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Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

You can speculate about various external reasons, but I suspect the real explanation is less rational and more psychological, instinctive, primal: managers enjoy the physicality and immediacy of management. They love to survey their domain, as if a lord, to be able to watch their underlings, to stand over their shoulders or get in their face, force them to acknowledge and respond to you. With WFH, a lot of that is lost, especially if as a natural consequence the communication workflow becomes more async than sync.

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I've seen this attribution of RTO to "managers" before but it doesn't ring true in my experience. Managers is too broad of a group of people. Every manager I've had since the beginning of the pandemic has loved working from home and said they don't want to go back.

If this [1] story from a few weeks ago is to be believed these directives are coming from the people at the top: executives, high level management, and investors. That story is about Microsoft specifically, but I don't see anything in there that would indicate the same couldn't have happened at other tech companies.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37643608

Frontline manager here. I trust my team and would be totally fine with any one of them working from home permanently. I know many other managers who feel the same. Anecdotal, of course, but in my experience the RTO mandate is generally coming from very high up the chain.

> Managers is too broad of a group of people.

It should go without saying that I was talking about the people making the decisions about RTO.

Another way of framing this without the fiefdom comparisons is that a lot of managers simply don't trust their employees. Weekly check-ins leave them with 4-5 days of fretting, not knowing if progress is happening.

Looking over at an employee and seeing them working is the worlds most common self-soothing mechanism. It really is as simple as that.

On the fringes, I'm sure there are a lot of creative collaborative environments with employees that have actual autonomy to act on such collaborations where RTO would move the needle, but I would speculate that very few of these environments actually exist even though everyone thinks they definitely have that environment (this is more at the executive level)

I am a manager and I certainly don't share this view and I know my manager doesn't either. In a lot of cases this push is coming from the executive committee which I think supports the argument made in the article if you extrapolate where we might be heading in the economic cycle. We just have to deal with it.

armchair psychiatry at its finest. you've never managed anything significant clearly.

Here I'll do one: "software developers like to choose their own tools because they don't care about using the most efficient best in class tool available, they like to think of themselves as artists as if they were all little da vincis who have yet to be recognized for their brilliance"

See how condescending and dumb this is?

> armchair psychiatry at its finest.

I don't deny it. I literally said "I suspect".

> you've never managed anything significant clearly.

Also armchair psychiatry.

> See how condescending and dumb this is?

I think your wording was a bit exaggerated but has a grain of truth in that many software developers do think of themselves as artists, and they're not wrong about that in essence. I do think it's wrong to claim that there's a unique "most efficient best in class tool available". Different people naturally find different tools more efficient for their personal workflows.

I actually think that the majority of human behavior, including my own, can be explained in animalistic terms. It's not condescending, because we are undeniably animals. In fact, it makes no rational sense for me to waste time commenting on HN, but I do it anyway!

Possibly, and also crab bucket mentality extracts more labor and more sacrifices from workers.

I think this is exactly right. Also I think that control over the bodies of others is a big point as well. You are talking about power and physical power to dominate the body of another is a very pure form of this power. So telling people where to sit, when they come and go, having them gather in this room and that room, it fulfills a primal need.

Yup. Imagine Michael Scott trying to manage a team of remote workers. He would do ANYTHING to get them back in the office again. And it would have absolutely nothing to do with profitability.

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