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

Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

801–810 of 838 posts

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#801

Post by spookieboogie »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #753
spookieboogie wrote: post #62

Nope. My previous employer tried this in ~2021 with the intention of demanding a full RTO as soon as they possibly could after decades of being a cubicle farm. I immediately left for a company that adapted to remote-first and never looked back My commute time has turned into workout and cooking time, (as expected I'm in the best shape of my life,) my only coworker is my spouse and best friend, I get to live closer to…

>my only coworker is my spouse and best friend TBH that's the part that scares me. I feel this is yet another avenue of socialization that is closing down in modern young adult life. People kept saying that the best place post college to meet friends is at work, and now some industries are going the direction where work may not even have coworkers in your area. So where now if you don't drink? Hope to hit it off in s…

There are many institutions for this that have been around for longer than you and I have been alive. Most of which I've been able to contribute at a regional level due to having time not commuting or being drained from being in an office all day

Local meetups, sports clubs, classes, hobby clubs (think board games, chess, ham radio, LARP), conventions, church if you're religiously inclined

And with the advent of the internet, there are forums, if not large social media groups, for all kinds of interests designed around connecting people. For example, I'm really into homebrewing consoles, so I'm in a few discord servers with others who share the same interests, and I like playing certain games online, so I keep contact with a few good people who I play with regularly

If all else fails, I find that most people get at least one acquaintance during their school years or still have family of some sort. Definitely ymmv if they were toxic in any way, but if not, you already have a foot in the door for maintaining a healthy connection to them

I apologize if this post sounds condescending or like I'm just preaching common sense, but sometimes it's easy to take these kinds of social groups for granted or overlook them in our hyperdigital age. There's so much toxic irony growing up as a millenial on the internet that made me think 'I'll never be like those losers' as a teen that evolved into 'Wow, they had it figured out all along' as an adult

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#802

Post by lampshades »

smoldesu wrote: post #800
lampshades wrote: post #798

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me guess, you're autistic too?

Nope, just insufferable (apparently). Mostly just shocked that this is what the site comes to, but I should have known better.

Understandable.

Yeah, I'm a dick online, it's an outlet. No hard feelings.

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#803

Post by btbuildem »

Zetice wrote: post #248
btbuildem wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't. The push for open-plan spaces was motivated by cost-cutting. Layouts with many closed offices would cost far more to build, and take up more square footage to host the same number of employees. At a time where savvy businesses have dropped their commercial leases / gone full remote, and the more conservative / less accepting of change ones are left holding the bag, I would not expect anyone to make big inve…

It's a common but incorrect belief that many small individual offices is a substantially more expensive buildout option.

[dead]

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#804

Post by smeej »

steveBK123 wrote: post #533
smeej wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many of the comments are acting as though the underling employee actually is of a different class. I'd bet anything this young person is used to having his family name make him welcome at any table he wishes to join, even in the Hamptons. He's on the well-worn path through a brief stint as a junior analyst before he's running some bank or hedge fund somewhere and the CEO of GS hesitates to approach his table. This…

You just made up a scenario that has a less than 50% probability of being true, in order to.. come to the defense of a CEO worth $100M+ ? LOL cmon man.

How is this a defense of the CEO? The CEO comes out looking not just like an ass, but an ignorant one.

When someone acts as entitled to be where they are and do what they do as that junior analyst to that CEO, it's because their life experience so far has told them, consistently, that they have every right to. It even mentions that he points out his other associates.

He's acting like he's meeting someone who's, at best, an equal, because from his perspective, he is.

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#806

Post by johnnyanmac »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #790
johnnyanmac wrote: post #766

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a family, neighbors, close friends I see frequently and less close friends I see occasionally I guess some people have all the luck. By the time I graduated: - my family was across the country - neighbors have never been really friends - close friends mostly went to San Fransico. No one was in my town. - Meetups didn't form any relationships. If there was no work I'd just be lonely, and not for the lack of t…

I have experienced all of these things as well, it's not luck that changed it but time and effort. Except meetups, never seen a real friendship come out of those.

how much time? I was trying for 2 years pre-pandemic and then I've been trying to slowly ramp up this year. Sad part is I'm not sure if the 3 or so years I lost from the pandemic would have even made a difference.

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#808

Post by Zetice »

btbuildem wrote: post #803
Zetice wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a common but incorrect belief that many small individual offices is a substantially more expensive buildout option.

[dead]

You do all of that already for buildouts, you're pretending like this isn't a marginal cost question when in reality it is.

And I never said you would retain 100% of the space exactly as it is in an open plan, I said it is not wildly more expensive when you're already building out the floor.

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#809

Post by giraffe_lady »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #806
giraffe_lady wrote: post #790

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have experienced all of these things as well, it's not luck that changed it but time and effort. Except meetups, never seen a real friendship come out of those.

how much time? I was trying for 2 years pre-pandemic and then I've been trying to slowly ramp up this year. Sad part is I'm not sure if the 3 or so years I lost from the pandemic would have even made a difference.

I'm old and my oldest social ties go back decades now. I think it usually takes 2-5 years of consistent interaction for someone to transition from acquaintance to friend. Neighbors takes years and is just constantly pretty uncomfortable & awkward until eventually it isn't. People come and go too you just roll with it. Most of my closest friends now I didn't know ten years ago. Some of them I won't know in ten years. It's just like that.

At one point I went to a lot of tech meetups and I think they're cool for other reasons but not for forming meaningful relationships. The things that have been most fruitful in that are ones that bring people together for value-based reasons: religion, volunteering, organizing for a specific local cause or movement.

In between are activity-based things like book clubs, sports leagues or game groups. They are good for meeting people to hang out with but individuals in them tend to be transient and I haven't formed many deep friendships from them. Sometimes the line gets blurry though, like martial arts dojos & boxing gyms are activity-based but tend to form tight bonds.

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#810

Post by johnnyanmac »

spookieboogie wrote: post #801
johnnyanmac wrote: post #753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>my only coworker is my spouse and best friend TBH that's the part that scares me. I feel this is yet another avenue of socialization that is closing down in modern young adult life. People kept saying that the best place post college to meet friends is at work, and now some industries are going the direction where work may not even have coworkers in your area. So where now if you don't drink? Hope to hit it off in s…

There are many institutions for this that have been around for longer than you and I have been alive. Most of which I've been able to contribute at a regional level due to having time not commuting or being drained from being in an office all day Local meetups, sports clubs, classes, hobby clubs (think board games, chess, ham radio, LARP), conventions, church if you're religiously inclined And with the advent of the…

>Local meetups, sports clubs, classes, hobby clubs (think board games, chess, ham radio, LARP), conventions, church if you're religiously inclined

Of course YMMV based on hobby, area, personality, and overall luck but: I haven't had luck with most of these and its not for the lack of trying

- I tried meetups for years pre-pandemic, and I could never quite get a constant connection going. "Flake" culture hit me hard whenever I tried doing something outside of the meetup. Post pandemic I can definitely tell a certain change has happened. I was optimistically hoping that maybe others would be more willing to go out and meet people live, but it seems to have had the opposite effect. Things simply feel more dead than before.

- Conventions theoretically sounded like the perfect situation... and I learned quickly that conventions are very much more "come with friends" sorts of fairs. You can still talk to people in happy hour, but not really expect anything deeper from a con. It seems you'd only go further if expecting a business connection, and I wasn't.

- Not particularly religious so church isn't an option. But after my current ordeals, I "understand" church now. It's not the kind of scene that is for me, though.

Classes are going to be my next faire once I get my finances re-stabilized. I tried a few online classes over the pandemic and they were about what I feared they'd be: go into a class with mostly cameras off, with some sort of discord/slack server that is mostly dead. So maybe live classes can get that feeling back.

>If all else fails, I find that most people get at least one acquaintance during their school years or still have family of some sort.

my old friends and family are fine. just long distance. So not really much option. Parents will contact me once a month but the thing with friends is that they can just pop in/out of chats/calls for months on end. Last non-local friend I talked to was in June? And it was a very brief chat. Time before that must have been in January or so.

>And with the advent of the internet, there are forums, if not large social media groups, for all kinds of interests designed around connecting people.

And to be frank I blame this for it being so hard to locally connect. I don't know how or who are the kinds of people that can talk on Reddit or Instagram or Hacker News and think "this person is someone I want to DM and talk to IRL". Forums just feel like the modern bar scene but online. Nice to share some shallow bonding with but at the end of the day they stay more as a bar friend. Not someone you'd bring around to your house or whatnot.

But at least bars had a face to connect to so I can see how those connections can form. Here, I'm not sure if I'm talking to a teenager or an older person who's well past making friends in lieu of family.

Post reply on HN