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I’ve been part of a lot of these conversations and it is important to note that there is a significant percentage of employees that want to go back to the office. The trick is how to please everyone. It is easy to say, let those who want to come back come and those who don’t stay home. However those that want to go back say it is because they want to be surrounded by their coworkers. Having gone back to the office vo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If an employer wants their workers to work in the office, they should work in the office. Workers who want to work remote can find employers who are ok with remote work. It isn't like there is a shortage of companies that allow remote work.
With employers being much fewer, the no-poach stuff, etc. this is a bad solution. Employers have always been more organized and holding more market power than employees.
I’ve been part of a lot of these conversations and it is important to note that there is a significant percentage of employees that want to go back to the office. The trick is how to please everyone. It is easy to say, let those who want to come back come and those who don’t stay home. However those that want to go back say it is because they want to be surrounded by their coworkers. Having gone back to the office vo…
Do you mean the majority? Because that is not true. The percentage of employees that want to go back and that doesn't want to go back are both significant and comparable. The question, as you say, is how to make everyone happy, but the meta-question is, does everyone really need to be happy?
A hybrid solution makes the "officer"s partially happy but non-"officer"s completely unhappy. A flexible solution makes officers happy and at advantage, but non-officers at a career disadvantage for being deprived of, among other good things, also all the schmoozing, self-marketing etc that takes place.
Also the breakdown of the "employees" is important. Not just execs but also mid-managers seem to be particularly unhappy with current setup because having the self-organizing IC to IC interactions reduced, managers' organization and coordination skills have been put under serious test. I am not saying only bad managers want RTO, but their shortcomings do get foregrounded more.
> Finally, there will always be under-performers who are desperately searching for a scape goat when they fail to deliver.
I think this is another problem of the managers' performance. Now it is up to their capabilities to steer up or weed out those chronic scape-goaters.
Also I think it is very important to operationalize the term "under-performer". There is a reason for having performance tiers and their proportionate rewards; anyone who is not operating at full-performance can be considered an under-performer, but that is OK and the employee's choice unless they are in the lowest tier.
That's what most ICs have been wising up to; it is easier to not cave into the peer pressure of an office environment to feel you always have to perform at top. You can totally pick a tier and have a proportionate work performance in comparison to your life performance, i.e. your other life goals. For the first time in a while a great majority of employees got a feel of what is to be not living for work.
I mean, this is not even just tech, eg. restaurant workers have been quitting disproportionately, due to many things, but also for realizing they just don't need to put up with the unnecessary pressure and rude clients.
> The trick is for executives to wrangle all of these new challenges at once... People haven’t been trained how to make this new world work... How do we make our execs feel more comfortable to let those who want to work home do so?
That is literally their job to handle and steer the ship under ambiguous conditions.
I absolutely don't think it is anyone's but their burden to find a working solution. If they find it too stressful, they can quit, or take comfort in their exec salaries.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m a generally introverted person who prefers to work from home and performs better either at home or with a private office. That said, I have worked for many different companies, and rarely felt like working relationships were ‘foisted’ upon me. I generally enjoyed interacting with colleagues because we were working towards a common goal - i.e. we had something meaningful which we cared about in common. The one com…
How many companies would you estimate have cultures with such problems? If they're quite numerous, then it seems to me that remote work removes a high risk of landing into an unsatisfying role while paying the price for having to still go to the office -- this lack of satisfaction is much easier to deal with at home where one doesn't have to pretend to be engaged so long as work gets done.
However it is definitely not a solution to an actual culture problem. Ideally, working from home should be a choice because it suits the individual’s needs, not a way to separate from dysfunction.
I think culture problems are quite common. Plenty of people report them, on the other hand I haven’t run into them all that often, and there are many people here who report reasonable cultures.
Company I work for is remote-only and has been for years. Since they already had that in place the pandemic didn't really hit them from an organisational point of view. The reason I was so interested in the job (other than the fact the work is interesting) was because they where remote-only before pandemic - so there was no risk of "right, it's over, everyone back in the building". I'm not sure what someone would hav…
> with everything setup how you want is just a no-brainer. I had an earlier comment on how those against WFH might change their mind if they had a good chair. It might work in reverse too. The office might be far less annoying to people if they had a budget for equipment or at least got high quality equipment.
Also, I have a porch ten steps from my desk.
I’ve been part of a lot of these conversations and it is important to note that there is a significant percentage of employees that want to go back to the office. The trick is how to please everyone. It is easy to say, let those who want to come back come and those who don’t stay home. However those that want to go back say it is because they want to be surrounded by their coworkers. Having gone back to the office vo…
I don’t see why those that want to work remotely need to suppress their needs for those that do not. It’s one thing to have the freedom to choose the option you’re comfortable with, but to force it on those unwilling to so doesn’t seem right. You’re right that it won’t be the same. We’re past the point where everyone being in the office was the unquestioned norm because we never really tried mass remote work on a lar…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't they just sell real estate? I mean, remote working is not a thing for the vast majority of jobs out there, so office space is still a valuable asset. So if you are in IT and have offices that are not going to be used (because your employees want to work from home) then just sell/rent it to other companies in which their employees cannot work from home.
For smaller companies this is likely feasible. But for Apple/Google/etc, I imagine there were a lot of architectural / design decisions that went into their campuses that assumed a single monolithic tenant working in a largely open-office format. That probably makes those spaces harder to sell/rent. It's unlikely they'll find a single large buyer with the same needs. They'd probably have redesign the campuses a bit t…
I’ve been part of a lot of these conversations and it is important to note that there is a significant percentage of employees that want to go back to the office. The trick is how to please everyone. It is easy to say, let those who want to come back come and those who don’t stay home. However those that want to go back say it is because they want to be surrounded by their coworkers. Having gone back to the office vo…
> it is important to note that there is a significant percentage of employees that want to go back to the office. Do you mean the majority? Because that is not true. The percentage of employees that want to go back and that doesn't want to go back are both significant and comparable. The question, as you say, is how to make everyone happy, but the meta-question is, does everyone really need to be happy? A hybrid solu…
I think the comment is asking the HN community for potential suggestions/solutions that allow for the remote-loving crowd and the office-loving crowd to coexist (presumably in a single company), since their needs are a little at odds with one another.