Its partly tradition, power displays, and disbelief. People who've been managers for decades somehow believe that being in the office is the only true way to do work because that's how it's always been done. Then you have some managers who will always get off on the fact that they can hold people's ability to feed themselves hostage to make them do what they want. Lastly, some managers just don't believe you can be productive at home. After all, all the not work things are there.
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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I know this site is heavily weighted towards IT professionals and other pure-office-work type professions, but sometimes in office work really is better than work from home. Online meetings are largely useless, even when it's a proper meeting, not just a should-have-been-an-email meeting.
In my current job, remote work isn't an option, and I can't tell you how much time I've wasted trying to get engineers and software devs to understand things that would have taken two seconds to understand if they would go physically look at the thing. But of course, they can't do that because they are working remotely. Instead we get to waste half a day playing picture/video tag
I think this is all really subjective and depends on how your team does work. Getting people to work with you or understand things is a communication problem, and in my own experience, being in the office didn't eliminate those issues.
I agree there are times to be in the office, but it damn sure doesn't need to be every day all the time. IMO people need to adapt, be smart and figure out what works for their teams and themselves, not hold themselves to tradition for its own sake.
Managers should be empowered to make these decisions to do the research and figure out the best strategy for their situation, and I think many would like that responsibility.
Online meetings are largely useless
Oh! Oh! This is where people say "skill issue", isn't it?
If you can't run a productive meeting over zoom you probably can't do one in person, either.
This will depend on your work. All my work is on the computer. Showing someone something is as easy as sharing my screen (and this might even be better, as I can draw on it).
And I don't agree online meetings are useless. All of my team work from home most of the time, and we work out how to make that work.
Having half the group in the office and half joining remotely I think is the worst of both worlds.
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It's not about productivity.
It's about control.
Guess who gets to work in private offices instead of the "productivity enhancing" open offices!
This point i don't get...in all my jobs, team leads, department managers and basically all management level employees are sitting in the same open office as everyone else. I have never been somewhere where this is not the case. Is this a predominantly American thing?
When my last company went to an open office plan, everybody (even the CEO) had to be out in the open because the whole company moved into one big room (with a little cordoned-off area for meetings). Granted, this was because we were on the edge of folding and we moved into the one big room to save on rent. But it did produce a nice "we're all in this together" vibe because it sucked ass for everyone.
The whole "return to office" thing is a cocktail of like.. "Feelings Driven Leadership" and "The Cruelty is the Point". Oh, and "I'm incompetent so everyone else must be incompetent in the same way, too."
Many managers make decisions based purely on feelings. You can show them data but they don't care. They feel like being in-office is better. And maybe, maybe, it is, on some metrics. Are those metrics better for workers? Probably not.
And the cruelty? Well, as others have said, some people get off on having power over others.
The last point, there are some people who just can't manage themselves so they seem to think no one else can, either. Like someone the other day was saying he can't work from home because he'll just play xbox. To which I respond, from the depths of my soul, fuck off. Grow up and stop making everyone else around you suffer because you're an incompetent, unmedicated, shit. You can go into the office if you have to. Don't make everyone else suffer a pay cut too because you're trash tier at self control.
You're forgetting the whole...." I invested entirely too much in corporate real estate".
When there's instability in the market a lot of fortune 500 corporations will start investing in corporate real estate as a "safe bet" to hedge more risky investments.
Skyscrapers and large office spaces are on paper horrible investments and have an awful time filling enough vacancies to offset their upkeep. The only thing that makes them a "safe" investment is that every company uses them as a way to bank equity. If those same companies pulled the rug from under themselves they would all lose that safe equity piggy bank.
Skyscrapers and large office spaces are on paper horrible investments and have an awful time filling enough vacancies to offset their upkeep. The only thing that makes them a “safe” investment is that every company uses them as a way to bank equity. If those same companies pulled the rug from under themselves they would all lose that safe equity piggy bank.
This is just the sunk cost fallacy though. You can inflate the paper value of assets by playing games like this, but the bill always comes due in the end. Yes, companies that do this can juice their books a bit in the short term, but they're harming themselves in the long term. They retain a bit higher book value for their real estate, but they make whatever goods or services they provide noncompetitive in the marketplace. They have competitors who aren't bogged down by past bad real estate decisions. Those competitors can outcompete them on price and can attract better talent. Meanwhile, they're stuck in their ways, fruitlessly trying to inflate their real estate holdings, all while their revenue is plummeting because they can't attract good people and have to charge higher for their services than their competitors.
It's just the sunk cost fallacy. You could inflate the book value of real estate by doing all sorts of foolish things. You could create a subsidiary and have that company rent out some of your floor space for absurdly high rates. But you're ultimately just robbing Peter to pay Paul. Those commercial real estate properties have already lost their value. The value was lost the minute it was proven that work from home was a superior work model.
These companies are going to go bankrupt at a mass scale when the next recession rolls around.
Fuck, these companies might actually be violating the law. Deliberately choosing unproductive business practices just to cook your real estate books is something Enron would do.
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gets to office and signs into zoom meeting
I was pushing to hold desk meetings back before we were in COVID.
Why am i stopping everything I'm doing to go sit in a room for 30 minutes and listen to everyone else talk about crap not related to me in which I've got maybe 5 minutes worth of things to say by the end.
In most cases we were already broadcasting the meeting to someone not in the room across the country.
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my wife kept getting pressured to go into a specific office location every week. 2-3 hour commute each way to sit at a desk on video calls with little IRL interaction
You guys don't understand that this is is the goal. Happy rested people thinl a lot, demand things, want a better life. Unhappy and exausted people only want to go home and go to sleep, they loose their souls and think that this is better enough. Those are easy to control
It's not a conspiracy, it'a a distributed systematic failure that can only be solved by cultural change.
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That guy in white with air pods looks like he's going to be at 110% at prompt engineering and LinkedIn engagement.
Surely he'd be more productive if he got the LLM to do the prompt engineering for him?
He's writing a LinkedIn post on this exact matter as we speak, on how he LLMed away his own position for the greater good a.k.a. The company.
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Remote work has been studied extensively for decades and the findings overwhelmingly show that remote workers, when provided the right tools and support, are significantly more productive. Demanding people commute to an office was never about productivity.
They don't care about this part at all. This is your time. It's your fault for not being rich.
Who owns commercial and office property? Guessing most aren't by non executive, non board member, working class
https://realestate.usnews.com/real-estate/articles/commercial-real-estate-market-trends
There's a reason they combine office with data centers and the rest of commercial has been down
They made a bad decision gambling on overvalued office and commercial property leases and want to push their loss onto workers because they love to socialize the losses and privatize the gains
100%
White shirt guy maybe, probably either at making you extremely mediocre coffee (looks too straight to be a good barista) or doing something like the ux design for the app interface to a microchip that doesnt let your dog love you without microtransactions. The owners are lobbying for it to be mandatory, and all dogs without it will be liquidated by 2030. The app is spyware written by a large language model, and only sometimes works. Iphone only.
Tan jacket lady maaaaaaaybe.
Black+white checkered shirt guy is a cop, he's already at work. He'll be very productive later, already planning on attending the protest.
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Trains are a much more desirable way to get to work than driving is.
I’m counting down the months until my work relocates to our new head office. I can say goodbye to the 35-75 minute commute (each way), and have a reliable ~60min train ride.
Sure it might take longer, overall - but I’ll be able to relax by reading a book, taking a nap or playing a game. I’d much rather that than deal with the anxiety of bumper-to-bumper traffic in a sea of SUVs filled with inattentive drivers.
I literally drive past at least one accident every day on my way to work. The Monash Highway in Victoria, IYKYK.
It really is the least talked about benefit to public transport, yet is so significant. Sure you can't do too much but you can watch a show/movie, play a game, read, write, draw or even do your taxes and shop from your phone and laptop.
Certainly can't do that driving around. And it let's you relax and change from work mode to home mode. Even if you have to do a little drive to and from the station.
Plus like you mentioned, less chance of delays and being involved in accidents. Win win win win.
Never thought I’d find myself in agreement with The Dark Lord, yet here I am…
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Environmentally, absolutely...personally? I absolutely fucking hate using public transport. I'd take 90min of sitting still in traffic alone in my car over bumping and griding with random strangers for 90min on a train any day.
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I don't overthink people's expressions on trains, nor do I think we should be taking pics of people who look upset because they look upset.
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evryone look irritated getting randomly photographed
Uuh, I remember the London Tube.
It's so soul draining (noticed the empty eyes and avoidance of eye-contact) that it convinced me to start commuting to work by bicycle in London when it wasn't all that common (and which ultimately took around the same time).
Looks like a lot of people who are waking up off the clock! I roll out of bed, clock in, and then have to spend 30 minutes actually waking up for the day.
IMHO, it depends on the role. Do you have a role that benefits from in person collaboration, or do you have a role where focus is the priority?
People get into warring camps about remote or onsite work, and we rarely talk about engineers, designers, accountants, etc. having very different needs. One size doesn’t fit all.
Statistically, most of them will be blue collar workers.
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