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> Many people don't prefer remote work, and they have good reasons for it.

It’s almost as if some people prefer one way and others prefer the other way! Which is why WFH advocates just want the option. They aren’t asking for everyone to have to WFH, just for the choice.

The back-to-office advocates however want to go back to office and force everyone else to go back to office. This is the difference in approaches. They don’t want people to have a choice—they want it their way for everyone.

WFH advocates will quickly say they're disadvantaged in career development in a hybrid approach, so no, they want everyone to have to WFH.

Literally no WFH advocates I know say this, and none of them advocate for forcing others to work from home. Everyone knows the trade offs and are willing to live with them. Hell I’d be willing to forego all promotions forever, in writing, just to be given the option to work remotely.

You and some of your peers may not be that way, but a sizable population of office workers probably don't like the idea of neutering their careers just so that they could be more productive (which that employer gets an outsized amount of value from).

No, but perhaps we'd like to "neuter" our careers in order to reduce the time spent in-transit, increase the flexibility with which you can do things around the house during the day, and generally avoiding the "management in passing" that can occur when you're in the office.

If it was a one-sided win for the company and no benefit being reaped by the employee then no one would opt for it.

Exactly. There are plenty of benefits I get from WFH that have nothing to do with productivity. My commute is 2 hours each way. WFH lets me recover 20 hours per week and use it either to catch up on work or (usually) for pleasure. WFH has allowed me to actually see my child during the weekdays and bond. WFH lets me eat a healthy, inexpensive meal at home rather than blow $15/day at the local oil-and-carb lunch shacks near the office. WFH lets me discretely run errands around my home during down time rather than having to just sit in my office chair picking my nose. WFH has saved hundreds of gallons of gasoline and carbon footprint from my commute. This past year has been pretty much all upside, and it’s going to suck to throw it all away because Mr. CTO just can’t bear to not have his minions crawling around the shiny office.

This should be top comment.

As a rebuttal: you chose either the workplace or home that is a 2 hour commute away.

You choose to buy $15 lunch instead of making something at home and taking it in.

Other people have different situations. My commute is ~30 minutes to a fun workplace with free & healthy food.

I do hope you keep your WFH, though :)

I see where you're coming from but as a counterpoint the following point can be made. I hope you take it as a healthy steel-man argument:

My commute is 20 minutes each way. I get to see and play with my child everyday because I manage to finish my work in time. I also cook my healthy home-cooked food with my family and also eat it in the office. I use bicycle or public transport to commute making me healthier. I can always run errands during office time because my team is considerate and understand the needs of us. I interact with my colleagues and tasks that took 2-3 meetings are now resolved in 1 single chat over coffee. The upside is that I have a healthy interaction with my fellow humans, and I can learn a few things from these interactions. It's going to suck to throw it all away because some WFH zealots want to stay holed in their cute little corner.

I really miss my commute to work as well. It was a 35 minute walk or a 9 minute bike ride, and I did it 5 days a week without thinking about it. In the morning it helped me wake up and after work it helped me _reset_ and not think about work.

I've lost that completely now, I find it extremely difficult to motivate myself to go out for a walk when there is no goal. Also the office was much bigger and the walk from my desk to get a tea or go to the bathroom let me get around 3k steps a day just inside the office.

I can easily manage sub 1k steps a day nowdays since my desk/couch/kitchen/bathroom are about 20 steps from each other. Combine that with gyms being shut and lockdown preventing me from going surfing, I am in the worst shape I have ever been.

I guess working from home without lockdown would be a different experience, but as it stands now, I really need to be in the office for my general health.

Sure, but you're right that what you're describing is because of the pandemic and only partially has to do with WFH.

I've WFH for a long time and I've missed the gym, mid-morning Jiu-Jitsu, and going to the local coffee shop to mix up the day. I think we should change the terminology from WFH to something like Freedom of Work. I think what people really like is the freedom to work how they want. Classic WFH is the closest to that today, but the 'home' part carries a specific meaning that isn't really true for many who WFH.

And again, I've found pandemic WFH to not really be represent of WFH pre-pandemic.

The only difference being you could have that and others could have WFH? From what I see whenever this topic comes up, it seems that the only zealots are those who want to work in the office. Remote working people are always more, "I work better this way, and you all can keep working as you prefer".

And, given the conditions you described most would be ok I guess. But, most don't have a 20min each way commute. Which then interferes with all the other points - seeing your children in the same vein as you do (if you have 1h or more of commute, you're going to miss the mornings and get home pretty much later, have less energy, etc), which also means you won't have the time to share on the home cooking (unless your partner does so and has a schedule that allows). You won't be cycling that distance either, instead you'll get a car, or public transportation. Running errands depends on the grace of your company, I'm sure many (and usually most where people are more inclined to work from home are exactly those where you won't be able to, either because the errands aren't geographically close enough or by office policy).

I do see value in in-person presence, be it for bonding, relaxing or discussing work, on the other hand, in terms of work I don't see why you would need 2 meetings and not a video call, or call, just as you could do over a coffee.

The other points about interaction, indeed, they have their own value.

> you could have that and others could have WFH

This is what I want in the end. Different people in different roles perform different operations, and unifying them under remote-only/office-only buckets is stupid. Finding acceptance for different view points is really hard these days.

It’s not even a given that you’re neutering anything by working from home. I’ve worked with lots of people in the past who succeeded just fine working remotely. You’re not going to make CEO but there is no reason why your career should actually suffer working remotely. This mythology that remote workers miss all this “critical” break room chatter about the hockey game and therefore miss out on promotion is mostly anti-WFH FUD.

I agree with you, there is no good reason why a career should suffer from working remotely in a largely non-remote office culture. But a lot of dumb things happen in corporate environments when they shouldn't.

It is not just mythology, it is experience. Plus "break room chatter about the hockey game" is massive straw man.

I have seen exactly that happen multiple times. The in office workers were core team, the from home workers were invariably "secondary citizens". In terms of what tasks they got and how much influence they had. They were first to go when the company needed to lay off people. They were forgotten about when splitting tasks, making decisions, starting meetings, dealing with issues.

And second, emotional matters. The productivity does influences how team and management treats you, but so does "connection" and crap like that. If you have jerk tendencies or lazy tendencies, people tend to excuse those much more if they know you in person. Bonus if they perceive you as cool or funny.

It depends on the company. IME, it's mid sized companies where the majority of the employees are forced into the office that most often have this problem. Small companies are typically tighter and have more flexibility anyway so it's fine. Larger companies are already distributed so it doesn't matter if an employee is taking another conference call from the local office or their house.

How often do you think senior execs are in the office anyway? I bet they travel a good half the time. Heck, I traveled about a third of the time pre-pandemic. And larger companies are distributed all over the world anyway. Most senior people in my company aren't even in the HQ.

"Career" is just a word used to make your job more bearable. You work. You do the things those paying you need you to do. There's no such thing as "career." You have a job.

Career is a superset of job and can encompass multiple jobs with different functions ... equating the two defeats the purpose of the words.

"Remote-first" is a thing (see StackOverflow, in 2017 though numerous other examples occurred in the past year given COVID-19, representative links below), and a major factor is in fact the reality that asses-in-seats, visible heads, and even the apparently small detail of one group connecting to a conference call or Zoom session from a meeting room via Starfish vs. other individuals connecting via separate phones or devices creates strong inconsistencies in direct and indirect communications and status signalling.

This isn't to say that "remote first" is the same as "all remote", but it's very highly cognizant of the distinctions in visibility, manifestation, appearance, and status developing between remote or on-site, or even differing office-location teams or individuals.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/02/08/means-remote-first-com...

https://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2020/03/remote-first-workspace-...

https://www.thehrdirector.com/features/future-of-work/how-be...

TL;DR take the same work you did with paper and turn it digital and it will be more cumbersome not less. OTOH take the digital tools you have to change the offline work environment and everyone will me more productive than before.

The reason why people say remote first is because when remote is an afterthought the workplace, everyone who is remote has reduced productivity and has to run after people to get information and keep informed.

Just using Slack isn't enough. I'm watching a multinational "startup" where my wife is working every day and the boss(of the mothership) is a control freak that schedules an average of 10 meetings with her per week. Meaning she has to work after those meetings. And with everything being remote there is no accountability on the work hours. Facebook has the same problem.

The problem is that employees tried to fit their ridiculous offline work into an online work place. Instead of taking the online work potential and changing the way they work accordingly. It's the same reason why digitalization in most places results in more work even though it should be less.

A simple example is that for most distributed workplaces there is no reason to do synchronous standups. There are plenty of tools that allow for structured asynchronous standups across multiple timezones.

> with everything being remote there is no accountability on the work hours

I don't believe it's true. Or more precisely, I don't believe it's different than what happens in offices. Given the right (bad) manager, people will be pushed to do 10h days at the office too. In that situation it is on the employees to say no.

I'd argue for labour laws and/or unions here. Individual workers vs. collective management greatly disadvantages workers, as Adam Smith observed 245 years ago.

How is there no accountability? You have a thing to be done and a due date, or a progress report date. If there are processes that have to be followed, then they should be documented. Beyond that, the details are unimportant. A thing is assigned, a thing is either done or not done. There’s your accountability.

You must not know these WFH advocates on HN.

Most people aren't taking extreme positions BUT

- Many people chafing to get back to an office are concerned that it's going to be a diminished experience with many of their teams missing

- As a sibling comment notes, remote workers will advocate for remote-first practices. For example, if anyone on a call is remote, everyone has to call in individually. No gathering in conference rooms. I knew teams that did this pre-pandemic. There are also practices that are frankly good in any case like everything needs to be written down, no hallway decisions, etc.

Do in-office people call in from their desks? Seems like a noisy office then, especially with an open office. Or does each in-office person have to reserve an individual conference room?

Once you have more than one office and teams split between them, you have to adopt practices which look a lot like WFH, such as putting conversations online, communicating asynchronously, and avoiding in-person-only meetings. Even if you made me go into my local office, there is literally one other person there who is on my team versus two dozen others around the world. Our WFH working method would not change discernibly.

When I first started WFH almost 15 years ago, this was the exact conversation I had with my boss at the time. Video chat wasn't as big of deal then, so most calls were on the phone. Even though I ended up moving 2 time zones away, I kept my work hours the same, and it took almost a year before co-workers I interacted with regularly even knew I moved.

I assume that many people here are with smaller companies or at least at companies where almost everyone they interact with is in a single location. That hasn't been the case with me for years. I'm basically never on a call of any size (including with my immediate team) where everyone would be in the same office (even if we were in the offices where we technically sit). I'm about to hop on a call where, even in normal times, there would be a mix of remote, two different US offices, and two different European offices. And that's absolutely the norm.

You soundly bested that straw-man.

Citation needed. "They" in your post is strawman and I've never heard this argument expressed.

Many back-to-office advocates are “social butterflies”, so they will not enjoy coming back to half-empty offices. They really need everyone to be there in order to thrive.

I can't say I've missed being the social butterflies's nectar while I'm trying to do my own work.

Good explanation, but it doesn't make things better. :(

I am anything but a social butterfly, but would be upset if I came back to work in a largely empty office. I enjoy being around people even if I don't talk to them much.

The pendulum of remote-to-onsite work is swinging back away from full-remote, yes, but I think this type of report has the air of "buggy-cart vendors in the age of the Model T" about it.

Major (or a subset of) employers do not like losing centralised control of their employees, but there are a large cohort of employees who wish to see remote or hybrid models of work and, critically, this trend was growing prior to COVID-19. COVID merely accelerated this trend, as it did with a lot of pre-existing social and industrial changes.

> And lastly I'm just not convinced that businesses actually act based solely on hard figures.

Correct. Large, Big-5-hiring, corporations are probably going to be the last companies to move to true hybrid models. They are behemoths that cannot be turned quickly. They have slow bones, vast inertia, and long memories, and will have been optimised for reporting chains that require face-to-face interactions and strong visual signaling. All of this takes time to change.

But I wouldn't expect that this return to all-onsite work will be completed before the pendulum begins to swing back again the other way.

Yeah, I largely agree that all-onsite will be a thing of the past. Eventually enough talented folks will just work elsewhere and businesses will react. I guess the real question in my mind is that if you work for a place doing a hybrid approach, are you at a disadvantage? Unless senior management folks also do the same, that lack of visibility is devastating to a career.

> COVID merely accelerated this trend, as it did with a lot of pre-existing social and industrial changes.

My perspective is quite different. Perhaps for more innovative companies this is true that it accelerated the trend, but there are plenty of stuck-in-the-mud companies where COVID-19 forced their hand to move to remote quickly, and they would've never done this without COVID. That's was I saw (outside the FAANG, outside the US) in a traditional industry.

There was a telling survey posted some months back (can't find it unfortunately) "What accelerated digital transformation in your company?" and the answers were management or COVID, the response was overwhelmingly COVID.

Yeah, the shift was no means universal in breadth or depth, but it was there beforehand (remember Wework?) and this pushed more traditional industries to take it up.

Another example would be ties; already in Australia it was becoming common to see professionals wearing business casual rather than suit-plus-tie (especially in summer). A walk around the CBD of Melbourne recently suggested to me that COVID has hit suit-plus-tie very hard, but suit and no tie appears to be going strong.

Not the survey in question but we did one last year that showed a significant acceleration of digital transformation. https://www.redhat.com/en/global-tech-outlook-report/2021

Also lots of anecdotal stories from senior IT folks. A pretty common theme is that COVID forced a lot of experiments that were on the maybe someday/probably risky pile and a lot of them turned out better than expected.

Anecdotally, I've observed that employers are conservatively opening to full-time remote employees based on needs. If a role can't be filled locally - they'll try in another office or full-time remote. I'd bet that as people move back to the office you'll see a settling towards equilibrium.

>> Have a handful of executives who can't wait to get back into their comfort zone - the office - and that office spending budget will find a way to get spent

you could have just said this. everything else you wrote is superfluous justification