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

Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

soatok.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

701–710 of 913 posts

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#701

Post by datacruncher01 »

I think the cat is out of the bag, didn't suffer in productivity from WFH and in fact many companies posted some of their best quarters. They got giddy on the returns and overhired and overspent, now credit is expensive and they are tightening back. Enforcing RTO is an easy way for most companies to cut 10% or more of the workforce.

Realistically these companies are going to lose out to companies that have embraced remote work. The benefits of not having that expensive downtown real estate and being able to hire talent from anywhere are too good.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#702

Post by mceachen »

cm2012 wrote: post #675
mceachen wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...timezones

1-3 hour Timezone difference is nothing

Absolutely agreed.

It's 10+ hour differences that can be rough for everyone involved--async communication is low bandwidth, and it can be brutal and erosive for either party to get up early or stay up late just to have some common work hours.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#703

Post by superwalker »

cj wrote: post #633
ndriscoll wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know when the Fed/government might stop lying about it, but inflation was immediately obvious to me, and should've been to anyone with assets and who tracked those assets' value. My net worth in Mint grew 38% from Feb 2020 - Feb 2021 (so from the high before the big dip in March 2020) during a time when everyone was talking about supply chain disruptions, delays, lockdowns, etc. My manager and I would regula…

I think this is where the "inflation is transitory" catchphrase was born. "Yes, we see all of these price changes, but don't worry it will go back to normal after the pandemic" ... which people went along with for a while, until it was clear that prices weren't dropping back to normal.

Inflation being transitory doesn’t imply prices will ever go down though. That was just people not understanding how inflation works.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#704

Post by VBprogrammer »

ajmurmann wrote: post #429
VBprogrammer wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one thing which wasn't obvious to me early on is that halving the number of office days doesn't half the requirements for desk space. In my experience people have a strong preference for going in on similar days, particularly Tuesday and Thursday. So if you ask all of your employees to come in 2 days a week you end up needing desks for almost every employee. The result in my experience is you have either full…

Also, what's the point of going into the office if nobody else is there? My department had a hybrid model for a bit with a fabulous, newly built-out office. I liked seeing people in person a couple times a week. However, if I go in and nobody from my team is there or we need to still call in to meetings as if we were at home, what's the point?

Yeah, definitely. The only real value I've had from going in is when we've got some kind of social event planned (over teams / zoom this sucks) and when we've gone in with the specific plan of talking about a how we can implement a new feature which is complex and touches multiple teams (which also sucks to do online).

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#705

Post by abustamam »

lazide wrote: post #596
_puk wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Granted. If you want something set in stone, add it to your contract. If it's a general policy that "we are remote", but your contract wasn't updated to reflect that, then don't be surprised if it changes.

If the general policy is updated to ‘remote is forever’, save a copy - that’s part of your contract too! If it gets changed in a way that causes you injury, guess what - you can be and should be compensated. If you can prove these things, then it should even be relatively easy to do so. Contract law is not just things that say ‘contract’ on them. It is about agreements between parties. Also, talk to a lawyer so they…

When people say "talk to a lawyer" how does one go about finding a lawyer? Like in this case, would it be an employment lawyer, a contract lawyer? And what sorts of rates could we expect? Obviously it varies depending on the contract, but I always see people advise that people talk to a lawyer when doing XYZ which makes sense, but I never understood the exact process for this.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#706

Post by Hermitian909 »

bit_logic wrote: post #664
The_Colonel wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then COVID happened and companies worked fine for three years with WFH. I don't think we have good data on that "worked fine" part. Personally I saw a significant degradation of our team performance during COVID remote. Some people slacked a lot (difficult to catch, though), many people worked hard (perhaps even harder than in office), but the bad communication reduced the overall team productivity a lot.

Where's the data? Before COVID, there were plenty of anecdotes from remote companies about how it helped their hiring and productivity, but that wasn't enough to convince the vast majority of companies to try WFH. They stubbornly said the status quo of in-office was enough and no further discussion was allowed. Now where's the data to change the status quo from WFH to the office? Amazon admits they have none. If the…

Talking to lots of middle and upper management, the primary complaints I hear are hard to measure - poorer communication, less alignment, less innovation, etc. None of this reduces the number of tasks being done, but reduces the utility of those tasks. Measuring directly is hard, but ultimately you'd expect it result in lower growth - which many companies are seeing (but it's hard to disentangle this from the macro situation).

I think the hard reality is that companies need to make a thesis on the level of flexibility in remote/in-office work and commit, then 5 years from now we'll get an idea of what works well.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#707

Post by Kye »

KMag wrote: post #427
peterleiser wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We work, on average, 365.25 days per year. But we're not heartless, leap seconds are always PTO.

Tell me you use the Julian calendar, without telling me you use the Julian calendar.

I prefer the julienne calendar where entire years run in parallel.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#708

Post by bloopernova »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #139
bloopernova wrote: post #125

WFH: No commute. Disabled people can work. Less micro plastics in the environment from car tires. Potentially lower greenhouse emissions. No office means no costs from rent, heating/cooling, cleaning, furniture, etc etc. Spending time around your family. (Although on that last one, I really dislike kids screaming in the background of conference calls) Edited to add: I wonder how to compare energy usage or emissions?…

Why didn’t you list the negatives? And in a John Stewart Mill way, list the negatives in their most sincere and effective forms by the people that truly believe them. Not just your take that you happen to easily to refute. Steelman RTO from the point of a company dealing with WFH abuse and I’ll think you are more serious.

Why are you so invested in saying people "abuse" WFH? You've made several comments in this thread stating as such.

What is your definition of abusing WFH?

How much time do you think a person should work each week?

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#709

Post by gburdell3 »

falcolas wrote: post #291
mc32 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some or many people are just as productive working from home, but also many are not and are more productive in an office environment. There need to be better more reliable ways of measuring this and affording those who are able to be productive while remote the option. Those who aren’t as productive WFH don’t get the choice.

> also many are not and are more productive in an office environment I see this assertion every time the WFH/RTO topic is brought up, but there's never any data to back it up. Mind changing that?

When I work from home, I watch 8 hours of Twitch and get 0 work done. When I work from the office, I watch 0 hours of Twitch and get 8 hours of work done. I simply don't have the self-control to effectively work from home. That's all the data I need.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#710

Post by kridsdale3 »

sys_64738 wrote: post #327
bradly wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a remote worker at Apple pre-pandemic and had no problems. After COVID I was told that moving states where I live would have to get some approval and is not guaranteed. I left Apple shortly after and have been contracting since. When I was in an office full time, I had to work my life around my work. When I have forty hours to fill out over a seven day period, I'm working my work around my life.

Why didn't you just move states and ask "forgiveness" later? Companies cannot tell you where and when to live and if they try it see who blinks first. I would certainly have ignored them and let them fire me or RIF me.

I told Apple in 2015 that I was moving from California to Washington. They said they can't support that. I said goodbye.
Post reply on HN