Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office? • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by JohnFen » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:26 PM UTC

thrashh wrote: post #108

snozolli wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every element you mention as being part of an in-office experience has been completely absent from my career. Never made a connection that proved valuable later on. Never received any mentorship or even any guidance, I was always simply given a task and expected to complete it. Company culture doesn't even feel like a real thing outside of HR blurbs. Spontaneous collaboration was outweighed by interruptions and meddl…

I haven’t worked at a FAANG but I still hang with people from old jobs. Idk it’s pretty normal to be able to make friends at most jobs I think you just had bad luck

If so, it's far from just him. I've never personally observed any of that, either. You have "work friends", but those relationships are work relationships and don't translate to outside of work.

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

#122

Post by klyrs » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:26 PM UTC

treis wrote: post #106

klyrs wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm working within minutes of waking up, and shower during my lunch break -- taking about 20 minutes total, instead of the hour spent on an office lunch. I take a minute or ten to do chores like laundry, meal prep or dishes, usually no more than twice a day -- in the office, I take similar length breaks and often end up socializing with others. I often find overlooked solutions during my breaks, which are spaced out…

>That isn't abusing WFH Did anyone say it was?

Your words.

> I think a lot of people are abusing WFH. Some make it obvious like doing meal prep during refinement...

What does "it" refer to in that sentence, if not the immediately preceding "abusing WFH?"

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

#123

Post by treis » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:26 PM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #90

treis wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that they also take advantage of the flexibility of agile. If a story is pointed for 2 days and it takes 3 it's better to take that as a missed estimate than a developer not producing as much as they should. Hammering them because they let a deadline slip leads to all sorts of bad things. But, again, even as a fellow team member I can't tell if they worked for 2 days and fucked off for one or it legitimately j…

When people were in the office, were you able to tell the difference between someone staring blankly at a screen vs actually doing work for six hours?

I'd think so, but either way staring blankly at a screen for six hours a day is way worse than writing code. A much smaller temptation than all the entertainment options in your house and abound.

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

#124

Post by junofan » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:26 PM UTC

mostlysimilar wrote: post #93

no_wizard wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The people who think like that want RTO, which is part of what GP is saying. The disposable resource people champion remote work.

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

#125

Post by hfbff » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:27 PM UTC

jonathankoren wrote: post #83

n8cpdx wrote: post #67

There’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…

> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes. I call bullshit. This is the claptrap that upper management always uses to to justify RTO or keeping separate bus lines or whatever, but it doesn’t match reality. In 25 years of professional experience, I have never seen collaboration done by random encounter. At most you’ll ask a question you were already going to…

I've talked about this topic with many people and it seldom matches the opinions of many people here in hacker news. I wonder if hacker news is biased towards a specific type of people that is less social / more family oriented / etc? (Of course, the people I meet in real life could be the more biased sample)

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

#126

Post by NoZebra120vClip » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:27 PM UTC

Let's talk about resources and overhead. If you WFH, then you're paying rent, utilities, you have a kitchen, you may well be BYOD, your ISP is a consumer-grade connection, you've got renter's or homeowner's insurance covering your stuff.

That's all miles different from working in an office. They've got cleaning staff and a maintenance team. They've got an enterprise-class high-speed redundant Internet connection (and the on-prem servers are on your multi-GB core network.) There's a break room and free sodas in the fridge. The engineers don't need to clean their own toilets.

I mean, if you think about it, it may be crazy for companies to insist on RTO because of costs of all that overhead they're saving, except for the simple fact that you get what you pay for. There are reasons people work together in offices and not from their homes, there are economies of scale, and there are efficiencies that happen.

I've been waiting for the penny to drop for some time now. Since COVID-19 locked everyone at home with a consumer-grade ISP, I've had plenty of time to read my TOS and service agreements. And you'd be hard-pressed to find such an ISP that actually permits "commercial activity" or WFH to occur on their connections, which are intended for gaming and entertainment. In case you haven't noticed, consumer ISPs don't really care when your connection goes down. The SLA is 0 CBR, best-effort delivery. So, enjoy your WFH infrastructure, but you get what you pay for.

My Site B is the public library, where I've been assured that I can conduct my WFH activities on their network, even in a private study room. That's the best I've got for now. If you're RTO--count your blessings. I have no office to return to!

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

#127

Post by 0xB31B1B » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:28 PM UTC

mostlysimilar wrote: post #85

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…

> You can find very committed senior talent in latam for 120-160k, the US equivalent would be 180-250k, and the latam folks are less likely to job hop or negotiate a higher comp in month 12 Disagree. Quality engineers will ask for their worth regardless of location. Also I think indexing on "less likely to job hop or negotiate salary" is short-sighted thinking. You're asking people to do a complex job where the key s…

Employees in the bay and NYC have more opportunities and thus more negotiating leverage. It doesn’t mean they’re better at the work. Hiring in competitive locales does mean more brain space dedicated to “how do I retain this employee” and less brain space dedicated to “how can I make my customers happy and grow my business” which is a losing trade. The winning play is pay top of market rates to labor in low cost locales, and if the people you hire don’t work out then fire them quickly because you’re paying top if market and there is a lot of talent liquidity in that band. It’s the Netflix model, but global. Not really a new playbook.

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

#128

Post by ilaksh » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:28 PM UTC

paulgb wrote: post #88

I suspect HN skews senior/established in our careers, but it’s interesting comparing the sentiment of people on here (almost universally pro-remote) with candidates I’ve talked to when we’ve listed roles. A lot of candidates, especially more junior ones, explicitly want an in-person office culture.

Is it an in-person job? Then no one who wants that job would be stupid enough to say otherwise.

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

#129

Post by bwhiting2356 » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:28 PM UTC

Remote communication is not as good as in person. One zoom meeting is not the end of the world. But after 1000 zoom meetings, the problems start to compound and matter a lot for any team that requires a lot of communication.

If you're maintaining legacy software, the requirements are relatively clear, everyone is experienced and knows what to do, and you're not in a hurry to ship, bearing the extra communication overhead of remote work is probably not a big deal, and you get the benefit of hiring people where the cost of living and wages are lower.

On the other hand, if you have a fast-moving project where you still don't know how to solve the problem, you need cross-functional collaboration, speed is important, you don't have time to spell out all the requirements in writing, you're trying to get junior people up to speed, etc, remote work makes that very challenging. It doesn't make it impossible for a project to succeed but it makes it less likely.

Ultimately, the measure of productivity should not in the number of lines of code written or tickets completed, but in delivering value to the customer. Many of the projects I've worked on in the past couple years have ended up failing and were a huge waste of time and money, and I think a lot of it comes down to communication problems.

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

#130

Post by zwayhowder » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:28 PM UTC

jonathankoren wrote: post #83

n8cpdx wrote: post #67

There’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…

> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes. I call bullshit. This is the claptrap that upper management always uses to to justify RTO or keeping separate bus lines or whatever, but it doesn’t match reality. In 25 years of professional experience, I have never seen collaboration done by random encounter. At most you’ll ask a question you were already going to…

I don't know what you do but I've solved problems and saved companies millions by overhearing a conversation in the office that would have been a Slack DM remote.

At one customer I was able to identify that 3 separate business units were all competing for the same tender, they were all undercutting each other not realising. There were 3 separate private channels in Slack #customer_tender #tender_response_customer and #project_unicorn_tender not one single person was in more than one of those channels.

Now all this goes away if your company only uses public channels and has regular discourse in them. But unless the company was built remote first, I've never seen this in my 25 years of professional experience.

And all of this is without counting the fact that most enterprises use Teams not Slack, and Teams hides information from everyone.

Don't get me wrong, remote companies can work, and some people do not work well in offices. But without a fundamental shake up of the structure of the companies remote work is very, very hard.