I've seen this from both sides, and I think there's about the same amount of bad-faith arguments on both sides. Now, line workers have less power here than the execs, so I'm inclined to side with the former group, but... the whole thing is a bit of a mess.

You can essentially divide IC employees into three categories. First, those who are about as productive from home as they are from the office, but are on average happier working remotely (no commute, etc). That's probably circa 80%. Second, those who are well-intentioned but fall behind over time, because they are less proactive about maintaining soft skills - communications, cross-functional relationship management, etc. That's the bulk of the rest. And third, there are people who actively exploit the situation in ways that the company is going to have an allergic reaction work (outsource their work to a dude in India, half-ass three jobs at competing companies, etc). That's typically <1%, but it's obviously a weird / scary new thing.

Further complicating this picture is the fact that line managers are not perfect either; there is an "out of sight, out of mind" aspect to it, and if a WFH worker is underperforming, it will on average take longer to address the problem, which has some ripple effects.

And on some level, the exec perspective is that the intangible gains in the happiness of the 80% that was previously willing to work for you in the office is not worth the horrors on the bottom end. So there is something resembling a credible argument for RTO.

At the same time, there is a degree of lazy thinking / bad faith on the exec side because the problems can be solved in other ways. You can retrain managers, you can improve performance management, you can monitor for certain types of grift, and you can accept some degree of added risk. In fact, you probably should if it keeps your top performers happier. But the overwhelming preference is for the easy choice of RTO.

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t-writescode 5 days ago | parent [-]

You missed the people more productive at home because they have less overall life stress, no pain of commute, disabilities which make commute painful or hard, etc.

And I suspect that’s a *LOT* more people than you’re giving credit.

To be very clear, I’m in that group, and probably so. Several engineers I’ve worked with are in that group, as well. I suspect it’s actually quite common in software.

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non_aligned 5 days ago | parent [-]

I honestly don't think this shows in the data. As a software engineer, I really want to believe it, but I think we're prone to confusing well-being with productivity. We feel better about the work, but if you try to quantify it in any imaginable way, it's not there. Not in launch velocity, not in the number of pull requests, not the number of design docs created, bugs fixed, etc...

Of course, all of these metrics are individually goofy, but in aggregate, they give you some approximation of productivity.

	▲	t-writescode 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		For what it's worth, my old job was quantifying it in meaningful ways and we were revealing, statistically, to be incredibly productive. And in my own analysis: PRs, test coverage, "story points finished", lines of code written, etc. I was more productive working from home on a reduced hour schedule than I had been working on a strict, high-hours one, too.
	▲	wiseowise 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If you are delivering same output while being happier that’s by definition increased productivity.