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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?

#131

Post by thisarticle »

fishcrackers wrote: post #103
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…

sounds like it would be effective if the cto was in latam too

Right? Funny how C-level employees never think they’ll get outsourced. Ten or twenty years from now there will be great CTO level talent founding companies in Latam if they aren’t already. Then the whole company can operate in a cheaper country with lower taxes and benefits. Good luck competing with that in the US.

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

#132

Post by olliej »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #14

I think that in our field people work better together - more collaboration, knowledge transfer, teamwork and ultimately better solutions delivered. I also believe that people are more motivated and engaged, and work harder and with more focus in a shared workspace outside of the home. I was on the fence going into the remote work experiment, but everything I’ve seen since supports my feelings above. I’ve seen less of…

That does not require being in person, pretty much the entire OSS community demonstrates that.

Honestly I’m beginning to find “we need to be in person to collaborate” to be a red flag for unable to communicate and “will interrupt people working all day”

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

#133

Post by Natsu »

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…

I think there's some value in actually meeting one's teammates, but I've found that the collaboration I have works just fine if they know they can IM me to talk when they're having issues. I have lots of people from many different departments who just know what kind of things to IM me for. I don't always have answers for them, but I can usually point them to someone who does.

When I hung around in person, we'd chat with them about totally random stuff. You can learn from that, but it's not nearly as business-centric as intentionally talking to people about work stuff.

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

#134

Post by jonathankoren »

hfbff wrote: post #125
jonathankoren wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

I’d challenge your friends to give some examples of these collaborations by random encounter. I suspect there’s a lot less to them than they think.

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

#135

Post by jasonpeacock »

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

If your business success is predicated on random encounters, then your business success is just pure luck compensating for a lack of planning and communication.

If you actually plan and communicate well across teams & orgs then your business will work equally well in person or remote (or a hybrid).

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

#136

Post by treis »

klyrs wrote: post #122
treis wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?"

Which of the things you mentioned are equivalent to doing a distracting task during a meeting you're supposed to be paying attention to?

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

#137

Post by 0xB31B1B »

junofan wrote: post #124
mostlysimilar wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly this, the two stable equilibria are “the company is the employees, we all work together in office” and “the company employs labor to solve our customers problems, and the company does this in the most cost effective way possible”.

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

#138

Post by arcturus17 »

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…

> you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy separation between your work and your life

Everyone is picking on the rest of your arguments, and I can sympathize with some of them, but not this one. Never had, nor can I envision, a commute with a healthy separation of work and life or that wasn't orders of magnitude worse than, you know, reclaiming that time for whatever I want.

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

#139

Post by deafpolygon »

jpeterson wrote: post #102
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've seen this idea repeated many times, but in over 20 years in the tech industry, I've never once seen a meaningful collaboration spring up in a kitchenette or hallway. It's invariably "how was your weekend?" fare. Don't get me wrong, there's value in connecting that way, but it's never the sort of thing that dire…

Same. I don't really collaborate in the hallways, I don't think IT people tend to.

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

#140

Post by Kharvok »

Some of my teams were fully remote about eight weeks in 2020, while others have been remote the entire time. I don't believe in full RTO, just hybrid.

1. The last few years have demonstrated that projects with teams that are primarily remote require a higher degree of project overhead staffing. I think this is most evident with very small teams. For example, it's fairly easy for a small internal tool team to coordinate their work without a project manager, design, or business analyst if they are in close phyiscal proximity. The struggle is when you distance that team from larger products/project. Even in the minimal case creating visibility for that small team into larger workstreams requires overhead itself. With the macro environment and with leaders being forced to tighten the belt, this is less and less possible. All communication has to be structured fully remotely. That structure requires management.

2. I've found about 20% of people have the ability to maintain a professional work environment at home. I'm constantly seeing in meetings where highly compensated employees are providing childcare during working hours. I'm all for flexibility, but it becomes a distraction.

3.Junior employees have little to no ability to develop skills from seniors. I have hired entire classes of employees in software engineering roles that started in a fully remote environment, realized they weren't learning anything, and then came to work in a hybrid setting.

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