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

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

#651

Post by watwut »

Volundr wrote: post #575
lairv wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least three you can count me in as well It's funny how people (in this thread and in general when the topic comes) find infuriating the idea of making friends or just socialize at work, when most friendships starts because some people happen to spend 8h/day at the same school/university

> It's funny how people (in this thread and in general when the topic comes) find infuriating the idea of making friends or just socialize at work I have yet to see someone find this idea "infuriating". What people find infuriating is people who want to drag everyone else back to the office so they can pretend we are friends. > most friendships starts because some people happen to spend 8h/day at the same school/univ…

I did find it annoying. The most annoying thing is I seen people doing then being treated as some kind of hard worker - but they were not. They did not produced more or anything. They just spent s lot of time socializing. And if you want to compete, you then have to stay late and move your socialization to work too.

Which has obvious impact on spouse kids and genuine friendships outside of work.

I would not mind it, if people socializing in work would not pretended their socialization is work.

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

#652

Post by Vanit »

Employee here, I really enjoyed full remote work during the pandemic, but I have to admit after 6 months I started to feel pretty lonely. I think for mental health reasons employees should be encouraged to at least do hybrid, but I do expect my workplace to also provide flexibility to suit everyone's needs. If I had kids I'd probably try to be remote as possible.

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

#653

Post by watwut »

projectazorian wrote: post #617
Gigachad wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably would have been better if I hadn’t moved out of my parents house. For a brief moment I was living the dream in the city with a 5 minute walk to work, then I found myself remote working sitting on a Monday thinking about the dinner party with friends I’ve planned for Saturday for the weekly social interaction.

Your username is “gigachad” and you never considered the option of going to a gym on weekdays? Not going to say I have made lifetime friends at the gym but I have nice conversations with other regulars fairly often, it’s a good serotonin top-up. Even works for finding romantic partners as well if you’re not creepy about it, in fact two regulars at my gym just got married. There’s always the bar as well but of course…

To be fair, gym is fairly individual activity here. You will be seen as annoying if you try to interact with others.

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

#654

Post by closeparen »

nostromo wrote: post #369
65 wrote: post #342

I'm in my 20s. I live alone in a city where I don't know anyone. Remote work destroyed my mental health. All I wanted was to be able to go into an office and talk to a real life person. I would go weeks at a time not talking to a single person in real life. I don't think people understand the plight of the young office worker until they've experienced the torture of solitary confinement. Day in, day out. All alone. I…

Working in person isn't the issue here -- not having friends is the issue. People do make friends at work, and that's a good thing. But it should never be your primary place of making friends. (Friends and family won't lay you off like a job might. Having a network outside of work is critical if that ever happens.) Asking your coworkers to come into the office just so you can get some needed face time with other peop…

All the friendships I’ve ever had have been, like, do something together for a few hours every couple of weekends. The only thing remotely on the scale of office life is a family.

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

#655

Post by dgoodell »

I work as an engineer at NASA in Cleveland, Ohio. We went from 100% in person work to completely remote work for a year and half due to the pandemic, and now the work environment is mainly in-person but remote work is much more common. I often work in a lab with physical hardware which obviously requires me to be present. Additionally, we don't produce anything per se, we do tech development. I'm not cranking out widgets/code/whatever where my productivity is easy to objectively judge.

Here are some reasons I could imagine in-person work may be advantageous:

-I think there is probably an increase in camaraderie when people can interact with each other in-person.

-Spontaneous unstructured collaboration and innovation absolutely increases in-person. We rarely have informal asides after a Teams meeting, but it happens a lot after in-person meetings.

-Hiring new inexperienced people who are from out-of-town and having them start 100% remote is generally a bad experience and they pick things more slowly.

-People that working from home abuse it and multitask by running errands, watching their kids, etc. This is great for employees and I would guess that it is a large part of the reason that many employees are loathe to go back to work 100% of the time. Productivity can be difficult to track.

-The NASA network is very reliable and under our complete control. Remote work depends on each person's home internet connection/router/wifi and it's MUCH slower and less reliable. I often deal with large quantities of data and and the only way to work with it is locally on the same network it's produced on. Sure I can remote in, but then we're back to depending on public internet infrastructure. Sometimes things break so I guess I can't work on that today.

A related thought: -If large percentage of the workforce depends on the complex public internet infrastructure to perform work, that creates a possible weak point in their operations that could be affected by adversaries or maybe a natural disaster or something. I get that many people here do work that would cease to have any purpose if the internet disappeared so there's less disadvantage to remote work. But most industries use the internet for convenience, it isn't fundamental to their existence and everything they do could be done without it.

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

#656

Post by calsy »

65 wrote: post #342

I'm in my 20s. I live alone in a city where I don't know anyone. Remote work destroyed my mental health. All I wanted was to be able to go into an office and talk to a real life person. I would go weeks at a time not talking to a single person in real life. I don't think people understand the plight of the young office worker until they've experienced the torture of solitary confinement. Day in, day out. All alone. I…

Why get paid while your socialising with people in a work environment when you can isolate yourself at home and talk to randoms on the street or join clubs at your own expense and time. Friends can be made anywhere BUT work now apparently.

Why do kids need to go back to school? They can sit at a desk at home. They can make friends elsewhere and they don't need to go to school for physical activity. They can do that in any club, group meet, sport, hobby whatever. Schools for learning after all, not making friends.

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

#657

Post by trieste92 »

65 wrote: post #342

I'm in my 20s. I live alone in a city where I don't know anyone. Remote work destroyed my mental health. All I wanted was to be able to go into an office and talk to a real life person. I would go weeks at a time not talking to a single person in real life. I don't think people understand the plight of the young office worker until they've experienced the torture of solitary confinement. Day in, day out. All alone. I…

It isn't just you, but also consider that this kind of situation is somewhat common now and probably won't last

> And here I am, again, in the torture of solitary confinement.

If you spending time alone is torture, is it torture because of the loneliness or is it torture because you aren't at peace with yourself?

I get that connection is needed, but if you're in a situation where it's inconvenient or hard to find you shouldn't be attacking yourself because of this

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

#658

Post by ftcHn »

leros wrote: post #590
jpeterson wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 dire…

I would probably say that 95% of my creative problem solving type work happened in unstructured conversations like hallway conversations. A lot of value was definitely lost there.

+1

Some of my best ideas that ended up being company changing started as a conversation walking to lunch with colleagues.

Initially these ideas were just undeveloped thoughts and I would never dream about booking a meeting to present them. Having a chance to develop them in a casual conversation might have been the difference between successfully building the thing and not doing it at all.

I love working from home but miss the unstructured collaboration.

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

#659

Post by watwut »

ineptech wrote: post #264
gemstones wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes. I echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work. Do you have specific examples of valuable collaboration in one of these environments? > Edit: full disclosure, I’m not an employer but I sympathize and spent a lot of time thinking about these things as…

> I echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work. Do you have specific examples of valuable collaboration in one of these environments? I can think of lots, and am surprised anyone would say otherwise - I guess you must be using a really high bar for "meaningful". An example might be, "You know, I didn't want to say anything in the meeting, but doesn'…

> example might be, "You know, I didn't want to say anything in the meeting, but doesn't Greg's data lake proposal sound exactly like the project that failed two years ago?"

The failure there is that the person is afraid to tell that in the meeting. He or she has to rely on backchannel.

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

#660

Post by scrollaway »

ravenstine wrote: post #636
scrollaway wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meetup works great in many cities and plenty of young people use it. If you’re joining a tricot or bingo group though don’t be surprised at finding yourself surrounded with “retirement age” members. In some cities it’s unused though. When I lived in Athens it was terrible, just crypto groups used it.

That has not been my experience in the LA region for many years. Some get some RSVPs, but be prepared for everyone to drop out the very last minute or not show up. Long ago, it was pretty great.

I'm sorry to hear that. FWIW I've also seen a decline in quality post-COVID (especially of events), but Meetup has remained an incredible source of friendships, social events, and great intros in Belgium.
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