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Comment by tonic_note | Hacker News Reader

Good satire. I find the "RTO is because of RE valuations" to be the most bizarre thing about the post pandemic work discourse. Office leases are a rounding error to large employers. They are not coercing employees back to the office because their worried about the value of a single portfolio asset falling (assuming they even own it). They are doing it because it's about power. Middle managers do not trust their staff. They need to surveil and police them to feel productive and powerful. The rank-and-file love remote work because we have lives and benefit enormously from the flexibility. The managerial class desperately needs bodies in office to feel like their jobs are worthwhile.

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I’ve been on Csuite of 3 orgs since the pandemic forced wfh normalization. Your correct the RE thing has always been a false narrative. I’ve never seen or read of it coming from an executive. To my knowledge, it was dreamt up by pundits, speculators, and is just a lazy attempt to understand what goes on in boardrooms driving these decisions.

What I have witnessed, with empirical evidence, is that productivity and/or output across the organization slows down. It is great at first as everyone can catch up on their work and existing projects but then the longer term implications is the teams are disconnected, decisions are more difficult, coordination of simple tasks more difficult, onboarding and actually integrating new employees is difficult, curating the culture is difficult, and it goes on. If you’re a very disciplined individual contributor focusing on low collaboration units of work, then it’s likely you did see a productivity boost. It’s unlikely you could maintain it over long periods of time. But even if you did, you’re probably an outlier.

So it’s not about anyone’s need to feel worthwhile it’s literally about doing what is probably the best for the company even if it upsets some people. Even if some people will be less productive, the organization as a whole will function better. When productivity goes up, it’s only a good thing if output and all the other tangibles aren’t sacrificed in the process. The leaders of organizations initiating RTO usually have done so by avoiding this true talk type conversation with the employees. This is what has led to people filling in the gaps with BS about real estate evaluations. It’s been poor communication and I think a dose of honestly and openness would be beneficial. Sometimes it’s a feeling and they don’t have the means to really collect data and lay it out in an empirical way, so I think that’s part of the reason they avoid it.

The RE thing may have been a false narrative, but tax abatements were a factor in at least one local company doing RTO; their business tax breaks were partially based on employees working in the city and then paying city payroll tax.

Can I ask how your orgs measured productivity before and after remote work/RTO? I agree that employees would have a much easier time accepting RTO if they were given hard evidence it makes the business more productive, but it seems like almost all companies don’t do this and simply justify RTO “because we know best” which frustrates ICs.

Sometimes there a track record of output to reference on. Project velocity. There’s a lot and I probably work in industries that aren’t comparable to yours so no use getting specific. Sometimes it’s just a hard thing for ICs to look at the whole operation instead of their part. The fact ICs think productivity is the most important thing they can provide is a signal they’re wrong (in the eyes of a leadership team).

The management team doesn't want it to be up for discussion, and doesn’t want to create wfh subclasses of employees, which is what data would lead to.

output only slows down because companies don't want to adjust how they work. its a complete skill issue if you cant manage a remote org. if a company/team is already spread out across multiple offices, its a remote org

There’s truth here. They don’t want to. It’s easier and more tried and true to just go back to what worked before wfh. Even multiple offices face some challenges working together. Always have. But usually there’s some systematic way of organizing the offices so most the function is together. As example, I’m a CFO and usually have my key teams (various teams of accounting and finance functions) in the same office. 90% of their work/communication/collaboration is amongst themselves. Being together does help.

> Even if some people will be less productive, the organization as a whole will function better

This is what the execs might THINK but it's not actually based in real evidence. RTO does not make organizations function better. Execs are gaslighting themselves into believing that RTO makes the org function better, but it's an illusion.

It comes down to how you define "better"? Because they're looking at it from a lot of angles and sometimes easier~=better. It's not easy to onboard and train and career path junior employees, so the preference for senior employees exists (even at IC level). Employee engagement and retention metrics are usually higher. I could go on, but I do not believe your take so please cite the evidence that remote orgs are holistically "better"

Honestly, the amount of times I need to call and impromptu meeting during normal/expected work hours but can't get the necessary attendees because 1) walking the dog 2) at the gym 3) putting baby down for a nap 4-99) life>work. This is something I can manage around, but it slows things down. I can't make a decision today, I have to schedule the discussion for another day when my calendar is open which might be next week. This just doesn't work for executives in our fast paced business environment. I appreciate that IC's like the flexibility and balance wfh provides, and feel like they are checking all the boxes even better than ever, but they often do not actually hold up their end of the deal and prioritize the urgency of their jobs once they get settled into the wfh setting. It's great if you do, but on average, people take a lot of advantage of the flexibility and it does slow down everything.

This is a bad take. There are plenty of orgs that were remote in some form or another way before covid. They're just organized and managed differently. It's 100% a management doesn't want to change issue.

It was forced on most businesses from the pandemic, you're right they never wanted it. Acting like businesses should honor it forever is a bad take too, like businesses should ignore what worked previously in favor of what doesn't work as well. It's really just about removing friction, remoteness can cause friction. Not many managers care about trying to adapt, if you require fully remote that's great, you're free to go find it. You need to do what's right for you just like the management is trying to do what's best for the business. It's not some butts in chairs power trip though, maybe that's been your experience with a bad manager, but (practically) nobody at the C level making these strategic decisions is concerned with that part. They just know/feel the business is more cohesive and healthier when people are together in an office. Sometime there needs to be creativity and collaboration, not just checking off a task list. If your job involves checking off task lists, it's likely you're in too tactical of a vantage point to have much of an opinion of the company's strategic interests. An in any case, there's a lot of other intangibles around being connected with your coworkers IRL. You may not have interest in that, but things like employee retention and engagement are higher when these relationships are deeper. Employee's care more about the company when engaged. So on.

That said, I feel most management teams have settled on being hybrid, where working in office is fluid, or perhaps standardized on a few days a week. I think everyone sees value in that approach, there's usually a happy medium is my opinion. But fully remote doesn't work well for a lot of larger complex orgs.

I mean, it's just anecdote vs anecdote. I'm a serial first eng -> VP/Dir for the last ... almost 30 years; I'm well aware of how creative projects work remote, and that retention and engagement are important. I've seen repeatedly over the last ten years especially C levels that want people in offices for "vibes" with _no_ data to back that up... In some cases opposite data. All of that gets mixed with data from teams that I support and/or lead being productive and never having a single person leave for reasons other than total corp restructuring; mean while everyone has a good mix of flexibility to have a family life.

Office first by default is a scourge on this industry.

Anyway, need to go empty my mouth after throwing up from reading your reply.

As you spit your listerine, please also clean your glasses and read again because the discussion is being made at a macro level and not centered on any particular industry and it’s also concerning RTO; as in, the company once was office based and wishes to resume that now that the pandemic is in the rear view. This is not a vibe seeking CEO discussion, it’s about large companies that were office first and designed and staffed around that concept. Them feeling like remote is a bad fit is completely fair game and employees should never have had expectations that it would be remote forever.

The truth of that may be upsetting, management is aware.

>You may not have interest in that, but things like employee retention and engagement are higher when these relationships are deeper.

I really cannot take a sentiment like this seriously after seeing the last 15 years of American work culture. And especially the last 3. We spent the better part of 40 years tearing down the concept of careers, trying to de-professionalize as much local labor as possible, and outsource whatever remains, and yet companies still want to pretend they care about "culture" and and "engagement"? They lay off millions of workers the past few years and yet "retention" is still a metric somehow?

This is the problem seeing employees on a spreadsheet. You don't see the generational damage this is inflicting and the upcoming reckoning when that generation can no longer be ignored politically.

I’m not trying to rationalize or humanize any of this , I’m just explaining it.

I find this argument for-RTO/against-WFH emitting exactly the same vibes as argument against women suffrage and workforce participation. Yes, if we forget that we are talking about real people, and only consider a benefit of abstract entities that companies (or society) are, there may be some conjectures, or - dare I say - please bear with me - even limited "evidence" of it. After all, the status quo has supported both arguments for very long time (millennia for society and centuries of industrialization era for companies) and opposition was non-existent for most of that time. Unthinkable even, so embedded was the status quo. But this horse has bolted, because benefits for the freedom and wellbeing of individual - woman or WFH worker - are so enormous, that I do not understand how this handwavy anti-Remote argument is more defensible than anti-suffrage.

Even if all the negatives are true, I am skeptical that it has a measurable impact on productivity. There are often outside factors that put a ceiling on what can be done anyway, with high productivity just causing days of waiting instead of any tangible reward.

Why are decisions more difficult? At the C suite level you have decisions going downstream to a bunch of offices that are never visited directly anyway.

The only thing I agree with is that onboarding is more difficult, but we haven't exactlty been in a hiring moood as of late.

> If you’re a very disciplined individual contributor focusing on low collaboration units of work, then it’s likely you did see a productivity boost. It’s unlikely you could maintain it over long periods of time. But even if you did, you’re probably an outlier.

A lot of development work is heads down. That's why I agree hybrid is the best approach, but I argue it doesn't even need to be once a week for many. Maybe go in bouts of a few weeks or even months, then have 1-2 weeks of in-person planning.

But this doesn't fit the 9-5 they want to push.

>The fact ICs think productivity is the most important thing they can provide is a signal they’re wrong (in the eyes of a leadership team).

>The management team doesn't want it to be up for discussion, and doesn’t want to create wfh subclasses of employees, which is what data would lead to.

All I hear is that managers ultimately care more about preserving their jobs (or the concept of their jobs) than about actually providing value to the company. And Managers are the ones that get to talk to executives, not CEOS.

Hearing that IC's are "wrong" for following their job description to "individually contribute" sure does sum up today's job market.

> Middle managers do not trust their staff. They need to surveil and police

2010-2016 in SF there was no such thing as a manager except PM who had no power (they were mostly just happy to be there).

Over time middle management and HR got insane - became the entire show. The whole point of a tech job. Then it was 1:1s and backstabbing all the sudden you could get someone fired. Hilarious, a few years prior if you complained about someone it was your problem - if you don’t like the culture you can leave. And some did because there were many opportunities.

Same thing happened with the web. Turned into banning and blacklisting and all the bullshit authority surrounding the activity taking over the activity itself - ruining it.

It’s not needed, we did better without these things.

i appreciate this kind of funny commentary but on the flip side, compare the top software list in 2026 - facebook, instagram, tiktok, gmail, youtube, chatgpt, ios camera, google docs, office on ios, android and windows - and two of those were created during 2010-2016, music.ly (tiktok) and instagram. perhaps the environment you describe is really good at creating social media phenomena. i don't know if i'd call it "innovation" but i'm not that judgemental. nonetheless most of the reason things were "good" in 2010-2016 is that the period contains most of the growth of iphone and android adoption (the inflection was in 2013). you are looking at cultural stuff that could be the exact opposite - it could be heavily burdened with management, Apple and Microsoft and their little ecosystem of partners certainly were - and still find success. so another takeaway is, none of that stuff really matters now does it?

It’s not just commercial real estate but selfishly on a personal level too.

Like a family home in Bay Area is 2-3M. Lots of other places in California with better weather and houses closer to 1M. The primary reason the area supports such high housing costs is the density of high paying jobs that require in office somewhere in the bay.

Without RTO, all the managers with property in the bay get skittish that a great exodus will happen from the Bay Area like SF in covid and their house won’t appreciate 10-20% a year

in Pittsburgh the local government tied RTO to RE valuations for the entire city by way of offering tax benefits to large employers for pushing RTO. I won't debate you on middle managers wanting power, the two aren't mutually exclusive. But WFH costs business districts a ton of money and that pressure isn't just being absorbed. Cities offer employers subsidies in exchange for RTO and get their money back in collecting taxes on parking, lunches, rideshares, after work drinks, quick shopping on the way home and all the other costs that employees bear. It's a direct wealth transfer from the working class to local governments, which then pass some of that wealth onto the business owners.

I think it’s a socially acceptable costly signal for communicating that power, less about the power itself. Perhaps a different culture could have settled on a humiliation ritual. Either way it has to be costly otherwise it won’t be seen as a true signal though it is likely possible to find a more efficient costly signal.

Could learn from Japanese CEOs to an extent right?

Is your opinion that groups of 1000+ naturally align and deliver business value lock step with company needs? Is coordination not needed? Is leadership not needed?

Why does coordination and leadership require my boss to be 15 feet from me, locked in his office 95% of the day, instead of tethered much the same through Teams?

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