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Comment by pw | Hacker News Reader

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.

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