Pretty ridiculous methodology, but the outcome confirms my priors, so I like it.
This sounds like the ceo of the last nonprofit I worked at.
So how do we reconcile a love of AI+firing workers with their vanity?
Talk about a digital Trojan Horse: the only job AI can replace is CEO.
@amydiehl yep it’s the same types of people who were flipping out that they couldn’t sit in a restaurant and have a server serve them in 2020 when they could just get takeout and eat with their friends at home.
I guess it’s not fun if you can’t order a server around and see and be seen by strangers who are supposed to be impressed by your designer clothes or whatever.
Also a lot of these dudes need someone to sexually harass, and if they can’t do it at work or when they are out shopping and eating in public, they crash out.
@amydiehl i disagree. i have coworkers that say, they should reduce the 50% wfh to 20%. because when they need to talk to others regarding issues, they don't want to call, they want to do this face to face.
"i've never worked from home in my 40 years here, there is no need that you should work from home"
i didnt know what to answer.
@utf_7 @amydiehl "Things change, sometimes for the better. If you want to have a face to face, feel free to have a video chat but otherwise I prefer you message me as I find it more efficient. That goes for when we are in the office too."
You can start preventing the impromptu "face to face" conversations when in office by telling them to schedule a meeting, message or call you. That removes the "its easier in person" excuse because it removes their ability to interrupt you whenever they want in the medium they prefer. This will require you to set boundaries and push back, because people who do this a lot will keep doing it until you stop them.
Are these the type of coworker that grinds you down because they never learn?
Their default is to ask others, rather than go search or work things out for themselves?
Trying to do your job and get constantly interrupted for questions similar to what you have answered 20 times already.
Or they never make a decision without consulting others, because they don't really know what they are doing?
i have to add that they often or they basically do stuff for us. e.g. we make a mock up or a sketch and they make a nice drawing or electrical schematic out of it. and often they have questions because our sketches are not always at the level of detail they want
But that would mean that Elon Musk might be a narcissist
Yeah I think we all knew that
@abmallgren @amydiehl I know I'm not giving your joke it's due, but it's worth mentioning that, while I know nothing of this study, many prominent CEOs taking positions against remote work don't hold themselves to the same requirements.
Starbucks is one blatant example.
@amydiehl
My husband’s multi-branch company found that people actually completed more work when they were home for the mandatory wfh, so they told everyone they were welcome to do whichever they preferred when rto was okayed.
The only caveat was if they found you weren’t being productive, then you would need to come in. A few people go in of their own volition (too distracting at home, too lonely at home), but most stayed remote. Fewer than 10 were told to RTO for not getting their work done.
I used to do most of my job by email and would often have all my work done by the time I came into the office, which was usually because I had a meeting.
My boss made me come in earlier anyway sometimes because he wouldn't believe I was working and didn't like my, "did you check your email?" response to his asking if things were done, so I would sit in my office and play spider all day.
The bosses hate going to an empty office because it constantly reminds them how useless they are.
I am absolutely and entirely unsurprised by this. (I have far too much experience dealing with narcissists in authority, including my father.)
Yeah it was never a "secret reason". People were calling this accurately from day 1.
Hey boss, they say if you decide to mandate return to office you are a selfish narcissistic moron. There's a study about that :)
Study finds narcissism the only trait that predicted objections to remote work. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — the more they favored return-to-office mandates. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/opinion/office-work-wfh-bosses.html
@ridetheory @amydiehl Yep. It's not at an end. It's just permanent now.
Maybe in a few hundred years humans will have adapted sufficiently. Or maybe it will take a thousand. In the meantime, COVID-19 is going to utterly wreck us while we try to just pretend it away.
@amydiehl I'm reminded of this essay, https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/attack-on-competence , which argues that because competence requires you put results ahead of desires, competence is often viewed as a risk to those in power.
That essay focuses on LLMs, but I feel the theory explains the attitude about remote work from those execs that complain the loudest.
The competent LLM-using engineer will, in general, find themselves treated by management as though they're exactly as bad as the people who refuse to use LLMs at all. The engineers who push out pull request after pull request and line upon line of code without any thought given to maintainability, codebase conventions or such trifles as *whether the fucking thing works at all* are lauded, while the competent, careful people who ship carefully considered, working code (with or without LLM assistance) and clean up the messes find themselves sidelined or redundant. The reasons are often as stupid as the fact that a competent engineer, even using an LLM, will tend to prompt less and consume fewer tokens than the incompetent ones. The fact that the product breaks goes unmentioned. One can quite easily draw the conclusion that, far more than competence merely being an indifferent to management, incompetence is actively wanted and competence actively punished.
Clayfoot
Amy Diehl, Ph.D.
Matt Hall
Mania Emma
samiamsam
Alessandro Corazza 🇨🇦
Large Format Projectionist
eestileib (she/hers)
Christopher
Darwin Woodka
Maggie Maybe
Feisty
�
liquidlamp
Supermoosie
Jonathan
Anthony Brian Mallgren
Brett R
RRB
Owl Eyes
Pomegranate_Stew
Natasha
Veda Dalsette
👑Henry Morgan 
Jack William Bell
Pete Alex Harris🦡🕸️🌲/∞🪐∫
Json Doh
decapitae
Ride Theory
Nazo
Nini
Mensch, Marina