Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It • Hacker News Board

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#761

Post by marcosdumay » Mon, Oct 02, 2023, 9:15 PM UTC

ncallaway wrote: post #510

throwaway5959 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are allowed to have different preferences and lifestyles than the majority. I’m not a CEO so it’s not my place to decide what a company does or doesn’t do.

Right, I think it’s fine for people to have differences and differing preferences. My point is that if 5/100 people want to work in the office and 95/100 don’t, that’s fine. If 5/100 want to work in an office with 100 people, and force the others to return against their wishes that’s * not* fine. They can have their preference, but it seems wrong to me for their preference to override the preference of others. > I’m…

> then that company won’t RTO

Just about this. We've seen again and again that they will.

I don't understand what is happening well enough to explain CEOs destroying their companies before conceding this to the employees, but this is clearly a thing common enough for it to be the default expectation.

And that's my main criticism of the article. Those CEOs clearly are not doing some random bullshit. They are doing some completely intentional and heavily desired thing. IDK what is their reasoning or if it's aligned with the company's goals, but they do have the intention.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#762

Post by sdfghswe » Mon, Oct 02, 2023, 9:17 PM UTC

Tainnor wrote: post #742

sdfghswe wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure thing buddy. Are we talking about an ultimatum not to send creepy as fuck text messages to female colleagues (...) Why would anyone make an ultimatum not to send creepy text messages to female colleagues, if they're not sending creepy text messages to female colleagues?

They were giving general examples of things where giving an ultimatum in the workplace makes sense and not explicitly addressing OP's workplace behaviour. I feel like you're the only person here bringing up that OP is a furry (you, and some other comment that is thankfully dead).

Why thankfully? Are you a furry?

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#763

Post by cultureswitch » Mon, Oct 02, 2023, 9:19 PM UTC

iwonthecase wrote: post #434

ScarZy wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I echo this sentiment completely. I do 2-3 days a week in my office and I am personally mentally better off for it. That said, personally is the key word. I manage a team. I love seeing employees together and aligning on things in person where possible - but totally understand if this does not suit their schedule that day or week. It often does not work with mine. It's the small human mistakes that are innocent and s…

> I also found myself working longer hours, not having solid disconnected time To the frustration of my then boss, I noticed that I (and a lot of other coworkers) used RTO as a way to reduce our hours to ~40/week and not spend our nights and weekends with our work laptops open nearby.

When one party stops goodwill arrangements to a contract, typically the other party follows suit.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#764

Post by thinkharderdev » Mon, Oct 02, 2023, 9:24 PM UTC

The_Colonel wrote: post #677

thinkharderdev wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, a lot of people don't "work" in the office either. You're either using some sort of concrete metrics to try and measure productivity or you're not. "Bob shows up to work every day" doesn't actually tell you much about whether Bob does anything useful while he's there. I don't think figuring out who is productive and who is not is substantially different for an in-office job vs remote job. One might even argue…

It's still much easier to gauge work in person. Like if a person complains about a difficult problem 5 times in a row in daily, it makes a big difference if I glance over and see them in the IDE/terminal/stackoverflow, discussing with colleagues, drawing on the whiteboard, cursing or even sitting in the chair, apparently in deep thought. In remote, all you see is their online status (maybe).

But you don't just have their online status. You can still talk to people even if you're not in the same room. You can ask them questions about what they've tried and see if they're making any substantive progress from day to day. When they say the problem is difficult in the daily you can ask followup questions to see if they've really thought about the problem hard. If on day 4 all they can say is "it's difficult" then they are clearly not working very hard on trying to solve the problem. Once they finally do finish you can ask details about why it was so hard and judge for yourself whether it was genuinely a tricky problem or they were just slacking off.

These are all things you should do as the team lead or manager whether you are in person or remote.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#765

Post by 121789 » Mon, Oct 02, 2023, 9:24 PM UTC

lsedgwick wrote: post #649

Not to say companies should or shouldn't RTO etc, but the shocking freedom and flexibility of remote work in tech is such a gigantic class marker and insane lifestyle luxury that I'm surprised it's not more often identified a such. How few people in history have been able to travel to exotic places or visit far-off friends and family, while still making decent money, and do this almost as much as they want (supposing…

in reality I think this flexibility is overrated. traveling for long periods of time sounds exciting but will eventually for most people be isolating (you won't materially be a part of the local community, and other travelers will leave) and logistically annoying (e.g. dealing with wifi at your 3rd airbnb). most companies have restrictions on this, and there are generally only limited places you can work from.

visiting family without concern about impact to work is nice, but eventually you just really want a consistent place where you can be productive

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#766

Post by gedy » Mon, Oct 02, 2023, 9:26 PM UTC

ncallaway wrote: post #420

scottLobster wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication. So unless you have a job that requires minimal communication on a day-to-day basis, an office is superior for productivity. Perhaps if everyone working from home were constantly available to screen-share/video chat it wouldn't be as bad, but my experience with WFH is people get distracted by kids/pets/etc and half the time I wait h…

> So unless you have a job that requires minimal communication on a day-to-day basis, an office is superior for productivity. If that’s the standard then the commute time should be billed to the employer. That way they can weigh the full benefits of the productivity gain of in person communication, against the dramatic efficiency loss of 100 employees commuting to work. If employers want the productivity benefit of i…

If you are on salary (as most devs are), I think it's pretty reasonable to include commute time in "workday" and not assume 8-9 hours in office on top of that.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#767

Post by zoogeny » Mon, Oct 02, 2023, 9:28 PM UTC

revlolz wrote: post #740

zoogeny wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does bother me when that hate is directed at anyone who might make the decision to return to the office when faced with a RTO policy from their employer. The author is plainly saying such people are dehumanizing themselves. I would hate to see that kind of contempt for others spread, especially for a compromise that a large majority of people will probably make. I'm not a saint myself, but I would prefer if popula…

I did not infer any contempt from the author towards everyday people who are forced to capitulate. The author empathized with the hardest hit victims in this target: h1b workers. Those who cannot simply 'play chicken' without risking deportation. There was no contempt or hate in these words or I feel like the sentiment would have been 'they are getting what they deserve... ' I agree completely with this author about…

> forced to capitulate

There it is again. As if it isn't possible for people to just, you know, decide that it is fine and move on with their lives? Are they really "forced to capitulate"?

I recall working in an office building for a small software company. Due to the growth, the company had people working in hallways. Soon after I joined the company moved offices so they could have more space. The new building was on the other side of town. That would increase the commute for a lot of workers, like adding one hour plus to their lives. Some opted to leave the company.

Was everyone else "forced to capitulate"?

> I agree completely with this author about the dehumanizing nature of these rto mandates.

You don't agree with the quote I pulled. The author isn't calling the "nature of these rto mandates" dehumanizing. He is explicitly saying that the people who submit to this are dehumanizing themselves.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#768

Post by sensanaty » Mon, Oct 02, 2023, 9:36 PM UTC

tgma wrote: post #116

Remote "work" is fine (with pros and cons). The problem is lots of people don't "work" remotely. Also, inevitably remote/async work flips the priority such that employee would be much more responsive to interrupts/errands of their own life than to focus their full attention on the employer's concerns.

My anecdotal experience is that whenever I'm in the office, 90% of the people there do nothing but chit-chat with each other, half the time with screens turned off. And no, it's not one of those mystical magical watercooler chats that solve every single problem in the company, it's just idle chitchat about their weekend or whatever.

My direct peer whom I work with closely every day takes hours to respond when in the office, while at home it takes him a few minutes at most. PRs take 10x as long to get done when he's at the office (even on the rare occasion I'm in the office, it actually takes longer cause all he wants to do is just chat), the PRs themselves are of a lower quality and less useful etc...

> Also, inevitably remote/async work flips the priority such that employee would be much more responsive to interrupts/errands of their own life than to focus their full attention on the employer's concerns.

I mean, good? I prioritize a lot of things, arguably MOST things over work. If I had the option to do nothing yet still earn money you bet I'd do it, but since we don't live in a post-scarcity Utopia I will in the meantime give minimal effort and not let my job dictate how I live my life.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#769

Post by The_Colonel » Mon, Oct 02, 2023, 9:41 PM UTC

danaris wrote: post #748

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.

And how may of those people slacked a lot in the office, and you just never knew because they were good at looking busy whenever anyone was nearby? And how many people were much more productive because other people didn't keep popping over their cubicle walls and interrupting them? "Easy communication" can be a double-edged sword, and Slack/Discord/email can be silenced for specified periods of time.

> And how may of those people slacked a lot in the office, and you just never knew because they were good at looking busy whenever anyone was nearby?

Some of them sure, but I believe less so. In my opinion, most slacking is not a result of very intentional attempts, but more of an environment / opportunity enabling it.

> And how many people were much more productive because other people didn't keep popping over their cubicle walls and interrupting them?

My intuition is that the trade-off is worth it. Larger projects lose the most productivity on information-sharing issues. Wrong things are being worked on, with focus on wrong aspects, which then again creates more useless work. Things are being reworked constantly because of wrong assumptions, people not reading miles long specs and thus missing or misinterpreting some details. People talking to each other frequently is IMHO critical for the success of the bigger organizations.

Sometimes you need uninterrupted time for deep thinking, but that's in my experience a smaller part of the work. In such cases I either go to meeting rooms or home.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#770

Post by The_Colonel » Mon, Oct 02, 2023, 9:47 PM UTC

JSavageOne wrote: post #747

The_Colonel wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By profit sharing, I mean literally giving workers a cut of their direct contributions. That to me sounds like a bad incentive in engineering. Everybody wants to work only on new features, things like code quality, maintenance, refactoring, infrastructure don't matter anymore.

If a code refactoring can increase dev productivity and shipping speed, then that is certainly worth something - though obviously can be hard to measure. Infrastructure updates can directly reduce server costs, latency, or have other benefits. For tasks that aren't straightforward to measure impact on bottom line, perhaps their impact can be approximated via product owners setting bounties on them. In any case as imp…

> If a code refactoring can increase dev productivity and shipping speed, then that is certainly worth something

The value of that is being distributed in very small increments over the whole dev team in the span of years. It's impossible to measure.

> Infrastructure updates can directly reduce server costs, latency, or have other benefits.

Well, most of the work is in that "other benefits". Very difficult to measure.

> Employers hire employees to increase the profitability of their business, and code quality is not the top priority.

With your incentive model it has 0 priority and the project will die under the weight of technical debt, inability to add features in reasonable time and critical defects appearing out of the blue.