Return to office is ‘dead,’ Stanford economist says. Here’s why

https://lemmy.world/post/9022658

Return to office is ‘dead,’ Stanford economist says. Here’s why - Lemmy.World

Return to office is ‘dead,’ Stanford economist says. Here’s why::The share of workers being called back to the office has flatlined, suggesting remote work is an entrenched feature of the U.S. labor market.

I say this as a rare person who prefers to work in office.

Good.

Seriously, would much rather work with productive happy people. the remote work phenomenon has proven that between reduced traffic, the commercial real estate bubble, the fact that we’re literally all connected to each other 24/7 through the series of tubes means it’s about time we restructure the workforce.

it’s about time we restructure the workforce.

I suppose a big part of that will be managers learning how to measure productivity more accurately than your clocked-in hours. That’ll be the most interesting change.. the “corporate welfare” program of just getting paid to occupy a desk space will have to be replaced with more sophisticated real performance measurements.

I have no idea how that pans out in software. Every bug is vastly different so they can’t merely count the number of bugs you fix. SLOC is a bit of a sloppy measure too.

Thanks to Goodhart’s Law, that doesn’t work. Any number used as a performance target ceases to be a useful measure, because people minmax them. You need to be able to look at a feature in a system, and evaluate if they completed it in an amount of time commensurate with their experience.

You need to think of productivity more abstractly, and have a lot of relevant expertise to assess it. Good management is hard, basically.