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Employees are returning to the office to sit on zoom calls

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Re: Employees are returning to the office to sit on zoom calls

#111

Post by mylons »

icedchai wrote: post #99
fartcannon wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What stops you from doing that now? You still get lunch breaks when WFH.

Nothing, but it's more than exception than the rule now.

the opportunity this presents is getting lunch with people that aren't ephemeral and transactional. you can experience something OTHER than work on your lunch hour, expand your horizons, and build meaningful relationships. of course you will on occasion get one of those relationships from the office, but they're the exception to the rule imo.

Re: Employees are returning to the office to sit on zoom calls

#112

Post by JohnBooty »

dang wrote: post #108
JohnBooty wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. We want the opposite here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dang, I think you are the best moderator I have ever known, but respectfully strongly disagree with who you've fingered as the "flamewar-style" poster in this conversation.

I, at worst, restated the parent poster's rude comment and stated I found it regrettable.

Additionally there are many other unbelievably rude replies to a small, positive anecdote I chose to share.

However, out of respect for your judgement I'll bow out of this discussion entirely.

Re: Employees are returning to the office to sit on zoom calls

#113

Post by wallfacer120 »

JohnBooty wrote: post #25

I recently spent a week in the office with my team. First time I'd had office time with any team since mid-2018. It was really, really, really nice. I've been a diehard work-from-home guy for ages. Why spend perhaps 10+ hours per week commuting? It's a productivity and environmental nightmare. But... sometimes? Yeah. It's nice to be in the room with other smart people, solving hard problems. I didn't realize I missed…

Regarding why this post is so inflammatory, it's just tedious "i hate people" misanthropic posturing from people who still haven't figured out that their problem is them.

Re: Employees are returning to the office to sit on zoom calls

#114

Post by simongray »

irrational wrote: post #51

Same. Half the people we hired during work from home are remote (that was never allowed before). Now all meetings are on zoom and all conversations are on slack. Being in an office is beyond pointless. It wastes time, gas, etc. the main take away from the past 2 years is working in an office is beyond stupid (at least for certain careers like developers). I drive to work, communicate with no one except on the compute…

> I drive to work, communicate with no one except on the computer, then drive home.

You don't talk to people aside from at the meetings?

Re: Employees are returning to the office to sit on zoom calls

#115

Post by jackstraw14 »

JohnBooty wrote: post #25

I recently spent a week in the office with my team. First time I'd had office time with any team since mid-2018. It was really, really, really nice. I've been a diehard work-from-home guy for ages. Why spend perhaps 10+ hours per week commuting? It's a productivity and environmental nightmare. But... sometimes? Yeah. It's nice to be in the room with other smart people, solving hard problems. I didn't realize I missed…

No offense, but your comment reads like it came from a script. Thing happened -> unexpected result -> wonder why -> learn more about yourself. And the moral of the story is that working in the office is not that bad, because we're human beings not... robots?

Surely you're not so surprised to get these responses :)

Re: Employees are returning to the office to sit on zoom calls

#117

Post by fartcannon »

irrational wrote: post #51

Same. Half the people we hired during work from home are remote (that was never allowed before). Now all meetings are on zoom and all conversations are on slack. Being in an office is beyond pointless. It wastes time, gas, etc. the main take away from the past 2 years is working in an office is beyond stupid (at least for certain careers like developers). I drive to work, communicate with no one except on the compute…

Where I work, it was actually like this before the pandemic. We are a global company with lots of tiny offices. Teams were assembly remotely just to satisfy requirements. It was silly to be in an office.

Re: Employees are returning to the office to sit on zoom calls

#118

Post by ebrewste »

simongray wrote: post #114
irrational wrote: post #51

Same. Half the people we hired during work from home are remote (that was never allowed before). Now all meetings are on zoom and all conversations are on slack. Being in an office is beyond pointless. It wastes time, gas, etc. the main take away from the past 2 years is working in an office is beyond stupid (at least for certain careers like developers). I drive to work, communicate with no one except on the compute…

> I drive to work, communicate with no one except on the computer, then drive home. You don't talk to people aside from at the meetings?

Not the person you were asking, but I had next to no conversations about work aside from video calls, even before Covid. Between national and international distributed teams (and people working weird hours to avoid sf bay commute hours), and packed meeting schedules, it basically didn’t happen. It’s making me sad to write this and it’s making me think.

Re: Employees are returning to the office to sit on zoom calls

#119

Post by dSebastien »

Same here. Everyone was "happy" and "proud" about our remote performance and now they force us back to the office 50% of the time. Many people seem to see it as a great leap forward, but I don't. One of the company value is supposed to be "independent"...

This week I was supposed to go, not see my kids in the morning, waste 2 hours in the train, expose myself to Covid, just to sit alone in an office and discuss through Teams because the rest of the team was not even there. What the actual f**. I just couldn't go.

I wrote about this and my feeling is still the same: https://medium.com/management-matters/going-back-to-work-no-...

Re: Employees are returning to the office to sit on zoom calls

#120

Post by winrid »

syrrim wrote: post #17
rootsudo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't so bad per se. It's pretty common at MSFT from experience, sometimes it helps. But if you are connected in the Seattle area/have a mortgage and such it can def see annoying then to leave.

The timezone difference would be murder, I imagine.

With the nightlife in Beijing, you could manage! :)
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