Comment by pqtyw

Comment by pqtyw 2 days ago

2 replies

> 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.

nyarlathotep_ 2 days ago

> 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

sokoloff 2 days ago

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".