[imcrs]

It's not about productivity at all. These same companies were commissioning studies during Covid that told their analysts "look how productive our employees are now that they are working from home!"

It's about crushing labor.

WFH forces employers to compete. It gives a lot of power to employees, because they can apply for far more roles, work fewer hours, moonlight for multiple companies, etc, apply for other jobs during work hours, etc. These companies know that white collar workers are not fungible. Their intellectual workers are genuinely very difficult to replace and produce a lot of value.

For talent that isn't fungible, it's RTO. For talent that is fungible, offshoring.

[imcrs]

For your comment about the turn towards authoritarianism, yeah, there's a reason every DEI program at every large corporation was pulled back within a few months, and it's not because the C suite all reads the same Musk tweets on X.

Employees started making demands of management to actually look at some... structural issues. Those demands had teeth because employees acted and organized as a bloc. Only a matter of time before other lines of questioning besides race and sex were explored at work.

Yeah.

[raxxorraxor]

With DEI you had to care about the same "structural issues®". It wasn't exactly employee representation and much more of a HR tool to sanction mostly low level employees.

Usually I don't care about race and sex at work and I am not sad that DEI is gone. Creates room for issues much more relevant to work. Like working hours, salaries, holidays, health insurance and general work benefits. Stuff that matters.

[ChadNauseam]

> It's not about productivity at all.

> WFH forces employers to compete. It gives a lot of power to employees, because they can [...] work fewer hours, moonlight for multiple companies, etc

Probably "working fewer hours" and "moonlight for multiple companies" has negative effects on productivity that employers would like to avoid.

[array_key_first]

I doubt it, productivity is an equation that's very complex for knowledge workers.

For example, is 80 hours of work a week more productive than 40? If you're working an assembly line, probably.

If you're a programmer, definitely not. You will write more bugs, make more mistakes, and churning out code doesn't mean much. Any monkey can write code, but writing maintainable code is hard, and reading that code and actually choosing to maintain it is harder.

[imcrs]

I've already kind of made it clear here where I stand on this, but I gotta tell you, you really do sound a lot like management.

Do you really think your superstar programmers are well and truly doing intellectual work, the kind of work that produces business value, from the time they hit the coffee machine at 9AM to the time they grab their briefcase to go home at 5PM?

If you believe this, I think you might be interested in bringing the Bobs in to discuss making our T.P.S. reporting process more efficient. They have thoughts on coversheets.

[eastbound]

I’ve hired remote employees, made them come, offered stimulating work, 5% above their requested pay with mentions that I could double it in one year, but I could never get them to the smartness and clarity of analysis they had during the interview. After 6 months they were clearly winging it in <1hr a day and exhausting my team lead, who didn’t think they were moonlighting for several companies. I did: Their progress had entirely stalled and their performance was negative.

I fired both the employees and the manager. This “remote employees don’t moonlight” is a union trope.