78 comments as of now and I can't find one from an actual employer, only people speaking for employers.
Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
81–90 of 921 posts
Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
#82Additionally to all the comments, I think it is a challenge for most middle managers and up. Because it becomes obvious who can manage people and who can not. Who is capable of planning tasks and who is not. They have less personal/social leverage => they need to be professionals... and 50% are not ...
In the office there is always an illusion of control and it's easier to come up with ad-hoc tasks.
But in my opinion, managers who don't know what their employees do via remote. They know even less what happens in the office. But sure every one looks busy when the boss is walking the floor... :D maybe that gives them a good feeling.
I personally prefer a mixed week, like 2 days in the office and 3 days remote. But I would say the remote days are more productive in a sense of getting stuff done.
Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
#83There’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 ask. And guess what? In 2023, that happens over Slack.
Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
#84People 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…
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Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
#85I’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…
> You can find very committed senior talent in latam for 120-160k, the US equivalent would be 180-250k, and the latam folks are less likely to job hop or negotiate a higher comp in month 12
Disagree. Quality engineers will ask for their worth regardless of location.
Also I think indexing on "less likely to job hop or negotiate salary" is short-sighted thinking. You're asking people to do a complex job where the key skill is critical thinking and self determination. Those skills go hand in hand with people willing to demand their worth from you. Sure, save a little bit of money now. But you're going to be building a brittle, disposable product with a brittle, disposable team for what ultimately will amount to a brittle, disposable company.
Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
#86Employer here. We had a fancy brick and timber office. It was beautiful and centrally located. I let the lease expire in 2021 after everyone went remote for the pandemic. There has been no sign of any decay in productivity. It is true that hanging out in person develops a sense of human connection that feels good. But is that needed for effective work? I’m not so sure. Brainstorming and creative collaboration activit…
>Brainstorming and creative collaboration activities seem more effective when done in person Let me tell you, I hate these. And I will take vacation days to avoid going to them. And I also think they're not very productive no matter how many 'How To Run A Sprint' classes the organizers take.
I think you're thinking "brainstorming and creative collaboration activities" implies something corporate organized. But it can also refer to actual brainstorming and creative collaboration that happens spontaneously and organically when smart people happen to talk to each other.
Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
#87There’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 meddling from management.
Maybe it's just because I've never worked at a FAANG or BigCo, but I have a hard time believing these points.
Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
#88I suspect HN skews senior/established in our careers, but it’s interesting comparing the sentiment of people on here (almost universally pro-remote) with candidates I’ve talked to when we’ve listed roles. A lot of candidates, especially more junior ones, explicitly want an in-person office culture.
Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
#89>Nearly every meeting I’ve had in an office since 2014 has been a video conference with remote people.
C-level leaders at my company set a mandate for our "distributed sites" to be relatively autonomous with their own missions and roadmaps. But middle and line-level managers keep making exceptions, finding it expedient to use India and LatAm teams as extra hands for projects run out of the US, for example. So as an employee you experience most of your collaboration being remote. Your EM and your skip get it. But HR and the CEO don't.
We're in a situation now where almost nobody knows anyone in their management chain who cares about their attendance, but the CEO and HR have made clear that they will be firing people who aren't badging in.
Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Caring about the raw amount of time people put into their jobs sounds like a middle management thing to do -- rewarding showing up and putting in hours like it was PR. If the results are there, and in accordance with the employment contract, time shouldn't matter.
Except that they also take advantage of the flexibility of agile. If a story is pointed for 2 days and it takes 3 it's better to take that as a missed estimate than a developer not producing as much as they should. Hammering them because they let a deadline slip leads to all sorts of bad things. But, again, even as a fellow team member I can't tell if they worked for 2 days and fucked off for one or it legitimately j…
When people were in the office, were you able to tell the difference between someone staring blankly at a screen vs actually doing work for six hours?