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Comment by kortilla | Hacker News Reader

Do you think that would be different if you lived in a place big enough for a dedicated office?

I have a dedicated office with a door that closes, fiber internet, giant monitor, etc. I can’t wait for all of this Zoom stuff to be over and go back to being in the office.

Why?

Personally I have no desire to go back to an office--which I haven't done regularly for years--although I do sincerely hope that business travel/events starts ramping up again. (And, if they don't, I'll probably find myself making changes of various sorts.)

But I can certainly understand someone who wants to 1.) Get out of their house and 2.) Be around people during the day. That said, based on what I'm seeing at a lot of tech companies, I expect going into an office will be an awkward and not terribly comfortable situation that doesn't have a lot of social interaction for the balance of this year and possibly beyond. I think you're going to see a lot more social not distancing outside of professional business environments than within them for quite some time. And a norm where most people go into an office most of the time may be dead at a lot of companies.

I don’t find Zoom to be an acceptable alternative to in-person meetings. I don’t like the lack of separation between work space and home space (especially since my spouse also works). I miss having support staff available in person.

In all fairness, you're making the assumption that the people you're meeting with are normally in the same location. Very few people I meet with are in the same office and/or they're often traveling or otherwise not physically present. So even if I came into the office every day, I would have a few serendipitous encounters but most meetings would still be over video link.

I have a good example of this.

Right before all of this I went to Austin to sit in a room with people from that office for a day for us to figure out how we want to continue using a service internally. We could have done it over zoom, but I'm 100% sure we would have been a lot less effective.

Zoom looses the ability for people to just argue and hash stuff out. There is less back and forth. IT's not the same

Oh, I don't disagree at all that getting people together in a room can be very useful. I'm just saying that, for me, those people are usually not all located in a single office so we're going to have to travel to some common location to get together in a room. A fairly small percentage of the people I work with regularly are within a hundred miles of each other.

What if others are finding Zoom and remote life acceptable? How can you ever go back to in-person meetings until all others in said meeting were back in the office?

You just... go back to it. The model will look a lot like what most companies had pre-pandemic: there'll be videoconference links for all the important meetings so that remote employees can kinda attend, and less important meetings will just take place among only the people who are around.

It sure would make it better, and this WFH shit has made me start to looming for a larger place that can do this. But this doesn't scale for everyone- they either can't afford a larger place or the area can't support it.

The big thing for me is going some place else allows for a shifting of mindset. I don't want my therapist's office to be the same place where I work which is the same place I get doctors appointments

There may be other solutions. What if instead of spending an hour commuting to the therapist, you spend half an hour ritually preparing your room for therapy? Hanging a curtain, switchin the lighting color, etc. What if you had a VR-CAVE-like projection system and you downloaded a "wallpaper" from your therapist for use in your session?

> What if instead of spending an hour commuting to the therapist, you spend half an hour ritually preparing your room for therapy?

That's quite an estimate. What is much more likely, and generally true, is that the commute is 10-15 minutes and the time spent in quiet, alone, on either end of the therapy session is a boon.

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