> I will die on this hill: tech firms that mandated 5 days in the office was about soft layoffs, rather than a principled stance on individual performance under WFH

“True work only happens in person with human collaboration! Everyone must come back”

2 years pass

“Oh wow we can replace everyone with a chatbot this is amazing”

narrator: It was the interest rates all along. Many of these tech businesses are fundamentally bad, the ROI is smoke and mirrors, energy shocks and bad macro-economics are coming, and investors are starting to ask hard questions.

There's a second layer of abstraction here where it's way harder to measure a big tech exec's worth.

Trading firm managers are like sales managers, you've got one number, nothing else matters, the truth will set you free.

Big Tech is a bunch of people competing for influence over the big shared number coming in from ads or whatever, it's important to have good UX etc so you get more ad money, but how do you tell who's meaningfully contributing, or who's just really good at playing internal politics? This will bias towards different sorts of decisions.

My guess is that it was a reaction to the pandemic-era trend of "over employment" where a small number of remote workers bragged about clocking in simultaneously to multiple jobs. Employers may have decided that their employees' physical body was the only unique identifier that couldn't be duplicated.

Absolutely. Is about having people leave through attrition than pay severance and potentially get bad pr.

Additionally, I wonder how many CxOs have corporate real estate in their investment portfolio which might influence decisions.

My company went back to 5 days in office in May 2025. Since then 8 people out of 100 in my office have retired. They were in the 55-65 age range and 3 of them directly told me that they would have stayed working if we stayed hybrid 3 days a week. So now we are hiring people and having to retrain them. Many of them are over 50 and were laughing at our 5 days in office. But our stock is high so I think they will stay for a few years and retire.

My employer very successfully shipped a lot of brand new stuff during COVID when everyone was full-time remote. We made a lot of money off of those products. Then they sort of bragged about it. Then they instituted RTO. Now (I'm told, I'm at a megacorp so I'm far removed from these discussions) the executive team is bitching that we're not in office 5 days per week.

I think some of it was just a belief that work you can see being done by a floor of people talking with their mouths and looking at screens in the same room is more real than the slightly less visible conversations in slack while looking at screens in their own rooms.

Open plan offices continue to be designed more for seeing the work happen than for doing the work. I spend a lot of mental energy on ignoring the distractions around me. No job has ever offered me a private office with a door that closes in exchange for being in the office 5 days a week.

There is also a whole cadre of Vice presidents that needed micro manager level oversight over their teams in order to feel fulfilled.

You don’t spend many billions on the offices for nothing.

I imagine there was some pressure from cities as well since many downtown businesses rely on foot traffic.

Also not all "WFH" is from home.

I for one am renting a desk at an office. I have all the usual office amenities and an environment in which I can focus properly, but I don't have to involve myself geographically with the company I work for.

Data from consultancies tends to show that WFH and hybrid work patterns are correlated with a significant increase in billable hours compared to 100% in-office. My understanding that a similar pattern can be seen in law firms.

The "RTO is more productive" thesis tends to come from industry sectors where quantitative measures like billable hours aren't so readily available. At best, it seems vibes-based - but, like you, I suspect that it's actually disingenuous posturing.

IMO it is just American business culture. Big boss tells peons what to do- very hierarchy based despite the nice break room.

And culture does not care about logic.

Of course it was. It's not even well hidden.

If they had a shred of evidence that RTO was the eminently more productive, they would smugly rub our collective noses in it.

They don't have evidence. They have vibes and a profound hatred for the labor class. It irks them that suddenly common people had access to a benefit exclusive to them.

> 5 days in the office was about soft layoffs

Look at the last 3 years of the job market: No company has any issue with doing actual lay offs. The layoffs have been about reducing capital spend, and one wants to get rid of dead wood and redundant hires, not let fate decide who stays or goes.

> My "evidence" is that trading firms that kept raking in the money

If you're talking about "trading" as in financial, then this makes sense from a culture perspective. Its a group of people who, are about the job and not about any ones feelings.

It's harder for teams to be this way without the social lubricant of bonding over lunch and coffee and small "how are you" or "the boss sucks" social interactions. Things that are easy in person but more difficult when all your communication channels are owned by the company or result in "documentation" that can be used against you. It's much easier to be "professional brusk" (I need this asap) with someone you just ate lunch and talked about life with than it is for someone you DONT have those interactions with.

I have been a consultant (read: mercenary) for over a decade now. I have seen just about every team layout there is, and there are lots of distributed teams whos effectiveness is much lower than it could be. Its going to depend more on your product and ALL your teams willingness to be candid and blunt than anything else.

I don't think it was a soft layoff, I'm sure that might have been part of it, but I think the majority of it was about telling the working class that the owning class is back in power and they want you to know it.

After all, not a single CEO cited published metrics for the productivity reasons for ending WFH, and almost all went about other power grab type moves later to show the working class the power they were able to wield during COVID was over and we were returning back to the old ways.

If they demand 5-in-office then they should stfu about climate and affordable housing. The commute offices tend to inflict on the staff makes such arguments bs.

I know that this is Hacker News and so all rich and important people must be geniuses making only rational moves, but consider the slim possibility that most aren't very good leaders and make poor decisions.

Maybe there's some 19D "soft layoff" motivation, but I suspect a large part is just about control and appearance. You spent all that money on offices so workers better be there. And what's the point of having your own nice big office if you can't look out on the peons toiling for you? And more fundamentally, some people just have this deep belief that work = something you do in an office and can't compute working at home as "real" work, no matter what the results show.

If you're looking for a cheap way to lay people off, you probably dont want to have to make large investments in real estate to do so.

I think it was mostly about lack of trust and desire to regain a feeling of control over employees. The soft layoffs were just a bonus.

When my company WFH during covid the first thing they did was force-install invasive tracking software. You could practically taste the executive paranoia.

This is the right answer. I have a child, work remotely and while I appreciate the flexibility, I kind of hate it for my career. The article is mostly vibe-y without any digging into why people with children need to commute from so far.

It's rent, the answer is almost always rent. Its my rent, its my child-care workers rent, it my kids school-teachers rent. It's always rent.

Through circumstance I went from a fully remote working arrangement to working for a place that's 5 miles down a single surface street from where I live (which, during commute hours pushes up to 15 minutes). I go in twice a week, but since we have kids it's mostly a wash. I still vastly prefer the 3 days per week that I work from home. The office gets very busy and very loud, especially in the afternoons.

In this case you either live in the middle of an industrial hub or you can’t change jobs, so I’m not sure what it actually solves.

Hiring by catchment area does seem very appealing for anyone - neither the companies nor the candidates.

Plus I need the ability to deduct my transport cost from taxable income.

Companies could also do this the way they used to - satellite offices and similar.

In fact, I've never actually commuted into the city for a job, it's always been suburb to suburb commutes - part of the problem there has been it's not worth moving for a job that lasts on average 3-5 years.

> If I could afford to live 15 minutes from the office I 100% would go to an office.

I live ~20 minutes away from my job and you eventually get tired of that, too. Car maintenance, bad weather, bad drivers, etc. grind you down little by little everyday.

Not to mention safe neighborhood!

Funny to read this as a consultant. My job is an hour away from my job.

Unfortunately, much of the US, and elsewhere, has been taken in by decades of successful American propaganda promoting and romanticizing the suburb after the War. The taste for the suburb, like the taste for cars, is very entrenched in many people's minds. In our vapid consumerist culture, they have become elevated to virtual rites of passage: buying a car and buying a suburban house are marks of manhood and adulthood.

Furthermore, there's a vicious cycle that keeps cities at a disadvantage, to a large part driven by the parasitic nature of suburbs themselves. Suburbs are financially completely unsustainable. Tax revenue doesn't come close to paying for the maintenance of suburban roads, infrastructure, and utilities. They survive by draining state and federal money, which itself is disproportionately drawn from urban centers where economic activity is highest. This takes money away from cities that should be reinvested back into cities.

One thing we should do is tax municipal bonds. There are other ways in which suburbs are actively and artificially propped up, of course. The point is that the suburbs has always been a Frankenstein on life support that's been bleeding cities.

So I think one way to address the suburb is to attack the parasitic dimension. By forcing suburbs to pay their own way, no one can be accused of robbing suburbs; it would incriminate the suburbs and call out their hypocrisy. It would also strike at the heart of the "adulthood" and "manhood" artificially bound up with owning a house in the suburbs. How adult and how masculine is it to mooch off of others to maintain the suburban lifestyle?

This would then fortify the urbs and also push back on the stupidity of the housing market in cities, the poor land use in many of them, as well as bad public transportation.

Thank god you're a software developer and not a cleaner.

> Take it one step further and give tax breaks to businesses that let employees work from home and close physical offices.

At this point I'd rather use the stick than the carrot. Make employers 100% shoulder their employees' commute costs. Don't like it? Allow WFH or pay them enough to afford to live close to the office.

In Europe post-pandemic rush back to the offices revealed more than anything that the Green Deal has actually been just the greenwashing. Bureaucrats just sat there not even once mentioning that WFH was actually a great opportunity to fight climate change, clean the air and revive small towns.

Also:

* Less time wasted in commute/traffic, which adds up to a significant portion of your lifetime

* Lower vehicle expenses (car-centric people often forget just how much the total cost of ownership for vehicles really is)

> They were thus more likely to be in an economic position where they felt comfortable having another child.

Just a reminder that if you pull up a chart of countries with the highest birth rates, they all have poor economic conditions. If the theory that a better economy correlates with more babies then countries like South Korea would have the world's highest birth rate.

Anecdotal, but...

I have a commute that varies between 30 minutes and 2 hours (one way). I am in office 5 days each week, eight hours of work, and hour for lunch. That's 11 hours gone each day (sometimes more, occasionally less). Add in getting ready to go in, doing stuff around the house when I get home, and the only time that I am really available to my spouse is dinner and Saturday/Sunday. Due to the time lost, I end up doing household work at least one day each weekend. My spouse and I now have 1 full day together each week. Where in that is there really time for romance?

I can fully understand where even two days with more time and less stress would create opportunity for romance that otherwise may not exist.

Because if both are at home working, well, you can have some couple time (also called "sex") during lunch break or at any given moment when there are no meetings etc.

Ask me how I know it...

The other reasons given make sense to me, but I bet there is also some psychological benefit in having a regularly scheduled escape from home, and having a guilt-free excuse for it built in, which partly compensates for being forced to come in a few days a week. The contrast makes it easier to appreciate the company of your spouse and probably makes child-rearing seem less oppressive. People theoretically could manage this without work imposing it on them, but in practice, having to make and justify the choice creates stress.

I think it's simpler.

two working people, trapped in the same house together during working hours.

if there are kids, they might be at school.

I have kids, so it seems obvious to me. It is much easier to coordinate kids related duties when at least one is at home every day. Things like, picking the kids up, taking them somewhere, being there when the kid comes home.

When the kid is sick and not in school daycare, that one person can do supervision. A sick kid usually does not need super involved care whole day, but they cant be left alone whole day either.

> you've ever been a parent with a young child at home, your estimate of how much work you could do would be possible is a lot more modest

Believe Switzerland allows professionals to choose the percentage of work time they want to sign up for. For instance, if 100% is 8h, 5d/week, 80% would be 4d/week. The parent can then both take 80% each & have 2 work days free for childcare.

While pregnant, additional intercourse does not make one more pregnant. You just need enough WFH days to get people pregnant.

Wasn't it pretty intuitive back in 2021 or so that wfh would make childcare easier?

It's good to have exact numbers of course, but I can't see how anyone would think RTO wouldn't impact fertility or households in some fashion.

Yup, that’s me! And it’s a rewarding life despite all the noise from anti-WFH ideologues. A string of open-minded startups have benefited from my labor.

I once took two planes to visit a client office so I could do a video call with them at their other office on the other side of the city I just flew to and then flew back home.

I once did a six-month project where I'd go the office to sit on zoom with my team in 3 other cities. One of those cities was our offshore dev team that we hired because they cost less and could do the job remotely. How the hell did CEOs get away with telling us that offshore dev teams would be fine because in-person collaboration wasn't necessary while simultaneously saying we all had to be in the office?

I guess I'm pro-natalist. I do agree with you on the goal of eradicating poverty, although to me that's a goal in itself that does not need to be justified. But I don't agree that all people on earth are fungible, and a birth in Mongolia is the same as a birth is Sydney, Australia.

Your "human achievement" viewpoint is highly reductive. The culture of a place is maintained by it's local population. When you have a low birth rate situation to the point that you need to supplement the workforce with immigrants, that signifies that the local culture is slowly dying. While some mixing of cultures is beneficial, we should also try to perserve our local cultures. We should not turn every city in the developed world into a little NYC.

Same in UK (from my anecdata)

Not in most of Europe.

Most of the CEE along with Western European countries like Netherlands and Ireland have ass-in-seat requirements for American companies to unlock FDI subsidizes when opening a GCC. Additionally, management culture in London as well as Paris is very hybrid work oriented.

There is a decent proliferation of WFH roles in Europe, but those are the same roles in the US anyhow - we're posting those in Europe it's us offshoring.

Germans need to stop using "Europe" as a stand-in for Germany.

>I don't think Musk and Andreesseen are who most people would associate with the concept of pronatalism.

Musk is for sure. Doesn't he have like 100 kids because he's constantly trying to get women to become pregnant by his sperm?

Ok, this is wrong but it's not your fault for believing it because for reasons I can't really fathom, nobody talks about it. There were several causes to the massive Covid inflation spike but the biggest factor was actually supply shock. And it was 100% Donald "Art of the Deal" Trump's fault. It requires a little explanation.

Let's wind back to March-April 2020. If you remember, there was a brief period where because of shutdowns oil prices went negative. Commodities are generally traded at spot prices and with what are called futures contracts. A future contract allows you to schedule the purchase or sale of a commodity at a price that's agreed upon today. Producers and consumers use this to de-risk prices.

Oil futures contracts are standardized with fixed delivery dates and sizes (usually 1000 barrels per contract). So in April there was a glut and nowhere to store it becasue people stopped buying on the spot market and had trouble accepting deliveries anyway. So for a brief moment, producers had to start paying people to take oil because they had nowhere to put it. Technically, this is an example of an extreme contango market.

So the world produces and uses roughly 100M barrels per day ("bpd") of oil. OPEC+ produces 40-50% of that and they like stability in the oil market. Too low and they don't make enough money. Too high and it create political instability and economic distress. The current guidance is a floor of $70 and a ceiling of $80 is considered "ideal".

So how does OPEC+ do this? They meet every 3 months and look at projected demand and adjust supply accordingly.

In May (give or take), Trump went to MBS (Mohammed bin Salman, Crown Pricne of Saudi Arabia) and asked--begged really--him to cut production because the administration believed there would be a prolonged demand slump. Now this was largely unnecessary because OPEC would do this anyway with their 3 monthly rolling cycle.

For reasons I won't get into, this was an opportunity for MBS to get back at Donald Trump for screwing over OPEC in 2018 when Trump intentionally crashed the oil market.

Starting in June 2020 and lasting 2 years, OPEC would cut production, initially by 9.7Mbpd (going down in stages to 6.3Mbpd). That's 10% of world supply. Don't believe me? It's documented [1]. And nobody talks about it.

This was, as we now know, a disaster. Demand exploded in 2021. The now-Biden administration quietly went to MBS and asked him to reverse the cuts. He refused. It was payback. The Biden administration could've absolutely talked abou this but didn't. No Democrat did. Because no establishment Democrat wants to actually upset the oil and gas industry and interfere with American foreign policy, no matter how much huffing and puffing they do about caring about such things.

So when people ask "what happens if the Strait of Hormuz closes?" we don't need to speculate. We know exactly what happens because it's already happened. Except this time it's worse. And all of these consequences were completely foreseeable and known but were ignored. And the war with Iran is 100% unwinnable.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/special-report-trump...

The second one is mostly accurate, yes. There aren't really many good rational arguments for requiring full-time in-office attendance.

I think the quotes is to say that these people who say that they are pronatalist have revealed preferences that indicate that it is not a serious concern for them.

The author of the submitted content also wrote this:

Yes, I am a pro-natalist - https://www.governance.fyi/p/yes-i-am-a-pro-natalist

Like many <label>'s, the group isn't seen as homogenous from within regardless of how smooth and unfeatured they appear from outside.

There are a lot of flavors of "pro-natalist". For example Elon Musk is a "pro-natalist" but he seems to clear favor white Christian people and himself especially. Others are pro-natalist but have a general eugenics bent, rather than just white/Christian supremacy. And then others are pro-natalist in a more general sense, in that our culture in general should encourage at least rough replacement levels of fertility so that that we should avoid a population collapse.

It isn’t political.

Its a a general term that a lot of people adhere to.

It's just that those people tend to be about 2 standard deviations out on whatever normal distribution you're dealing with.

Here in the US, you get a lot of these incel-y types with women control and breeding kinks.

But in China, it's more the very hardcore commies worried about the future of the party in 30 years and maybe have one chubby grandchild.

In Korea and Japan, you get a lot of Moonie types and that sort of folk.

In the Middle East (huge, I know), these are the hardcore Muslim folks but with a family bent (think strange uncles without children themselves).

South Americans here will be the turbo Catholic variety typically with a lot of kids already

Generally, the person that is in the pro-natalist camp is generally a person that is conservative in their social ideas. They want yesterday to be like to day, and today to be like tomorrow.

But, their individual ideologies and day-to-day-life are about as opposed to each other as can be and they may outright hate each other.

Marx would have a field day with these people.

As far as I can tell it's mostly these weirdos https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-elite-breeding-couple-ar...

"...they went on to become the faces of the pronatalist movement, and so far they’ve been given several long profiles for mainstream media outlets to share their pronatalist ideals. This week, it was the Telegraph. In January, it was the New York Post. Last year, it was Business Insider. As Business Insider put it, pronatalism—espoused by Elon Musk, for example—is about breeding supposedly “genetically superior” people. The Collinses have expressed in multiple profiles that certain traits like empathy and even political beliefs are genetically inherited, and so breeding among people who hold those beliefs will carry them forward. In an email to Motherboard, the Collinses disputed this characterization and described pronatalism as “a movement that urges individuals from low fertility cultures to have kids to preserve as much genetic and cultural diversity as possible.”

Pronatalist also usually implies a racist/nationalist angle, some of the reason you want more births is because your people are genetically better than immigrants in some way. This isn't universal, but it's often true.

There’s important history and connotation behind pronatalist narratives—particularly with eugenics, xenophobia, and gender (in)equality.

Vogue did a decent overview of this[1] and history is littered with all kinds of examples if you go looking.

1. https://www.vogue.com/article/dark-history-of-the-far-rights...

Special mentions to Paul Ehrlich (the "population bomb" guy). Got all his predictions wrong, never changed his mind, got a lot of money for it eg from the Ford and the Rockefeller Foundation. His ideas led to millions of forced sterilizations and abortions in China and India, with his full support, by far surpassing anything the Nazis did in that regard.

I mean Zuckerberg renamed his company Meta, then forced everyone back into the office. So I'd say outlook not so good.

The tech bros are also funded by the tools of wfh

> And now it's OK to WFH again?

To be fair, the SV is not moving toward home office. Asian governments are moving to WFH because of high oil prices.

I think the more mainstream understanding of transhumanism is closer to "post-genics" than eugenics.

> Unfortunately this is an argument from the wrong angle, because it assumes what the pronatalists 'mean' by their belief.

Thank goodness you didn't assume what they mean as well, then.

Do you think anti-natalism is or should be the default for humans?

Correct. Pronatalism is a just a front, sometimes for pure racism. Remember that Musk grew up in Apartheid South Africa. They're worried about demographic shifts away from white dominance of the US.

Also, according to the article, Musk "called children and called declining birth rates a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming," which is not so much pro-natalism as it is dismissive of global warming, because Musk no longer cares about electric cars and has pivoted to ventures that are much less friendly to the environment such as AI and mass rocket launches.

>The silicon valley pronatalist stance is because they want to be patriarchs in full control of their family.

I am not sure what % of pro-natalists that applies to, exactly, but keep in mind most people in Silicon Valley voted for Clinton/Biden/Harris in 2016, 2020, and 2024 and most are not weird traditionalist cultural conservatives. There are many progressive left-liberal pro-natalists who just 1) don't want humanity to go extinct and 2) know that population decline in a country can lead to various issues, including economic problems. Immigration can help with some of that, but reproduction rate is declining or low in basically every single country and so immigration will eventually also not be a sustainable solution.

I think the majority of vocal pro-natalists are probably right-wing/racist/misogynistic, but the core pro-natalist stance in itself (as opposed to a stance of "whites are being out-reproduced", or something) is, in general, still a completely reasonable and I'd argue moral position.

Basically all of human history can be described in similar terms, and it's not melanin-specific.

If you can name a historical figure, they were probably some flavour of non-standard mental processing and beliefs.

Even just coming up with "marvels that expanded our freedom and made our lives better" is inherently a non-standard position relative to how most people live and think.

it’s postmodernism. they have core interests around making money and opposing worker power but everything else is about the appearance of strength and appearance alone. sometimes referred to in the literature as spectacle

Correct, the term "pronatalists" is in scare-quotes, suggesting that their belief/concern is fake.

On the topic of capitalism, one can't make money from wfh policies like one can from the "fertility tech" one funds. It's synergy, you see.

Yes, ignore the natural experiment that is unfolding before our very eyes, and gain nothing at all from the war that is causing it.

Like the saying goes: lemons -> lemonade