The amount of class warfare here is hilarious. Will you really parrot elite coined phrases like “laptop class?” What even is the laptop class? It’s a meaningless term created so it’s easier to dehumanize a group of people that have a massive salary range. There are WFH making $50k. They are not all vest and resters.
Do we really need to make the conversation be about the upper middle class being “lazy” and completely ignoring the fact that these RTO orders come from billionaires?
> Will you really parrot elite coined phrases like “laptop class?”
Sometimes, I think about the phrase "human resource" and how it's a nice linguistic nod toward "natural resources", which obviously are meant to be exploited. It makes it easier when you think about laying off thousands of people, or making thousands commute needlessly simply to boost someone's ego.
"Exploit" and "use" have multiple meanings, some positive and some negative.
It's the words people hear based on their own particular biases determine if those words associate with anything particularly positive, neutral, or negative.
The problem with creating abstract business jingo is it's typically viewed as an artificial "thieves' cant" between managers. A sublanguage meant to obscure and hide meaning.
I don’t have a problem with the term Human Resources. It’s not trying to hide anything, it’s stating the obvious utility. It’s not trying to do anything extra or communicate something it’s not.
Worse would be something like Vanguard of the Revolution or Organization for the Workers, etc.
Writers gonna artist. I wouldn't take it as anything but a colorful metaphor.
The strata who should be rightfully derided are the chauffeured-and-business-jet-class who have an embarrassingly-low tax rate while concentrating and keeping vast amounts of profits. Nearly 60% of the post-pandemic inflation was due to the profit price spiral. The "wage spiral" is a delusion and layoffs aren't actually necessary. They're business theater belying boosting corporate profits to keep up with the proverbial Jones' in other stocks.
> Nearly 60% of the post-pandemic inflation was due to the profit price spiral.
Any chance you have a source for this? I haven't seen that stat before and an not quite sure how we'd know that, or if the profit spiral was itself a side effect of monetary policy throwing new money into the system.
The laptop class’s interests are closely intertwined with those of the billionaires. When billionaires offshored jobs to China, there was an army of laptop class people who helped them do it. And they collectively benefit very much from the economic changes that have fueled billionaires’ fortunes. The top 10% have an annual income of over $6 trillion. The total income of all US billionaires is less than half a trillion dollars. Since 1970, the growth in median income of the upper middle class has vastly outstripped the growth in median income of the rest of the country.
If there’s anything standing in the way of more economically redistributive policies in this country, it’s the laptop class. They would take a huge and material hit in their standard of living in a more equal society such as Canada or Germany. Everyone from programmers to lawyers to HR administrators make a third to half as much as their counterparts in those countries.
This is only half the story. Government share of GDP and real dollar Revenue has also vastly increased since the 1970s. Redistributive policies and spending have had a massive increase.
Billionaires own the most widely circulated print media in the U.K. so it doesn’t seem impossible that this agenda is being influenced.
Especially when those exact papers spilt a lot of ink telling people to “get back to work” despite the fact those people were always working during the pandemic.
I still think out of all the...unique... things Elon has said... work from home is morally wrong has to take the cake. I try to spend time looking at things as radically as I can. I think it's helpful to accept folks views as widely as possible, but I'm still trying to wrap my head around work from home being morally wrong.
I was on a bicycle ride listening to this interview when he said it and I literally pulled my bike over and sat for a half hour or so thinking about what I think about the idea, I'm still not sure what I think. (Intellectual dishonesty or a valid view point?)
My two cents on this is that he is saying "working from home is morally wrong" - for his companies... but he left out the for his companies part.
He owns a car company and a space ship company - both of which have assembly lines with tons of workers. A majority of his employees will need to be working in a factory or with physical equipment/prototypes. Therefore they must be at the office or at the plant.
In that environment - allowing a small percentage of people to have the flexibility to work from home all the time, actually can seem amoral as that will create two classes of workers - the in-office class and the laptop WFH class - within the same company.
Friction could be generated if for instance the laptop class is making decisions/mistakes from the comfort of their PJs which negatively impacts the production line class. Its much easier to just make that 8% laptop class of the company RTO and experience the impact of their decisions.
Similar issues would be apparent at Amazon (distribution center workers versus AWS staff) and possibly Apple (i.e. HW Apple engineers have to be in office, but iCloud workers can WFH).
I think it'd be hard/impossible that a small cloud first company or small remote only startup like GitLabs would be amoral for being WFH.
Twitter could probably be WFH, but in order to make statement that would not possibly be construed as hypocritical he unfortunately can't make such a distinction.
But those aren’t moral issues, they’re productivity issues. My younger brother used to do his computer job from the office because it was attached to the factory. It meant he could talk directly with the people manufacturing the steel frames he specified in the building dressing to get the right thing built quickly. This was a USP of the company vs other design shops.
This could be true for Tesla, there’s no morality to this. The fact Musk brings morality in suggests he’s talking out his arse.
Twitter is a different company. If he doesn’t bring morality into it, he doesn’t have to be a hypocrite. He could easily say “working on site is necessary for Tesla, not for Twitter.” Being dogmatic is not good business.
According to the dictionary, morality is simply “ principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior.”
> they’re productivity issues
Some would say that choosing being unproductive when you could be productive IS immoral. Not only does Benjamin Franklin jump to mind, but the entire Protestant-informed culture of “the West”. Japan’s culture is also infused with a productivity mindset.
> According to the dictionary, morality is simply “ principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior.”
Right/wrong in this case are meant in the sense of "it's wrong to murder people" as opposed to "saying 2 + 2 = 5 is wrong." The former is a statement of morality, the latter is a statement of correctness. This does not link productivity / morality.
> Some would say that choosing being unproductive when you could be productive IS immoral.
Therefore it's not an axiom. Most people would only consider it immoral if you chose to be unproductive for the sake of being unproductive. For example, refusing to do your job while expecting to be paid is something many people would consider immoral.
This is different from choosing a path you prefer, that happens to be less productive. For example, doing something more slowly but more safely may be less productive but also something many would not consider immoral.
> This is different from choosing a path you prefer, that happens to be less productive.
In the context of one's life, I agree fully.
However, once you choose to work in a collective, choosing to be less productive without a positive tradeoff to the system, harms the ones around you.
The positive tradeoff to the system is that the employee who prefers to WFH is happier and less stressed, which leads to increased productivity and retention. Now whether this offsets the decreased productivity from not being there in person, that's what's being argued over.
I think you may have missed the issues they intended to bring up. The moral issues I see could be that you might have one class of worker ("knowledge worker") who is able to work from home and another class of worker who is unable to work from home. It's along the lines of the difference between paid catering for the executive suite but not the rest of the office.
No they’re not even remotely related. One type of work can’t be done from home, one can. That’s not a moral discussion, that’s just a description of reality.
Paid catering isn’t an intrinsic part of the work, so it has absolutely nothing to do with this discussion.
The exclusive paid catering I gave as an example is something that might foster resentment towards executives from the rest of the office staff. Work from home, regardless of circumstances around the work which allow for it, can be seen as a similar privilege which might draw resentment from one worker group to another. I think something like that is what was being suggested.
No, but it's fair for a company to mandate some minimum level of behavior that reflects a baseline of values. A cable company I worked for had fewer holidays than most other companies, even for their corporate employees. The rationale was that if the line cable installer or phone rep was schlepping in to work, then so should the marketing guy.
I would say usually this is deftly handled at other tech companies (MSFT, AAPL, Netflix, Facebook, Google) by outsourcing all meal preparation, cleaning services, security, low level IT, contract manufacturing to other companies. That way there is not a separate class within the same company. This works most of the time to not create a press $*$!storm.
The challenge for Elon (and Bezos/Jassy) is that his two of his companies rely on physical labor and can't outsource the physical part but still need tech talent that could otherwise WFH.
I don't envy him or Bezos/Jassy...
If you don't say stuff like this you have folks even on the tech side who will protest (i.e. TBray of AWS VP).
"I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of COVID-19," he wrote.
I think its important to realize that Elon's smart enough to realize that part of his job is performative - for his primary investors/faithful (i.e. Cathie Wood, Tesla Daily, Hyperchange, Ross Gerber).
They want Tesla to maintain that original "Elon sleeping under desks", all hands on deck, Tesla hunger of yore. To them - they probably were concerned about the design teams getting to soft from WFH and getting uppity.
Also a symptom of that management style is measuring input not outcomes.
A star worker for them is someone who works 16 hours a day, adds 10K lines of code and sleeps under their desk. Not someone who goes for a long walk in the park while thinking deeply about the problem, and then spends half an hour at the keyboard refactoring to remove 1000 lines of code and clear a major performance bottleneck.
Elon may be performing for his shareholders, but if he was actually smart he'd be informing them. It's notable how many of the actually-smart rockstar CEO's didn't seem to care what their shareholders thought.
"But role XYZ can't work from home therefore no one should work from home" is the silliest of all arguments. It's similar to "Back in my day, we didn't have parental leave and it was very hard, so why is it fair that young people should not have to go through the hardest experience too!".
Here's just some of the benefits to on-site workers in role XYZ of other workers being able to WFH:
* Quicker commutes (less congestion from people needlessly traveling) and thus more free time.
* If a partner is WFH, they haven't wasted time commuting and thus have more time and energy to assist with the household.
* Higher salaries as the jobs requiring a commute become less desirable vs. WFH jobs.
* Higher salaries as the business wastes less money on having unnecessary office facilities and (theoretically at least) workers could demand these savings be reflected in their salaries.
* Improved health from reduction in pollution caused by commuting.
* Reduced cost of living from less wasted land used for offices that are only used 30% of a week.
* Lower taxes or improved government services as less money needs to be wasted on infrastructure that is overwhelmingly built to cater for the 12% per week that it is used to needlessly shuffle everyone around.
* Increased productivity from reduction in illnesses transferred on public transport and within office facilities.
* Improved happiness and productivity resulting from workers being able to setup a workspace/home office that is most productive for their needs. Fresh air, lighting, seating, etc are all controllable by the worker at home.
* Households could switch to having a single car.
If one were to debate against WFH, more sensible arguments would be things like:
* Greater heating / cooling efficiency to cram more people in a single cramped building than to have those same people heat / cool their homes individually. Passive houses largely solve this.
* More efficient access to some services such as getting a haircut, buying goods from a specialist retailer, etc if they're all centralised in a CBD as opposed to requiring individuals to travel all across a city. Increased deliveries to home negates this.
* Forced exercise (on average) due to workers needing to walk between transport options and an office building, whereas at home they don't have to walk anywhere unless they are motivated to do so.
It seems weird that the office workers are working from the office and not in the production line too, no? Do your meetings while assembling a car, I'd you're worried about the people assembling cars feeling bad
I think that is the preference/ideal scenario that Musk has in his head.
Take a morning standup with your coworkers about supply chain/scrum, head to the factory floor to show the technicians how to flash the latest firmware to the infotainment system, do some heads down work, go home, eat dinner and then take a phone conference late at night with your Tesla China/Berlin counterpart.
Probably impressions matter on the factory floor and when you scale up operations. You don't want a situation where the people on the factory floor just refer to the design team as "corporate" (i.e. "corporate" wants us to do this, guys we have to redo X over again on all 10,000 cars we produced today because "dude in corporate" thinks its not going to work otherwise).
I think this is probably where the motivation comes from. You don't want the people who get their hands dirty viewing the people that make decisions for them as some floating heads somewhere off in the ether. If they dont come around ever that's what's going to happen. It creates resentment, destroys morale, and you have to balance that with the morale impact of making the information workers show their faces often enough.
Given that Tesla have been producing cars where the steering “yoke” literally falls off on the highway after a few miles, I wouldn’t be so sure this hasn’t been implemented already!
I saw this first-hand at a defense contractor. A lot of the work is classified, so it needs to be done in-office. The group of in-office workers definitely harbored a lot of anger toward the out-of-office “no-work-from-home” workers. It doesn’t help that it was mostly true (there) that the work-from-homers were doing nothing; I know because I was one of them, at one point.
There are 12 year olds working in Cobalt mines, I wonder if Musk is going to send his children to work in those. Some people have to live on the street, maybe we all should, otherwise it's "messed up".
> allowing a small percentage of people to have the flexibility to work from home all the time, actually can seem amoral as that will create two classes of workers
This is kind of absurd, though, since they are already two classes of workers. Information workers and factory workers are different.
But also, the deciding factor on whether you can work from home should be: can you do your job from home? Look at nurses. They have to be in a hospital, walking into rooms and tending to patients, right? Not phone nurses and poison control center nurses. They work from home nowadays.
I agree from a technological/logical standpoint but from a human/emotional standpoint I think there are issues. People love to complain/go to press about HR decisions. The press would love to portray Musk as hypocritical about treating production line workers as second class denizens. The headline writes itself.
I tthink the way you overcome it is by paying a premium to in office staff. In your scenario - onsite nurses likely get paid a very significant premium to the salary of a remote, phone nurse.
But in the "Elon" case its going to hard to show how your are paying a premium for onsite factory techs when the design engineers are making $$$ plus RSUs.
> from a human/emotional standpoint I think there are issues
From an emotional standpoint, sure, but not from a moral standpoint, which is what your previous post was saying. There is no moral case for punishing an advantaged class if that punishment does nothing to help the other class.
I think that's a fair point - especially if one prescribes to most economically efficient == most moral - which not all subscribe to (although perhaps of all people Musk would subscribe to this theory).
That said I could for see cases where the laptop class could be isolated from pain when a separate class has to do the physical work. Imagine a scenario where the laptop class engineer does some sloppy work in order to pick up the kids for soccer. The goof up requires 100 production line people to redo step 8 of 30 steps for 3 additional hours.
That goof up will be less visible there - buried in the timesheets of 100 workers - than at a company that has outsourced production line work. At the outsourced production company the goof up will show up as the additional change order which will have a directly mappable line item on the quarterly accounting that the responsible engineer will need to answer for.
There are also many people in non-desk jobs who could never imagine doing one. The recent example I have in mind are the wildland firefighters described by Desmond. It's hard, grueling, dirty, long work, but for many of them, it beats sitting still stuck at home attempting to look busy for some guy in a suit.
Just because our kind of people thinks of it as the dream job does not mean every type of person shares that ideal!
Zero opinion on the work-life balance question, because it's irrelevant here (this is not fundamentally a work-life balance issue, and people who work remotely have their own work-life balance problems). This is about whether or not you have to physically be in a particular place to actually perform your job duties. For a factory worker, yes you do. For an awful lot of information workers, you absolutely don't.
Park rangers get to perform their jobs out amongst the majestic beauty of nature. Should we make it "fair" by forcing them to go sit in a cubicle under fluorescent lights too?
100% remote work was a thing before the pandemic and it will continue to be a thing in the future. Companies that don't learn how to adapt to this will be at a disadvantage on this point. This cuts both ways, of course. If I can do my job "anywhere" and I live in an expensive place like Seattle, I should worry that I have to compete with people in very low CoL places, and that likely pushes my own market value down. That's life. But pretending we need information worker's butts in seats downtown to operate servers thousands of miles away from them is not going to fix the problem.
Pure speculation, but my guess is that he’s invested in the commercial real estate market and hoping for a turnaround. I don’t think it’s some profound or insane ideology he has, I think he’s just trying to prop up CRE like he does with crypto.
He’s famous for buying distressed commercial properties and for gaslighting, it just makes sense and the whole moral argument was a great way to get people talking about it.
But he's not the only business leader using heavy-handed techniques to get workers back in the office. I think it's likely that he genuinely believes that working from the office is better - he's not playing 4d chess.
The morality argument is just him rationalizing what he already believes. This isn't the "first principles" thinking that he demands from others.
My brother calls return-to-office policies "panicking, in Boomer."
Tech company profits are declining. Management (especially Boomer management) needs to be seen as "doing something" or they're the ones on the chopping block. So they force everybody back into the office so they can be seen to be managing.
God forbid the cause of declining profits be things like national monetary policy or years of short-term decision-making that propped profits up to unsustainable highs.
No. It must be that Andy works from home. Better bring everybody in to keep an eye on them (to read their faces and find out for sure just how much shit they'll take from you before they quit).
I doubt there are that many Boomers left in tech management - almost all that age cohort are in retirement or semi-retired, they're enjoying their Saga cruises and golf courses (or if they're unlucky, their Walmart greeter jobs).
I suspect there are managers panicking about losing relevance in a post-office world, but those will be middle-managers, not CEOs. Much of the panic is from owners of commercial real estate and their flying monkeys in the media who are seeing empty office blocks and declining property values and rents.
As for Musk, who knows. He's in his own very weird bubble of long-terminism or cosmism or whatever it is he believes in. Maybe he thinks if everyone works from home it will lead to a drop in birth rates or decline in Western society or something.
I'm specifically talking about the middle managers. They're the ones who need to be seen "doing things," so when it's time to surface any ideas for how to fix the problem, especially when it's their butts on the line, this is what comes out.
But I also refer to the boards and investors. We'd love to think it's all a young person's VC game, but behind all that money is still, more often than not, someone who panics in Boomer.
Baby Boomer generation is 1946-1964, which would make them 59-77. I expect only the younger range is likely to still be middle managers.
Maybe it's just me, but I feel like the use of "boomer" as a derogative to be reductionist and ageist, not to mention most of the time incorrect, as I've seen it applied all the way to Millennials.
They've been criticizing my generation for receiving the "participation trophies" they gave us as kids, as well as screwing over our entire economy with shortsighted self-protectionism, so I definitely mean it in a derogatory way against people their age.
To be fair, I criticize them for the shit they did when they were my age too, so I'm criticizing them as a cohort, not because of their current age.
Yes, 100%, Boomers are the parent generation of Millennials. They spent our whole childhoods giving us participation trophies, and our whole young adulthood criticizing us for having received them.
I criticize them as a generational cohort for being the most entitled, wasteful, short-sighted generation that has ever lived, and has done more to screw up the entire world they are handing on to their children than anyone in history.
They have done this at every stage of their lives, but especially once they were old enough to be having children.
> Yes, 100%, Boomers are the parent generation of Millennials. They spent our whole childhoods giving us participation trophies, and our whole young adulthood criticizing us for having received them.
I don't mean as a cohort, I mean as individuals. I have my doubts that the exact same person who has given out participation trophies is the one who criticized. I think you are mixing two separate groups into one, by using their birth years as a commonality.
Also, I suspect that participation trophies is a Western creation, perhaps even an American phenomenon, and the Boomers who are not part of those cultures did not participate in those actitivities.
I'd say this of low- or first-level managers, but not the middle layers.
Those are filled with people who are clinging to their roles well past their usefulness, because even though they're ruining social supports like Medicare and Social Security by pulling out multiples more funds than they ever contributed, they also failed to save anything of their own or are otherwise refusing to retire and leave the workforce (even though they've already started receiving "retirement" benefits).
There’s no way that someone as wealthy as he doesn’t own at least some commercial property. Even if not himself, Tesla alone owns billions in CRE, not to mention his other companies.
Commercial properties are some of the most valuable assets a company owns, of course the guy wants to keep CRE values up. Just because he owns some transportation companies doesn’t mean he’s allergic to CRE, that’s kinda naive.
That’s like arguing guys at his level don’t donate to both political parties when they clearly do. Because by doing that, you get to own the whole system, not just a piece.
But they definitely own a ton of stock in companies that own real estate. 10 percent of their portfolio is in Bank of America, which has a huge commercial real estate lending portfolio. Berkshire doesn’t need to own CRE directly when they own companies that do CRE.
Commercial real estate is foundational in corporate finance. I guess I just don’t this argument that these huge companies aren’t somehow exposed. I guarantee you that if the CRE market tanks, Berkshire is gonna feel it too.
>Pure speculation, but my guess is that he’s invested in the commercial real estate market and hoping for a turnaround. I don’t think it’s some profound or insane ideology he has, I think he’s just trying to prop up CRE like he does with crypto.
We should assume any public statements on morality from powerful people out of the blue are motivated by a secondary factor.
You don't even need that rule of thumb here. I believe Elon's very public tantrums on and regarding Twitter have shown that he lacks even basic integrity. The gall that he would discuss what is or is not moral from that position.
It must be some form of gaslighting for an obviously amoral person to make public announcements of moral platitudes. Why people agree with them is beyond me, is there perverse pleasure in being deeply wrong?
Being a billionaire in America transforms the person in some kind of super hero. People are mentally incapable to disagree with them, even on basic topics that everyone knows are wrong. The media exploits this every day.
Elon has shown us all how to make a small fortune in social media. It’s not his fault that we don’t have 40 billion to burn buying a 20 billion business with a 13 billion mortgage
They are, but at least in my city, comparing traffic at rush hour (a.k.a. commuting hour) to other times of the day makes it fairly clear commuting is one of the primary use cases.
It also edges your car mileage from the circumstance where electric cars excel (daily medium distance trips ending at home every day to charge) towards less advantageous use (long multi-day trips).
This is an excellent way to put it and a great observation. I was never able to put my finger on it even though the BS meter was off the charts. Here it is. Thanks.
By adding "morally" it enforces questioning one's own principles in support of the thing.
Without "morally" it's dismissable nonsense (ie. bullshit). With "morally" it requires pulling at strands that make up our world-view.
It's not necessarily a bad thing to question one's world-view on occasion, but causing that level of fundamental questioning, for a comment that would otherwise be easily dismissable, is gaslighting.
Personally I think the repeated part of the gaslighting definition is really important (and the implication that the repetition is conducted abusively). Otherwise you'd argue that any dialog that causes one to question one's world-view is gaslighting, and that's simply not true under the colloquial use of the term.
If I make a statement that killing is not justifiable even in self defense, and that causes you, who believes that killing is justified as a measure of self defense, to question your worldview, I'm not gaslighting you into believing me, I'm simply sharing a viewpoint. If I repeatedly show you propaganda where innocent people regularly die because they are not allowed to defend themselves, and where people who do are punished, perhaps by being put in mental hospitals, etc. then I'm gaslighting you. Generally gaslighting refers to using lies and other statements that do not reflect reality, repeatedly, to manipulate someone into a false worldview.
I actually think it's dangerous to throw gaslighting as a term around so casually. Gaslighting, very specifically, means to repeatedly question someone's worldview, while ignoring their anecdotal experience, and that of general reality assuming they roughly align, in order to emotionally abuse them into submission or indoctrination. It's pretty serious and ugly. I know it's fun on HN to throw the term around, but Elon (regardless of how much you dislike him, and how many people follow him) arguing that WFH is morally wrong, is not an instance of Musk gaslighting the public at large. Not even really by a fun shot.
Preemptive corollary: to repeatedly espouse one's viewpoint, even if it pertains to the mental health of a class or group of people, is also not to gaslight, though that is more recently how the term has been used and how we bridge from a serious topic to a rhetorical device used as a Kafka trap. Gaslighting is targeted at an individual, with the specific goal of essentially brainwash. It's not espousing a political belief that may negatively impact a group of people, even if the result would be oppression of the faction's liberty. That's just politics, and politics in the west is all about choosing which factions to oppress and at what cost to the majority.
For example, repeatedly arguing that you think the idea of unchecked ownership of assault weapons is a stretch too liberal of an interpretation of the 2nd amendment, and that it's crazy to think it's okay for anybody to own one without training, and that you think it'd be a good idea to limit gun ownership and require mental health checks and registered firearms lists of trained individuals, and even that you think it's immoral to allow such easy access to acquire devices that make killing trivial, because it puts too much responsibility in the hands of civilian organizations to protect people from maniacs, which they clearly can't do at scale, and even to go so far as to argue they're insane to think otherwise, is not an instance of gaslighting gun owners or rights advocates into thinking their worldview is broken and in need of an update. But by the casual interpretation, it is, since you're arguing to oppress the liberty of some group of people on practical and/or moral (designation doesn't matter, anything that causes them to question their worldview) grounds.
If I were to refuse to pay my rent. My landlord would post an eviction notice and if I refused to comply, I would likely be arrested or forcibly removed.
Why can’t the landlord “evict” twitter? Does the process look significantly different for commercial real estate? Does twitter provide value to the landlord in some form other than rent? Maybe they’re afraid of bad PR?
Having run a small business for some years, refusal to pay an uncontested debt is (very unfortunately) a routine part of business and negotiation. It's a very ugly part, but creates a bit of a prisoner's dilemma where you wonder if you're the only sucker paying debts on time and in full.
That remains to be established. People often have no idea what renter protections are like. If he's in California, he might find that he can't be evicted without the landlord going through a multi-year process.
Take years, or even a year, is very much hyperbole, even for SF. Particularly when dealing with non-paying tenants. This may have been different during eviction moratoriums at the height of the pandemic.
And another thing -- the "morally wrong" is remarkably selective. Musk is clearly saying that it's "morally wrong" for white collar workers to be remote while insisting that blue collar workers be fully present.
In a CNBC interview this week, speaking about service and manufacturing workers, Musk said “it's messed up to assume that, yes, they have to go to work, but you don't. It's not just a productivity thing, I think it's morally wrong,” suggesting “the laptop class is living in la-la land.”
What if the headline was "CEO phones in 20 hours/week from Hawaii while threatening to fire workers who clock < 60 hours/week"?
The commute and the open office layout. If getting to the office doesn’t take a big bite out of my day and salary and I’m given an environment that makes me more productive than I am at home, I’m happy to go to the office.
That’s unusual, though. Usually getting to/from work takes at minimum of an hour (30m both ways), either due to traffic or from being pushed out way from where the office is located in order to be able to afford the rent/mortgage. You’re also usually stuck with an open office where maintaining focus for any period of time is impossible, as opposed to cubicles or private offices.
If Elon finds it morally distasteful that blue collar workers' commutes are unpaid, he could simply pay them for their time, or have them work fewer hours for the same pay and benefits.
I think it's mostly true. Yes, people have gotten used to the flexibility and maybe their very particular setups at home. But, if people could walk 10 minutes to their office and people they knew would be there I'm pretty sure you'd see a lot less pushback--especially for coming in a few days a week.
Furthermore, if fewer people are commuting then employees whose work requires physical presence will have shorter commute times, and better parking spots.
> Musk is clearly saying that it's "morally wrong" for white collar workers to be remote while insisting that blue collar workers be fully present.
If that is his justification then it's just as silly. Does Musk think it's morally wrong that white collar workers live in bigger homes than blue collar workers? That they send more of their kids to private school? Has Musk gone full communist?
I hate the office. Shitty equipment, loud distracting environment, uncomfortable, need to keep appearances up, notion of ass-in-seat rather than creating output that matters.
Interesting, haven’t seen this exchange till now. He’s basically talking about what is increasingly becoming identified as the “laptop class” who can do the whole virtual life, live in lockdowns indefinitely, carry on with delivery stuff, etc etc. He’s building a set of claims about the morality of that set of arrangements for our subpopulation who are members of the laptop class. I’ll have to think about that one, that’s a novel claim to view those affordances critically in terms of special treatment and how that all intersects in the morality angle.
Eh, the more mindshare these people think they have the more crazy they become. Pre-2018 Elon was more focused on the companies, although he still made mistakes (Taking TSLA private tweet, borderline self-dealing with the SolarCity acquisition). The cave rescue fiasco and how he was sleeping on the floor of the factory during the 2018 Model 3 Ramp[0] (which also supposedly had Tesla a month away from bankruptcy[0]) must have triggered something, perhaps he'd already done the hard work and wanted to celebrate by increasing his fame/clout and by eventually purchasing his favorite social media platform.
Take it to it's absurd conclusion... Is it morally wrong for you to have a job sitting at a desk while someone else digs ditches all day?
It's obviously not. The fundamental differentiator is what is the nature of the job? What are the needs to accomplish the work being performed? If it's typing on a computer and talking to people, it can be done from home. It's not morally wrong to do it that way.
As someone who generally likes what Musk has to say, this one threw me for a loop. He's smarter than that and I don't think for one second he truly believes that. I think it's a public position he is taking on the subject, moralizing to dismiss criticism, he has other motivations. I don't think they're "his ego" but I don't think he genuinely believes it's morally wrong to sit down while typing.
> There are some exceptions, but I think that the whole notion of work from home is a bit like the fake Marie Antoinette quote, ’Let them eat cake,'″ Musk told CNBC.
> "It's like, really, you’re going to work from home and you're going to make everyone else who made your car come work in the factory? You're going to make the people who make your food… that they can't work from home? The people that fix your house — they can't work from home? But, you can? Does that seem morally right?" the billionaire asked. "That's messed up."
Of all the people in the position to claim people are morally obligated to commute to work, a rich billionaire focused on minimizing carbon emissions isn't one.
Elon's argument makes no sense on multiple levels:
1. Every job has different requirements, and you can't arbitrarily apply the same standards to every one. It's no different from saying that "Cooks have to de-grease the grill, so desk workers have to de-grease their desks at the end of the day as well." You'd think that someone so ruthlessly focused on productivity and efficiency would acknowledge this.
2. He speaks as if the current hierarchical capitalist structure with all its particular corporate idiosyncrasies is a fundamental aspect of reality rather than a very specific and arbitrary social construct. We should be fighting to move away from it rather than submit to it further.
3. He does not apply these standards to himself, flying around in his corporate jet and rarely "in the office" himself. So apparently he does believe some roles are not bound by the same rules and requirements, which is inconsistent.
Realistically he likely understands all this, but just can't say the truth directly because it's not so palatable.
It makes a lot of sense when you consider how much of his wealth is invested in a car company.
Even in a hybrid work environment, the vast majority of the miles I put on my car are commuting to and from the office. And if a household has 2 adults who need to commute, they're more likely to want 2 fuel-efficient vehicles.
I think a lot of the speculation about his motivations and just how long of a game he is playing give him too much credit. The past 12 months have been a complete backslide in his credibility. I chalk it up to the fact that he has literally become an attention seeking soundbite machine.
I have a farm and work remotely. I'm awake 18 hrs a day, spend 6 with my family & 12 working -- 8 for tech job, 4 for farm. I do this 6 days a week. I'm insanely productive by most metrics (many many launched products, side gigs, work 1.5 jobs, etc). I schedule my day down to 15 min increments (though obviously, adjustments are always made).
Remote work affords me that opportunity and I work as hard as anyone. It's fun to wear the blue and white collar at the same time to be honest. I have survivalist friends, guys who work on cars, tech folks where wee discuss AI, etc.
I think Musk is wrong here, but do agree people need to roll up their sleeves and do legit work. You should always be contributing to your community, family, etc.
Your work ethic is very impressive, but what do you mean by 'legit work'? Are you implying remote work is not legitimate? I'm confused because you even state that you spend your days working remotely - are you are obviously very productive at it. Is that not legit work, and only the blue collar is legit?
Not the author of the comment, but it is pretty clear to me that they are saying you can work from home and coast, or you can work from home and be productive, and they suggest that everyone who works from home should do the latter.
I agree with them. To me it isn't about the color of one's collar or the location they work from. It is about being productive. Productive workers should have flexibility, where possible. Unproductive ones shouldn't.
It's easier to coast at the office and look productive. Much easier. Attending every social fuction, social visits, adhoc meetings can kill half a week easy.
Why should people work so hard all the time? In the US, we are already insanely productive compared to almost every other worker in every other country and even compared to ourselves a few decades ago.
We work hard to bring value to our employer who wouldn't waste a minute for sympathy when they lay us off to increase their margins for a quarter, but you feel that we have to be productive all the time or else, what? We are immoral?
I contend that the worker owes nothing but fulfilling their job description. If you don't have work to do, then why find it?
There is no need to 'be productive' every working hour of every day if you don't have to be. To do so is insanity in my opinion. Go be with your family. Kids grow up way too fast and you are missing it.
I think if productivity is high enough then there should just be fewer working hours.
Edit: I also want to be clear that I don't really think about productivity as an instantaneous measure, but more of an average over time. Someone (at home or at work) who is "coasting" in my opinion is someone who is rarely, if ever, productive. Someone who is productive is someone who gets good work done every week or month or whatever unit of time is relevant to the job at hand. What you do with this 5 minutes or that hour isn't really as important, IMO.
> people need to roll up their sleeves and do legit work.
I don't like this kind of Calvinist attitude toward work. Increasing productivity via technological advancement should free us all up to do more of what we want.
What does your planning process look like? I’d like to get more structure in my workday, maybe not that much… but how do you deal with the Stuff that inevitably Comes Up?
If you can, you push it to the next day and schedule accordingly. If you can, obviously plans changed lol. 99% of what we have going on can be pushed to tomorrow
Most calendars you can break down to w.e. interval you want, I share a calendar with my family and we put our stuff up. Then for each bucket, I break it down individually as the day comes up. Takes like 10 min at night to put it all in, so maybe an hour a week of planning. That may seem like a lot, but worth the effort IMO.
As an example, every day my basic schedule: 6-8am with family, 8am-12pm [farm] work, 12pm-4pm [collaborative] work, 4-7pm chores & family, 7-9pm [emails / focus work] work, 9-10pm family, 10-12pm [focus] work.
Then the day before, I will break out individual events. There are times, for instance, I have to take a kid to the doctor so I'll block that out, put in all my meetings and adjust the 4-7pm family time to say 5-7pm (take an hr from work & family time).
It's all about being disciplined and trying to ensure you are organized and maximize time for me. Gotta keep focused
As an early retired person who is most definitely capitalizing on “taking it easy”, this lifestyle sounds positively exhausting and hellish to me.
I find it mostly interesting how different successful people can be with wildly varied takes on what works for them lifestyle-wise as well as what they value in life. Not to mention how we prioritize (and focus) our limited time on earth.
Kudos to you for making your life work well. We’re wired differently, and that’s okay.
i'm fascinated by your schedule as well - is your life (during the work week at least) really just work & family and all fully scheduled in advance?
what about hobbies? alone time? being lazy & purposefully wasting time? culture & entertainment? sports? etc. where exactly is your "me" fitting in here?
His argument also boils down to the idea that since other jobs such as manufacturing require employees to be on site, that all jobs should have the same requirement. Smh...
Also the idea of a ruthless capitalistic multibillionaire invoking morality as a defense is just kafkaesque.
I like his argument, and I would like to extend it to something like 'Since some people get through life on a salary of $7.75/hr (Or less), we should take away Elon's billions of dollars.' It'd only be fair - he can, after all, do well without all the comforts and power that his wealth affords him.
I think it would also be a reasonable accommodation to just cut the SWE’s salaries down to 10% below the lowest end salary of the manufacturing workers who have to be in person to do their job and let the SWEs do their job remote.
But I expect that may not be a popular opinion here on HN, though.
How about people with dangerous jobs? police officers, firefighters, miners and ironworkers, pilots, soldiers, drivers...
Would that make having a desktop job morally wrong?
I get Elon's point that manufacturing often requires some people to report to site, particularly in a company like Tesla.
But generalizing and saying that all positions require to report to office because of moral and ethical reasons is ridiculous.
How about incentives for commuting to work? Not flashy offices with free snacks and meditation rooms, how about money?
Companies usually reallocate to remote suburban areas to pay less taxes, and they expect people to spent over 40 hours per month, a full week of additional work, for free, to commute to the office.
It's pretty textbook behaviour for narcissistic manipulators.
Harm the victim in some way, when victim complains about it, turn it around so as to frame it as the victim doing the wrong thing all along, and the victim should feel like a bad person.
Yeah seriously! I was riding beside a river (for fun) listening to the interview and it came to that section, he said it and I laughed out loud... thought what a weird perspective. I'd never considered that before and there was a bench over looking the river a ways down so I pulled over, sat on the bench and debated it with myself for a while... let myself agree in one direction... see how I feel, let myself agree in the other direction, see how I feel. Just think it back and forth with myself for a while. As the other reply to this comment said, it's a great deal of fun to do this and I enjoy it a lot!
That was a real head scratcher for me too. I really think it was some kind of a virtue signal. He framed it in a way that evokes a kind of righteous indignation from people...like calling out the privilege of people who work from home when there are nurses who have no choice but to be at their workplace. I too tried to see the argument, but I just don't get it. I _can_ work from home and some people can't...therefore I ought to travel to some arbitrary place...for what exactly? As a show of solidarity with people who don't have a choice? I just don't get it...
I generally like feeling spouting off in the reflection that comes from it. I wouldn't want to put words, but I can see some individuals claiming a human right to work from home as an example of moral hypocrisy. That's sad, of course I don't work from home as a mutual agreement between consenting adults has any moral questions
> I'm still trying to wrap my head around work from home being morally wrong.
By being a selfish individual and wanting to work remotely you are devaluing a wealthy investor's commercial real estate all because you didn't want to waste a tenth of your day pointlessly commuting to the office to do something that could have been done at home
Hard to judge from the truncated context provided there. Was he just saying anybody who wants to work from home is morally wrong? It actually sounded like the conversation was about people who thought they had a right to work from home. If they expected others not to, I can see that as being somewhat hypocritical.
If I had to try and think of an angle, I guess it could be around the protection of intellectual data.
In the office, it's a controlled environment.
Whereas working from home is essentially taking corporate assets into an uncontrolled environment.
It does seem like most studies show WFH workers being happier/healthier/more productive. Wouldn't necessarily take that as conclusive, but i've certainly not found much evidence beyond random anecdotes saying the opposite.
There is no way Elon doesn't know about this. I think for him, poor people should feel unhappy. He feels it immoral for poor people to be happy and content.
It's hard to decouple this phenomenon from the aftereffects of COVID restrictions. We'll be able to figure the isolation from WFH in the next few years.
Upper class is fighting for a perk that the working class will never have. Maybe not morally wrong but working class is treated pretty badly in a place like SF.
Taking the argument seriously is exactly what he wants - debating the position makes it a valid position. There is really no argument there, just self-interest. If its immoral to have more or different privileges than someone else, thats literally communism. He should give up all his wealth in that case.
It’s really no different than other forms of wealth inequality. Some people get to work in palaces and others have to work in the salt mines, and most of us are somewhere in the middle, mostly (not totally) due to our status at birth. It isn’t moral or immoral in and of itself - it is a direct consequence of our economic and social system. I don’t think there is any value inherent to it at all.
Work from Home - Throughout the ages of man, I would tend to believe that more work has been done at home than at any notion of modern workplace. Farming, milling, iron working, etc. have all historically been performed by small tradesmen working out of their homes. "Go to Joe's house if you want your horses shoed."
Home School - Again, I would argue that far more children throughout history are being school at home than in a western notion of traditional school. I would wager that even today, more kids are currently "at home" schooling across the globe than in a modern school.
Interest Rates - Maybe this one is a reasonable notion of "unnatural". But again, throughout all time, bartering has dominated merchant exchanges and simple currency exchanges (through precious metals). There has probably always been a notion of interest rates in all this, but what you're describing is more about the federal reserve's interest rates and fractional banking, which is quite a modern invention.
In all, I don't think anything about work from home, home schooling or making transactions with neighbors is unnatural. If anything, it's the most natural way that society has worked and existed throughout history.
> Farming, milling, iron working, etc. have all historically been performed by small tradesmen working out of their homes. "Go to Joe's house if you want your horses shoed."
All of this has significant IRL contact with the wider world. Modern knowledge worker WFH does not.
Working in a separate place than your home is a recent concept - humanity has worked from home far longer than in offices or workplaces. Consider farming, or craftspeople working their trade, as well as nomadic cultures.
Define contact. I talk to my coworkers regularly, I am able to visit and support my local community businesses where I live (rather than a large, faceless city), I am able to socialize with my local community as well.
I would avoid extrapolating your own WFH experience to others.
I read it as a direct opposition to the moralizing here oh HN about how it’s morally wrong to not let people work from home. (the “noise” argument, the “I’m individually more productive” arguments and all that)
> but I'm still trying to wrap my head around work from home being morally wrong.
Are you? Have you tried seriously considering his position instead of watching 1 second sound bites OBVIOUSLY taken out of context?
> I was on a bicycle ride listening to this interview when he said it and I literally pulled my bike over and sat for a half hour or so thinking about what I think about the idea
Oh? This musk interview was the first time you learned about unfairness in the world? I'm glad he "got you thinking". Heh.
It is not some extreme, radical position that shutting down your company by staging a strike because you _deserve_ to work from the comfort of your own home is morally tenuous. You can disagree, but acting like musk is a raving lunatic for sympathizing with minimum wage workers who bus to work is nothing short of supreme stupidity.
Honestly the anti musk sentiment around here is so braindead and reactionary its beginning to feel like an astroturfed psyop.
> It is not some extreme, radical position that shutting down your company by staging a strike because you _deserve_ to work from the comfort of your own home is morally tenuous.
Why? This is just a negotiation. Striking is one bargaining chip that labor has that they can play. Striking isn't morally tenuous.
> You can disagree, but acting like musk is a raving lunatic for sympathizing with minimum wage workers who bus to work is nothing short of supreme stupidity.
How is Musk sympathizing with minimum wage workers? Did the minimum wage workers ask for the "laptop class" to comeback to the office? Do they even care? What about people in other lines of work where remote isn't an option? Do they care? It seems more likely that Musk is just using this false comparison as a way to pit labor classes against each other.
> Honestly the anti musk sentiment around here is so braindead and reactionary its beginning to feel like an astroturfed psyop.
> How is Musk sympathizing with minimum wage workers? Did the minimum wage workers ask for the "laptop class" to comeback to the office? Do they even care? What about people in other lines of work where remote isn't an option? Do they care? It seems more likely that Musk is just using this false comparison as a way to pit labor classes against each other.
Capital class tries to pit working class against itself, part N
I’m so proud of these workers uniting and fighting back on RTO mandates. It has been proven that knowledge workers can work productively and efficiently without being required to be in the office a set number of days.
> It has been proven that knowledge workers can work productively and efficiently without being required to be in the office a set number of days.
I'm a big proponent of "I don't care where you work as long as your work gets done" and have been since before covid, but I haven't come across anything that actually proves that, so... source?
If there's a good study out there that shows that that is true, I'd love to see it so I can use it as evidence, but so far every study I've seen that claims this tends to either have some very narrow definition of productivity (like number of emails sent) or fails to take overall impact on the organization into account (more work completed, but less coordination between teams may not be a net positive).
It’s my opinion that people feel like they are more productive at WFH, but it’s a bit of a hard metric to actually measure. I get the sense that the freedom and flexibility might create a feeling of personal productivity to accomplish many things (not just career related) they couldn’t before WFH, but as for job productivity…I bet it’s probably a wash overall.
I say this as a remote worker who wouldn’t want to RTO—because I feel like I am more productive at work from home. However, I wouldn’t bet the farm on that if there was a reliable way to measure it.
I have been WFH since the pandemic, and I have grown used to it. My company doesn’t even have offices anymore.
However, last week we had a happy hour to all meet in person, and I had a 20 minute conversation with someone about a work topic, and it was amazing how much productive information we were able to share with each other in such a short time. It was just easier to work through things in person than on slack or zoom.
I have absolutely no problem shooting the shit over text, voice, or video chat, and since I went mostly-remote, I have had a number of highly productive conversations over Zoom that looked a lot like a typical casual interaction resulting in good brainstorming. In fact, some of those times, it was even easier to communicate what we needed because one or another of us could share our screens (which is fine in person when you happen to be at someone's desk, or carrying your laptop with you, but if you just run into each other at the water cooler, it often requires a "hey, I'll send you that thing when I get back to my desk and we can continue this over email" or whatever).
I think the biggest thing that far too many RTO proponents fail to understand is that different people work differently, have different experiences, and need different environments to be most effective. This has been hidden to a large extent by the fact that (nearly) everyone has been required to work in an office, but now that we've all experienced something different, many of us have seen firsthand that we can do just as well or even so much better if we're not forced into a particular box.
The problem with that argument is that WFH has a short history with a unmeasurable productivity benefit to the organization vs a long history with in office work productivity measurements.
The other problem is that people advocating WFH over RTO tend to focus on the individual benefit to them rather than the holistic benefit to the organization.
The benefit is only unmeasurable if you've been doing no data collection over the past 3 years.
And frankly, there's been way too much prioritization of "benefit to the organization" across all sectors these past few decades, very much at the expense of the individuals who do the actual work.
The really dumb thing is there's also a lot of evidence that doing things that make individuals happier, healthier, and more comfortable is a net benefit to the organization. This leaves the logical conclusion, given the fact that we still do all these things that hurt regular people, being either that a) the people making the decisions actively want to hurt us, or b) they are doing these things to benefit themselves over the organization (in short-term profit, in feelings of control, in feelings of superiority over others, etc).
> This leaves the logical conclusion, given the fact that we still do all these things that hurt regular people, being either that a) the people making the decisions actively want to hurt us, or b) they are doing these things to benefit themselves over the organization (in short-term profit, in feelings of control, in feelings of superiority over others, etc)
That may be a logical conclusion given the perspective of a certain set of knowledge workers but how about the employees who are pissed that their roles don’t get that WFH option? Does their unhappiness get a voice with the organization? As an organization how do you reconcile that disparity? Just belaying their fairness concerns with a “learn to code” kind of answer seems a bit more evil than just resetting knowledge workers back to 2019 work environments in my opinion.
So it’s not always a decision to actively hurt, it’s possible that the decision is one of a more holistic fairness for the organization’s employees…which benefits everyone to a degree including the organization.
I certainly haven't been saying "learn to code" or anything like it.
The idea that no one should be allowed to work from home because some people can't has nothing to do with "fairness". It's the same mentality that says "you kids should have to suffer the same things I did when I was your age", despite the fact that conditions have changed.
I am genuinely sympathetic to people who work jobs that cannot be made remote, but want to work from home. I hope that they will be able to find a way to achieve that desire. But no one gains anything when they force other people to stop working from home just to prevent a "disparity" like that.
There have always been, and will always be, differences in the conditions that different jobs require. As some others have commented, some people have to work shifts; some people have to work outside in bad weather—yet we don't see a clamoring to make everyone work shifts, outside, in bad weather. This is just a very unusual time when some of those differences are changing in a very visible and very widespread way.
> It's the same mentality that says "you kids should have to suffer the same things I did when I was your age", despite the fact that conditions have changed.
No, not exactly. RTO efforts now are simply taking things back to the pre-pandemic normal. The pandemic was the excuse to go remote, if it’s no longer the excuse and if you can’t argue the benefits from a position of strength successfully to your organization…it comes off as a selfish benefit only available to a select few.
My first job was 40 hours a week in an office, my current job has been full WFH because of covid, transitioning into 3 days in the office. I can tell you factually that the days I'm actually at home in this hybrid setup that I'm way less productive in terms of getting my actual job done than I am days I'm in the office. I think when I was full WFH my at home productivity was actually much higher. However, the days I'm actually in office are way more productive than the average day at my previous job, and I'm pretty sure it's because of the low job productivity WFH days. I think return to office 5 days a week will lower my average in office productivity, resulting in approximate equal job productivity, and leave me less happy overall.
I've noticed a similar trend in myself. WFH was, averaged out by day, (to the extent I can objectively do that through my own memory) more productive when I was 100% WFH than now, where I am 40-60% WFH. Overall I think it's probably a wash: I think I'm a bit more focused when in the office now than pre-covid, which makes up for the the less focused time at at home.
However there may be less tangible benefits, even if overall productivity is a wash, to having the WFH times. 1) Is the obvious work/life balance. Everything that comes with the convenience of not having to commute, freedom to intersperse everyday household chores during the workday even when it means extending working hours a little later, etc. 2) Is that when I'm WFH I seem to be a little less concerned with the immediate work issues and more likely to drift off into peripheral & speculative projects, things that may yield less results in the short term but might (too soon to really say) yield more in the long term.
Overall I think my general output is about the same, but I'm more content, and perhaps (though not definitively) doing things that will be more productive in the long term.
But there are countless different jobs and responsibilities and personalities that intersect in a way that doesn't lend itself to a single one size fits all rule. But unfortunately, "One rule for all" tends to be the top down approach in most work environments.
The first two years of covid pandemic may not be a typical time though. The non-work demands on most people's time and energy, and most people's psychological state, were pretty different than usual. All things that seem like they could effect "productivity" (and/or your perception of productivity) (and hypothetically in either direction), in addition to the factor of whether you were full-time WFH or not.
There is something to be said about individual productivity (whatever that means in a very innovative/creative environment) vs team/company output, just today I saw this in my feed: https://flocrivello.com/changing-my-mind-on-remote-about-bei...
And that's coming from someone who actually tried to build a business out of remote work (TeamFlow was the product).
I can be much more productive at home when it is about my individual contribution (me coding to deliver something unambiguous), but xxx individuals doing this does not necessarily align into a great product: that does not scale.
I while back I was slammed on here for making essentially a statement that my remote team seems to individually claim/feel more productive but the net team productivity I felt decreased as we transitioned from in office to remote.
I think this observation is spot on - and you don't have to look far to understand why individual productivity != systems productivity. 100% individual utilization in a system is a negative - manufacturing companies learned this years ago and is where the principles of the toyota system/kanban/lean manufacturing/etc. rose from. The only resource that should be 100% utilized in a process is the bottleneck - and anytime anyone is interrupted to help the bottleneck, that is a net win for the company output, even if individually it feels annoying.
It's really unfortunate that it seems so many people are in the "you can pry remote work from my cold dead hands" camp that it's hard to even have a conversation that doesn't devolve into "I feel more productive remote, so you shouldn't care where I work".
I have zero problem with that. If your current gig is not a good fit for any reason, change it. I guess I mean it’s strange to me how some folks feel entitlement enough to think that their individual preference should be important enough to demand their employers accommodate them. i.e. they shouldn’t have to find another job.
It’s simply not the same thing as safe working conditions, ADA accommodations, etc… it’s a preference…and one mostly born out of the pandemic.
I have the experience that the quality of the office building makes a difference. We moved to a new building a few months back with more space, fewer people crammed into one room, generally quieter. People that used to work from home now prefer to be in the office as much as possible.
Glad to see this is the top comment here. If anything, I think jobs where productivity can be easily measured (think customer service agents that handle a particular volume of calls, radiologists that already have a very well defined "Relative Value Unit" system for calculating productivity, etc.) are the ones that make the most sense working from home, and these are also the types of tasks most likely to be compared in these remote work studies.
But the thing that tech companies are the most worried about is a long term slide in innovation and competitiveness, and the effect of WFH on that has definitely not been proven one way or the other.
> more work completed, but less coordination between teams may not be a net positive
Here's one anecdata: I have never in any job coordinated as much with my team mates and other teams as I have in the past ~3 years of working remotely.
The trick wasn't that we're remote or on-site, what increased our level of coordination was how we work. As a team instead of as a random grouping of individuals.
It's worth considering whether that's a positive, or if the extra coordination is required simply because there are fewer and slower information channels available to communicate vs. on-site.
The positive is that we get more done faster with better quality. Hard to compare with on-site comms volume because the on-site stuff goes into a mental black hole and nobody thinks of it as a measurable event.
A 10min chat with a colleague remotely feels like a thing. A 20min chat in the office feels like “yeah of course I was coding this whole time”.
I think this effect is also why people like async meetings via documents. They don’t realize it’s still a meeting and is taking waaaay more of their time than just sitting down synchronously for 10min to hash things out. They’d rather do it in 10x 2min bursts between other things.
It's obviously not true as a generalization. If your job is bolting together cars, you can't work from home effectively. There might be some individuals and job classes that can do it effectively
My good-faith two cents: one step is better than zero here, even if this isn’t, as you plainly state, much more than a hollow gesture. I doubt Amazon senior leadership are thrilled that this has been in the headlines since this past weekend.
AI doesn’t mind working in the office and works 24/7, I’d tread lightly here if I was a knowledge worker. There are much worse things than being asked to come to the office to work. Like being told you aren’t needed at all ever again.
Your argument is that employers will eventually have the leverage to say, “come in to the office or else we’ll replace you with AI”.
If it becomes overwhelmingly obvious that AI is the more cost-effective employee, then it won’t come to that; employers will just replace their employees with AI. Office presence is completely unrelated.
My ability to work in an office efficiently or at home efficiently has zero bearing on whether my job can be replicated by an AI.
- If a job can be outsourced, it will be outsourced.
- If a job can be eliminated, it will be eliminated.
- If a job can be replaced by AI, it will be replaced by AI.
Work location does not factor on these decisions. It's just simply an evaluation of production efficiency.
are you suggesting that a worker who does not protest an arbitrary mandate to log onto their computer at a specific corporate office building, would receive greater clemency from the management team when the opportunity arises to replace them with automation?
Silliness. Willingness to come to office, or wear a tie, or carry a briefcase - will have about as much effect on pushing back progress as puffing your cheeks out to blow away a hurricane.
If my company's office were close, I would return to it without much of a fight. But my roundtrip commute is over three hours. That changes my entire day/life. That's a lot of time and energy spent and the benefit isn't clear to me, at least not the way the office is currently structured or laid out. Our office is an open office plan and engineers are near sales and others whose job is to chat on the phone all day, making it nearly impossible to get any deep work done. The reality is that on the rare occasion that I do go to the office, no real work gets done. Constant interruptions, I maybe get 30 minutes of uninterrupted, heads down work done. There is so much socializing and roaming around and eating that goes on at the office. When I'm home, I'm just working all day. Being in the office is kind of cushy, actually. But a) I'd rather do my best work and b) I'm willing to work harder at home if it means I can avoid spending a large chunk of my day commuting. I think companies really need to make the office a place you _want_ to come to. Give me a space that's conducive to work. Make the office feel more inviting than home. Simply saying "you all need to be in the office" just isn't going to cut it. I know I've conveyed a few unrelated ideas here, but that's my ramble. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk :P
Yeah I'm exactly the same way. I assume they are just days for face time and no deep work will be getting done. As you said, fine, maybe even necessary, every once in a while.
Also screw the office, coworkers are so distracting. I don't know how anyone gets anything done. Any amount of chit-chat throws me off and gives me a headache.
Why should anyone quit their job? The company is the one who changed the terms of employment. Mass walkouts are a form of collective action, and are a good step towards unionization. Amazon can fire all the participants if they want (but something tells me they are not going to).
The companies keep getting away with things like this for three reasons 1) Lack of regulation 2) Lack of consequences 3) They still seem to attract people.
The USA has shown very little interest in the first two.
During the pandemic I had an initial meeting with a hiring manager at Amazon that didn’t care that I was multiple time zones away from her office. Even though the official policy was actually return to office when pandemic conditions change. Luckily I didn’t want to go through their interview process- I’m guessing I would have gotten axed in the layoffs for being newer on the team and not being able to come to the office.
I have a friend who was hired in 2019, moved to a city with Amazon office and then moved back in 2021 while keeping his job. He still works at Amazon and is fully remote indefinitely. From what he had told me, this is only impacting those who work within commuting distance of an Amazon office. Those who were hired as remote employees or relocated during pandemic years were pretty much grandfathered into fully remote roles.
This may be the case for your friend’s team, but certainly not everyone. I was hired during the pandemic and was fully remote for 1.5 years, but am now expected to be in office Tuesday-Thursday. If my contact had slightly different wording I believe my situation would be different.
I entertained a position at Amazon (that I ultimately didn’t take) that would have been remote. I’m sure that would have changed as I live about half an hour by bike from the nearest office.
"You need to be in the office because you will collaborate better" is corporate code for "we're unwilling to build up our internal documentation to make it possible to do your jobs without serendipitous meetings with colleagues which is actually an admission of our own organisational failures"
Change my view.
The remote working genie is out of the bottle. Trying to push it back in is pointless.
> There’s been good energy on campus and in urban cores like Seattle where we have a large presence. We’ve heard this from lots of employees and the businesses that surround our offices.
This is not about in office productivity and they are not exactly hiding who and what the real goal of RTO is.
So they are fine with worst in class vesting schedule, pressure cooker, stack ranking, PIP good engineers, disconnected middle managers culture. As long as they can do it from home
I hope these return to work policies get outdated. Remote work is the single greatest thing about high speed communication in my opinion. A lot of tech advancement related to computers has proven to be underwhelming. We have fancy 3D games and social media and search engines. None of these things are better than a climbing rope, mountain bike, or good library in my experience.
My neighbor at AWS did WfH pre-pandemic, went to "100% in-office" for about 3 weeks, and I think is at about 50/50% now. There's no real reason to go into the office without coworkers on the same team.
Offices = commute time and expense + noisy distractions - declining perks.
Long answer is effectively things will go back to how they were pre-pandemic. Except you now have to average 3 days a week in the office instead of the 5 that it was before. Some people can get exceptions, but it's basically going back to 2019 rules where the default is office.
The funny part for me is that if they had of announced these new rules in 2019, they would have been heralded as forward thinking employee first visionaries... but because it is a step back from the temporary COVID rules, it's all pitchforks and walkouts.
Of course, that's why they refuse to give even an inch except when they absolutely have to -- because people will fight to retain something that benefits them much more than they will fight to gain a possible benefit they have never experienced.
Here in South Africa, with electricity outages every few hours, driving through traffic with disabled traffic lights is a nightmare. So glad my job is fully remote.
Let the people who can work from home work from home. The money saved on office space can be used to increase wages for the people working in warehouses and doing deliveries
There's a line between a strike and sabotage. That idea is on the wrong side and either a reason to fire you or sue you. I hope nobody seriously considers it.
"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!" - Marco Savio
When bus drivers go on strike you cannot continue to use the buses. When air traffic controller go on strike you cannot continue to fly. When teachers go on strike you are forced to stay home and look after your kids (which isn't actually a bad thing).
It isn't a strike if you aren't inconveniencing others.
When factory workers walk out on strike nothing in the factory gets made. It doesn’t seem insane to me that when engineers walk out the systems they maintain stop working.
It would obviously be career suicide to do something like turn off S3 for an hour, but it would definitely make a point.
Paying a person for a commute opens up many and large cans of worms.
Do you trust all of the workers to accurately report when they left home?
How do you handle a person who carpools and has an extra 30 minutes of diversion for that carpool drop off route?
When I was in Eau Claire, one of my coworkers commuted from Minneapolis (for various reasons) - 1.5h each way. As we were not exempt workers (and I suspect that warehouse workers aren't exempt either) should he get time and a half for working 6h in a day? When we had a blizzard one day and he decided to not take a day off and ended up with a 5h trip in (and I suspect a at least 2h on the way back) should he be getting time and a half for that?
Can I get fired for moving further away from the place of employment even if I show up on time for work each day? This year my commute is 30 minutes each way, and then I move another 15m further away next year... and another 15m away the next year...
Alice and Bob are neighbors. Alice drives in (30 min commute) while Bob takes the bus (2h with transfers).
Those crazy SF2G people commute in on bike ( https://sf2g.com ). The half moon bay route is about 4.5h...
Charlie bikes to work in the summer (and drives in inclement weather). Biking to work is 2h while driving is 20 minutes. Does he get paid 2h if he shows up on a bike (and then needs to take a shower and change) vs only paid for 20 minutes if he drives? Could the employer mandate that he drives to work?
David drives through McDs each day for breakfast (adding 7 minutes to the commute in). Does he get paid for that additional (unnecessary) time? Today the drive through is broken so he stops, gets out, orders in and eats breakfast in (15 min). Does he get paid for the entire "left house" to "arrived at office"? Only in the car (+7 min drive through)? Or did it reset when he got out of the car at McDs?
Edward normally has a 20 minute commute. Today, his kids missed the school bus today and so he drove his kids 20 minutes in the other direction resulting in 1h total commute time. Does he get paid for 40 more minutes (turns out it pays better to drive the kids to school rather than the bus pass!)
Freddie normally drives in (it's a short commute - only 10 min), but today is a nice day and the shift doesn't start until later this afternoon and decides to walk to work instead (1.5h).
George lives up north and in the winter snowmobiles in to the warehouse rather than taking a car. It's another 15 min because he can't take the highway (and yes, I've seen snowmobile parking at a distribution center up north).
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I'm not going to say that it is wrong to compensate someone for commute time. I will say that compensating someone for commute time will create things that other people regard as profoundly unfair and may incentivize things that we would rather not have be the case.
Here's an easy way to cut through the complexity: pay everyone the same commute subsidy, equal to what it would cost to commute to the nearest area where housing costs the same or less as the national average. So if the office is in a neighborhood that already costs the same or less as the national average housing cost, $0 commute subsidy for everyone. If the office is in say, manhattan, then I guess everyone gets a 2.5 hour commute subsidy, since the nearest area with reasonable housing prices is Allentown, PA. Workers can choose what to do, whether to bank the subsidy and apply it to expensive nearby rent and live near by or spend it on commuting to somewhere more reasonably priced, or any combination thereof.
Really, the issue is that housing costs have gotten so extreme that there are places where a certain advertised or minimum wage is much less once you account for how far you'd have to live.
But it would be nice of the minimum wage was adjusted for location, and advertised and negotiated wages had to automatically include location differentials, as it would make comparing and negotiating wages a lot easier.
Another unrelated and actually much larger issue this would help a lot with is the phenomenon of low wage service hours being forced to work many small shifts, 2 hours here, 3 hours there. Office workers are used to commuting once per day, 5 days a week, for a full day's pay each time, but a Starbucks worker might be forced to have a much higher ratio of commute to paid work, and the company is getting a free ride there-- this would disincentivize that significantly, regardless of whether the worker chooses to live nearby or far.
“If I cant have it neither should you.“ probably. I am not sure whom their thought leaders are but i have been seeing this more often in the recent months on reddit.
I think you’re reading that upside down. Commenter is saying “I think I should be able to work from home, and those who MUST go in (warehouse people) should get extra compensation to pay for the commute”
The corporate workers were okay with hearing about the warehouse workers peeing in bottles because they were getting their fat paychecks on time. Remember, capitalists will come for you no matter how comfortable you feel.
Don't be a cog in the machine of an unethical company? Everybody's trying to act like it's soooo difficult, and every FAANG SWE is like some Obama-platitude "single working mother with 3 kids working 2 jobs"
That’s true. Everywhere I’ve worked has been evil in one way or another. Amazon is no exception. It also has its bright spots. For now I am willing to disagree and commit.
It’s only “the virus” if that’s how shallow you want to go and ignore the fact that the whole planet was forced to try WFH and people liked it, so that’s why they want it.
Worker rights came from events that you call “people feeling entitled”.
The government will punish me and the company if I do that. I am also forced to take my vacation. Even when the government says I can't go anywhere. I. Must. Not. Work.
If you're talking about labor laws, that is not true. They only specify that the employer cannot demand you to work 7 days a week, but you still can if you choose to (e.g. as a contractor).
These protesters are just going to accelerate outsourcing. If companies can't get the benefits of in-office Americans and are forced into having a remote workforce they might as well get them for 1/4 of the price from Central and South America.
I'd guess that most software work doesn't require super-specialized roles. You can get good quality engineers for generalist tasks (web app dev, API dev, etc.) all over the world.
I agree, the end game for remote work for non-specialists isn't an obvious positive for those in HCOL countries
People think this, but after a stint in boutique consulting it just is not true.
We worked for companies that had a lot of extra cash but didn’t want to hire for these roles out of stubbornness. We were basically there to clean up messes and attempt to build/handoff AI backed solutions to off shore teams… the generalists just were not good and were drowning in work.
We even assumed that in a few cases we were typically not talking with the person on teams and instead got a random employee of their own consulting place. Face to face meetings were RARE.
I guess my point is that people working these “quarter of the price” roles are not great and the companies hiring them aren’t trying to build anything of quality.
Healthcare companies trying to get their piece of the govt money without providing any real value
> You can get good quality engineers for generalist tasks (web app dev, API dev, etc.) all over the world.
The issue here is that, while code is easy to write for these tasks, the hard part is understanding the requirements and engaging with stakeholders.
There's a good level of business/domain expertise required. Of course, someone else could do that and just the coding part could be offshored. But at that point how is that different than the US analyst/offshored programmer business model of the 90's?
If that’s how your employer views your work, sounds like unions are in order.
I don’t think workers should feel afraid of asking for better working conditions, and if workers are afraid, we’ll unions are the best answer to that problem.
That happened because Detroit manufacturers failed to keep up with quality and supply chain innovations, plus the lack of smaller cars during the energy crisis. Asian manufacturers ate Detroit’s lunch AND dinner, it wasn’t the evil unions screwing things up.
It's pretty well documented in primary sources that just about every manufacturer has moved their factories in pursuit of lower labour costs. Jurisdictions without labour protection regulation tend to unsurprisingly have lower costs for unskilled and semi-skilled labour. This isn't just about unions, but (very costly) safety regulations too.
This was all a fully predicted outcome of international free trade. US-based manufacturers simply can't compete with unregulated labour pools of people willing to work capably in toxic and dangerous conditions for most of their waking lives just to survive. It's the same reason we have to import enormous amounts of agricultural labour.
Depending on your political leanings you may take this as a cry to deregulate labour, or to increase tariffs. The status quo however dooms most domestic manufacturing to be noncompetitive.
CAFE was written in a way that protected UAW workers jobs at the expense of fuel economy and the ability to make and sell small cars. In the end, the only vehicles that were still profitable for the big three were vehicles riding on truck frames. Unintended consequences strike again.
This is correct. The only reason these manufacturers are still standing is because they are propped by the government, eg bailouts is just one example.
The market has otherwise already decided their shitty approach didn’t work.
Isn't that the opposite of the direction that (Western) countries are looking to go after COVID exposed the fragility of global logistics dependencies? (and China's manufacturing power and Russia's energy production power).
On-shoring, in-sourcing, are the trends, from a country perspective anyway.
Do we really need to make the conversation be about the upper middle class being “lazy” and completely ignoring the fact that these RTO orders come from billionaires?