence" is that trading firms that kept raking in the money, and that benefit from maximum productivity of their employees, still generally have a hybrid work culture.
“True work only happens in person with human collaboration! Everyone must come back”
2 years pass
“Oh wow we can replace everyone with a chatbot this is amazing”
narrator: It was the interest rates all along. Many of these tech businesses are fundamentally bad, the ROI is smoke and mirrors, energy shocks and bad macro-economics are coming, and investors are starting to ask hard questions.
I'd be fine with earning less (we're pretty frugal) to work in that kind of environment with good people.
Trading firm managers are like sales managers, you've got one number, nothing else matters, the truth will set you free.
Big Tech is a bunch of people competing for influence over the big shared number coming in from ads or whatever, it's important to have good UX etc so you get more ad money, but how do you tell who's meaningfully contributing, or who's just really good at playing internal politics? This will bias towards different sorts of decisions.
Now compare it again.
you don't need much experience. the tools make you insanely faster with much much less physical strain and maintenance time. they're simple, predictable, reliable, and obscenely powerful.
an experimented carpenter would take a few minutes to be decent at using then.
- stable and "slow" is best - don't ever let the blade get pinched (by wood) - be mindful of the cords - keep the flesh out of the way - goggles up and don't breathe the dust
you got 95% of it there
This holds whether their butt is in a seat in some office or at home.
> Homo Economicus
GOOD ONE
Companies should stop penalizing people for being work efficient, and increase their salary if the workload increases.
Rich people sitting on multiple boards and running multiple companies is A-OK
Poor people having to work 3 jobs to keep food on the table is A-OK
But, middle class office workers working at multiple jobs is fraud and abuse and must be stopped.
I'm guessing the opposite: that these firms wanted to push back-to-the-office policies, and so either invented, or publicized, engineers doing "over employment", and that it wasn't a real problem that any of them actually faced.
(And this might be why the CEOs all seem to have coordinated changing back to RTO at the same time).
Realistically I think very little employees were doing this. And, of the ones that were, is it even a problem?
I mean, the idea is that they're such amazing developers that they can be 2 developers at once. So you still end up with 1 developer. So, break even, right? No harm no foul?
Additionally, I wonder how many CxOs have corporate real estate in their investment portfolio which might influence decisions.
Look at the last 3 years of the job market: No company has any issue with doing actual lay offs. The layoffs have been about reducing capital spend, and one wants to get rid of dead wood and redundant hires, not let fate decide who stays or goes.
> My "evidence" is that trading firms that kept raking in the money
If you're talking about "trading" as in financial, then this makes sense from a culture perspective. Its a group of people who, are about the job and not about any ones feelings.
It's harder for teams to be this way without the social lubricant of bonding over lunch and coffee and small "how are you" or "the boss sucks" social interactions. Things that are easy in person but more difficult when all your communication channels are owned by the company or result in "documentation" that can be used against you. It's much easier to be "professional brusk" (I need this asap) with someone you just ate lunch and talked about life with than it is for someone you DONT have those interactions with.
I have been a consultant (read: mercenary) for over a decade now. I have seen just about every team layout there is, and there are lots of distributed teams whos effectiveness is much lower than it could be. Its going to depend more on your product and ALL your teams willingness to be candid and blunt than anything else.
Open plan offices continue to be designed more for seeing the work happen than for doing the work. I spend a lot of mental energy on ignoring the distractions around me. No job has ever offered me a private office with a door that closes in exchange for being in the office 5 days a week.
Historically though, the data suggests that mass layoffs have a huge impact (negatively) on productivity after a short term "boost" by the survivors.
Maybe there's some 19D "soft layoff" motivation, but I suspect a large part is just about control and appearance. You spent all that money on offices so workers better be there. And what's the point of having your own nice big office if you can't look out on the peons toiling for you? And more fundamentally, some people just have this deep belief that work = something you do in an office and can't compute working at home as "real" work, no matter what the results show.
Then the executives come up with justifications, one of which is surely the ability to trim some hires in a tight financial environment.
I haven't had an in person meeting in, god, years at this point.
The only difference between my house and the office is the physical location. That's literally it. Oh, and I'm a lot less happy now.
... hard to feel that the "lot less happy" part isn't the motivation.
Every single frontpage thread on WFH / RTO for years now on HN has dozens to hundreds of comments bitching about the obvious stupidity and narcissism of upper management to force RTO, which is obviously inferior in every way, at least according to HN.
You don’t spend many billions on the offices for nothing.
I imagine there was some pressure from cities as well since many downtown businesses rely on foot traffic.
Are the tech firms the ones spending billions on office buildings? It's certainly not the VPs.
What pressure are cities applying to companies to get them to move back into the offices, exactly?
... everyone else follows because, "Amazon's doing it.."
I don't think any companies move into cities with agreements they will meaningfully increase foot traffic in large urban centers, certainly not with any sort of true repercussions if they don't. That just simply does not happen.
And culture does not care about logic.
If they had a shred of evidence that RTO was the eminently more productive, they would smugly rub our collective noses in it.
They don't have evidence. They have vibes and a profound hatred for the labor class. It irks them that suddenly common people had access to a benefit exclusive to them.
I think it was mostly about lack of trust and desire to regain a feeling of control over employees. The soft layoffs were just a bonus.
When my company WFH during covid the first thing they did was force-install invasive tracking software. You could practically taste the executive paranoia.
I for one am renting a desk at an office. I have all the usual office amenities and an environment in which I can focus properly, but I don't have to involve myself geographically with the company I work for.
The "RTO is more productive" thesis tends to come from industry sectors where quantitative measures like billable hours aren't so readily available. At best, it seems vibes-based - but, like you, I suspect that it's actually disingenuous posturing.
After all, not a single CEO cited published metrics for the productivity reasons for ending WFH, and almost all went about other power grab type moves later to show the working class the power they were able to wield during COVID was over and we were returning back to the old ways.
Or both.