The always-ongoing efforts to create productive office spaces do not justify RTO. It's unfortunate if an office design is commissioned that is later (or immediately) not fully utilized, but implying that this justifies RTO is purely circular reasoning.

Worse than that: Implying that not wanting to come into the office is tantamount to not wanting to do "good work" is antagonistic and disrespectful. I would never work for somebody who treated humans like that.

Ultimately you are committing the same fallacy as many other proponents of universal RTO - that every person is the same, and the people who do better working from home hurt the people who do better in the office (but not the other way around, somehow). They are not mutually exclusive.

Also, snacks and coffee do not "keep people boosted". They are nice. What keeps people boosted is motivation, productivity, the qualitative nature of the things they are creating, responsibility, communication, quality of life, using the bathroom in peace, salary, health, leadership that gives a shit, not being miserable for the potential benefit of the vertical, and not commuting.

We already give so much of our lives to earning a wage for a (most-likely) useless job. Give us some time back, at least.

> It makes them feel useful and a productive member of society.

This is a lie for most jobs. Making internet ads more "clickable" is useless. We only work these jobs because the alternative is either starving or accepting a lower status in society by doing something more blue collar.

Again this mentality. Not everyone is making ads clickable. I do not know from where this idea comes. I do not want to go deep into the industries we operate in but we are helping people take care of each other and inspire each other. Nothing to do with ads. People enjoy working there. I do not fire people, retrain them, take care of them. Why is it so hard to believe?

The point that I think you are missing is that I don't want to work in an office if I can avoid it, and it's not because the office or company is evil. I just choose not to do that if I have that choice; I have worked in offices in cities around me for 20 years. I am making different choices, today there's no shortage of work without in-person. I have been looking for a new job and every company with rto has kind of defensive recruiters, please tell us before you go ahead with an interview loop if you won't rto. I almost feel sorry for them. If you paid me lots more than wfh I might consider them, but that's not what they are doing.

I was talking with one of the top 3 cloud provider companies. They said you must rto but everyone you'd be working with is in another city 1000 miles away. You can work in any of our 3 local offices because you'll just be in online meetings with them, it doesn't matter because there's no one to work with here. That's the crazyness and endless complaints about some RTO. It's great that you respect your workers, that is appreciated and not universal.

So everybody is happily working in your specific office space, but your original post is a complaint about people who claim to not work well in the office.

You might need more context in your original post. I can't tell what you're trying to achieve.

For each person who works well in the office, simply let them work in the office.

It's a generalization; if you squint hard enough every employee at Facebook and Google is making ads clickable, including the janitorial staff.

Another generalization - tech hasn't improved the quality of our lives since before Facebook. Today tech is just the means for the masses to entertain themselves by moving around the deck chairs on the Titanic while our civilization sinks, and allows a handful of people to make billions of dollars by providing that entertainment.

But hey, at least this guy has a cool office with coffee and snacks! That'll keep us afloat!

The owner of the last company I worked for did that instead of giving raises for a while - the renovation was expensive - so everyone stopped caring about the business and then the company fell apart and he had to sell it. Invest in your people not your stuff and things.

I am sorry your last company didn't have profits. If making a better office bankrupts your company maybe the whole business wasn't very good.

If giving your workers agency over where work is performed is against a company's values, again, the whole business might not be very good at all. Companies are allowed to say no, but workers can also unionize and support reps who will codify remote work as a right. They can also leave, potentially putting the business in peril depending on role.

We can't argue this from data, because the data is mixed, so we are left with arguing from a position of power asymmetry ("I am the boss so I make the rules") and working conditions at somewhere workers spend a third of their life. Workers are left to flex whatever is available to them. Change happens slowly, and then all of a sudden.

If businesses must die in the process, and commercial real estate investment losses are enormous, so be it. Work to live, don't live to work (and quality of life and working arrangement is a significant component of that). Meaningful work is nice, but no one is showing up if you didn't provide the check.

Perfection. You've just confirmed that an office is an ego thing. Your goal with an office is to prove your business is good by the ability to waste resources on that office. "If making a better office bankrupts your company maybe the whole business wasn't very good." That means that if you can have a better office your business is good. That's the goal - to broadcast that. It has nothing to do with building a good business. It's a trophy.

All I am saying is, we have enough profits that we can invest in people. We are not trying to increase profits to make a better office. That is such a silly statement.

If your business is so successful that building a nice office is a rounding error then that's fantastic. I just know that, like a real time strategy game, if you spend some resources on something, you aren't spending it on something else. It's called opportunity cost and it's the first thing you learn in intro microecon, which, despite being a developer, I have taken. Spending X dollars on an office is a decision to not spend that somewhere else in the business. That might be the right decision, I don't know, I'm just a developer. But yeah, I guess it's more complex than that, as I suppose one wouldn't want to slip into a scarcity mindset, either.

Making a better work environment for your employees is good for the bottom line and the employees. It is not that complicated.

> a better work environment for your employees

By whose definition? Home can be a great work environment with a modest investment.

Exactly , all the money put into the office could go towards ensuring that workers have the best WFH setup.

I agree. That's why we made a choice and want to work from home (or wherever we chose from, not you).

If I can decide between a fancy office with a pool table, free snacks, innovative spaces and all that

vs

My employer gives me a generous stipend to keep my home setup ergonomic and comfy

I'll pick the latter every time.

I feel like what you're really saying is that you don't think offices are worth investing in. I don't think you'd say “Invest in your people not your stuff and things” if you were talking about how well equipped a lab was for research or engineering.

I actually enjoy working with my team in the office.

My only issue is the 2-3 hours of commuting each day. If I only had to go in twice a week, that would be fine.

I agree with you. The 2 - 3 hours of commuting is horrendous. This is where the business owners have a duty to speak with the city council and keep forcing much better transportation and services. Commutes should always be less than an hour.

Even a 30 minute commute is ~240 hours a year of miserably wasted time that we give for free to employers (generously, if we ignore the actual chair-to-chair time). When you consider how the nature of our society highly optimizes for filling time, even one hour a day becomes a sacrifice - because that hour is not coming out of your work time, or your sleep time, or your cooking time, or your chores/responsibilities time - it is coming out of your life, and your family's life.

On top of that, no matter how much you improve the major cities, there will always be tons of people not working somewhere with a public transportation line to work.

I think a short commute is ok. It gives people time to clear their minds and is a liminal space which allows a transition to occur. They can catch up on a short episode or read a book. The fact that our society optimizes filling every single second is a personal issue and also a societal issue but it it definitely not the right way.

"They can catch up on a short episode or read a book."

My house is a bit too close to the street for me to be comfortable with the idea of people reading books while they drive to work.

Is yours by chance an open plan office? Because the peer-reviewed research overwhelmingly indicates it does not inculcate creativity, inspiration or focus.

It is not an open plan. There are a lot more strategic choices you can make with plants, walls and sunlight to make it more interesting. You would have to hire experts though. And yes a pure open plan is terrible. I knew it when I first set foot in one.

Are you saying that developers have individual offices?

Whoa now, whoa now, that would be bad for collaboration. They've done interesting things with plants, walls, and sunlight.

He has his own office, of course.

That's how it usually ends up. I worked at a company where devs had their own private offices, it was heaven. Now I work at home where I have a private office instead of a shared office space with no privacy, loud noises, and and nothing of mine is there because no one owns an office.

I will accept RTO if I can make a little cave with office plants as my office.

Now there's an idea! Someone needs to write "The Goblin Developer Manifesto"!

Of course not. He would have said it outright if that was the case. He's using weasel words to obscure the fact that it is an open office after all. Or a bunch of smaller open offices separated by expertly designed drywall.

You never really stated why you chose to do this though - just the what.

So, why did you push for your employees to commute, spend more time away from their families, and incur more personal costs? The data does not support the proposition that in-office work is more productive, or causes less stress.

The data I have seen and that I have observed personally: remote work is not sustainable long term for high growth companies / startups. There is this natural organization which happens when all the people are in the same room which is incredible clunky with remote tools. Remote work made our teams less productive and lonely.

This is a tiny subset of cases. You need to make this clear up front if you are trying to limit the discussion to only fast-moving startups. For many people, that environment would be a miserable existence for many of the same reasons that this specific case benefits from everybody being in the office. We should really not try to optimize or generalize for this specialized case - it would hurt everybody. It would be like punishing everybody who doesn't work overtime - i.e. you're describing an exception that people, if they truly want to, are free to willingly engage in. But it's irrelevant to the broader discussion of work-life balance in a healthy society.

Could you share that data, then? There are successful / sustainable organizations of all sizes that embrace a remote work culture - Oxide, Dropbox, Palo Alto, VMWare, etc., heck - just check out this list [0]. Neither does the data support your assertion that remote work makes folks less productive [1].

I will agree that remote work may be more lonely for folks that depend on their job to socialize and make friends. But most of us (clearly) don't want or need that.

0. https://builtin.com/awards/fully-remote/2023/best-large-plac... 1. https://hbr.org/2020/08/research-knowledge-workers-are-more-...

I work for VMware and we are being acquired by a company that has an, at-best, complicated relationship with WFH.

I have a genuinely nice house. I also have coffee and snacks at home, and a lot of space too because I don't have to live in an overcrowded bit of an overly expensive city.

You also have a private bathroom! Extremely good reason to never work in an office.

> It makes them feel useful and a productive member of society. This same environment is really hard to replicate at home where there might be less space, kids, dogs etc.

See, I think this is a much better demonstration of the disconnect going on than "it's all about power". What I think is that too many people (both employees and employers) reject the idea that this is "different strokes for different folks".

It's just not true that everyone is more productive in the office you've invested in than they are in the spaces they've invested in themselves. It's true for many people, but not for all or nearly all people. A lot of people seem to have trouble believing that, but it really is the case.

The question is, once you do believe this, what can you do with that information? Is the best strategy still to go 100% in person, and just select for people who prefer and are more productive that way? Or does that leave out different kinds of people that you'd benefit from being able to hire? And if so, how do you make it work to also be able to hire those people? Is "hybrid" the best of both worlds, or is it actually the worst? Can you have some groups be fully in-person and others be fully remote, and select people into the right group for their own preferences?

I dunno, I think it's really hard. But I don't think the simplistic answer of "we have a nice office so everyone should come there and they'll be maximally productive" is the right one.

What's the point in WFH if only some people do it?

That you have access to different kinds of people who are able to work in their preferred way and live in their preferred location.

I think this is a huge benefit. What are the odds that all the best matches for your company happen to live within an hour's drive? And that all those people happen to be their happiest and most productive coming into an office every day? The odds of that are zero.

But it's also a trade-off. It's a big benefit, but it also comes with a lot of downside.

I meant to say RTO.

Aaaaah! That makes sense! I'm with you.

I feel that one of the major points of tension is that many of the benefits of RTO are contingent on having virtually (no pun intended…) everyone in the same place to, e.g., foster serendipitous collaboration. If 30-80% of those that you work with aren’t in the same office on a given day, for various hybrid reasons, so many of the friction of all-remote vanish: meetings still need to be zoom, you probably won’t have enough team members for an impromptu working session, encounters in the hall or cafeteria are rare… This still comes with all the downsides of both the office (high costs, meeting room conflicts, commute) and all the downsides of the fully remote workforce that you mention, and some new ones, like people sorting into office people and remote people, which has implications for visibility and influence.

So, the options seem to be “require nearly full-time office work” or “accept that the office is merely a coworking and offsite location”, but the latter still brings all thw costs. This leads us to the trend toward greater and greater RTO, with no desire for control required, though I agree with the author that this seems to be a component in practice.

> building an office space in a location where it is easy for folks to commute

I'm curious, how did you do that? Obviously "easy for folks to commute" depends on where folks live, so are you only hiring and have you only hired people that live close by?

Study transit nodes in the city and rent offices near the densest networks.

re: less dogs

I visited one of Google's offices and I noticed they let them bring dogs. I think they said there's an approval process to make sure they're well-behaved. I'm not a dog owner but I bet the ones who do would prefer not to leave their dogs alone all day.

Just to nit-pick one thing. But that one thing could be huge to a lot of people. (I personally would feel better with people in the office since I live by my self and most days go to a completely empty office to work. Then again, I live across the street from the office. When I had to commute I didn't bother on those days. A few people come in a couple days of the week and we get coffee and lunch which is nice.)

The thing for me is while I like dogs, I'm allergic to them. Or rather the dandruff they all have to one degree or another.

I don't want to be compelled to work in an office that's had dogs in it recently.

So, on your case it's sunk cost fallacy instead of evilness. Well, good for you, but that doesn't improve the outcome.

Did you also fix peoples commutes?

Those with money can live close by. It’s the worker bees with less options and resources that will by necessity have the longest commutes. But who are they to disrespect tasteful interior design choices, and “snacks”.

There’s quite a few metro areas where “money” is not enough to live near where the office is. Manhattan, Boston, I imagine large swaths of the bay and valley. Even having a 250+k salary does not afford a convenient house for commuting especially if school districts are a factor.

That sounds great, and I'm sure a lot of people would choose to travel to that office to work. Equally, there are people who can replicate that environment at home, or close to home (by renting office space, for example) who don't need to travel to that office. Choice is key.

And there are people who don't like to have all their meeting through zoom when the amenities provided by the company allow for much more comfortable and productive options. Choice is indeed key.

The technologyto bridge that gap exists. When we do hybrid meetings at work we do so in a videoconferencing room with two 75" screens and a device that zoom on the person currently speaking, it's surprisingly good.

Yep, our solution is face-to-face for things where it really helps. Whiteboarding, brainstorming, big architectural discussions, etc. The rest of the meetings like standups, planning, 1:1s are on Zoom. Works great for us.

If you limit your talent pool to people who live around your office, you won't be able to compete with people who hire the best talent anywhere in the world.

I think best talent anywhere is a bit of a fairy tale. There is sufficient talent in talent pools that it actually makes sense to hire from there and build an office near those pools. For the very rare one of case, exceptions are always made.

Not a fairy tale at all! I've exclusively managed global remote teams for the past 10 years an wouldn't have it any other way. We run circles around our competitors and we do it with much smaller teams.

The fuck it isn't.

Nobody asked you to "put in a lot of hard work" into making an office into a goddamned romper room for adults. My office requirements are very basic: I want it to be quiet, I want minimal distractions, and I don't want to have to put in a lot of effort just to show up to work.

My home office has two beautiful monitors and a very comfortable and expensive chair where I don't have to hear anybody's gossip or singing or their raging. I also don't have to sit through bullshit corporate "team-building" events which are just giant distractions which end up eating half my day. Give the sales team another award? I have nothing to do with sales and I couldn't fucking care less, so why am I being distracted from my work? Oh, and I don't have to wear headphones if I want to listen to music or be in a virtual meeting.

Painting the walls in company colors complete with all them logos sure as fuck makes me proud that I only got a 1% raise this year despite being a top employee in the company.

No, sorry, the office thing is and always has been an ego trip for managers and bosses. It is a waste of time for people who have to commute and frankly it makes our days even longer. You don't get to tell me where I'm more productive and it's insulting that you would even attempt to.

> the office thing is and always has been an ego trip for managers and bosses

No, not always. Once upon the time that is just where people did work, because that is where they were needed and their job could be done. You are lucky to have a job that can be done remotely and live in a time where remote work is possible. There are a whole lot of folks that still need to show up at a job site every day to help provide for all those things you listed that make your home office possible.

Do your employees flock to your meticulously designed office space by choice, or do you mandate their presence?

If they come by choice, I'll buy your story. However, if you have to compel them, perhaps the office is more a monument to your own vision of productivity than a boon to your employees.

You are speaking for your employees when you say, "It makes them feel useful and a productive member of society." I wonder what they say when you're not in the room.

That is their statement. People like working in an environment which is conducive to working. It keeps their house a space for relaxing and being with their family. I honestly have no idea why so many people in this thread are so antagonistic and suspicious.

> People like working in an environment which is conducive to working.

Yes, for many people this is not the office, obviously. There are many variables that the design of an office can not alter. You do not have to force everybody one way or the other. And the answer as to why people are responding with some antagonism is easy: You antagonized them. Your post was, in part, disrespectful in a broad sense.

I absolutely love working in an environment which is conductive to working. That is SO not the office I work in, also designed by so-called "experts". It's an open-office though, and apparently yours is not. I'd be interested to see what it looks like.

Your response seems to be driven by hubris in the effort and expense you put into your office setup. I’m sure some people would enjoy it, but I hear “snacks and coffee to keep people boosted,” and vomit a little in my mouth. I’ve never seen either not used to make up for a lack of compensation, or an attempt to keep people working longer with more time away from their homes and lives. I think you may want to have a harder look at why you’ve done so, because I don’t think it’ll be for your employee’s benefit.

I have spent many many days on this. I have done comprehensive surverys and reviews. Snacks help keep sugar levels consistent.

> an attempt to keep people working longer with more time away from their homes

I am really sorry that this has been your experience. But I can assure you this is not the case with me and many other business owners I know.

Can I see the survey and the results? Otherwise to put it politely, I certainly do not believe your claim. Your assurance means quite literally nothing, mate. Sorry. I’ve been assured by liars and egomaniacs more times than I can count. Your post does nothing to assuage that nor does it appear to be somehow different.

Work surveys should be looked at skeptically. The wording of questions can skew results. People may not trust that work surveys are anonymous and thus answer the way their bosses want them to.

That is exactly what I thought. Sugary snacks. Not an office for me. Unless you meant you provide snacks like beef jerky, cheese, nuts etc to keep sugar levels consistently low and the brain fed?

Jesus Christ. Yes I have those snacks too and not just sugary ones. I meant blood sugar levels.

"I hear “snacks and coffee to keep people boosted,” and vomit a little in my mouth"

I am reminded of the "We want more MONEY, not more dancing dogs!" line from the BeforeTimes when "Dilbert" was funny.

Lot of knee-jerk reactions. I do enjoy some in-person interaction so currently prefer to be hybrid 1-2 days a week with my work despite my office being an hour away. My company has also done/continues to do quite a bit to get its people into office some of the time WITHOUT DEMANDING RTO and I respect that. They even offer commuter reimbursement.

That said, outside of good employers like yourself and my company, I think you have to realize the downward trend in office quality since the 90's/00's. Open office planning, hot-desking, lack of sound proofing. These are very noticeable drawbacks many large employers have not addressed since RTO became a thing.

A nice office does not give the commute time back; people will get less rest time (less productivity). It does not prevent colleagues from spreading COVID (more sick people, losing a tiny proportion of the workforce to long COVID periodically). It does not protect against background noises which lower concentration.

I don't see how being in an office makes one feel useful. It depends on the individual, but I would believe just actually working regardless of the location would be enough.

Sure it is possible to do good work at the office. Meeting colleagues physically rather thab online can also help discussions that require a whiteboard. But it's possible to be more productive at home.

What you did is great. If you're making coming to that place a requirement regardless of outcomes, then you're failing your employees AND yourself, in this case.

I'm sure its nice, but you're making assumptions about peoples' homes that really aren't a given

My home office is the nicest setup I've ever had. I have a door, I got excellent equipment and a cheap L-shaped desk, coffee is a given, and my dog is a very good boy.

I like people enough that I'd happily meet up regularly, but the idea of spending a lot of time in traffic (even a short commute is an hour per day) to go to a worse working space just feels silly at this point.

Lol. Your subordinates are just afraid to tell you what they really think. Noone cares about your snacks and coffee boomer. Those are not "perks".

Tell your workers that they can work 100% from home without any repercussions, and see how many of them willingly pays a visit to your meticulously crafted office panopticon.

I understand your point, of course everyone is not evil and whatever. But you also sunk money into your office, maybe you signed a long term lease or own office buildings. Even if you don't own it, you put time and effort into it and don't want to give it up. As a potential employee, I don't care if the company put money into their office, I don't want to ride the bus both ways and suffer a half hour or more each way to go there. I'm only taking work from home jobs. I'm switching and interviewed with a big company and medium companies. The big company insisted on 3 day a week in office time, I got an offer for similar money and said no. Actually I got two offers for wfh companies, I just stopped waiting on other big co to get through their interview process.

So all your employees have willingly returned to office without you having to tell them to? If so, why do you care about what other people think? If you had to drag people back in to the office, under threat of penalty stated or otherwise, then it was about control.

> a space which is great for creativity, inspiration and focus. There are lots of snacks and coffee to keep people boosted.

Just admit it, you want people in the office because you don't trust them and you want to keep an eye on them.

Ok as someone who actually likes coming in to the office (definitely not for the productivity - for food, social chit chat, gym, getting out of home etc). I still call BS on this argument. The idea that your "expert designed environment" can cater for "everybody" is a bit naive at best. I am surprisingly productive at home (even with family around etc as COVID has taught us all to establish boundaries). Now you could argue that you are trying to hire employees with minimal ties who don't have houses/families and for them your environment offers a sanctuary. So much for inclusiveness (or older employees) then!

You're getting a lot of flak about this, but I'm with you. I enjoy aspects of WFH but I would be much happier with a nice office. This is short sighted from my company's manage, I know, but universal WFH has turned out to just lead to universal outsourcing. We don't hire anyone from the US anymore, especially not junior devs. For example, college grads would normally be a good source of cheaper labor you expect to go elsewhere within a few years, but someone in Colombia would be a good source of even cheaper labor you expect to go elsewhere within a few years. And if there's no advantage of the college grad being in-person, why choose them?

It's all very short sighted and also speaks to a lack of internal career development and raises, but if there is one thing you can count on from executives, it's making short sighted decisions that boost numbers for the current quarter.

Re: Outsourcing,

This is a destructive hostage-taking tactic. Businesses can outsource any time they want, to any extent they want, in response to any behaviors they want to dissuade in the employees that are in the places they normally hire from - not just to punish WFH. WFH just happens to have parallels with outsourcing that make it "look" like a gotcha. Of course in reality, the fact alone that businesses will treat people like this is not justification for the acceptance of that treatment. Taking advantage of the various deltas between different economies/cultures, which the people in those places have no control over, for the sake of profit, is simply immoral. Any immorality that is inevitable by the basic laws of business (barring regulation) is still immorality. Businesses often trick normal people into thinking that if they don't engage in all of the exact same shrewd practices that other businesses do, that they will go under. In reality, it's not that simple, and businesses should (and hopefully will, in the future) be held viciously accountable for their immorality.

"I for example have put in a lot of hard work in building an office space in a location where it is easy for folks to commute, invested in experts who came in and designed a space which is great for creativity, inspiration and focus."

I'm sorry you put a lot of effort into designing the perfect buggy whip, but that doesn't change the fact that most people drive horseless carriages now.

"If only people understood that I'm trying to make the world a better place. I'm doing this for their own good, they just don't understand so I need to force them to understand. Once they're forced to appreciate the glorious office space I have created, they'll realise my motives were benevolent."

So tell me, how do you react to people who tell you that seriously they don't want to spend even one day in the office that is so important to you. Do you accept it and continue working with them? Or do do you tell them to look for another employer? If the latter, then yes, it's about power.

Things that annoy me about working in the office:

1. Commuting. This is a life-suck and no amount of great furniture and food makes up for sitting in traffic for 2 hours a day.

2. Meetings. When you're in the office, there's just no escaping the "Do you have a minute?" conversations. I've had weeks were I had to work 12 hour days because I was in scheduled and unscheduled meetings for 8 hours, leaving me 4 hours to work on deliverables.

3. Shitty people. There's just some people in the office that you just don't want to talk to or see if you can avoid them.

Things I like about NOT working in the office:

1. Picking up my kid from school. I pick her up and we talk on the way home one-on-one and we learn and understand more about each other. NOTHING you can give in the office will replace that.

2. Taking breaks. Lean back, stare off into the distance, have a cup of coffee without someone commenting, "Working hard or hardly working? chuckle"

3. Not working at home. Sometimes it's nice to sit al fresco at a cafe and reply emails while enjoying a beverage.

Again, no amount of snacks, coffee, feng shui aligned furniture can make up for these points.