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Damaging results of mandated return to the office: it’s worse than we thought

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Re: Damaging results of mandated return to the office: it’s worse than we thought

#121

Post by tmpz22 »

commandlinefan wrote: post #104
wredue wrote: post #50

I reclaim 1.5 hours a day from work from home, so a mandated back to work would actually represent a 6 point pay cut on the day assuming I thought that through properly. I don’t even have an egregious commute compared to others. Never mind that all of a sudden I no longer need before and after daycare. I have a home gym and can acceptably exercise at lunch. I don’t have peer pressures to go out for lunch all the time…

> transparently a middle management “I’m still relevant!” Which makes one wonder who the people who kept posting on here how much they missed the office and wished we'd go back to the office during the pandemic actually were.

Its easy to believe RTO would be a bandaid to a degraded social life or non-optimal at home situation. And for some it might even be true. But by large your social life can and should thrive outside your job. You just have to work for it.

Re: Damaging results of mandated return to the office: it’s worse than we thought

#122

Post by bluefishinit »

elvis10ten wrote: post #98

Every time this topic comes up on HN, I see many anecdotes on why WFO is bad. My anecdote: I work from the office everyday (unforced). 20-30 minutes commute. I come in at 6am/7am and leave at 2pm/3pm. I do a 30 minutes calisthenics session and then head home and usually leave my laptop in the office (as a forcing function to disconnect). The result: I have built strong bonds with colleagues outside my team. A few of…

> I feel the ideal environment is contextual and it’s probably a hybrid work environment where people who want to work remote can but have to touch base in-person a few times every month

This necessitates living near the office/only hiring people that live near the office. I will not let my employer dictate where I live and I will not live in some of the most expensive real-estate markets in the world

Re: Damaging results of mandated return to the office: it’s worse than we thought

#123

Post by piva00 »

pc86 wrote: post #67
gottorf wrote: post #3

Of course it's too early to tell with lots of confounding variables, but labor productivity has been taking a steep dive[0]. So perhaps in the aggregate, WFH is resulting in less work being done. I say this as someone who's been full-time WFH for over a decade; I'm not taking a position one way or another. [0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MPU4910063

Here is the same chart showing an absolute value instead of percentage change. Not quite as steep of a dive - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=17uvX - in fact, nothing that could be considered a "dive" by any reasonable person.

It's much more eye opening as well, productivity per hour of labour has doubled from the baseline right before 1990, salaries have definitely not increased at the same rate.

Re: Damaging results of mandated return to the office: it’s worse than we thought

#124

Post by Freedom2 »

commandlinefan wrote: post #104
wredue wrote: post #50

I reclaim 1.5 hours a day from work from home, so a mandated back to work would actually represent a 6 point pay cut on the day assuming I thought that through properly. I don’t even have an egregious commute compared to others. Never mind that all of a sudden I no longer need before and after daycare. I have a home gym and can acceptably exercise at lunch. I don’t have peer pressures to go out for lunch all the time…

> transparently a middle management “I’m still relevant!” Which makes one wonder who the people who kept posting on here how much they missed the office and wished we'd go back to the office during the pandemic actually were.

There's a non-zero number of HNers who arguably make their job a core part of their personality that experienced significant distress when they discovered that people were fine working from home. It's the only way I can rationale people who cannot fathom that others have hobbies / friendships outside of work.

Re: Damaging results of mandated return to the office: it’s worse than we thought

#125

Post by Lutger »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #80
wredue wrote: post #50

I reclaim 1.5 hours a day from work from home, so a mandated back to work would actually represent a 6 point pay cut on the day assuming I thought that through properly. I don’t even have an egregious commute compared to others. Never mind that all of a sudden I no longer need before and after daycare. I have a home gym and can acceptably exercise at lunch. I don’t have peer pressures to go out for lunch all the time…

Ed Zitron wrote about it a lot in his newsletter a while back and I think had some really excellent insights about it. Especially these three factors: - Executives work in a way that genuinely does probably reward or even require in person interaction. A lot of their job is "intangible" human connection-building stuff with other executives, shareholders, investors, manufacturers, etc. And because of the way executive…

There are also other jobs which truly benefit from in-person interactions, for example sales people basically are basically fueled by it.

And in my experience there is a minority of people, also developers, who really enjoy working at the office, or don't do well at home.

Good managers would be busy figuring out what their people actually need to thrive and know that it is not the same for everybody.

In this case, I really hope forward thinking companies will destroy the competition and scoop up all the displeased talent that is forced to return to the office. Insofar as we have a free market, the problem will then sort itself out anyway, even though the road to get there might be ugly.

Re: Damaging results of mandated return to the office: it’s worse than we thought

#126

Post by NoZebra120vClip »

Tarball10 wrote: post #103
NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While people driving cars solo is surely a pitiable waste of time and resources, and my current commute is about 20ft from bedroom to living room, I would say that a happy medium has been my public transit-based commutes. As long as there's at least one leg with a long-haul distance (30+ minutes), I am usually able to enter a calm and meditative state, lower my blood pressure, and set aside the cares of home and work…

You can also sit out on your porch or deck in the morning before work with a cup of coffee and a podcast, and meditate, relax, or whatever you like to do to get ready for work. I've heard managers try to spin a commute as a good thing, giving you transition time between work and home, but it always comes off to me as corporate BS and nothing you can't also do at home without dealing with traffic or public transit.

> set aside the cares of home and work alike

Part of my imperfect joy in commuting to work in an office is neither being at home, nor at work, for a while. That's my POV. Sit on your porch if you want. I love the train. I have this in common with Iggy Pop and Siouxsie:

https://youtu.be/-fWw7FE9tTo

Re: Damaging results of mandated return to the office: it’s worse than we thought

#128

Post by elvis10ten »

bluefishinit wrote: post #122
elvis10ten wrote: post #98

Every time this topic comes up on HN, I see many anecdotes on why WFO is bad. My anecdote: I work from the office everyday (unforced). 20-30 minutes commute. I come in at 6am/7am and leave at 2pm/3pm. I do a 30 minutes calisthenics session and then head home and usually leave my laptop in the office (as a forcing function to disconnect). The result: I have built strong bonds with colleagues outside my team. A few of…

> I feel the ideal environment is contextual and it’s probably a hybrid work environment where people who want to work remote can but have to touch base in-person a few times every month This necessitates living near the office/only hiring people that live near the office. I will not let my employer dictate where I live and I will not live in some of the most expensive real-estate markets in the world

That’s why I said it’s contextual :) There is always a good enough balance (I think).

Some of my colleagues live outside Berlin and I think they are only required to come to the office a few times a month and they haven’t complained so far.

Re: Damaging results of mandated return to the office: it’s worse than we thought

#129

Post by mnw21cam »

pc86 wrote: post #56
seydor wrote: post #17

Hybrid work is an unstable point. An office where half people are missing / zooming is useless. remote vs fully present are the only two stable attractors

Most hybrid places are a set in-office schedule, e.g. Monday and Tuesday in-office, Wed-Fri WFH, not "be in whatever two days you want."

My experience is more that a hybrid working environment includes people who are in the office all week (because they have to pipette things and look down microscopes) and people who are never in the office (like me, because I'd rather not go into hospital with covid again, and I can do everything on the computer). That means meetings will typically be a zoom/teams thing with a load of people in a meeting room and a load of people joining individually.

Re: Damaging results of mandated return to the office: it’s worse than we thought

#130

Post by bluefishinit »

spacemadness wrote: post #120
commandlinefan wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> transparently a middle management “I’m still relevant!” Which makes one wonder who the people who kept posting on here how much they missed the office and wished we'd go back to the office during the pandemic actually were.

Yes, it seems weird so many HN folks seemed to pine for the office when the statistics show a different picture.

My guess is that there are a lot of founders (or aspiring founders) on here who have dreamed of having a team to lord over and look at everyday and now they feel that dream slipping away.

It's very common for neophyte founders to get and office (and business cards) as their first order of business, because in their mind the artifice of being "in-charge" is the actual motivation behind moving into leadership.

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