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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?

#211

Post by avsteele »

I'm an employer, but my opinion would be the same regardless.

The script is something like this:

Person1: Arg! This thing!

Person2: What ya working on?

Person1: is giving me trouble.

Person1 then figures it out while trying to explain it, or Person2 has a helpful idea. Happens multiple times a week. If you were working at home you wouldn't even know you were missing out on this interaction.

Also, WFH is also just too distracting if you have a family/roommates etc...

I'm sure there are plenty of jobs where regular, informal face to fact interaction didn't help me solve problems faster, but not in my line of work.

I have some interaction with Federal employees too. They have been out of the office for a long time. You now have more a problem getting a hold of someone who is nominally 'at their desk'. I don't know why this is, but its a fact.

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

#212

Post by 0xB31B1B »

listenallyall wrote: post #151
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…

> the vibe I get in my peer group You acknowledge you are a cofounder of your company, therefore you and your cofounder named you as CTO (as opposed to an existing company where somebody was promoted or hired into the position by someone else). I'm just curious who your "peer group" is, the ones you believe "don't know how to manage remote teams" and have "loneliness issues" -- other self-proclaimed CTOs? Or a wider…

Peer group: CEOs, VP eng, CTO, directors at seed-series B companies where leadership team is Bay Area based. I think you’re seeing this wrong. Every other locale is a discount to SFBA/NYC. Many companies can and should pay top of market in cheaper locales. That is the winning remote playbook. Maybe the locale is Canada, maybe the locale is Argentina, maybe it’s Portugal. Pick your choice, they’re all 1/2 cost or less of SFBA/NYC, and if you’re all remote locale doesn’t really matter.

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

#213

Post by sseagull »

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…

> I echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work.

If you restrict yourself to that metric, maybe. But theres more to life (and business) than that.

Does everyone on HN seriously care that little about fellow workers? Not necessarily asking to become close friends, but I feel a workplace that is business-only to be sterile and depressing.

It’s interesting to talk to people, even co-workers, about non-work stuff. People are cool in so many different ways, and it makes life better to know them a little bit.

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

#214

Post by ilyt »

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.

It has been certainly be nice distraction, and I definitely knew more people by name but I haven't noticed anything actually profitable for company happening there.

The things that did happen is that I could just catch the few people needed to push things forward, drag one to the other and clear the roadblocks but grabbing a quick call on the communication system of choice isn't that worse.

The brainstorming on problems was better when in person tho, but that might be the mix of tooling and platform company I work for chose (MS Teams, need I say more?)

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

Yeah, the one remote work experience that has been my benchmark (in startup) had us meet every 2 weeks and just had half-party, half socialising, half-brainstorming thing. I feel like there is heavy underuse of tooling, back then our standard was voice only but screen sharing via ancient methods (screen session) that worked well, editors like IDEA also have very neat "editor sharing" feature that I rarely seen talked about

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

#215

Post by kwhitefoot »

joyfylbanana wrote: post #51

I'm not a direct employer, mostly an investor and solo entrepreneur who has low likelihood of ever employing people again. Used to be a big employer until sold my company. Personally I have seen lots of different work in my previous work, and I just don't believe that remote work provides as much value for the shareholders. Productivity is likely better as remote, but the communication and trust issues cause problems…

> People often end up working on wrong things.

The must have pretty bad managers then. Why should there be a trust issue? My manager assigns me a task, I do it on time and they are happy or I fail to do it on time and they are unhappy. How does where I do that task make a difference?

I think the return to office thing is just a cover for incompetent management.

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

#216

Post by tonnydourado »

wildrhythms wrote: post #70
ttul wrote: post #60

Employer here. We had a fancy brick and timber office. It was beautiful and centrally located. I let the lease expire in 2021 after everyone went remote for the pandemic. There has been no sign of any decay in productivity. It is true that hanging out in person develops a sense of human connection that feels good. But is that needed for effective work? I’m not so sure. Brainstorming and creative collaboration activit…

>Brainstorming and creative collaboration activities seem more effective when done in person Let me tell you, I hate these. And I will take vacation days to avoid going to them. And I also think they're not very productive no matter how many 'How To Run A Sprint' classes the organizers take.

I can imagine how one could arrive at such conclusion, but I have seen somewhat useful stuff come out of those.

Some key components for me are:

- don't impose too much structure, or God forbid, try to make it fun. It's work, let's complain about work and hopefully some useful ideas might come up - Bring in relevant people, that actually get work done. The less managers the better. - Don't be afraid of being negative. The whole point is to complain about shit and see communalities in problems, and perhaps come up with potential solutions.

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

#217

Post by gtvwill »

Because they have assets sitting there empty and accountants are like wtf you gotta make use of this were stuck in the contract for x years. There ya have it. Simplified but mostly the cause, if ya company rents space to operate and tells you reasons other than above they are probably lying through their teeth at ya. It's got zero to do with what they think is good for you the worker or some water cooler innovation bs and everything to do with profit,loss and expenditure.

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

#219

Post by arcturus17 »

paulcole wrote: post #207
arcturus17 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Get yourself a short bike commute. I did pre-pandemic and it was amazing. I’ve never had a commute longer than 30 minutes by bike in my professional life. I always much preferred living in the smallest cheapest apartment I could find near a place with a lot of jobs. Pandemic royally fucked over that lifestyle.

I already walk to work, because working remotely doesn't mean necessarily working from home, and I could do that even if I worked at home.

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

#220

Post by zwayhowder »

jonathankoren wrote: post #162
zwayhowder wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You'd be amazed what people say in open plan offices thinking they can't be heard.

But you are correct; however again in 25 years, the number of those years working for a company that had perfectly working leadership, management, communication and coordination is very very low.

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