The way this position conforms to the interests of the capital class, and conflicts with those of the labor class, is a red flag.
It simultaneously and conveniently:
1. takes the heat off AI blowback
2. synergizes perfectly with "RTO" mandates (to the extent this needed synergy to become A Widespread Thing)
On that basis alone, I'll wait for further analysis.
Edit: to be clear I'm no anti-AI holdout, and I actually don't mind working from the office (which i do 4x a week). Just observing.
It also doesn't really sit well with what I have observed in over 25 years of working for remote companies. We hired juniors and grew engineers up just fine. The problem, at least at orgs I have worked at in the last decade, is companies no longer want to invest in junior hires.
I have been fortunate to have a C-level above me, who believes in hiring juniors, take over in the last year. We are hiring now and mentoring, but not enough companies around me are doing this.
People job hopping when they get past 'junior' status is what seems to have caused the reluctance to hire juniors, especially combined with the surge of 'opportunists' who started getting comp-sci degrees when it became obvious that it was the easiest way to earn a comfortable living. The job-hoppers made it obvious that it was just cheaper and faster to hire intermediate and senior developers (rather than investing in juniors to learn the basics, then have to pay them to stay). The opportunists further reduced the value proposition of developers to employers as many job-seekers (particularly juniors) have little passion or aptitude for the job, and will never be 'stellar'.
If your junior employees frequently job hop as soon as they have been trained up then your company is mismanaged. There are always personal reasons (I ended up immigrating to another country as I was coming into Senior-hood because my partner couldn't affordably immigrate into the US) but if it's a pattern then that pattern is owed to undercompensation and other failures of management.
In the 2000s it was seen as very fashionable to job hop frequently, but it was a biased impression that was assumed to be nationwide while it was only really common in SV with the hugely lucrative signing contracts folks like Google, Meta et. all were handing out.
I would argue that job hopping was a symptom of companies under compensating for the market. This is a common problem even above Junior level. It's been easier to get a raise by leaving to another company that will pay more, then by just asking your employer for more money.
> The job-hoppers made it obvious that it was just cheaper and faster to hire intermediate and senior developers (rather than investing in juniors to learn the basics, then have to pay them to stay).
Critically: While this is the common perception, it is generally un-true.
Just look at how often you get it as reply when you tell people complaining about how it's "impossible to find staff" to hire juniors.
Even in the situations where it is true, the effect of hiring seniors and refusing to hire juniors (thus pushing them into other fields) creates the shortage of seniors that makes it un-true again.
There's just a trend of employers having hard numbers on their staffing expenses, but barely if at all accounting for hiring costs and opportunity costs.
Many simply get it in their head that a senior costs $X/year, and therefore utterly refuse to pay a junior $X/year when they had to spend a flat amount $Y on training them up. Even when the real cost per hire for the senior is vastly bigger than $Y.
Before the post-covid/AI layoffs, tech firms throwing away hundreds of thousands of dollars and years chasing seniors instead of just training up a junior was a common thing. So much so that it's a notable contributor to the overworking and burnout problems.
And it's still everywhere in the blue-collar world.
What do you mean by investing though? I think these days junior people have to just invest in themselves and learn by working right? It’s also hard for companies or managers to spend more on them when they can leave at any time, which means all that effort training them will just benefit some other employee.
I’ve noticed younger generations are especially a lot less loyal, probably in response to abusive and exploitative employers and horror stories. But the downside is if employees have less loyalty themselves, then even caring companies and managers cannot justify being loyal to them. They end up losing that time invested and learn a hard lesson.
> The way this position conforms to the interests of the capital class, and conflicts with those of the labor class, is a red flag.
If being in the office conforms to the interest of the capital class, it implies that WFH is inherently less efficient.
This is one of those things that I often find strange with work from home advocates. They seem to imply that business owners just want employees to suffer as a goal in itself.
1) A lot of executive type work _is_ easier in person... and those executives forget that their work might not be representative of _other_ roles within their own org, and they might actually be the outlier.
2) A lot of managers don't know how to manage by looking at output. We see this not just with WFH, but also with multi-location teams, where some managers simply can't do it competently.
3) Many managers do, in fact, get some satisfaction from having that sort of power over their workers.
4) Many executives like having an office that is a bit of a tribute to the company (and therefore their) power. And this falls apart if the office is empty.
That's not necessarily true, though. For instance, real estate investors have a lot to lose from vacant office space and therefore would benefit from RTO.
I personally find that I enjoy in person collaboration but that should not mean we should universally force every team to come back to the office.
I never understood this argument. Most companies do not own their office buildings, but rather lease space from corporate landlords. It is in the best interest of these companies to dramatically reduce their lease burden via WFH. Why would a company totally unrelated to real estate investment act against its own self-interest just to prop up real estate investors?
This is a weird conspiracy theory. You'd have to believe that real estate investors were pulling the strings in companies to get them to spend more money with no upside. Like they're just milking these companies for rent and the companies are doing it because they want to give money to the real estate investors?
Even in the rare case where real estate investors are also investors in the startup, my experience is that the startup gets reduced-rate rent as a bonus.
I don't doubt what you're saying, but I don't these situations where real estate investors and company investors overlap and also want to micromanage the company's operations are common.
The way this is brought up as a general explanation for RTO across the industry is getting a little silly
The interests of the capital class are not necessarily aligned with efficient allocation of capital. Note this is far from saying they want employees to suffer, but they install inefficient policies over them.
"If being in the office conforms to the interest of the capital class, it implies that WFH is inherently less efficient"
only if the capital class is solely motivated by efficiency. I think this is trivially demonstrable to be not the case.
The capital class's primary interest is self-preservation - both of their capital, of course, but also preserving their place in the pecking order. And they'll spend a LOT of the former to maintain the latter because the latter is how they got the former.
Through that lens, GP's point is perfectly coherent.
"They seem to imply that business owners just want employees to suffer as a goal in itself."
Have you met... people? Yes there are literally many owners who do want employees to suffer. Or, perhaps worse, will tolerate tremendous amounts of suffering in the pursuit of minor other gains. (Amazon pee bottles come to mind.) It would somehow be a comforting kind of moustache-twirling comic book evil to say they just want people to suffer. Another to say they simply don't value human happiness (or lack of suffering) enough to not trade large amounts of it for small things they do care about.
I had a boss who was only willing to hire non-whites because he could inflict undesirable work on them, leaving more desirable work for the white employees.
I just want to end this by remarking that this presumption of owners being perfectly optimal, morally clean agents of free markets is absurd and honestly disgusting to bring to an argument.
> This is one of those things that I often find strange with work from home advocates. They seem to imply that business owners just want employees to suffer as a goal in itself.
I've worked remote a lot and I'm a big fan. I find it hard to discuss WFH online because it's so hard to find people willing to discuss it honestly, including the challenges. The way it's talked about here and on sites like Reddit is as if WFH is perfect, works for everyone, and the only reason we can't have more of it is because companies are hell-bent on doing things against their self interests.
I'm in another forum where we have a subforum for managers to talk, and remote work problems are a perennial topic. A lot of people really don't handle it well. There are even managers in the group who would prefer to work from home, but they've moved their teams into the office at least 2-3 days per week because their 5 day WFH experiments didn't go well.
It's a hard topic. I find myself holding back from discussing it because anything other than 100% pro-WFH anti-manager comments will get a lot of drive-by downvotes.
It is sane and inevitably correct to treat with extreme skepticism any explanation for an economic effect that reduces the cause to a singular source. AI is to blame, to an extent, so is remote working (it is excellent for older folks who have lives to support but is a rug pull on the social aspects of office working), but the economy is the big looming threat here. We still hadn't recovered fully from the pandemic and then we got Trump 2: Electric Tariffoo which has wrought absolute havoc on business stability. All these combine (with other factors like the ever growing PE investment) to discourage innovation and long term investment.
Junior employees are a long term investment - if the R&D budget is frozen, you're sure as heck not going to dump 60% of your budget into onboarding.
It's not reasonable for us to frame 'return to office' as a class issue, it's a productivity issue - moreover, the general point is not implausible but a bit conspiratorial.
It's odd that we conflate that somehow 'return to office' is inherently more productive and that somehow 'dumb corporations acting against their interest'.
I don't think that's true, and if it were, well, we should all be in a position to take advantage of it.
Sure, FT is part of the 'corporatocracy' for sure but they're not working to 'create narratives'. Individual journalists are actually writing about things they see.
My bet is the real reason is that companies just don't want to hire juniors, and that's it.
RTO mandates are primarily pushed by the managerial class, not the capitalist class. Both want to blame AI so its not clear they want to avoid doing so.
RTO is primarily pushed by the capitalist class, and managers are just stuck in the middle. No good manager wants pissed off employees, but managers who push back on the capitalist class do not stay managers long.
Managers, like police and prosecutors, are enforcers for the capitalist class. This is why they are not part of the working class. Managers do the job of squeezing surplus value from workers, rather than producing real Value themselves.
Relationship to capital determines class.
AI is not responsible for anything at the moment, except making existing senior developers reasonably more efficient for sleeve of tasks, but not the tasks that take the most time.
Saying "we don't need as many staff because AI" is an oft-repeated trope because it sounds like a reasonable excuse to fire people. It's nearly impossible to back up the claim with any measurable method, and investors will look aside on the mismanagement and/or ridiculously over-engineered/over-complicated custom tech stacks companies run if they say "AI" anywhere in their reports.
AI is absolutely responsible for executive suites dumping huge budgets that could be more productively elsewhere. There are extremely helpful tools out there but people are being too gullible when it comes to advertised ROIs and the blame inevitably falls on engineering, not management, when all the devs fail to 10x overnight.
Apparently there has been some AI-caused firing on companies that spent so much on AI that needed to fire people to make their short-term numbers not break. From the way people are talking, Facebook seems to be in that category.
There is probably some AI-caused firing coming soon on companies that vibe-coded so much that people abandon their products. I expect Microsoft start is on Github.
I have been repeating for months that AI hasn't caused any firing. But it doesn't seem to be technically correct anymore.
In my anecdotal experience in a FAANG, weak junior hiring started during the hiring freezes in mid 2022, and was made worse by the layoff cycles that began soon after. Once you know headcount is going to be extremely tight indefinitely, you want to use your precious few slots to hire someone that can deliver value pretty quickly, rather than take years to coach up.
It personally seems hard to connect that to remote work as that had been going for 2 years and in between was the largest hiring burst we'd done, which included many junior folks. Though admittedly I'm biased as a remote worker.
I got significantly more work accomplished when I worked remotely. There was tons of work I could not do from the office as people needed the systems I need to work on and could only be done out of hours/remotely.
When in the office I got a lot of people complaining/pissed I was leaving early because I got there an hour or more before everyone so I could get more work done/do the work on systems they needed. The only thing I got while in the office was constant interruptions for things a junior could have handled. Meetings was a bad word, never allowed, so there was really no reason for me to be there constantly (I could have done most of my job remotely and gone into the office once or twice a week)
I hired a junior I was eager to mentor/train to replace me, they proceeded to throw endless things I did at them expecting them to fill the multiple hats I was filling (to the point they pushed them to work on very dangerous equipment and got themselves hurt)
Dammed if you do, dammed if you don't
I absolutely loved the work I did. I GTFO of that misery that was only miserable/got me crucified due to the stupid shit people made up in their head instead of the actual work I did
I have worked with graduates joining remotely during the pandemic, like most graduates they also lacked the skill to work in a real environment, but we can teach them, it's easy. But during the AI boom, the people who could teach the graduates were let go, leaving only a handful of senior engineers that had to "increase their productivity" while also mentoring the juniors. Guess where people cut corners to keep their job longer?
I did that and it was rough at first. Turned down the internship -> full-time option in favor of freelancing so I could do the level of work I wished.
15 years later...there are good parts and bad parts. Great for focus and getting real work done, terrible for feeling like you have any real connection to your peers (even if/when I went to meetups, conferences, etc, you always feel like an "outsider"). Eventually embraced the "lone wolf" aspects and learned alternatives to socializing, but yeah, that first lap around the track was brutal.
Yeah it's awful and the lack of any sympathy from people further along in their career with kids made it even worse. Everyone thinks it's great but I literally developed depression and anxiety from isolation.
I have found working with remote first natives that the narrowness of their knowledge is also very high. When you work in an office there is a some knowledge transfer happening having lunch with the guy in accounts or the women in the sales team. This non structured learning is missed in remote work.
I absolutely agree with this point. I fit in as an interdepartmental communicator for engineering and while it took time to accumulate the deficit of gossip[1] since we had a very solid understanding of the system at the beginning of the pandemic. Eventually the gap of understanding from that casual interdepartmental communication became too wide, however, so now I take active steps to have check-ins with people on different teams to make sure we've got a good comprehension of where our shortfalls actually are. Probably owing to my own negligence, I've been burned a few times now by being told by executive that X is really critical only to find out that no one outside that executive actually cares about it. There is a lot of "wasted" office time chatting and being friendly, when you go full remote you, or someone on your behalf, needs to keep some of that chatter going to make sure there's still an understanding of where the product shortfalls are.
1. Work gossip like "Gosh, it'd be great if I could make a widget on this page instead of needing to click into that modal and then toggle the "Yes I do" checkbox - I do that twenty times a day" - whether UX based or generally feature based.
In contrast, when I worked in office, I found these fabled “lunches with the guy in accounts or the women in the sales team” didn’t ever happen. A lot of the mythical spontaneous collaboration that supposedly happens in office seems to be just that: a myth. At least for many.
I think only a few people manage to build such a network inside a company. But those are usually the successful ones, because they know much more than others.
Even in a relatively open organization where conversations and work are public/discoverable by default, there's still a huuuge difference between the level of curiosity required to join a convo happening in the office kitchen while you're waiting for a coffee to brew vs needing to spend your idle time at work discovering places (Slack channels or whatever else) to chime in while hoping you're not a distraction for others.
I'm a pretty staunch defender of remote work for most roles, but outside of the smallest companies where the entire organization is on a single conversational thread, you really do lose the organic peripheral vision that comes with an office environment and deliberate effort is required to try and recreate some of that in your fully-remote org if you want some of the same upside. Even with deliberate effort, I'm not convinced you can match it perfectly.
Yeah, that seems obvious to me, even to me as a programmer who likes to be able to take long stretches of solitude to really nail the solution to a problem. The indirect transfer of knowledge, understanding and alignment that happens when you're not just sitting at your desk working on your things, seems invaluable once you've had the experience of a workplace where that happens naturally and seems to be able to "steer the entire ship".
Finding a way to make this happen in a remote environment feels like what's missing right now. I know there been some Slack/chat apps that kind of force those kind of meetings, but it's very different from what happens with real humans in real places in close proximity to each other.
The best remote jobs I’ve had included many hours a week of no-agenda calls with colleagues, just catching up and talking about what we’re up to. This is very hard to make happen. Most people don’t want to, don’t see it as work, or more likely just don’t know anyone well enough to call and shoot the shit. But imo this is the only real way. Just doing transactional interactions, it’s very tough to stay well connected.
My first programming job, I had a private office to myself. It was amazing. I close the door, I’m left alone. I leave it open, people stop and talk and I walk and talk to them if their door is open. Was incredible. Never had anything like it since.
Yep, this was the Microsoft Way for a long time. It is the best. I just visited their huge new campus and it's a bunch of open "pods" and "focus rooms". Blech.
They did retain the MS tradition of an incredibly confusing floor plan. We used to say the last interview question is "can you find your way back to the lobby?"
The best office layout I've had was Infinite Loop at Apple. Private offices with lots of little open discussion spaces -- exactly the opposite of today's open offices with lots of little private discussion spaces! Perhaps shows how the job of the people signing the checks for the office differs from the job of the people working in the office...
That does sound kind of ideal, easy to signal when available, easy to turn off the rest of the world when needed, hopefully I'd get to experience that too someday :) Maybe we need companies to go back to this model? And also have long hallways, where people can bump into each other and (optionally) chime in on each other’s problems. We could call it Chime Labs.
Because often it happens so randomly. Sometimes it takes two people to be on a natural break at the same time, hungry at the same time, or just how two people got on at a meeting.
I call bullshit on these social interactions having any meaningful impact on work. I've been in very social offices of a large company where we all lunched together, spent a lot of time at the coffee machine, went out together during and after work. Lots of fun. I didn't once see, hear or participate in cross team discoveries as a result that improved work. And in smaller orgs that were also social, the social part is extremely inefficient at moving work information.
My current remote employer does as good a job at building trust between employees with 6 monthly on-sites. But they also do things that expose cross team productivity issue: rotate people in leadership roles between all the different company meetings, so the CEO might be in the planning meeting this week. Get different people in different roles to join customer calls. Not just anecdote at the coffee machine, actually see what's happening across the company.
This is complete bullshit. I worked in an office for many years. The number of times I was asked to lunch with "the guy in accounts or the women in the sales team" or even anyone in our so-called People team was precisely zero. They would keep to themselves at lunch, and reach out to Engineering only with tickets, or when they needed help with something computer-related.
Engineers have a reputation for being loners, but marketing, sales, and other "soft skills" or "people oriented" functions are super cliquey as well and rarely contribute to this supposed "knowledge transfer" that higher-ups keep talking about. I did notice that this cliquishness gets better at their level; the VP of Sales and the VP of Engineering did have lunch a lot. But expecting it to translate to the lower ranks is naive or fake.
---
If any actual leaders who have already mandated in-office time and happen to be reading this, see what happens if you mandate that everyone in the non-tech parts of your org is required to have lunch with the tech people every single day of in-office work.
dTrack this as a metric and be honest with yourself whether it's going up; and most importantly whether that is actually helping the company.
When I worked in an office, I ate lunch without my coworkers. If the business wants knowledge transfer and institutional knowledge diffusion, they should be willing to invest in documentation, resources, and time to facilitate during work time, not on my time.
(remote 10+ years, death before going back to an office)
The one glaring omission the jumps out to me is Holmström's theorem like effects of incentives.
There has been a huge shift towards metrics, to the point that managers are often forced to or at least commonly believe they are forced to game those metrics.
It is challenging to take strategic risks when you have to focus on metrics which cannot measure let alone value those choices.
Now tell me which executives ever did the math on how remote working makes juniors take longer to learn and then took hiring decisions based on that math. This all seems good in theory, but doesn’t seem to hold out in the real world if you’ve ever worked with higher ups in your life
If my location dictates the type of employees your organisation needs / doesn't need, then yeah, you pretty much over-hired to begin with and just lack accountability. Hence trying to blame it on everyone and everything else except yourself. Respectfully.
Companies used to invest in building up their employees and even in retaining them by giving competitive pay. I can hire any junior developer and train them to be a better developer, unless they themselves do not want to be a better developer, I cant fight lack of motivation.
A lot of senior developer roles list things that make it sound like senior devs are supposed to mentor other devs but they never seem to do so.
Intial folks in gold rush benefits. Later folks don't. It happens everywhere. This weak junior hiring was seen by everyone 10 years ago when our politicians were asking coal miners to learn to code.
It's telling how rhetoric and conjecture are now normalized in company and business culture. When we were at the peak of remote work, companies were reporting record high revenues.
Yeah. Capitalism has never been less about actual profits and efficiency than it is right now. They just tout whatever random thing they're currently doing, regardless of why they're doing it or whether it was voluntary or not, is great and producing amazing results.
Junior hiring was clearly depressed thanks to COVID, but AI has absolutely made that depression worse. We know this because it's what the tech leaders keep saying. They can't fucking shut up about it.
It's as though the only idea any tech CEO has had in the last year is "what if we gave our best engineer 1000 agents and a case of Red Bull and fired everyone else?" Historically you had to hire junior engineers, because you needed the help. Now there's a [theoretical, purely imaginary] world where you don't, because agents will magically do that work for you. Nobody is losing sleep over the effect this has on talent as a whole, because that's a problem for someone else in the future.
Or how about we make remote work mandatory where possible so the economy lets people live their lives. Getting back unpaid time from commutes and being able to reorganize work time freely makes a huge difference.
It's mismanagement, a prevalence of PE pushing profit margins as thin as possible, and the inevitable feeling of an oncoming recession. Mismanagement and PE both push to prioritizing short term gains (something you can use to justify your position/investment today) at the cost of long term profitability. No one is getting a bonus for having a great quarter in 2046 when your new project has turned you into a trillion dollar company. Executives tend to be very gullible and believe the department head that will claim it wasn't R&D but the new slick UX that 10x'd the company.
Add to that the economy, especially after the disastrous Trump administration, which we can all plainly see as an oncoming train heading straight towards us, and even those who would optimistically advocate for long term budgeting in good times are in baton down the hatches mode.
Hiring juniors is an excellent long term strategy that takes time to pay off - you're much better off having a mix of labor that can mix bold initiative and raw enthusiasm with prudence and planning - and those junior devs today will turn into highly skilled professionals with a deep understanding of your platform in half a decade or so. But when times are lean that's difficult to justify.
I wouldn't shift all the blame away from AI though, this isn't a singular cause thing - working for a PE owned firm we're now on the hook for 200/mo anthropic seats owing to our overlords making a horrible deal. The current brand of AI is a rent-seeking technology that's pulling funds out of the working areas of the economy to fund its insane R&D concepts while more traditional AI applications that have proven utility are languishing,
I have been working since 2008, in that time the only periods my manager has been within a hundred miles of me has been between 2010-2013 and 2015-2017.
Even if I pretend for a moment that a generation that is younger than Google is somehow unable to collaborate online, remote work has been the mode of operation of most people even before COVID, the only question is whether they are sitting in traffic or not first.
In 2026 a Junior Engineer is just Claude Code with a bad UI, higher latency, and extra steps. Literally.
I wouldn't even considering hiring a junior engineer at this point. The ROI was already barely breakeven for any but the top of the top junior engineers as they are likely to move on before they are meaningfully contributing.
With AI in the mix the ROI for Junior Engineers is strongly negative for 2 reasons:
1. (obvious) I can just have Claude Code do the work a junior engineer would have done with faster turnaround and generally better results.
2. (less obvious) Junior engineers are going to just turn around and use Claude Code, so now I'm talking to an AI and playing the telephone game, and the Junior engineer isn't going to learn much if anything in the process.
1a. If you train it enough, one day you'll be able to trust that it's going to be able to execute what you want correctly, and you don't have to meticulously go through each line to find any issues.
to your list of arguments?
Because just like a junior human, training Claude will make it a capable senior developer, right...?
The way this position conforms to the interests of the capital class, and conflicts with those of the labor class, is a red flag.
It simultaneously and conveniently: 1. takes the heat off AI blowback 2. synergizes perfectly with "RTO" mandates (to the extent this needed synergy to become A Widespread Thing)
On that basis alone, I'll wait for further analysis.
Edit: to be clear I'm no anti-AI holdout, and I actually don't mind working from the office (which i do 4x a week). Just observing.
It also doesn't really sit well with what I have observed in over 25 years of working for remote companies. We hired juniors and grew engineers up just fine. The problem, at least at orgs I have worked at in the last decade, is companies no longer want to invest in junior hires.
I have been fortunate to have a C-level above me, who believes in hiring juniors, take over in the last year. We are hiring now and mentoring, but not enough companies around me are doing this.
People job hopping when they get past 'junior' status is what seems to have caused the reluctance to hire juniors, especially combined with the surge of 'opportunists' who started getting comp-sci degrees when it became obvious that it was the easiest way to earn a comfortable living. The job-hoppers made it obvious that it was just cheaper and faster to hire intermediate and senior developers (rather than investing in juniors to learn the basics, then have to pay them to stay). The opportunists further reduced the value proposition of developers to employers as many job-seekers (particularly juniors) have little passion or aptitude for the job, and will never be 'stellar'.
If your junior employees frequently job hop as soon as they have been trained up then your company is mismanaged. There are always personal reasons (I ended up immigrating to another country as I was coming into Senior-hood because my partner couldn't affordably immigrate into the US) but if it's a pattern then that pattern is owed to undercompensation and other failures of management.
In the 2000s it was seen as very fashionable to job hop frequently, but it was a biased impression that was assumed to be nationwide while it was only really common in SV with the hugely lucrative signing contracts folks like Google, Meta et. all were handing out.
I would argue that job hopping was a symptom of companies under compensating for the market. This is a common problem even above Junior level. It's been easier to get a raise by leaving to another company that will pay more, then by just asking your employer for more money.
Again, the company has the control to avoid this.
> The job-hoppers made it obvious that it was just cheaper and faster to hire intermediate and senior developers (rather than investing in juniors to learn the basics, then have to pay them to stay).
Critically: While this is the common perception, it is generally un-true.
Just look at how often you get it as reply when you tell people complaining about how it's "impossible to find staff" to hire juniors.
Even in the situations where it is true, the effect of hiring seniors and refusing to hire juniors (thus pushing them into other fields) creates the shortage of seniors that makes it un-true again.
There's just a trend of employers having hard numbers on their staffing expenses, but barely if at all accounting for hiring costs and opportunity costs.
Many simply get it in their head that a senior costs $X/year, and therefore utterly refuse to pay a junior $X/year when they had to spend a flat amount $Y on training them up. Even when the real cost per hire for the senior is vastly bigger than $Y.
Before the post-covid/AI layoffs, tech firms throwing away hundreds of thousands of dollars and years chasing seniors instead of just training up a junior was a common thing. So much so that it's a notable contributor to the overworking and burnout problems.
And it's still everywhere in the blue-collar world.
What do you mean by investing though? I think these days junior people have to just invest in themselves and learn by working right? It’s also hard for companies or managers to spend more on them when they can leave at any time, which means all that effort training them will just benefit some other employee.
I’ve noticed younger generations are especially a lot less loyal, probably in response to abusive and exploitative employers and horror stories. But the downside is if employees have less loyalty themselves, then even caring companies and managers cannot justify being loyal to them. They end up losing that time invested and learn a hard lesson.
> a lot less loyal
So have companies.
This goes both ways and labor is just reacting to the "it's just business" excuse companies have been using for over 30 years.
Why be loyal without pensions, good benefits, and more than CoL raises?
What inspires loyalty about someone paying under market rate because they refuse to see change?
If they leave they got a better offer. Simply be more competetive.
> The way this position conforms to the interests of the capital class, and conflicts with those of the labor class, is a red flag.
If being in the office conforms to the interest of the capital class, it implies that WFH is inherently less efficient.
This is one of those things that I often find strange with work from home advocates. They seem to imply that business owners just want employees to suffer as a goal in itself.
There are a few factors at work, including:
1) A lot of executive type work _is_ easier in person... and those executives forget that their work might not be representative of _other_ roles within their own org, and they might actually be the outlier.
2) A lot of managers don't know how to manage by looking at output. We see this not just with WFH, but also with multi-location teams, where some managers simply can't do it competently.
3) Many managers do, in fact, get some satisfaction from having that sort of power over their workers.
4) Many executives like having an office that is a bit of a tribute to the company (and therefore their) power. And this falls apart if the office is empty.
That's not necessarily true, though. For instance, real estate investors have a lot to lose from vacant office space and therefore would benefit from RTO.
I personally find that I enjoy in person collaboration but that should not mean we should universally force every team to come back to the office.
I never understood this argument. Most companies do not own their office buildings, but rather lease space from corporate landlords. It is in the best interest of these companies to dramatically reduce their lease burden via WFH. Why would a company totally unrelated to real estate investment act against its own self-interest just to prop up real estate investors?
This is a weird conspiracy theory. You'd have to believe that real estate investors were pulling the strings in companies to get them to spend more money with no upside. Like they're just milking these companies for rent and the companies are doing it because they want to give money to the real estate investors?
Even in the rare case where real estate investors are also investors in the startup, my experience is that the startup gets reduced-rate rent as a bonus.
Not a startup, but real estate investors have a good chunk of shares of the company where I work and they can influence the decision makers just fine
I don't doubt what you're saying, but I don't these situations where real estate investors and company investors overlap and also want to micromanage the company's operations are common.
The way this is brought up as a general explanation for RTO across the industry is getting a little silly
The interests of the capital class are not necessarily aligned with efficient allocation of capital. Note this is far from saying they want employees to suffer, but they install inefficient policies over them.
"If being in the office conforms to the interest of the capital class, it implies that WFH is inherently less efficient"
only if the capital class is solely motivated by efficiency. I think this is trivially demonstrable to be not the case.
The capital class's primary interest is self-preservation - both of their capital, of course, but also preserving their place in the pecking order. And they'll spend a LOT of the former to maintain the latter because the latter is how they got the former.
Through that lens, GP's point is perfectly coherent.
"They seem to imply that business owners just want employees to suffer as a goal in itself."
Have you met... people? Yes there are literally many owners who do want employees to suffer. Or, perhaps worse, will tolerate tremendous amounts of suffering in the pursuit of minor other gains. (Amazon pee bottles come to mind.) It would somehow be a comforting kind of moustache-twirling comic book evil to say they just want people to suffer. Another to say they simply don't value human happiness (or lack of suffering) enough to not trade large amounts of it for small things they do care about.
I had a boss who was only willing to hire non-whites because he could inflict undesirable work on them, leaving more desirable work for the white employees.
I just want to end this by remarking that this presumption of owners being perfectly optimal, morally clean agents of free markets is absurd and honestly disgusting to bring to an argument.
> This is one of those things that I often find strange with work from home advocates. They seem to imply that business owners just want employees to suffer as a goal in itself.
I've worked remote a lot and I'm a big fan. I find it hard to discuss WFH online because it's so hard to find people willing to discuss it honestly, including the challenges. The way it's talked about here and on sites like Reddit is as if WFH is perfect, works for everyone, and the only reason we can't have more of it is because companies are hell-bent on doing things against their self interests.
I'm in another forum where we have a subforum for managers to talk, and remote work problems are a perennial topic. A lot of people really don't handle it well. There are even managers in the group who would prefer to work from home, but they've moved their teams into the office at least 2-3 days per week because their 5 day WFH experiments didn't go well.
It's a hard topic. I find myself holding back from discussing it because anything other than 100% pro-WFH anti-manager comments will get a lot of drive-by downvotes.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc...
It is sane and inevitably correct to treat with extreme skepticism any explanation for an economic effect that reduces the cause to a singular source. AI is to blame, to an extent, so is remote working (it is excellent for older folks who have lives to support but is a rug pull on the social aspects of office working), but the economy is the big looming threat here. We still hadn't recovered fully from the pandemic and then we got Trump 2: Electric Tariffoo which has wrought absolute havoc on business stability. All these combine (with other factors like the ever growing PE investment) to discourage innovation and long term investment.
Junior employees are a long term investment - if the R&D budget is frozen, you're sure as heck not going to dump 60% of your budget into onboarding.
It's not reasonable for us to frame 'return to office' as a class issue, it's a productivity issue - moreover, the general point is not implausible but a bit conspiratorial.
It's odd that we conflate that somehow 'return to office' is inherently more productive and that somehow 'dumb corporations acting against their interest'.
I don't think that's true, and if it were, well, we should all be in a position to take advantage of it.
Sure, FT is part of the 'corporatocracy' for sure but they're not working to 'create narratives'. Individual journalists are actually writing about things they see.
My bet is the real reason is that companies just don't want to hire juniors, and that's it.
Their next post's gonna be how building new datacenters is clearly great for everyone based on trickle down economics.
RTO mandates are primarily pushed by the managerial class, not the capitalist class. Both want to blame AI so its not clear they want to avoid doing so.
RTO is primarily pushed by the capitalist class, and managers are just stuck in the middle. No good manager wants pissed off employees, but managers who push back on the capitalist class do not stay managers long.
In my experience, investors push hard to go in office when fundraising
Managers, like police and prosecutors, are enforcers for the capitalist class. This is why they are not part of the working class. Managers do the job of squeezing surplus value from workers, rather than producing real Value themselves. Relationship to capital determines class.
AI is not responsible for anything at the moment, except making existing senior developers reasonably more efficient for sleeve of tasks, but not the tasks that take the most time.
Saying "we don't need as many staff because AI" is an oft-repeated trope because it sounds like a reasonable excuse to fire people. It's nearly impossible to back up the claim with any measurable method, and investors will look aside on the mismanagement and/or ridiculously over-engineered/over-complicated custom tech stacks companies run if they say "AI" anywhere in their reports.
AI is absolutely responsible for executive suites dumping huge budgets that could be more productively elsewhere. There are extremely helpful tools out there but people are being too gullible when it comes to advertised ROIs and the blame inevitably falls on engineering, not management, when all the devs fail to 10x overnight.
Apparently there has been some AI-caused firing on companies that spent so much on AI that needed to fire people to make their short-term numbers not break. From the way people are talking, Facebook seems to be in that category.
There is probably some AI-caused firing coming soon on companies that vibe-coded so much that people abandon their products. I expect Microsoft start is on Github.
I have been repeating for months that AI hasn't caused any firing. But it doesn't seem to be technically correct anymore.
In my anecdotal experience in a FAANG, weak junior hiring started during the hiring freezes in mid 2022, and was made worse by the layoff cycles that began soon after. Once you know headcount is going to be extremely tight indefinitely, you want to use your precious few slots to hire someone that can deliver value pretty quickly, rather than take years to coach up.
It personally seems hard to connect that to remote work as that had been going for 2 years and in between was the largest hiring burst we'd done, which included many junior folks. Though admittedly I'm biased as a remote worker.
I got significantly more work accomplished when I worked remotely. There was tons of work I could not do from the office as people needed the systems I need to work on and could only be done out of hours/remotely.
When in the office I got a lot of people complaining/pissed I was leaving early because I got there an hour or more before everyone so I could get more work done/do the work on systems they needed. The only thing I got while in the office was constant interruptions for things a junior could have handled. Meetings was a bad word, never allowed, so there was really no reason for me to be there constantly (I could have done most of my job remotely and gone into the office once or twice a week)
I hired a junior I was eager to mentor/train to replace me, they proceeded to throw endless things I did at them expecting them to fill the multiple hats I was filling (to the point they pushed them to work on very dangerous equipment and got themselves hurt)
Dammed if you do, dammed if you don't
I absolutely loved the work I did. I GTFO of that misery that was only miserable/got me crucified due to the stupid shit people made up in their head instead of the actual work I did
I have worked with graduates joining remotely during the pandemic, like most graduates they also lacked the skill to work in a real environment, but we can teach them, it's easy. But during the AI boom, the people who could teach the graduates were let go, leaving only a handful of senior engineers that had to "increase their productivity" while also mentoring the juniors. Guess where people cut corners to keep their job longer?
I couldn't imagine working remote straight out of college. I'm very glad I work remote now though.
I did that and it was rough at first. Turned down the internship -> full-time option in favor of freelancing so I could do the level of work I wished.
15 years later...there are good parts and bad parts. Great for focus and getting real work done, terrible for feeling like you have any real connection to your peers (even if/when I went to meetups, conferences, etc, you always feel like an "outsider"). Eventually embraced the "lone wolf" aspects and learned alternatives to socializing, but yeah, that first lap around the track was brutal.
Yeah it's awful and the lack of any sympathy from people further along in their career with kids made it even worse. Everyone thinks it's great but I literally developed depression and anxiety from isolation.
Should those other people be made to RTO and spend less time around their kids, to fill in your isolated lifestyle?
I have found working with remote first natives that the narrowness of their knowledge is also very high. When you work in an office there is a some knowledge transfer happening having lunch with the guy in accounts or the women in the sales team. This non structured learning is missed in remote work.
I absolutely agree with this point. I fit in as an interdepartmental communicator for engineering and while it took time to accumulate the deficit of gossip[1] since we had a very solid understanding of the system at the beginning of the pandemic. Eventually the gap of understanding from that casual interdepartmental communication became too wide, however, so now I take active steps to have check-ins with people on different teams to make sure we've got a good comprehension of where our shortfalls actually are. Probably owing to my own negligence, I've been burned a few times now by being told by executive that X is really critical only to find out that no one outside that executive actually cares about it. There is a lot of "wasted" office time chatting and being friendly, when you go full remote you, or someone on your behalf, needs to keep some of that chatter going to make sure there's still an understanding of where the product shortfalls are.
1. Work gossip like "Gosh, it'd be great if I could make a widget on this page instead of needing to click into that modal and then toggle the "Yes I do" checkbox - I do that twenty times a day" - whether UX based or generally feature based.
In contrast, when I worked in office, I found these fabled “lunches with the guy in accounts or the women in the sales team” didn’t ever happen. A lot of the mythical spontaneous collaboration that supposedly happens in office seems to be just that: a myth. At least for many.
I think only a few people manage to build such a network inside a company. But those are usually the successful ones, because they know much more than others.
If we're collecting anecdotes, it happened for me in more of my office jobs than not. Might have been relevant that these were smaller offices.
I don't fully agree. If the only way information and cross-pollination is through in-office water-cooler conversation, that's an organizational smell.
If you have most of the work and conversation is done in public, you're not hiring very curious people.
What other options are there? Confluence pages and public Slack channels or some sort of organized events? Its not even remotely the same..
It's not like there are that many natural opportunities to meet and interact with people you don't directly work with when everyone is remote.
Even in a relatively open organization where conversations and work are public/discoverable by default, there's still a huuuge difference between the level of curiosity required to join a convo happening in the office kitchen while you're waiting for a coffee to brew vs needing to spend your idle time at work discovering places (Slack channels or whatever else) to chime in while hoping you're not a distraction for others.
I'm a pretty staunch defender of remote work for most roles, but outside of the smallest companies where the entire organization is on a single conversational thread, you really do lose the organic peripheral vision that comes with an office environment and deliberate effort is required to try and recreate some of that in your fully-remote org if you want some of the same upside. Even with deliberate effort, I'm not convinced you can match it perfectly.
Yeah, that seems obvious to me, even to me as a programmer who likes to be able to take long stretches of solitude to really nail the solution to a problem. The indirect transfer of knowledge, understanding and alignment that happens when you're not just sitting at your desk working on your things, seems invaluable once you've had the experience of a workplace where that happens naturally and seems to be able to "steer the entire ship".
Finding a way to make this happen in a remote environment feels like what's missing right now. I know there been some Slack/chat apps that kind of force those kind of meetings, but it's very different from what happens with real humans in real places in close proximity to each other.
The best remote jobs I’ve had included many hours a week of no-agenda calls with colleagues, just catching up and talking about what we’re up to. This is very hard to make happen. Most people don’t want to, don’t see it as work, or more likely just don’t know anyone well enough to call and shoot the shit. But imo this is the only real way. Just doing transactional interactions, it’s very tough to stay well connected.
My first programming job, I had a private office to myself. It was amazing. I close the door, I’m left alone. I leave it open, people stop and talk and I walk and talk to them if their door is open. Was incredible. Never had anything like it since.
Yep, this was the Microsoft Way for a long time. It is the best. I just visited their huge new campus and it's a bunch of open "pods" and "focus rooms". Blech.
They did retain the MS tradition of an incredibly confusing floor plan. We used to say the last interview question is "can you find your way back to the lobby?"
The best office layout I've had was Infinite Loop at Apple. Private offices with lots of little open discussion spaces -- exactly the opposite of today's open offices with lots of little private discussion spaces! Perhaps shows how the job of the people signing the checks for the office differs from the job of the people working in the office...
That does sound kind of ideal, easy to signal when available, easy to turn off the rest of the world when needed, hopefully I'd get to experience that too someday :) Maybe we need companies to go back to this model? And also have long hallways, where people can bump into each other and (optionally) chime in on each other’s problems. We could call it Chime Labs.
Because often it happens so randomly. Sometimes it takes two people to be on a natural break at the same time, hungry at the same time, or just how two people got on at a meeting.
I call bullshit on these social interactions having any meaningful impact on work. I've been in very social offices of a large company where we all lunched together, spent a lot of time at the coffee machine, went out together during and after work. Lots of fun. I didn't once see, hear or participate in cross team discoveries as a result that improved work. And in smaller orgs that were also social, the social part is extremely inefficient at moving work information.
My current remote employer does as good a job at building trust between employees with 6 monthly on-sites. But they also do things that expose cross team productivity issue: rotate people in leadership roles between all the different company meetings, so the CEO might be in the planning meeting this week. Get different people in different roles to join customer calls. Not just anecdote at the coffee machine, actually see what's happening across the company.
This is complete bullshit. I worked in an office for many years. The number of times I was asked to lunch with "the guy in accounts or the women in the sales team" or even anyone in our so-called People team was precisely zero. They would keep to themselves at lunch, and reach out to Engineering only with tickets, or when they needed help with something computer-related.
Engineers have a reputation for being loners, but marketing, sales, and other "soft skills" or "people oriented" functions are super cliquey as well and rarely contribute to this supposed "knowledge transfer" that higher-ups keep talking about. I did notice that this cliquishness gets better at their level; the VP of Sales and the VP of Engineering did have lunch a lot. But expecting it to translate to the lower ranks is naive or fake.
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If any actual leaders who have already mandated in-office time and happen to be reading this, see what happens if you mandate that everyone in the non-tech parts of your org is required to have lunch with the tech people every single day of in-office work.
dTrack this as a metric and be honest with yourself whether it's going up; and most importantly whether that is actually helping the company.
When I worked in an office, I ate lunch without my coworkers. If the business wants knowledge transfer and institutional knowledge diffusion, they should be willing to invest in documentation, resources, and time to facilitate during work time, not on my time.
(remote 10+ years, death before going back to an office)
The paper:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6787638
Unclear if it's been peer reviewed. The abstract looks fairly convincing. But it is argued against by the majority of research on this topic.
The one glaring omission the jumps out to me is Holmström's theorem like effects of incentives.
There has been a huge shift towards metrics, to the point that managers are often forced to or at least commonly believe they are forced to game those metrics.
It is challenging to take strategic risks when you have to focus on metrics which cannot measure let alone value those choices.
Now tell me which executives ever did the math on how remote working makes juniors take longer to learn and then took hiring decisions based on that math. This all seems good in theory, but doesn’t seem to hold out in the real world if you’ve ever worked with higher ups in your life
Large companies opting to hire several overseas engineers into their GCC for way less pay than a single domestic junior is a factor as well.
If my location dictates the type of employees your organisation needs / doesn't need, then yeah, you pretty much over-hired to begin with and just lack accountability. Hence trying to blame it on everyone and everything else except yourself. Respectfully.
Companies used to invest in building up their employees and even in retaining them by giving competitive pay. I can hire any junior developer and train them to be a better developer, unless they themselves do not want to be a better developer, I cant fight lack of motivation.
A lot of senior developer roles list things that make it sound like senior devs are supposed to mentor other devs but they never seem to do so.
Intial folks in gold rush benefits. Later folks don't. It happens everywhere. This weak junior hiring was seen by everyone 10 years ago when our politicians were asking coal miners to learn to code.
For those without a FT subscription: https://archive.ph/DrFSW
What if hiring offshore developers is to blame for not hiring onshore ones?
It's telling how rhetoric and conjecture are now normalized in company and business culture. When we were at the peak of remote work, companies were reporting record high revenues.
Yeah. Capitalism has never been less about actual profits and efficiency than it is right now. They just tout whatever random thing they're currently doing, regardless of why they're doing it or whether it was voluntary or not, is great and producing amazing results.
Hiring was strong a couple years ago during peak remote work.
It's not AI, it's workers asking to work from home.
Yeah.
No, that's not the reason they claim. From the paper:
> WFH has been shown to raise the cost of supervising and monitoring workers, and can slow on-the-job learning
Junior hiring was clearly depressed thanks to COVID, but AI has absolutely made that depression worse. We know this because it's what the tech leaders keep saying. They can't fucking shut up about it.
It's as though the only idea any tech CEO has had in the last year is "what if we gave our best engineer 1000 agents and a case of Red Bull and fired everyone else?" Historically you had to hire junior engineers, because you needed the help. Now there's a [theoretical, purely imaginary] world where you don't, because agents will magically do that work for you. Nobody is losing sleep over the effect this has on talent as a whole, because that's a problem for someone else in the future.
Or how about we make remote work mandatory where possible so the economy lets people live their lives. Getting back unpaid time from commutes and being able to reorganize work time freely makes a huge difference.
Haha, Your still supposed to actually work when you're at home.
There's a paywall, so I won't be able to read anything post the title.
But let's not pretend reality enters the decision-making of the large tech company at any point, for any kind of decision.
It's mismanagement, a prevalence of PE pushing profit margins as thin as possible, and the inevitable feeling of an oncoming recession. Mismanagement and PE both push to prioritizing short term gains (something you can use to justify your position/investment today) at the cost of long term profitability. No one is getting a bonus for having a great quarter in 2046 when your new project has turned you into a trillion dollar company. Executives tend to be very gullible and believe the department head that will claim it wasn't R&D but the new slick UX that 10x'd the company.
Add to that the economy, especially after the disastrous Trump administration, which we can all plainly see as an oncoming train heading straight towards us, and even those who would optimistically advocate for long term budgeting in good times are in baton down the hatches mode.
Hiring juniors is an excellent long term strategy that takes time to pay off - you're much better off having a mix of labor that can mix bold initiative and raw enthusiasm with prudence and planning - and those junior devs today will turn into highly skilled professionals with a deep understanding of your platform in half a decade or so. But when times are lean that's difficult to justify.
I wouldn't shift all the blame away from AI though, this isn't a singular cause thing - working for a PE owned firm we're now on the hook for 200/mo anthropic seats owing to our overlords making a horrible deal. The current brand of AI is a rent-seeking technology that's pulling funds out of the working areas of the economy to fund its insane R&D concepts while more traditional AI applications that have proven utility are languishing,
I have been working since 2008, in that time the only periods my manager has been within a hundred miles of me has been between 2010-2013 and 2015-2017.
Even if I pretend for a moment that a generation that is younger than Google is somehow unable to collaborate online, remote work has been the mode of operation of most people even before COVID, the only question is whether they are sitting in traffic or not first.
In 2026 a Junior Engineer is just Claude Code with a bad UI, higher latency, and extra steps. Literally.
I wouldn't even considering hiring a junior engineer at this point. The ROI was already barely breakeven for any but the top of the top junior engineers as they are likely to move on before they are meaningfully contributing.
With AI in the mix the ROI for Junior Engineers is strongly negative for 2 reasons:
1. (obvious) I can just have Claude Code do the work a junior engineer would have done with faster turnaround and generally better results.
2. (less obvious) Junior engineers are going to just turn around and use Claude Code, so now I'm talking to an AI and playing the telephone game, and the Junior engineer isn't going to learn much if anything in the process.
Can I add:
1a. If you train it enough, one day you'll be able to trust that it's going to be able to execute what you want correctly, and you don't have to meticulously go through each line to find any issues.
to your list of arguments?
Because just like a junior human, training Claude will make it a capable senior developer, right...?
/S because this is the Internet.