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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?

#591

Post by goostavos »

Gigachad wrote: post #386
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…

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.

Huh. It's wild how different two people's experiences of the same thing can be. I hated the office. I hated commuting. I hated meeting in stuffy rooms. While I like (most) of my coworkers, and enjoy the occasional drinks with them, I could also never see like 99% of them ever again and never even think about it. I vastly, vastly prefer WFH and would trade those "relationships" away in a heart beat in order to have it.

It's hard for me to wrap my head around the "best years" of someone's life being those where they're surrounded by people who think of them so little that the flexibility of doing laundry during the day beats ever seeing them again.

This thread has a healthy mix of both camps, which is pretty surprising to me.

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

#592

Post by antisthenes »

listenallyall wrote: post #168
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. Sorry buddy but that's on you. You make valuable connections by being generous and helpful to others. Then at some point down the road when they need to hire someone, they remember, hey 'snozolli' was a great coworker, let me see if they're available.

That's on you only if the people you made friends with later advanced to positions of power that can make hiring decisions. I don't think I have to tell you how incredibly lucky that is.

Otherwise, they probably just moved on to be another cog in the machine that has no say over hiring.

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

#593

Post by camgunz »

asdadsdad wrote: post #481
camgunz wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a symptom of societies that require you to work way too much and get everything (status, health care, socialization) from your job.

Would you like college to be remote too? School? Let's all wake up in our pijamas, hop on a zoom and live most of our lives like that?

> Would you like college to be remote too?

I think the university system is pretty hamstrung by the number of students it can accept. A lot of grad programs are coming online (I used to work at 2U which does this) and this is good both for students and the school as more students get an education and the school gets more income. Whether or not I want it to happen (I think it's probably an important part of reforming the university system) it seems like it's happening anyway.

> School?

I think most studies show this is pretty bad, so no.

> Let's all wake up in our pijamas, hop on a zoom

Probably twice a week I get through the whole work day in my PJs and I'm great at my job, so that sounds fine.

> live most of our lives like that?

Nah I'll go to the grocery store in the AM for supplies in my PJs but that's the extent of it.

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

#594

Post by projectazorian »

The_Colonel wrote: post #196
hfbff wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've talked about this topic with many people and it seldom matches the opinions of many people here in hacker news. I wonder if hacker news is biased towards a specific type of people that is less social / more family oriented / etc? (Of course, the people I meet in real life could be the more biased sample)

I noticed that very technically focused people tend to underestimate the importance of communication. They dislike daily standups, coordination meetings, don't really value informal exchange. All these things take their time out of what they want to do - deep work on solving technical problems. There's often the hidden assumption that "solving technical problems" equals "creating value", but that's not always so. Lac…

I used to prioritize communication and collaboration because I’m better at it than most engineers I work with. A problem emerged where I noticed that come review and promotion time, I was always coming up short due to concerns about lacking technical seriousness. My interview performance was also suffering due to not spending enough time in the codebase.

I deprioritized collaboration as a result and now I get much better results. It’s not an issue because I am happy to explain the trade off up-front to anyone who asks. My job title is “software engineer” and my job role is to ship code. If you want me to be a staff+ engineer, engineering manager, or PM, happy to chat about a role change, but until then collaboration needs to take up a minority of my time.

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

#595

Post by antisthenes »

nprateem wrote: post #292
dymk wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, why do you think it’s reasonable that be a requirement to be productive?

Because it helps people bond and so work better as a team. Plus probably not all your colleagues are complete introverts and may actually enjoy the company of others.

In my experience the only thing helping people work better as a team is just working better as a team.

Be patient, kind, and spend an extra minute writing a more detailed email that is helpful to your colleagues. If you're a manager, give them the right tools and empower them.

But this is completely orthogonal to whether the work is in an office or remote.

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

#596

Post by VerminOctopus1 »

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…

Blaming the fact that you don’t have any friends or romantic partners or a “life in this city” on remote working is absolutely absurd. Relying on a corporate office to bring you those things is most likely going to end in disappointment. Get a job that doesn’t demand your entire wakeful life on this earth and find some hobbies you can share with people where you’re not constrained by the weirdness of office politics and culture.

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

#597

Post by krabizzwainch »

nostrebored wrote: post #390
ornornor wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Our director started scheduling a big group video meeting with all the people that started since 2020 just as a chat room. But he did absolutely 0 planning or conversation guiding or anything outside of "so who wants to talk about something?" and we would just sit there in silence.

It completely feels like the scene from Arrested Development where Gob yells "everybody dance, NOW".

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

#598

Post by antisthenes »

Kharvok wrote: post #140

Some of my teams were fully remote about eight weeks in 2020, while others have been remote the entire time. I don't believe in full RTO, just hybrid. 1. The last few years have demonstrated that projects with teams that are primarily remote require a higher degree of project overhead staffing. I think this is most evident with very small teams. For example, it's fairly easy for a small internal tool team to coordina…

> 3.Junior employees have little to no ability to develop skills from seniors. I have hired entire classes of employees in software engineering roles that started in a fully remote environment, realized they weren't learning anything, and then came to work in a hybrid setting.

How often were they mentored by senior engineers? Daily meetings? Weekly? Who developed the training program? Who wrote the documentation?

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

#599

Post by scrollaway »

mustini wrote: post #586
scrollaway wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s often repeated because a lot of people make friends this way. My board game buddies are my closest real life friends, and I met them exactly like this. However people do need to accept that not everyone makes friends the same way.

Maybe the more interesting question is what does it take for this to work? I’m just going anecdotal here from college friends that have dispersed across the US. Warm intros, so to speak, help. If you join a running group attended by a friend of a friend it seems to stick better than joining when you know absolutely no one. Public transit helps. It’s hard to be consistent when going to the activity requires slogging t…

In my experience the reason board games work great is because you are forced to interact, understand the people, you play better when you figure out how they think etc. It forces you to create a rapport. You inevitably find out when you have chemistry with someone and want to play more with them.

Most people meeting over other activities I believe have similar stories. Dancing for example, or other group sports.

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

#600

Post by projectazorian »

mgraf1 wrote: post #522
dmitriid wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Most work “friendships” are transactional. Always exceptions of course, like in your case, but it’s important to be clear eyed going in.

A lot of people in my life have had their feelings hurt when their “work friend” stopped talking to them after leaving the company, because they failed to understand this important truth.

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