They just want people to come back to justify their corporate lease / rent on whatever offices they have. That's really what it's all about. All their productivity claims are bullshit.

Also their investment portfolios.

I don't suspect any grand conspiracy, but I do think a lot of asset managers have had chats with high net worth individuals and gone over just what the collapse of the commercial real estate market would look like for them personally, especially with the stock market being so shaky as of recent.

I suspect these causal conversations are behind a large number CEOs return to office strategies (in addition to justifying their office investment as you mention) as well as Malcolm Gladwell's sudden revelation that working in an office is super important for everyone who is not him.

The commercial real estate market has no reason to collapse. In these cities with a lot of vacant office space, like NYC today, what do you also have? Enormous demand for apartment housing. Land owners never lose money in these hot markets where apartments are leased the day they are put to market. Your building could burn down and it doesn't matter, the money is in the deed to the dirt and the zip code, and the potential rents that this piece of dirt in this zip code can yield based on the zoning of the property.

I think that and retention. It’s well known that remote jobs make it way easier to jump, plus people are less attached to their coworkers.

That’s still not a good reason, since you are essentially trying to guilt people into staying or making their life more busy so interviewing is harder.

This sounds likely, but is there solid data to support this?

An HR department at a giant company probably does have solid data.

There is also a lot of pressure from local governments to get companies to force people back to work as the businesses built up around large biz centers suffer if everyone works from home (no one eating out for lunch, going to beers after work, getting coffees, getting dry cleaning, etc etc)

This is true.

I will say I've been work from home for years now and I still do all of those things ;). Just not with my coworkers. And not always in the heart of downtown, but more local to where I am.

The money is still spent, just not in the same places.

Or, if they want more people in the area, they could zone for housing in these downtowns that they previously hollowed out the housing for to build these offices and their parking lots.

okay but if you're an executive surely cutting the entire office budget would be a massive win for the business?

Many assumptions in your statement. You probably can't evaluate your productivity by yourself and record profits come at specific context, specific time and based on a historic inertia and multi-year strategy.

This is not about fighting any tyranny, this is about running companies, and the same way there are costs associated to work in an office for you, there are costs associated with employees working remotely (and not only economic), but you don't see them.

I can, because I go into office twice a week now. The days I am least productive are the ones I go in, because I lose more than the two hours of door to door commute every day. It is the fact that I lose my most productive hours of the day in waking up, getting ready, fixing a breakfast, getting myself to the office and having to small talk with people before FINALLY I can work.

Then you are accepting that what drags your productivity down is commuting, not actually working from an office. Remote working may be a solution to your problem but comes with associated costs you may be not counting (misunderstandings, wrong team member mental models, alignment calls, longer on boarding times, suboptimal knowledge sharing, less serendipity/synergies in general). Another solution to your commuting problem is find a job that is closer to your place

I agree. However I still support work from home because it’s not up to me as an employee to fight for something that benefits the company at my own expense.

Commuting, finding an apartment closer to work, living in a place that you dislike, buying lunch or making it in advance, and a whole mess of other things are expenses that fall directly on an employee.

On the other hand suboptimal knowledge sharing, misunderstandings, less serendipity, etc. are not only hard to measure but are strictly of benefit to the employer.

If WFM means slightly less productivity per dollar spent in exchange for employee happiness , then so be it. The company can absorb the expense just like it does when it pays for on site cafeterias, overtime, and bonuses or extra vacation to mitigate burnout.

> Another solution to your commuting problem is find a job that is closer to your place

A solution that may depend on first resolving the housing crises in many tech hub cities.

I'm confused how any of those downsides are resolved coming into work? All of those things are just as liable to happen in person. To be honest meetings are a lot more to the point when done remotely. In person the first and last 10 minutes of a meeting are spent just pissing away the time on whatever, the presenters dog did something funny this morning perhaps. If you are having issues with onboarding team members or getting everyone on the same page, just have them meet more often over zoom to discuss projects. Having them come into the office comes with this assumption that people will meet up and help eachother and be productive etc, but in my experience most office chitchat is not relevant to work at all.

There are also associated gains for an employer. The office rent is a massive one, for example. It is not clear to me which one is bigger.

Productivity is hard to mature, and the more senior someone is, the more their job involves communication vs production. Communication in person is different, so while companies can be remote, and that can work well, the prices sometimes paid are subtle and hard to see/measure.

It’s fairly easy for most people to compare their own productivity before and after working from home. Mine is significantly greater. The number of hours I’ve spent working has drastically increased due to losing my 2 hour commute, and the focus I’ve been able to achieve at home is like nothing I’ve ever seen at an office.

Personal productivity isn't the same as organizational productivity. This is one of the key things at the heart of the WFH discussion. It's entirely possible that you personally wrote more lines of code, but the team still fell behind in products shipped. This could be due to many different factors. One easily identifiable one is that while good employees might be more productive WFH, poor performers are even more poor when WFH, and it becomes much more difficult to actively manage/coach/mentor poor performers when they are remote.

There's many more metrics too, like attrition, or poor onboarding experience for new hires, or inability to coordinate across teams (sure you're producing more personal output, but is it the right output?)

Organizations are more than individuals working in isolation. They're coordinated masses of people that have to work together, and what is best for one person's personal productivity may not be best for the organization's overall productivity.

Communication is great for organizations, but I don't understand what you are getting in person that you don't get over zoom talking about whatever you need to talk about. It's not like the entire org is talking to eachother at once in person. At best you talk to like a handful of people a day, probably a good amount of that talk has nothing to do with work. Meanwhile with zoom I've been having so many more directed meetings with key people. Like before, we would sit in this in person meeting and say something like "it would be nice to get Steve's input on this, if he were here in this meeting" and now with zoom we can actually get steve in the meeting. We meet with people from around the world who might have relevant input.

If your issue with wfh is team isolation, just have more meetings and get better at communicating. The issue is not the venue, its the event.

How you know it was not anecdotical due to switching workspaces and it is not regressing to normal?

I work with a bunch of people who are super busy and they would say productive.

But little of their work drives the company forward.

6 people that are paddling a boat in different directions goes nowhere.

> You probably can't evaluate your productivity by yourself

I’m going to go out on a bit of a limb here, and say if you can’t evaluate your own productivity, you aren’t trying.

If you are running any kind of scrum, or you are tracking estimates on tickets, you can create a velocity for yourself. You can track that velocity over time - weeks, months, years.

You can track the velocity of your peers, or at least your entire team and compare your velocity to that.

You can look at how many features you implement.

You can look at how many code reviews you do and compare that against how many code reviews your peers are doing.

And finally, you can calibrate your own measurements against your bosses feedback on your performance.

There’s a lot of data to be tracked, and so I really do believe that if you don’t know your own productivity in relation to your past productivity, or to your peers productivity, it’s because you are not collecting the data, not because there’s no data to collect.

Many assumptions in your statement: people are fully capable with self evaluation of their own productivity and companies aren’t bringing people back because of some cost associated with remote work. Apple, in this case, is making people come back to justify their super expensive and ridiculous new campus.

> Apple, in this case, is making people come back to justify their super expensive and ridiculous new campus.

Needs sources. Otherwise it's just speculation.

Need counter sources; otherwise it’s just speculation. Goes both ways.

> and the companies I’ve worked for have only seen record profits

This cannot be sufficiently overstated.

To be fair, most tech based companies have very long pipelines. Google is making money off software written over the course of two decades. Intel has a 4 year pipeline for chip tape outs. A lot of tech companies were positioned well to increase revenue due to the pandemic.

So just because companies are making more money, doesn't mean productivity hasn't gone down. It could be that it's just lost in the noise at the moment and won't show up in the data for a few years.

I feel like this is a really good point - Most people are likely pretty bad at measuring their productivity, and honestly my expectation is that (if present), the productivity impacts of long term WFH are likely to manifest in ways that aren't entirely obvious.

For example, it seems evident to me that there's going to be a lot less "cross pollination" (for lack of a better metaphor) between people in a WFH environment as opposed to an office. For those with plenty of experience, this will have a fairly minimal impact, but for anyone else I'm concerned about missing out on the little things that are seamlessly transferred in face-to-face interactions over time. That thing that takes you 30 minutes that can be resolved with a 5 minute chat with the guy who knows, etc. Things you won't even really think to ask about that don't get brought up.

Even less direct things as well - eg random new product ideas that come from a chat with a coworker, or improvements, anything like that. Those can all add up to improving products and productivity, and are difficult to measure the effect of.

All of this stuff is in the tail though, and we probably won't see the effects for years (and it'll be muddied by people who do genuinely work well in WFH environments too)

>random new product ideas that come from a chat with a coworker, or improvements

I've had this happen plenty of times over text.

I suspect the "cross pollination" might get balanced out by the ability to interact with anyone at the company, rather than just those on your floor or building.

That's a good point as well - I suppose you could argue the likelihood of entering a conversation like that over text vs in person. In my experience you're generally a bit less likely to end up off track in text as opposed to talking, simply because it's usually slower - you can't bounce ideas back and forth at the same rate (not to say you can't, though)

Unpopular opinion, but you can’t just look at “companies made more profits” and decide that means WFH is more productive.

People starting dying from covid while crypto markets soared, so I guess killing people with covid fuels bitcoin.

Or possible they huge money printing influenced the picture.

EDIT: Not saying we weren’t more productive, just saying that HN tends to be very scientific but is really ignoring correlation != causation which we all would point out for most other things.

I didn’t say work from home is more productive, I meant the record profits while the ENTIRE company was WFH suggests that at the very least, drop in productivity cannot be an excuse to bring EVERYONE in.

Correlation does not imply causation. A company achieving "record profits" does not necessarily have to be because there was no drop in productivity.

It's entirely possible that a company can have a drop in productivity and record profits at the same time.

Anecdotally, my company had record profits during the period of WFH, and I personally think my productivity stayed the same or improved. However, as a company we also shipped significantly less new features/products than we did in years past (and my opinion as to why is because we had significant organizational delays caused by miscommunication about timelines and priorities (stuff that in theory might have been improved if we were not WFH)). If we had not had a drop in the amount we shipped, it's possible our record profits would have been even higher record profits.

If correlation does not imply causation, does that mean corporate productivity might correlate with, but not cause, profits?

Sure, which is why the entire "productivity" discussion is a bit speculative. I note that in the OP article, productivity of any kind is not cited as a reason for the return to office. Neither is profit, for that matter.

Clear "Correlation does not imply causation" case. The fact that people stayed more time at home implied they consumed more of everything online and accelerated digital services adoption making companies related with digital services sell more, plus less expenses (no travel, less expenses in facilities) made higher profits. Remote work correlating with Higher profits is a correlation not a cause afaik.

Not trying to be nitpicky but that sounds like actual causation. I would describe it as a second-order effect.

Corporate overlords will only sacrifice the bottom line for one thing: the illusion of control. It's why open-plan offices and Scrum are still things, despite the money left on the table by adopting them.

How do you propose to keep in touch without periodic team meetings (aka scrum)?

Scrum is more than "periodic team meetings". It's daily standups, sprints, sprint planning, backlog grooming, retro (cited lengths for these meetings are aspirational; usually they take 1.5x-2x the recommended times). It's sprint goals and sprint commitments, failure to meet which will be recorded and used against you in performance reviews and disciplinary actions. (Don't tell me they're "forecasts" now. They're commitments because people higher than you in the org chart use them for long-term planning.)

The only reason why major companies undergo Agile transformations -- and why these almost always take the form of Scrum -- is because of the promise of fine-grained metrics, analytics, and control of the SDLC by upper management. That's what the agile consultants pitched to the CTO. Everybody involved in a typical Scrum shop is playing a game of Mornington Crescent -- of pretending to deliver quality software in an organic developer-customer relationship when what they're really expected to deliver is stories, estimates, and burndown data to their bosses (or their bosses' bosses).

Anyway, that has not much to do with WFH, aside from the fact that calling workers into the office comes from the same place as imposing Scrum: the bosses need to feel in total control.

I was introduced to Scrum at 2 companies that didn't use Scrum this way, and am currently at a company that uses it exactly as you describe. It was a shock and it's a real pressure cooker.

Scrum is notorious for not being rigorously implemented. It's pretty much just daily meetings.

You cannot do a scrum meeting over Zoom?

Over zoom is 99% all we do. Office is optional for those who want to get away from their families.

With a task tracker, forum, and chat software.

You get on a call periodically.

Many have commented on correlation-vs-causation. We get it, there is lag in the economics and the profits have partly been boosted by COVID. However, there has also been inflation-riding on behalf of these companies, and the same argument can be made in reverse: what evidence have they presented that WFH is causing a drop in productivity? None whatsoever. This move is simply to get employees back on the chairs so that the corporations may exert the same level of control they had in the past. On the other hand, those that are doing just fine and aren't cynical about their work practices are embracing WFH.

> This is about fighting back to the tyranny of upper management

hardware engineering requires shared access to tens of millions of dollars of shared equipment.

disclaimer: ex Apple hardware engineer who used tens of millions of dollars of equipment.

Okay, so hardware engineers can work from the office. Having a single set of rules for everyone else that doesn’t need to come in is something I don’t agree with.

Woah get out of here with your nuanced approach, this is the Hackernews comment section.

So don't work at Apple?

Their company, their rules.

Voicing dissatisfying as part of a mass popular outrage is a good way to get rules changed. Leaving a company also achieves that, but is a little more drastic.

I keep coming back and reading your idea about "mass popular outrage".

I wonder if that pattern has almost been commodotized, because of social media, to the point where it has less impact than a few years earlier.

I've long-considered that social media outrage, even something tech-specific like blog articles getting passed around on HN, is sadly sometimes the most effective form of customer service on these huge platforms that have mostly automated support:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17689749

Oh, hey, over a decade ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2493645#2494528

As far as it being commoditized, I think it might work a little differently in examples like the OP where the outraged people is the workforce itself. It's a more focused audience.

If you don’t like it, there’s the door? That’s a terrible solution to a problem. The my way or the highway approach assumes there is no room for growth or understanding of other positions. This is the root of no-compromise.

That’s the point

My labor, my rules. How about we compromise?

What are you getting out of posting that comment?

Do you think choosing employment based on conditions of employment has just never occurred to people on this website?

"Their company, their rules." Yeah, no shit. Great observation.

The OP literally quotes Craig!

I like how no companies complained of productivity problems when everyone was working from home.

After RTO, companies start mentioning productivity problems.

Maybe they're related?

I'm a huge fan of working in the office - but it astounds me that anyone can miss that people have different working styles.

>This is about fighting back to the tyranny of upper management who have nothing better to do than make poor decisions that affect other people negatively.

No, this is about Apple spending $5B on a state of the art amazing HQ that no one was doing much complaining about except those folks walking into the windows.

I remember when the plans for the new HQ were first unveiled. There was some disquiet from colleagues about the shift towards open floorplans. Not sure how it ended up being received by those who did relocate to there.

> I recall some disquiet from some colleagues about the shift towards open floorplans.

I can’t blame them for that. I am of the opinion that Frank Lloyd Wright may be the greatest sadist ever to walk the earth for popularizing the concept.

Why would you commute that long? I’ve never had and would never tolerate a commute longer than 20 minutes. I go into the office every day of the week because the time spent in the car is negligible when you consider it’s just podcast time.

I'd say it's a pretty rare luxury to be able to commute less than 20 mins for your entire career. There are tons of jobs that happen in major cities that don't pay enough to live within 20 minutes. Many don't pay enough to reasonably commute by car.

Plus there are a lot of life circumstances that make people accept different tradeoffs over time (schools/districts, medical care, aging/ailing relatives, space vs price, urban vs natural, car vs transit etc).

Man, I commuted 4hrs daily. I won't go back.

Holy shit, to me you are a giant. I could not stand a driving commute of more than ~30 minutes.

Same. Honestly, doubling my comp wouldn't get me back to that grind.

Beware, this attitude works while employees have relatively strong bargaining power. As tech layoffs accelerate, this bargaining power dynamic may change. Unless there’s strong unionization efforts on this basis, I suspect WFH is not long for this world in its current, widespread form.

I get your point but I’d hardly say asking people to come to the office for their job 3 days a week is “tyranny of upper management”. If this is your tyranny then I’d say you have had a pretty lax career.

Good for you I suppose and let’s hope times don’t get tough.

It's hyperbole, sure, but we know what they mean.

But I do reject the concept of 3 days a week not being an absolutely huge impact on your life, depending on your circumstance. It's life altering for a huge number or people. Others It's fine, or preferred.

If you are doing something against your will, it is tyranny. If you do things based on reasonable conversation, it is partnership. That said, to be fair, most entities are organized as 'on command' workplaces and management does not really understand and/or like empowered workers. Now, we can quibble over money and such, but most employees already voted, quite vocally, some with their feet.

Seriously, against your will? This is not an interment camp where you are forced to mine rocks out of the ground.

Quit the job if it has requirements that don’t meet yours.

Welcome to freedom!

>>Seriously, against your will?

Yes.

Does an average person wake up and thinks 'gosh golly, today is a good day to write a better way to track people for ad targeting purposes' or 'today is a splendid day to test that software package'?

I don't. If I don't, it is against my will. It is not rocket science. It is basic logic.

Naturally, you could argue that you are doing it for money and this negates it, but, well, it does not. It just means you are paid to do something against your will.

But wait, I can go somewhere else! That is freedom. You are just changing one tyranny for another and that does not change the fact that it is tyranny.

Thanks for the detail. I think I follow the perspective but let me ask a couple of questions to make sure I got it right. (not intended to bait you here but want to know where the nuance lines are)

Is paying for food/rent also a tyranny? (because who actually wants to pay for that)

Is the need to contribute to society a tyranny?

Is it a tyranny to enforce laws like a speed limit through a school zone?

No problem. To me it is an interesting question in itself in general; as such I do not think you are baiting anyone.

I am mildly concerned that what we are experiencing in our chat can be classified as 'cultural differences'. As such, our assumptions and cultural norms may not be the same.

With that in mind, I probably should define few things.

1. What is tyranny[1]?

   - oppressive power
   - a government in which absolute power is vested in a single ruler
   - a rigorous condition imposed by some outside agency or force
   - an oppressive, harsh, or unjust act : a tyrannical act

  A lot of people default to the 2nd one, because it is, the one most covered in our history lessons. That said, just because it is the most recognized definition, it is not the only one. I have a pet theory as to why, but that is probably not a place for such musings on my part.

2. Beyond that, I noticed that the questions attempt to conflate societal and governmental rules, which is fair as you want to establish the lines, but I fear it may muddle the point somewhat. It is possible I am channeling Chomsky a little here, but would you be willing to accept a distinction between private power ( corporation ) and societal power ( society and its byproduct government )?

If so, I think we can try to answer those questions.

>> Is paying for food/rent also a tyranny? (because who actually wants to pay for that)

   Food and shelter are necessities. For practical purposes, any governing structure quickly recognizes that hungry and homeless population ( especially if it outnumbers fed population and population with an abode ) is a recipe for an end to that governing structure. As such, most bodies do try to keep basic minimum needs met.

   That said, it does not appear to meet the definitions above at this time. Although, we are slowly reaching a boiling point of renting/housing being so expensive that it is "oppressive, harsh, or unjust act". Food-wise, it does not appear to be the case yet despite record inflation. Most can still eat, albeit not as much, or as well, as they used to

>> Is the need to contribute to society a tyranny?

  Depends. What is the society we are discussing? Is the contribution unfair? If so, tyranny definition could apply.

>> Is it a tyranny to enforce laws like a speed limit through a school zone?

  Maybe? Is the law enforced in an unfair manner ( say only women are stopped )? If so, tyranny definition could apply.

In short, I do not really believe in one and zero type answer. If anything, it is a spectrum of sorts and this does not even begin to cover the deeper dive into differences between corporate and non-corporate power structures.

I hope I did not make it too esoteric.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tyranny

> had a pretty lax career.

Being common place does not negate the fact that it is indeed tyranny.

Sorry but where are you getting your definition of tyranny?

“cruel and oppressive government or rule.” It kinda comes with the weight that you have no free will to leave and do something entirely different.

Is it really cruel to make you jump in your air conditioned car and drive to work? While listening to music or a podcast…Then work in an amazing office with fellow gifted engineers and civilized people. Same you did 3 years ago 5 days a week and now 40% less?

> your air conditioned car..

I would rather drive the car through a beautiful landscape (that I pick), instead in rush hour trafic that I don't have a choice in..

>Then work in an amazing office..

That I did't choose...

>with fellow gifted engineers and civilized people.

That I didn't pick..

There is a poem in Malayalam with a portion that goes like this "Bhandura kaanjanakkotilanengilum bandhanam bandhanam thanne paaril". It means, "bondage is bondage even if you are in a golden cage".

So the point is that office work is vastly less freedom (thus a kind of oppression), even with all its perks (that is for the few that indeed have those perks).

I think you would agree, when you choose a job you are choosing it based on a few base components. Job duties, pay, culture, location, travel requirements, hours per week etc... If these do not match up with what you want then its your job/right to get a different job at a different place with different components.

And negatively affect their businesses.

It will take a while to determine which jobs lose or gain productivity from WFH. Some regimented jobs like radiologists, or call centres we’re doing a lot of WFH well before the pandemic. Jobs that require focus probably also benefit, but in a lot of cases it’s just regaining lost productivity from the switch to open office plans.

The sort of major product breakthroughs that more creative people had during walks, cross team pollination over coffee breaks, or extended lunch brainstorms are probably fewer though. It’s hard to measure.

Just ignore any orders to come into the office. No one is checking.