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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?

#691

Post by Spooky23 »

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…

I feel similarly. WFH has killed my city.

I personally enjoy it and generally work remote 2-3 days a week, but it’s awful for the organization. At this point I keep doing it as I expect there will be some incentives offered to come back.

On the productivity side, There’s way too much babysitting and people in certain roles doing errands. On the work relationship side, units with turnover struggle as new hires don’t get assimilated well.

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

#692

Post by phoronixrly »

chrismatheson wrote: post #606
phoronixrly wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm constantly seeing in meetings where highly compensated employees are providing childcare during working hours Do you really think it's good, and that people should be separated from their children for 8-10 hours (or more if commuting) each day? I don't. Also, since you don't want your employees to get distracted by childcare, does your office offer daycare for their children? Edit: And yes, they daycare questio…

Not that I’m particularly defending RTO. But specifically on the daycare thing. No. They offer you a large salary and let you choose and organise what works for you. Not deciding for you and staffing some daycare as an afterthought on the 3rd floor or whatever :) IMHO most “perks” are just someone else spending your money for you.

I am sorry, but maybe you didn't understand where I was coming from. I think that having someone else bring up your children because you're forced to be present at an office is absolutely insane. I don't understand how we got to a point where it's considered normal.

I also think that the least that your employer could do is facilitate a place for your child to stay close by and be taken care of, so you can be able to spend your breaks/commute with them, take immediate action if they get sick/hurt, etc.

Why the employer? Because good luck organizing with your co-workers to rent a place suitable for daycare in/close to your office building and hiring personnel to staff it. I wonder what salary should they offer me to make this more feasible than sending a CV to a remote-first company instead...

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

#693

Post by jltsiren »

Volundr wrote: post #677
jltsiren wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Defaults matter, because people take the easy default choice most of the time. If people don't meet other people by default, they will have fewer casual acquaintances and they are less likely to meet the ones who will become good friends. Then there will be fewer friends overall. > Once someone realizes this and learns to put effort into their social connections, they are far less likely to end up isolated than just…

> People on the average don't do that. This is part of the idea I'm contesting. Remember, "65" has an office they can go to, their problem is no one else wants to. Unless you are asserting that you are a better judge of what is good for 65's co-workers then they themselves are, presumably "on average" they have found sufficient social interaction to satisfy themselves outside of the office. And if you are asserting t…

Again, communism would work if everyone behaved like a good communist. They don't, because the default is acting in the interests of yourself and people near you rather than in the interests of the wider society. If you insist on communism, the whole society suffers, because most people take the default choice and do what's good for them.

If social isolation during work is the default, people will have fewer friends, because making friends takes more effort. They may be satisfied with their situation, because they contrast the outcomes of having more friends with the effort needed to make them. But the entire society may be worse off than a society where people have more friends because working with other people is the default.

Fundamentally, everything based on the idea that people should make different choices is doomed to fail. To make the society better, you must work on structural level and change the defaults.

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

#694

Post by terminatornet »

dsugarman wrote: post #546
lolinder wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're the most honest pro-office person here. Everyone else is making justifications that dance around this idea that they need the office for the human connection. What you describe is very real and I understand that it hurts. I think what's happening is that we're in the shaking out phase where companies are deciding whether they'll be remote/hybrid/office. Each company will make that decision based on the…

Put yourself in the executives shoes for a second, they're not stupid people, they know how large the risk of blowback is and how many employees they might disenfranchise or lose. They're that confident that remote work is a bigger threat to their long-term performance and they don't want to get lapped by the companies with an in-office culture

Executives are indeed stupid people

> Workers with full schedule flexibility report 29% higher productivity and 53% greater ability to focus than workers with no ability to shift their schedule, according to a just-announced report from Future Forum. But do bosses trust employees to be productive when working out of the office?

> Microsoft released a new study, where it found that 85% of leaders say that the “shift to hybrid work has made it challenging to have confidence that employees are being productive.” More concretely, 49% of managers of hybrid workers “struggle to trust their employees to do their best work.” This lack of trust in worker productivity has led to what Microsoft researchers termed productivity paranoia: “where leaders fear that lost productivity is due to employees not working, even though hours worked, number of meetings, and other activity metrics have increased.”

So workers are more productive with remote flexibility, working more hours and managers and execs still want more.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/glebtsipursky/2022/11/03/worker...

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

#695

Post by PartiallyTyped »

mettamage wrote: post #421
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…

Digital nomad here. I like being one. For me making friends, the best places are: Tinder (it took a lot of effort) and just giving compliments to people on the street (it took some effort to learn). Regarding complimenting people on the street and potentially turning it into a conversation, it takes some practice. 10 years ago when I did some solo traveling (before uni even) for the first time, I had the choice to st…

Contrary to the other person, i find you, at least through this interaction, to be quite likeable.

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

#696

Post by terminatornet »

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…

fine, i'll come in but you have to rip out all the desks and turn every bit of space in the office into a hallway or a kitchenette to maximize opportunity for collaboration.

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

#697

Post by goostavos »

Gigachad wrote: post #603
goostavos wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> surrounded by people who think of them so little that the flexibility of doing laundry during the day beats ever seeing them again. My coworkers have all gone back to the office part time, they go out and do stuff in the city almost every week after work, they go to huge javascript meetups, go to the pubs and clubs, and I'm here sitting alone doing very little because my city doesn't have a large tech scene. Remote…

Cool man. Glad you found your people!

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

#698

Post by Adraghast »

SpeedilyDamage wrote: post #560
Adraghast wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the tip, but I was doing good work remotely ten years before covid and will continue to do so ten years after.

I mean sure, but there’s no real way of knowing what you’ve left on the table by working remotely. And I say this as someone who was also working remotely before the pandemic. I’m always wary of people who refuse to acknowledge the downsides of ideas they support…

There's not, but I do know what's on my table: a career doing things I find reasonably stimulating that provides me more material comfort than I know what to do with. I am doubtful these hallway conversations I keep hearing about could provide me anything else that I would want, and I'm definitely not willing to give up my freedom and flexibility just to find out.

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

#699

Post by falcor84 »

terminatornet wrote: post #694
dsugarman wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put yourself in the executives shoes for a second, they're not stupid people, they know how large the risk of blowback is and how many employees they might disenfranchise or lose. They're that confident that remote work is a bigger threat to their long-term performance and they don't want to get lapped by the companies with an in-office culture

Executives are indeed stupid people > Workers with full schedule flexibility report 29% higher productivity and 53% greater ability to focus than workers with no ability to shift their schedule, according to a just-announced report from Future Forum. But do bosses trust employees to be productive when working out of the office? > Microsoft released a new study, where it found that 85% of leaders say that the “shift t…

There is a bit of a leap of faith between "Workers with full schedule flexibility report 29% higher productivity" to "workers are more productive". Everything else being equal, I would trust the managers more than the employees' self-assessment.

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

#700

Post by SpeedilyDamage »

giantg2 wrote: post #670
SpeedilyDamage wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don’t know why or how your management figures out what to build or if what you’re building is what they need, and don’t see how that’s related to remote work, there’s not much I can do to help you.

What are you even going on about? Discussing what to build isn't what we are talking about here. Mor to mention, my management doesn't talk about that. The business side does. And this topic is covered via meeting. Whether those meeting are remote or not do not matter. Now please stop trolling this topic.

So,

a) we're not talking about how people decide what to build, as that has nothing to do with working remotely,

b) managers aren't involved in determining either what to build or how well the plan to build something was executed, and

c) the people who do decide those things have meetings which are irrelevant when talking about working remotely or in person.

Am I understanding you correctly?

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