Comment by jacquesm

The abstract says one thing, the title here suggests an entirely different thing. Besides that not-so-subtle editing, I also find the sample size used more than a little bit lower than one that you could draw such a sweeping conclusion from.

I think this will do exactly nothing for RTO, neither increase nor decrease the push from management.

The decisions around RTO seem to be more “gut feeling” based than data driven. Look at Amazon, a supposedly “data driven company”. During RTO, Andy Jassy admitted there’s no data to back it up but that they “believe” it will help due to improving culture.

Fast forward a year and they just did a first round of layoffs because “culture”. So I guess ultimately RTO was a failure for them that they won’t admit to.

Because the C-suite needs to justify those 15-year commercial leases, and anything with a veneer of credibility will be used to do so (in addition to simply firing people who don't comply).

> So why would this make managers push RTO more?

> Proximity [office] *increases* development

Do you seriously expect managers to read anything beyond title?

What is your definition of "new person" though? If someone has been remote for years, are they still a "new person"? If you trust them enough to hire them, why is there a need to keep earning trust for more privileges. This just seems like a carrot to squeeze some kind productivity or control out of people.

> A lot of people cannot handle remote work for different reasons

So how come those who can handle it are being punished?

> This was all common knowledge. It has been for a long time.

Many years ago my advisor passed on an observation (edit: originally from Hamming's 1987 "You and Your Research"): faculty who generally kept their office door closed published more papers each year, while faculty who generally kept their office door open had more successful careers.

Correlation is not causation of course, and sometimes you do just need to get a paper out. But it's worth noting that optimizing for daily productivity has costs.

No idea, but yes, that's exactly how we do it. We've been full remote since COVID and honestly, I don't think any of us would want it any other way but we're a very small team so not representative of larger trends.

This is only a harm if you are ambitious and career-oriented. I'm remote and know it won't be conducive to promotion, but I also get to:

1) live in the low CoL area that I grew up in,

2) be near family and friends (and therefore free, high-quality childcare),

3) avoid a hellish commute in one of the sprawl-y hellscapes that grow up around tech hub cities,

4) live in a paid-off house instead of 50%+ of my income going directly to rent or a mortgage, and

5) have a massive nest egg due to all the money I'm saving.

Could I get faster promotions by going back to the office? Maybe, though I see the careers of my at-the-office colleagues around me stagnating just about as much as mine. But...I don't want to be management. I don't even necessarily care for promotion as an IC unless that's the only way to tread water with inflation.

The only major downside I think about is that it will obviously be harder to get a remote position if I lose the one I have, but we're financially prepared for that. With a paid-off house in a single-car neighborhood, we can make ends meet with a normal job stocking groceries or something. At the worst case, I have connections to get a job at the factory a town over, though that would mean getting a second car.

In other words: I, as a worker, do not care about maximizing the value of my human capital stock. I am not cattle. I am not a slave. I have preferences that are unrelated to my ability to receive praise and promotions from my boss. In short, I deserve respect from my employer, whether they are currently being forced to give it or not.

That's not what it is about though. There is plenty of evidence that there are pros and cons both to WFH and work-at-the-office, assuming the work lends itself to work-from-home to begin with. This is at best a datapoint and not so much a grand conclusion worthy one at that.

The metric 'code productivity' alone is such a terrible one. I remember the 80's when such things were introduced. The best one that I ran into professionally was 'object code size' (because we don't want to count those pesky comment lines as production now, do we?). It didn't take long for the rookie in the team to outscore everybody else based on those metrics. He found the largest library in the system to link to...

In general I'm against such metrification of productivity and in software I'm more against it than in other industries because I think software quality is a very hard thing to measure to begin with. Lines-of-code and such are useful on an assets list during a business transaction in a descriptive way. But they're not very useful in other contexts.

As for the code review data they analyzed:

"We find that sitting near coworkers increases the online feed- back that engineers receive on their computer code. Engineers ask more follow- up questions online when sitting together, and so, proximity can not only increase in-person but also digital communication. Proximity is particularly integral to the online feedback received by young and less tenured engineers. "

I've seen the exact opposite happen as well. Proximity decreased the feedback because there was no need to communicate formally what could be communicated informally.

> [has benefits]

Long-term and for the company. Of course I’m going to dismiss it lol, why the fuck would I want to be left holding the bag?

Nobody's stopping you from commuting an hour each way into a beige box with the coldest fluorescent lighting ever. If you really want to inhale someone else's rhinovirus, by all means, be my guest! Just don't force me to do the same.