Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office? • Hacker News Board

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

#831

Post by kwhitefoot » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 1:06 PM UTC

joyfylbanana wrote: post #282

kwhitefoot wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People often end up working on wrong things. The must have pretty bad managers then. Why should there be a trust issue? My manager assigns me a task, I do it on time and they are happy or I fail to do it on time and they are unhappy. How does where I do that task make a difference? I think the return to office thing is just a cover for incompetent management.

Yeah, let's say that it is incompetent management. As an business owner, you can fix the situation either by forcing people into offices, or firing the bad managers and recruiting a competent management instead. To me the latter solution sounds crazy expensive and difficult compared to the first.

> you can fix the situation either by forcing people into offices

That probably doesn't really fix the problem, the incompetent manager is probably still incompetent just in a smaller sphere of operations.

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

#832

Post by matrisking » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 1:07 PM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #412

matrisking wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeesh. Who said you're supposed to do anything?

Literally everyone in these threads advocating for a return to office?

Not the OP on this thread. It looks like they were just sharing their feelings/experiences without proposing any policy changes. I don't see a reason for anyone to adopt a tone.

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

#833

Post by DougN7 » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 1:13 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #167

DougN7 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With three out of three different employees so far, all slowly did less and less work the longer they worked from home. I’m 90% sure one of them had an additional job, and another one admitted it when he quit. I don’t like to micromanage so give developers a lot of freedom. Few people have as much long-term integrity as we like to pretend we all have.

If they aren't getting stuff done, that's its own conversation. Whether they have a second (or third, or fourth) job is irrelevant.

They weren’t getting stuff done, because they weren’t putting in the time to get it done, because they were splitting their time between two jobs.

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

#834

Post by epistemer » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 1:16 PM UTC

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…

It is all bullshit.

The problem is that it is obvious how useless and misconfigured our entire corporate management structures are with remote work so the easiest solution is to go back to the office.

The pandemic was a fun exercise in forced, real efficiency but we need to get back to the Dilbert cartoon version of life because the Dilbert cartoon characters call the shots and put a ton of time into becoming those characters.

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

#835

Post by nunez » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 1:40 PM UTC

Solving the in-person/remote work problem is becoming intractable.

The people who prefer remote seem to strongly prefer remote. Any arguments against it are dismissed as RTO bootlicking. See the top-level comments here from people who will absolutely not give up remote work and are giving people advice on how to live in a remote-only world. (Just get a hobby, bro! How hard could it be? Can't make friends after work? That's a you problem!)

The people who prefer in-person strongly prefer in-person. They think that this is the ONLY way to build a community culture and foster spontaneous collaboration. Moreover, the kind of work the people with "power" in these organizations (executives, salespeople, marketing, etc) have is almost entirely face-to-face, and they are also raising families and dealing with traffic, so there's willful lack of empathy there too.

Hybrid work environments make it easy for the "minority" to miss important context.

Either extreme (RTO, or full-remote) leads to serious backlash.

I think that a mostly-full RTO will win out for the same reason that chain layoffs happened this year.

The biggest companies are all _very_ pro return-to-office. I don't know of any big companies that stayed full remote after vaccines were viable.

The smaller startups that can do full remote are vying for acquisition or to go public. In both cases, the power dynamics will shift towards making people go back into the office because that's what the people in charge want. (Again, their jobs are mostly face-to-face, and they also raise kids and deal with traffic and doctor's appointments, so empathy is lacking there.)

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

#836

Post by nunez » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 1:40 PM UTC

givemeethekeys wrote: post #488

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…

> 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.

As someone who organized two very large social groups on Meetup in NYC, let's delve into your suggestions a bit more.

> Pick a social hobby. Pick up sports, hiking / running / reading / trivia / sports groups.

It is very hard to pick up a new hobby as an adult.

By 30, most adults (in the US; earlier outside of the US) will have real full-time job responsibilities, a significant other and a few children. Since the children will be young and will need almost all of your time and attention, that leaves little time for anything else.

Families with access to parenting groups will likely be living in bigger cities with high-enough density to support that. This also assumes that you have enough free time/money to participate in these activities (unlikely if you just spent most of your free capital on the house that you just bought because houses are at an all-time high now...).

Many new families are living in HOA-run communities that are wholly designed to be traveled by car, in towns that are also designed to be traveled by car, because you'll likely be commuting to work and back...by car.

Taking your kids on a walk to the grocery store that's 15 minutes away and seeing lots of people on your path isn't possible in these towns. Instead, you're driving four minutes to a huge supermarket where you'll run into families who are also rushing to pick up their groceries because time is scarce, and then driving right back.

Can you interact with neighbors and enjoy community in this environment? Sure! If you like your two or four neighbors in your surrounding area, and if they aren't filthy renters like me who aren't in it for the short-term. (Rentals are also increasing...because houses are at an all-time high and life happens...)

If you're childfree and live in a large city, then, sure, tons of opportunities to make new friends. Unless you're a lawyer working 100+ hrs/week or a SWE grinding at a startup that just hit PMF and is hyperscaling. Or you suck at breaking through cliques. (Lots of people suck at this; myself included. Don't feel bad! Most people make most of their lifelong friends in grade school or church, as a youth, so most times, you're trying to shoehorn yourself into a group that has developed decades of direct and indirect ways of communicating and interacting with each other.).

> Take a class. > Take up a cause - volunteer your time at the local farm, shelter, political office..

This is actually good advice, but, again, time is scarce for many people.

This is more or less like saying "wanna lose weight? just eat less!" Not invalid, but also not helpful and very dismissive of people needing different things.

> Kids don't go to school with the goal of making friends. The friends are a byproduct.

...of being in an enclosed environment with other humans for eight hours a day, doing things they might or might not want to do. Kind of like work actually...

Let's be clear. I'm not saying that it's impossible to make friends as an adult. I've done it, and I've met tons of people that have done it!

I'm just saying that it's significantly easier to make friends at work.

More importantly, it is a lot easier to foster a culture and a work community in the office.

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

#837

Post by nunez » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 1:49 PM UTC

Smaug123 wrote: post #301

ineptech wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work. Do you have specific examples of valuable collaboration in one of these environments? I can think of lots, and am surprised anyone would say otherwise - I guess you must be using a really high bar for "meaningful". An example might be, "You know, I didn't want to say anything in the meeting, but doesn'…

My team kept a Webex room open at the start of every morning for just turning up and chatting in; it would generally stay open in the background until everyone had left for meetings. It certainly worked well for us. Sometimes people just worked silently through it, but usually there was lots of chat.

Not at all the same. Most people will just go back to their own stuff behind the camera. Also, Zoom is EXHAUSTING for a lot of people. You're talking at a monitor, not a person!

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

#838

Post by nunez » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 1:53 PM UTC

gemstones wrote: post #158

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 echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work. Do you have specific examples of valuable collaboration in one of these environments? > Edit: full disclosure, I’m not an employer but I sympathize and spent a lot of time thinking about these things as…

At least 72.14%* of very big-money deals that our paychecks depend on are closed at the golf course or over dinner and drinks.

* not a real statistic, but the intent is real

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

#839

Post by nunez » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 1:59 PM UTC

zwayhowder wrote: post #130

jonathankoren wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes. I call bullshit. This is the claptrap that upper management always uses to to justify RTO or keeping separate bus lines or whatever, but it doesn’t match reality. In 25 years of professional experience, I have never seen collaboration done by random encounter. At most you’ll ask a question you were already going to…

I don't know what you do but I've solved problems and saved companies millions by overhearing a conversation in the office that would have been a Slack DM remote. At one customer I was able to identify that 3 separate business units were all competing for the same tender, they were all undercutting each other not realising. There were 3 separate private channels in Slack #customer_tender #tender_response_customer and…

I've never worked at a place that disabled DMs in Slack. Is that even possible?

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

#840

Post by adamhp » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 2:02 PM UTC

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.

You shouldn't need to measure your company's productivity in output based on these things. Are people getting the necessary work done? Your measures are wrong if you feel worried about not being able to tell if people are "actually working". It should be painfully obvious if the necessary work isn't getting done.