[mattdeboard]

The way this position conforms to the interests of the capital class, and conflicts with those of the labor class, is a red flag.

It simultaneously and conveniently: 1. takes the heat off AI blowback 2. synergizes perfectly with "RTO" mandates (to the extent this needed synergy to become A Widespread Thing)

On that basis alone, I'll wait for further analysis.

Edit: to be clear I'm no anti-AI holdout, and I actually don't mind working from the office (which i do 4x a week). Just observing.

[kxrm]

It also doesn't really sit well with what I have observed in over 25 years of working for remote companies. We hired juniors and grew engineers up just fine. The problem, at least at orgs I have worked at in the last decade, is companies no longer want to invest in junior hires.

I have been fortunate to have a C-level above me, who believes in hiring juniors, take over in the last year. We are hiring now and mentoring, but not enough companies around me are doing this.

[nickff]

People job hopping when they get past 'junior' status is what seems to have caused the reluctance to hire juniors, especially combined with the surge of 'opportunists' who started getting comp-sci degrees when it became obvious that it was the easiest way to earn a comfortable living. The job-hoppers made it obvious that it was just cheaper and faster to hire intermediate and senior developers (rather than investing in juniors to learn the basics, then have to pay them to stay). The opportunists further reduced the value proposition of developers to employers as many job-seekers (particularly juniors) have little passion or aptitude for the job, and will never be 'stellar'.

[munk-a]

If your junior employees frequently job hop as soon as they have been trained up then your company is mismanaged. There are always personal reasons (I ended up immigrating to another country as I was coming into Senior-hood because my partner couldn't affordably immigrate into the US) but if it's a pattern then that pattern is owed to undercompensation and other failures of management.

In the 2000s it was seen as very fashionable to job hop frequently, but it was a biased impression that was assumed to be nationwide while it was only really common in SV with the hugely lucrative signing contracts folks like Google, Meta et. all were handing out.

[nickff]

What is the benefit (to the company) of paying to train a junior, which costs their wage, along with a significant proportion of a senior’s wage, if there is no long-term savings on the junior’s wages later on? This seems like a prisoner’s dilemma where every company counts on another to do the ‘apprenticeship’ training.

[Saline9515]

In other sectors, juniors are paid a subsistence wage for a few years, so they are still profitable for the company during training. A plumber still needs a cheap pair of arms to move around a bathtub.

[munk-a]

There is a wide gap between an intermediate dev and a senior dev - and a senior dev that's spent years learning your codebase and problem area has a lot of tools ready to go that a newly hired dev won't even if they are quite proficient.

[kxrm]

I would argue that job hopping was a symptom of companies under compensating for the market. This is a common problem even above Junior level. It's been easier to get a raise by leaving to another company that will pay more, then by just asking your employer for more money.

Again, the company has the control to avoid this.

[shagie]

It might be under compensating for the market at large, but the market has companies where the revenue per employee is orders of magnitude larger than other companies.

I've worked at small companies that had revenue per employee of under $150,000.

The NYT has a revenue per employee of $470k ( https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=New+York+Times+revenue+... ) ... and a profit per employee of $50k ( https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=New+York+Times+profit+p... ).

https://www.levels.fyi/jobs/company/the-new-york-times-compa...

If an employee there got an offer in Big Tech, they're going to make more.

Until you hit Big Tech or companies trying to compete with them for talent, you can always find an employer that will pay more than your current one.

[tdeck]

Very few industries have an interview process that's as painful and time-consuming as the software industry. If people are "job-hopping", perhaps it's because they're dramatically undervalued by their employer. I left my first job for a 30% raise, despite really liking my colleagues and leaving behind a bunch of institutional and systems knowledge and starting with a blank slate.

[SlinkyOnStairs]

> The job-hoppers made it obvious that it was just cheaper and faster to hire intermediate and senior developers (rather than investing in juniors to learn the basics, then have to pay them to stay).

Critically: While this is the common perception, it is generally un-true.

Just look at how often you get it as reply when you tell people complaining about how it's "impossible to find staff" to hire juniors.

Even in the situations where it is true, the effect of hiring seniors and refusing to hire juniors (thus pushing them into other fields) creates the shortage of seniors that makes it un-true again.

There's just a trend of employers having hard numbers on their staffing expenses, but barely if at all accounting for hiring costs and opportunity costs.

Many simply get it in their head that a senior costs $X/year, and therefore utterly refuse to pay a junior $X/year when they had to spend a flat amount $Y on training them up. Even when the real cost per hire for the senior is vastly bigger than $Y.

Before the post-covid/AI layoffs, tech firms throwing away hundreds of thousands of dollars and years chasing seniors instead of just training up a junior was a common thing. So much so that it's a notable contributor to the overworking and burnout problems.

And it's still everywhere in the blue-collar world.

[SilverElfin]

What do you mean by investing though? I think these days junior people have to just invest in themselves and learn by working right? It’s also hard for companies or managers to spend more on them when they can leave at any time, which means all that effort training them will just benefit some other employee.

I’ve noticed younger generations are especially a lot less loyal, probably in response to abusive and exploitative employers and horror stories. But the downside is if employees have less loyalty themselves, then even caring companies and managers cannot justify being loyal to them. They end up losing that time invested and learn a hard lesson.

[knollimar]

Why be loyal without pensions, good benefits, and more than CoL raises?

What inspires loyalty about someone paying under market rate because they refuse to see change?

[jvuygbbkuurx]

If they leave they got a better offer. Simply be more competetive.

[matheusmoreira]

> I’ve noticed younger generations are especially a lot less loyal

Smart. Corporations aren't loyal either.

> even caring companies and managers

I'm not convinced there is such a thing.

[SilverElfin]

> I'm not convinced there is such a thing.

They absolutely exist. Companies that train and support junior employees definitely exist even if it’s not because they care but some economic reason. But both types are more and more rare as younger generations become more and more likely to job hop.

You’re saying job hopping is smart - maybe it is. But my point is this causes ALL companies to invest as little as possible and to disregard junior candidates. Even if they wish they could have things be different.

[kxrm]

> a lot less loyal

So have companies.

This goes both ways and labor is just reacting to the "it's just business" excuse companies have been using for over 30 years.

[Negitivefrags]

> The way this position conforms to the interests of the capital class, and conflicts with those of the labor class, is a red flag.

If being in the office conforms to the interest of the capital class, it implies that WFH is inherently less efficient.

This is one of those things that I often find strange with work from home advocates. They seem to imply that business owners just want employees to suffer as a goal in itself.

[sisyphuslife]

There are a few factors at work, including:

1) A lot of executive type work _is_ easier in person... and those executives forget that their work might not be representative of _other_ roles within their own org, and they might actually be the outlier.

2) A lot of managers don't know how to manage by looking at output. We see this not just with WFH, but also with multi-location teams, where some managers simply can't do it competently.

3) Many managers do, in fact, get some satisfaction from having that sort of power over their workers.

4) Many executives like having an office that is a bit of a tribute to the company (and therefore their) power. And this falls apart if the office is empty.

[antoinealb]

That's not necessarily true, though. For instance, real estate investors have a lot to lose from vacant office space and therefore would benefit from RTO.

I personally find that I enjoy in person collaboration but that should not mean we should universally force every team to come back to the office.

[MontyCarloHall]

I never understood this argument. Most companies do not own their office buildings, but rather lease space from corporate landlords. It is in the best interest of these companies to dramatically reduce their lease burden via WFH. Why would a company totally unrelated to real estate investment act against its own self-interest just to prop up real estate investors?

[addaon]

The argument (which may or may not be valid, just explaining it) is that companies do not lease space (or take any action), people do. And the same individuals who are able to make leasing decisions for office space are co-invested in commercial real estate; even if the company doesn’t benefit from maintaining an expensive office, the C suite might; and if so, then of course that’s the decision that will be made.

[MontyCarloHall]

>[T]he same individuals who are able to make leasing decisions for office space are co-invested in commercial real estate

But those individuals are much bigger shareholders in the company they work for. Downsizing the office footprint of a single company has a tiny marginal effect on the overall real estate market, but can incur enormous savings for the company, and enormous personal rewards to the people making the decision to downsize and save money.

Individuals are notoriously bad at considering collective externalities. If a CFO realizes that they could save tens of millions of dollars per year on real estate by switching to remote-only, they’re not going to then think “but if everyone did this, it would hurt the commercial real estate holdings I have in my portfolio.” No, the CFO is thinking “announcing that we’re saving 8 figures per annum on real estate is going to pop the share price of my company (and thus my equity holdings), and likely net me a really fat cash bonus.” By similar logic, CTOs, who likely have considerable technology investments, would want to needlessly maximize tech spend. Instead, they get lauded for cutting IT costs.

[Aurornis]

This is a weird conspiracy theory. You'd have to believe that real estate investors were pulling the strings in companies to get them to spend more money with no upside. Like they're just milking these companies for rent and the companies are doing it because they want to give money to the real estate investors?

Even in the rare case where real estate investors are also investors in the startup, my experience is that the startup gets reduced-rate rent as a bonus.

[antoinealb]

That's not what I believe. Other posters have explained it well, but to respond myself:

1. Some large tech companies are also large real estate funds. Google had >100B$ in real estate positions (although mixed between datacenters and office parks) [0]. So its not that they are milked for rent, but more that they would be loosing some money here, although not much. 2. People making decisions are also probably invested in the real estate market, and therefore have money to loose from a collapse of real estate value.

I also gave more thought to it, and I don't see it as impossible that WFH reduces employee's productivity (from the perspective of the employer). However, that is also true of other worker's rights like vacation time or sick leave. RTO mandates are an act of control of workers, from the managing class, and pushing it as "because of productivity" does not change that.

And again: I personally like working more from an office. I don't want to force others to follow my preferences.

[0] https://www.realtygroupfl.com/blog/posts/2022/02/02/google-r...

[alserio]

Not a startup, but real estate investors have a good chunk of shares of the company where I work and they can influence the decision makers just fine

[Aurornis]

I don't doubt what you're saying, but I don't these situations where real estate investors and company investors overlap and also want to micromanage the company's operations are common.

The way this is brought up as a general explanation for RTO across the industry is getting a little silly

[hunterpayne]

Office Real Estate used to be looked at as a very reliable investment. Good return for fixed income and reasonably safe when diversified across geographic locations. So lots of investment houses used REITs for some of their investments, pension funds, investment banks, even those companies that also invest in risky software startups. So you have this idea that there is a person called a "real estate investor", but really the majority of the people who invest money have some stake in office real estate. And those investments got crushed post-COVID. And they are salty about it and blame (probably correctly) remote work. Doesn't matter though, they took the risk and this time it didn't pan out for them so they don't have a real platform to complain. So they do this nonsense and trick a journalist into writing a hit piece.

[SilverElfin]

> They seem to imply that business owners just want employees to suffer as a goal in itself.

No, it’s more that they want to steal from employees by not paying for all the time lost to commuting and the impact of living near a few pricey locations. That theft is suffering.

[fmajid]

There’s some research that suggests WFH is less efficient per hour worked, but people work more hours that they would have otherwise wasted commuting so it’s a wash.

That said, the motivations of managers are seldom aligned with the interests of the business. There is such a thing as ego trips. Also, mediocre or insecure managers will rely more on the crutch of face time.

[xboxnolifes]

> If being in the office conforms to the interest of the capital class, it implies that WFH is inherently less efficient.

Not quite. It implies it affords the working class more power than the capital class is comfortable with.

[baq]

The interests of the capital class are not necessarily aligned with efficient allocation of capital. Note this is far from saying they want employees to suffer, but they install inefficient policies over them.

[prewett]

It's even worse. The capital class is disconnected from employees because they have the managerial class running the business, so it's actually the managerial class that creates the employee experience. But, it turns out that "the capital class" has a large component of 401k funds, and so "the capital class" has a very large component of small shareholders, and so they don't really even have any influence whatsoever.

[atomicnumber3]

"If being in the office conforms to the interest of the capital class, it implies that WFH is inherently less efficient"

only if the capital class is solely motivated by efficiency. I think this is trivially demonstrable to be not the case.

The capital class's primary interest is self-preservation - both of their capital, of course, but also preserving their place in the pecking order. And they'll spend a LOT of the former to maintain the latter because the latter is how they got the former.

Through that lens, GP's point is perfectly coherent.

"They seem to imply that business owners just want employees to suffer as a goal in itself."

Have you met... people? Yes there are literally many owners who do want employees to suffer. Or, perhaps worse, will tolerate tremendous amounts of suffering in the pursuit of minor other gains. (Amazon pee bottles come to mind.) It would somehow be a comforting kind of moustache-twirling comic book evil to say they just want people to suffer. Another to say they simply don't value human happiness (or lack of suffering) enough to not trade large amounts of it for small things they do care about.

I had a boss who was only willing to hire non-whites because he could inflict undesirable work on them, leaving more desirable work for the white employees.

I just want to end this by remarking that this presumption of owners being perfectly optimal, morally clean agents of free markets is absurd and honestly disgusting to bring to an argument.

[Aurornis]

> This is one of those things that I often find strange with work from home advocates. They seem to imply that business owners just want employees to suffer as a goal in itself.

I've worked remote a lot and I'm a big fan. I find it hard to discuss WFH online because it's so hard to find people willing to discuss it honestly, including the challenges. The way it's talked about here and on sites like Reddit is as if WFH is perfect, works for everyone, and the only reason we can't have more of it is because companies are hell-bent on doing things against their self interests.

I'm in another forum where we have a subforum for managers to talk, and remote work problems are a perennial topic. A lot of people really don't handle it well. There are even managers in the group who would prefer to work from home, but they've moved their teams into the office at least 2-3 days per week because their 5 day WFH experiments didn't go well.

It's a hard topic. I find myself holding back from discussing it because anything other than 100% pro-WFH anti-manager comments will get a lot of drive-by downvotes.

[BoredPositron]

Post hoc ergo propter hoc...

[moffkalast]

Their next post's gonna be how building new datacenters is clearly great for everyone based on trickle down economics.

[munk-a]

It is sane and inevitably correct to treat with extreme skepticism any explanation for an economic effect that reduces the cause to a singular source. AI is to blame, to an extent, so is remote working (it is excellent for older folks who have lives to support but is a rug pull on the social aspects of office working), but the economy is the big looming threat here. We still hadn't recovered fully from the pandemic and then we got Trump 2: Electric Tariffoo which has wrought absolute havoc on business stability. All these combine (with other factors like the ever growing PE investment) to discourage innovation and long term investment.

Junior employees are a long term investment - if the R&D budget is frozen, you're sure as heck not going to dump 60% of your budget into onboarding.

[graemep]

RTO mandates are primarily pushed by the managerial class, not the capitalist class. Both want to blame AI so its not clear they want to avoid doing so.

[iterateoften]

In my experience, investors push hard to go in office when fundraising

[greekrich92]

Managers, like police and prosecutors, are enforcers for the capitalist class. This is why they are not part of the working class. Managers do the job of squeezing surplus value from workers, rather than producing real Value themselves. Relationship to capital determines class.

[graemep]

That argument only holds if you think RTO increases output. Infact it has to create more value than the costs t imposes otherwise it reduces profits. I am not convinced this is true.

I think your overall picture is simplistic too. Many managers (and police, and prosecutors) act contrary to the interests and wants of the capitalist class. Managers have their own interests which are frequently at odds with those of their employer. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/agency-...

[atomicnumber3]

RTO is primarily pushed by the capitalist class, and managers are just stuck in the middle. No good manager wants pissed off employees, but managers who push back on the capitalist class do not stay managers long.

[bluegatty]

It's not reasonable for us to frame 'return to office' as a class issue, it's a productivity issue - moreover, the general point is not implausible but a bit conspiratorial.

It's odd that we conflate that somehow 'return to office' is inherently more productive and that somehow 'dumb corporations acting against their interest'.

I don't think that's true, and if it were, well, we should all be in a position to take advantage of it.

Sure, FT is part of the 'corporatocracy' for sure but they're not working to 'create narratives'. Individual journalists are actually writing about things they see.

My bet is the real reason is that companies just don't want to hire juniors, and that's it.