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?

#181

Post by dalyons » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:44 PM UTC

conductr wrote: post #49

It’s usually the executive class of employees making these decisions, and they want to convey business as usual to the board and others that they report to. They also work differently than almost everyone else. They usually have meeting all day and the topics and decisions being made benefit greatly from the in person dynamics. They also get a lot done by just dropping by other peoples desks and quickly having an imp…

I think it’s mostly this! And it’s not necessarily malicious - the exec folk have lost sight of the way most people work. To them it’s “obvious” that the office is better, because it IS better for their type of work.

Managers schedule VS makers schedule.

Add to that exec level are usually already rich enough that they don’t have commute or schooling problems to deal with. So they just can’t understand why RTO isn’t popular!

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

#182

Post by snozolli » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:44 PM UTC

listenallyall wrote: post #168

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…

> 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.

You're making some really huge assumptions.

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

#183

Post by hdjjhhvvhga » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:44 PM UTC

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…

> But without a fundamental shake up of the structure of the companies remote work is very, very hard.

While I agree, I could rephrase your argument as "remote work is very easy provided that you adjust your structures accordingly."

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

#184

Post by skhameneh » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:44 PM UTC

gemstones wrote: post #158

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 echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work. Do you have specific examples of valuable collaboration in one of these environments? > Edit: full disclosure, I’m not an employer but I sympathize and spent a lot of time thinking about these things as…

Depends on the environment. If your team is open to casual conversations and comfortable going off topics, then this likely isn't an issue. But, if your team is very metrics focused, you may not see levels of casual conversation that build rapport and build on ideas that come up on conversation. Sometimes a casual conversation is all it needs to hook a random thought into successful action.

I like having casual talks about nothing in particular without having to worry about meeting budgets or taking away from "limited time" of others. Such time is important for growth in many aspects.

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

#185

Post by phphphphp » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:45 PM UTC

snozolli wrote: post #160

thisarticle wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Never made a connection that proved valuable later on. Never received any mentorship or even any guidance That sounds awful, none of your senior or principal engineers offered/provided any mentorship?

What senior or principal engineers? I graduated college with significant, real-world programming skills. I immediately went to work writing software. The only thing my first manager contributed was showing me where to find documentation, and even then, books that I found on my own were far more valuable overall. It was no different the first year from the tenth: here's what we want made, go make it. No mentorship, no…

I don’t mean this as a slight against you because there’s a place in the world for every type of developer, but your description of work and collaboration is very cynical. You could be the most unlucky person in the world and thus you’ve never met anyone worth collaborating with, or, more likely, you’ve not attracted those people in your workplaces.

I’ve worked at great companies and awful companies, and no matter what, I have always met talented people in these companies who I’ve been able to build meaningful professional relationships with. Even in the most toxic hell-holes, there’s people worth learning collaborating with — across all disciplines.

The most valuable work you can do when in software engineering is to help non-swengs in businesses achieve their goals: code is just a means to an end, collaboration is how we discover what to build.

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

#186

Post by Implicated » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:46 PM UTC

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.

I gasped when I read this sentence. I wish I had a blood pressure monitor to get an idea of the effect. What an incredible perspective. Amazing how we can massage things in our minds into a shape we can accept.

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

#187

Post by kwhitefoot » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:46 PM UTC

cj wrote: post #110

Waterluvian wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Similar story here. 5 years in person, 5 years running a fully remote company (remote before Covid, not because of). I agree, for the most part. It's not too hard to build good working relationships within a small team that's remote. One notable challenge, though, is developing working relationships between different teams and cross-departments. In-office, it's easier because you likely at least know of the people on…

>In-office, it's easier because you likely at least know of the people on the marketing/sales/service team by running into people in the hall or at lunch.

Only in very small companies or if you happen to work in the head office. I worked at the same company for thirty years and only met the sales people in the period before it was taken over by ABB. After that meeting anyone from sales was something that happened only rarely and always deliberately.

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

#188

Post by MuffinFlavored » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:47 PM UTC

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 used to work at a job where I was required to go into the office (Florida). My teammates were 1. offshore (India) 2. in Nebraska 3. in Atlanta.

My manager was in Atlanta.

I had 0 teammates in the office in Florida.

What's the justification there?

I also had to do a lot of 2am-3am on call.

Our laptops were also tracked with Sapience Buddy.

I no longer work there.

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

#189

Post by Implicated » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:47 PM UTC

atsuzaki wrote: post #175

jpeterson wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I scored most (if not all) of my career-defining opportunities from hallway convos after a meeting, or chatting while waiting for coffee to brew, so YMMV.

Question for you to help satisfy my curiosity about this a bit... do you also enjoy socializing in bars or the like?

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

#190

Post by PheonixPharts » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:47 PM UTC

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…

> everyone being remote is really bad for younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship, company culture, etc.

I've personally found mentorship is much easier remote since you can more easily dedicate your entire focus on a person rather than just catching up real quick before meetings.

I had a team member who was really struggling with isolation. Mentioned it to me briefly in chat and I had him give me a call. That turned into regular bi-weekly meetings where we chat about work issues and whatever topics are interesting to us. It's helped us both tremendously.

The only reason for anyone to suffer remotely is deliberate ignorance by senior member of the team.

And because of the more private nature of remote communication, I've found colleagues are much more willing to open up about concerns and frustrations they have about the office.

Sure remote means that if you're a senior member of the team and want to abandon your responsibilities it's easier to hide, but some of my best working relationships have been founded remotely.