As a notable example, it's much easier for employees to hop between remote jobs. Forcing you into a physical location is a way to lock you into the job: you socialize and make friends at work, you buy a house close to work, you build an entire life around work.
No employer will tell their employees "let's all get back to the office so you will find it harder to leave your role even if we underpay and overwork you."
For some barely logical reason the more complicated work and the higher salary came with a kind of military authority position that use to be reserved for the level above or (longer ago) didn't exist.
This gets interesting where management tasks, like all other tasks, need to be optimized. If it is the same person doing both the tasks and the planning optimization happens naturally. A is compared to B, one goes over the advantages and disadvantages of either and makes a choice.
But now the manager has to chose between his own comfort and/or the effort he has to make and that of his underlings and the actual productivity. I don't think we need numbers to know what most would chose when the options are themselves or others. Its a damn hard choice to make objectively.
But the thing is, didn't we get these big brain high salary guys to make everyone under them work more efficiently? I think comfort in a job makes the largest contribution to productivity out of all factors. At one end of the scale people just start walking off at the other you get the [rare] unimaginable performance only seen in people who love what they are doing.
WFH is going to make management that much harder but also more valuable. If one is not excited about that the job seems to have evolved beyond capabilities.
What more do we need than the employee himself stating: "I cant do the work like this" in a context where we know others are doing it with great success.
Video chat is like the way PDF tries to replicate the paper office. I'm sure people are already building parsers for video chat and failing to match organized exchanges.
I imagine some kind of analogy with using whatsapp as a bug tracker. Surely it would kinda work to some extend? You would be able to find things you know are in the log but if you don't know it is there it is going to be a huge waste of time. If the person filling the ticket has the tools to make that extra inch of effort it saves the person on the other end of it a mile of scrolling.
A water cooler is designed to provide cups of water. It is only suppose to do one thing and it does it well.
I refinanced last year to a 15 year mortgage planning for this to be our “forever home”. I woke up one morning and I asked my wife did she want to move to one of the tax free states. We can save $12K a year and try some place different for a few years.
Managers happy that employees bought a house bc “now you’re stuck here”. Which isn’t too far from the truth.
There are or where a lot of places where a specialty like networking and various tech fields might only have one or two major employers in the area.
Is it the banal they vs us, search for an enemy and cause of one’s unhappiness?
That generational housing affordability factor might also help explain some of the WFH sentiment split between older and younger generations, and between management and IC. Older generations tend to as an aggregate have already locked in their housing cost basis in generally desirable areas with better commute characteristics, and be more represented in management.
Additionally thats one company, maybe you just have a particularly social group of swes who like each other and a good office environment
Nothing productive was getting done during those office days but they definitely made the job more tolerable and contributed to me not job hopping earlier.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/456925/median-size-of-si... [2]: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/ahs/data/interactive...
Space is ridiculously expensive in Europe and nobody is used to it, so the market rarely offer that.
That's my view that management are there to enforce the often unpleasant demands of those above. In most cases anyway.
While I'm not "resisting" (I'm communicating that this is the organisational preference) I'm making it clear to the team that as long as they stay highly functional and get work done, there's going to be no mandate and people can make their own choices. They are all choosing 80% WFH.
But our office space sucks. I think it would be a little different if we had really nice space.
As someone who works in a software shop that sells directly to this sector, I have a guess (and it’s just a guess but a quasi-informed one):
Office/Building leases.
Combine this with the fear of many managers that they will not be able to change policy once they allowed everyone to work fully from home and you get the prevalent policies
Which leaves the question of what is motivating it? I feel like this is more managers struggling to recapture their previous sense of identity which was founded in some way on there being a physical place full of warm bodies with a specific culture shaped by management through various decisions. Without that managers are left with a much more intangible sense of what their role and value is. Everything seems a lot more hollow if your only reason to exist is to deliver on bare bones work requirements. Then, managers also feel they have a lot of influence over employees by controlling their physical environment which they don't have with WFH.
The problem the managers have is, the factors in favor of WFH are pretty clear and objective. Just eliminating commute saves most employees a couple of hours a day which is already probably more productivity gain than you could achieve through any other kind of workplace measure. The benefits for the environment, reduction in burden on infrastructure, etc etc are all pretty easy to add up.
So we are left with management weirdly struggling to assert a rationale made up entirely of intangibles against pretty obvious hard objective facts. It's going to be pretty interesting to see who wins this one.