Capitalist, socialist, or whatever, you have to admit that this is an extremely stupid hill to die on.
What’s the companies’ obsessions with in person office work anyway? Most companies reported anywhere from no productivity loss to improved productivity once they got into the swing of WFH, and now they don’t have to buy or rent office spaces. More importantly, most workers report lower stress, better morale, and more free time due to not commuting (which also has the benefit of cutting down on emissions). Seems like a win-win for everyone.
There are certainly tasks that are harder to do remotely and training new people is also easier in-house.
But I found it telling that in the OP article they are specifically mentioning large game development sweatshops as those negatively effected by remote work. Which at first seems odd, as game development should in theory be a prime example for remote work.
But when you think about it a bit more you realize that these game companies are infamous for insane amounts of often unpaid over-time and other kinds of group-pressure to exploit their employees, which become a lot harder to do with remote workers unless they really desperately need the job.
Or to put it in nicer terms… it is about company loyalty. If you spend most of your day in a physical place and in physical contact with your co-workers and your entire life is organized around that workplace, then you are much more loyal to the company and thus much easier to exploit.
Or to put it in nicer terms… it is about company loyalty. If you spend most of your day in a physical place and in physical contact with your co-workers and your entire life is organized around that workplace, then you are much more loyal to the company and thus much easier to exploit.
When they talk about compay ‘culture’ being negatively impacted this is what they mean lol
I’ve always wanted as little physical contact with my co-workers as possible. Listening to them screaming across the office, watching them picking their noses, and hearing them prattle on about the inanities of their lives tends to do that to me.
While I guess many people feel like that, human psychology has this odd quirk that despite how annoying they are we still mostly like our extended family or modern day equivalents of it. Isolating oneself from that effect is not easy when working in-house and companies know that.
Oh, I enjoy spending time with people I choose to spend time with, just not with people foisted upon me. Basically, “friends” over “family”.
Harassing online isn’t as fun as harassing in person.
TBH this reeks of manager god complex. “I need the peasents in the office so I can feel better about my sad life by making the people under my management worse!”
The company I work for has reopened our flagship office in SF, but there are no mandated returns for any employees. We’re effectively going to remain a 100% remote company, which is very nice. I was hired under the pretense of being 100% remote anyway, but I have some friends who are being forced to go back into their offices pretty aggressively and they’ve all more or less said they’re planning to look for other jobs. This is in tech, mind you, so my perspective might be a little skewed, but given how hot the hiring market is right now, managers and C-levels are going to eventually realize that if they push the issue too much (especially with Delta surging) they’ll wind up losing a ton of their good employees and be stuck in a bad market for hiring competent replacements at anywhere near their current salary. The salary demands that current tech applicants are getting away with make the salaries I was seeing ~2yr ago look pretty meager.
It’s more effective to intimidate people in person.
It’s hard to see it from the employer’s perspective, so I tried to find some of their arguments detailing what challenges they’re facing: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/sustaining-employee-networks-in-the-virtual-workplace/
The major concerns seem to be networking effects and an environment with less distractions.
These arguments have merit looking at them myopically, but the reality is that most of the jobs where this even becomes an argument are Bullshitjobs. Or at the very least are so unimportant for anything but the share-holder’s bottom line that one might as well do them half-assed remotely.
