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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?

#381

Post by pxue »

nostromo wrote: post #369
65 wrote: post #342

I'm in my 20s. I live alone in a city where I don't know anyone. Remote work destroyed my mental health. All I wanted was to be able to go into an office and talk to a real life person. I would go weeks at a time not talking to a single person in real life. I don't think people understand the plight of the young office worker until they've experienced the torture of solitary confinement. Day in, day out. All alone. I…

Working in person isn't the issue here -- not having friends is the issue. People do make friends at work, and that's a good thing. But it should never be your primary place of making friends. (Friends and family won't lay you off like a job might. Having a network outside of work is critical if that ever happens.) Asking your coworkers to come into the office just so you can get some needed face time with other peop…

C'mon that's just bullshit.

Once working, you spend 8h a day with a group of people.

It's by far the easiest way to make friends since the needed repetition of making contact (a minimum requirement for friendship) is already solved by going to work together.

Making friends as an adult is hard. Work is the easiest shortcut in establishing meaningful relationships with strangers.

Edit: addressing some of the comments below.

Some of the commenters describe a friend as someone who will maintain a connection with you no matter the circumstance (loss of job, moving to a new city etc)

I believe that is an unrealistic expectation.

Friend just means someone you have established a platonic relationship with right here right now. You may drift apart in the future, but what's important is that the connection and relationship is genuine and real.

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

#382

Post by golergka »

no_wizard wrote: post #76
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…

Man I do get it, cost of labor sucks as a business. It’s always disheartening to me though that it’s just so easy for people to justify undercutting labor in just a few swift sentences like this, especially because the nuances of culture are very different, for one, and for two, there are downsides to this form of recruitment that never gets acknowledged from issues with time zones to acceptable quality standards and…

> No you don’t need to hire in traditionally geographical Silicon Valley areas every time or by default, but you don’t have to go all the way to latam either.

I'm sure all the latin american developers are super hyped about this advice not to hire them.

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

#383

Post by krippe »

65 wrote: post #342

I'm in my 20s. I live alone in a city where I don't know anyone. Remote work destroyed my mental health. All I wanted was to be able to go into an office and talk to a real life person. I would go weeks at a time not talking to a single person in real life. I don't think people understand the plight of the young office worker until they've experienced the torture of solitary confinement. Day in, day out. All alone. I…

So I'm supposed to deal with the hassle of commuting, losing hours of my day, because YOU are starved for human connections? Get out of here...

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

#384

Post by kelnos »

65 wrote: post #342

I'm in my 20s. I live alone in a city where I don't know anyone. Remote work destroyed my mental health. All I wanted was to be able to go into an office and talk to a real life person. I would go weeks at a time not talking to a single person in real life. I don't think people understand the plight of the young office worker until they've experienced the torture of solitary confinement. Day in, day out. All alone. I…

The problem is that the solution is entirely within your grasp, but you've decided that the only way to solve your problem is through in-office socialization.

Find co-workers who are local and suggest meeting for lunch or dinner on occasion. Hopefully you've developed some level of rapport through video calls and chats so this won't feel weird to you. Your company/team should be organizing regular get-togethers anyway. If not, they are failing at doing remote work. I hesitate to say "find a new company where they are better at this", but that's better than "require everyone to come into an office to fix your social life".

Beyond that, don't center your social life around work. Go to meetups dedicated to topics and activities you're interested in. Just get out and walk!

> I tried to join clubs and a maker space, but no time - I was working all day. The maker space closed early. I'm creative, I like working. I just wanted to go to an office. That's all I wanted. I wanted a routine. I wanted to commute and people watch. I wanted to feel like I was living life.

That seems to be a problem you've created for yourself, and it's a bit selfish to want to require everyone else to go to an office in order to make your choices work for you.

Stop working all day. Set boundaries with your employer. If the maker space really closes by 5pm, negotiate a more flexible work schedule where you get to take a 2-hour break (or something) around lunch or in the afternoon so you can go to the maker space, but then you work later into the evening, or get up earlier in the morning to start work. Also, I'm not sure how any of this would have changed if you were working in an office: the maker space would still close early, and you still would be working all the time and be unable to get there during their open hours.

If you want to people-watch, take a 30-minute walk in the morning and in the evening, to replace what a commute would be like.

> I'm an optimistic person, yet I slip into depression because the only thing I want - to be able to go into an office - will not happen for me.

This is a bit much, frankly. If you really truly are so inflexible that you can't imagine a good life without an office job, find a new job that has an office you can go to! This isn't rocket science. These jobs exist. Stop advocating making life worse for all of the people whose lives have been markedly improved by the extra opportunities for remote work, just because you can't figure out your own life.

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

#385

Post by mr_tristan »

Not an employer, but work at a pretty big company where the CEO made a pretty big tell: he mentioned that remote work seemed to cause a loss in overall productivity. But then almost all engineers chafed, and he had to clarify: we was talking specifically about the sales organization.

My sense is that leadership making these decisions simply isn't really tuned into how engineering operates. And that's mostly it; they're focused on the business, and probably are dialed into the sales pipeline. And that probably leads to tons of questions and one-off-style clarification sessions where video chats and Slack just aren't great, to be frank.

At the same time, I do think there are significant tradeoffs between a remote team and a "shared meatspace" team. With remote teams, cross-team relationship building is really challenging, and I've noticed that there's a natural tendency to focus purely on your team. With all teams in a same physical location, it's easier to actually just pop by and clarify complex details. But, I did work at a place that got hundreds of engineers together about 3x a year, and that seemed to be enough to build significant bridges across the org.

Ultimately though, in my experience, these kinds of decisions are just because upper management is more aligned with sales organizations than engineering.

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

#386

Post by Gigachad »

nostromo wrote: post #369
65 wrote: post #342

I'm in my 20s. I live alone in a city where I don't know anyone. Remote work destroyed my mental health. All I wanted was to be able to go into an office and talk to a real life person. I would go weeks at a time not talking to a single person in real life. I don't think people understand the plight of the young office worker until they've experienced the torture of solitary confinement. Day in, day out. All alone. I…

Working in person isn't the issue here -- not having friends is the issue. People do make friends at work, and that's a good thing. But it should never be your primary place of making friends. (Friends and family won't lay you off like a job might. Having a network outside of work is critical if that ever happens.) Asking your coworkers to come into the office just so you can get some needed face time with other peop…

I’ve got friends but you can’t fill 100% of your social interactions with meeting friends. Unless you have a very large number of them, you won’t be able to see them daily, and even if you do, you end up consuming all of your free time with socialising and having no personal time left.

Remote work left me choosing between fulfilling social interaction or personal time after work, either option leaving me unsatisfied. I can’t wait to get back to the office, those were the best years of my life.

Remote work is making me depressed and isolated.

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

#387

Post by AnEro »

65 wrote: post #342

I'm in my 20s. I live alone in a city where I don't know anyone. Remote work destroyed my mental health. All I wanted was to be able to go into an office and talk to a real life person. I would go weeks at a time not talking to a single person in real life. I don't think people understand the plight of the young office worker until they've experienced the torture of solitary confinement. Day in, day out. All alone. I…

I've been thinking the same, for me, it's also the work hours were to get ahead I have to do 60 hours on the business side AND homework to get more skills. Even just a part-time job or something to have a mental reset, money would be tight but every angle I see it could be easier to be happier.

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

#388

Post by cal85 »

Volundr wrote: post #376
65 wrote: post #342

I'm in my 20s. I live alone in a city where I don't know anyone. Remote work destroyed my mental health. All I wanted was to be able to go into an office and talk to a real life person. I would go weeks at a time not talking to a single person in real life. I don't think people understand the plight of the young office worker until they've experienced the torture of solitary confinement. Day in, day out. All alone. I…

I hear you and doubt nothing about your plight, but frankly that feels like a you problem. I can sympathize while also rejecting the idea that I should have to come into the office so your not lonely. Have you considered a co-working space? It seems like that could get you what your looking for. Beyond that I'd look to get creative around finding ways to get social outside work. A martial arts or social dance class f…

> frankly that feels like a you problem

It's also a me problem, so there's at least two of us.

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

#389

Post by sekai »

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…

> 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.

Especially questionable in an open-plan office, everyone is trying just to concentrate and are wearing headphones.

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

#390

Post by nostrebored »

ornornor wrote: post #296
ineptech wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? I can think of lots, and am surprised anyone would say otherwise - I guess you must be using a really high bar for "meaningful". An example might be, "You know, I didn't want to say anything in the meeting, but doesn'…

> If you only interact during scheduled meetings with a defind purpose, you never engage in work-related small talk Whats stopping people from scheduling “shoot the shit” of coffee calls though? That’s what I’ve seen many do since the wfh mandate and it works in exactly the same way you describe: people vent, talk about what happened during meetings, etc.

I hate online coffee chats and love workplace conversation. Coffee chats have an overloaded amount of assumptions — conversation should start off personal, last for x minutes, make you feel closer to a teammate.

This is the exact opposite of a hallway conversation that can be about anything. It can differ based on the person and your relationship.

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