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Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?

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Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?

#71

Post by doubled112 »

Waterluvian wrote: post #28
cloudwalking wrote: post #4

People need social connections with their peers to work together successfully. It's much easier to build these connections in the office than virtually. Seeing each other a couple times per quarter for an extended period could also work, but it's easier--if you already have an office space--to bring people together in the office once or twice a week.

Five years in office. Five years fully remote with a team of dozens of fully remote engineers. I find the latter, in my experience, to be strictly superior in all ways including working together successfully despite being remote. I think we overrate the need to build in-person social rapports. Just be a professional. I think there’s a concept where often work colleagues become friends and we misidentify that as being…

I agree with you.

> Just be a professional

In my experience, there are many people that find this an incredible challenge. This is where it can easily fall apart.

Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?

#73

Post by jonathankoren »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #15
cloudwalking wrote: post #4

People need social connections with their peers to work together successfully. It's much easier to build these connections in the office than virtually. Seeing each other a couple times per quarter for an extended period could also work, but it's easier--if you already have an office space--to bring people together in the office once or twice a week.

Why not just get rid of the office space and use the money saved to get people together twice per quarter for an extended period? I bet in almost every case it would be a significant cost savings for the employer. Unless, of course, there is some other reasoning than what you state in your comment, like for example, middle management feeling irrelevant or sunk cost fallacy on office space?

Mozilla used to do something similar.

For background, at least half, or more of the company is fully remote. It’s so many, that the transition to remote work was met with a collective shrug. So MoCo used to have weeks (maybe twice a year?) where teams would fly in to the office to work. Later, in a cost savings move, it switched to fly every everyone in MoCo to some place for a week twice a year. It was called “All Hands”.

I enjoyed the free trips to Whistler, Berlin, and Austin, and Maui, but it never really felt like work was actually getting done. It was conference room chats ostensibly about planning, but everything always felt a bit phoned in.

I never got it. Inevitably the real planning work would end up after we returned back to our regular locations, so it was more social than anything.

My personal thought is that RTO among the FAANGs is 100% sunk cost fallacy. They wasted billions on bespoke glass donuts, circus tents, and airplane hangers. There’s pride on the minds of these oligarchs.

Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?

#74

Post by olliej »

For many (most?) it’s fairly clearly about demonstrating power over the plebs. For some there’s making it look like their investment in shitty open plan offices wasn’t a waste of money.

Of course they dress it up as collaboration, much like they do open plan offices, and much like open plan offices it’s BS in this case as well.

Obviously there are some people who desperately want to return to the office as they use the office for socializing, except that of course they’re taking the position that their socializing /lack of non-work life is more important than everyone else’s life.

Also chatty coworkers isn’t productive, especially in open plan offices. Oh and of course now you get to have coworkers coming to the office size and giving you plague as they did prepandemix, only with an exciting new plague option as well.

Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?

#75

Post by devoutsalsa »

joyfylbanana wrote: post #66
irrational wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opposite for me. At home I start working when I wake up and often don't stop until the evening. When I go into the office I have to get ready and commute, and then at the office there are so many distractions - our campus has fantastic fitness facilities and I'll often spend a few hours each day over there. So, at home I probably work for 10 hours. When on campus I probably get 4 hours of work in, if that. Plus, I am…

It is always the employees telling these stories, but how managers are supposed to know if they are really working? When they are at the office the see it with their own eyes. Common counter argument to this is that the manager sucks because he/she can't measure the work otherwise. But from managers perspective it is much easier to force people to be on-site than fix his/her own problems.

Managers know who is and isn’t getting work done.

Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?

#76

Post by no_wizard »

0xB31B1B wrote: post #21

I’m a CTO at a small startup, not forcing RTO on anyone BUT the vibe I get in my peer group is that managers don’t know how to manage remote teams, don’t want to do real performance management, and they personally have some loneliness issues they solve by working from the office. I work from an office with my cofounder 1 day/week, and it has been great for my mental health to leave my living room. I think broadly spe…

Man I do get it, cost of labor sucks as a business.

It’s always disheartening to me though that it’s just so easy for people to justify undercutting labor in just a few swift sentences like this, especially because the nuances of culture are very different, for one, and for two, there are downsides to this form of recruitment that never gets acknowledged from issues with time zones to acceptable quality standards and other things.

Maybe I’m just old, but it feels almost heartless to be compared by the numbers that someone should just “hire in Latin American because they have less leverage”.

Just treat your employees well. No you don’t need to hire in traditionally geographical Silicon Valley areas every time or by default, but you don’t have to go all the way to latam either.

I hope people in other areas of the world wise up to this and ask for 1st rate salaries and benefits

Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?

#77

Post by wankle »

hikingsimulator wrote: post #36
treis wrote: post #23

I think a lot of people are abusing WFH. Some make it obvious like doing meal prep during refinement but others are just kind of ghosts during the day. Even as a fellow team member reviewing code it's hard to tell how much my coworkers are working. Assume my EM has less of an idea than I do and anyone above them is totally in the dark.

Caring about the raw amount of time people put into their jobs sounds like a middle management thing to do -- rewarding showing up and putting in hours like it was PR. If the results are there, and in accordance with the employment contract, time shouldn't matter.

Contractors get to set their hours. Employees are expected to be performing services for their employers for a minimum of 30 hours per week: https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care-act/employers/identifyin....

If you're signed into Teams but playing a game or watching a movie, it could probably be challenged in court whether you're performing a service for your employer.

Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?

#78

Post by detaro »

jonathankoren wrote: post #73
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just get rid of the office space and use the money saved to get people together twice per quarter for an extended period? I bet in almost every case it would be a significant cost savings for the employer. Unless, of course, there is some other reasoning than what you state in your comment, like for example, middle management feeling irrelevant or sunk cost fallacy on office space?

Mozilla used to do something similar. For background, at least half, or more of the company is fully remote. It’s so many, that the transition to remote work was met with a collective shrug. So MoCo used to have weeks (maybe twice a year?) where teams would fly in to the office to work. Later, in a cost savings move, it switched to fly every everyone in MoCo to some place for a week twice a year. It was called “All H…

Yes, all-hands like that 100% are primarily about social and unplanned factors - getting people to see and talk to people they'd otherwise not meet and talk to.

Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?

#79

Post by olliej »

cloudwalking wrote: post #4

People need social connections with their peers to work together successfully. It's much easier to build these connections in the office than virtually. Seeing each other a couple times per quarter for an extended period could also work, but it's easier--if you already have an office space--to bring people together in the office once or twice a week.

People need social interaction, sure, people also need to have social interactions outside of the office.

What we are seeing is a large swathe of people who use the office as their social life, and they’re taking the position that their inability to socialize out of work is important enough to inflict the negative consequences of returning to the office on people who don’t treat the office as a fun zone for personal sustenance.

Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?

#80

Post by pythonbase »

Short answer: Control.

Traditional employers want their employees back in the office since they are unable to control them otherwise. Employers and managers who have failed to grasp the concepts of remote working, lack in async communication, and have trust issues with their staff, want to keep a physical headcount of the sheep

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