This is exactly it. When you see story after story from corporate news outlets, pushing the idea that work from home causes all these mental health issues for everyone, work from home is isolating, work from home is bad for the company. It’s all because there is a vested interest somewhere. When you understand their base motivations, you understand why certain stories are ran on the news and others are not. Their base motivations are always money.

Do you have any actual, hard, direct evidence to support the claim that there is some deliberate, large-scale campaign by the media to propagate such (alleged) false narratives? If there were, it would have to be a conspiracy involving hundreds of people across (or within) a large number of news outlets; there would be no way to keep that a secret.

It's quite possible that people have good-faith reasons for disagreeing with you and writing stories expressing perspectives that you dislike.

> it would have to be a conspiracy involving hundreds of people across (or within) a large number of news outlets

Do you eat when you're hungry? Oh, you do?! Guess what? I do, too. And so do everone I know of. But have we all met before and arrived at this surprising consensus?

In the same vein, when some sort of global consensus is observed, one possibility is that it's driven by innate needs of actors, instead of due to explicit agreement. Granted, it's just a hypothesis. But considering that corporations amassed huge profits while WFH scheme was in place, but now want to undo all that without any other rationale (yeah, I'm not buying the "collaboration" shit), you'd wonder if this driven by some nth order profit motive.

The question doesn't really make sense though. Who is going to come out and admit to this? It's a subjective topic that's been carefully crafted to avoid backlash, so you're not going to get actual hard direct evidence.

Ever read the "work-life" articles for this topic on the BBC website? They are so obviously hit pieces against remote working that it almost forces you to think there's a campaign against it, whether you want to believe it or not.

So...there is no evidence, there will never be evidence, but we're just supposed to believe it anyways, because your gut feelings tell you to? Are they "hit pieces," or just articles expressing viewpoints you disagree with?

Why do they need to hide it? It doesn’t have to be a conspiracy! There’s no law that fund managers have to look out for employee preferences. This whole idea of a vast conspiracy has zero support for it other than paranoia.

You don't need a conspiracy, just converging interests.

I don’t think this is a conspiracy as much as motivated people with deep pockets making sure reporters, legislators, etc. keep hearing that message until they start thinking it’s newsworthy. Many of the stories have involved things like studies on productivity or health, or surveys of what businesses intend to do or have found to be productive – and those almost inevitably were funded by commercial real estate or retail business groups. Those groups have a ton of money to spend on PR teams who’ll keep their talking points in circulation and are constantly looking for new ways to link it to other things in the news. This can be self-reinforcing: write a “study” saying that working from home leads to people getting less exercise (oops, we meant their cars), make sure it’s covered in as much of the business press as you can, make sure every local official hears about it, and then you can repeat the whole process by running a survey finding that business leaders have heard that WFH is unhealthy. Since there isn’t a WFH trade group, there’s no counterbalance in those stories or a spokesperson getting asked to provide a response.

A lot of this comes back to the new to write new stories constantly. Remember a few years back when you’d see stories in news outlets about how cryptocurrency would transform daily life or a certain activity like going to concerts? That was the same mechanism: nobody really believed that, and nobody’s boss told them to write the story or they’d be fired, but a heavy promotion effort meant that journalists kept hearing about it until some of them wrote stories in case it turned out to be a real trend.

Anytime someone is appealing to your emotions you should be suspicious.

Yes, I believe this conspiracy theory too. All of the vcs are double dipping, they own a ton of real estate in sf and invest in sf based companies because they know they get the money back through rent

It's entirely plausible this is true just one layer up, where major partners at SF VCs are separarely invested in real estate investment firms without actually making that part of the VC strategy.

Or one layer down (= founders), let’s not forget Adam Neumann renting his properties to WeWork

VC's investing in real estate, that a new one. Care to share any data or sources on that?

Any good investor will diversify their investments, so maybe the funds themselves are not investing in real date but the investors of the funds and probably the managers do it.

More likely that their LPs are the ones investing in both.

And GPs would risk their promotes on their investment returns to benefit their LPs unrelated investments? Give your head a shake…

The fund isn't doing the investing in real estate, the individuals controlling the funds are. Anyway, that's why I said it's a conspiracy theory but the incentives line up like I mentioned in another comment.

But it's a conspiracy theory that doesn't even require a explicit coordination, just people acting in their own self interest.

If you argue that WFH improves productivity why would they risk their company investment returns in favour of their real estate returns?

Because that would involve these people caring about their "boots on the ground" or thinking in the long term. Those two things to happen less and less as things scale up and become public respectively.

I think they realize the truth which is that productive people can be productive anywhere. Do they care about the toll a 2-hour commute takes on the workers or how that translates into deliverables and timelines? Ask yourself if this sounds likely.

Also they understand that most of these companies are 100% losses anyway, but real estate investments are much less likely to go to zero. (Plus rent is just cold hard cash.)

David Sachs whinges about his SF real estate portfolio nearly every episode of the all in podcast.

It does seem unlikely the SF VC exists due to SF real estate, interesting theory though, I'm all ears.

I mean, you are adding more to my claim by stating it "exists due to SF real estate".

I never said that's the only reason it exists, but you know what, that might be the only reason it's so hyper localized to one place.

Let's look at the incentives:

Pretend you are a wealthy VC with tens of millions invested in San Francisco real estate.

You have been given billions by LPs to manage.

If I, as the person that has control over how this money can be distributed, only invest those billions in the bay area and bring all these high skilled workers to this one place I can actually impact the price of real estate and triple the tens of millions I already have invested. Once those high skill workers move here they will remain, even after the initial startup goes under because they will move to a different startup.

Now if all the VCs are doing this and they all control large multi billion dollar funds...

Which VCs own real estate that remotely measures up to their portfolio companies such that they would risk their portfolio company productivity for their real estate returns?

Or maybe instead of a conspiracy companies are just finding work isn't getting done and although people are loudly proclaiming productivity the work isn't materializing.

So where are all the studies showing this precipitous drop in productivity? Surely those would be cited to support RTOs right?

Why? Why would an employer care about studies? They have either seen a drop in productivity or they haven't. They couldn't care less about what other employers are experiencing.

When looking at my employer - they’re enforcing a 3/2 hybrid model during the last 6 months. Before that more or less everybody worked from home 100%.

During the WFH period we had more deployments & less incidents than ever. In addition we had less sick leaves (due to tolerance being higher when WFH). Yet - the leadership is ignoring this and enforcing the hybrid model.

> They have either seen a drop in productivity or they haven't.

Some of them are claiming that they have, but none have shown anything resembling evidence or numbers, there’s been nothing but hand waving about the value of water cooler talk. There’s no reason to believe a word they’re saying.

Employers have no obligation to provide studies. They set the rules if they pay the salaries. Employees can choose to leave. In the end, the decisions by both will determine winners and losers. That’s a market!

Nobody is suggesting otherwise, obviously.

The conversation is about whether there is a drop in productivity and what evidence we have of it, not whether employers have an obligation to collect or share such evidence.

Without an actual formal study, I'm skeptical that an employer can accurately measure productivity. Unless of course they are in a stagnant industry where the tasks today are exactly the same as yesterday, like counting widgets built on an assembly line.

I challenge you to measure the productivity of middle management.

Because any good thinker of any sort knows that their locally experienced “vibes” are rather fallible?

Because sharing these insights could help convince at least some employees to RTO?

Because it’s good to have credibility and look like a sensible decision-maker in the eyes of your employees?

Note: Studies includes internal studies or analysis of a company’s own performance.

They havent done them yet, the researchers are too busy 'working from home,' getting sidelined by Youtube shorts and Facebook reels for hours on end.

Jokes aside, the topology of the office<->employer relationship has inverted.

Productivity has fallen even further, as people get too comfortable and start to resent the lack of a "third place", or even a second one; the allure of working, playing, and leisure from the same place all day turns out to be less ideal than others prothetized.

As for the middle management's productivity themselves, that is a function of their subordinates work, and their own office water cooler politics. Between unconfident, unreliable, and gamed reports of employees' activity status, and the increased difficulty of socializing horizontally, of course middle management wants a return to office. Without it, eventually they will boil themselves as it is most apparent how little management actually is needed with modern companies.

Productivity can increase on the individual levels and decrease on the team or company level, and it can be difficult for individuals to recognize this. It also isn’t necessarily the same effect across companies.

I think in these discussions everyone oversimplifies to one single conclusion that should apply to all companies in all locales and all employees. There’s way more nuance to this.

This is a non-sequitur. Sure that’s possible, and sure it’s case by case, and sure it’s nuanced.

What’s especially helpful to such nuanced and detailed debates is data. So my question is why isn’t data being brought out in support of the RTO argument?

Two pretty obvious potential reasons are that they don’t have data or the data doesn’t support the argument they’re making, which reflects rather poorly on management and their decision-making.

I’m personally skeptical of the explanation “they have the data and it supports their argument but they just don’t wanna show it to their employees as they beg them to come back to office.” Just makes a lot less sense than the other explanations IMO.

> So my question is why isn’t data being brought out in support of the RTO argument?

No one’s bringing out data to support WFH either, so I really don’t understand this demand. WFH at scale only has around 3 years of history where in office has decades and decades.

The only data I’ve seen supporting WFH is that some percentage of employees prefer it and will quit their job if required to go back to the office and other jobs exist that do not require the office.

There are plenty of anecdotes by employees stating that they are definitely, for sure, 100% more productive at home. But I have seen very few by top level execs stating that this is true and that it also scales to teams, divisions, etc. Even the definition of productivity seems very, very loose in these discussions - is it that an employee feels more productive because they don’t have to commute? Because they write more code or better code? Because they can do the laundry at lunch rather than outside work hours?

So on the one hand you have people saying “I prefer it.”

On the other hand you have people saying “in office is more productive.”

Note how it only makes sense to ask one of those parties for data to substantiate their position.

The people saying “in office is more productive” don’t have to answer to anyone because they pay the salaries. The employees who are saying “I prefer it” have the right to quit.

There really isn’t a debate here that requires scientific studies backing it. It’s like asking whether Elon Musk had any studies showing X was a better name than Twitter. Companies can do what they want and employees can vote with their feet. If the job market weakens then it becomes a harder vote in the negative.

WFH is really no different a perk than free lunches or unlimited PTO. it will be offered when the labour market demands it, but I think we are heading into a weaker market and employees will be up shit’s creek.

As explained elsewhere: no one is saying companies have any obligation to do any of this

That is irrelevant to the conversation going on here.

Your skepticism is unsolvable, as it is for the majority of managers who have this data, individually.

Imagine, for a moment, that I have collected metrics on the members of the teams that I manage that measure productivity against work from home, things like sprint burn down versus work from home, and things of that nature. Suppose that I have this information for 50 people. I can’t share it externally due to corporate policy, and I can’t extend its scope to other teams that don’t use Jira in the way we do.

I can use it to try to discuss WFH with my teams directly, but even starting this conversation is liable to upset WFH stalwarts, but if I do I cannot present this information in a way that is both deidentifiable and satisfyingly comprehensive. If I aggregate it I get something like “we’re 10% better at task completion while in the office”, I have people who claim to be an exception to the rule (and the loudest complainers are disproportionately actually the worst when it comes to WFH productivity), and if I present it unaggregated then I have people complaining about being called out publicly as under-performers (rightfully so) and people complaining since their productivity didn’t slip 10% they should be able to work from home.

I cannot manage 50 different WFH policies due to incoming complaints about fairness, mandating RTO upsets the team, allowing unrestricted WFH nets a productivity loss, and anyone who says “fire the people who are underperforming from home” knows nothing about management.

So my personal response here is to just allow the productivity loss: 10% productivity means less to me than the major impact on the happiness of the teams, but it must be recognised that this pick is the “best of bad options”, if you’re trying to maximise business output.

Clearly, at some level of management, the happiness is less important that the profit, but that’s beyond my pay grade.

> Clearly, at some level of management, the happiness is less important that the profit, but that’s beyond my pay grade.

It isn’t beyond your pay grade. If your team underperforms because of your decision, then you risk the entire team being let go in the next downturn.

Yeah this is a thoughtful comment rooted in the (complicated) reality of management. I’m curious in your specific experience: do you feel like you have that data and what type of data are you looking at? (Without sharing the figures of course)

By virtue of my role I have access to all sorts of data, even down to how many emails a day any given person might be reading or how many Teams calls they're in. I don't ever dig into this on an individually-recognisable level (because that is overreach), although I do look into anonymised trends & aggregates, because it is useful and interesting to know these trends across teams.

I also have access to other more obvious task-tracking metrics like the number of pull requests, or Jira task completion, or stack deploys.

I also have team calendars where team members plug in whether they're working from home or from the office.

It's fairly trivial to punch a bunch of this data into BI tooling to get an approximation of how work from home makes a difference to how much actually gets done. Is it 100% accurate? Certainly not. Would I ever use it for an actual performance conversation? Nope. But it does help as a component of the gestalt that is my understanding of WFH performance.

The other major component of my understanding is more direct. I go out for lunch with my teams or for beers with my teams, and I listen to what they have to say. I know that a reasonable number of my team members head out at 3PM to pick their kids up from school every time they work from home, because they tell me that to my face. The guy with the new baby is not 100% focused on work when he's home, because he's got tiny human to deal with.

It's also very important to note that performance is squishy and hard to quantify at the best of times, before you even get into things like Goodhart's Law. For example. employee retention is important and as a rate of turnover fairly easy to measure, and is a significant factor for total velocity, but causes of turnover are almost always orthogonal to the root cause of job dissatisfaction... More importantly, though, do we decrease the negative impacts of turnover commensurate to the loss of productivity by allowing WFH? Who knows!

I have way way way more that I could say on the topic, but I might be being a bit hypocritical by continuing to talk about it while at work. ;]

So where are all the studies showing that it’s better? All I ever hear is individual anecdotes claiming increased productivity and then it always centers around all sorts of individual benefits generally unrelated to productivity for your organization. i.e. “My commute”, “More time to do…”

I work from home and dont want to change. I can make a case why it’s better for me, but I can’t make a case why it’s better for my employer.

Right, so that’s why I’m not asking them for productivity data. A lot of people just like working from home.

It’s the companies saying that productivity has gone down, so I’m very curious: how do they know? They never seem to say.

Management could say “come RTO because I prefer it that way” in which case asking for productivity data would be silly, but management doesn’t say that because it’d be unconvincing and indicative of vibe-based management.

It’s certainly vibe based, most executive decision making to degree is. However, it’s their prerogative to manage that way. Employers have always had control over where the work is performed. As employees we can choose to not work there if the location of the work doesn’t meet our needs.

More than once in my career I have worked for companies that have moved office locations. In all the cases I certainly wasn’t consulted ahead of time or given a vote. To my knowledge, no one beyond the executive leadership had a vote in the location. I am not sure why RTO vs WFH is any different.

It’s telling that even here in this thread, the answer to “what’s the evidence” is “employers aren’t required to produce evidence.”

Correct! They are obviously not required to produce evidence! But the question wasn’t “are they required to produce evidence,” it was “what’s the evidence,” and so the provided answer here amounts to “I don’t know/I don’t have any/I don’t know if they have any”

nah because if it was about productivity, the rto emails would emphasize that. not "helping out our neighbour restaurants and city centers"

Conspiracies are anything that contradicts or adds nuance to what the local newsman tells me on my teevee!

And maybe work is getting done but the quality, speed, and creativity are suffering immensely.

I don’t require my employees to be in office, and given that 60% of my team is non-local it’s not an option anyways. Given a magic wand I would 100% have everyone be around for at least a hybrid 3/2.

There are so, so many information and communication inefficiencies that could be solved by an off the cuff 1m in-person chat. Idea generation as well. Being in a zoom occasionally and chatting on Slack is a shit replacement for this in a creative field like video game development.

And to be clear, I am wildly productive remote but I’d be willing to trade 33% of that for the benefits my team would have by being in-person.

Chances is that if you used your magic wand, over time you wouldn't be able to find the best employees (as many people are refusing WFO and hybrid) and your team would suffer anyway.

I think a best use of your magic wand would be for you to acquire the skills to manage a highly productive remote team.

You need to resort to insults to make a counterpoint?

Why is this an insult? You are assuming that the problem with your team is WFH and not yourself.

There are hundreds of managers with remote teams that don't need to propose hybrid work as a solution for collaboration problems. Instead of looking at yourself for the solution, you're choosing to send your poor team to the office.

BTW, my highly remote teams are very productive. While some like the office, we never had to resort to mandatory attendance/hybrid to improve our communication.

You assume my issues with full-remote stem from a leadership failure. That's the insult.

I've been making games for 15 years across three companies, two of which ended up full remote. I can judge the effectiveness of a team, and I can say for certain that there are some situations and needs that benefit greatly from in-person. YMMY, especially if you are not in a creative field like games where a team comp is designers, artists, and eng. all mixed in a chaotic pot.

I worked years in game development... Which suffers sometimes from doing things the old way.

This is a what everyone who wants WFH assumes to be true but simple logic itself points that it’s not realistic.

If/As WFH gigs start to become scarce or more the exception to the rule, you will still have top level folks ready willing and able to go work in an office.

And.. gasp maybe some super talented people actually miss connection with other people!

Definitely. I know many exceptionally talented folks that prefer in office with the flexibility to occasionally WFH over full time WFH.

‘Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, “I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better.’ [0]

Oh well then of course!!!

There is no data to back it up. Managers I’ve talked to have in fact said their figures show productivity has gone up but who knows. How do you measure productivity in a knowledge economy?

In the absence of a compelling argument for return to office it’s reasonable to assume this is driven by other factors.

[0] https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-offic...

It seems hard to believe that a company’s managers would want to do their landlords a favor by paying more rent when they don’t have to. How would investors even ask for that?

As folks have said... investors are not actually concerned about the companies they invest in... they are concerned about the balance sheet of their portfolios. Real Estate holdings going deeply negative may affect their balance sheet more than one or two or all of their companies carrying extra lease OpEx.

I am involved in a real estate selection process right now and I can definitely see this sort of stuff going on. I don't like it but folks with the money make the rules.

"We happen to have some cheap rental space near other companies we own, no credit checks, and you're near <insert other SaaS companies that can be used so you have close accss to them>"

If you're a startup, getting office space without much bullshit is worth a premium.

> How would investors even ask for that?

What do you mean "ask"? They demand because it's their capital that fuels the company.

It's not like a VC gives money to a company and then cannot do anything but wait for returns.

I hear you’re looking to raise another round. It’d be a real shame if a board member got in the way of that.

Investors are the landlords, if indirectly. To be honest, I always wondered how much of the venture capital would turn into revenue for other investments.

Assume, you own Microsoft stock and are a venture capitalist. How do you react to your latest investment considering to buy AWS vs. Azure? The same pattern might apply in many more direct forms. Where does that fruit basket come from? What headhunting agancy do you trust with your top-level hiring?

I wouldn't be surprised if most VCs would mitigate their risks by funneling a startup's expenses back to their own investmentsnin one way or another. Vacant office space is just another such investment.

The theory was that they are also the landlords

Where else are the investors investing?

I think it's going to burst regardless. Plenty of companies have fully embraced the remote model, and many more are only doing hybrid. Even if they don't completely sell off their buildings they're not going to use as much. One company in my city is already closing their HQ and reorganizing their other offices: https://www.cleveland.com/news/2023/07/progressive-to-close-...

It’s also a tactic to do a mass layoff without doing a layoff. Return to office, people quit, no layoff politics or severance needed. I’ve even heard of companies doing this and then quietly backpedaling on return to office requirements once they’ve shed some staff.

Terrible strategy since the people who leave are likely to be more experienced or higher performers able to land remote jobs more easily. It’s also slimy.

I think this is right. It is also a tactic to increase attrition without having to announce layoffs. A big chunk of people will just move jobs instead of wasting 10-15 hrs a week to a commute.

Definitely some of that going on, and SF government begging companies to bring workers back downtown. But also, and I feel this even as an IC, working in person is better for the company and for some types of people. I work much better in person, company culture can actually exist in person, career development is easier.

I can appreciate the coinage of novel lexicology moreso than many, but I'd be remiss if I didn't point out the exacting nature of "invested" as an extant nomination of the given subject and thier relationship to the noun

Yep 100%. Get those wageslaves back in our buildings buying our overpriced sandwiches.

Many of those investors (who sit on company boards) also participated in the decision to sign those 10 year leases or outright purchase or build massive offices.

Rather than looking stupid by having hugely expensive, empty, office space that you’re contractually obligated to keep paying for because of a decision you made pre-Covid, you encourage the he company to utilize so the asset doesn’t sit unused. (For better or worse)

If you purchased or built the office, it might hurt your balance sheet to sell the asset at a loss.

That loss might be greater than the cost of filling the office with people.

I could see a CFO making a pretty compelling argument like this to a board filled with investors.

Apparently HNers think seasoned investors don't know how to adapt to changing economic conditions or know how to write off losses. That's just amazing.

> i still think every single one of these return to office orders are from investors that are heavily portfolio'd (new word!) in commercial real estate and are trying to keep the bubble from bursting like it should.

Is there any actual evidence of this? Why do you believe it?

I would add companies that invested into fancy office space, which is hard to justify because nobody wants to use it.

What percentage of venture capital firms do you think have real estate funds attached? I am betting quite a small percentage given that the risk and return profiles are dramatically different. And even where a parent fund owns both VC funds and real estate funds, how many VC fund managers do you think would sacrifice returns (the argument by pro-WFHers is that everyone is more productive at home) and consequently their promotes in favour of their sister-real estate fund managers’ returns? I am guessing none.

I just think this whole argument is so far fetched as to border on idiotic.

> i still think every single one of these return to office orders are from investors that are heavily portfolio'd (new word!) in commercial real estate and are trying to keep the bubble from bursting like it should.

I run a fully distributed company where work from home is standard. It works for us but has major downsides related to sharing of information that we struggle with every day. We have to overcommunicate every decision to ensure everyone gets the memo. Plus collaborative problem-solving is very hard, especially when the team crosses timezones. It's a constant threat to our competitiveness. At a more basic level, many people simply can't stay motivated or work productively a fully distributed environment. This reduces the pool of people to whom we can offer jobs.

I love work from home and we have no plans to change. At the same time I am skeptical that it is a general solution that can work across the entire economy. It's just too difficult to manage.

> At a more basic level, many people simply can't stay motivated or work productively a fully distributed environment.

I wouldn't trust a person like this to work very well in the office either to be honest.

Your company and approach sound great tho, you must be saving a ton in office space expenses.

Thanks! It works for us. We're also saving because we're not in Silicon Valley or any of the other high cost tech centers like New York or Seattle. It's harder to do bootstrapped companies in those locations and be profitable.

> It's just too difficult to manage.

Bold words.

I've heard plenty of people with various opinions on this, but I suspect that you've cut to the heart of it here.

It's not that it can't work.

It's just harder to make it work.

...and that hard work has to be done by people who previously just sat everyone in a room and expected them to do their things with no additional effort required; and having to do that extra effort on top of what they normally do is uncomfortable for them.

There's no denying that remote work makes some people's lives more difficult; but it indubitably makes the life of others easier.

It's a trade off; and anecdotal 'it works' or 'it doesn't work' comments are just people commenting on their personal situation; what is much less clear, is if it actually has a meaningful impact at scale, or what that impact is.

They are avoiding entering long term contracts on the hope that prices will come back up. I don't see that happening, though.

Last I checked about 30% of people are better off WfH, 30% from office and the rest either hybrid or no preference.

It seems possible that Zoom got more of the first sort of person.

SF commercial real estate prices being offered to startups are way lower. Sources: girlfriend leased office for her company pre and post covid. Also they talked about in in all-in podcast.