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Sith Lord's avatar

I'm in tech, and going into the office actually used to be somewhat enjoyable 5-10 years ago. Three things happened that absolutely destroyed tech office culture:

1. The absurd flood of H1Bs into tech at every level. Even the "elite" companies like Google are not safe, every team at every company is 80%+ H1Bs.

2. HR cat lady (or metoo) culture took over, with company holiday parties, offsites, etc. all being removed during COVID and replaced with lame "office happy hours".

3. Post-2022, tech employees' mental has been systematically ground down by mass layoffs, aggressive performance management, and cost-cutting to every perk that made it worthwhile to go into office.

There's really no hope for American corporate culture at this point. Even if one could do something about H1Bs (it won't happen, Trump/Musk love H1Bs), it'll still take decades to undo the damage.

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Toiler On the Sea's avatar

Yes, the lone rational argument for office work is enabling a social and mentoring environment for new employees to enhance engagement, but office "culture" sucks now; cost-cutting has ensured fun is no longer permitted; now keeping inputting those widgets, slave.

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Based in Paris's avatar

I am very pro-telework for the right roles and company and even published a policy paper on the topic.

I understand that not everyone's job can be done remotely, nor is it right for every company or department. But, it seems that at minimum flexible work arrangements benefit employers and employees.

If an employer is concerned that people aren't getting work done, that is a leadership issue-- not a telework issue.

Anecdote: During the pandemic, my employer's office was closed per the city's lockdown regulations, so I worked from my tiny studio apartment. Most restaurants, gyms, bars, etc. were also shuttered and many friends had moved away. It was an isolating, mentally taxing experience.

Some departments were permitted to be "fully remote" AKA work from another state or even country for weeks or months at a time. Mine was not. No reason was given.

Why am I saying this? I *easily* could have worked from my parent's home in another state, spent extra time with my extended family, but the bureaucrats in charge wanted me physically in the then-closed city working from my apartment for no reason.

I live in Paris and all my client work is remote. One can easily check Google docs, email threads, or Signal to see what I am up to.

NB: Remote work is a great solution for those with chronic illness, special needs children, member of a religion with a specific prayer schedule and/or dietary restrictions

Bottom line: Outside of select business cases, opposition to remote work is about control and poor leadership

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Patrick Mathieson's avatar

The irony of the Musk purges is how they seem (like so much related to this administration) to be going after precisely the wrong people.

The folks who are most abusive of telework privileges are the actual “elites” whose work product is not tied to X widgets produced in Y hours. In my field, private equity / VC, I know many investment partners who jet off to Europe without even caring to notify anyone that they’re out of office. None of these folks are getting chastened by back-to-office policies.

Meanwhile, extremely low level federal administrators are being called traitorous deep staters for having the audacity to work remotely a few days a week.

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Based in Paris's avatar

This is a good point. Based on what I’ve read a lot of the people going back to work are solidly middle class or upper middle class. They probably have at least an hour commute and drop their kids off at school.

They aren’t luxuriating in the south of France while their live in nanny watches after the kids.

That having been said the Samantha Power types can bug off.

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Great Power Policy Journal's avatar

You nailed it. I was a mid level federal employee. Worked circles around my boomer leadership and DEI hires. I’m not gonna have Elon slander me. I found a new job making 30% more, not gonna wait around to see if Elon feels like firing me, I have a family to support.

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Ben Mordecai's avatar

I think a lot of the contemporary popular "back to the office" trends are post-hoc justifications for what they really want: layoffs. Laying off people is difficult, fraught with legal risks, severance packages, dealing with the process of figuring out who to layoff, it reflects poorly on your company and its financials, etc. etc. etc.

A back to the office mandate in these cases is like laying people off by simply adding massive arbitrary inconvenience to people's lives and see who quits.

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Phil James's avatar

The genie is out of the bottle and white-collar work will never go back to five full office days. The equilibrium post-COVID seems to be some kind of Hybrid policy.

As far as I can tell, the mandated RTO has not worked well for companies. Amazon delayed their mandate claiming “lack of space”. But I even before delaying the mandate, reading into the details of it, Amazon actually said there would be exceptions. In other words, if you’re good enough at your job and could quite easily find another one that would allow you to work remote or Hybrid, Amazon would let you continued to work how you want.

I think the debate about office work vs remote work is a red herring, which distracts attention away from the fact that most people are in fake jobs. If your job isn’t real to begin with, what does it matter if it’s performed in an office or at home.

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Auguste Meyrat's avatar

“I think the debate about office work vs remote work is a red herring, which distracts attention away from the fact that most people are in fake jobs. If your job isn’t real to begin with, what does it matter if it’s performed in an office or at home.”

This is exactly right. If you’re able to fart around at a remote job, you were probably expected to do much anyway.

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Nominal News's avatar

Great piece - the push against remote/hybrid simply has no justification.

I would add (and I agree that measuring productivity for white collar work is hard) that there is some research on the WFH helping white-collar work. Police in a crime recoding unit saw larger productivity when working from home than in the office (described here in my piece - https://www.nominalnews.com/p/wfh-hybrid-productivity)

Additionally, another paper (Frey and Presidente) found that the development of disruptive research has also not fallen when researchers work from different locations. This holds true when we look at after 2010, when many of the remote works were created - Zoom, Dropbox, Teams.

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Aaron Sellers's avatar

"What the employer does not want is for you to get your work done in 4 hours and then fuck off for the day. That makes them mad. They want you to spend 4 more hours tied down doing things for them, even if the things they find for you to do are petty, of little worth, and not part of your job description."

As someone who has never worked an office job and only done blue collar work, the most "fun" I've ever had working was a "piece rate" job in carpentry. Some days were legitimately 8 hour days but mostly you could decide how much got done on what days as long as you completed your work by a set date. You could work longer hours the first day and be done in just a few the next. You got paid for what you built and installed on that job.

Switching back to hourly rate in the trades makes for a consistant paycheck, but being in control of my time was really enjoyable, and there are honestly days where there's not much to do and you weigh whether you're stealing from the employer who's paying you to stay "busy" or if it's worth the reduced hours to go home early.

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Saul Badman's avatar

Also, the boomers seem to think that if we’re paid to work, we’re indentured serfs bound to toil away, physically, at our desks - for the sake of physically being at the desks. Has any boomer ever explained why, and for what? “Just because… culture.. collaboration.” Fuck off and die

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Saul Badman's avatar

I’ve always loved your posts since I’ve become a subscriber (and a paid one, at that…), Person Online. Bang on every time!

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Based in Paris's avatar

Love this. Will comment more tomorrow. Bedtime in France now.

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Christopher F. Hansen's avatar

Michel Houellebecq is "for" telework (to the extent he expresses opinions like that) because he wants normal French people to be able to move out of Paris and earn a decent salary while living normal lives in the French countryside or regional cities. He sees this as a possible route to the preservation of France and French culture.

I think this is a sensible position. Telework is neither bad nor good. It is just a further advance in technology. We need to adapt to technological change and do our best to divert it into channels that make our lives and society better.

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Person Online's avatar

Well, it's good in the sense that technological changes which make people's lives easier are good. This is why I compare it to the invention of the automobile, along with every other invention that has ever reduced the amount of pointless drudgery we must endure. Most significant innovations of any sort fall under that umbrella.

Anyways, this reminds me of something I didn't have a chance to touch on because the article was already too long; remote work enables geographic freedom and gives people the opportunity to form intentional communities. My family is spread all over the country and most of them I'm lucky to see once a year. That is because we are all tied to jobs in specific places. The only congregation of family members I have that live near each other are the older generation most of whom were finally able to move next to each other after they retired.

I'm more than a little bitter to know that I was basically one generation short from this no longer being the case, as once remote work is the norm, people will no longer have to wait until retirement before they can live where they want to live. Hopefully I'll live to see my daughter's generation escape that paradigm for good.

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Patrick Mathieson's avatar

One thing that will be very complicated in a telework-dominant world is the unwinding of real estate cost disparities between places with lots of high earning white collar jobs and those with less. As an example (something I’ve noticed recently since moving from California to the midwest), housing costs about 1/10th as much per square foot in Cincinnati versus San Francisco. When we get to the point where most high earning workers can accomplish their work just as well in Ohio compared to California (we’re basically there right now after the acceleration of web infrastructure due to the pandemic), how exactly are these exorbitant SF and LA real estate prices going to persist?

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forumposter123@protonmail.com's avatar

Here’s what I’ve observed about telework.

1) in a lot of cases RTO is just an excuse to reduce headcount. With musk and federal workers that the direct stated purpose. But with a lot of companies since rates went up and they want to get rid of people and “oh, you moved far away since Covid, I guess if we make you RTO you will probably quit”.

My wife recently lost her telework and it’s pretty obvious to me that it was related to a new set of much younger owners coming in and wanting to trim some of the older more expensive employees (nobody wants someone older then them reporting to them, especially if they have a high salary).

2) dimon was ceo when I was in investment banking 25 years ago, wow. Still remember him speaking.

I buy that investment banking has to be done in person. If you’ve worked in a trading floor you get it. That’s the environment he’s used to.

It probably isn’t true that most of his back office people need to be in the office though. My guess is that breaking up his business into “people I need in the office” and “people I don’t” is just not something he wants to do (you can think of reasons).

3) I’ve successfully teleworked for over a decade. I think the only way to ensure you get to telework is to be in a profession with in demand skills that can’t all congregate in one place and can’t be done from India.

4) I think young single women are actually a big problem for remote work. They like wasting time and see their work colleagues as a kind of captive audience.

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Based in Paris's avatar

"4) I think young single women are actually a big problem for remote work. They like wasting time and see their work colleagues as a kind of captive audience."

What do you mean?

I love working from home because I get more done and mostly avoid office/interpersonal nonsense.

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Person Online's avatar

I knew one woman who was like this, although she wasn't young. But she was single and seemed to have little or nothing else in her life besides her devotion to her job. She expressed skepticism towards telework and made it clear that she wanted everyone to come back into the office while we were all teleworking during COVID. Every single other person I worked with at the time had a spouse and kids and felt the complete opposite. Wonder why!

This touches on another aspect of the telework debate where there is a generational divide, one that I think a lot of people don't even fully pick up on. My mom worked at a particular company for decades and got to be good personal friends with many of the other people there. Her job and co-workers were a big part of her social life. But, she is a boomer. That was a different work environment under different cultural norms.

My experience is that I have never made any friends through any of my jobs at all. Everyone is there to get their 8 hours over with and go home. IMO this is a result of enforcing "diversity" and the associated globohomo slop monoculture. My mom got to work with people who all grew up in the same region as her with similar demographics and cultural sensibilities, in a time before political correctness was a term that anyone had ever heard. My generation? Not so much. I typically have little or nothing in common with anyone that I work with, and if I were to find a co-worker who I had something important in common with, like my faith, we wouldn't be able to connect other that because us talking about our faith would make the entire rest of the office uncomfortable.

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forumposter123@protonmail.com's avatar

"mostly avoid office/interpersonal nonsense"

A lot of women seem to like that nonsense.

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Based in Paris's avatar

I believe you. But, my experience has been different. In my last few workplaces some men were manipulative, backstabbing, and even made personal insults.

The women were mostly pretty good.

That said, I worked in Washington, DC which is not exactly known for "high competence, high EQ."

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forumposter123@protonmail.com's avatar

"I worked in Washington, DC"

Run, don't walk, to a better life.

I'm finally leaving the DC area in two months. Should have done it a long time ago (should have never even moved here).

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Based in Paris's avatar

Ran to Paris 3 years ago for my French husband!

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miles.mcstylez's avatar

From 1 Laptop Class millennial to another, I think you're too quick to write off RTO.

Having worked my way up into a management role, where I see the real difference between remote work and in-office work is when it comes to collaboration. For generic solo work like writing TPS reports, the productivity differences are negligible, but when it comes to more improvisational problem-solving, having all the smart people who understand different aspects of the problem in a building together really greases the wheels. If NASA had telework during the Apollo days, I doubt they would have succeeded to put a man on the moon. Someone like Musk who designs new rocket technology undoubtedly knows firsthand how much the siloing effect of remote work hobbles innovation. It's also worth pointing out that any role that can be done by a single person at home in their pyjamas is a role that can be filled by AI at a fraction of the cost of a salaried worker.

There's also a third faction besides blue-collar Physical Class workers and analog boomers who roll their eyes at the remote work crowd: the truly busy-as-fuck white collar workers.

For someone like a lawyer or an investment banker, "40 hour workweeks" are a complete joke. You're pulling 55s minimum if you're lucky, which makes it tempting to fire up the laptop and reply to that email your boss just sent you at 10:58pm on a Saturday night, so that you have 1 less fire to put out on Monday morning. RTO does have a real silver lining for high-utilization workers, which is having the perfect justification to leave your laptop, your company phone, and everything else at the office when you go home for the day.

Laptop workers with >40 hours of weekly workloads tend to therefore be much more ambivalent about RTO; what is lost in commute time is regained in better work/life boundaries. The feds rending their garments over RTO are somewhat exposing themselves as entitled fatcats who had a great run of getting handsome taxpayer-funded salaries to sit at home and watch Netflix all day. Nobody would ever accuse these 2 girls of being overworked: https://www.tiktok.com/@durbinmalonster/video/7104742170426641710?lang=en

1 final thing I will add as a manager is employees who are stuck in the office for 8 hours are far more likely to notify their managers when they run out of work, as having something to work on makes the day go by faster. So we get better allocation/utilization feedback and can rebalance workloads rather than having 1 person suffering in silence while 3 others sneak off to the golf course at 1:30pm.

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Auguste Meyrat's avatar

Yeah, I’m a teacher, and while I can appreciate the writer’s argument here, I also think that there are many jobs, if not most jobs, that really do require collaboration and a physical presence.

Remote work reduces a job to particular tasks and deadlines, but jobs like mine or super busy hustlers can’t be reduced to a set of concrete chores that can be done on a computer. Less work is done and no one knows what they’re supposed to be doing and there’s no accountability for anyone. This is why virtual learning was a total bust.

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Middle Aged Dad's avatar

RTO is about power dynamics, pure and simple. Trump, Musk, Dimon, et al. want their workers to be in the office all the time and, frankly, to be more miserable, because that's the point: it underscores that they have the power to set working conditions and their workers just have to accept it.

There doesn't have to be an immediate tangible benefit from forcing RTO. Merely shifting the power balance further away from the workers is valuable in and of itself.

Even if RTO is eventually limited or partially reversed in court, as seems likely in the case of federal employees covered by a collective bargaining agreement that guarantees telework, the employees have still been forced to comply in the meantime, and the point has still been made.

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Person Online's avatar

While I agree with your assessment, I'm not sure if this is supposed to be a defense of pointless RTO mandates, or a criticism of them. I think it's pretty self-evident that punishing employees literally just because you can is evil and probably not great for business either. If Donald Trump and Elon Musk decreed that every federal worker will now be subjected to 10 lashes per week in order to "put them in their place," would anyone seriously defend that as a reasonable or moral policy? I mean, I know some people would because of the extreme dedication to Hurting the Bad People, but you get the point.

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Middle Aged Dad's avatar

I'm with you, I think the RTO mandate is stupid and cruel.

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Patrick Mathieson's avatar

One reason a Jamie Dimon type might prefer middle management to be in the office is that physically attending work encourages competitive/memetic status games between managers/directors/VPs at a given level. Since the main way to outflank your competition at an enormous corporation like JPM is for your team or division to generate tens or hundreds of millions more in profit than the other guy’s unit, on net more status competition probably leads to way higher aggregate profitability.

Jamie Dimon is probably not thinking about individual cases like Person Online and whether he can be just as productive or even more so from home than in the office. One individual contributor is too far down in the organization for him to care or maybe even conceptualize. Instead he is thinking about how to energize EVP vs EVP battles, SVP vs SVP, the North American sales & trading team versus the EMEA one, and so forth.

The biggest risk to JPM’s bottom line is if a very high up leader with enormous P&L responsibility works from his beach house in Saint-Tropez and realizes during a particularly glorious sunset that life is too short to be spent in high finance.

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Person Online's avatar

I don't buy this narrative, but notably, Dimon himself is apparently not smart enough or informed enough to articulate it. Even though I am skeptical of this theory, it would've been a better sell than the pants-shittingly retarded boomerisms that he spewed in defense of his telework position. His own words betray the truth--there is no 400 IQ super smart business strategy going on, he's just acting based on his feels and coming up with bullshit to (very poorly) try and justify it after the fact.

As far as I've observed, this exact same pattern holds in every instance of people hating on telework. No one ever tries and makes any sort of coherent argument like the one you've put forward. The blanket RTO mandate for feds began when some article came out saying only 6% of feds work in-office full time and people at places like the Daily Wire pounced on that as some kind of mortal sin. There was no argument for how or why this actually makes government worse or less efficient, just an emotional assumption that it must be a Bad Thing because feds are Bad People and we want their lives to be difficult because reasons.

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Tess Dixon's avatar

Yeah. I mean, in my experience it's just this, plain and simple: https://twitter.com/Jobvo/status/1496507164445356032

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Bojack Horseman's avatar

Recently caught up with a boomer couple. Both make six figures and had been teleworking 4 out of 5 days. Told me their company was getting rid of it. Outrage? Righteous indignation? Nope. "It's understandable, employees are less productive working from home." Not even an 'oh well' or 'it's unfortunate, but...'. No resignation, just naked acceptance of being stripped of their privileges for no good reason and then justifying it as if they're the boss and not the fucking employees. What is wrong with these people? I can only assume it's because they're born slaves and don't value their time because they don't know what to do with it.

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Person Online's avatar

>boomer

Answered your own question right at the start.

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