What's actually really unhelpful and actually harmful to the viability of hybrid work arrangements is RTO.
> "I should be able to work anywhere and my employer must accommodate me" is an extremely privileged and elitist view of thinking.
Nope! You totally missed the point. "You must accomodate me" is a demand, that you can place on your employer, when you have labor power, as an employee. The acceding is what we're talking about here. That is not cultural; it is a matter of market power.
> At the end of the day, if you don't want to work in an office, you don't have to.
What are you talking about? Did you read my post? Yes, I have to! Because of RTO!
I like a full service espresso bar at the office. If I ask my employer for that, guess what they'll say? Fuck you, you're here to work. And I have to take it. I'm sure you can guess why.
> This makes sense when you consider that all of these big companies are run by leaders who talk in similar networks and listen to the same consultants (McKinsey, BCG, etc
Yes, it certainly does! I'm sure they also talk to Pinkerton :)
> decent lag between the peak of equity nonsense and RTO
Just about the amount of time it would take for management to (1) realize what was happening and what it meant for their power over labor; and (2) align on a policy.
> Company I was went from 1 quarter talking about the increases in productivity WFH brought to the next quarter town hall talking about RTO for the culture and productivity.
Yes, exactly. That's how you know anything about "productivity" is all a load of shit.
RTO is about controlling labor, nothing else. Everything else is a smoke screen. Ask yourself the following questions and you'll understand what happened:
- why did RTO happen seemingly right after salaries jumped and labor became scarce?
- why did RTO happen virtually in lockstep across all of white collar employment?
- why did RTO happen despite no evidence that productivity had anything to do with it? (and in fact, lots of evidence that it made employees more productive!)
- why did RTO happen at the same time that critical equity/diversity viewpoints were increasingly being discussed at work?
- why did RTO happen at the same time that outsourcing ramped up? If businesses are so opposed to remote work, why are they outsourcing so aggressively?
It's not about AI. It's not about CRE. It's not about "synergy" in person. It's about disciplining labor. Businesses will happily tank productivity to prevent the power balance from tipping towards the employee.
In that 2020-2023 period, people started talking seriously about how much value they bring to the table. They started making demands of their employers (especially around diversity, equity, inclusion). They started interviewing at multiple places, seeing their worth, demanding more, and giving only as much effort as strictly required to get the job done. The sudden, overnight, incredibly strong reaction to this period, the hard right turn, that is the whip cracking down on labor.
To be clear I'm having a lot of fun being snarky here.
Like everything it's a mix.
In seriousness, I do find the labor perspective sorely and quite conspicuously lacking in these discussions, both discussions about remote work and about DEI backlash.
I've already kind of made it clear here where I stand on this, but I gotta tell you, you really do sound a lot like management.
Do you really think your superstar programmers are well and truly doing intellectual work, the kind of work that produces business value, from the time they hit the coffee machine at 9AM to the time they grab their briefcase to go home at 5PM?
If you believe this, I think you might be interested in bringing the Bobs in to discuss making our T.P.S. reporting process more efficient. They have thoughts on coversheets.
For your comment about the turn towards authoritarianism, yeah, there's a reason every DEI program at every large corporation was pulled back within a few months, and it's not because the C suite all reads the same Musk tweets on X.
Employees started making demands of management to actually look at some... structural issues. Those demands had teeth because employees acted and organized as a bloc. Only a matter of time before other lines of questioning besides race and sex were explored at work.
It's not about productivity at all. These same companies were commissioning studies during Covid that told their analysts "look how productive our employees are now that they are working from home!"
It's about crushing labor.
WFH forces employers to compete. It gives a lot of power to employees, because they can apply for far more roles, work fewer hours, moonlight for multiple companies, etc, apply for other jobs during work hours, etc. These companies know that white collar workers are not fungible. Their intellectual workers are genuinely very difficult to replace and produce a lot of value.
For talent that isn't fungible, it's RTO. For talent that is fungible, offshoring.
I have always wondered how we can reconcile that things "are" objectively so great and yet "seem" subjectively so bad. In my experience both online and off, there is a pessimism about work, poverty, and basic security that persists (or is even getting worse) despite these changes. To my eyes, it has to be larger than just the state of the media.
We have a few of things we can quantify, and that are often brought out in discussions such as this one. Healthcare outcomes, wages, life expectancy, basic material goods, access to education, casualties from war, etc.
I heard another commenter here talk about the human experience being understood as a vector, with twenty or thirty dimensions. Most of those are moving in their positive directions. But the problem is that when God made the human experience, he crafted it with uncountably many components, most of them themselves unquantifiable.
Unfortunately for us "objectively" exists only in that limited set, not in the greater whole. "The number of species going extinct per unit time is more than it has ever been, maybe ever." What is the cost, paid in pessimism and hopelessness rather than dollars, of knowing that? Does it counteract a 2 month increase in my projected lifespan?
It does take time. But I would put it up in the trifecta of Most Important Things a person can do. Everyone says exercise makes you happier, but I will take it a step further: it fulfills a fundamental need for a person to be comfortable in their own body. Denying yourself exercise for any reason at all is self abuse.
I am American, and I hear this from Americans all the time. The reality is far different, though. Does the Russian military perform more humanely in war than the US military? I don't think so. Would the Chinese? Things like My Lai and Abu Ghraib are the exception with the US military, not the rule.
I obviously don't want any single powerful entity to have access to this technology, but I can see the reality of it, which is that someone will have it. Who will it be?
What is the solution? I would rather have automated drone armies in the hands of the US government than anyone else.
The same could be said of the atomic bomb. A weapon made purely for mass scale indiscriminate destruction of humanity. But if not us, then who would we trust to develop such a technology?
He has a point though. The author chose lawyers as a comparison point. Why? Manual laborers work long hours. People with two or three part time retail jobs work long hours.
Lawyers have a different set of qualifications and requirements than game developers do.
Artstyle is far far more important than graphical capability.
A game like Team Fortress 2, released in 2007 (!) looks so much better than many modern games because there is a coherence and style to the art. It's not "HD" for the sake of "HD."
We're in a period where the graphical canvas is getting larger every year, and the temptation is to fill it with as much color and pop as possible. But some restraint really works wonders.
> "I should be able to work anywhere and my employer must accommodate me" is an extremely privileged and elitist view of thinking.
Nope! You totally missed the point. "You must accomodate me" is a demand, that you can place on your employer, when you have labor power, as an employee. The acceding is what we're talking about here. That is not cultural; it is a matter of market power.
> At the end of the day, if you don't want to work in an office, you don't have to.
What are you talking about? Did you read my post? Yes, I have to! Because of RTO!