So… Make your case
That’s my case, and in my estimation, the responses thus far have entirely proven it.
i think that's a very unfavourable way to view it.
The reason they are so "toxic" is becauses this remote work privilege is very easy to remove by those who own the company (or have power within the company).
Employees are used to be abused - after all, they are mostly a commodity and cannot really command control over the operation of a company. The bargaining power is next to zero.
The remote work happenstance is luck - and grasping it hard doesn't seem illogical when they see the risk of it being removed without their consent. Loss aversion is real.
I think there’s an interesting debate to be had on the pros and cons of remote work, and even more interesting discussions to be had about how to compensate for its flaws. (Such as difficulty integrating new hires into the social fabric of the company, challenges experienced by junior devs, a slow burn of “othering” in interactions, lack of serendipitous conversations, challenges with creative group work, tendency towards long scheduled meetings over “pop your head into my office” moments.) Those are actually of intense interest to me, since I’m dealing with these challenges in my real-world work. I have solutions to some of them, but not all. I’d love to learn from other people’s experiences.
But that doesn’t seem to be possible on HN, where the barest hint that remote work isn’t perfect brings out the shouters.
that's because the flaws are irrelevant to the employee. Those flaws are problems for the company (e.g., they are all related to extra value extraction from the work of the employee).
The simple answer is - pay more for working in the office, and you will get people to come. There's a monetary value associated with WFH, and you just need to the pay to exceed that value (as determined by the market of course).
It does. People's actual happiness is at stake. From being able to be with their family and loved ones more to being able to live closer to their families, the places they grew up in and the extremely-important social support networks that those create constitute a survival-level benefit for those people, and they naturally react harshly to sick sociopaths who want to control people and improve the percentage of the imaginary-value of companies that is tied to real estate.
There is absolutely no rational, justifiable reason for rto other than very, very ugly, sociopath-grade reasons. This includes those extroverts who want to force people to 'socialize' by forcing them to move away from their families, relatives, friends and places they were born and grew up in and forcing them to !waste! their lives commuting to and back from work. 'Waste' is emphasized here, because there is no taking back the time that is collectively lost in commuting. Its a gigantic loss for the commuters, the company they work in, the local economy and the society at large.
Reality because of the HN audience is heavy on tech workers, which is one of the few disciplines that can actually and effectively WFH en masse, it’s out of balance to the real world. Add to that we tech folk already tend to believe we are the smartest humans to walk the earth, it makes for a fun combination of lack of real world awareness coupled with arrogance on the subject.
- Avoid MASSIVE loss of time, and as a result, productivity and happiness to entire society by having people commute. That is time that can never be taken back. The time lost commuting is lost to the individual who's commuting, the company he or she works in, the economy and the society in general. No need to even talk about the cognitive cost that commuting carries.
- Avoid ripping people off from their families, relatives, friends and their entire social support network which exist in the places they were born and grew up in. The cost of this is immeasurable as the loss of this support network involves a lot of costs ranging from detrimental psychological impact to the person to financial costs as the person must replace this support network by paying strangers to fill in those positions ranging from babysitting to care taking. The result is an entire society dumbed-down by xanax to cope. Which directly affects the companies that they work for as lost productivity. But of course, like real estate, there is an industry that profits from this misery - the pharma - and their profit is society's loss.
- Avoid cramming millions into already overcrowded urban centers and creating innumerable problems ranging from social ones to infrastructure. There isnt any megapolis on the planet that solved these problems yet. And there wont be any until we invent something like 'space/time compression' and succeed in cramming more people into a place than what's physically possible.
These should be enough by themselves as benefits as they are massive benefits to everybody involved and the society itself, while many more arguments can be made for remote work.
I do want to thank you however for making my exact point with an arrogant comment illustrating only the beneficial effects on the individual and nothing on the beneficial effects on the organization. It’s all the sweeter coming from an apparent throwaway account.
That’s the point I think you’re missing. It’s not neutral, the point is that RTO benefits the individual less than the organization - hence why people don’t like it.
Nobody has made a good case for RTO benefiting the individual
The organization gets to decide the work environment for its employees. The employee can decide to work for the organization or not. So if you as an employee want to influence the organization’s decision to RTO you better be able to make a case for why its better for the organization. They hold the cards on where you work for them.
(To be fair, I’m pretty well known in the industry I was recruiting for, and presenting an extremely attractive opportunity for those people to work in a way few companies will allow. So maybe I would have gotten just as many star applicants if they had been required to move. But somehow I doubt it.)
On the less positive side for US workers, it also opens the doors to hiring workers from places with lower cost of living. We can hire two engineers in Latam for the cost of one in the US, and three in India.
These are comment sections, where people are responding to a force they have little power over, as it puts together an unpopular position.
The people who enjoy RTO wont even be in these threads, they are getting what they want. Why actively spend time in a thread to engage with someone who has no impact on their glowing future to come?
They do have morale superiority on this issue though. Not because WFH is superior and they are smarter than everyone else. But because the arguments brought by their counterparts are in most cases either very dishonest, or very dismissive and confrontational.
RTH mandates acknowledge that the fulfillment of the employees preferring WFH is not their priority even if it does not negatively impact productivity. Company culture is prioritized over employee fulfillment, while it was pretended that these cultures were all about making employees happier. Masks off, people are calling the BS, and this is perfectly legitimate.
What you see as arrogance really isn't, it is just outrage, and a legitimate one in my humble opinion. Keep in mind that not everyone has the luxury of watching this situation playout while being comfortably employed as VP of a fully remote company.
Can’t say I’ve seen that on HN. Typically, the arguments I see are along the lines of “I prefer working with people,” “I don’t have a good place to work at home,” and “I get distracted too easily at home.”
Can you point to 5 examples of those dishonest or confrontational replies? Because I see examples of the bad behavior I’m talking about in pretty much every single thread about remote work on HN.
Note that I did not dismiss your liking of offices. Nor does anyone else who prefers WFH. We are all indifferent to it. Like it all you want.
(Take a second look and find the part where I said I like offices. Look real close. There’s a sentence that talks about my preferences. You’ll find it. Now quote it back to me and explain what it means.)
If you really are the VP of Eng at a company, I hope this kind of fight-picking isn’t how you lead.
Maybe consider the wider context of the thread before supposing that you’re only being downvoted “by angry people”
Management does seem to be in favor of office work. Do you feel like you don't have control?
(Edit: I believe the RTO trend is due to herd-following behavior from incestious boards, shadow layoffs, management inexperience with making remote work successful—it’s harder than in-person work—and the genuine issues remote work causes with interpersonal relationships and team dynamics.)
I happen to agree, but obviously the RTO people don't.
I'll make a bet that you have worked as <whatever the people you're managing do>, and were good at it, before going management. You understand the work from the inside.
They’re angry, vocal, and sure of their morale superiority. There’s no point in engaging with them, so I remain quiet.
(I give it a 50/50 chance that they’ll downvote this comment to oblivion. That uncertainty about whether it’s worth even writing this is my point.)
Signed, VP Eng at a fully remote company.