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Comment by LiquidSky | Hacker News Reader

I know that this is Hacker News and so all rich and important people must be geniuses making only rational moves, but consider the slim possibility that most aren't very good leaders and make poor decisions.

Maybe there's some 19D "soft layoff" motivation, but I suspect a large part is just about control and appearance. You spent all that money on offices so workers better be there. And what's the point of having your own nice big office if you can't look out on the peons toiling for you? And more fundamentally, some people just have this deep belief that work = something you do in an office and can't compute working at home as "real" work, no matter what the results show.

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There’s some of that for sure, but also knowledge sharing is easier in person. The question is whether or not it’s that much easier to justify the trade off of in person work. I don’t think so, but even most remote workers I know would agree that in person has a certain collaborative nature that remote lacks.

Sure, WFH has some downsides as does anything, but it's always funny to me that we have 150+ years of basically everyone who's ever worked in an office despising it as a place where productivity goes to die mired in pointless meetings, office politics, etc., but when WFH becomes a realistic option all of a sudden the office is now Plato's Academy reborn.

I dispute this in my case. While this is true theoretically, in practice we all go to an off to sit in front of a computer 8 hours.

I haven't had an in person meeting in, god, years at this point.

The only difference between my house and the office is the physical location. That's literally it. Oh, and I'm a lot less happy now.

... hard to feel that the "lot less happy" part isn't the motivation.

This was a trend among boards and executives, people like GE's CEO would not shut up about it, and that started the trend of boards requiring even recalcitrant CEOs to do it too.

Then the executives come up with justifications, one of which is surely the ability to trim some hires in a tight financial environment.

Every single frontpage thread on WFH / RTO for years now on HN has dozens to hundreds of comments bitching about the obvious stupidity and narcissism of upper management to force RTO, which is obviously inferior in every way, at least according to HN.

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