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Comment by zdragnar | Hacker News Reader

The article incorrectly conflates "cares about productivity" with "cares exclusively about productivity".

SWE salaries are a massive cost. Improving productivity is one way of offsetting that cost. The examples provided for "don't care about productivity" are things like open office plans- where a certain amount of productivity is sacrificed while offsetting a different cost (building space).

Yes, it is fair to say that managers and executives do not care about productivity to the exclusion of all else. It's something of a pointless statement, though, as I don't think anyone actually thinks that.

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> The article incorrectly conflates "cares about productivity" with "cares exclusively about productivity".

No, I don't believe it does. The argument is actually that they "care about control over labour and stock prices" above all else, including productivity.

> The examples provided for "don't care about productivity" are things like open office plans- where a certain amount of productivity is sacrificed while offsetting a different cost (building space).

From the article: "Home offices also lower office real estate costs, so you’d think executives would love it, but they also makes employee surveillance harder."

WFH also made it massively easier for people to slack off/pretend to do multiple jobs.

And life was disproportionately more difficult for more junior folks.

WFH was far from an unalloyed good that only got abandoned "because it made surveillance harder".

Would it be possible to salvage WFH? Maybe. At a bare minimum, it'd require rapidly firing the abusers. And spending a lot more on helping juniors grow.

SWE salaries are a massive cost. Improving productivity is one way of offsetting that cost.

In a lot of businesses you get praise and look important if you’re responsible for leading a large group of highly paid employees, more so then if you have a smaller team.

Thus the motivation is frequently to spend as much money as possible, not to improve efficiency.

If you improve efficiency then maybe you just get your team size cut and people ask hard questions about why you needed all those resources in the first place.

This is true only so long as employees are actually producing things. Case in point: I'm working for a tiny company building an internal tool for a very very large company because their internal team isn't getting the job done. Hard questions are being asked, but not of us.

Maybe things were different in the days of zero APR free money being thrown left and right at companies to keep growing, but I don't think we'll see a return to that any time soon.

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