[paulusthe]

I think it's personality differences. The people who love being in the office probably do best in that environment and likely got promoted into leadership as a result of their interpersonal skills / ability to navigate office politics. Those people cannot fathom why others would dislike going into the office, because it's so natural and normal for them, and they tend to think people complaining about it are just being kind of immature children. After all, the office has been great for them, so it's gotta be great for everyone!

I think it's an introvert extrovert split, primarily, with extroverts more likely to be in leadership roles and therefore dictating to everyone else to live like they do.

[taylodl]

> I think it's an introvert extrovert split, primarily, with extroverts more likely to be in leadership roles and therefore dictating to everyone else to live like they do.

And the introverts are sick of it. They see the mess so-called "leadership" has created - from the corporate level clear up to the national level. Incompetence and corruption is running amok throughout the world and people are sick of it. They're also sick of being forced to work and live in ways solely intended to protect the wealth of others.

[hotnfresh]

I know plenty of extroverts who strongly prefer WFH.

I think a lot of it’s manager insecurity, bad processes and structures that also harm in-person work but are harder to ignore when remote, and tax incentives (these are often tied to having X employees working from a given office, and they really do mean working from)

[afavour]

I don't disagree with you about the things people are sick of but there's an implication that none of this would be happening if only the people in charge were introverts and I really don't see it.

Corruption and greed are accessible to both introverts and extroverts.

[taylodl]

I don't know if the introverts would have done any better, but it's clear people are no longer content with the status quo.

[lisper]

As an introvert myself I totally sympathize. Unfortunately, until we introverts figure out a way to work together, the extroverts will continue to run the show.

[joelfried]

Personality differences are certainly a piece of it, sure.

But if the folks On High do not realize what the people doing the actual work value about their current position, that seems like a pretty big failure of leadership. If you don't understand the needs of those following you, you're not doing a good job leading.

[tmpX7dMeXU]

If only some people are doing “actual work”, why even have the others around? Why hasn’t everyone done their own thing? Are you telling me that with all these jeans and hoodie wearing teeny boppers starting startups that go big, the people that aren’t doing the “actual work” have somehow managed to slide in despite bringing nothing to the table?

Occam’s razor would suggest that it’s more likely that you have a pretty self-centred view of what “real work” is.

[willcipriano]

From the Havard Business Review:

> Excess Management Is Costing the U.S. $3 Trillion Per Year

> More people are working in big, bureaucratic organizations than ever before. Yet there’s compelling evidence that bureaucracy creates a significant drag on productivity and organizational resilience and innovation. By our reckoning, the cost of excess bureaucracy in the U.S. economy amounts to more than $3 trillion in lost economic output, or about 17% of GDP.

https://hbr.org/2016/09/excess-management-is-costing-the-us-...

[unforeseen9991]

Bullshit jobs continue to grow, especially as productivity increases. I can see the gap widening quickly as more and more automation comes from the AI progress boom.

[joelfried]

If my use of "actual work" offends you so greatly, you can replace "people doing actual work" with "people you manage" and my point stands.

Managing competing priorities and setting company-wide direction are certainly actual work - but regardless, that's pretty tangential to my real point about leadership.

[jedberg]

I think you're mostly right, but I'm not sure the split is extrovert/introvert. I think it's more "I like my kids/family/home life" vs not.

I'm in technical management and would probably be considered an extrovert by engineering standards. I'm really good at navigating office politics. And I hate the office. But that's because I like my family, I like hanging out with my wife at home and my kids, and I have a great office setup at home with windows and big screens and snacks and such.

The people who I see that enjoy going to the office are either young people who live alone and/or in small places, and old people who talk crap about their spouse and kids during lunch and have an obvious disdain for them.

Well there are also the "I had to do it for my whole career, so you can suffer now too" crowd, although most of those people also seem to hate their family.

[bokchoi]

Ditto for me as well. I like having lunch with my wife at home during the week and I like picking up my kids from school and hearing about their day. I can't do these things on the days I'm back in the office.

[dogman144]

Ya whenever I read this framed as it’s just the basement dwelling techies wanting to stay in the basement…

Do people not have home lives they like, and don’t want the ability to build something widely robust there?

You’ll throw all that away, and the first chance available to do it for workers in idk, forever(?), so that we can all go back to… hanging with Brad and Barb at the office park more often?

Part of this is hard to grasp until you’ve got a house, partner, kids and hobbies that are home-defined (cooking, gardening), that all are worth spending time on, let alone the massive increase financial independence odds.

But also if I was 24, in an urban center, and could work from anywhere… that’s a wide wide open space to figure yourself out, like all the benefits of urban college attendance with an adult spending budget.

It’s a lack of imagination or an implication of a real sad state of affairs in your home/community like that you’d walk away from all that to hit the office park in Toledo or free cold brew in office in NYC.

Really blows my mind. Get a life outside of work! You can succeed at work without being in the office, for a very long time, until you’ll hit a job that the comp makes in-office an easy trade.

[pizza]

Hang on.. while I get that you mean "feel a sense of comfort/security in personal social situations" by interpersonal skills - and I agree with that characterization of what's going - I just want to say that not being able to even imagine an alternate preference is quite indicative of rather poor interpersonal skills, imo - it's un-collaborative, un-curious, un-empathetic, unnecessarily combative and short-sighted, etc. Typically associated with a bad leadership style that avoids taking responsibility for making things worse for others.

[dogman144]

Got nothing to do with introvert extrovert imo. It’s got to do with “I like my home life and family more than a commute and can digitally be extroverted enough for office politics” and those that can’t/don’t.

I’m an eng on a leader path, have a strong background in leadership, and like people well enough.

There’s nothing stopping you from being an extroverted leader in a digitally-defined environment. It’s easy, it works. Be social-ish, be professional but casual, be friendly, produce output, and soon enough you start winning at tech leadership - produce output on high vis projects (what matters/is seen in remote-first), and be seen doing it and have “friends” (as in, banter on slack a bit - the other part that matters, people need to like you).

If you’ve grown up in chatrooms, text message first (so, born early 90’s and after), the argument that to be extroverted means to be in-person is nonsensical.

You just have to take these digital social skills, wrap a bit of professionalism on it, and you’ll do fine climbing (if that’s what you want).

So more accurately - it’s a split around people who know how to build IRL outcomes via digital context and also like their IRL home lives, and those that can’t and don’t.

[biggc]

I personally enjoyed _work_ more in person than remote, but I enjoy my life overall more with remote work. I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels that way.

If you’re in a leadership position, what are you supposed to optimize for?

[TX81Z]

I’d think employee productivity and retention would be high on the list.

Likewise as a recent founder myself the fact that I’ve been able to start a company with no office and have the flexibility to hire people from anywhere in the country is a game changer.

If big old fashion companies want to make people work in person, it’s basically just a gift for smaller competitors ready to eat their lunch.

[dv_dt]

IMHO There is negative value in in-person work all the time. There is positive value in occasional in-person meetings with focused agendas. Work remote by default with quarterly or semiannual get together.

[afavour]

I currently work with one day in the office every week and I find to to be perfect. That day is basically "meetings day" and once you accept that you won't get any actual coding done that day it's fine. In person meetings are better and more productive than video calls and packing them all into one day makes the rest of my week much better.

[dv_dt]

I would prefer not to be tied to a commute distance of an office with a commitment to waste that commute time and energy every week. What works for you personally is very different from a hard requirement for everybody.

[afavour]

> What works for you personally is very different from a hard reqirement for everybody

Is that not implicit? You stated what works best for you, I stated what works best for me.

[dv_dt]

To me, meetings day implies a rule that everybody attached to that office is required to be in to have meetings with, but I apologize if I read to much into it.

[tmpX7dMeXU]

In the interest of fairness, you could reverse your whole comment and it would still ring true.

Not to say that you are implying it yourself, but when these points are usually made, it comes with an implication that the “extroverts” are seeking to perform some sort of superfluous duty, or something that is at the very least leaser.

Again, in the interest of fairness, anyone that isn’t able to see that WFH presents genuine challenges for leadership that aren’t just about “micromanaging”, “butts in seats”, or “feeling important”, really needs to dig deeper.

Speaking from the perspective of someone that recently had to build a small team from scratch entirely remotely, it has certainly been harder to build momentum, culture, rapport, etc remotely. These things are all important and all materially affect productivity. Onboarding is substantially harder. I had a severely underperforming team member (my standards aren’t terribly high, he interviewed really well, and I’m almost certain he was trying snd failing at over-employment), and working remotely turned it from essentially a non-issue into a months-long ordeal.

This incessant tribalism by esp. developers over the topic of remote work is ridiculously childish.

[pdonis]

> This incessant tribalism by esp. developers over the topic of remote work is ridiculously childish.

No, it isn't, it's a symptom of the fact that herding everyone into the same building whether it is actually necessary or not is an outdated business concept, and now that employees have the wherewithal to push back--because now there is abundant evidence that lots of jobs can be done by remote work--they are pushing back. From an employee's perspective, even if there might be some benefits to having everyone in the same office, there are huge costs associated with having to commute back and forth to an office every work day, and having to live close enough to work to make that feasible, meaning your choice of where to live is dictated by your job. In the past those costs were unavoidable so employees simply had no choice but to suck them up. Now employees have a choice.

Yes, that means that managers who are used to managing in an everyone-in-the-office environment will now have to learn how to manage in a remote work environment. That's always one of the risks of being a manager: the game can change at any time, and you either adapt or you go out of business.

[Volundr]

> Again, in the interest of fairness, anyone that isn’t able to see that WFH presents genuine challenges for leadership that aren’t just about “micromanaging”, “butts in seats”, or “feeling important”, really needs to dig deeper.

Can you present some of these challenges? I've actually done director level management both in person and remote, and I don't know what they are. When asking this question to management looking to RTO, it usually comes down to "how do I know who is working and who isn't?", and in my experience if you don't know who on your team is productive remote, you probably don't in the office either. You just see bustle and assume it's productivity.

Other challenges like running effective video calls are already problems in person in medium to large organizations. I find it easier to keep everyone in the loop when everyone is remote, vs having to remember to update the team in New York about the conversation that happened in California.

[marcosdumay]

Nah, I fully sympathize with this problem, and fully acknowledge that it's harder. I don't think anybody would disagree.

I'm still fully committed into forcing your hand. It's your problem to solve (or did you want that salary increase to come with less responsibility), not mine. At the same time, once in a lifetime, I have the upper hand, and I'm not letting it pass.

The incessant tribalism by esp. managers insisting that workers just give away anything they want and never negotiate is ridiculously childish.

[UtopiaPunk]

I don't think it's quite as simple as extrovert/introvert, but otherwise I would agree that there's probably a strong correlation between individuals who like being in an office with individuals who become managers.

I think I'm pretty extroverted in social circumstances where I feel comfortable. But I'm energized by topics that tend to not be great in the workplace (broadly speaking, religion and politics), so in the workplace I usually keep my head down. My workplace has said they want people to bring their "whole self" to work, but work is absolutely not a safe place for my whole self, so in the workplace I have the behavior more of an introvert. WFH is definitely the way to go for me.

[2muchcoffeeman]

I don’t think extroversion makes you a moron though.

They took a look at what appear to be fantastic results and came to the conclusion that, “we should fix things”.

[re-thc]

> After all, the office has been great for them, so it's gotta be great for everyone!

Except they themselves don't even go to the office that often or come and go as they please. It's not the same.