It's not about productivity at all. These same companies were commissioning studies during Covid that told their analysts "look how productive our employees are now that they are working from home!"

It's about crushing labor.

WFH forces employers to compete. It gives a lot of power to employees, because they can apply for far more roles, work fewer hours, moonlight for multiple companies, etc, apply for other jobs during work hours, etc. These companies know that white collar workers are not fungible. Their intellectual workers are genuinely very difficult to replace and produce a lot of value.

For talent that isn't fungible, it's RTO. For talent that is fungible, offshoring.

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imcrs 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

For your comment about the turn towards authoritarianism, yeah, there's a reason every DEI program at every large corporation was pulled back within a few months, and it's not because the C suite all reads the same Musk tweets on X.

Employees started making demands of management to actually look at some... structural issues. Those demands had teeth because employees acted and organized as a bloc. Only a matter of time before other lines of questioning besides race and sex were explored at work.

Yeah.

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ChadNauseam an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> It's not about productivity at all.

> WFH forces employers to compete. It gives a lot of power to employees, because they can [...] work fewer hours, moonlight for multiple companies, etc

Probably "working fewer hours" and "moonlight for multiple companies" has negative effects on productivity that employers would like to avoid.

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imcrs an hour ago | parent [-]

I've already kind of made it clear here where I stand on this, but I gotta tell you, you really do sound a lot like management.

Do you really think your superstar programmers are well and truly doing intellectual work, the kind of work that produces business value, from the time they hit the coffee machine at 9AM to the time they grab their briefcase to go home at 5PM?

If you believe this, I think you might be interested in bringing the Bobs in to discuss making our T.P.S. reporting process more efficient. They have thoughts on coversheets.

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lukas099 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I’ll attempt a steelman and say, no, employees are not doing deep work from 9–5, but I could see being in an office 9–5 setting the stage for a lot of deep work to be done. Moonlighting for another company I could especially see as detrimental to focus at work.

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moscoe 3 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’m sorry management hurt you.

It’s not your fault.

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legostormtroopr 18 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't expect someone to do deep focused work from 9am to 5pm.

But at the same time, I don't expect them to spend their 9-to-5 working for another company at the same time.

As a founder, who respects the 9-to-5 and supports WFH, if I'm paying for 8 hours of work, I want 8 hours of output. Not 4 hours of output, and then you working 4 hours for another job.

If multi-jobbing becomes a thing, then WFH becomes untenable because at least in the office you can be monitored.

	▲	imcrs 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Do you pay your programmers hourly or on salary?