I did the same and for around 50% cut. Working from home allows me to spend more time with my kids (I get to have lunch with them and hear them play in the background), no toxic rush hour commute, and I get the comfort of my own space. I know there's a down side of not being able to collaborate as well with my team. But I put my wellbeing over that.

And to be honest, the pay cut - while significant - made no change in my daily life. But the peace of mind and serenity I have retained by WFH is invaluable.

My pay cut was only around 15%, but I also wasn't working for a large company, and was apparently underpaid by around 20%. This will come of a spoiled and privileged, but I honestly have no idea how we'd make our day to day life work if I didn't work from home, with incredibly flexible hours. Getting children ready for school and pick them up at a reasonable hour, without stress just isn't possible. You have to drop off your children in some kind of care before their even fully awake, and you need to pick them up almost before you get out of the office.

Obviously people make it work, but I have no idea what kind of hours other people work, because doing a pick up at 16:30 would mean that my child would be the last one in the day care. In any case I don't see the point in tolerating the stress of traffic, school/day care, or just regular difficulties getting your daily tasks to fit in with a 8-16 job at an office. I have a family member that works at a hospital, she can't get her car service for four weeks because there's no available time to drop of the car and pick it up afterwards, which also fits with the mechanic. I can normally get appointments for mechanics, doctors, dentists, contractors, everything, with a few days notice because I can be incredibly flexible with my time.

When I was looking for a job I was offered peanuts for a position requiring very specific knowledge. When I pointed this out, they said "well, if you want to earn a lot of money, go to company X".

I did. Now I'm exploring the limits of slacking off while getting a nice paycheck. I could aim higher, but I doubt my new place would allow me to slack off as much as this place does. After all, I have only one life, so I'd rather spend it doing things other than working, and I know that modern work is unlikely to bring deeper life satisfaction.

3-4 hours a day commuting? I confess I used to bike to the office and that could take about 3 hours/day, but I could cut it down to a 2 hour/day by switching to an ebike. I also like biking. On my "work from home" days I would aim for an hour and a half ride every morning.

I can't imagine being in a longer commute that I didn't like.

FAANG is just Big Blue 2.0 nowadays. Not a place for smart people, a place for Jassholes.

I did a radical change recently too, save for the fact my job (full remote) wasn't very well paid to begin with. The additional 700€/month I got for working in comparison to the unemployment benefit is absolutely not worth working 150h a month, since I still can pay for whatever small or medium things I want, and it don't make a real change to what I can't (buy a house).

On the other hand, I have now time and energy to focus on all the cool things: writing research papers and my thesis, learning accounting to set up my company, make contributions to the open-source and open-data projects I care about, taking time for friends and family. In a word: living.

I’ve done essentially the same thing for years, working for small remote companies at rates below what my resume would justify.

There are labor force bargains to be had for companies that offer workers flexibility.

This comment, to me, is heartwarming. The free market works! You valued something more than $$$ and so made adjustments to your employment (aka selling your labor).

I think that in-office work is good for certain situations, which is why onsites still make sense. And for folks newer in their career, onsite time is really important, based on my experience.

But if remote is more attracitve, over time companies that offer it will win in the talent marketplace.

Depending upon where you wind up living to work remote you could well see an almost 50% cut in life expenses and taxes.

> 3-4 hours/day commuting

I’d switch jobs then as well, or rather, I would never take such a job in the first place. Luckily my commute is only 20 minutes by bike. I don’t earn anywhere near FAANG level either, though.

I'm happy that you found something that works for you. But wouldn't it have been cheaper to move to a place closer to the office of your previous employer?

Sounds like a correct action .. good on you, enjoy the extra time in your life, it's the real value.

I'd never work for a "FAANG" style corporation, but otherwise made a similar choice when my first kid was born, back in early 2019.

I'll surely lose out on some currency in the long run but I'm not so sure whatever value it's going to have in the coming fifties outweighs the time with my family I've gained. On a global scale a lot of things are going to shit and I'd rather my kids think of me as someone who didn't bail on them under such circumstances.

Did you take a pay cut? If you include your commute hours in your hourly pay rate, maybe you didn't have such a pay cut after all.

Hey, congrats. I did a similar thing... in December 2019. Poor timing, but a good decision nonetheless.

Even years later, I am still not making as much money as I was making back then. I could not care less about that. I'm making plenty of money, and am more than twice as happy—this is harder to measure than salary, but it sure feels true.

I spend 40 minutes a day commuting. Would I take a 50% pay cut for that? You know the answer.

Depending on how one is, working from home not only isolates you, but if you have kids, dealing with them on a daily basis while trying to work is not what you think it will be after months and years of doing so.

Yes, your life will change and be totally different.

At least you have a much better chance to (live to) eventually retire. I am glad to see this kind of change is not just possible, but really happening.

I’ll get downvoted for this but so many people taking 15-50% paycuts without a moments thought, or trading 50% of pay for 3-4 hours back out of a 11-12hr workday (including commute) sort of implies that there are a lot of overpaid people right now.

Is it really a pay cut if half your day is spent commuting (unpaid)? Just a thought.

Yup makes it easier than firing you. We don’t want less productive people.

I don't mind the commute if I live close enough that I can just walk 30-40 minutes to the office, because then it serves as a good exercise (okay, fine. Grass-touching) that I don't have to do separately in the day.

But I realize that this is NOT a luxury most people have. Most people's commute looks like being stuck in the subway, or driving in traffic, for up to several hours every single day, and I just can't think of anything that would justify that type of commute.

Here is mine: I like the commute, it marks the beginning and end of my workday and I get fresh air. I loathe being in the office, it is mentally taxing and I have to put in more for the same output.

I just need flexibility and variety. Some days I work better from home. Some days it feels claustrophobic and I cannot focus. Sometimes the office helps me focus. Sometimes it facilitates communications that never would have happened remotely. Other times I’m bogged down by unwanted social interactions. Sometimes I really need to be on site with customers or at a conference building and maintaining social ties.

I’ve worked in hybrid environments for over a decade and could never go back to a full RTO position. I’m currently mostly remote and that is also driving me a little crazy.

Some people do great in the office. Some do great remote. I’m not in either bin.

This girl has pretty severe Crohn's, severe enough to make commuting in pretty much not an option: in addition to the severe fatigue, she's immunocompromised and more prone to whatever bugs her coworkers bring in to work. That's something new and unique about this post I took away from it. It's not just a rant because me no like office/commute. There are health and profound QoL issues in play.

> I like being in the office

I love being in an office with the handful of people I work with. I hate being in an office with hundreds of people I don't work with.

I'm in the same vein. I enjoy being in the office a couple days a week - I feel like there's different types of focus needed for different tasks and sometimes the focus I need is the kind I get from being in a very structured environment with co-workers. Other times it's the kind I get from being in my own space in full control of my own surroundings.

But either way I hate commuting. Especially if I have to drive.

I don’t mind going in either, but I like having it as an option and not mandatory or only 2-3 designated days that excludes Fridays.

I did two hours of work this (Saturday) morning, and I was pretty ill four days in a recent week but able to work for two of them. That's a lot of productivity my employer would not have had from me if I had to go to the office to work.

As somebody who generally dislikes the office, i respect your opinion and your preference.

The issues arise when we’re all forced into the office, whether we like it or not.

I wouldn’t mind going from time to time, but i absolutely abhor being forced to.

We need those tubes from Futurama.

Did I understood correctly, if teleportation would be real you would go to the office every day? I would, if I would meet my team there.

I like being in the office when everyone else is wfh. When everyone is in the office I can't focus, am stressed, little gets done.

I think being in the office together with a plan is a good tool to use, but you need to use it well.

Just yell at people to be in the office for 2 days per week for no reason? Meh. Why?

Organize a week to have all local and international employees together for a week once or twice a year, schedule big organizational meetings and important discussions in that week, sponsor dinner and lunch together, have a team event or three? Just accept that concrete and hard productivity will crash for that week, and consider it a social event? That's actually nice and valuable.

Ok, what if you are paid to create a office in your house?

Heavily agree on the “going to and from the office”

I was just thinking about this recently as $company executives are sociopathically dangling RTO in our faces. The worst part is the commute by car.

I’m totally for WFH, but give me an office I can walk/bike to in a safe calm environment - not a bike lane next to 60 mph traffic - and I may just want to go into the office.

Furthermore, the company culture needs to be such that you can leave the office as necessary like we do in WFH. Do errands, take a break, etc. Cal Newport makes the point on his podcast that our work culture for creative jobs (anything that uses the brain primarily, I don’t know the right word) has not really changed from factory line physical in nature jobs.

Yeah this is my position. There are aspects of being in the office that I like. I loathe having to drive 45 minutes to get there, however.

> I like being in the office, sometimes. I hate going to and from the office.

I like being in the office when it means the office isn't packed to the brim. Prior to RTO mandates at my employer, our team voluntarily went in on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And it was very nice. Not everyone (including myself) came in every day but there was always others present. Then RTO mandates came down, then we got moved out of our office space into another, next to a very loud group of non-engineers, then we got moved again, again next to a very loud group of non-engineers, and we are being moved, yet again, but this time back to our own, secluded space. It's all frankly ridiculous bullshit. I'm 60% remote today but I'm still generally annoyed about being in the office when I am there because of all of the stupid bullshit that comes along with it.

Don't think I've seen the point about office work spreading disease in a blog post like this before. Do you have any examples of this?

I run a remote company, so I don't have skin in trying to convince anyone that RTO is a good idea. And there might be some truth to this in a wider, more systemic sense, in that employers and employees are always in some degree of zero-sum negotiation. But...like, do you think management actually thinks in these terms?

I've known some pretty rich and powerful people. None of them talk this way behind closed doors, or at least they haven't around me. Even the ones that denigrate social programs or support for workers or poverty don't frame it this way. They think - rightly or wrongly - that it's a more effective way to run their company, usually because they don't trust workers not to abuse remote work, or sometimes because they've bought into some hustle-culture narrative that wanting comfortable work means you're not a Scrappy Highly Motivated Self Starter or whatever.

For smaller companies yes leases can be broken but for others spending billions building college like campuses where they sublease space to businesses to sell to employees part of their worth is connected to real estate value. Others getting tax breaks by having people in an office in a downtown core.

For Faangs it's about power, control and real estate.

For the yc startup crowd it's often about investor control forcing it and fake signalling (come to my trendy office and look at people working) and inexperienced management who needs to see what effects their poor decisions are having with their eyes so they can pivot.

It’s also a way to cut your labor costs without having to fire people which seems to be the latest trend.

Yep, noticed the same. I and others have pressured executives to give exact argumentation with data and motivation.

All 7 of those people (in 3 different contracts) have failed to do so. At one point they said a variation of "because I say so" and that was that.

A lot of more liberal-leaning people don't understand the power-play games that many of the people on top love to play. One could argue some of them long stopped being there for the money and only do it for the power-play, even.

Yeah, well, see, if you're an exec and you didn't like feeling "the sting of at will employment", forcing RTO is a great way to feel it again.

My employer invested tens of millions in telepresence, telecommuting and remote working options. When the pandemic hit they got Zoom scaled up and working for tens of thousands of employees. Which it did, beautifully.

Now that the pandemic is over, we're back to mandatory 3 days per week, minimum, with more for higher level roles. Yet except for a recently acquired employee my entire team is remote. So, WFH and meet on Zoom or sit in an office and meet on Zoom.

Unfortunately the sales people are the policy makers and they can't seem to wrap their heads around doing anything that isn't face to face. Yet we started on this investment in remote work to control travel costs.

Meanwhile there are those who expect you to process every Slack ping, making them in some ways worse those who interrupt in person — since they don’t feel the distress of the person they’re interrupting through the screen.

A workplace’s culture of consideration is expressed through communication channels, but is not determined by the choice of channel.

"Open office" - I've never been healthier (and fitter) than since I went remote. Not sharing an open office with coughing sneezing co-workers who would come in, no matter what, and commuting on trains, has been remarkable. I'd previously have 2-3 heavy colds a year. I think I've now had 1 in 5 years.

> people who have no sense of boundaries, and will gladly invade your personal space and interrupt your train of thought at any time for any reason

You gotta game the system and learn some basic acting skills. Twitch your face. Pause just a little too long before responding. Get up in the middle of a sentence to stare out the window and just stop talking, forcing the other party to ask you to continue. Laugh obnoxiously loud at your own jokes. Stall, delay, confuse, whatever you do: make the experience not worth repeating for the offender.

Get bipolar: be the very best person you can be on Slack. But be a complete hebephrenic bug eyed lunatic when someone interrupts you IRL.

You know you can turn Slack off right?

I’m a huge proponent of async messaging (email) over sync… but if you are in the office, turn that nonsense off if you need to get work done.

I would tend to agree RTO is primarily about middle managers and control

Though, I think the following could suffer from post-hoc rationalization fallacy:

> We noted that this kind of friendship definitely would not have happened if we were working remote.

I have the opposite problem as you: I've done tech all my life but live in a place where there are few tech opportunities, and it's a bit late in my life to switch to being a longshoreman. So I kind of have to find remote opportunities, even as it becomes more difficult to do so.

I just turned down a job that I would've been amazing at, because they're in person 3 days a week.

They lost literally tens of millions in grant opportunities that I have written and the experience I bring, because they wouldn't go remote 3 days instead of just 2.

I understand wanting some time in person, absolutely. I hate it, but it does make certain processes much easier. But to not negotiate at all, even when the candidate is perfect for the job and happy with everything else? Ridiculous.

Yet the deadlines don't move to accommodate this.

At 100 people, every desk-job company is already a remote company, even if they don't know it yet.

Travel distance between desks has already become so large that many people won't do it for small things. For decades now those situations would be handled by a phone call or email.

Meeting in the coffee room to chat becomes rare because schedules and tastes (eg. office coffee versus off-site coffee, bagged lunches versus going out) differ. Also there's too many people and too much churn to really get to know anybody.

Arranging meeting times becomes difficult outside smaller 5-10 person units so asynchronous communication becomes predominant.

What I've seen work is not trying to co-locate a full team at all. Doing so only leads to silos and hiring difficulties. Instead have small offices which people from a small geographic area use. Those people will be on different teams and in different departments -- which is good for inter-team communication and synergy. This is exactly what offices normally miss because teams are co-located resulting in a relatively high 'distance' to build a rapport between teams.

I actually would not mind a slightly bigger org - like even up to 100 or so...but everything else you noted i'm 100% in agreement with. I'll call this the "village way"...because what you noted - to me at least - seems like how villages, small towns, whatever you want to call them had to exist a hundred years ago or so...like, not just before digital, but i mean, even when base telecom was not a common thing....so i would imagine most folks in a town/village worked for one of a few extremely local workplaces. I'm not saying having only very few employers in an area is good, since that would be giving a central group way too miuch power. But, yeah, i kinda yearn for a sort of village approach. And, yes, it could also mean that the "local pod" is everyone in the local area working together in one place, but remotely coordinating with a mothership as you put it. That all sounds pretty decent!

But, this approach is not something that powers-that-be would even begin to support...even though, i betcha, this approach would have tons of people actually invested in the success of the org because of the good that it represents in allowing people to earn a living without making commutes and such that much more difficult. I know that if my employers supoorted this sort of model, i would not only work karder, but actually give more of a damn, and really care to have the org succeed. Basically, i would contribute far more to the org. But, nah, the bosses just want to squeeze the lemons, and not care how they get their juice produced. ;-)

So what happens when someone wants to change teams for whatever reason? Or they're presented with a new opportunity? On the other side of the city--or in a different city. Do they have to move?

At my previous job I worked in a room with ~6 people, now it's a small open plan office and I hate it. I just can't focus with all the talking, noise, meetings etc. it's awful, especially with the contrast of our 2 work-from-home days per week.

Funnily enough our team lead works in a 2 person office... hmm.

> You wouldn’t dare to do that with elevators or other accessibility features

This is only because there's usually legal protection for that kinds of accessibility features. If employers could legally, it would be way more common to threaten to take them away.

I have no doubt there are some that do so illegally.

Never think that pure hard work leads to success, placement, privilege, or anything else. The farmhand in a field works harder than 99.9% of high paid tech employees. Hard work is important, sure, but it’s all about relative value contribution in the market, nothing else.

It’s easy to find another farmhand, it’s hard to find another ML engineer

I think the nuance here is while we should continue to push for WFH, we should also be aware of the feelings of people around us when we speak from our privileged position. This doesn't just apply to WFH, we should keep other people's feelings in mind when arguing from any position of privilege. Software developers are extraordinarily privileged and it's important to keep this in perspective or else we will contribute to a sense of disdain toward all software developers.

Some will argue this is a talking point for anti-WFH people, but it's still a valid point to make independent of your WFH stance and as a general tip for being a decent, empathetic human being.

We should all work to end exploitation and that starts with ourselves.

> The thing I keep coming back to here is how we all must sound to the janitors, security guards, baristas, etc, who can't ever work from home.

Every job has its perks and disadvantages. I don’t have the same perks my friends who are doctors have, so should they now give them up because it’s not fair to me because I’m not a doctor and don’t have them?

I personally see WFH as a way to improve working conditions in general. Just because some jobs really need to be done in person does not automatically mean all of them should be. Similarly, not all should be RTO. As such, it is valid to point out ( and even complain ) that trying to apply 'one size fits all' RTO solution is silly at best.

And just a point of perspective, it was only recently 40h a week ( 1940 ) and child labor (1938) was not considered some sort of communist plot intended to overthrow capitalism.

Yes; let’s do what the companies and billionaires want in solidarity with our blue collar worker peers. Let’s not stick together and work for the benefit of everyone. We should be demanding better conditions for everybody.

Your average blue collar workers benefits from the 300,000 corporate Amazonians working from home and staying off the road. He cannot avoid his commute, you can.

And frankly, stop LARP-ing as a “sympathetic to blue collar work” person. God knows you’re probably an executive using them for messaging.

When has anyone on HN ever given a fuck about blue collar workers until RTO, when these mysterious “sympathies” emerged? Of course we should support the working class, but you should’ve started a lot fucking sooner.

Yeah, and if the homeless people outside the office heard the security guard complaining about their low pay imagine how they would feel.

The “somebody has it worse” argument always ends up pushing people to accept getting screwed over.

Do you consider $450k a lot for a house? That would hardly get you a shack in the Boston area.

Eh, the difference is that for some roles being in-person is obviously necessary for the role while in others it isn't. Most people I know working in lower-level roles in-person recognize this because they've experienced more than their share of blatant management power games themselves.

There's definitely a generational divide though. Older folks seem more likely to view being at the office as just a natural part of how work "works", while younger people are more likely to understand when it's necessary and when it isn't.

It's a different story for lower-status jobs that could be done from home but aren't allowed. But when it's such a clear signal that you aren't trusted by management/society/etc, you really do have something to resent!

> how we all must sound to the janitors, security guards, baristas, etc, who can't ever work from home.

Absolute bollocks. This is the Elon Musk screed and it's baseless. Do you think fast food workers gripe and moan when extremely well paid pilots or nurses go on strike?

Every worker wants every other worker to succeed over management.

Thank you. Truly.

I have no sympathy. America has made it so easy to convert hard work into a better job. Nowhere else on earth has it even close to this easy to literally pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

Security guards are usually security guards because they want to be (most require a concealed carry license). I do not care if they think they are underpaid. They can always snap and go murder half the building. Id rather we didn’t even have a security guard, since the tweaker whod try to come into our building to do drugs is almost certainly not going to literally shoot the place up because overpaid tech workers were talking about not like RTO…

They're afraid that people will see that they're not needed in the organization. It's easy to fake that when everyone is forced into the same location and the people who like to talk do just that.

Difficulty training juniors is easily the weakest argument I’ve heard related to RTO.

I’ve trained dozens of people remotely and helped them level up. Sure it’s not the most *effective*, but given the immense benefits of WFH, I have no problem sacrificing the ease of my job so that my juniors can have a better life.

If you cannot train your juniors up remotely, that’s a management failing. Why punish them for that?

In a world with any worker’s rights, you wouldn’t be able to.

When’s the last time a junior engineer was hired at a US tech office? Onboarding hasn’t been a thing for us in the Bay Area since ZIRP.

I'm sure this'll help provide them with a positive view on remote positions.

This would just mean that people living farther away would have a harder time finding jobs, or negotiating salary/promotions, because they are more expensive for their employer. Yes you could have laws making it illegal to discriminate based on commute distance, but you know that employers would find other pretexts.

I can see commuting being regarded as a total time waste requiring employer compensation in the US, where most people commuting are driving. But in countries where commuting is done via public transportation, the time spent commuting can be productively used for personal improvement in the form of reading.

In Japan workers comp insurance covers commute by law.

Because of this, it is common for companies to get a cheaper policy that does not cover car commutes and set a company policy requiring employees to walk, bike or take public transit.

I arrived at this conclusion too after 3 years of smart working, it's unreasonable to have today an obliged/implicit sacrifice of time and money that's commuting to the work place.

Don't most people take into account requirements to commute when negotiating salary before taking a job? It should already be baked into pay.

I get some people were hired without any understanding of that during/after the pandemic and sometimes offices move, but that seems like when to renegotiate.

If people want to live far from the office, that is not the employer's fault.

If employers pay for commute time they can also use home location as a hiring criterion.

Sure, I'll bite:

> in office socialization is shallow and distracts from more meaningful socialization with family and friends

Many people's adult friends come from work. Sometimes their spouse does too. I've noticed a phenomenon where more junior team members in particular would go into the office, even though the senior folks rarely did, and I think part of this is just to meet people because they may not have built up a friend group in their city yet.

> at home office is far more accommodating to fit an individuals needs

That's the case for me, although it depends a lot on your physical home situation and the social dynamic at home. I think for some folks the office is an escape.

Being able to jump into a zoom call with everyone immediately outweighs trying to book a room or walking over to someone's desk. I can easily waste more time and look like I am working in the office where at home it's hard to coverup nothing has been done.

There has been some bad faith over hiring and then forcing rto to avoid termination payouts. We see Musk plans to do the same even moving government offices to states like Wyoming.

Most companies are not bad faith actors just copying others.

They absolutely are at an advantage in hiring - our data set has remote companies with 5-10x the candidate pool of non-remote ones, even ignoring differences in salary asks.

The question is: are they at an advantage in effectiveness? I think they probably are, but it seems like a reasonably open question, one that we should see an answer to in the coming years. If in five or ten years remote companies aren't crushing non-remote ones, that's going to be pretty strong evidence that there is good reason for in-office work.

Liberals dominate the jobs where RTO is even an option. Conservatives are trying to eliminate it from the US government for a reason.

It’s entirely political. Conservatives hate the idea that “lazy” limp wristed soy boy ML engineers can make more money than their good old boys making tractors at catapiller.

“ The whole point of our jobs is to facilitate the needs of the business.”

But people conflate the needs of the business with the “needs” of the executives or investors. I have little faith that any exec that I have met that is capable of putting their own ego aside and honestly describe how RTO helps the business. Maybe it does help the business, but I haven’t seen anyone make that case.

where does that number come from? and i cant imagine it applies equally across industries if it is true. 50% of software related job cant be 5 years to retirement?

> Sometimes I think millennials fell into a trap following GenX back to urban living

You should be more specific, because the cities were always inhabited. Which millennials are you talking about?

I'd bet that most people agree with you, which is why the people who actually do it get a lot of attention--from the other folks who want to, but can't. This particular topic notwithstanding, employers have so much leverage that it's risky to stick your neck out but I'm thankful there are people who do it.

It’s an anonymous blog…?

That’s what life is all about, right? The job search, the grind, the hustle…

Sounds great if it wasn't for the powers that be still being infatuated with their open plan hellscape.

And if people are just interchangeable widgets, that's a clever strategy.

People aren't, though. The most valuable people are the ones who have the most options, precisely because they are valuable. If you play that game, you're going to differentially lose your most valuable people. That's not a smart move.

Time slicing? Being able to effectively 'work from home' may often mean 'work as productively at 7pm as at 2pm'. Working from an office often (not always) implies synchronous work with others, which often is tied to the 9a-5p 'office day'. Companies that embrace 'work from home' usually can accommodate more asynchronous work from folks as well.

John Carmack was said to take a weekend and lock himself in a hotel room so he could achieve total focus on difficult problems.

What surprised me about this article is that it's not the typical Hackernews fare of "Hi, we're Cerridwen, a transenby fox-weasel hybrid plural system and CISO of Eoana, a startup building enterprise static container verification tools in Rust." It was just someone with kind of a shitty job who does tech on the side because it interests her. There are more people like her out there working in "tech", by far, than there are Cerridwens, and yet the Cerridwens are the ones who bubble to the top of Hackernews. And so the thinking of Hackernews tends to be within the Cerridwen bubble, whether we're aware of it or not. So it's great to get a more ordinary perspective on this kind of issue.

They sold you on the college campus? I guess it is working.

I think OP is not arguing if working in the office is good or bad. The point, as far as I can understand, is about the way the return to office is presented to the workers. With sugary lies and fake cheer. It's like they're addressing toddlers in preschool.

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Work is not only about what the company wants but also about what the employee needs. I don't see much difference between the ability to work from home and the ability to avoid working on weekends; the later is an acquired rights in many places, the former can come over time.

Are you saying: our colleagues have performed poorly while WFH, and because of their poor performance, management is forcing RTO on everyone?

This is a free correction for over hiring force someone to pull the kids out of school and move across the country or lose severance.

Very much feel that sentiment.

I'm grinding to start a cooperative company with a non-abusive work philosophy.

I have respect for the people I collaborate with. It's easy. Yet so many managers and business owners rely on explicit abuse and manipulation... for what?

You are going to love law firms, then.

My bosses already don’t believe I need to collaborate closely with my coworkers in person, or they wouldn’t have shifted three quarters of my team’s headcount offshore.

The sole content of the RTO “collaboration” controversy as applied to these big global companies is whether it’s better to join Zoom calls from your desk in an open office, or from home. The answer to that is obvious to anyone who’s tried it.

Tech offices only work to the extent that everyone in them is wearing noise canceling headphones all the time - a technological simulation of not being there.

Oh no, if only it were possible to collaborate without being forced into an office! Hopefully we can invent some sort of technology for communicating asynchronously to make this possible.

lol, “entitlement”? Do you believe companies pay over $200k out of charity? They pay what they have to pay, and that $200k is artificially lowered by illegal backroom deals by the FAANG cartel.

You sound like a bitter contractor. And even if you aren’t, support your fellow proles.

> mentions "lies" but ...

That's not fair.

I didn't finish it, but they spent at least half the article pointing out deliberate misconceptions and misrepresentations of the reasons for going back to office. That is definitely lying, either repeating someone else's lie or making your own. They just used different words.

> Immature

> Throwing toys

Sheesh, the point is "It's hard and not useful for me - and likely hard and not useful for others". You may not find this convincing, but let's recall the main rhetorical mechanisms, all the way back to Aristotle: Pathos, Logos, Ethos.

Using Pathos (emotion, in this case sympathy) is a fine way of persuading. It didn't work for you, but it's not "immature" to point out physical, emotional limits when asked to do something.

> The title mentions "lies" but the main article doesn't use the word once.

> This is just someone angrily reacting to a frustrating situation, it's not a reasoned argument for the effectiveness of working from home.

I feel like the "fake positivity" and various arguments for supposedly better productivity or innovation (or even the claim that there is the sort of innovation that would better happen in person vs remotely, in a given environment) would fit the role of being described as lies.

At the same time, anyone calling for data is going to struggle to find an unbiased look at it: between corporations trying to equate hybrid work to a fully fledged alternative to being in the office all the time (and replace the idea of fully remote work), that hybrid model still having a certain amount of being present in person being set in stone (in a top down fashion) and in addition to some people just functioning better remotely or in office (the same as how some will thrive/be miserable with synchronous/asynchronous communication or the preference for various levels of social interaction), you'll struggle to find anything that is applicable across the board.

I think best anyone can do is not buy into others trying to make absolute claims one way or the other and just look at works best for them. I feel best working remotely and being in the office all the time would both take away some freedom from me and make me feel miserable. If anyone was trying to erase that with a plethora of claims that feel shallow or made up, then it'd surely be frustrating. And if that's the direction that the whole industry eventually goes, well, I guess I'll just be a somewhat more miserable employee then.

> An immature rant that doesn't make the point very well.

> This person is obviously frustrated by a much less understanding employer, but the article is written in such a childish way it's hard to be as sympathetic as it would if they were more carefully considered in their writing.

I disagree with both of these. The writing feels genuine and I don't think there's anything wrong with it.

The platitudes that executives give to justify RTO very obviously don’t add up. They’re smart enough to understand that. They know we’re smart enough to understand it. The repetition of these statements that everyone knows to be false takes on a life of its own. It’s a flex of dominance. The lies are the point.

> The title mentions "lies" but the main article doesn't use the word once.

The entire second paragraph (after a short intro paragraph) is about the lies, and it doesn’t really seem ambiguous.

That said, I agree that it comes across as an immature rant.

So what? Even if it isn't some well-reasoned whitepaper, there's nothing wrong with venting a little. It's possible (desirable, even) to be sympathetic towards people who haven't written a thesis defending themselves. Often those are the people who deserve sympathy the most.

(I also disagree that the author doesn't give good arguments, sure it doesn't mention the exact word "lies" but a good chunk of the article is in the same embedding space cluster.)

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Anyone younger than a boomer knows how to make friends, they don’t need office hostages for that.

You can have a separation of spaces within your home. I have a home office. The only time I go in there when I'm not working is if I left something there (and it's really nice that "swinging by the office to grab my earbuds" doesn't involve a commute).

As a result, I just don't think of that room as part of my home. I'm never tempted to go in there and use that room for something else. For the most part, it's as if that room only exists during the workday.

Skill issue. Newton did just fine in his home office.

In this economy?

Most can’t afford this in Europe.

Any data, bro? Or should we just take your word