Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The damaging results of mandated return to office

entrepreneur.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 348 posts

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#91

Post by baq »

throwaway675309 wrote: post #41

There have been a lot of, at least to me, somewhat unsubstantiated criticisms that fully remote work is difficult for new graduates. I can only provide n=1 sample data, but back when I was working for a company that was fully remote, we brought on many junior engineers who lived across the United States and didn't have any problems onboarding them by keeping a continual slack team huddle running during office hours.…

That’s the thing - you need to consciously do things like that. Some don’t have presence of mind to do that and effectively waste everybody’s time.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#92

Post by Agentlien »

BaseballPhysics wrote: post #59
RestlessMind wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with little evidence that’s a better way to work. You are assuming that decision makers are dumb. I disagree with that. My null hypothesis is that they are smart, competent people and are doing the best decision according to data they are seeing.

> My null hypothesis is that they are smart, competent people and are doing the best decision according to data they are seeing. Speaking as a senior manager at a smallish software company (300 people), absolutely, decision makers are in my experience smart and competent. But what they don't do is necessarily make decisions based on data. I don't believe for a second that most RTO debates are based on meaningful meas…

When I joined my current employer the biggest drawback was that unlike my previous job they did not allow remote work. Managers were against it because they were paranoid about people slacking off.

The pandemic hit, we transitioned to remote work, I was happy. Everyone quickly adapted and learned how to efficiently work from home. About two years later, two things happened:

1. Surveys and postmortems showed that remote work lead to increased employee satisfaction and productivity at our company.

2. Company leadership started talking about a mandated return to office.

People of course challenged this decision, pointing to the data, and no real explanation was given. Those who wanted to returned to office, but the mandated return was indefinitely postponed and eventually silently dropped as the manager primarily pushing for a return left the company.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#93

Post by oregano »

lynx23 wrote: post #74
CtrlAltDelete51 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a source for any of that? Speaking personally, everyone I’ve spoken to on the matter (myself included) have zero desire to return to a traditional office.

How many people do you know? When WFH was mandated, I hated it. When the mandate was finally kicked, I loved going back to the office, and have spent almost every workday at the office, despite having the possibility to do 40% WFH if I wanted. No, I don't want that, thank you. Not a coder, working as admin. I like people, that is why I work in an office. And personal experience is definitely that working together wit…

> Not a coder, working as admin

The working environment which is conducive to a successful developer vs a successful admin are, most likely (in my experience), two completely different environments.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#94

Post by Solvency »

diego_moita wrote: post #19

I wish we stopped with the "companies should do this/should do that". Existing big companies are too comfortable and lazy for the remote work revolution. Remote work is a radical change in culture and work organization. It will take new companies with new workflows and organizational ideas to make it work well. We're not there yet. Managers don't understand yet how to do it, they need to read a lot of documentation (…

Virtually the entire VFX industry has shifted to remote. Let that sync in.

The most hardware/GPU intensive industry of creatives dealing with ungodly complex technical pipelines, terabytes of 32bit EXR frames of rendered data, Houdini fluid simulations, compositing, color grading, the whole works... is almost entirely distributed now.

They've done it. Everyone can do it. And are doing it.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#95

Post by stakhanov »

Uehreka wrote: post #37
diego_moita wrote: post #19

I wish we stopped with the "companies should do this/should do that". Existing big companies are too comfortable and lazy for the remote work revolution. Remote work is a radical change in culture and work organization. It will take new companies with new workflows and organizational ideas to make it work well. We're not there yet. Managers don't understand yet how to do it, they need to read a lot of documentation (…

…what? Sorry to harsh the vibe, but that second paragraph reads like something out of 2014 when people were first reading REMOTE. At this point remote work is nothing new, and while many large companies don’t like it, many large companies are going along with it (and developing the culture, documentation, etc.) because it works well as a way to attract talent. And some startup founders are trying to go “full Musk” an…

> At this point remote work is nothing new[...]

I couldn't agree more. In fact, historically, the norm has been for the work to come to where people lived with their families, rather than for people to leave their family homes to "go to work". This was at a time when the prevalent type of work was farming and craftsmanship in relation to goods that were easily transported. A craftsman's workshop was usually in the same building as their family home in towns and cities, and rural areas operated a "putting out system" [1] where travelling tradespeople brought supplies and collected finished wares.

With industrialization, the factory became a thing, and it somehow got into our heads that factories are the success model that everything else should be modeled after. Offices that don't do factory work started looking like factories. Schools started looking like factories. Public administration started looking like factories. Everything became a factory. ...this trend is hostile to human nature and relatively recent when looking at it on historical timescales.

Recent advances in telecommunications have made what little advantage there was to factory-like offices obsolete, and it's time to "return to normal". And by that I mean remote work, because remote work is "historical normal".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putting-out_system

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#96

Post by [deleted] »

WalterBright wrote: post #66
alistairSH wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except almost all white-collar offices (in the US at least) went remote during the first 2-3 years of COVID. Most did so successfully. Yet, many now want to return to traditional office work with little evidence that’s a better way to work.

I've done a lot of remote work over the decades. It starts out well, because you know your coworkers well. But, over time, those relationships fade, and people come and go at work. You lose the connection with them, and they with you. It's hardly all roses.

[deleted]

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#97

Post by ornornor »

mrtksn wrote: post #90
diego_moita wrote: post #19

I wish we stopped with the "companies should do this/should do that". Existing big companies are too comfortable and lazy for the remote work revolution. Remote work is a radical change in culture and work organization. It will take new companies with new workflows and organizational ideas to make it work well. We're not there yet. Managers don't understand yet how to do it, they need to read a lot of documentation (…

Shouldn't the workers in the rich countries be terrified of remote work? You essentially open up against competition from much cheaper places and you might end up moving there to be able to match the margins. It's not that I'm against it - IMHO freedom of movement should be absolute and people should be getting the based jobs on merits and not on nationality, it's just that all this visa stuff that makes people drown…

> Shouldn't the workers in the rich countries be terrified of remote work? You essentially open up against competition from much cheaper places and you might end up moving there to be able to match the margins.

Offshoring hasn’t been an amazing success story so far, what you save in cost you spend in fixing low quality, bridging cultural gaps, and herding workers with no skin in the game who can’t afford to gaf because they’re paid so little in comparison.

Companies will always offshore but I think it’s the jobs at the crappier companies that are offshored and these aren’t the places we typically want to work at anyway.

I’m talking about large body shops whose value proposition is “we’re cheaper and we work harder”, not about individuals around the world who are hired by 100% remote companies. The latter are typically pretty good.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#98

Post by clement_b »

For now the data may show difficulties, but at some point, people need a job, and if only onsite is offered, will 'talents' keep being picky? Not so sure someone laid off once or twice in 2023 will be. Remote as we've known it during the pandemic is not going to stay, and all those that have made a move to a city for a better (personal) life will be stuck in the mid term, if they are not lucky on their next job search what will they do? I know this isn't popular opinion, but if some level of hybrid will probably remain on the long run (e.g., WFH once/twice a week doesn't hurt productivity and provide a great improvement for QoL) I don't see remote being the new way of working we have enjoyed in 2020-22. This is gone.

edit: typo

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#99

Post by mrtksn »

ornornor wrote: post #97
mrtksn wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't the workers in the rich countries be terrified of remote work? You essentially open up against competition from much cheaper places and you might end up moving there to be able to match the margins. It's not that I'm against it - IMHO freedom of movement should be absolute and people should be getting the based jobs on merits and not on nationality, it's just that all this visa stuff that makes people drown…

> Shouldn't the workers in the rich countries be terrified of remote work? You essentially open up against competition from much cheaper places and you might end up moving there to be able to match the margins. Offshoring hasn’t been an amazing success story so far, what you save in cost you spend in fixing low quality, bridging cultural gaps, and herding workers with no skin in the game who can’t afford to gaf becau…

I agree, it wasn't a mainstream success so far but there are teams who cracked it. There are some companies who are proudly WFH-only and global.

The sweatshop model surely doesn't lead to quality but there are other models where companies open a local branch where they actually can have the company culture and yield just as good results.

I wouldn't trust too much on the "secret sauce that makes us special" theory, the secret might have been the culture which forms when working from the office.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#100

Post by BLKNSLVR »

RestlessMind wrote: post #49
alistairSH wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except almost all white-collar offices (in the US at least) went remote during the first 2-3 years of COVID. Most did so successfully. Yet, many now want to return to traditional office work with little evidence that’s a better way to work.

> with little evidence that’s a better way to work. You are assuming that decision makers are dumb. I disagree with that. My null hypothesis is that they are smart, competent people and are doing the best decision according to data they are seeing.

> You are assuming that decision makers are dumb

That's only a single aspect, whilst it's also a very wide aspect.

They may not be dumb, they may be "politically smart" and their KPIs are easiest to meet when their subordinates are in the office.

They may not be dumb, but they feel less powerful (and therefore that their position as decision maker is more vulnerable) when their workforce is outside of whipping distance.

They may not be dumb, but their idea of "normal" is not what covid hath wrought, and therefore a return to the office is a return to "normal", and thus a heaving sigh of relief can be had that we're now past that extended weirdness.

They may not be dumb, but they may not be able to understand that people are motivated differently from themselves and from each other. "I work better in the office, therefore y'all do too". (admittedly there's a bit of dumbness in that one, however that's far from saying it's unrealistic or rare).

> according to data they are seeing

Anecdotal warning: Outside of the "best of the best" kinda places, my experience is that most decision makers work on 'feel' and not data - whether data is available or not.

Post reply on HN