80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans • Hacker News Board

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#571

Post by mikhailfranco » Sun, Aug 13, 2023, 3:21 PM UTC

paulcole wrote: post #132

judge2020 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> employers who have a delusion that their workplace is important enough that people need to sacrifice a large portion of their lives just for the opportunity to be there in person. Being in the office only works with others in the office, so it's a balancing act between this (likely minority) group of both people managers and employees that want RTO, and the group that excels when working in their own curated, contr…

What about the group that thinks they excel when working in their own curated, controlled environment? Companies can probably get more out of average and below average people easily by forcing them into an office. That’s good enough for some companies to get by. And I say this as an average person who would get more done if I didn’t work remotely.

Upvote for a brave comment.

I was triggered by the word Excel in conjunction with average and below average, but that's just me.

Also saddened by the phrase get by. Move, if you can, and are also saddened by that phrase.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#572

Post by mikhailfranco » Sun, Aug 13, 2023, 3:31 PM UTC

MBCook wrote: post #173

jayd16 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would those people be working significantly more without supervision? I find it hard to believe.

I don’t think that’s their point. The kind of person who isn’t going to work when not stared at all day by a manager is also probably the kind of person who is going to try to LOOK busy at the office without actually having to do a lot of REAL work. Surfing the web, playing games, chatting with their friends, whatever they can get away with when someone’s not watching. Or maybe doing their real tasks really slow. The…

This is a long comment section, with many good viewpoints, but your summary is the most insightful: WFH spreads the performance distribution of pre-existing traits for attitude to work.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#573

Post by bagacrap » Sun, Aug 13, 2023, 4:01 PM UTC

tekknik wrote: post #537

bagacrap wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think "expense" is more appropriate than "tax". The difference is that you get to blame someone else for a tax, but expenses are something you bring on yourself. Victim mentality.

So having to pay $1.2mil for a 3 bedroom home instead of $300k because I need to be near the office because RTO is an expense I choose?

Obviously no one would rather pay 4x as much for the same thing. In that sense no one chooses the price of their house as they'd clearly pay $1 if they could.

But yes, you choose to pay a lot to live near work (you value your time), in a place with great weather and public schools and natural beauty (since we seem to be talking Bay Area here). The $300k house in BFE Ohio does not have these properties.

At one point in my life I chose to live in a basement for about 10% of my monthly post tax income. Why don't you choose that? Turns out you do, in fact, have agency in choosing your living conditions.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#574

Post by sitkack » Sun, Aug 13, 2023, 4:03 PM UTC

ascotan wrote: post #378

wonderwonder wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open offices are terrible. Management knows they are as well because Sr. leadership almost always have their own offices. The peons sit in the pit. Until the CEO is sitting next to everyone else they are all speaking lies when preaching the benefits of an open office. The only benefit is that its cheaper and they can keep an eye on you.

it's a millennial thing. they grew up working on laptops and their dream office is to make the workplace look like starbucks. Open seating, no cubicles, a barista. It's a knee-jerk reaction to the old office place standard of 'cubes'. Managers hire out to consultants that hype this type of office layout because it will supposedly attract a talent. To be fair, cubes weren't any better. I remember having a guy slerping…

It has absolutely nothing to do with millennials.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#575

Post by screye » Sun, Aug 13, 2023, 4:21 PM UTC

mtlguitarist wrote: post #555

commonlisp94 wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, I left out a lot of life situations that could benefit. Let me be a little more specific: - if you're young you probably want to be around others to learn from. - if you're not well established, you want others to know you and see your impact. - if you're struggling financially or to find a job, you probably don't want to compete with the whole world for basic employment (especially against low cost of…

The young people I know hate going into the office, it's all the older folks that want to go in. I've been almost entirely remote since I've graduated and haven't missed being in person at all. I've developed my skills more being left alone and having time to read and learn on my own than I ever have being forced to sit in an office and struggle to be productive. I'm absolutely not established, but I've had no issues…

Yeah, the only young people who I know want to go into the office are interns and fresh-grads. There is a lot of in person upskilling that happens in those years, but after that, learning is effectively self-guided.

There are 2 kinds of jobs in tech. Demanding jobs and chill jobs.

Demanding jobs involve effectively resigning your life to the company for 5 days of the week. The hours saved on commute and ability to actually get chores done between at-home downtime allows people to put a lot more hours from home than from an office.

Chill jobs on the other hand, lead to a terrible commute vs hours worked ratio. You're in the office for 40 hours of the week, but spend 5 hours commuting, 5 hours chilling during lunch break, and another 5 hours waiting in line to select one of 10 fancy coffees. That's effectively 30 hours of work, 10 hours of in-office loitering and 5 hours of out of office mind-numbing commute. Make those same people work 'real' 40 hours from home and you'd see a 30% productivity increase just from hours saved. Remote employees take meetings during lunch, coffee is instantaneous and there is no commute.

People complain about how much better in-person meetings are. But, have we even tried to make remote work palatable. Slack and Zoom are terrible tools for remote work. Give every employee a 2000$ digital whiteboard. Make them stand and give their presentations using better cameras. Use gather.town to make collisions feel more natural. Guess what? with remote work, all your meetings & interactions can be captured. You can send out meetings summaries & key screenshots for every interaction without ever lifting your finger. But nope, remote work is relegated to having the same in-person secondary tools (zoom, slack) without leveraging new primary tools that work well for remote work.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#576

Post by wlonkly » Sun, Aug 13, 2023, 4:56 PM UTC

ascotan wrote: post #378

wonderwonder wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open offices are terrible. Management knows they are as well because Sr. leadership almost always have their own offices. The peons sit in the pit. Until the CEO is sitting next to everyone else they are all speaking lies when preaching the benefits of an open office. The only benefit is that its cheaper and they can keep an eye on you.

it's a millennial thing. they grew up working on laptops and their dream office is to make the workplace look like starbucks. Open seating, no cubicles, a barista. It's a knee-jerk reaction to the old office place standard of 'cubes'. Managers hire out to consultants that hype this type of office layout because it will supposedly attract a talent. To be fair, cubes weren't any better. I remember having a guy slerping…

I would definitely prefer good cubicles over open assigned desks. (I mean, with open desks or cubicles, I would ask the other person to stop slurping loudly.)

But "good" is the key there. I worked at an office in 2001 which had a cubicle system that was probably only a year or two old. The desks were wood (probably veneer) with nice big keyboard shelves, as was the style at the time. The panels were either grey metal or red fabric, and they stepped up and down so that beside your close coworker there might be only a 4' wall, and then a 6' wall to the "hallway".

Immediately after that, through an acquisition, we were in an office whose cubicles were probably from the 80s, and they were all 6' well-worn beige fabric panels, which despite being private and relatively quiet were just so ugly and energy-draining.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#577

Post by starttoaster » Sun, Aug 13, 2023, 5:12 PM UTC

ascotan wrote: post #378

wonderwonder wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open offices are terrible. Management knows they are as well because Sr. leadership almost always have their own offices. The peons sit in the pit. Until the CEO is sitting next to everyone else they are all speaking lies when preaching the benefits of an open office. The only benefit is that its cheaper and they can keep an eye on you.

it's a millennial thing. they grew up working on laptops and their dream office is to make the workplace look like starbucks. Open seating, no cubicles, a barista. It's a knee-jerk reaction to the old office place standard of 'cubes'. Managers hire out to consultants that hype this type of office layout because it will supposedly attract a talent. To be fair, cubes weren't any better. I remember having a guy slerping…

Hmm, I think it’s more a managerial thing than a millennial thing. I don’t know a single millennial that wants to sit in open floorplan offices. Just because something happened when our generation entered the workforce doesn’t mean we were the driving force for it. Maybe millennials also caused climate change, as far as I know that started becoming a recognized problem around the time we were born. Expensive housing is on us too.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#578

Post by starttoaster » Sun, Aug 13, 2023, 5:20 PM UTC

wizofaus wrote: post #548

gardenhedge wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mine are also useless. Communicating with your team is super important but the mandatory status checkin when team members are working on unrelated things is pointless and draining.

That's a definition of "team" I've never heard before - "people working on unrelated things".

Pretty common in “DevOps” teams, in my experience. Some people are working on some autoscaling CI runner server initiative, some are working on writing code, some are fixing issues in CI pipelines, some are hardening the security of kubernetes clusters, etc. Their goals are completely unrelated to the others but is all work that falls under their team’s umbrella, and needs doing.

Equally common in operations roles for the same reasons. Lots of servers and networking gear. You might be changing failed hard drives in a RAID array while someone else is patching servers while somebody else is upgrading some 20 year old Cisco firewall. None of these three people rely on the work the other is doing. Especially if they’re working in different server cabinets.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#579

Post by closeparen » Sun, Aug 13, 2023, 5:25 PM UTC

bagacrap wrote: post #573

tekknik wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So having to pay $1.2mil for a 3 bedroom home instead of $300k because I need to be near the office because RTO is an expense I choose?

Obviously no one would rather pay 4x as much for the same thing. In that sense no one chooses the price of their house as they'd clearly pay $1 if they could. But yes, you choose to pay a lot to live near work (you value your time), in a place with great weather and public schools and natural beauty (since we seem to be talking Bay Area here). The $300k house in BFE Ohio does not have these properties. At one point i…

We have agency in that we could choose to renounce careers in tech. That’s it.

There is a price/quality tradeoff in every housing market; all complaints about price can be interpreted as insufficient willingness to compromise on quality. A cardboard box under a bridge is free! “You’re actually obscenely wealthy because you don’t live in a basement and drive 6 hours to work” is not the argument you think it is. Tech workers are telling you how they feel about Bay Area weather, schools, and transportation every time they complain about RTO. We all want nothing more than to get the fuck away from here. Nothing more except, perhaps, to do the work we were meant to do.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#580

Post by generic92034 » Sun, Aug 13, 2023, 6:04 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #493

generic92034 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why did SV companies fire a lot of employees recently, if the severance and WARN act outweigh the positive impact on the share prices?

> So why did SV companies fire a lot of employees recently, if the severance and WARN act outweigh the positive impact on the share prices? I didn’t say they did. I said that if you can get people to leave voluntarily , that’s better for the financials. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t conditions where the best available option (from a serving the shareholders perspective) is layoffs. Just that, ceteris paribus ,…

Well, my impression regarding the latest rounds of layoffs is that they are intentionally trying to create headlines about those layoffs. The C level is more interested in higher share prices than they are interested in costs for the layoffs themselves. But, admittedly, it is hard to prove the truth of such an impression.