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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?

#761

Post by kyleee »

terminatornet wrote: post #706
falcor84 wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.” nothing about this figure from managers says employees are more or less productive, just that managers having a feeling worke…

Yep, they are uncomfortable because they can’t fall back to idiotic / superficial metrics ie. “butts in seats” and it will require more work/introspection etc. to find actual better metrics and use them

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

#762

Post by joxel »

giantg2 wrote: post #548
joxel wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes sense. I'd just be trying to get out of a job like that, and don't see how that's desirable at all. You seem to think its the better way though.

I never said it was the better way. It's simply reality, at least for most jobs (larger non-tech companies).

I hope you find a better job man!

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

#763

Post by chii »

9530jh9054ven wrote: post #747
givemeethekeys wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Making friends as an adult is hard. Pick a social hobby. Pick up sports, hiking / running / reading / trivia / sports groups. Take a class. Take up a cause - volunteer your time at the local farm, shelter, political office.. Kids don't go to school with the goal of making friends. The friends are a byproduct.

So what happens when you have no interests, no hobbies, no cause? And for those that do, but lack the time or financial resources to persue them? What then?

if you lack financial resources, that's the problem to tackle. Making friends and having leisure activities will be secondary until your financials become stable and good.

Once you have the financial resources, _then_ you tackle the problem of no interest/hobbies/causes issue - which, i say is relatively easy to tackle as long as you have money; try different things until something sticks!

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

#764

Post by spacedcowboy »

alexfoo wrote: post #277
arcturus17 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy separation between your work and your life Everyone is picking on the rest of your arguments, and I can sympathize with some of them, but not this one. Never had, nor can I envision, a commute with a healthy separation of work and life or that wasn't orders of magnitude worse than, you know, reclaiming that time for whatever I want.

For the sake of balance I'd just like to say that I agree with the GP on this. I miss my ~30 minute commute (by bike) from my old job. It provided good delineation between home and work, and 1h of good cardio a day meant I didn't need to do any of that at the gym. I didn't have a need for that time to myself to choose what to do because I liked that choice being taken away for these relatively short periods and me be…

I work from home, in the shed at the bottom of the garden. If I want/need time alone, I still have that separate space. Mostly though, I just appreciate the extra 20 minutes in bed in the morning, and the extra time in the evening with the family (the kid is at the stage where engineering challenges are still fun for him, so it's fun for me too).

I have already told my manager that despite the official "you must work 2 days in the office per week" policy, if they ever try to apply that to me, I'm out. I'm looking for an excuse for early retirement, but it's just too much of a risk to disturb the status quo at the moment. Perturb the situation at your peril, employer-mine.

I got a seat-assignment earlier in the week (the official line is that they've hired too many people and can't place everyone, so some of us have 'volunteered' to stay at home). I was just about to enquire what was going on in Slack when he got to me first saying it was a group-wide thing and he'd reassign me to a non-desk seat as soon as he could. Which he did; and so I continue to work there...

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

#765

Post by RestlessMind »

lolinder wrote: post #573
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

This argument is an appeal to authority that I just can't buy. You don't have to be a stupid person to succumb to your own biases, you just have to be human, and plenty of executives make irrational decisions based on their subjective feelings.

Not like you are providing any cogent argument. Execs sure have their own biases but they do have a lot of data to make important decisions like RTO policy. If you disagree with them, maybe it says more about your ignorance, blind spots and biases?

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

#766

Post by RestlessMind »

csomar wrote: post #748
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

You are making the dangerous assumption that these people know what they are doing. Time and again, winners and losers emerge of this and many of the top level executives turns out to be dead wrong.

And you are making assumption that these people are all stupid. What is your arguement?

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

#768

Post by RestlessMind »

jpeterson wrote: post #102
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've seen this idea repeated many times, but in over 20 years in the tech industry, I've never once seen a meaningful collaboration spring up in a kitchenette or hallway. It's invariably "how was your weekend?" fare. Don't get me wrong, there's value in connecting that way, but it's never the sort of thing that dire…

The most meaningful collaborations I have seen in my 20+ years of work involved a small group of 3 to 5 people huddled around a whiteboard. I can make a list of top 10 collaborations I recollect and none of them were remote interactions. In-person somehow made the collaboration easier.

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

#769

Post by RestlessMind »

kelnos wrote: post #288
atsuzaki wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I scored most (if not all) of my career-defining opportunities from hallway convos after a meeting, or chatting while waiting for coffee to brew, so YMMV.

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.

> Not everything in life is about career advancement.

But you see, all the decision makers about the RTO are the sort of people who would be obsessed with career development. So they would be very biased against this sentiment. In an employer's market, they have all the power now.

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

#770

Post by thrwawy74 »

lolinder wrote: post #486
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 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…

Like you, I appreciated his comment. It was honest, and I have been there. We are in the shaking-out phase of this change. The bigger problem is management isn't across-the-board good at determining productivity in-person or remote. Good managers are rare, and staring over someone's shoulder to make sure the work is getting done correctly is harder in remote work. The systems to provide this checking and oversight are still maturing - I don't mean employee surveillance.

I've been at the other end of the spectrum where I don't get work done in the office. I get involved in crosstalk between coworkers too much. We go to far too many pointless meetings. Everyone wants to share about their family while I'm working. I feel over-socialized and it affects my work and my ability to disconnect at the end of my day. This is a job. I get paid money for the work I do. I should not feel indebted to people who parody themselves as my friends (coworkers) who need this last-minute thing done by me at the end of the day. I'm off the clock and I want to disconnect. How many times have I worked through lunch? How many times have people called my personal number for non-emergency needs? The workplace infringes on my work-life balance, and remote work gave a large part of that back to me.

If we care about both groups of people (those over-socialized, and those isolated), we should give the worker the option. A good supervisor should be learning how to engage with the employee in the way they wish to communicate, as long as the work is getting done.

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