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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?

#271

Post by robotresearcher »

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…

Relationships are really important for getting stuff done at work. An irrelevant water cooler conversation that clicks can make someone your future ally. Having a better idea of someone's interests and priorities can make it easier to persuade them when the time comes.

Simply smiling at someone nicely over the coffeepot a few times can make them disposed to help you later. A three minute chat about nothing, and now you have a contact in IT/purchasing/payroll...

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

#272

Post by sodapopcan »

sseagull wrote: post #213
gemstones wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 interest…

I'm one of those people who likes to enjoy work--ie, I don't think of work as "just work"--and I want to get to know the people I work with and maybe even make a real friend or two. And yet, I don't ever want to go back to an office. Zoom/Tuple calls are more than sufficient for me for shooting the shit for a bit while on the clock. Otherwise, I prefer to get together outside of office hours if I really want to spend social time with coworkers. I mostly despise forced social interaction on the clock. I do miss whiteboards, but that's about it.

I totally respect people who prefer the office life, I was just trying to offer a perspective as someone who is, like, half-aligned with you :)

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

#273

Post by listenallyall »

ilaksh wrote: post #101
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…

If you can connect or collaborate in a hallway, you can also do so in a Discord channel (or whatever tool). There are also several good applications for internet collaboration that simulate a rich shared 2d or 3d or video space. Or things like GitHub issues and Wikis. Networking, mentorship, company culture, etc. can all happen over the internet. You make it part of the company culture to use the remote collaboration…

Discord, rich shared 3d spaces, GitHub Issues, wikis... Lol. Some people (most, I'd say) prefer going to lunch or to Starbucks with other people, leaving all the technology behind briefly, and simply talking. I think it's also more effective in getting a point across than any virtual medium.

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

#274

Post by sunsunsunsun »

ilaksh wrote: post #128
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.

Seriously, if you're junior then you're more desperate and you're going to straight face lie about your opinions to make yourself more hireable.

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

#275

Post by leftbit »

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.

Those spontaneous connections yielding noticeable results are probably an urban legend. 25 years in the business and I've never seen this happen. You're talking with people in your team/project anyway in regular meetings, so there is no reason to drag that into the hallway. Talking biz to people from other projects/teams is mostly impossible - would take hours to explain a specific problem to get a meaningful contribution. Never goes beyond basic griping and commiseration.

If you think those meetings are essential for company success you REALLY should examine your process.

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

#276

Post by isoprophlex »

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.

Unhealthy separation: spending 45-90 minutes (one way) in traffic, polluting the planet.

Healthy separation: the 6 vertical meters between me working in the attic and my kids playing downstairs in the living room

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

#277

Post by alexfoo »

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.

For the sake of balance I'd just like to say that I agree with the GP on this.

I miss my ~30 minute commute (by bike) from my old job. It provided good delineation between home and work, and 1h of good cardio a day meant I didn't need to do any of that at the gym. I didn't have a need for that time to myself to choose what to do because I liked that choice being taken away for these relatively short periods and me being "forced" into doing a nice chunk of exercise. It also allowed me to ramp up to work thoughts on the way in, and to slowly dump my work thoughts as I went home.

Maybe this is also just me who, now working fully remotely, struggles to regularly schedule in a similar amount of exercise despite having more time available with no commute. Since it's no longer strictly required I'm less likely to do it.

But discussing this with other colleagues and we worked out that, as a generalisation, which side of the fence you are on these types of things comes down to whether or not you have children.

If you have kids then you often crave an activity like a 30 minute commute because it's an genuine excuse to have this time to yourself. If you don't have kids you've no idea why you would crave this time.

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

#278

Post by giantg2 »

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,"

You can find devs in the US for less too. $160k for a senior dev in the Philly region is generous.

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

#279

Post by ilyt »

avsteele wrote: post #211

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…

We bitch like that on corporate chat, works the same

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

#280

Post by koliber »

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…

One thing I got out of mentorship is that it’s one thing being correct, and and entirely other thing having people actually want to listen to you. It happens often enough that you have one and not the other. Until you have both, you won’t have impact and will grovel about others.
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