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Comment by dahdum | Hacker News Reader

Here is the actual study: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....

They didn’t control for occupation, pay, managerial status etc.. An on-site physical job like nurse, facilities, or technician was compared to predominantly remote administrative jobs.

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Not even attempting to control for these factors makes this seem more like a push poll than an actual study

Thanks. The complete gap to measure at-home living conditions kicks this into a flawed study. It does not control for physical living conditions anywhere. For instance, if your home is just some hot and filthy room in a neighborhood with lots crime, you're RTO just to escape the horrible environment.

Exactly. I support remote work, but purely as a question of science, it may not be a direct causal link between remote work -> happiness. There may be other factors at play.

They also completely fail to ask for the reasons of better well-being and then the article just starts guessing.

Besides, the premise seems stupid to me. Employers don't like wfh because of perceived lower performance. 'For years, many employers have worried that work-from-home arrangements leave employees isolated, disconnected from coworkers and more likely to leave their jobs.' this is just stupid PR, no different than netflix saying they're cutting down on shared accounts to give subscribers greater "personalization" and "covenience". employers care about employee health only in so far as it bears on performance. this stupid study is investigating the stupid pretext employers give for demanding rto.

interestingly moving between jobs is more likely to increase workers salaries. Would be interested if one of the reasons stopping wfh is to prevent salaries from increasing. There is a physical barrier to finding new employers that are further away from where you live and less jobs available overall in the area you live compared to the entire country/world. People who wfh can work almost anywhere, do not have a moving barrier and can job hop their way to higher salaries

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