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Comment by antonzabirko | Hacker News Reader

Weird sentiment in this thread. Regardless of the survey i have only seen positive reactions to working remote, and hope remote is here to stay.

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My employees love the camaraderie and face-to-face adhoc conversations that come from everyone being on the same floor. However no one likes the new workstation layout our company employs; people are on top of each with other minimal partitioning for those that face each other, and no partitioning at all side to side. It's noisy and hard to concentrate and the fact you have a locker and may keep nothing personal on your desk sends a certain message. A message that is amplified by the fact people at a certain org level get offices with a door.

We're working out how to mix up WFH with WFW to try and get the benefits of both.

Those terrible workstation layouts (or the equivalent at my company) are the reason why I find it much easier to talk to people on my team when I'm working from home. I can start a teams call with anyone and have a 1-on-1 conversation with no distractions. When we were still going to the office, it was difficult to have a 1-on-1 conversation because you would have all the noise of people around you talking loudly, plus my own conversation is distracting those other people who are sitting 3 feet away but are not part of the conversation. So we'd have to go to a meeting room nearby, but then you don't have your computer screen available, so you can't talk about the code you're working on. The whole concept of trying to collaborate in the office was ludicrous. Adding insult to injury, the company calls these cramped office spaces "collaborative".

Personally, I hate being fully remote and will probably not stay at a job that is permanently full remote. I live alone in a fairly small apartment, and only have space to work at the same desk that I use for recreation. I find myself unfocused more easily, which leads to being less productive, which leads to working more, which leads to being less productive, etc. I have started going into the office alone just to get some separation.

For context, I'm also much more extroverted than the average developer - I suspect that also has something to do with my absolute dislike of full remote working.

I think WFH is challenging for some people as its harder to maintain that social connection to your org. You have to work a bit harder, have already built the relationships, or simply be secure knowing that you can deliver value to the org and even if people do not see you on a consistent basis that you are valued by the team/org. Embrace the change though I think, its certainly worth the tradeoffs in my mind, no commute is pure glory.

I agree with most of that. At the end of the day i do quality work in silence, and not in the open office. Losing the commute is a nice side effect though.

Online discussions quickly fall into the Obligatory Contrarian trap when there's little else to latch on to.

So in every one of these threads, HN is all of a sudden nostalgic for two hours a day commuting, shelling out-of-pocket for parking, eating junk food for lunch every day...

Offices cost money. This is why WFH isn't going away. Even people who are required to go into the office periodically might find themselves sharing temp space with others who use the same (reduced) space on alternating days.

As you can tell from this comment, I love WFH and will never go back....and it doesn't look like I'll have to. While the poor office dwellers are sitting in their cars, I'm enjoying a nice morning run.

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