Isn't this kind of proving the point of RTO from the company's point of view? If you're taking care of your child and doing housework instead of working?
Who cares if you do the job? I have much higher efficency at home compared to office. No distractions, no wasted time communiting. I can organize myself better too. If I need to take a break, I do it and then I do job later, still keeping 8h of work, just splited.
The problem is how you are accounted for doing work. By tasks or by time spent in office... I saw people in office doing nothing, just talks on kitchen or answering emails.. When asked about tasks.. Im working hard sir.. heh.
Its a bit complicated matter, because when you are more efficient, boss usually will attach new tasks so you have to work harder or be even more efficient. And those who are less efficient dont get new tasks.. Not smart..
Thats the idealistic point of view, but management will always wrangle themselves out of it.
"Why aren't you efficient at the office? We've optimized it for efficiency" or "Okay well we'll budget in making you more efficient in office so that you're even more productive here".
Another could be the argument that you need to be highly available during core hours, you shouldn't potentially not be available during the core 8 hour work day of your location, and the best way to force that is you being visible in office by management.
The root of the issue is we value our time, and commuting is basically a loss of time and is not compensated. If we don't make enough money when commuting to make up for how much we value that time, we're losing. Most of us are comparing our salaries to what we used to make before this was the norm, and its not that different from before. So when going back to the "norm" we are losing part of what we consider our compensation packate -> more free time.
I guess it depends on the kind of work. But are there people who really spend all their time in the office continually doing work?
I spend some time pottering about and doing chores during the workday when I wfh. But I also spend lots of time goofing off while at the office. The difference is that while at the office, I have to be constantly vigilant about how I'm perceived by others, so time spend goofing off isn't nearly as rejuvenating and reinvigorating as it would have been at home.
Isn't it pretty normal to only have a few hours of real-work capability per day?
Right, but how much work is done when in the office. You might have the same amount of downtime in the office than at home, but now that down time can't be spent doing something else.
It would be if people were hourly. But devs are all salary so hours should not matter and besides Amazon generally wants more then 40hrs of work anyway
