> Before COVID-19 sent one-third of the global workforce home, the Melbourne property surveyor that employs drone operator Nicholas Coomber called its 180-strong staff into the office every day at 9 a.m. to hand out assignments.
> Now that they work from home, the surveyors travel straight to the field as early as 7.30 a.m., enabling Coomber to pick up his children from daycare earlier than before the pandemic.
The example here seems like a particularly stupid (from the company POV, even) place to put an in-office mandate. Clearly much of the actual work was never happening in the office anyway.
Overall what the article describes seems pretty similar to what's happening in a lot of companies in the US (and globally, as the article notes), though with more unions involved than in the US. Bosses are much more likely to want 5 days in the office than employees, negotiation over how many days, etc. A lot of work certainly doesn't need 5 days a week in office.
Not just the housing situation. The biggest contribution, by far, to mitigate the climate change crisis, would be to let your employees work remote. Commuting adds a ton of waste to the environment, no matter how energy efficient you get. Even if you go 100% ev, particulates are never going away,directly/indirectly killing 100k+ people annually in the US alone.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/07/elect...
In smaller towns utilization for things like restaurants, mechanics, etc is usually much lower in big cities. The amount of time spent waiting because shit was full was a big shock to me when I moved to a very large city.
So if everyone with a job that's possible to do remotely distributed themselves across the country, I think that would actually result in more people, proportionally, in in-person service-industry jobs, since each employee of those businesses would be serving fewer other people per day. (Which would be less stressful for a lot of people, probably! But it's very short-sighted to think anything like "100% work from home" is realistic for that many people.)
But I'm also not convinced by the main claim, here. Bigger, denser cities are more expensive. That's because they're more in demand. Some of that is "because that's where the jobs are." But a lot of that is things like weather, entertainment, shopping, availability of services... so I think you also open up the possibility of someone who was working in-person for an employer in Tulsa, say, now being able to move to Dallas instead for more free-time options.
In the last hundred years in the US the most effective ways of distributing people were two things: weather (sun belt vs cold-ass winters) and in-person work that got geographically distributed for big-govt/strategic reasons (e.g. let's make sure our new defense project is going to employ people in as many states as possible to get votes, or let's spread out our industry to be more robust against Soviet bombs, etc).
Big cities are built for many ppl. Allowing 100% remote work makes it possible to move to smaller towns/cities, which are not prepared for the extra intake.
Many towns struggle with this exact issue in Australia. You can view it as just a temporal issue as it will settle on the long term. But on the short term many of the locals can not afford to live in the town they grew up and the same goes for their children too.
> we could actually improve the housing situation across the country
The benefit of concentrating people together is that it also concentrates capital, which makes people rich, which allows them to do things like buy expensive homes.
Spread people around and the sticker price will be lower, but the capacity to buy the homes will be reduced commensurately.
> right to work 100% from home is what really makes sense
*for some particular jobs
That bit is always ignored. We're arguing for a right, but that right can only possibly apply to a small subset of the entire workplace.
There will never be remote gas station attendants. There will never be remote mechanics. There will never be remote construction contractors. There will never be remote warehouse receiving clerks.
So this can't possibly be a right. Rights apply to humankind, regardless of where you exist or your job situation.
So... what people are arguing for is a privilege, for some particular industries, and protected by government regulation.
Seems like that's just never going to happen. Instead, people need to negotiate for remote work. And if an employer wants you to go to an office in exchange for a paycheck, well, get over it or find somewhere else to work.
> The example here seems like a particularly stupid (from the company POV, even) place to put an in-office mandate.
Doubly or triply so considering the travel times to their field sites, just look at the timeframe differences quoted for that office meeting vs when he leaves for the survey site otherwise. What an incredible gain in productivity!
If companies are going to force people to be in the office, then the government should mandate that commute time is included in office hours.
That means if you want me in the office, I will leave my house at 9AM, if you want me to be close to the office, then increase my pay and I will move closer.
> the government should mandate that commute time is included in office hours.
This is would have a bunch of perverse outcomes you probably haven’t considered. Employers would immediately start to consider the commute times of candidates before hiring them. Longer commute times is a feature of cheaper housing, so that would correlate to employers discriminating against candidates of lower socioeconomic standing. Which would in turn correlate to discrimination against the ethnic groups that are over represented in those lower socioeconomic groups.
It’s basically only a good idea if you’re trying to intentionally constrain social mobility.
Suppose I really like driving. Under such a policy, I might be inclined to move 4 hours one-way from the office and just listen to podcasts and drive around all day.
(I don't actually want to do this, but when writing government policies, you have to consider that some people will be aggressively adversarial if it suits them.)
> the government should mandate that commute time is included in office hours.
I think a strong case can be made for this. For those of us lucky enough to be able to negotiate salaries, we absolutely should be pricing that time into the rates we're negotiating for.
Bigger picture, I've always thought it was insane that we talk about "40 hour workweeks" as if they exist. Realistically, the time it takes me to commute is part of my workday. If my commute takes an hour each way, then I'm working a 50 hour workweek.
Since when has going to the office been a matter of forcing people? Until covid hit (just two years ago?) almost everyone did. So how did this turn into forcing anyone to do anything different?
EDIT: To be clear. I mean "forcing people to do anything different". Going into the office was normal for almost everyone.
I have no objection to commuting counting as paid time - at the very least, the fact that in the US even things like mandatory security processes don't count is absurd - but for all of us "lucky" enough to be "exempt" in the US... blah.
My dad worked the latter half of his career this way. He came in late and left early. But he was good enough / indispensable enough that he got away with it.
I want to be in the office some. Three years of trying to work on complex systems/problems/concepts purely over video calls is quite enough of that.
But it doesn't need to be every day, and I also have non-work obligations that are often far easier to accomplish during the week if there's some flexible time.
I feel the same, but I am still not going to do the commute ever again. It is much easier to do meals and start automated tasks (like a load of laundry) during a break. It is nice to have time in the evening to do things so I can actually use the weekends for myself.
I've met a few who don't really like remote meetings so prefer to have their employees available to talk in person, even if they themselves aren't in the office full time.
personally I wouldn't work from an office so would basically skip on applying to those places but that is the excuse I've heard most often
More realistically many only know "asses in seats" as a metric for their employees working.
I'm migrating to a mixed mode. And glad to be able to.
One of the nagging questions/worries I have about the increase in WFH is greener employees. I've entertained summer interns for the last 11 years at work. And I've tried to help some older but newer-to-programming peers.
I can take "experienced" contractors/helpers up to speed in one of the many domains I have to work in pretty quick. Share some code. Some chats/emails. Couple desktop shares, it's usually enough to bootstrap an ongoing remote conversation.
With younger/newer/greener people, I have found this to be nigh impossible though. I don't like the optics of "you need to get some experience before you can work from home" and it also begs the question "who's going to show up in office to do the mentoring." I do see this as a problem that's not getting addressed.
As a concrete example: getting an intern’s corporate proxy set up for a build system over video chat can be quite difficult. If they change the system proxy settings or change networks, the screen share goes out. You don’t face these day 0 mentoring issues in person.
Counterpoint: I work at a major tech company and I feel like our interns have been more productive since covid 19. It's forced them to establish a more diverse network of people to ask help from. Maybe it's harder for them, but they don't seemed handicapped by it at all.
The whole "juniors need easy help and struggle to get it themselves" seems like an artificially concocted narrative to me.
The last place I worked had full WFH and used Tuple (not affiliated) and it worked great for ramp-up and onboarding.
It basically lets you pair program where you and a remote person can control your computer (or theirs) more or less completely and seamlessly. There are competing products too, but that was the nicest I've used.
I tried it at my new job with a colleague in Brazil (I'm in US) and the performance was awful as it seemed to be routing it through the VPN for some reason.
My point is though, good pair programming software might be the solution. Zoom is inadequate in my professional opinion, though it's almost viable. Knowing how much better it could be it falls short.
For the mentoring experiences I've had, being able to observe the newer person allows me to make observations that can help them a lot. I don't need to tell more experienced people how to use their tools (shortcuts, etc) to be 10x happier. But newer employees would never know to ask that, and it's hard to pick up on those nuanced details without having them sitting across the bullpen, periodically sitting next to them, going to the whiteboard, etc.
Aside: I sometimes see stuff like "employees are 10% less productive from home." [0]
However that's somewhat misleading, the "productivity" does NOT mean physics-style efficiency of human effort to create value and fight entropy... No, it's based on what employers had to spend. So slaves that only produce a quarter as much per day are technically "more productive."
This matters because employers that require unnecessary time/fuel for commutes typically don't pay for it. Out of tradition and negotiating-power, those costs are usually shoved off onto employees and are not being tracked.
If commuting to the office was compensated, the "productivity" differences with work-from-home would be dramatically flipped.
Basing the decision on a 10% productivity change is insulting when you consider that the average commute is 11.5% of an 8 hour work day (2019 numbers, [1]).
If employers were in fact willing to swing major policy and spending decisions based on +/- 10% knowledge worker efficiency, offices would look very different.
Quite a few companies are somewhat reasonable and steering towards a hybrid model where people come in 1-3 days a week.
The unexplored outcome of hybrid is that there's no such thing as hybrid.
In a hybrid model, you come into the office and find people sitting in chairs with a headphone on. Because they're just as much in calls as they were at home. Because part of the meeting participants on any given day is not there.
Hence, this nice physical face-to-face meeting, a supposed benefit of returning to the office, does not materialize.
Well, perhaps you'll at least do some ad-hoc brainstorming with your colleague at the coffee machine. Sure, but you need to put the outcome of that in writing...for the people that are not there.
Hence, this mode of virtual working cannot be undone. You can't do a "little" virtual working. When you come into the office you largely continue to work as if from home. Perhaps without the sweatpants.
For the record, I'm not anti-office. I enjoy the socializing, lunch walks, etc. And in our increasingly touchless home-based society, it's not that bad of a deal to get out of the house for 2 or 3 days a week. Finally, we should empathize with juniors. In my experience, remote mentoring is a piss poor substitute for the real thing.
That's an exaggeration. You can actually walk to a person, knock, and get facetime in the office. Instead of zoom-time which is arguably worse.
The issue of which-3-days is real though.
A bigger issue is the asymmetry in the system - new people get a net benefit from facetime and mentoring. Experienced employees get net loss. It's distraction, unproductive time for your own projects, unrecognized at review time.
And since experienced employees have more clout, mentoring can become a negligible part of the new employees experience. Even at companies that claim to have made a system of mentoring, stories abound of failures ('mentors' that ignore questions or requests for meeting)
Hybrid is not reasonable. Hybrid means having to maintain a home office and also remain within commuting distance. It is the worst of both worlds. Even the people who choose to work every day in office are complaining: they can’t find a desk now. It’s been a hilarious shitshow that I get to watch remotely.
> Because part of the meeting participants on any given day is not there.
That's not the only possible "hybrid" model though. The one where multiple large companies (or company-like divisions) are time-sharing the same facility, so that for any workday it's either 100% of the group present or 0% of the group present.
I'm not saying it'll prove practical or popular, but it does avoid the "there's always somebody missing from the meeting" issue.
> In my experience, remote mentoring is a piss poor substitute for the real thing.
This is very true. Probably the biggest contributor to my career were the first two internships I have had. I can't imagine having them done virtually over Slack and Zoom and still having the same impact and connection, it would be devoid of an essential sense of belonging and inspiration.
> Hence, this nice physical face-to-face meeting, a supposed benefit of returning to the office, does not materialize.
It does in my experience. 1 on 1s and small meetings often do have all of the attendees present, especially when in-office days are designated. Some meetings do have people attending virtually, but a good conference room setup with large screens and good interfaces for conferencing make it more comfortable than being stuck in front of your computer. Regardless, you are in the room with many people face-to-face, and you can discuss things with them after the meeting and build relationships.
I see your point, because sometimes I have to find a room in the office just to have a 1:1 virtually, which arguably is more of a hassle than just taking the call at home. But I do find that hybrid works well overall in my experience, and the interpersonal benefits are large even though not everyone is in the office at the same time.
One line I can't square with mandatory returns to office is that the same orgs and agencies requiring employees in office are also waving big flags about going green and fighting climate change.
Has anyone seen a justification for the disconnect?
Climate change is a luxury belief that people wave to get federal funding or social points. Living a true low-emissions lifestyle (not one where you consume exactly as much as you did before except EVs instead of gas cars) is a serious handicap in the modern economy.
Easy. It is all about making your life poorer. The wealthy will continue to drive and fly but you and me will have to walk from the sleeping pod to the working pod. You don't see the WEF walking to Davos do you?
> One line I can't square with mandatory returns to office is that the same orgs and agencies requiring employees in office are also waving big flags about going green and fighting climate change. Has anyone seen a justification for the disconnect?
The type of argument
> It's hypocritical that they [group A] are the ones doing [some thing] but at the same time also being the ones [group B] doing [another thing]
with groups A and B being independent of each other often irks me. Who says they are actually the same people? What is this line of thought called, that must be a named fallacy of some kind.
Not directly commenting on the topic here, but headlines of the form "X fight for the right to Y" seem to presuppose that there is such a moral right, and they are fighting just to bring it into legal recognition. When the question really starts with whether such a moral right exists or not, whether Y should be a legal right.
The problem with presuppositions is that they are preserved under negation. Whether you say you are for or against right Y, it seems that you presuppose that right Y exists in some capacity. But that's not what people who are "against" would want to assume, as they are probably denying it.
Another way to say is "They don't already have that right?". Can't they already get/negotiate work-from-home jobs voluntarily with other equally free people?
I'm not arguing against you, but you're giving the technical, logical explanation to a purposely a-technical and a-logical claim. The vast majority of people (not the ones who think like you or me) simply call the use of force against other people in order to get what they want (the social order they want, etc) "rights", whatever the moral implications (or even practical consequences).
I’ve worked at home my whole career. First by necessity and then by choice. If I happened to live in the same city as my job, I’d be happy to come in one or two days a week. But I’d never accept having to come into the office every day. I hate driving in traffic and I don’t get much done in the office.
Working remote has let me live and travel wherever I want. I’m planning a three to six month working vacation to Asia / Australia for near the end of the year. I currently live in a cheap cost of living location, with extremely low taxes, near family, and work in a high salary location. Best of all worlds.
I wish that "working remote" translated into "live and travel wherever I want" for everyone.
So many companies now have policies that restrict where you work from for tax/payroll purposes, or because they don't want employees working in country where the employee doesn't have the proper visa (even if working for a US company).
what the resistance to WFH makes explicit is that when companies hire workers they don't really conceive of it as buying their labour, they conceive of it as taking control of them for eight hours and dictating how they have to behave.
That's the real reason why WFH faces so much resistance. When people are done with their work they can just play with their kid or do what they want, and it becomes obvious how much, using Foucault's analogy, of a prison aimed to discipline the office is.
I also think it shows how insufficient some management is. They coast on "butt in seats" and call it management. Being forced to actually monitor and assess work is a chore they previously skipped. Likewise ensuring that staff are properly utilized is another chore often skipped and them being remote forces you to acknowledge and confront this reality.
That's not the reason. Very few people who can work from home can be "done with their work".
As far as I can tell the real reasons are some combination of:
* Working physically next to people generally is more efficient. Of course there are some people like Knuth who need to be undisturbed for 6 hours, but for most people the ease of communicating in the real world is a big time saver. It really is.
* The benefit of face to face meetings is bigger the more meetings you have and the more talking to people your job involves. Guess how many meetings the people making these decisions have...
* You're less likely to spend time doing house chores and whatever. I generally do a solid day's work when WFH but even I sometimes just mow the lawn or whatever. If I was at work I would probably just read HN on my phone instead but I obviously hide that better. So this isn't a good reason IMO but it is a reason.
* Companies don't like paying for fancy offices that nobody is using.
* It isn't the company that pays for the time and cost of your commute, so to them that is not a downside.
I wouldn't ever work for a company that didn't let me WFH again. The lack of commute is just too good.
But I do understand the real reasons why high up managers don't like it.
I would say yes, but I'm not sure I could articulate my argument very well. I don't think that they explicitly care about it, i.e. "control of our employee is $x which we accept as a cost of doing business". I think it's more indirect, more secondary, like it's a result of other more surface-level concerns. For example, "we need employees in the office so that we can make sure they are working so that we are ensuring we get our money's worth", which possibly has effects that mirror the 'nebulous notion of control' we're talking about. I think your comment is correct in a literal sense. Doubtful anyone is sitting at the top of a tower rubbing their hands together, scheming, trying to establish/maintain prison-like employment conditions.
Readit News
> Now that they work from home, the surveyors travel straight to the field as early as 7.30 a.m., enabling Coomber to pick up his children from daycare earlier than before the pandemic.
The example here seems like a particularly stupid (from the company POV, even) place to put an in-office mandate. Clearly much of the actual work was never happening in the office anyway.
Overall what the article describes seems pretty similar to what's happening in a lot of companies in the US (and globally, as the article notes), though with more unions involved than in the US. Bosses are much more likely to want 5 days in the office than employees, negotiation over how many days, etc. A lot of work certainly doesn't need 5 days a week in office.
This way, we could actually improve the housing situation across the country, because otherwise, it all concentrates in the biggest cities.
So if everyone with a job that's possible to do remotely distributed themselves across the country, I think that would actually result in more people, proportionally, in in-person service-industry jobs, since each employee of those businesses would be serving fewer other people per day. (Which would be less stressful for a lot of people, probably! But it's very short-sighted to think anything like "100% work from home" is realistic for that many people.)
But I'm also not convinced by the main claim, here. Bigger, denser cities are more expensive. That's because they're more in demand. Some of that is "because that's where the jobs are." But a lot of that is things like weather, entertainment, shopping, availability of services... so I think you also open up the possibility of someone who was working in-person for an employer in Tulsa, say, now being able to move to Dallas instead for more free-time options.
In the last hundred years in the US the most effective ways of distributing people were two things: weather (sun belt vs cold-ass winters) and in-person work that got geographically distributed for big-govt/strategic reasons (e.g. let's make sure our new defense project is going to employ people in as many states as possible to get votes, or let's spread out our industry to be more robust against Soviet bombs, etc).
Big cities are built for many ppl. Allowing 100% remote work makes it possible to move to smaller towns/cities, which are not prepared for the extra intake.
Many towns struggle with this exact issue in Australia. You can view it as just a temporal issue as it will settle on the long term. But on the short term many of the locals can not afford to live in the town they grew up and the same goes for their children too.
The benefit of concentrating people together is that it also concentrates capital, which makes people rich, which allows them to do things like buy expensive homes.
Spread people around and the sticker price will be lower, but the capacity to buy the homes will be reduced commensurately.
Conversely, companies will sometimes locate themselves in suburbs just to make it harder for employees to leave. IIRC that's why IBM is in Armonk.
Less concentrated human habitation is not without cost…
When people are allowed to live wherever they want they choose the biggest, best, most expensive cities.
*for some particular jobs
That bit is always ignored. We're arguing for a right, but that right can only possibly apply to a small subset of the entire workplace.
There will never be remote gas station attendants. There will never be remote mechanics. There will never be remote construction contractors. There will never be remote warehouse receiving clerks.
So this can't possibly be a right. Rights apply to humankind, regardless of where you exist or your job situation.
So... what people are arguing for is a privilege, for some particular industries, and protected by government regulation.
Seems like that's just never going to happen. Instead, people need to negotiate for remote work. And if an employer wants you to go to an office in exchange for a paycheck, well, get over it or find somewhere else to work.
Doubly or triply so considering the travel times to their field sites, just look at the timeframe differences quoted for that office meeting vs when he leaves for the survey site otherwise. What an incredible gain in productivity!
That means if you want me in the office, I will leave my house at 9AM, if you want me to be close to the office, then increase my pay and I will move closer.
This is would have a bunch of perverse outcomes you probably haven’t considered. Employers would immediately start to consider the commute times of candidates before hiring them. Longer commute times is a feature of cheaper housing, so that would correlate to employers discriminating against candidates of lower socioeconomic standing. Which would in turn correlate to discrimination against the ethnic groups that are over represented in those lower socioeconomic groups.
It’s basically only a good idea if you’re trying to intentionally constrain social mobility.
(I don't actually want to do this, but when writing government policies, you have to consider that some people will be aggressively adversarial if it suits them.)
I think a strong case can be made for this. For those of us lucky enough to be able to negotiate salaries, we absolutely should be pricing that time into the rates we're negotiating for.
Bigger picture, I've always thought it was insane that we talk about "40 hour workweeks" as if they exist. Realistically, the time it takes me to commute is part of my workday. If my commute takes an hour each way, then I'm working a 50 hour workweek.
EDIT: To be clear. I mean "forcing people to do anything different". Going into the office was normal for almost everyone.
The same is true for most office jobs. It might appear to happen in the office, but that's because computers and desks are in the office.
Also I hate being at home. Nothing good ever happens there.
But it doesn't need to be every day, and I also have non-work obligations that are often far easier to accomplish during the week if there's some flexible time.
It seems that you have some issues going on, no need to drag your colleagues into that.
I'm truly sorry to hear that. :-\
personally I wouldn't work from an office so would basically skip on applying to those places but that is the excuse I've heard most often
More realistically many only know "asses in seats" as a metric for their employees working.
One of the nagging questions/worries I have about the increase in WFH is greener employees. I've entertained summer interns for the last 11 years at work. And I've tried to help some older but newer-to-programming peers.
I can take "experienced" contractors/helpers up to speed in one of the many domains I have to work in pretty quick. Share some code. Some chats/emails. Couple desktop shares, it's usually enough to bootstrap an ongoing remote conversation.
With younger/newer/greener people, I have found this to be nigh impossible though. I don't like the optics of "you need to get some experience before you can work from home" and it also begs the question "who's going to show up in office to do the mentoring." I do see this as a problem that's not getting addressed.
The whole "juniors need easy help and struggle to get it themselves" seems like an artificially concocted narrative to me.
Edit: fixed a word
It basically lets you pair program where you and a remote person can control your computer (or theirs) more or less completely and seamlessly. There are competing products too, but that was the nicest I've used.
I tried it at my new job with a colleague in Brazil (I'm in US) and the performance was awful as it seemed to be routing it through the VPN for some reason.
My point is though, good pair programming software might be the solution. Zoom is inadequate in my professional opinion, though it's almost viable. Knowing how much better it could be it falls short.
Dead Comment
However that's somewhat misleading, the "productivity" does NOT mean physics-style efficiency of human effort to create value and fight entropy... No, it's based on what employers had to spend. So slaves that only produce a quarter as much per day are technically "more productive."
This matters because employers that require unnecessary time/fuel for commutes typically don't pay for it. Out of tradition and negotiating-power, those costs are usually shoved off onto employees and are not being tracked.
If commuting to the office was compensated, the "productivity" differences with work-from-home would be dramatically flipped.
[0] Example: https://fortune.com/2023/07/06/remote-workers-less-productiv...
[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-...
God I hate Thursdays at the office, too many meetings, day broken in a bajillion pieces, and I can't get anything done.
The unexplored outcome of hybrid is that there's no such thing as hybrid.
In a hybrid model, you come into the office and find people sitting in chairs with a headphone on. Because they're just as much in calls as they were at home. Because part of the meeting participants on any given day is not there.
Hence, this nice physical face-to-face meeting, a supposed benefit of returning to the office, does not materialize.
Well, perhaps you'll at least do some ad-hoc brainstorming with your colleague at the coffee machine. Sure, but you need to put the outcome of that in writing...for the people that are not there.
Hence, this mode of virtual working cannot be undone. You can't do a "little" virtual working. When you come into the office you largely continue to work as if from home. Perhaps without the sweatpants.
For the record, I'm not anti-office. I enjoy the socializing, lunch walks, etc. And in our increasingly touchless home-based society, it's not that bad of a deal to get out of the house for 2 or 3 days a week. Finally, we should empathize with juniors. In my experience, remote mentoring is a piss poor substitute for the real thing.
The issue of which-3-days is real though.
A bigger issue is the asymmetry in the system - new people get a net benefit from facetime and mentoring. Experienced employees get net loss. It's distraction, unproductive time for your own projects, unrecognized at review time.
And since experienced employees have more clout, mentoring can become a negligible part of the new employees experience. Even at companies that claim to have made a system of mentoring, stories abound of failures ('mentors' that ignore questions or requests for meeting)
That's not the only possible "hybrid" model though. The one where multiple large companies (or company-like divisions) are time-sharing the same facility, so that for any workday it's either 100% of the group present or 0% of the group present.
I'm not saying it'll prove practical or popular, but it does avoid the "there's always somebody missing from the meeting" issue.
This is very true. Probably the biggest contributor to my career were the first two internships I have had. I can't imagine having them done virtually over Slack and Zoom and still having the same impact and connection, it would be devoid of an essential sense of belonging and inspiration.
It does in my experience. 1 on 1s and small meetings often do have all of the attendees present, especially when in-office days are designated. Some meetings do have people attending virtually, but a good conference room setup with large screens and good interfaces for conferencing make it more comfortable than being stuck in front of your computer. Regardless, you are in the room with many people face-to-face, and you can discuss things with them after the meeting and build relationships.
I see your point, because sometimes I have to find a room in the office just to have a 1:1 virtually, which arguably is more of a hassle than just taking the call at home. But I do find that hybrid works well overall in my experience, and the interpersonal benefits are large even though not everyone is in the office at the same time.
With the penalty of wasted time on commuting.
The type of argument
> It's hypocritical that they [group A] are the ones doing [some thing] but at the same time also being the ones [group B] doing [another thing]
with groups A and B being independent of each other often irks me. Who says they are actually the same people? What is this line of thought called, that must be a named fallacy of some kind.
The problem with presuppositions is that they are preserved under negation. Whether you say you are for or against right Y, it seems that you presuppose that right Y exists in some capacity. But that's not what people who are "against" would want to assume, as they are probably denying it.
I'm not arguing against you, but you're giving the technical, logical explanation to a purposely a-technical and a-logical claim. The vast majority of people (not the ones who think like you or me) simply call the use of force against other people in order to get what they want (the social order they want, etc) "rights", whatever the moral implications (or even practical consequences).
Working remote has let me live and travel wherever I want. I’m planning a three to six month working vacation to Asia / Australia for near the end of the year. I currently live in a cheap cost of living location, with extremely low taxes, near family, and work in a high salary location. Best of all worlds.
So many companies now have policies that restrict where you work from for tax/payroll purposes, or because they don't want employees working in country where the employee doesn't have the proper visa (even if working for a US company).
That's the real reason why WFH faces so much resistance. When people are done with their work they can just play with their kid or do what they want, and it becomes obvious how much, using Foucault's analogy, of a prison aimed to discipline the office is.
As far as I can tell the real reasons are some combination of:
* Working physically next to people generally is more efficient. Of course there are some people like Knuth who need to be undisturbed for 6 hours, but for most people the ease of communicating in the real world is a big time saver. It really is.
* The benefit of face to face meetings is bigger the more meetings you have and the more talking to people your job involves. Guess how many meetings the people making these decisions have...
* You're less likely to spend time doing house chores and whatever. I generally do a solid day's work when WFH but even I sometimes just mow the lawn or whatever. If I was at work I would probably just read HN on my phone instead but I obviously hide that better. So this isn't a good reason IMO but it is a reason.
* Companies don't like paying for fancy offices that nobody is using.
* It isn't the company that pays for the time and cost of your commute, so to them that is not a downside.
I wouldn't ever work for a company that didn't let me WFH again. The lack of commute is just too good.
But I do understand the real reasons why high up managers don't like it.
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No one is forcing them to? That sounds like an argument for WFH, not against.