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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?

#311

Post by [deleted] »

cweagans wrote: post #290
treis wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're supposed to be actively participating in refinement. Reading the story being talked about, looking up documentation, checking on potential solutions, and other things of that nature. You can't do that with raw chicken on your hands or while walking to the fridge to get veggies. The fact that this has to be explained to people is why there's a push to return to the office.

Maybe put your condescension away for a second and try to understand a different perspective. Your refinements work a little different than mine. In mine, the SME or the person who opened the issue (often the same person) reads the story, gives any extra context, answers questions, etc., we assign a point value, and move on. Refinement can be a discussion -- it doesn't always have to be a research session.

[deleted]

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

#312

Post by giantg2 »

The_Colonel wrote: post #283
giantg2 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems wild to me. It seems like the company and managers are doing something wrong if all your advancement is coming from random unofficial chats.

That's exactly how managers advance. Through good personal relationships across the organization, rapport, "alignment".

Maybe for managers. But really it should be about delivering completed projects, especially for technical folks.

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

#313

Post by Johnny555 »

At my company we have the worst of both works with "hybrid office". Employees need to come to the office 3 days a week, each team picks one day for the entire team to be in-office, the employees can choose the other days.

The team day is mostly consumed with in-person meetings with others on your team, so no individual work gets done that day. The other in-office days are either spent heads down with headphones trying to focus or trying to book one of the limited conference rooms to have a zoom meeting with coworkers that are working from home or in a remote office. It's hard to book meetings before 10am or after 4pm because someone's usually commuting during that time.

Companies should either pick full remote or full back in the office, Hybrid doesn't seem to work well.

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

#314

Post by snozolli »

thrashh wrote: post #108
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…

I haven’t worked at a FAANG but I still hang with people from old jobs. Idk it’s pretty normal to be able to make friends at most jobs I think you just had bad luck

Idk it’s pretty normal to be able to make friends at most jobs

I never said that I didn't make friends, I said that I never made a connection that proved valuable in the context of networking, i.e. career growth.

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

#315

Post by klooney »

maartn wrote: post #153

Microsoft did a very interesting research about this amongst 60k+ employees. Read it to find out why serendipity is a good thing and hardening already existing relationships is not good for the whole: “Furthermore, the shift to firm-wide remote work caused employees to spend a greater share of their collaboration time with their stronger ties, which are better suited to information transfer, and a smaller share of th…

That resonates with my experience.

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

#316

Post by kelnos »

alexfoo wrote: post #277
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.

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 be…

The problem here is that you've decided that because you liked your commute, and that it had benefits for you, everyone else should be forced to do the same, and inevitably it will often be in much less comfortable and useful ways than you've been able to do it.

Allowing remote work increases possibilities, and you've presented a false dichotomy. There's nothing that says an employer can't still maintain a (smaller) office for people who want to come in (either every day, or a smaller part of the week). Employers could also provide a stipend so people like yourself could rent a desk in a co-working space (assuming they still exist post-pandemic). And at the most basic, assuming you really did have to work from home, there's nothing stopping you from taking a break and going on a 30-minute bike ride. You could even "simulate" your commute by taking that ride once in the morning and once at the end of the day.

Requiring people to come to the office reduces possibilities, and requires that everyone conform to the same mold. I totally get that you liked going to an office. But it's selfish to require everyone else do that just because you want to. And you don't need to require that in order to get what you want, too.

> 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.

This is completely unrelated. Please don't suggest that everyone else should have to go to an office every day because you somehow can't negotiate a 30-minute break from your kids with your partner. That's your problem to fix, not mine.

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

#317

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

My guess:

- the communication aspect (I've noticed projects with people who are physically in the office progress much smoother than when I have to schedule a meeting or reach out via chat; the friction to ask someone is lower when you run across them and can see that they're not busy vs. pinging them and then not getting a response because they actually were in a meeting)

- some people treating WFH as "part time, work a few hours between child-minding, chores and other non-work tasks" or a fear of that happening

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

#318

Post by robertlagrant »

kelnos wrote: post #288
atsuzaki wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So we should require that everyone be in an office, so that people like you can get their career-defining opportunities? Maybe many of us would be fine making that trade-off: fewer opportunities for career-defining opportunities in exchange for the elimination of a commute, more-comfortable working arrangements, and a much more flexible work schedule. Not everything in life is about career advancement.

Why go off one example and pretend it's the whole topic? They were just saying it's easily possible to have meaningful conversations, as a counter to the previous comment.

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

#319

Post by itronitron »

klooney wrote: post #294
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 do a good job arranging your life (as most software engineers absolutely have the means to do) you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy separation between your work and your life. I feel like this isn't really true in the SF Bay Area, it's too expensive even for most software engineers. We're not all making L7 @ Meta money.

I know, that comment about a pleasant commute is absolutely laughable for anyone that commutes in or around a major US city.

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

#320

Post by joxel »

garciasn wrote: post #208
skhameneh wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m a Sr. Director. There is nothing but non sense in any claims that say random shout outs as people are breezing between one unnecessary meeting and another are useful. It just doesn’t happen. The only useful conversations are thoughtful, planned, and collaborative. Almost never what happens in a hallway nor in most meetings, frankly. Let’s dispel with any of this outdated thinking. Remote work is here to say and i…

You are completely detached from reality. Almost all of my conversations happen by running into someone in the hallway, or seeing them in their office with their door open and asking if they have a couple minutes.

I’m honestly curious about where you work that that doesn’t happen.

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