[wubrr]

There were many studies during covid that concluded remote employees are more effective [1]

I don't really put much trust in these studies, nor the studies that claim the opposite, but it's pretty obvious to me that both the WFH and RTO mandates have nothing to do with worker productivity. We've witnessed record levels of hiring at tech companies during the most remote working conditions ever. I've been in calls with higher level leadership where they essentially admit they have no objective data to track worker productivity. And I've witnessed great engineers, who've received nothing but great performance reviews and promotions during their WFH stints being fired for low productivity because their manager wants to have good RTO stats.

[1] https://www.vox.com/recode/23129752/work-from-home-productiv...

[potatolicious]

Yep, if there was compelling, rigorous data to show a major productivity boost from RTO - evidence strong enough to shut up the opposition, at least some companies would've revealed it by now. We've seen zip, nada, zilch.

The RTO mandates are a pure labor/capital power play. It's really not much more complicated than "we want to remind you we're in charge, and to show you just how we're in charge, we're gonna make you do something you don't want to do"

[40yearoldman]

Where I work, I have access to the data. There is a clear drop in PRs, lines of code committed, and new documents created.

To further that we have moved to 3 days RTO, and have Monday and Friday as WFH. Guess what? Github activity and slack message counts are nearly non existence on Friday, and just a blip on Monday.

Companies have the data, they don't need external studies to tell them what they already know. This is why they can move forward with RTO without worrying about any of the nonsense the WFH crowd drone on about. WFH folks know they are wrong, and companies know the WFH peoples are wrong, and that is why every comment suggesting otherwise is a knee jerk reaction to mob anybody who suggest differently.

Good luck WFH folks, while I am at the office making impact, you won't even have a chance when it comes for review or promotion time, because you can't list "answered the door for a package delivery" as anything useful.

[40yearoldman]

Many studies also said a handkerchief over your face prevented Covid.