I'm not in the position to set policy but if I had to give a reason: mentoring of juniors. This could be done over chat and webcam but it appears to me this is not a great fit for everybody.
Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
91–100 of 921 posts
Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
#92People 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 connections with their peers to work together successfully." Our team doesn't, are we anomalies? People need to be mature, reasonable, responsible and accountable to work together well.
No you’re not.
There are many people who have never developed social connections outside of school or work and unilaterally decided that that is how people must socialize. After all if they can’t socialize outside of such an environment surely no one else can. If they can’t see a person as a person if they’re not face to face surely no one else can.
It’s unfortunate that these folk provide backup to the executives who are forcing RTO simply to provide the appearance of value and/or control over the plebs.
Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
#93I’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…
I believe for every person out there like the parent poster there are people like you and I who can hold back that flow. It's incumbent upon us to not give our skills or our time to people who treat us like disposable resources. It's also incumbent upon people like us to build companies and hire people who share those values, and to treat them with dignity and respect.
Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
#94I’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…
> I hope people in other areas of the world wise up to this and ask for 1st rate salaries and benefits
LOL. That's totally out of touch. It is not about them "wising up". There are quite lots of different dynamics here at play. It is a complex and competitive market.
Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
#95I worked for 5 years for a group that was located on a different continent; I was the only one not in that office. My performance was stellar based on official evaluations, but career was stagnant, I was almost a myth than a real person with a real career. Salary raises were limited by the level in the company, so that had a ceiling too.
Then I was the manager of others for even more years and we were part of a geographically distributed team. I asked the people to come to the office a couple of days per week, mostly to discuss face to face the stuff not so productive on audio (we almost never do videoconferences) and to have lunch and keep the feeling of being part of a team. This was only because of my previous experience.
The result was during the summer most of the team was in the office most of the time (the request was only for 2 days), while during the winter the people with complicated comute were coming only a few days per month. Some of us were walking, cycling or motorcycling to the office, so weather was an important factor and traffic is usually very bad on bad weather, working from home was the right choice.
A full work from office makes no sense, in my opinion, for most IT people except local helpdesk that interacts with people, from replacing a laptop to fixing an app for the business people, as IT people usually self-service their problems. At the same time I believe that a 100% work from home is not good for many people, especially new hires and people that thrive in a community.
There is also the aspect of performance: if a bad performer is just a name, a person you never met and don't care, it is very difficult to empathize and the tolerance for their mistakes or slowness is very, very low.
Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
#96There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes. That’s the sort of thing that isn’t immediately obvious, but becomes more noticeable as time goes on. The first months of the pandemic people were able to coast on their existing connections, but it becomes harder years on, especially if half your team has _never_ met in person or come to company HQ. In the before tim…
Sorry but this sounds really bad (and frankly, a bit entitled). Not everyone can afford to live 15 minutes walk to work w/ Bay Area, Seattle, etc housing prices. Not everyone wants to spend 30 minutes or more each way in a car just to get to an office that has a demonstrably worse setup than what they have at home. I have a healthy separation between work and home, it’s called closing the laptop lid and walking away.
Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
#97Whiteboards !
None of the online whiteboards equivalent tools work as well a old fashioned white board and markers.
Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
#98Earlier 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?
It's very hard to get people to travel for days at a time. Especially those with children.
Happily commuting for hours and being away from home most of the week is actually super easy for people with children.
Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
#99I’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…
> ...most managers who graduated Stanford/MIT...
> ...you don’t need a team in NYC/SFBA for most things... There are great engineers in Latam
> ...globally average Bay Area engineer
There are two sides to the kind of broad strokes generalizing you are doing.
It has been my experience, and the experience of everyone else that I know, that the Ivy League US-SF-NY people we work with are far and wide smarter, more productive, nicer, and way fewer problems, fewer emotional problems especially, than others in engineering and management.
Go ahead and run a LATAM team. Nobody really cares. It will not turn out to be the management superpower / huge insight you are making it out to be.
Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
#100I don’t think work culture has broadly attuned itself to working from home and how companies operate hasn’t shifted enough to leverage its advantages and mitigate the disadvantages.
Companies that do figure this out will thrive of course, as it seems that this is something employees are willing to stand up to management over