Advancing tech was sold as a way to make all our lives better. Here is an instance of tech making our lives better, but instead companies dismiss it because the real purpose of tech for the capital class is control.
this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2025
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Work Reform
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I bet they aren't going to make the AIs come into the office.
I love the way any article which says remote work is good still has to use the word, "surprisingly" as often as possible. Nobody is surprised.
So much of this is just slop for the White Collar hogs. You're not "Working from Home" as a retail employee or a grease monkey or a machinist. They spilled a thousand bytes to tell you what you already know "surprisingly", but I don't see word one in there about paid sick leave or vacation time.
Working in an office for 8 hours a day costs me an additional hour getting ready and commuting to to work, an hour away from home for lunch, an hour commuting back home and unwinding after work, turning 8 hours of paid labor into 11 hours of doing shit for other people.
Working at home claws back 15 hours a week.
It’s also how I got into a head on collision when some oblivious guy who pulled out in a left turn with oncoming headlights (me) driving straight in the lane. Close to home like most crashes are statistically, had I not been made to drive down to the office building then the rental car and repairs would never have been needed. There are costs everywhere that can be factored into this.
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Sleep. Precious beautiful sleep. I can roll out of bed, rip a huge wet fart, log into Teams, pretend to care for 5 minutes, go right back to sleep (and still be able to smell that fart, thankfully), take a long nap, get up to take a big smooth dump, then put in the same 3 hours of actual work I'd do at the office, then play Sokoban all afternoon. All the while reducing resource usage.
This is the UBI/leisure society I was promised as a kid.
If you spend most of your day getting to and from work, then pretending to be busy at the office, you don't have time to think or be a threat to the billionaires by starting your own competing company/product.
You paint a beautiful, utopian picture of how life could be.
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Facts don't matter anymore, get your ass to the office!
Mostly US companies
It is seeping into Canada as well. Not a lot of fully remote jobs. A lot of forced hybrid (usually 3 days).
Also here in Denmark. Novo Nordisk just reimplemented 5 required office days per week.
You mean we had a worldwide event that proved to us that an incredible technology that allows us to work remotely could actually be used to work remotely, then our overlords chose to ignore that and now studies are proving what we already knew was true, is true?
Neat.
It’s the shareholders who own our government that make money off commercial real estate that want everyone back at work. Shareholders don’t give a fuck about your wellbeing. They’re literally looting our government, destroying any and all global safety nets and installing facism worldwide quite publicly.
Working from home also proved that the "middle-manager" was at best, a part-time job, maybe not necessary at all.
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Aaaaand See how people will deny scientific research for the sake of Control.
I'm fed Up on how much a workplace wants to Control anyones Life. And all the rights that have ever been fought for under a broad Attack every single day. And it kinda feels like we're losing the battle.
Unionize!
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Evidence shows performance holds or climbs when people choose flexible setups with solid support from managers and peers.
That's the part these chuckle-head RTO folks willfully ignore. In a virtual environment you have to lead differently, and since they're never the ones who are wrong it must be everyone else who is broken.
With the right leadership and support mechanisms virtual work absolutely can raise all boats. But that means you have to be willing to change. And open-mindedness is not typically an attribute selected for in corporate senior leaders.
B-b-but I was told big tech companies love disruption!
All about balance. Working from home is such an improvement from past times. Face to face contact with your peers should not be underestimated though - very valuable.
It's bad enough having to hear my colleagues in teams meetings, I don't see why I have to smell them too.
This simply means that your local culture is flawed. Where I am, everyone looks and smells beautiful.
While this sounds intuitive, I've crunched side-by-side with a coworker (literally couch-coop, sshing into pods to solve a production issue), and then having also done the same over Discord with screen sharing, I can confidently say that once you actually embrace remote there is no marked tangible advantage to in person.
Other than it's easier to recruit for a union push on company time because people are constantly jawing, rather than doing their job when in person.
Are you painting the whole picture here?
First thing that comes to my mind is: You have met the person, thus connected, then worked together remotely.
That is a physical presence. How much physical presence is required for a good working relationship differs from individual to ~; having personally experienced a coworker is invaluable in my opinion.
The second paragraph does not resonate with me, I am from across the pond. To each their own!
Did the web site swap in a completely unrelated story about how swimming is good exercise for people over 55?
LOLWTF it also swapped it for me
It's probably just another clone of this clone of a clone of a ....
Which is why the ruling class has decided we can't have it...
It largely depends on if you can afford to have a room dedicated as your home office.
Working/relaxing cannot happen in the same space. Our brains are not wired to do such a dramatic difference in mental activity in the same location. That's also why bedrooms should be used for sleeping and fucking ONLY. Once you start reading/scrolling in bed, your brain makes that connection, "Oh, I'm in bed, I should doomscroll for the next 3 hours" instead of "Oh, I'm in bed. I should sleep."
As someone who currently sleeps, works, and relaxes in the same room these absolutes you're throwing out come off as hilarious. I've literally always lived in a room with both my bed and my computer, always worked and gamed from my computer, always slept within a couple of meters of my desk chair and computer.
You absolutely can work, relax, and sleep in the same space.
Does that mean I prefer that? Could I gain some meaningful benefits from having more spaces to dedicate to certain tasks? Absolutely. And the moment we tax the ultra-wealthy out of existence and therefore make housing affordable again, I'll make those rooms.
But working from home is not reliant on a square ft/m metric that the home must pass, nor how those spaces are organized or themed. I think saying it does only hurts my ability to stay at home, which is better for the environment, the economy, my productivity, and most importantly my life and mental health.
Our brains are not wired to do such a dramatic difference in mental activity in the same location.
Sounds made up bro.
Is this linked wrong? The article is about swimming for health not WFH.
oddly, the link goes to the right article, then the site redirects to the swimming article,
here it is on another site
https://evidencenetwork.ca/remote-work-increases-happiness-4-year-study-findings/
edit: it's someone elses take, looking for original
edit2: OK, the original article is from 2020, there are updartes in 2024.
This page does a better job covering the the couple of gallup polls and some of the criteria listed
though the site is sus to me :)
Every time this comes up i tell my personal and data driven experience as a middle manager in a company, and every time people trash me, but i keep saying it.
IT FUCKING DEPENDS!
From purely data point of view (note: this is from my place of work) workers whose work is purely executing more or less the same duties every day had their productivity have a nose dive when working long stretches from home. Also their works quality got worse. Its easy to reinforce bad habits whitout even noticing it, if the feedback comes from email and and not straight from the supervisor.
BUT with jobs like coders or artists where the job is more open ended instead of monotous labor there was no ill effects.
Then on the other side communication has gotten much slower with the people working from outside office. Where i used to just walk to the other room and ask something from my collegue i now need to message them in our internal and hope they notice it. Getting answers for questions have turned from 5 minute thing to 10-40 minute things.
Also from the point of more inventive things on my work we have lost a lot of changes to brainstorm ideas. No more throwing ideas around during lunch or coffee breaks
Where i used to just walk to the other room and ask something from my collegue i now need to message them in our internal and hope they notice it. Getting answers for questions have turned from 5 minute thing to 10-40 minute things.
Those rude shoulder-tap interruptions may have only taken you 5 minutes, but they ruined half an hour of productivity to the person you were interrupting. This is the whole reason people can be more productive at home without annoying bosses blathering at them.
Yeah every programmer I know loves not being exposed to the manager who just "has a question" or just want to "check in".
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The immediate interruption is good for management, but bad for the company overall.
That's why we still have Jira/email.
Critical importance: slack/in person
Can wait but important: high importance email, P1 Jira
Not important: Low impotance email, P2 Jira
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I have WfH for about twenty five years now and I will say the same thing I always say when this type of comment pops up, if people do not want to talk to you for some reason they will not respond as its a lot easier to hide on email/IM than an office situation. If you finding that people are hiding from you, then that's as much a you problem as anything else for not directly addressing it.
I actually find it considerably easier to get hold of someone via IM than any other method short of direct dialing them as I can reach them in meetings or away from their desk or even in another country entirely, its only if they are intentionally ignoring you it does not work. If the person is presenting in a meeting or otherwise legitimately incommunicado then they aren't going to respond F2F or IM anyway.
Not measuring output volume or quality consistently is a widespread problem for businesses, regardless of location of the employee. Consistent and accurate measurement is the only way to be sure you are getting the results you are expecting, for coding that means code reviews not commit counts, 360 feedback, and so on. If you are feeding back, and someones ignoring that, guess what, its also a you problem for not building in consequences and follow ups. It also applies just as much in an office situation as it does remote.
The article does have this caveat.
"Context still matters. Job type, home setting, and leadership quality vary. Yet the direction remains positive. Even with modest differences by role, the health and satisfaction curves point upward. Inside those curves, remote work behaves as a flexible option that organizations can calibrate rather than a rigid rule."
Though I will say your argument is still centered around being productive and effective for the company (make money for the company), the article specifically centers around an individual's well-being (sleep, family life etc.). So not the same metrics.
Other articles and research I've seen that did center on productivity did conclude that yes, it depends.
How about the workers' wellbeing? Is that ever considered?
Out of curiosity, can you describe, with a bit more detail, the kind of work that was repetitive and became worse?
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I liked working from home at first, but after so long it becomes harder and harder to leave your work at "work" when your workplace is also your home. Now I am back in the office and actually prefer it that way. I have the flexibility to work from home on weekends or when I need to be home for some reason, which is good enough for me.
You are just a rare exception. Don't push it on the rest of us
I'm just pointing out that not everyone thrives in a WFH environment and I think it shouldn't be a controversial take to admit that.
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The only advantage to me being in the office is that I get free access to the gym.
Whereas I have a home gym I invested in over 10 years ago, so wfh means I go to the gym during the day instead of at night.
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