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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?

#431

Post by paulcole »

kelnos wrote: post #340
paulcole wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or you can, y'know, just go for a bike ride before and after work. Just the starting and ending points will be your home, rather than an office.

My apartment is too small for me to want to be there for both work and after work hours.

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

#432

Post by alentred »

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 agree, but not with the hallways and kitchenettes part. Sorry, never have I ever seen anything productive done in a hallway.

But I wholeheartedly agree with the "spontaneous communication" part, but *in the office, at the desk*. There are many things that are much easier when you can just come to a desk of your colleague (someone on the team, or your manager, or your direct report) and discuss instantly, then maybe grab another person into this discussion, make a decision, etc. Yes, I see that happening all the time in the office. Just not in a kitchenette indeed.

Now, I agree that maybe not every team needs it. Consider the two extremes. One is when your daily work is mostly "executing tasks”. In this case, whatever is more *comfortable* is the best: for some it would be working from home, for some it may be working from the office. Or, on the other end, if the team is in the early stages of making some important decisions. In this case, I truly believe this team needs to be able to communicate spontaneously. If this team is Okay with Discord - fine. Or if this team prefers being in the same physical place - fine as well.

Bottom line: being in *the office* is *one of the ways* to create an environment for spontaneous communications, which works wonders for making a series of small decisions fast.

P.S. I currently work in a flexible hybrid environment: we just agree with colleagues when we go to the office, if we want to.

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

#433

Post by Gigachad »

kelnos wrote: post #410
Gigachad wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gen Z and A are going to have serious problems. Work and School are biggest sources of friends. The two things they missed out on. I doubt many friends were made in the chat box of an online class.

School goes on until you're 18 or so (and even later if you go to university). Two-ish years of online schooling certainly hurt a bit, but is a small percentage of available childhood socialization time.

It’s so many small things chipping away at young people’s social lives, car dependant design, remote schooling, remote work, the loss of public spaces and facilities, social media, etc. We can see the trend, young people are constantly getting more lonely and isolated, but we only make changes that make it worse.

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

#434

Post by asdadsdad »

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…

This is much more than a one person's problem, but it's a general issue that many older people with well-established lives don't sympathize with unfortunately. As much as others can deny, work is source of most people's friendships, relationships, mentorships, and other social interactions. There's hardly a substitute for that outside.

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

#435

Post by jmyeet »

Not an employer but the answer is obvious: control.

It is true you can get some organic team-building and spontaneous collaboration but the cost of that is so high, it's no justification. Not having to commute, being able to live in a lower cost area, having flexibility to run errands, etc are of such monumental value to people.

But the real lesson here I think a lot of people are learning to their surprise is that tech companies are really no different to any other companies.. Moves like forcing you into the office and all the entails (commuting, face time, regular hours, no real breaks, unpaid overtime) has the same motivation as layoffs for the "recession": to suppress labor costs.

15 years ago we had collusion by Apple, Google and otehrs to suppress wages through collusion not to "poach". Now? Other companies laying off 5-10% of staff gives every other company the freedom to do the same. It's all the same: to suppress labor.

So forcing you into the office is both about control and increasing organic attrition. Some people have made new lives in the last 2 years and can't just come back to the office. A certain paercentage of those will quit. Great. No severance.

Many tech workers with so many good years and high-demand for our services have fallen into the trap of thinking they're somehow above the adversarial (exploitative) pressures other people are subject to. Fancy offices, Herman Miller chairs and "free" food play into this delusion.

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

#436

Post by paulcole »

arcturus17 wrote: post #219
paulcole wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I switched to a coworking space about a year ago. I still hate remote work but having a nice building to go and work it makes it tolerable.

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

#437

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

pxue wrote: post #381
nostromo wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

Ummm, no! Maybe some people get their social life from work but many don't.

I have 1 friend I've made during my entire career that stayed with me after the job ended. The others I've lived with, or went to school with, or met following other interests.

If you just mean socialising with colleagues, sure, I do that. But they aren't my good friends.

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

#438

Post by DiggyJohnson »

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…

I can second the GP’s testimony, even though I’m not new to my city / have a decent social life outside work.

The only thing that fixed up was moving to a company that was mostly in-office, with a few people hybrid/remote. Being able to interact in person with people working on the same project as me was rejuvenating, and that might be understating it.

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

#439

Post by bsuvc »

onethought wrote: post #411
bsuvc wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when I can hire someone 95% as good remotely in a low cost area of the world and actually get an employee that sticks around for a decade vs. a year This is fantasy.

Having done this for over ten years. It’s not. It’s actually way easier than people think.

Over 20 years of seeing this attempted by large companies and I have have never seen it work out well for them.

I'm not saying there aren't some talented developers working for cheap, but most of the time you get what you pay for.

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

#440

Post by kelnos »

atsuzaki wrote: post #337
kelnos wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

...No? I think people who wants to work from home should be able to. I'm doing hybrid personally as well now, it's great for keeping my chronic pain under control. And I enjoy coming in couple days a week to a quieter office (as lots are doing hybrid/mixed wfh as well). Internet has conditioned us to think that people can only have extreme beliefs, and any disagreement means their opinion must be the polar extreme op…

Then say that! Your post was a single sentence in support of office work.

This isn't about assuming extreme positions, this is about reading what someone has written and responding to it at face value.

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