I am full remote for a very small, non-software business but I think even for us we are probably losing productivity vs the office.
I think child care is a big driver but no one can come out and say this.
I am more productive remote but I wouldn't be if I was also baby sitting a 5 year old while working. A big reason I am more productive is living alone and not being distracted.
A company can't demand a remote worker pay for child care so the kid isn't at home like in an office.
I also think my increase in productivity doesn't offset the office slackers who are doing basically nothing at home. I think the office can squeeze some productivity out of the slackers while it is a lost cause remote.
In the aggregate, I think for most companies it has to be a net loss of productivity to be 100% remote.
While it is a huge increase in my general well being and happiness, the highly productive workers are going to be highly productive either way and not that much more productive remote. It is everyone else that causes remote to not work as well at the margin. Then if a competitor does RTO, the company almost has to hedge and RTO as well.
That is not at all what the comment you responded to said.
Rather, if you are of the mindset that you want to work the bare minimum to get by in life, then what constitutes the bare minimum is probably more when you're in an office.
To cast those who enjoy their work as having no meaningful life outside of work is small minded and jealous.
I think this is simple and has little to do with child care. I have 2 kids, fully remote, but otherwise worked office jobs (w/kids) prior to 2022.
Companies believe that in-person interactions lead to more productivity. And I think that's true for many companies and many workers. Anecdotally, lots of folks I know that commute into NYC feel that the distinct on-at-work and off(ish)-at-home is more productive for their work.
I have children. I work from home. I don't look after them at the same time. This is true for every parent in my company who works from home.
> A company can't demand a remote worker pay for child care so the kid isn't at home like in an office.
A company can't demand an in office worker pay for childcare either. But if they don't have arrangements, they can't come to work.
You seem to be implying that every parent who works from home is only doing so in order to secretly mind their kids and not pay childcare which is a very unfair and unrealistic generalisation.
I see a lot of people on HN claiming to be more productive at home and honestly think they are the exception rather than the norm. Maybe there is a bias here because the kind of person who is "locked-in" enough to their career field to browse and discuss work-related articles and threads outside of work hours happens to be the same kind of person who cares enough about what they do at their job to be productive even at home.
I suspect for the majority of people though, working from home lacks the mixture of accountability and shame that comes from having to work side by side alongside your coworkers/managers/bosses and at least have to do some level of work to appear minimally productive. If no one is watching you and you feel that work is just a means to an end you might be tempted to goof off or drag your feet.
I personally noticed that my productivity plummeted during work from home and skyrocketed when return to office was mandated. Probably it is at least somewhat related to the above. If I'm at home I might be tempted to go on a walk / do some chores / read a few chapters of a book / go workout / take a nap because I don't feel shame for it and no one can tell me otherwise. I would feel significantly more uncomfortable doing any of those things in the office and will more likely than not actually be forced to get some work done out of boredom and with no other options or distractions.
What’s wrong with doing chores or going for a walk? Doing such things increases my productivity. At a certain point you hit a cliff where further effort doesn’t increase productivity.
When I worked in an office, I would often go on walks by myself or with colleagues, explore the campus, etc. It’s hilarious to believe you can’t fuck off and play hooky when you’re in an office.
Nothing is inherently wrong with that if you still get your work done. And I agree that you can find ways to slack off in the office just the same.
I'm not saying everyone needs to be glued in butt in seat 8 hours a day 5 days a week to be productive. I'm saying I suspect that for a large and noticeable enough amount of people it is more shameful to slack off in office when they have to spend all day sitting next to / passing by / talking to the people they are accountable to than when they spend their whole day at home with no worry that they're being judged by anyone. It's no doubt much easier to justify goofing off all day instead of working when your boss and coworkers aren't in constant visual range of you.
Companies probably noticed this (I don't think a degree in psychology is needed to acknowledge that most people act differently alone vs in social settings) and are making people go back.
Your suspicion overlooks the substantial data showing productivity remained stable or even improved with remote work. Being physically visible doesn’t inherently equate to accountability or productivity. It often just encourages performative behavior (“looking busy”) rather than genuine output. Effective management relies on outcomes rather than proximity. If someone is “goofing off” excessively, that’s fundamentally a management issue, not a remote work one. Companies forcing RTO based purely on perceptions of productivity misunderstand or disregard the evidence and real metrics showing remote work effectiveness.
I'm going to make a guess that you only began working from home during COVID, as a lot of people did. It takes discipline and doesn't suit everyone, and during COVID a lot of people who were not suited to it were forced into it.
Sure, some people are more effective in an office. No denying that. Even just for the social benefit, which some people sorely need. But it's not a universal truth. Some people are better off working remotely.
I live hours from where my company HQ is. RTO for me would mean a 7 hour round trip ever day or staying over for a few nights a week, just so I can sit in a room with other people with headphones on.
Except you can pick who to fire and the people leaving because they have better options might be slightly more valuable. Then again trusting or upper or middle management to get that right (outside of small/medium companies) is impossible.
It seems like RTO isn't specific to the tech industry.
It also seems like most publicly traded companies have instituted some form of RTO by now.
I'm fairly certain that many entities that hold large amounts of commercial real estate also own large amounts of stock in companies that are doing RTO.
If Amazon (or some other company) thought they were going to be more profitable and more successful working remotely, I don't think the threat is credible of some commercial property owning shareholders deciding to further underperform the market by dumping shares unless that company made the decision to underperform by forcing RTO.
"If you want to threaten me that you'll underperform unless I do, be my guest..."
I suspect that different companies could have different motivations (including potentially forcing resignations), but it strains credibility for me that it's to answer to shareholders in conflict with what they think will make them successful.
> If Amazon (or some other company) thought they were going
This presumes that the company is fully capable of measuring and comparing the utility between RTO and working from home. That might be the case or it might be mainly due to management culture and other indirect factors but neither is self evident.
Major corporations are almost by definition have massive amounts of bloat and inefficiency to one degree or another and are carried (especially tech companies) by certain products/teams/departments the rest are often there only for the ride (short to medium term at least and who has time for any "long-term" development these days?). To be clear, I don't think this has that much to do with people who are "lazy" or hard workers (you can put in extreme amounts of effort into something that leads nowhere).
Anyway, not particularly pro or anti-RTO but I just find it bizarre that we usually assume that decisions making in large companies are always logical, rational and quantifiable and are not made to benefit specific subgroups or individuals in one way or another.
> Major corporations are almost by definition have massive amounts of bloat and inefficiency to one degree or another and are carried (especially tech companies) by certain products/teams/departments the rest are often there only for the ride (short to medium term at least and who has time for any "long-term" development these days?). To be clear, I don't think this has that much to do with people who are "lazy" or hard workers (you can put in extreme amounts of effort into something that leads nowhere).
This is a really good summary, IME.
Yes there's loads of people that do "actual work" (technical work) on projects that are "pet/promo projects" that are doomed from the start to go nowhere and have no path to profitability.
There's also loads of managers managing managers overseeing project managers etc etc
I don't presume that they are fully capable of measuring and comparing the utility between RTO and WFH.
I think they're making the decision based on 5-15% data/measurement and 85-95% beliefs and judgment. I don't know how you'd possibly carefully and precisely measure something as multi-faceted as the difference between the two modes of working, especially when the one pre/post test you have data on was heavily influenced by COVID, ZIRP, massive stimulus, massive disruptions to economic consumption patterns and working patterns, but you still have to decide where to position yourself between "working the way we did in Dec 2019" and "working the way we did in April 2020 or June 2021".
They wouldn't threaten to dump shares (and they may not even be allowed to dump shares, eg. they may be an index fund). Instead, they'd threaten to exercise their votes, and potentially fire the CEO.
But most likely they wouldn't have to. The CEO knows that a deleveraging event would kill their stock options even if their company outperforms the market on the way down.
>it strains credibility for me that it's to answer to shareholders in conflict with what they think will make them successful
I'm not so sure. I don't think that it's exactly the most probably scenario, but I can absolutely see it being a factor. I don't think there's some commercial real estate mogul on every F500 board demanding RTO, reality is way more complicated than that.
Maybe not, but if you have signed a massively expensive long-term lease and end up keeping the offices empty your investor will start looking cross at you. Of course that's more of a Covid era thing.
> It also seems like most publicly traded companies have instituted some form of RTO by now
So have plenty of private companies.
> It's not the most far-fetched conspiracy theory
It really is. (With unusual prevalence in the San Francisco Bay Area.) You're talking about some of the most powerful and notoriously-independent companies on the planet kowtowing to invisible shareholder pressure.
I posit the desired first order effect isn't the nebulous benefits of RTO, but rather, induce another culling in the vein the bigs have been doing since 2023. This one's voluntary, doesn't need a buyout, and you net save on leasing if you get a temporary space that'll fit 100%.
Then expect 10% leave due to RTO, another 10% are managed out, or leave of their own accord (FAmazonMG target these days is at least 5% / year perf firings)
Now you can wait out a year and find out if the leaving due to RTO # is 5% or 30%, and defer a long term lease until you have enough info to rightsize it.
Oh man. Wework is the worst office I've ever worked in.
Those glass walls and hardwood floors are great to tour. Working in them though, w/o a single bit of sound-deadening anything gives you a new appreciation for cubicles and ugly carpet that actually absorbs sound.
Just wait until a woman wears heels and you can hear "clack clack clack" echoing up the straight hallways for 500 feet.
nah, it’s great! we all get to sit at the same desk with noise cancelling headphones on in the same meeting, and for added bonus - if someone forgets to turn voice isolation mode on you get to hear yourself with a one second delay which makes it really hard to talk..
and a nice commute either side of the workday because who really wants to spend time with their kids during the week anyway?
Totally agree. I used to work in an office like that. It was a converted 1800's factory building and visually it was beautiful: high ceilings, old exterior brick walls and interior glass walls with hardwood floors.
Then we went remote with Covid and my productivity skyrocketed. It was only then that I realized just how loud and creaky those floors were, and all the hard surfaces just reflected sounds around. It was a constantly noisy space and we had just all gotten used to it. In comparison, my house in the country was dead quiet and a much better working environment.
Why though. Are all these companies doing RTO because they believe it's more productive?
I am full remote for a very small, non-software business but I think even for us we are probably losing productivity vs the office.
I think child care is a big driver but no one can come out and say this.
I am more productive remote but I wouldn't be if I was also baby sitting a 5 year old while working. A big reason I am more productive is living alone and not being distracted.
A company can't demand a remote worker pay for child care so the kid isn't at home like in an office.
I also think my increase in productivity doesn't offset the office slackers who are doing basically nothing at home. I think the office can squeeze some productivity out of the slackers while it is a lost cause remote.
In the aggregate, I think for most companies it has to be a net loss of productivity to be 100% remote.
While it is a huge increase in my general well being and happiness, the highly productive workers are going to be highly productive either way and not that much more productive remote. It is everyone else that causes remote to not work as well at the margin. Then if a competitor does RTO, the company almost has to hedge and RTO as well.
It basically boils down to the dichotomy -- "live to work" or "work to live".
We want "work to be able to live" while the employers want us "live to be able to work".
That is not at all what the comment you responded to said.
Rather, if you are of the mindset that you want to work the bare minimum to get by in life, then what constitutes the bare minimum is probably more when you're in an office.
To cast those who enjoy their work as having no meaningful life outside of work is small minded and jealous.
I think this is simple and has little to do with child care. I have 2 kids, fully remote, but otherwise worked office jobs (w/kids) prior to 2022.
Companies believe that in-person interactions lead to more productivity. And I think that's true for many companies and many workers. Anecdotally, lots of folks I know that commute into NYC feel that the distinct on-at-work and off(ish)-at-home is more productive for their work.
A lot to unpack here.
I have children. I work from home. I don't look after them at the same time. This is true for every parent in my company who works from home.
> A company can't demand a remote worker pay for child care so the kid isn't at home like in an office.
A company can't demand an in office worker pay for childcare either. But if they don't have arrangements, they can't come to work.
You seem to be implying that every parent who works from home is only doing so in order to secretly mind their kids and not pay childcare which is a very unfair and unrealistic generalisation.
An authoritarian streak amongst management.
Something funny about dealing with AWS tech is that it's so full of bureaucracy, it feels like dealing with a soviet government department at times.
I see a lot of people on HN claiming to be more productive at home and honestly think they are the exception rather than the norm. Maybe there is a bias here because the kind of person who is "locked-in" enough to their career field to browse and discuss work-related articles and threads outside of work hours happens to be the same kind of person who cares enough about what they do at their job to be productive even at home.
I suspect for the majority of people though, working from home lacks the mixture of accountability and shame that comes from having to work side by side alongside your coworkers/managers/bosses and at least have to do some level of work to appear minimally productive. If no one is watching you and you feel that work is just a means to an end you might be tempted to goof off or drag your feet.
I personally noticed that my productivity plummeted during work from home and skyrocketed when return to office was mandated. Probably it is at least somewhat related to the above. If I'm at home I might be tempted to go on a walk / do some chores / read a few chapters of a book / go workout / take a nap because I don't feel shame for it and no one can tell me otherwise. I would feel significantly more uncomfortable doing any of those things in the office and will more likely than not actually be forced to get some work done out of boredom and with no other options or distractions.
What’s wrong with doing chores or going for a walk? Doing such things increases my productivity. At a certain point you hit a cliff where further effort doesn’t increase productivity.
When I worked in an office, I would often go on walks by myself or with colleagues, explore the campus, etc. It’s hilarious to believe you can’t fuck off and play hooky when you’re in an office.
Nothing is inherently wrong with that if you still get your work done. And I agree that you can find ways to slack off in the office just the same.
I'm not saying everyone needs to be glued in butt in seat 8 hours a day 5 days a week to be productive. I'm saying I suspect that for a large and noticeable enough amount of people it is more shameful to slack off in office when they have to spend all day sitting next to / passing by / talking to the people they are accountable to than when they spend their whole day at home with no worry that they're being judged by anyone. It's no doubt much easier to justify goofing off all day instead of working when your boss and coworkers aren't in constant visual range of you.
Companies probably noticed this (I don't think a degree in psychology is needed to acknowledge that most people act differently alone vs in social settings) and are making people go back.
Your suspicion overlooks the substantial data showing productivity remained stable or even improved with remote work. Being physically visible doesn’t inherently equate to accountability or productivity. It often just encourages performative behavior (“looking busy”) rather than genuine output. Effective management relies on outcomes rather than proximity. If someone is “goofing off” excessively, that’s fundamentally a management issue, not a remote work one. Companies forcing RTO based purely on perceptions of productivity misunderstand or disregard the evidence and real metrics showing remote work effectiveness.
I'm going to make a guess that you only began working from home during COVID, as a lot of people did. It takes discipline and doesn't suit everyone, and during COVID a lot of people who were not suited to it were forced into it.
Sure, some people are more effective in an office. No denying that. Even just for the social benefit, which some people sorely need. But it's not a universal truth. Some people are better off working remotely.
I live hours from where my company HQ is. RTO for me would mean a 7 hour round trip ever day or staying over for a few nights a week, just so I can sit in a room with other people with headphones on.
Because people quitting is cheaper than a layoff. It's a tried and true method.
Except you can pick who to fire and the people leaving because they have better options might be slightly more valuable. Then again trusting or upper or middle management to get that right (outside of small/medium companies) is impossible.
Amazon doesn’t need the best. They need the desperate, the good enough with no better options. Those you can abuse and squeeze.
Yes, for the company’s definition of productivity.
They wouldn't be rushing to take back facilities and electricity costs that had been offloaded to employees if they didn't think it was a net benefit.
Local commercial real estate markets aren't holding the reins of the tech industry.
It seems like RTO isn't specific to the tech industry.
It also seems like most publicly traded companies have instituted some form of RTO by now.
I'm fairly certain that many entities that hold large amounts of commercial real estate also own large amounts of stock in companies that are doing RTO.
It's not the most far-fetched conspiracy theory.
If Amazon (or some other company) thought they were going to be more profitable and more successful working remotely, I don't think the threat is credible of some commercial property owning shareholders deciding to further underperform the market by dumping shares unless that company made the decision to underperform by forcing RTO.
"If you want to threaten me that you'll underperform unless I do, be my guest..."
I suspect that different companies could have different motivations (including potentially forcing resignations), but it strains credibility for me that it's to answer to shareholders in conflict with what they think will make them successful.
> If Amazon (or some other company) thought they were going
This presumes that the company is fully capable of measuring and comparing the utility between RTO and working from home. That might be the case or it might be mainly due to management culture and other indirect factors but neither is self evident.
Major corporations are almost by definition have massive amounts of bloat and inefficiency to one degree or another and are carried (especially tech companies) by certain products/teams/departments the rest are often there only for the ride (short to medium term at least and who has time for any "long-term" development these days?). To be clear, I don't think this has that much to do with people who are "lazy" or hard workers (you can put in extreme amounts of effort into something that leads nowhere).
Anyway, not particularly pro or anti-RTO but I just find it bizarre that we usually assume that decisions making in large companies are always logical, rational and quantifiable and are not made to benefit specific subgroups or individuals in one way or another.
> Major corporations are almost by definition have massive amounts of bloat and inefficiency to one degree or another and are carried (especially tech companies) by certain products/teams/departments the rest are often there only for the ride (short to medium term at least and who has time for any "long-term" development these days?). To be clear, I don't think this has that much to do with people who are "lazy" or hard workers (you can put in extreme amounts of effort into something that leads nowhere).
This is a really good summary, IME.
Yes there's loads of people that do "actual work" (technical work) on projects that are "pet/promo projects" that are doomed from the start to go nowhere and have no path to profitability.
There's also loads of managers managing managers overseeing project managers etc etc
I don't presume that they are fully capable of measuring and comparing the utility between RTO and WFH.
I think they're making the decision based on 5-15% data/measurement and 85-95% beliefs and judgment. I don't know how you'd possibly carefully and precisely measure something as multi-faceted as the difference between the two modes of working, especially when the one pre/post test you have data on was heavily influenced by COVID, ZIRP, massive stimulus, massive disruptions to economic consumption patterns and working patterns, but you still have to decide where to position yourself between "working the way we did in Dec 2019" and "working the way we did in April 2020 or June 2021".
They wouldn't threaten to dump shares (and they may not even be allowed to dump shares, eg. they may be an index fund). Instead, they'd threaten to exercise their votes, and potentially fire the CEO.
But most likely they wouldn't have to. The CEO knows that a deleveraging event would kill their stock options even if their company outperforms the market on the way down.
>it strains credibility for me that it's to answer to shareholders in conflict with what they think will make them successful
I'm not so sure. I don't think that it's exactly the most probably scenario, but I can absolutely see it being a factor. I don't think there's some commercial real estate mogul on every F500 board demanding RTO, reality is way more complicated than that.
Maybe not, but if you have signed a massively expensive long-term lease and end up keeping the offices empty your investor will start looking cross at you. Of course that's more of a Covid era thing.
> It also seems like most publicly traded companies have instituted some form of RTO by now
So have plenty of private companies.
> It's not the most far-fetched conspiracy theory
It really is. (With unusual prevalence in the San Francisco Bay Area.) You're talking about some of the most powerful and notoriously-independent companies on the planet kowtowing to invisible shareholder pressure.
They are in Seattle.
For the more metric-fluent among us, that's about 13,100 square meters. Didn't immediately see how many employees are affected, though.
Why WeWork? Why wouldn't they buy a building or lease from a traditional outfit?
I posit the desired first order effect isn't the nebulous benefits of RTO, but rather, induce another culling in the vein the bigs have been doing since 2023. This one's voluntary, doesn't need a buyout, and you net save on leasing if you get a temporary space that'll fit 100%.
Then expect 10% leave due to RTO, another 10% are managed out, or leave of their own accord (FAmazonMG target these days is at least 5% / year perf firings)
Now you can wait out a year and find out if the leaving due to RTO # is 5% or 30%, and defer a long term lease until you have enough info to rightsize it.
Frugality
Oh man. Wework is the worst office I've ever worked in.
Those glass walls and hardwood floors are great to tour. Working in them though, w/o a single bit of sound-deadening anything gives you a new appreciation for cubicles and ugly carpet that actually absorbs sound.
Just wait until a woman wears heels and you can hear "clack clack clack" echoing up the straight hallways for 500 feet.
nah, it’s great! we all get to sit at the same desk with noise cancelling headphones on in the same meeting, and for added bonus - if someone forgets to turn voice isolation mode on you get to hear yourself with a one second delay which makes it really hard to talk..
and a nice commute either side of the workday because who really wants to spend time with their kids during the week anyway?
right? right?
Totally agree. I used to work in an office like that. It was a converted 1800's factory building and visually it was beautiful: high ceilings, old exterior brick walls and interior glass walls with hardwood floors.
Then we went remote with Covid and my productivity skyrocketed. It was only then that I realized just how loud and creaky those floors were, and all the hard surfaces just reflected sounds around. It was a constantly noisy space and we had just all gotten used to it. In comparison, my house in the country was dead quiet and a much better working environment.