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Comment by cableshaft | Hacker News Reader

Because fuck you, that's why.

Pretty much what it boils down to. A lot of executives hated that employees got so much power during the pandemic (even though it's still miniscule compared to the power the executives have themselves) and they couldn't wait to take it back away from them. Now that there's a bit of a downturn (at least in tech jobs), they're taking advantage of it to force things back to the way it used to be.

Nevermind it's completely unnecessary and damaging to the planet, they're just going to pretend that watercooler talk is the biggest and most important thing in a company ever, so they simply cannot abide by you skipping your commute.

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Yeah, it's very much a "because f you, that's why".

CEO's like Benioff from Salesforce are out there touting record profits and productivity on stock earnings calls all throughout the pandemic and then go on and lay everyone off and call the remaining employees back to the office under the guise of "no one is working"

It's quite odd - you can't both have record profits & productivity and then also have "no one working"

> CEO's like Benioff from Salesforce

The guy built the largest office building west of the Mississippi which now sits largely unoccupied alongside other unoccupied office buildings. His opinion is biased.

> Nevermind it's completely unnecessary and damaging to the planet

I mean the list of things like this is a mile long and nobody cares about doing a damn thing until helping the planet happens to align with something they really like.

I don't disagree with that, although I would argue that we had already established a bit of a 'new normal' where few white collar workers had to commute to work, it went fine, and now there's major actions taken to revert everything, whereas a lot of these other things you're mentioning (I imagine, if we're thinking the same types of things) haven't even shifted to a new normal yet.

To throw a hopefully not that controversial of an example out there, how about the obligation of gift giving and wrapping paper (and lets throw company swag in there, while we're at it). Tons of people give dumb or destined to be unused crap just to meet a societal expectation of giving gifts. I got a whole box of crap from my company as a welcome gift. I use maybe one item from it, the rest are just sitting in the house and will be trashed at some point. And I had to throw away yet another garbage bag of wrapping paper this past Christmas because it's expected to wrap gifts.

But that's the norm, and there hasn't been an established new normal yet. So it's not nearly as infuriating (to me at least) as this intentional clawing back of remote work to stroke the egos of executives.

This is such a cynical take. Why is it so ridiculous to believe that teams that work together in-person are more effective/innovative?

So what if they are? (And I'd argue there's not much hard evidence of that, and the in-person working together I did a couple months ago at an engineering summit was completely ineffective and far from innovative, and I think the pandemic in general has proven that people don't need to be in-person to be effective and innovative.)

Why must a company hyper-maximize the effectiveness of every employee at the expense of their work-life balance and happiness (assuming they would rather be remote, of course)?

And if the employee isn't happy, they're probably a lot less effective in-person than you might think, but you assume they are just because they're physically present.

> I think the pandemic in general has proven that people don't need to be in-person to be effective and innovative.)

Yes, for some subset of people.

Many people found they did prefer to be in-person to be effective, innovative, and enjoy their work. Some companies are going to want to hire those people and avoid hiring the ones who don’t prefer in-person work.

Nothing wrong with that. It’s somebody at the the company’s decision to make. And maybe it’s a bad decision or a good decision, who knows.

So why not let people decide for themselves whether they want to be remote? You're assuming in person workers are more effective, which is precisely what's in question to begin with.

How is my assumption different from the pro-remote work people who assume remote workers are more effective.

Both sides here think they’re correct and are incredibly dogmatic and protective of their side.

Companies can choose to let workers decide. It’s definitely one of the options available. But companies can also mandate RTO or mandate continued remote work.

All of those choices allow the employee to decide if the company’s choice is a dealbreaker for them when it comes to where they choose to work.

Another issue is that the pro-remote workers love to assume that a pro-office person sitting alone in the office while everyone else works remotely makes everyone happy. This isn’t always the case.

Because there's no evidence that this is the case, and there's a lot of lived experience saying that it isn't.

>lived experience

So anecdotes?

Lived experience only becomes anecdotes when it's told to another person. But yes, my personal observations as well as my personal experience on the job.

That's also not evidence, of course, but I'm not the one trying to convince people to return to a less-than-ideal working environment.

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