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Comment by mylons | Hacker News Reader

That’s fine. Don’t make me come back to the office because you have undesirable accommodations.

I'm not sure this "you can't make me X" attitude is particularly helpful. The reality is that lots of people have undesirable accommodations, and whether you do or not a lot of people do and don't want to go back into the office. IMO this has to be a group conversation not an individualistic one.

Full disclosure: I don't really want to return to 100% office requirement either. I'm really excited to see other humans again - though I suspect we'll see a 2-3 day a week in-person expectation and then 2-3 day flex moving forward.

I believe my company is going to end up maintaining a small office with a set of open desks that people can come in an work at. At least for us, this seems like the right balance. We've grown in the pandemic, so keeping a smaller office lets the company save money. Hiring remotely expands our pool of candidates. At the same time, employees who benefit on the whole from remote work get to keep it, while employees who thrive on in-person interaction and a dedicated space outside their home get to keep it. It's a little tricky to set up blended in-person and remote meetings, but once that's in place, the office can be much more fluid.

Surely this works both ways though? Remote workers always bring an implied expectation that their coworkers will do a certain amount of extra work in order to bridge the larger communication boundary. This means more documentation, more aggressive status tracking, more time spent on communication (zoom calls and slack simply aren't as high fidelity as in person communication - body language is important), more independent investigation as the activation energy of a remote call is higher, etc.

Now, many of those things are probably good for the business anyway, but they are nevertheless obligations that remote workers force on their colleagues in order to achieve that cleaner, "API-like" working relationship that remote workers often need to succeed independently.

It's even more stressful if some employees are gelling well and some aren't. Many remote workers feel they should be treated like contractors but given fuzzier expectations like salaried workers - I've seen this misalignment of expectations about culture destroy teams, and in an office culture transitioning from full time in office to partially remote, all of this is fundamentally caused by the "benefits" that the remote workers are receiving at the cost of their colleagues. It's absolutely not a win-win.

This. Plus, I myself am living in a top floor apt, but over the past year I learnt the power of just taking walks, having quality weekend times, taking trips, and exercising. Just because I'm supposed to work at home does not mean that I should stay home all the time. If anything, this has taught me what I was doing wrong in my pre-covid life.

Nobody’s making you do anything, if your employer forces a return to the office and you don’t like it you can find a new employer.

If the only option to stay remote is to quit then that's the definition of "My employer is making me return to the office".

They are voicing a very US view on the relationship. From my understanding, in EU there are jurisdictions that any concession extracted from employees by employer is effectively done under duress because the employer controls employees livelihood, even if temporarily. Actual reality depends on how desirable your skills are and how good the existing employment is.

I expect the bigger legal pushback would be the other way around. I definitely heard some grumbling early in the pandemic when some still saw office closures as an over-reaction. The complaint was that companies were making a unilateral change to the working conditions agreed-upon when they were hired.

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