[thegrim22]

There's obviously two sides to the issue, right? Or else there wouldn't be any debate. Or else no companies would do RTO. Why is it that in multiple years of reading HN I've never once seen an article that covers the other side's position? Why is it that the reporting is 100%, completely, always biased in one direction? It's like this across whole swaths of topics, not just about RTO.

Wouldn't we prefer forums of communication that were unbiased and which fairly discussed the props/cons of each point of view? Or do we really just prefer the echo chamber / propaganda / dogpile approach?

[tamimio]

The other side is all over companies’ announcements, emails, and LinkedIn posts. The debate is not between equal peers, but between the few who want to bring back the pre-pandemic norms because they need to: fill the void in their lives as their lives revolve around work, and/or satisfy the need to control others and feel it face to face, and/or justify the commercial building rents, and/or help landlords pay their debts, among other reasons. On the other side, you have the average person who discovered that they can do the same job perfectly well while saving on commute costs, time, and even rent by being far from crowded hubs, and spending more time with family, especially since they still produce the same outcome. This is not your typical debate, this is a typical power exchange dynamic between different classes, the greed versus the need.

[chii]

Why are those reasons for RTO any less valid than the ones presented by employees?

[nottorp]

> Drilling down, the data indicated that RTO mandates were linked to firms with male CEOs who had greater power in the company. Here, power is measured as the CEO’s total compensation divided by the average total compensation paid to the four highest-paid executives in the firm.

Here's your explanation. They're compensating for something.

[nh23423fefe]

all the men ruining the world have tiny dicks!

[AndrewDucker]

Go find some research that shows the opposite effect. Submit it. Join in the conversation.

Complaining that the research doesn't support your side doesn't really seem like a useful approach.

[Eridrus]

A few papers I found when trying to actually look into this:

Software engineers give substantially less code review feedback when not colocated (either remote or just in different buildings);

https://www.nber.org/papers/w31880

People are less productive WFH, and those who self select into remote work take an even bigger hit than those who prefer the office:

https://www.nber.org/papers/w31515

Previous pre-pandemic papers that I didn't save links to also found negative selection effects into WFH were significant.

If you believe the mythical man month, which all software engineers seem to, then productivity hits to engineers are very bad for the project since outcomes are not linear in inputs.

Anecdotally, CTOs I have talked to were all uniformly negative about remote work at their companies, basically all feeling that their teams were less productive than before the pandemic.

[cbeach]

Are you surprised that a majority of people would favour having the freedom to work in the environment that best suits them and their team?

RTO mandates are simply a way to curtail freedoms that we’ve established; freedoms that we demonstrably didn’t abuse.

Why would anyone (except a commercial real estate investor, or an authoritarian senior manager) defend RTO mandates, given the data shown in this study?

[rufus_foreman]

>> There's obviously two sides to the issue, right?

This is false.

[undersuit]

Thank you. I'd like the option to work from work or home and I don't want to schedule it.

[CPLX]

So there’s literally no example, anywhere on this wide planet, of a company that would be more successful with its team working together in an office?

[paulddraper]

Numerical advantage.

Most ICs prefer working from home.

Most managers prefer teams to work in office.

There are more ICs than managers.

[boppo1]

Good kuck getting ICs to unionize. Otherwise it's 'there's more miners than mine bosses'.

[malfist]

This is the both sides fallacy

[yazzku]

"...examined a sample of firms on the S&P 500 list—137 of which had RTO mandates and 320 that clearly did not between June 2019 and January 2023."

There are samples of both types of RTO policies in the study. So the study itself deals with the supposed bias in your question.

"Overall, the analysis, released as a pre-print, found that RTO mandates did not improve a firm's financial metrics, but they did decrease employee satisfaction."

Though I cannot speak to the quality of the study or its conclusion, because the damn crap is behind a login/paywall.

Link to the actual study: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4675401#...

[paulddraper]

Well it's the third time this article has been posted here in the last 6 weeks.

[intended]

Which is the other side? It’s only in the past few days that I have seen 2 articles cover the same study that suggested that RTO isnt all that great.

Otherwise it’s generally been about how RTO is needed or necessary.

[Archelaos]

> Why is it that in multiple years of reading HN I've never once seen an article that covers the other side's position?

If there were one, why didn't you submit it?

[socar]

>omg omg french literature forum is not discussing japanese welding equipment. so biased toward one thing

ok

[Simulacra]

You don't see the other side because I think mostly the media is pro labor. If company says return to the office, the media is going to say no, I side with the laborer, who does not want to return to the office. That kind of decision I think shapes the reporting. I guess you could chalk it up to general media bias and issue advocacy.

[deprecative]

The media is pro wealth. It's no pro labor. They operate as a clickbait factory with nothing of value desperate for eyes on ads and nothing else.

[jiggawatts]

HN is full of entrepreneurs, which by and large are more experienced, more senior people. A total beginner/junior would not be running a startup (I hope). Someone who struggles to write a function or a for loop isn't going to be hired by startups that have like... three developers total, and the success or failure of the entire company hinges upon their output!

The real world is full of juniors, especially in IT and software development, where the continuing growth of the industry means that juniors can outnumber more experienced staff.

I have no problem working from home solo, but I've noticed that juniors will flounder. Even if they find something useful to do, they don't get to "look over my shoulder" to see how I do things.

It's the little things too, things you might not even consider to be a skill because it's so automatic for you.

    Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V

Yes, really. Really!

I've lost count of the number of times I've stopped some kid typing something (with typos) and told them to do it again using the clipboard to avoid that.

    Tab

It's not even watching someone type out each and every character one painful keystroke at a time. It's that not using tab-complete means they don't get the implicit spell-check. They also don't get to rotate through the variants of the function names (or whatever), so there isn't that implicit act of "discovery" as they see what else is up for grabs.

Etc, etc...

There's a thousand things like that a junior can pick up by being present physically next to a senior. Zoom or Teams is just not the same, especially because by default these systems don't show the keyboard shortcuts used.

[jen20]

> Even if they find something useful to do, they don't get to "look over my shoulder" to see how I do things.

This is your fault. I work remote, and have an open video call when I’m coding. Lots of people drop in for that. The keyboard is neither here nor there: I promise you can’t tell what I’m typing from looking at my keyboard, yet jetbrains solved this decades ago with the shortcut presentation mode.

[AndrewKemendo]

You never made an argument for in person so there’s nothing here you offer other than what is effectively a taunt

So… Make your case

[nottorp]

> Signed, VP Eng at a fully remote company.

Management does seem to be in favor of office work. Do you feel like you don't have control?

[positivedialog]

> They’re angry, vocal, and sure of their morale superiority. There’s no point in engaging with them, so I remain quiet.

They do have morale superiority on this issue though. Not because WFH is superior and they are smarter than everyone else. But because the arguments brought by their counterparts are in most cases either very dishonest, or very dismissive and confrontational.

RTH mandates acknowledge that the fulfillment of the employees preferring WFH is not their priority even if it does not negatively impact productivity. Company culture is prioritized over employee fulfillment, while it was pretended that these cultures were all about making employees happier. Masks off, people are calling the BS, and this is perfectly legitimate.

What you see as arrogance really isn't, it is just outrage, and a legitimate one in my humble opinion. Keep in mind that not everyone has the luxury of watching this situation playout while being comfortably employed as VP of a fully remote company.

[dmitrygr]

Absolutely NOBODY will stop YOU from working in the office, and none of us WFH proponents care about that. We only care when you are bored in the office and want to force US into it. You are welcome to work there, live there, etc, we do not care...

[transcriptase]

The other side of the issue is extroverts wanting to extrovert, managers worrying about losing out on the watercooler aspect of career advancement, and the collective will of companies with commercial real estate holdings not wanting to crash that particular market. Cities want it because there are plenty of businesses that rely on office workers buying food etc in downtown cores.

None of those have anything to do with the quality of life of employees or benefit to the company productivity wise. That’s why nobody cares.

[denimnerd42]

there's also the soft-layoff side. You can encourage those pesky mothers or child caretakers to quit as well as those that don't live very close or can't stand the office for any myriad of reasons..

[tpmoney]

>The other side of the issue is extroverts wanting to extrovert,

I *really* wish people would stop with this overly simplified take. I'm an introvert. WFH was something before the pandemic I thought I wanted. It was miserable. Turns out that when you're an introvert, you don't have great "maintaining a social relationship" skills and things that happen naturally when you're forced by proximity to work and interact with other people now require dedicating specific effort towards. If trying to maintain a good social relationship with my co-workers was a drain on my energy levels before, having to do the things necessary to do that AND also having to put extra effort into making it happen was even more draining.

And that doesn't even get into the other more subtle "anti-introvert" consequences of WFH. Like requiring extensive use of chat systems, leading to extreme self-consciousness over the fact that every "hey I'm sure I'm being stupid here, can you help me find the obvious thing I'm missing" or "I swear I've seen this documented before but confluence is awful, can someone point me at the instructions for Foo" moment is now a part of the permanent company record. And more than that, it's no longer a simple call over the cube wall to my immediate co-workers, it's in a public channel broadcast to everyone who happens to be there.

Or the number of times we'd be discussing something and then have to deal with a micro-manager butting in the next day after they'd read half the thread and mis-interpreted everything was massively increased. And yes, in theory you can have a separate channel for every combination of people you might want to be talking to at any given time, but in practice you often need to share things or bring in outside people from time to time and having to copy context to an entirely new channel every single time is a waste of time and energy and simply broken compared to being able to just include people in the channel.

Or the fact that because all communication now has to happen via text medium, if you want to keep an eye on something, you literally have to stop and context switch to keep that eye on it. It's no longer possible to work on one thing and listen with half an ear to your teammates on something else unless everyone wants to be on headsets and in an open mic call all day long.

Or the incessant pings of notifications all day long. Yes you can mute notifications, but you very quickly find out that if you're not at least then dedicating specific times in the middle of your day to again stop and context switch, you'll be missing things you probably didn't want to miss, or be failing to respond to requests and questions. It's like all the worst parts of coming back from vacation to a fully loaded inbox, but every day. Made even worse because people know you're not on vacation so now you have to balance reducing your context switching against not delaying responses too long so you don't start looking like an ass or a flake. And sure, your co-workers are probably in the same boat and get it just fine, but again remember that all of this is public and timestamped and someone just might decide to take an interest in how long it takes you to respond.

Or the fact that now every meeting is probably recorded, and you need to be eternally vigilant about an open mic and camera.

Or the lack of physical and mental separation of your work space and your home. Not everyone is blessed enough to live in a house where they can dedicate one whole room to an office space. A number of my "unwind after work" hobbies were on permanent hiatus because the space they would have occupied was instead my office space. Turns out when you're not getting any of the already limited social interaction you normally get as an introvert and mix in not being able to engage in your preferred hobbies, things get miserable really quickly.

To be clear, I prefer a flexible policy. There are absolutely benefits to being able to work from home when needed or wanted. But I came out of the pandemic STRONGLY preferring to be in the office as often as I could. And yes I know things will be different for different people; some folks won't be bothered by the things that bothered me. But that's also my point. We're all different, and just because I'm an introvert doesn't mean I'm a misanthropic hermit either.

[15457345234]

> Cities want it because there are plenty of businesses that rely on office workers buying food etc in downtown cores.

So casually dismissing the fact that this provides a HUGE amount of employment and revenue and, in turn, encourages face to face socialisation which builds communities and social cohesion.

Like... what's your plan for these people, this huge proportion of the population that can't work remotely, won't enjoy working remotely, don't want to work remotely etc.

People enjoy socialising. That's why so many TV programs are made about work and the office environment. People enjoy the social aspect of it. It's not all 'the office' - that's a massively cynical viewpoint. Most people get something out of going to the office, date co-workers, play golf with their colleagues, you know.

Society is not going to change to revolve around shut-in people haters. You're a minority. You're not normal.