I also wouldn’t force anyone to go back to office so I could see the humm of their work. If you need that there’s co working spaces for that reason, or places which have in office options.

Large companies mandating everyone work in office is purely a flex for control and probably to save their property investments.

It's a hidden layoff.

The high-profile RTO places tend to hire in bulk for programmers that will do as product tells them. Weeding out people who value quality over conformity is a goal.

I’m curious what you mean by this.

At best, it signals the company is done with growth and is going for a high-profit, low investment (including low innovation) policy.

But if it's the second one, well, you'd be stupid and my best possible explanation up there doesn't apply anymore.

The less productive are the ones dragging their feet, coming up with excuses to stay home and hide as much as possible from peer scrutiny.

Almost like best engineers enjoy coming and working with the team, while the worst dread it.

Again, sample of one, so take with the grain of salt, do not draw generic conclusions, etc.

I do know excellent engineers working solely remote. Not on my team though, and they are freelancing contractors. Different organizations, different dynamics.

Yup! Remote workers need to realise this, and build up a local social life.

That's not the case with WFH setups. WFH scenarios do not care where people are. They could be in the office, in a stairwell, or on the beach.

So one position is inherently one of control, and the other is one of freedom. Maybe that's controversial to say, but to me it's plainly true.

"If anyone has an office in a building, then everyone must have an office in that building and must be forced to work there."

And I just don't follow that. Why must it be this way? So that the office is full?

If so, then: If having the office full every day is an important metric and WfH interferes with that metric, then the problem is not that the people make choices.

Instead, it is that the office is larger than it should be.

Yep, but rather than admit that having too big an office is a mistake, they double down on it and try to force employees back into the offices. For a certain type of personality, pushing the negative ramifications down to subordinates is easier than admitting that they need to solve the actual problem.

If you let people "choose" and 99% choose to always work from home, do you think that's gonna fly? I don't. I think the in-officers would be very upset about that because that's not enough people to make their in-office experience how they like it.

No matter how you slice it, such a position is one born of control. You have to force some people's hand in where they work.

If 10% of the workforce loves pizza and the other 90% is lactose intolerant should we order pizza for the office every day and just let 90% of it go to waste? This is only really a discussion because working in an office was the norm for so long.

"I need to have people around me to do my best work, and you are going to be one of them -- no matter how much that fucks you up."

I have some thoughts: Things change. Or at least, things can change. Or at least, things should be allowed to be able to change. (Usually.)

There was certainly a time when a news reporter worth their salt would never be very far from the office unless they were engaged in field work -- after all, the office was where the calls/faxes/wires/twice-daily mail/walk-in stories showed up, where the archives and typewriters and other business machines happened to be located, and where the copy editors and printers also were located.

But these days: A news reporter can potentially assemble their story from wire sources wherever they are. They can get a whiff of a scoop and be on an airplane to get closer to the source rather quickly, and can even continue to write their story and communicate the whole time that they travel. Sending a draft for review or editing is as simple as sending an email -- and this can be done without wires from just about anywhere on earth.

They don't need to go to the office anymore to find a scoop, or to report the scoop -- extroverted, or introverted, or whatever, and that's been increasingly the case for a rather long time.

And that's a pretty fucking neat marvel of technological enablement, I think. (Now, if only regular news would simply cease just regurgitating stuff they found on social media and actually get a scoop for themselves...but I digress.)

So, in the past few years: For reasons, we've broadly discovered that some people can do much of the same with engineering tasks at home, and that some appear to even be able to be more productive (in a dollars-vs-quality-output fashion) at such things without ever (or at least, without regularly) setting foot in a centralized corpo office. Some even report an increase in the quality of their life in general when they have this freedom to work...from wherever.

I think that this is a pretty fucking neat marvel of technological enablement, too.

---

If an extroverted engineer requires people to be around in order to [try to] do their best work and live their best life, but some/most/all of their peers are working remotely because they found their own happy place, then: That's a conflict of goals.

Perhaps the correct resolution for the conflict is that the extroverted engineer should find a way to apply their abilities in tasks/careers where other people are both inherently and necessarily present, instead of one where other people may have broadly chosen to work in relative solitude or one where people are forced to be present in the office even when that isn't ideal for them.

I mean: Some of us introverts in many fields have been seeking increased aspects of solitude and freedom of movement for a long, long time -- and lately, we can achieve that more easily in a far broader selection of trades. That's good for introverts, and introverts are people too even if they're not necessarily very vocal about it.

But when that's incompatible with an extrovert's own proclivities, then: Perhaps things have simply changed, and perhaps the extrovert may need to change with them if they require people to be around to try to most-effectively live their own best lives.

Some that are hybrid optional list themselves as (remote), but do so fully remote companies.

Speaking as someone who would have to be dragged back to an office, it's obvious that the in office group would win out. Bonds are weaker in the remote group and your type A ladder climbers will be overrepresented in the in office group.

So hybrid office is probably going to lead to all in office. Especially in these difficult economic times as workforces stagnate or shrink in these companies.

So, yeah, I think there was some pre-COVID middle ground but you probably have a fairly large percent of people mostly coming into an office and a fairly small percent doing so--which of course tends to reinforce both behaviors. (And it grew a lot in a distributed manner as well which probably made getting everyone together physically all the time less relevant.)

There was this intersection of COVID and don't spend money that isn't NECESSARY. And the result was basically everything on Zoom. I actually spent a lot of my own money to attend some conferences to maintain some contact with people.

I thought I'd enjoy going back to the office, until 5 days a week was enforced and I was frequently getting interrupted.

As another commenter said, nurturing a social life is more difficult when working from home, you have to be deliberate about it. I felt the office just made it more convenient to hang out, but it never really happened because I was too burned out by the work.

Not sponsored, I encourage you and anyone else who suffers from clothing-drain to try different brands too. Stretchy, breathable, and clean/crisp looking work best for me.

Sizing up also doesn't work for women - we look slovenly then unless we go tailor everything which is more time and $.

I prefer being able to work in a sports bra and sweatpants.

They’re aware. What a strange comment. Are you mad?

Edit: you have more nipples than I do, and I’ve never felt compelled to talk about it until right now.

I was using hyperbole as a rhetorical device to point out some of the absurdities of professional dress codes - I would have thought that was evident from context. Imagine a man who worked in a building that doesn't allow shorts even though it lacks A/C; he might make a comment along the lines of 'god forbid the customers know we have legs.' Or men who are in professions where they have to wear full suits in the summer.

I talked about it because my femaleness is directly relevant to why I feel uncomfortable in professional clothes since the biggest reason is bras, which men don't wear.

I'm a woman. I have breasts. They impact my life in some ways. Sometimes that impact is relevant to a discussion - in my case, it's a factor in why WFH is more comfortable. I have sensory issues that are probably familiar to the numerous people on HN and, since HN is generally full of curious people who have a cultural disdain for doing things 'just because' or following uncomfortable social norms for no reason, I shared a variable that may not have been considered because a lot of people here actually like being introduced to data they hadn't incorporated to their worldviews yet.

If you can't grok hyperbole, I'd recommend looking up some middle school Language Arts lessons.

Also, sexuality =/= gender, and mentioning that I have breasts and that they're a statistically unusual size isn't 'exerting' anything any more than Yao Ming complaining about clothes/shoe shopping would be. If you can't hear someone talk about their body without sexualizing them, that's a you problem.

My bra size isn't even manufactured/sold in my country, and at one point in my life I was a size that was so rare one company in the world made it.

And this is without getting into non bra issues like my shoulders being much smaller than my bust by size and while some alterations are possible, changing the shoulders requires essentially redoing the entire garment if that can be done on a garment at all. Truly fitting professional clothing would essentially require bespoke or made to measure clothes and I'm not rolling in money. (And even if I was, I'd prefer to spend it on weird tinkering hobbies like the rest of you.)

The clothes that fit me best off the rack involve substantial amounts of stretch and are too casual for the workplace. (Mostly tops; skirts are very easily altered).

In my 10+ years working in offices, I made exactly one friend (someone who I see outside of work).

I would rather not commute and spend that time with actual friends, more quality social interaction over quantity.

(YMMV of course)

One of those things where I’m happy to hang out with a friend for an hour so if I’m already out, but travelling there only to return after an hour is less attractive.

If you're happy with token interactions, sure. Your colleagues are right there (even talking to you while you try to work!). But IME, and from what I hear others say on HN and elsewhere, those aren't really "friends". The relationships are very superficial. How many of these people would help you move? With how many do you keep in contact when one of you changes jobs? I know exceptions exist, but those seem to be rather rare.

So, if you actually want a deeper relationship, you still have to look for it deliberately. Only now, you have even less time to do it, since you're stuck in the office for 8 hours a day and possibly a few more depending on your commute. Whereas if you're at home, if it's not practical to go have lunch with a buddy or something, at least you can deal with some of your chores that can be time-consuming, while not requiring you to interact with them continuously, like laundry, waiting for a delivery, slow cooking something, etc.

5 days on office places are silly in my book. They’ll lose anyone talented enough to get another job. I’m an in office person for the most part, but if you take away my flexibility I’m frankly just going to work for someone who gives it back to me. Why wouldn’t I want the ability to work from home when I need to pick up the kids early or similar? In my experience the best of both worlds is when you let people work where they want but try to staff your teams with half of each preference or with people in between and then label certain days as preferred in-office days. Notice how I said preferred and not enforced. I my teams it has usually developed sort of naturally, often depending on what is for lunch.

That doesn't make it reasonable to _force_ people back into offices though. Companies requiring in-office work so that the workers can experience social interaction that they don't have time for outside work sounds pretty dystopian, and arguing for that for one's own personal benefit at the cost of others feels pretty selfish to me. To be clear, I think it's totally reasonable for a company to hire someone with the understanding that they'll be in-office, but the issue with what's going on now for me is that plenty of people who were hired with the understanding that they _wouldn't_ ever have to be in an office are now being told that they need to. I'd argue that forcing someone originally hired remotely to pick between coming into the office or resigning is effectively equivalent to firing without cause, and it's disappointing that it isn't viewed that way legally.

A significant percentage of my social circle is former coworkers. I still meet up with some that I haven't worked with for over a decade. Or even several decades if you count pre-career jobs.

It'd be pretty weird for me to assume those interactions have to be token interactions.

I've been friendly with most of my co-workers, but aside from the two above, I wouldn't consider any of them "friends". As in we'd never randomly hang out outside of after-work drinks.

We haven't really hit a true recession yet, esp for the laptop class. I think you will see more of this.

I had coworkers at Amazon who never lived near any office and were hired with the understanding that they'd always be remote. After several years, they were told to "return" to an office that they never worked in before hundreds or thousands miles away or to resign (without severance of course, since it's "voluntary", and of course refusing to quit or move would lead to firing "for cause"). Are you saying that this is okay because it's Amazon, and their employees don't need to be treated as fairly as anywhere else, or are you arguing that this should be allowed anywhere? I can't imagine why this would be reasonable at any company, but I can't tell if this is an anti-Amazon sentiment or just a consistent opinion that seems crazy to me.

Wouldn’t that be some constructive dismissal, or am I misunderstanding the US labor law?

When I was laid off through the PIP’s way just before the 2022 official layoffs, the first thing I questioned was if they were firing me for no cause, and I collected both Amazon’s severance and the government mandated severance for non-cause dismissals.

Well, it turns out that these specific German business cases, which are hard enough for the average German developer to understand, are even harder to explain to someone if there's an additional language barrier between them. Most people using that software don't speak English, so there's always a proxy between the developers and the stakeholders.

I could write a lot about this (I actually deleted two very long versions of this comment here already), but I really would not recommend that any company recruit too many people from outside of its own country, apart from a few exceptions where that fits the business model. Having some diversity in your team structure can help, but as with most things, too much is not good. But many companies will have to learn that for themselves. I have already seen some that did not survive that lesson.

1. WFH is amazing and just as good for productivity and back-to-office is just a flex by evil managers.

2. WFH is bad for global productivity and so we need back-to-office.

Seems pretty straightforward that if #1 is right, then full-remote companies will have a massive competitive advantage, and the issue should be adjudicated decisively once more companies implement b-t-o.

You’re assuming a fair world. It isn’t. As an employee the game is rigged against you.

But also unlike many, I believe that that weight, whatever it is, to be overwhelmed by the colder calculation of profit, growth, etc.

If our corporate overlords could get it done with 50% of the present workforce fully remote, they would, happily. Even better if they were in Bangladesh. Which is another reason to be careful what you wish for.

It shouldn't be, but it is for many.

Most times I mention online preferring to not work remote I get people calling me some sort of corporate shill, or worse.

(Or the posts just get downvoted to oblivion by people who can't articulate their objection more meaningfully than that!)

> Companies telling everyone to be in the office 5 days a week 9-5 (or whatever) is removing that choice.

The problem is that it is genuinely hard for a company to support both (and/or flexible mixes) well, and if you ask for a little of the old way it becomes a tribal binary us-vs-them thing. I work in the office most of the time because I prefer to keep work and home separate, and I find I work better that way, but I'm still working on a remote team because practically everyone else is remote. We have a day-per-week policy (well, more of a string suggestion) but most people ignore that.

> It's called having a preference/choice.

Unfortunately while people are usually all for being flexible when being flexible means doing things the way they prefer, being flexible in both directions is rarer than it should be. For instance: I dislike phone calls and video calls, to the point of significant anxiety, but trying to get people to just send me an email or IM instead has been an uphill struggle with some. Of course I'll clench my arse and take part in a call when it is the best way to deal with a situation (as it sometimes really is) or because there is no choice (perhaps it is dictated by a client, or those up high), or the dailies and other regulars (calls that are habit/routine are less of a problem) but otherwise I much prefer to communicate in person (“in person” in person, not virtual in person) or by text mediums.

If I leave this tech job, or lose it for any reason, I think I'll have to retrain for a different industry, even if that means taking a hefty pay cut, heck even if that means mind-numbing minimum wage work. Working on a remote team is not great for my mental health, and it very much seems to have become the norm. Luckily in current DayJob we have found some sort of balance that works well enough, and I've been here long enough (and I'm sufficiently good at what I do) to be inconvenient to dispose of, and the people who wouldn't take the hint about not wanting to take a call for a chit-chat are no longer here, but at some point that might all change.

It's all about choice. I have 3 young kids. The youngest will be in school next year. At that point, I may find myself actually going to a coworking space from time to time (and if my company had an office near me, I'd go into that sometimes). I certainly don't mind the amenities and the company of my coworkers (all 2 of them that are actually physically located within a 4-hour-drive radius of me).

But for right now, being able to be full-time remote with a fully flexibly work schedule is ridiculously important and useful to me. My wife has a dentist appointment? I can sit here in the basement and pull up the kid's camera while he naps and she can just go. I can eat lunch with my kid. I can do morning drop-off when my wife needs a break from the morning kid-prep grind. It's absolutely vital and our lives would've been a mess the last 4 years without it.

Plus, besides the work-lifestyle thing, there's a question of equality of opportunity. As you can probably guess based on my above remarks, I live in BFE (five generations of my family live here, so I can't leave) and there's literally nothing that San Francisco-type SWE's would recognize as a "tech job" until you get up to Lake Michigan. My options, were I to work locally, would be to work in a place that specializes in government/enterprise contracting and "staff augmentation". If your nose is wrinkling and your brow furrowing upon reading that phrase, yes that's the correct facial expression to be making. And yes it pays what you'd expect.

But thanks to remote work, I'm working for a startup and actually getting to program an actual software product and engage with its product development and all that.

I have. lots of people get a lot of their social interaction from work.

The genie offers them one wish each

The Irishman says 'sure i'd give anything to be back in galway, stuck in a snug, with a pint of porter' and <poof> he's gone.

The scotsman is amazed and roars 'take me back tae glasgae!' and in a similar puff of smoke is gone.

The englishman, looks around and says 'I say, its going to be awfully lonely around here without those chaps around, can you bring them back please?'

It should not be. I work from home 100% now, but feeling alone is a very real issue for many of us. I have friends I talk to during the day via IRC or one the phone, regular chats and video calls with colleagues and managers, family is right around the corner and I try to get out every day and talk to people.

For some the isolation is wonderful. For others, like me, it's amazing for doing focused work, but I also need people in my life. For some problem arises when their sole social circle is people they work with. If you struggle to talk to people you don't know then coworkers quickly be an "outlet" for socializing.

I don't think I'd enjoy it at all if I didn't have so much family and loved ones around, just sitting in an apartment all day by myself. What interaction you have with co workers with so much fewer social cues can hurt more than it helps, really.

I'll bet you many managers in favour of RTO feel exactly like this when they work from home, and base their decisions on the way they feel.

Another dimension to that spectrum is a development of a working cohort. Essentially a half dozen people or more that hire each other at new jobs and move together from company to company. A true best case there us to meet a potential co-founder.

Though, I have had a remote colleague whome we spent days on video calls together working on a problem. I am not sure remote is in-office is actually mutually exclusive. The people willing to spend 5 hours on a call peer coding with you might be the same that you actually become friends with in office

I'm not sure why one couldn't do this working remotely? Maybe these people can only socialise through work? Being passive about getting out of the house? Unable to create boundaries between work and personal life?

Working "remote" doesn't mean one has to stay at home all the time. We all have laptops and can go any where to work.

Unless you have dozens of friends already the likelihood is you’ll often be alone after work.

Thankfully I’ve made my friends and have a family but if I was just starting out I don’t think I’d even have met the people that are close to me. My friends are mostly from work or work friends of my college friends.

People often say to that “just get hobbies”. Well, hobbies are often done with friends or are introduced to by friends.

I think this WFH epidemic was an opportunity to enlighten a lot of people. There are many, many people (myself included), who were husks of human beings. Alive, technically, but not living.

We work, we eat, we sleep. We had money, but at the end of the day we were losers. I knew this to be the case when I realized what I looked forward to what dinner. Eating a meal was the highlight of my day, and the highlight of every day. And then the weekends I stayed in, exhausted from work.

When people lost the office, it was an opportunity for them to realize they had absolutely no life. No friends, no socialization, no passions, no desires. Some realized that and took control of their life, and others took offense to that realization and demanded the office back.

It was very much a matrix red pill versus blue pill situation. Live in lalaland on autopilot? It's tempting.

Not even close. Hobbies are done in groups, which can be stood up in your local area. This shit was figured out in the 1700s FFS, with no internet, with no online message boards to coordinate preferences, with no real choice in WHO they interacted with.

We invented "third places" like coffee shops, where average people could show up, buy a coffee, and chat with literal strangers, where you would often get into discussions about philosophy, politics, this newfangled "science" stuff, and all sorts of topics, usually involving people guessing about things they didn't even have a right answer to. But that didn't matter because the point was to interact with strangers.

The scientific method was literally a bunch of wealthy people exploring a brand new hobby by finding each other in "journals" (basically hobby magazines), sending each other snail mail, and chatting about their different experiments.

Companies have decided they can just stop supporting an open environment, and charge you for the right to exist, and now we don't have a third place in the US, because nobody has the time or money or energy to socialize after work, because work takes so goddamned much out of us.

So no, please do not force me, who has a perfectly functional social life and several great friend groups for life, just because you don't know any other way to meet people. That's not my problem and forcing me into the office so you can take advantage of the requirement that I am there to socialize with me is not an okay solution.

Work doesn't pay me to be your friend.

Well, anywhere I can be sure no external person can see what I'm doing on screen. So a cafe will work if I can sit in a corner with my back to a wall. And even then, I'm giving up my tooling to make work easier on myself and more productive, like a nice, large monitor. Coworking spaces let me alleviate the second part, but the first problem is even more pressing there: now, everyone around me must be expected to understand what I'm doing, and thus is a bigger danger to my companies data security.

It's not for possible for everyone, though, and the bar is not "is any IP loss realistic" but rather "what are the policies my employer demands", independent of if they are sensible or not. Make sure you're not getting caught breaking company policy, kids :P

Now I live on the other side of the province, and holy shit is it hard. I've been here for over 6 years and I haven't been able to maintain a single friendship. I could try harder, for sure, but that's my point. It was effortless before, and now it feels like being social takes serious work.

I still work from home, and I've settled into a quieter way of life. It's nice, I enjoy it. That said, I'm not surprised others don't.

I also like the commute. I get in early to miss the rush. I end up walking more. I have the ability to switch from work to home on the way back. After work drinks also help.

That's all based on one 30 minute train that is extremely reliable, air conditioned, and getting a seat. I couldn't do it if I had to drive or take 3+ trains.

Maybe there are many companies who do allow for flexibility, in which case everybody is happy, so you don't hear about them, since they have better things to do than "not-complain" about their situation.

I'm lucky to work for such a company, and the main issue of discussion these days is whether we like or not the new office decoration. Managers are free to decide how often their teams have to come in, and, from what I hear, their underlings did have their word to say. Some people like coming in often, others less so. But basically, it all depends on who you're working with right now, and whether it makes sense to meet in person. This seems to work great for pretty much everybody.

I work for a remote-only company but use a workspace almost every day. I get to chose my own “office” and the people in it, I also pick the commute I want, this one is just 5 minutes away.

To me, feels super refreshing to talk to people when Im at the office, and to be fair Im much much less productive in the office. But makes me appreciate when Im at home and when I dont need to be in the car for 1 to arrive my home, take everything and go to the gym.

It feels like, going from time to time to the office when almost everyone is there, gives to the remote working more sense and value. And viceversa.

You can come in every so often (weekly) without issue (or by choice).

When you're forced to come in every day, that becomes different.

Before kids I would also become depressed if I worked remotely full time. But today my "alone time" is already pretty much gone outside work hours so I don't mind being by myself during the day.

Counterpoint: That's an exact description of how I felt working in an office.

There’s a local tech Slack in my area that I keep up and I have a text group that I’ve built up over the years that sometimes grabs lunch or hits the gym. Keeps me balanced.

That's the thing, though; it's important to remember that it very much _is_ an opinion/preference. For some people, working from the office is better, for others, it's working from home, and for others it's a combination of both. There are positives and negatives to each, for both the employee and the employer.

That being said, a company limiting itself to _only_ people willing to work in the office is doing just that; limiting itself. I expect the reverse is also true; but the pool of workers to choose from for "everyone remote" is a _LOT_ bigger than the pool of workers for "everyone in the office".

This is why making it flexible is so great. You could be in the office with other people who enjoy it, while people like me don't have to.

Even before the pandemic I would often hang at the office until 10pm because I could only get work done after the others left. I would get so stressed from all the distractions around me.

As is sitting in an area and seeing who everyone goes to ask questions, and even overhearing the discussions.

So someone can learn how to phrase questions, what are useful types of questions to ask, what types of questions get someone told to ‘do their own research’ vs gets in-depth help, etc.

For a junior, that is very valuable because they often literally don’t even know where to start.

For someone with more experience, they often either already know all these things, or know how to find them out pretty quickly even without the help of watching what is happening, yeah?

I always maneuver myself into such a place that I have something to work on for myself.

Hybrid is probably the ideal; but even so I live 15m from the office and when I go in it's empty 90% of the time anyway. I don't know if I'd take a 45m commute until the kids can get themselves home from school (daily pickup/dropoff) - but I do miss 2h beer lunches on a Tuesday after closing a ticket to blow off stress.

My problem is that i really hate flex desks and now you don't get your own office anymore.

But my problem is more with my home: I'm now buying a farm and i don't think it will feel the same way as it does at my flat. Its surprisingly hard to 'get out' to not feel annoyed by my flat. But i don't have a good outdoor view only a small window and i do not have a extra office space.

Now, when I weigh 30 minutes of commute versus being cooped up in the same room I was in for the whole pandemic and almost lost my mind, it's easy: office whenever I can.

That said, I'd be very loathe to _have_ to come in to the office. There are whole weeks where it just doesn't work out logistically, and it's nice to be able to work from home.

When everyone can choose what work best for them! We are not the same - and face to face meetings have their huge benefits from time to time anyway.

Except for those poor souls working for Amazon.

A few advantages: 1) you have a wider pool of people to choose to co-work with, since they can have other employers, too; 2) you can choose who you want to co-work with; 3) you get to (mostly) choose which and how many hours you wish to co-work; 4) no stress about being late due to a commute or childcare commitments, since co-working hours are optional.

[1] I deliberately arrange to work on things that aren't confidential on co-working days.

Or worse, the middle management is given authority to give these mandates, and are in their highest level of incompetence and use it as a "power move".

You need social interaction, so go out and get social interaction.

I don't. So why should employment cater to you rather than me?

- buying a house you never see the inside of while the sun is up

- buying a car whose purpose is making the two hours every day you spend commuting a bit less miserable

Similarly, in the old days when I had jobs where I was expected to wear a shirt and dress reasonably smart to the office, I enjoyed getting changed into other clothes afterwards. It marked a real change between work and personal time. That gets very blurred with working from home.

I actually try to dress 'properly' even when working from home. I know most people find it silly, but I feel I work better when wearing 'work' clothes.

Popular

> Amazon tells

Sucks

No, they don't. It's intentional.

Someone quitting over an RTO mandate is cheaper than a layoff. And if someone doesn't quit, they're likely to put up with a whole lot of other grief too. Unpaid extra work (to cover the people who quit), not asking for raises, etc. It's purely money-saving and to instill fear.

In the 20th century, IBM and the Welch era brought in a lot of tools to extract the most from employees like the "up or out" mentality or simply firing the bottom 5-10% of employees every year.

Tech has simply reached that point. You are a replaceable cog. Tech is now in permanent layoffs culture to suppress wages. Laying off 5% of the workforce every year is now a permanent fixture of your company.

Personally, I think engaging in layoffs means you, as an employer, have demonstrated there is insufficient need and you are ineligible to sponsor a work visa in any broadly related area for 24 months. "Broadly related" here means if you layoff a software engineer, you can't sponsor another software engineer. I don't care if one does C++ and the other does Python. I guess you'll have to train somebody.

That might be a thing, but I can only speak from personal experience, and I'm an area of the world where there's still a pretty big shortage of IT workers, so it doesn't make sense to drive them away.

The employer is simply filling a role. They're looking for someone sufficient. They don't need to be perfect in this process.

It's the same here. You are replaceable. Never forget that. You may be thinking the company is losing a good employee. And they might be. But it doesn't matter because keeping particular employees is almost the goal. There are very few people who are truly irreplaceable.

If out of 20 employees, one quits over the RTO mandate then their work gets spread around the other 19 who now do 5% more work for less money because they're not asking for raises and there's no severance to pay. It's win-win-win.

The company would rather understaff and underpay to any other outcome.

I was steering myself towards remote work since it was technically unfeasible. I worked from home in the late 90's setting up a removable hard drive with data and two computers taking that (office + home), but that WFH was beyond the 40h / week, I had to go in 9 to 5 still. I liked the tasks, so it was exciting.

Then technology improved, chose a position where the pay was only acceptable but I had the chance of working from different places, city, country, so no chance of going in to the office! This was the 2010's.

Then chose an on-site work in a rich country so after getting to know and trust each other I'd have the theoretical possibility of working from a cheap country remotely on a very good salary (or something between the two for mutual benefit). Unluckily I had a stoneheaded and actually very incompetent COO coming from decades of secretarial position in a uni unable to comprehend working elsewhere than in an allocated (rubbish) chair at a particular (rubbish) desk in a cheap office (being cold in winter so my poor female colleagues sat in coats) far from amenities, from 9 to 5. This was her sole understanding what work is, the poor soul. So after some time trying (suffering, fighting) for remote dominant settings I handed in my resignation (they headed a wall anyway with that poor incompetent COO) into the nothing. Having some months of rest before picking up something new. That was 2019 December. Oi! : )

Now I work with colleagues - working on the very same codebase - from 3 continents spanning 18h of time zones, most of them never met. This is nice!

Sort of similar, a friend of mine was fired. Ostensibly for not bringing in enough revenue/profit in a consulting business. Very few of his hours where billable, so he looked unprofitable. The issue: He was working on internal tooling, building systems that everyone else rely on to do their jobs effectively. His value was hidden in the work of others, but that's not measured.

When looking a "work from home", you rarely see companies measure job satisfaction, stress levels or even do proper exit interviews. The sort of things you need to keep on top of the keep people long term. Many customers won't report back to your boss that because you sat a your desk at home you where able to help them after your normal working hours, saving time the next day. In consulting tracking billable hours is normal, but if you don't track when and where those hours are worked, you're not going to see that some work better at the office, while others have a skyrocketing productivity boost at home.

Other times you have bosses that wants "butts in seat" because they don't trust their employees. Hell, we had a sister company where the employees sat in a fucking horseshoe configuration at the office, on the "inside" of the horseshoe, so the owner could sit at the open end at check that people where working at all times. Do you think that fucker is going to let people work from home?

The problem though is their new small business employed mostly office-type workers yet they still had that hourly/retail employee mindset. Treated their employees very poorly and had high turnover as a result. Then COVID happened and suddenly everything got better for everyone.

He was forced to trust his employees working from home and they loved it. He, of course, was high anxiety all the time worried that his employees were slacking off. I asked him, "are they not getting all the work done?" and he was very adamant that was completely irrelevant. From his perspective, if an employee was doing anything other than "work" while on-the-clock they were stealing from him. It was a pretty clear message.

As soon as COVID was over he forced everyone to come back into the office... And shortly thereafter he had to sell his business because he couldn't find anyone to work for him anymore. No idea what he's doing now but I still see people with his attitude everywhere (in varying degrees from mild to extreme).

On the plus side that guy would never ever bother his employees after work hours. Which is quite a step above employers that treat their employees as always-available serfs.

Perhaps especially in the case of larger companies, sunk costs on office space may be a factor

Even worse, in many cases the costs are not entirely sunk. You might be able to get out of a lease with a penalty, if you own the buildings you can sell them. In either case its cheaper to keep a building unused than to run it as an office.

While business leaders want to think of and portray themselves as these hyper-rational actors whose every choice is either made from ingenuity or total necessity, this is obviously false and I think the prestige and optics of office spaces heavily play into the priorities of managers, especially as compared to people who do any other kind of work

Those people are world-class politicians or born super-rich. When you put a selection filter that exclusive in a population, you force every other attribute extremely close to the median.

And the median of competence on any field is much smaller than the mean.

This opens a new avenue I'd never considered: that some of the RTO pressure is perhaps due to keeping real estate prices up. Maybe there is somehow pressure from commercial landlords towards the tenants to keep the building occupied, or as you stated places that own the building don't want it to be devalued by appearing (or actually being) abandoned for years.

The companies already know all about the positive time savings from not sitting in traffic commuting. But they believe that benefit is negated by employees getting less work done at home. My previous comment about employees "saving time" by working from home isn't seen that way by companies mandating RTO : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34929902

For some regions, where salaries don't match housing cost, I don't think it's unfair to ask your employer to pay half of your commute. Either you pay a salary that allows relocation, or you pay at least some of the commute time. Again it's not as if work stops just because you leave the office, if you're a developer at least.

1) Ego/Power trip reasons: It just makes you feel like the big man to be physically lording over your minions and they miss it.

2) Class Warfare: Workers need to be kept miserable enough so they turn to mindless consumption and don't start asking any inconvenient questions.

3) Financial Conflicts of Interest: Higher Management is likely to have some real estate investments, maybe even in commercial real estate. They might be worried more about that part of their portfolio than about the company stock part.

Employees know what the job will entail 99% of the time because it's their career focus. For that reason they don't really need much from their employer other than the tools necessary to do their jobs (e.g. a computer).

If you think employees in tech have just been asking for computers and money - for well over a decade and a half - then you’re living in a completely different industry than I have been.

they don't care about your commute at all. "if [c-level exec] can make it to the office every day, so can you" not to mention that, said exec does not in fact make it to the office every day

More that they assume (or demand) the worker is going to pay this cost on their behalf.

And since pick-up is at 4:30, it means I have to leave the office at 3:00 at the absolute latest, lest I incur significant monetary penalties - as well as the ire of the people who care for my child - for late pick-up.

So sure, if you want me in the office for five hours a day - one of which is going to be taken up by going to lunch with my coworkers, since face-time is so important - I'll be there.

Unless there are significant delays, which there usually are, in which case I'll be there for maybe four hours a day, because I'll also have to leave early since delays in the morning frequently mean delays in the evening.

Or to complain about the significant monetary penalties you'd have to pay, when it's surely easier to pay those on your salary than theirs.

And used someone else being worse off than you to justify being right about it.

Having said that, complaining is free. We both can do it.