People job hopping when they get past 'junior' status is what seems to have caused the reluctance to hire juniors, especially combined with the surge of 'opportunists' who started getting comp-sci degrees when it became obvious that it was the easiest way to earn a comfortable living. The job-hoppers made it obvious that it was just cheaper and faster to hire intermediate and senior developers (rather than investing in juniors to learn the basics, then have to pay them to stay). The opportunists further reduced the value proposition of developers to employers as many job-seekers (particularly juniors) have little passion or aptitude for the job, and will never be 'stellar'.

What do you mean by investing though? I think these days junior people have to just invest in themselves and learn by working right? It’s also hard for companies or managers to spend more on them when they can leave at any time, which means all that effort training them will just benefit some other employee.

I’ve noticed younger generations are especially a lot less loyal, probably in response to abusive and exploitative employers and horror stories. But the downside is if employees have less loyalty themselves, then even caring companies and managers cannot justify being loyal to them. They end up losing that time invested and learn a hard lesson.

There are a few factors at work, including:

1) A lot of executive type work _is_ easier in person... and those executives forget that their work might not be representative of _other_ roles within their own org, and they might actually be the outlier.

2) A lot of managers don't know how to manage by looking at output. We see this not just with WFH, but also with multi-location teams, where some managers simply can't do it competently.

3) Many managers do, in fact, get some satisfaction from having that sort of power over their workers.

4) Many executives like having an office that is a bit of a tribute to the company (and therefore their) power. And this falls apart if the office is empty.

That's not necessarily true, though. For instance, real estate investors have a lot to lose from vacant office space and therefore would benefit from RTO.

I personally find that I enjoy in person collaboration but that should not mean we should universally force every team to come back to the office.

There’s some research that suggests WFH is less efficient per hour worked, but people work more hours that they would have otherwise wasted commuting so it’s a wash.

That said, the motivations of managers are seldom aligned with the interests of the business. There is such a thing as ego trips. Also, mediocre or insecure managers will rely more on the crutch of face time.

> They seem to imply that business owners just want employees to suffer as a goal in itself.

No, it’s more that they want to steal from employees by not paying for all the time lost to commuting and the impact of living near a few pricey locations. That theft is suffering.

> If being in the office conforms to the interest of the capital class, it implies that WFH is inherently less efficient.

Not quite. It implies it affords the working class more power than the capital class is comfortable with.

The interests of the capital class are not necessarily aligned with efficient allocation of capital. Note this is far from saying they want employees to suffer, but they install inefficient policies over them.

"If being in the office conforms to the interest of the capital class, it implies that WFH is inherently less efficient"

only if the capital class is solely motivated by efficiency. I think this is trivially demonstrable to be not the case.

The capital class's primary interest is self-preservation - both of their capital, of course, but also preserving their place in the pecking order. And they'll spend a LOT of the former to maintain the latter because the latter is how they got the former.

Through that lens, GP's point is perfectly coherent.

"They seem to imply that business owners just want employees to suffer as a goal in itself."

Have you met... people? Yes there are literally many owners who do want employees to suffer. Or, perhaps worse, will tolerate tremendous amounts of suffering in the pursuit of minor other gains. (Amazon pee bottles come to mind.) It would somehow be a comforting kind of moustache-twirling comic book evil to say they just want people to suffer. Another to say they simply don't value human happiness (or lack of suffering) enough to not trade large amounts of it for small things they do care about.

I had a boss who was only willing to hire non-whites because he could inflict undesirable work on them, leaving more desirable work for the white employees.

I just want to end this by remarking that this presumption of owners being perfectly optimal, morally clean agents of free markets is absurd and honestly disgusting to bring to an argument.

> This is one of those things that I often find strange with work from home advocates. They seem to imply that business owners just want employees to suffer as a goal in itself.

I've worked remote a lot and I'm a big fan. I find it hard to discuss WFH online because it's so hard to find people willing to discuss it honestly, including the challenges. The way it's talked about here and on sites like Reddit is as if WFH is perfect, works for everyone, and the only reason we can't have more of it is because companies are hell-bent on doing things against their self interests.

I'm in another forum where we have a subforum for managers to talk, and remote work problems are a perennial topic. A lot of people really don't handle it well. There are even managers in the group who would prefer to work from home, but they've moved their teams into the office at least 2-3 days per week because their 5 day WFH experiments didn't go well.

It's a hard topic. I find myself holding back from discussing it because anything other than 100% pro-WFH anti-manager comments will get a lot of drive-by downvotes.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc...

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In my experience, investors push hard to go in office when fundraising

RTO is primarily pushed by the capitalist class, and managers are just stuck in the middle. No good manager wants pissed off employees, but managers who push back on the capitalist class do not stay managers long.

Managers, like police and prosecutors, are enforcers for the capitalist class. This is why they are not part of the working class. Managers do the job of squeezing surplus value from workers, rather than producing real Value themselves. Relationship to capital determines class.