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Comment by Kerrick | Hacker News Reader

This article makes a lot of noise about RTO being about corporate peacocking and/or real estate. But it also cites a source that a third of people _prefer_ in-office work and another third of people _prefer_ hybrid work. I don’t understand why it leaves no room for the simplest explanation: the managers pushing against remote work simply belong to one of those two thirds.

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It's harder to attract an audience with the article you describe.

The internet likes black & white. There's little room for shades of grey and any expression of nuance just invites hot takes. Like this one.

Not to mention that this means 2/3 of people prefer to be in the office at least some of the time and 2/3 of people prefer to work at home at least some of the time. So naturally if you're strictly going based off of numbers hybrid makes the most sense, but I've noticed a lot of "I only want to work from my home office and never go anywhere else ever for any reason" folks frame hybrid as "RTO" which it is not.

We frame hybrid as RTO because hybrid is usually mandatory rather than flexible, and implies having to live in some wretched metro area close to an office. I want to live someplace where offices do not exist, which means hybrid is a non-starter for me.

Mandatory hybrid == RTO, but optional hybrid - a combination of hybrid for those who live near an office and remote for those who don’t - can please both camps without drawing battle lines between them.

IMO hybrid only works when there is a set day to be in the office for everyone. Otherwise you are just going into the office to have zoom/teams meetings with the remote people, and you end up with one of two things:

1. Everyone taking calls from their cubicles

2. Remote people calling in individually, onsite people calling in with 5-10+ people on one screen in a conference room.

Both are horrible and fully remote is better than this for basically everything except team-specific stuff (e.g. sales onsite, execs onsite, software remote, that sort of thing). But if you're going off of numbers alone, hybrid makes the most sense and I don't think hybrid makes sense just being an optional free-for-all.

Everyone's circumstances are different so you can't come up with a policy that everyone will like.

Because managers likely prefer it due to corporate peacocking. The article clearly says this.

"likely" as in vibes? Or is there actual backing evidence?

But perhaps corporate peacocking is not why they prefer it?

I like a day's worth of face time once a week or so. It's not because I like to show off to my colleagues or minions - most of my direct colleagues are not in the same country as me. I prefer it just because I'm the sort of person who prefers a little, but not a lot, of direct human contact when given the choice.

The managers get given the choice and may just prefer it innately. It's irritating that they elect to inflict it on others if it's not economically rational to do so.

The article asserts it, yes, with not a single quantitative study actually supporting that. They have some tangentially related evidence around real estate and survey responses, and they assert - again, without direct evidence - that these are explained by corporate peacocking.

Because that reasonable - "these people are idiots who are just peacocking" gets upvotes and makes the readers feel smart and superior.

There is definitely a trend, and not a new one, to assume that all managers, directors, etc. are just bumbling fools who nepotised their way into bags of cash every two weeks and provide no actual value. I'm sure there are examples where that's the case, but at least in the (small no-name) companies I've worked at my entire career, the non-owner bosses are typically as smart as I am or smarter, work about as hard as I do with a lot more inanity to deal with, and don't actually make that much more money especially at the front-line manager and director level.

I wonder if those in that category might also have a tendency towards lower empathy with those outside it?

"I don't work as well when I'm not in the office, so all those other guys are slacking off" would presumably be the thought process.

What I think's interesting is that those pushing for RTO rarely seem to be using data to support their positions. I don't know if it's that they're people who prefer "intuition over evidence" or just that there's a lack of evidence supporting a stance that they're emotionally committed to, but it's something I've noted quite a few times now. Or perhaps it's just that once you introduce the decision as data-driven you get into interminable arguments about methodologies and so on?

I don't really buy the various borderline conspiracy theories about a tie between corporate management and local property prices simply because that same set of people seems to have been wildly enthusiastic about the various offshoring waves that preceded Covid and the resulting WFH boom.

I think you might be on to something with the empathy but I don't think it's as naive as "I don't work well at home so these other people can't work well from home." I think it's much more likely something like "I don't work well from home, so if I'm in the office I will do better. If we're fully remote, I will do worse in my career, get fewer/smaller raises, miss a promotion, etc. I will have more success in the office so I will fight for everyone to be in the office."

If other people perform worse in the office it just means those that prefer that environment will do that much better in their careers.

Especially as you get into higher management levels, your coworkers are also your competitors - if the guy in the office next to you gets a promotion, you don't get that promotion.

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