this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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I understand the value of working in an office, but I wish our society would choose to pursue improving the quality of our lives instead of increasing productive capacity. It's never enough. These companies always want more.
We can do our jobs just fine, even great, at home. But they want to squeeze everything out of their workers.
It's not about the benefits of going to an office. It's all about corporate realestate. Companies and rich people have a lot of money invested in office buildings and they are all losing value.
There are also huge swathes of middle managers who cannot justify the existence of their job if all the peasants are free to work from wherever. Who’s gonna judge you for being 3 minutes late and not in dress code as you sit and type?
Middle managers have absolutely zero say in such kind of decisions. They often find out a day before everyone else to prepare to share the news to their reports.
I think for a lot of engineers, their productivity would be much higher at home. In the office you have way more distractions and time wasters, like coworkers, physical meetings, etc. Even if employees at home are scrolling social media, they're going to procrastinate in office too, just in a different way, whether that's just sitting and doing nothing or going out for lunch on a really long break.
Yeah this is the part I don't get. We are always arguing about whether productivity is highest with wfh or wfo. But we never discuss what maximizes people's happiness. Which seems more important to me, why are we doing any of this anyway? Capitalism I guess.
I work at an NGO and you could argue that they are 'one of the good ones'. They work us into the ground from the goodness in their hearts. The motivation at C-suite is that they want to get as much work done as possible because it seems important. If your job helps to save lives then you want to be really efficient. Profit companies have different goals but the motivation to improve efficiency remains.
Technology enables it. As productive as my company is today I know that we are well behind where we could be. Recent developments in AI have set a brand new horizon to reach towards. These forces aren't going away anytime soon. It makes you want to move faster.
We need to incentivize companies to put more money into people. I think this is something that government has the power to do. There is definitely a way to make sure a company hires two people, pays them salary of two people, and they do the job of one person by working 25 hours a week.
I don't, but I'm also a sysadmin. Offices are my hell.
What I learned from some of my colleagues when we moved to WFH, is that some people want to get away from their kids and working from an office is a blessing for them.
The entire system is designed to demand more every year. If they don't show year-over-year increases in revenue then stock investors dump the stocks, the company loses value, and it's considered a failing company, even if the revenue and performance is already enough to sustain a billion people for a thousand years. Enough is not enough, the system demands more.