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It’s not about productivity.
It’s about control.
Guess who gets to work in private offices instead of the “productivity enhancing” open offices!
This point i don’t get…in all my jobs, team leads, department managers and basically all management level employees are sitting in the same open office as everyone else. I have never been somewhere where this is not the case. Is this a predominantly American thing?
There’s at least one time traveler in this picture
evryone look irritated getting randomly photographed
I don’t overthink people’s expressions on trains, nor do I think we should be taking pics of people who look upset because they look upset.
Humans have more worth and potential in life than being subjected to a soul crushing machine that drains the light from their eyes for their entire lives. We aren’t free.
Everyone here already looks like they want to go home, hah.
They don’t care about this part at all. This is your time. It’s your fault for not being rich.
Trains are a much more desirable way to get to work than driving is.
Environmentally, absolutely…personally? I absolutely fucking hate using public transport. I’d take 90min of sitting still in traffic alone in my car over bumping and griding with random strangers for 90min on a train any day.
If they’re really, really good.
Here in Munich, our public transport is much better than any American city, but I still hate taking the train in summer. AC either does not exist or is far too weak. Taking the car takes 40, maybe 50 minutes, the train 1h25min. I still take the train, mind you, but it’s so much more exhausting than the car…
I have to mention my daily commute is between two cities outside Munich.
I’m counting down the months until my work relocates to our new head office. I can say goodbye to the 35-75 minute commute (each way), and have a reliable ~60min train ride.
Sure it might take longer, overall - but I’ll be able to relax by reading a book, taking a nap or playing a game. I’d much rather that than deal with the anxiety of bumper-to-bumper traffic in a sea of SUVs filled with inattentive drivers.
I literally drive past at least one accident every day on my way to work. The Monash Highway in Victoria, IYKYK.
taking a nap
Well, I see you don’t live in America lol.
That highway is in Melbourne, Australia. I fell asleep on a train in Australia once as a kid and for some reason had my shoes off. When I put them back on I crushed a cockroach that had snuck inside. As long as you check your shoes before putting them on, you should be just fine taking a nap on an Australian train.
TBH I have also fallen asleep on the NYC subway and the worst thing that happened was I missed my stop and accidentally went super far in the wrong direction
It really is the least talked about benefit to public transport, yet is so significant. Sure you can’t do too much but you can watch a show/movie, play a game, read, write, draw or even do your taxes and shop from your phone and laptop.
Certainly can’t do that driving around. And it let’s you relax and change from work mode to home mode. Even if you have to do a little drive to and from the station.
Plus like you mentioned, less chance of delays and being involved in accidents. Win win win win.
Never thought I’d find myself in agreement with The Dark Lord, yet here I am…
I always try to argue this when people say they’d rather drive to commute.
When you drive both you and your employer lose time. When you take a train you keep your time in a way.
White shirt guy maybe, probably either at making you extremely mediocre coffee (looks too straight to be a good barista) or doing something like the ux design for the app interface to a microchip that doesnt let your dog love you without microtransactions. The owners are lobbying for it to be mandatory, and all dogs without it will be liquidated by 2030. The app is spyware written by a large language model, and only sometimes works. Iphone only.
Tan jacket lady maaaaaaaybe.
Black+white checkered shirt guy is a cop, he’s already at work. He’ll be very productive later, already planning on attending the protest.
That guy in white with air pods looks like he’s going to be at 110% at prompt engineering and LinkedIn engagement.
Surely he’d be more productive if he got the LLM to do the prompt engineering for him?
He’s writing a LinkedIn post on this exact matter as we speak, on how he LLMed away his own position for the greater good a.k.a. The company.
Yep! Who else would set their bag on the floor of a metro, lol.
The whole “return to office” thing is a cocktail of like… “Feelings Driven Leadership” and “The Cruelty is the Point”. Oh, and “I’m incompetent so everyone else must be incompetent in the same way, too.”
Many managers make decisions based purely on feelings. You can show them data but they don’t care. They feel like being in-office is better. And maybe, maybe, it is, on some metrics. Are those metrics better for workers? Probably not.
And the cruelty? Well, as others have said, some people get off on having power over others.
The last point, there are some people who just can’t manage themselves so they seem to think no one else can, either. Like someone the other day was saying he can’t work from home because he’ll just play xbox. To which I respond, from the depths of my soul, fuck off. Grow up and stop making everyone else around you suffer because you’re an incompetent, unmedicated, shit. You can go into the office if you have to. Don’t make everyone else suffer a pay cut too because you’re trash tier at self control.
You’re forgetting the whole…" I invested entirely too much in corporate real estate".
When there’s instability in the market a lot of fortune 500 corporations will start investing in corporate real estate as a “safe bet” to hedge more risky investments.
Skyscrapers and large office spaces are on paper horrible investments and have an awful time filling enough vacancies to offset their upkeep. The only thing that makes them a “safe” investment is that every company uses them as a way to bank equity. If those same companies pulled the rug from under themselves they would all lose that safe equity piggy bank.
Skyscrapers and large office spaces are on paper horrible investments and have an awful time filling enough vacancies to offset their upkeep. The only thing that makes them a “safe” investment is that every company uses them as a way to bank equity. If those same companies pulled the rug from under themselves they would all lose that safe equity piggy bank.
This is just the sunk cost fallacy though. You can inflate the paper value of assets by playing games like this, but the bill always comes due in the end. Yes, companies that do this can juice their books a bit in the short term, but they’re harming themselves in the long term. They retain a bit higher book value for their real estate, but they make whatever goods or services they provide noncompetitive in the marketplace. They have competitors who aren’t bogged down by past bad real estate decisions. Those competitors can outcompete them on price and can attract better talent. Meanwhile, they’re stuck in their ways, fruitlessly trying to inflate their real estate holdings, all while their revenue is plummeting because they can’t attract good people and have to charge higher for their services than their competitors.
It’s just the sunk cost fallacy. You could inflate the book value of real estate by doing all sorts of foolish things. You could create a subsidiary and have that company rent out some of your floor space for absurdly high rates. But you’re ultimately just robbing Peter to pay Paul. Those commercial real estate properties have already lost their value. The value was lost the minute it was proven that work from home was a superior work model.
These companies are going to go bankrupt at a mass scale when the next recession rolls around.
Fuck, these companies might actually be violating the law. Deliberately choosing unproductive business practices just to cook your real estate books is something Enron would do.
The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
You’re right. It’s all right. Except the part where you think they can’t do this for long. How long did it take Madoff to get caught?
And there are enough barriers to competition to sustain this as long as they need. If anyone threatens them, they can just buy the competition.
This is just the sunk cost fallacy though. You can inflate the paper value of assets by playing games like this, but the bill always comes due in the end. Yes, companies that do this can juice their books a bit in the short term, but they’re harming themselves in the long term.
I mean… That’s kinda what late stage capitalism is all about, squeezing blood from stones on a quarterly basis.
You could create a subsidiary and have that company rent out some of your floor space for absurdly high rates. But you’re ultimately just robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Reminds me of the twin towers. One of the reasons it was such a catastrophe is because the towers were such a money sink that the city of New York subsidized the development by relocating a ton of government offices to there.
Fuck, these companies might actually be violating the law. Deliberately choosing unproductive business practices just to cook your real estate books is something Enron would do.
Pretty much the standard quo nowadays…why invest in things like labour when you can just inflate the worth of assets for free? Capitalism is about reducing cost while simulating growth, there is no reason to actually invest in the company if you can simulate investment enough to make share price go up.
Capitalism, such efficiency!
Pull all your own, sell office space. Profit?
Maybe if capitalism actually relied on competition for growth as capitalists often claim, however it’s pretty easy to recognize that corporations often work together to create their own demand.
fuck your unmedicated ass, you can go to theboffice if you want
The office or a park with cell reception, a cafe, a fucking wework, a…
Yeah, you just have to know yourself. Personally I feel like I need to go into the office once per week otherwise work starts becoming an abstract thing. But I’ve known some co-workers I wouldn’t see for months at a time that were really on the ball. Ask an obscure question about something really technical on slack and get an answer within seconds kind of thing. I knew another guy that said he had to come into the office every day because his family was too distracting.
Everyone needs to know what works for them and be a responsible professional about it.
And yeah managers that want 100% RTO are just admitting they can’t handle working from home. Ok that’s your thing, but it’s not a thing for everyone else.
Anyway I got out the the RTO thing because I told them of the times some computers were having issues and I had to work the whole weekend (from home) to fix them. If I’m going to be 100% RTO then I’m 0% WFH and the next time something like that happens I won’t be able to start working on it until 9am on Monday morning. So I’m still in the office one day per week, weather permitting, which is my preference.
Its partly tradition, power displays, and disbelief. People who’ve been managers for decades somehow believe that being in the office is the only true way to do work because that’s how it’s always been done. Then you have some managers who will always get off on the fact that they can hold people’s ability to feed themselves hostage to make them do what they want. Lastly, some managers just don’t believe you can be productive at home. After all, all the not work things are there.
I know this site is heavily weighted towards IT professionals and other pure-office-work type professions, but sometimes in office work really is better than work from home. Online meetings are largely useless, even when it’s a proper meeting, not just a should-have-been-an-email meeting.
In my current job, remote work isn’t an option, and I can’t tell you how much time I’ve wasted trying to get engineers and software devs to understand things that would have taken two seconds to understand if they would go physically look at the thing. But of course, they can’t do that because they are working remotely. Instead we get to waste half a day playing picture/video tag
Wasting a lot of time on “explaining things” is an excellent indicator of overstaffing.
Which is completely orthogonal to the question of remote work or not.Online meetings are largely useless
Oh! Oh! This is where people say “skill issue”, isn’t it?
If you can’t run a productive meeting over zoom you probably can’t do one in person, either.
I think this is all really subjective and depends on how your team does work. Getting people to work with you or understand things is a communication problem, and in my own experience, being in the office didn’t eliminate those issues.
I agree there are times to be in the office, but it damn sure doesn’t need to be every day all the time. IMO people need to adapt, be smart and figure out what works for their teams and themselves, not hold themselves to tradition for its own sake.
Managers should be empowered to make these decisions to do the research and figure out the best strategy for their situation, and I think many would like that responsibility.
This will depend on your work. All my work is on the computer. Showing someone something is as easy as sharing my screen (and this might even be better, as I can draw on it).
And I don’t agree online meetings are useless. All of my team work from home most of the time, and we work out how to make that work.
Having half the group in the office and half joining remotely I think is the worst of both worlds.
Remotely joining an in person meeting is horrible. Joining a remote meeting from your desk is fine.
Yeah except for the people around you trying to work as you jibber jabber 😆
Skill issue :-)
I think most people acknowledge that some things do gain efficiency in physical proximity. Most dont. We aren’t talking about you.
Though sending a solidworks file shoukd be easier than it presently ie.
Those things, and needing to prop up the commercial realestate market.
I can guarantee every company demanding in office work has owners that either own (or are friends with the owners of) tons of commercial property or have stake in retail that over extended into commercial districts.
Eh, we don’t have buses or trains at all.
But fighting traffic pumps up your adrenaline and you’re ready to crush it when you walk in the office door! /s
You guys don’t understand that this is is the goal. Happy rested people thinl a lot, demand things, want a better life. Unhappy and exausted people only want to go home and go to sleep, they loose their souls and think that this is better enough. Those are easy to control
Plus, look at the great job of keeping commercial real estate prices high they’re all doing
It’s not a conspiracy, it’a a distributed systematic failure that can only be solved by cultural change.
Luigi is culture right?
Wahoo
I think its a conspiracy fact
