alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
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> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.