Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 921 posts

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

#161

Post by jedberg »

I'm an employee and I've been working remotely since long before the pandemic. But occasionally I'll roll into the office when they have free lunch, because I know a bunch of people will be there. And when I do that, I always get a chance to meet up with some coworkers and end up getting a lot done.

And sometimes we have a leadership meeting where I fly into the corporate HQ, as do my coworkers, and we have an all day in-person meeting with no one remote. And it's amazing how much we can get done in a day.

Sometimes it's just a lot easier to discuss a contentious subject where we don't all agree in person, and see body language, and not have to deal with the weird gaps that happen with online meetings.

That being said, I won't ever return to the office full time. The boosts in productivity only happen because it's not a regular occurrence, and it's a huge hassle to get there and back.

But I do see the upside to occasional work in the office.

Also, I used to work at a company that had no remote employees, so we were all in the office every day. That was nice, because if you needed to talk to someone you could just wander over and hash out an issue right then and there, and you could have meaningful hallway conversations, and we were just generally closer as humans. But that only works if you have no remote employees, and I'm not sure that's feasible anymore, at least in software. People got too used to remote work. But if I ever found a company like that where everyone came in every day, and it was close to my home, I'd be willing to do it.

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

#162

Post by jonathankoren »

zwayhowder wrote: post #130
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 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…

This goes away, if they have better management and coordination. They’d be in the same mess even if they were physically conference rooms. Unless you somehow think that people spontaneously drop by meetings they’re not invited to

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

#163

Post by sbmthakur »

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…

What was the 70s-era trend?

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

#164

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

arcturus17 wrote: post #138
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.

> nor can I envision

Actually I implemented this. When I worked in the office, I used to bike to and from work every day. Every week I tried to choose a (slightly) different route. An it was really, really good for my mental health.

For the first 10 minutes or so of the ride I still had some thoughts from work, then gradually they started to disappear, I got intrigued by new shops being opened, some random folks doing crazy stuff on the street etc. In the end, I could feel endorphins coming and finally felt pleasantly tired when arriving home.

Now, when I work remotely, I do the same, I just ride whenever I want instead to the office.

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

#165

Post by AdrianB1 »

QIYGT wrote: post #117
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’m also an Urbanism nerd and don’t want to see cities revert to the 70s-era trend, which is clearly and noticeably happening, destroying decades of progress on livability. There's more demand than ever before to live in NYC, as evidenced by record high rent prices. Cities don't need to be about offices.

I heard the opposite, but I haven't seen any proof in any direction. What I read is that office space in NYC is still expensive, but occupation rate is lower than ever.

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

#166

Post by danaris »

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…

> They have a playbook that worked

The playbook worked for them, but that doesn't mean it worked for the people they were managing, or the company they worked for.

My experience with managers and "the playbook that worked" for the past 50 years is that 80% of it consists of "if the employee is in their seat, and not visibly goofing off, that means they are working at 100% productivity; anything else is stealing from the company."

It's effectively rooted in an assembly-line mindset (where if you weren't at your post, you clearly weren't working, and it was pretty easy to see whether you were working when you were at your post), in addition to treating subordinates like robots with no mental, emotional, or even physical needs while they are at work.

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

#167

Post by pc86 »

DougN7 wrote: post #61
josefrichter wrote: post #2

Not an employer. But I believe most employees simply put in less hours when working from home, and most employers aren't very good at rewarding people for their results, not their hours.

With three out of three different employees so far, all slowly did less and less work the longer they worked from home. I’m 90% sure one of them had an additional job, and another one admitted it when he quit. I don’t like to micromanage so give developers a lot of freedom. Few people have as much long-term integrity as we like to pretend we all have.

If they aren't getting stuff done, that's its own conversation. Whether they have a second (or third, or fourth) job is irrelevant.

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

#168

Post by listenallyall »

snozolli wrote: post #87
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…

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…

> Never made a connection that proved valuable later on.

Sorry buddy but that's on you. You make valuable connections by being generous and helpful to others. Then at some point down the road when they need to hire someone, they remember, hey 'snozolli' was a great coworker, let me see if they're available.

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

#169

Post by ovao »

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…

For the purpose of enabling more “spontaneous connection” in a remote environment, could managers not simply foster an environment in which bandying around ideas in Slack or Teams is just encouraged?

I can see how employees existing solely in the Slackosphere can be crippling to the sort of shop talk that can spur new ideas, but I see no reason why it has to be that way.

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

#170

Post by ilaksh »

I think that within a few years this question is going to be much more nuanced. There are numerous tools for remote presence, from chatting to real-time code windows, 2d RPG-style shared spaces, and 3d and VR shared spaces.

My assumption is that within say five years the question is more often going to be something like, how often (if at all) are you required per day or per week to "teleport" into the shared AR/VR collaboration space.

We should anticipate putting on a pair of normalish glasses or maybe goggles that can then integrate a very realistic virtual room into your home. There will be eye contact with what appear to be real people. These will make heavy use of AI for compression and realism. This is just extrapolating from existing research or enterprise devices and software that have most of these capabilities already.

Many people will view this in the same way they do going to the office. They will either think it's essential or a total distraction.

Post reply on HN