This is an oversimplification in three different ways:
1. One can be a proponent of remote work without claiming that it is "equal to or superior to in office work". Remote work is better for a subset of people and a subset of jobs. In-office work is better for a subset of people and a subset of jobs. The most common fallacy is that we must go all-in on one or the other. Having multiple people in a company, even on the same team, at different points on the all-remote to no-remote scale does not have to cause the mutual hindrance that leadership portrays it as doing.
2. Remote work has value for mental health, societal health, and work-life balance, which are things that may, abstractly, in the long-run, make a company more competitive, but it's subjective. The point is, "business absolutism" is a fallacy (i.e. the idea that a business must do whatever makes it the most money with no qualifications to that statement).
3. Disregarding #1 and #2, even if remote work was superior by business-benefiting metrics, the successful rise of all-remote companies would not be a prerequisite of nor a sure-sign of that statement. You would need controlled experiments, which are impossible in the business world. You can never, by the laws of reality, have a reasonable sample size of real-world businesses that are identical in every way except for remote work and "success".
That being said, Amazon is stupid for punishing people for WFH.
Or they'll just buy you out. Competitive advantage doesn't work too well when your competitors have large moats of cash that you don't have access to.
Honestly, people just need to organize unions. That's the only effective counter to policy like this.
The issue is that this will not raise the working standards of the workers already working for the abusive employer, not that this can't be leveraged by a privileged few.
That would require you to sell. And if one is confident they can win in the marketplace then why sell to them when you can eventually flip the scenario and have them asking to be acquired?
Fully granted that in my experience, in the USA for the past long time, it's felt like Corporatism has made this scenario far less likely. But, perhaps that's more of a sign to start your company elsewhere. Perhaps America is no longer a good place to start a company.
I'm not saying they are a bad thing necessarily, but they don't make sense in competitive markets.
Most unions function to keep an established order where seniority matters more than capability and performance.
Besides sports unions, actors guilds, and other small examples, unions exist to provide a framework for collectivising unskilled labor into a unit of power, where individually they have none.
Even unions in industries with legitimately undifferentiated labor will have shift differentials built into their contracts.
https://amp.theguardian.com/football/blog/2023/sep/20/inter-...
What you’re doing is trying to craft a special definition of a union that excludes the most analogous unions to the one that software engineers could form and ignores the real examples of solidarity between professional class and other types of workers. See also the solidarity strikes against Tesla in Sweden. I won’t speak to your motivations in attempting to do so, but it doesn’t correspond to how labor organizing is actually practiced.
Most importantly because companies have no good way of judging skill of developers.
And also because, in most companies writing business software, good enough is good enough.
Listen, I know as SWEs, we're supposed to reject unions because we're paid so well, and listening to a lifetime of anti-union propaganda that leads to hilarious conclusions like the above. But reading some of the other threads complaining about work conditions that it sounds like a majority would like to avoid, not to mention some of the horror stories out of, eg, video game development studios, getting people to understand that, no, a union could be useful is, for some reason, an unhill battle. Wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to try and do deep work in an open office floor plan? if there were more conference rooms? If RTO wasn't a thing? If there was no deathmarch to make the upcoming release?
Because people who can compete on skill could band together and say "we're not putting up with open office floor plans".
I mean, the “on skill” part is superfluous, but, yes, it is definitionally true that a union is for workers that no longer wish primarily to compete with each other, and who realize that such competition is a race to the bottom that works against them and for the benefit of their employers.
All organized groups are rejections on some level of competition among the members in favor of cooperation for joint advantage.
This seems like a non-sequitur to me. You seem to be suggesting that unions magically understand the best way to organize each and every workplace and that every employer should be required to organize its efforts according to the wisdom of "the union".
How about each company runs its business as it sees fit and each person decides on their own who they want to work for or perhaps just work for themselves? Systems that work thrive, systems that don't work wither away. Build in some social support for people to be able to move to new jobs or create new jobs/companies with as little friction as possible. For example:
ensure that substantial changes to a work arrangement must have a notice/grace period (no unforeseeable changes) * make health insurance independent from your employer * reduce occupational licensing regulations and require states to accept licenses from other states * simplify and streamline the creation and overhead of small/all companies (incorporation, taxes, reporting, etc.) * allow employers and employees/contractors to define the relationship that works for them without the ambiguous and irregularly enforced employee/contractor distinction in the tax code
Yes, it's called "representing the needs of the worker".
> every employer should be required to organize its efforts according to the wisdom of "the union".
No, it's always a fight. The company is perfectly capable of using the piss-poor labor protections in this country to fight back.
Only if the competitive advantage of remote work is large enough to overcome all the other moats a company of Amazon's age and size has built. Which seems wildly unlikely (but this says very little about the competitive advantage of remote work one way or the other).
This is a stupid take, and one that is based on a simplistic idea that the success or failure of a business are determined solely on whether random workers working on random projects for random industries with random business models will work from home or from a random office in a random city. Truly stupid. It sounds like a desperate attempt to extend "might makes right" towards employee relations.
My sense is that companies are highly complex and there are too many factors to weigh to say that WFH is 'better'. It's a bit of a truism, but a 'well run' company is going to perform better than a 'not well run' company, regardless of whether it's in-office, remote, or hybrid.
Being clear that the company is going to prioritize in-office and build the way they operate around that seems like a good signal that the company is 'well run'. Especially when the alternative I see are companies that hop around various 'hybrid' work policies that make no one happy, or worse yet avoid making any proper policy because they don't want to make a hard decision.
You'd think so. CrowdStrike, a self-proclaimed remote-first company, instituted a return-to-office policy earlier this year. Despite never requiring office presence before the pandemic. They still have blog posts like [1] on their website.
[1]: https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/the-perks-of-remote-work/