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?

#101

Post by ilaksh » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:23 PM UTC

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…

If you can connect or collaborate in a hallway, you can also do so in a Discord channel (or whatever tool).

There are also several good applications for internet collaboration that simulate a rich shared 2d or 3d or video space.

Or things like GitHub issues and Wikis.

Networking, mentorship, company culture, etc. can all happen over the internet. You make it part of the company culture to use the remote collaboration tools for these things routinely.

So if it's someone's job to mentor someone else then you tell them and the other person getting mentored. That 100% can be done with a text chat. But you can also do screen shares, remote code collaboration, voice and video chats, or simply an at mention in a GitHub issue. If one or both employees cannot or will not use the tools and accomplish this mentorship then you warn them and if they continue to refuse then you fire them.

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

#102

Post by jpeterson » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:23 PM UTC

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 directly leads to any of the productivity gain that the anti-remote crowd would like you to believe.

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

#103

Post by fishcrackers » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:23 PM UTC

0xB31B1B wrote: post #21

I’m a CTO at a small startup, not forcing RTO on anyone BUT the vibe I get in my peer group is that managers don’t know how to manage remote teams, don’t want to do real performance management, and they personally have some loneliness issues they solve by working from the office. I work from an office with my cofounder 1 day/week, and it has been great for my mental health to leave my living room. I think broadly spe…

sounds like it would be effective if the cto was in latam too

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

#104

Post by bawolff » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:24 PM UTC

amf12 wrote: post #32

eerikkivistik wrote: post #6

Some problems are solved faster by multiple people getting together in front of a whiteboard and drawing. For those kinds of problems it’s useful to have people in the same room until we have AR solutions that can fill that need. Also for some people, not leaving their home caused significant issues in their performance. People aren’t solitary creatures, so for some - the office fills that role. For others, home offi…

> Some problems are solved faster by multiple people getting together in front of a whiteboard and drawing. I hear this often, and it makes sense, but I am not sure how frequently do people solve problems with whiteboarding? Is it such a frequent problem that we need to be in the office every day?

I'm not sure i have ever solved a problem at a white board in my entire career.

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

#105

Post by thisarticle » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:24 PM UTC

snozolli wrote: post #87

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…

Every element you mention as being part of an in-office experience has been completely absent from my career. Never made a connection that proved valuable later on. Never received any mentorship or even any guidance, I was always simply given a task and expected to complete it. Company culture doesn't even feel like a real thing outside of HR blurbs. Spontaneous collaboration was outweighed by interruptions and meddl…

> Never made a connection that proved valuable later on. Never received any mentorship or even any guidance

That sounds awful, none of your senior or principal engineers offered/provided any mentorship?

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

#106

Post by treis » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:24 PM UTC

klyrs wrote: post #65

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.

I'm working within minutes of waking up, and shower during my lunch break -- taking about 20 minutes total, instead of the hour spent on an office lunch. I take a minute or ten to do chores like laundry, meal prep or dishes, usually no more than twice a day -- in the office, I take similar length breaks and often end up socializing with others. I often find overlooked solutions during my breaks, which are spaced out…

>That isn't abusing WFH

Did anyone say it was?

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

#107

Post by JohnFen » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:24 PM UTC

jonathankoren wrote: post #83

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 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…

This. I think of this every time I hear the "spontaneous connection" argument. Decades ago, this was true, but it hasn't been true anywhere I've worked for at least 15 years.

Now, even when people are all in the office, very nearly 100% of the communications are done via chat programs (even to the person next to you) or email. For good reason, really. It minimizes the risk of interrupting someone deep in the flow.

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

#108

Post by thrashh » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:24 PM UTC

snozolli wrote: post #87

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…

Every element you mention as being part of an in-office experience has been completely absent from my career. Never made a connection that proved valuable later on. Never received any mentorship or even any guidance, I was always simply given a task and expected to complete it. Company culture doesn't even feel like a real thing outside of HR blurbs. Spontaneous collaboration was outweighed by interruptions and meddl…

I haven’t worked at a FAANG but I still hang with people from old jobs. Idk it’s pretty normal to be able to make friends at most jobs

I think you just had bad luck

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

#109

Post by treebeard901 » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:25 PM UTC

Employers are locked into all these commercial real estate transactions and since it's a big part of the budget, they have to utilize it. The alternative is a realization that without the performative part of office politics most of the stage is unnecessary since in most companies the core business ultimately is done by a small group of people. Often similar with tech teams... Management and middle management without the meetings and performances to prove their need and value require everyone in the office to be in attendance as an audience. Otherwise it's just even more obvious how much is needed for the core business to be profitable and succeed.

So far Twitter has been a good example. Now for workers, it's important to go back for other reasons. Remote workers reduce your power negotiating as an employee and it's a much larger pool to even get hired. Being able to be in person becomes an emoloyment advantage at that point.

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

#110

Post by cj » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 7:25 PM UTC

Waterluvian wrote: post #28

cloudwalking wrote: post #4

People need social connections with their peers to work together successfully. It's much easier to build these connections in the office than virtually. Seeing each other a couple times per quarter for an extended period could also work, but it's easier--if you already have an office space--to bring people together in the office once or twice a week.

Five years in office. Five years fully remote with a team of dozens of fully remote engineers. I find the latter, in my experience, to be strictly superior in all ways including working together successfully despite being remote. I think we overrate the need to build in-person social rapports. Just be a professional. I think there’s a concept where often work colleagues become friends and we misidentify that as being…

Similar story here. 5 years in person, 5 years running a fully remote company (remote before Covid, not because of).

I agree, for the most part. It's not too hard to build good working relationships within a small team that's remote.

One notable challenge, though, is developing working relationships between different teams and cross-departments. In-office, it's easier because you likely at least know of the people on the marketing/sales/service team by running into people in the hall or at lunch. Remote, it's not unheard of to (literally) never interact with other departments at all.

So in remote, cross-department projects like "let's launch a new marketing site" become more difficult to orchestrate because the engineers simply don't know the people they're working with in (for example) Marketing until the project starts.

Granted, this issue isn't completely unique to remote work. At big 200+ person companies, even when 100% in-person, you won't know everyone and you'll face the same challenges. But for a 10-50 person company, it's pretty easy for everyone to know everyone when in-person. Still possible when remote, but it has to be encouraged at the management level since intermingling between departments for fun isn't something that most people will do on their own unless directed to.

Remote works really well for task-oriented jobs (like engineering, where you're assigned a Jira ticket to complete) especially when you're working with a small group of people every day. Remote starts to become challenging as an engineer if you're in a position where you need to frequently (and quickly) build working relationships with people on other teams to complete cross-departmental projects where collaboration is necessary.

This is also where good product managers can really come in handy. Good product managers will be able to handle the cross-team relationships, manage expectations, gather/communicate requirements (offloading that overhead from engineers).