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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?

#521

Post by etempleton »

Working closely with a number of pro-office senior leaders it basically comes down to a few thing:

1. It is very hard to steer a giant organization and get everyone on the same page under ideal circumstances. Work from home makes that even harder because people aren’t as tuned into what is happening beyond their job. If the business needs to pivot it takes longer.

2. Most senior leaders spend 6-10 hours a day in meetings. It really sucks when they have one or two people on Zoom and everyone else is around a conference room. Wait, your mic is muted, Ted. Oh, no it is the conference room speaker is off or something, I don’t know…20 minutes later someone fixes it, but it wasted 20 minutes that all those people don’t have in their day.

3. Usually senior leader, C-suite folks, got to where they are at, in part, because of how good they are in the in-person meeting / 1:1 in-person. It is their super power. You take that away and they feel less effective.

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

#522

Post by mgraf1 »

dmitriid wrote: post #475
pxue wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Once working, you spend 8h a day with a group of people. Until they, or you: - quit and move to another company in 2-3 years - move to another department in the company - get fired Then what?

Then you keep in touch with them.

The best friend I've made as an adult was met through work. Then he took another job, and I moved across the country when I went remote. We still keep in touch and occasionally travel to visit each other.

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

#523

Post by namaria »

koala_man wrote: post #209

I heard from one large tech company that was pressured by the city to bring people back in order to prop up the city's downtown service sector. The company caved because they depended on city approval for some licenses. The person who told me this was an analyst tasked with cherry picking data to justify the decision that had already been made on political grounds. (This was after a few drinks and has not been indepe…

The desire to not be involved in professional cherry picking was a big factor in my decision to steer clear of data engineering / data science jobs early on.

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

#524

Post by treis »

throw248989 wrote: post #328
treis wrote: post #23

I think a lot of people are abusing WFH. Some make it obvious like doing meal prep during refinement but others are just kind of ghosts during the day. Even as a fellow team member reviewing code it's hard to tell how much my coworkers are working. Assume my EM has less of an idea than I do and anyone above them is totally in the dark.

I know someone who basically only actually works 3-4 hours a day. The rest of the time they do other personal things but are still available online. They get told they're doing a great job and hit all the important targets. This person also routinely ignores/mutes as many meetings as possible and frequently multi-tasks in the gym, house chores, etc. Had that person been in the office they'd have had their time wasted…

>I know someone who basically only actually works 3-4 hours a day.

I'm not sure if people are even doing that. And really if you tack on a couple hours of pointless meetings we're pretty close to 40 hours a week. They're within spitting distance of an expected work week and if they're responsive and hitting targets then who cares. I'm talking about people I think work more like 3-4 hours a week.

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

#525

Post by molodec »

thisarticle wrote: post #105
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…

> 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?

I've never had any mentorship too from engineers in the company where I started my career. I learned a lot from books.

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

#526

Post by nmeofthestate »

thisarticle wrote: post #145
NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #126

Let's talk about resources and overhead. If you WFH, then you're paying rent, utilities, you have a kitchen, you may well be BYOD, your ISP is a consumer-grade connection, you've got renter's or homeowner's insurance covering your stuff. That's all miles different from working in an office. They've got cleaning staff and a maintenance team. They've got an enterprise-class high-speed redundant Internet connection (and…

> There are reasons people work together in offices and not from their homes, there are economies of scale, and there are efficiencies that happen. Such as?

Well you see, at home everyone has their own fridge, but in the office there's a single fridge for 50 people. And it's got free drinks in it to make up for the extra (say) hour a day spent travelling to get there.

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

#527

Post by shadeslayer »

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 in the same place you are now. I completely agree with the need for a healthy routine to be able to keep depression at bay and not having a environment to socialize robs you of key experiences we all need to have in our youths in order to be well adjusted later in life.

Having said that, you're in a great place to make a few key changes that might help! I moved to another country and learnt a new language and a whole new culture when I was in the same place as you!

Perhaps that's not a option for you, but maybe you could travel to a new city for a week or two! Trial out a few places and see what fits you. It takes a bit of effort and persistence, at the cost of routine, but having a fresh start might be the thing that gets you out of this.

Edit: You might want to look up Croissant to go and meet other remote co workers, there's a fair few of us around the world ;)

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

#528

Post by lampington »

thisarticle wrote: post #131
fishcrackers wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sounds like it would be effective if the cto was in latam too

Right? Funny how C-level employees never think they’ll get outsourced. Ten or twenty years from now there will be great CTO level talent founding companies in Latam if they aren’t already. Then the whole company can operate in a cheaper country with lower taxes and benefits. Good luck competing with that in the US.

Lower taxes? Which countries are you thinking of? (Genuinely interested not a rhetorical question; IME many poorer countries have higher taxes, in percentage terms.)

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

#529

Post by krabizzwainch »

herghost wrote: post #416
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…

Sorry, but I have to disagree. I'm happily married, children, dog, several distinct groups of friends, great job at a great company, lovely house in a nice village, etc, etc, etc. I worked from home for about 4 years as a freelancer and found it incredibly isolating (but lucrative, so endured it) but finally had enough and get a permanent job back in an office. This was 5 weeks before what would be the first of sever…

I started a new job during the pandemic (well, 2...). What sucks for me is that my boss has been like "Yeah, you can go back to the office." But both him and my direct coworker have said that they will never go back to the office. Pretty sure I will never physically meet them before I inevitably try to find some other job.

And what is more isolating than being home alone? Well, working completely alone in an office building meant to hold like 300 employees that was last updated in the 80s.

My basic idea about all of this is to restructure where people work. Take all the employees that want to come into the office on a regular basis and put them in the same building on the same floor.

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

#530

Post by Volundr »

jltsiren wrote: post #479
Volundr wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You should look at the bigger picture. People usually find friends as a byproduct of of some activity, such as work, studies, hobbies, or activism. If you remove the activity people spend a third of their waking hours on from the list, the result is a massive reduction in the number of friends people have. And it's going to hit the people who can't easily make friends the hardest. This is not an individual problem. I…

> This is not an individual problem. It's an issue that affects the entire society. Social isolation feeds many undesirable things, such as political polarization and extremism. If a society wants to survive, it has to deal with the issue somehow.

Agreed, and I think the best way is for people to realize that "the people I chat with at the water-cooler" are not my friends, and take action based on that. Job loss and retirement are often terribly isolating events for people for exactly the reason your specify. Work is 1/2 of their waking life and they rely on it too heavily for their social needs.

Forcing the majority who prefer work from home to work from the office because a minority of people will feel lonely does not "benefit society". It hides a real problem that some people have while sacrificing the rest of us to do so. If the majority of us wanted to work in the office this would be a non-issue. GP would've simply gone to the office, found the majority of their co-workers there and been perfectly happy, while those of us who wanted WFH were happily home. Better to tackle the problem head on than sweep it under the rug.

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