Return to Office?

Tuesday I took a meeting onsite with a customer in the Bay Area. For me this is what a Return-to-Office (RTO) policy looks like. I work in a customer's office, on the rare occasions when they're interested in an on-site meeting.

Of course, that's not actually an RTO policy. My employer doesn't have an RTO mandate. Many of my customers now do, though. After big tech companies embraced remote work through 2020 and 2021, many have since instructed their employees to return to the office at least a few days a week.

I routinely see big gaps between RTO policy and practice. For example, a company may have a policy of "3 days a week in office", but my customer contacts tell me they go in just once a week or even once a month. Here's a quick photo from the customer's office at 10:30am on Tuesday:



This pod of cubes has 32 desks. At 10:30am, when I'd been there since 9am for an all-day meeting, there was just one person working in this pod. My contact said on a normal day maybe 50 people total are in the building, across all pods and floors. That's only about 10% occupancy. And my contact is seldom one of them. He only comes in when there's a specific meeting to attend— and always tries to leave by 2:30pm, as he did on Tuesday, to beat the traffic to his home 50 miles away.

Why do we have RTO mandates? It's really as simple as senior execs look at scenes like the one in my photo and get upset about all the money being wasted on real estate. "Let's get people back in the office to put our investment to use," they figure. But that reasoning is actually a fallacy. It's the sunk cost fallacy. Commitments on rent, mortgage, etc., are sunk cost; the company pays them whether people sit in the office or work from home. But all that forcing people to go into the office does is lower their productivity.

Why lower productivity? Because working groups aren't physically co-located anymore. Execs spent lots of years chasing talent in whatever markets they could find it, preferably lower-cost markets. So now a team member or two working in an office in the SF Bay Area spend the day on Slack, Teams, Zoom, etc. interfacing with colleagues all over the country and overseas. Thus there's no "collaborative work" gain in RTO for many workers. They're still working remotely, just doing it sitting in an office that's an inconvenience to get to.

Trump Convicted on 34 Counts

A jury in Manhattan surprisingly returned a verdict late this afternoon in the case against Donald Trump for falsifying business records. Prosecutors charged that the former president paid hush money to porn actress Story Daniels to cover up an alleged affair, then lied about those payments in his business records to cover up the coverup. After just 2 days of deliberation the jury found Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts.

I've been following news of trial daily the past few weeks, though not blogging about it because— like I've written a few times before— I'd rather this blog not be consumed by politics. I've got to say, as a person reading the news daily, I'm surprised the jury convicted.

Why is it a surprise? Because, quite to the contrary of what Trump and his propaganda allies in the right-wing media and Congress have claimed without fact the judge said in the courtroom, a guilty verdict requires a unanimous decision by the jury. All 12 member must vote to convict. All it takes is one juror finding reasonable doubt; their vote to acquit prevents a guilty verdict.

Was there reasonable doubt? In my opinion from what I saw of the evidence, no. But I am not representative of the mindset of every person in this country. Some 40% of the electorate believe the lies repeated every morning, noon, and night by Trump and his allies— that the trial is rigged, the judge is corrupt, the judge made numerous outright violations of the law, all the prosecution's witnesses were lying, and it was all orchestrated by President Biden to knock Trump out of the 2024 presidential race.

All it would've taken was one out of 12 people on the jury to be a hardliner among that 40% and claim reasonable doubt, and then we'd have a hung jury and a mistrial. That's what I expected: a hung jury. Instead we got an unanimous vote to convict... and on all 34 counts... and quicker than just about anybody expected.

Do these guilty verdicts change the 2024 presidential campaign? Indications so far are "Not really." Trump being convicted does not make him ineligible to run, or to be elected, or to serve as president. He could even run from prison, if he's sentenced to prison. That's been done before by other presidential candidates! And Trump very well could still win in November. Most of the people who were going to vote for him already believed the trial was an utter sham and a miscarriage of justice. Him being convicted only proves what they already believed, that President Biden is the corrupt one. Plus, there's the right of appeal. Anything could happen on appeal, from the case being overturned on a technicality to the far-right-wingers on the Supreme Court making up some outrageous new legal theory setting aside the conviction.