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Comment by protonimitate | Hacker News Reader

I have a hard time wrapping my head around why companies are mandating 100% return to office.

Cost issues aside, I've always maintained that the absolute best experience is a hybrid/flexible schedule and location policy. I'm currently full time remote (I'm on the East Coast working for a West Coast company). My previous company had its main office in my current city, but allowed a super flexible choose-where-you-work-from policy. It was the best.

Didn't feel like dealing with the commute or had a ton of heads down work to do? Stay at home. Wanted to go in to be present for meetings? Easy. Start the day at the office and go home to finish off the day and avoid the commute? Sure.

Of course they made it possible by actively managing it. No meetings before 11am ET (to accomodate those in different TZs). Every scheduled meeting required a Zoom/conference link. Dedicated offices were set up as "conference rooms" so remote people could call in. And of course, people all the way up the ladder worked from home at least some of the time.

Being full remote doesn't work for everyone. Providing a space for those who want it is such a huge quality of life bonus imo. But the biggest factor is creating a culture of inclusion, despite your employees working preferences. This is the hardest thing to do, especially at scale.

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> I have a hard time wrapping my head around why companies are mandating 100% return to office.

Hot take: There's a whole way of communicating and handling team organization that grew up around 20th century business management culture, and it just doesn't work well with remote teams. Methods that do work well with remote teams, though, don't work well with traditional deeply hierarchical management structures. At best, they tend to make all those management layers somewhat superfluous.

This means getting people back into the office may be a matter of self-preservation for career managers, whether they realize it consciously or not.

LOL, this might be one of the biggest truths I've ever read on HN. An expanded, micromanagement style of leadership just isn't necessary in a remote style office. Trust in your employees and a flatter structure, with fewer executives and more people who produce is ideal for a remote office business style. This is a direct contrast to the mantra of the 80's, 90's and 2000's logic of grind it out for as short a time as possible producing and move to middle management. It's been a detriment to our school system and many businesses. Lifetime crafters/creators/producers are looked down upon in our society, more often than not.

This is a depressingly accurate assessment of the last 30 years.

The only hope I hold is that people with shared creative interests will eventually prevail.

The pessimist in me also considers that the allowed monopolies will then buy up those creative successes.

As long as they are paying decent prices for those creative successes (so the creators can have a comfortable retirement with healthcare in the US), this is not the worst outcome.

But my wish is that the really creative, motivated people don't lose their motivation. F*ck You money is a great idea, but after a couple of years of coasting, spend some energy and funds to make something really cool happen.

Unfortunately, some people go through such a traumatic experience which happens to result in FU money that they burn out and stop creating. That's a great shame for us all.

I guess?

TBH, getting acquired by a big boring corporation in my early 30s, and having the startup into which I had poured countless late hours' worth of blood, sweat, and tears become a long and joyless coast into mediocrity, was possibly the greatest thing that ever happened to me both professionally and personally.

There was a brief period of anxiety over all the corporate bullshit, and the loss of edge, and all that good stuff. But, after about 6 months of that, a magical thing happened: I started leaving work at work. My demeanor became more placid. My sleep improved. I found hobbies.

I guess maybe, in some poetic sense, it's sad that I'm no longer driven to build exciting things. But, in a more mentally healthy (for me -- I'm certainly not going to begrudge someone else for continuing to be ambitious and driven) sense, that was benefitting a bunch of strangers more than it was benefitting me. I've done my time, and I'm now content to sit back and watch the young'uns take their turn to run themselves ragged chasing dreams around the office all week, and then watch my own young'uns run themselves ragged chasing each other around the yard all weekend.

That's really for you, and I mean no disrespect or judgement. But at some point in the future you'll have a need to "do something" again. Maybe after you've built a family and put them all into motion, you'll find a place where you want to do something again.

And for better or worse, your kids will be shaped by the environment you provide. If you have so much money that they need never worry, then it will actually be harder for them to find their own place and be motivated. Think back honestly... if nothing you did really mattered in terms of your financial success, would you have been motivated to do what you did? I probably would not.

Already my children are a mix of complacent and unconcerned of the financial future and also driven to create. They know they will never be poor or hungry. Will that limit the raw expression and energy they have? It did me. I could not fail if I tried. I knew I was capable of anything, and I demonstrated some degree of that in various ways. But I had nothing to lose.

Eventually everyone begins to ask what the point of anything is. And frankly, we are left with no answers and just some guesses or assumptions. We basically decide what life means. If it means nothing, then why bother with any of it? If it means something, then we should put energy into whatever that something is. Money makes most of it nicer, but it can be a distraction for those who have it and for those who seek it.

If we didn't have managers, all the planning, negotiating, syncing, communication & meetings stuff overflows into the engineers themselves, who might get grumpy at doing something they really typically do not enjoy, which is management work. If you remove the managers, your staff engineers quickly start becoming defacto managers.

PM work, management work and all of that is work, and someone has to do the work and if the managers / PMs don't do that work other people start taking up those jobs. That stuff doesn't go away with the magic wand of remote.

Yes there is an argument that those jobs make a bunch of extra work that may not of been necessary, but that also applies to engineers themselves. Every job role creates extra subjectively unnecessary work.

And I am saying this as someone who has been an engineer my entire career, I haven't been a manager.

If we remove and automate away as much red tape as possible, is the remainder really that bad we still need a dedicated manager over a hybrid? Will somebody of the team not feel the urge or the will to pick it up instead?

Do we still need a manager who has power over the developers and partially decides which jobs exist, giving them not only an incentive to create extra work, but have a trump card on anyone who would call out their BS?

Do we truly need all this manual syncing and negotiating? Or has part of the corporate machine become addicted to all this red tape so much, they believe it is not only a necessity, but an insult to the individuals participating if the red tape is removed in its entirety?

Frankly, as much as I despise management work, I have a hard time buying the argument it really would be as terrible as it is now once you get rid of that red tape. Hybrid roles don't have an incentive to inflate the amount of red tape: they can go back to doing the other side of their role instead, and have an incentive to remove any existing red tape if it becomes suffocating.

Manager as facilitator works awesome. Manager as controller sucks. One path gives the team power, the other gives the boss power.

Managing a highly self-motivated team of engineers is different than managing a team of undermotivated slackers.

For the former, a great manager will regularly ask, "What can I do to help you do your job well?" This person fights the political battles that need to be fought, takes bullets for the team, gets the team the resources they need, removes roadblocks, recruits, etc. The team already wants to work hard, wants to do their job well, and "manager-as-controller" is absolutely the wrong way to lead.

But when you're managing a team of undermotivated people doing more dreary work (which, honestly, might be most people and most jobs), a great manager will occasionally pick up a hammer and do some of the hard work themselves to boost morale. They'll find and remove the major pain-points of the day-to-day, improve training so the team is more productive, cheerlead a bit, try to improve compensation, make sure the team's major wins are visible to upper management so they can get the resources they need, etc.

But critically, this second type of manager ALSO needs to be able to crack the whip once in a while to make it clear that being deadweight won't be tolerated, and complaining won't be rewarded. When the work is somewhat painful, you really want to foster a kind of contagious, optimistic busy-bee state where everyone is eager to do their part and help one another, and you'll have to put on your "manager-as-controller" hat once in a while to get there.

>you really want to foster a kind of contagious, optimistic busy-bee state

Is that really how american workplaces look? Sounds incredibly dystopian.

Yes, it is how american workplaces look. It's a bit dystopian in a sense.

Working in a faster-paced environment probably isn't the hellscape you're imagining: most foreigners I've worked with like it. Some don't. It is different, though - in England the slower pace of everything irritated me.

> all the planning, negotiating, syncing, communication & meetings stuff overflows into the engineers themselves

That is traditionally done by managers, but it doesn't actually need to be handled someone who is anyone's boss in particular. It's handleable, often with less overall effort, by people who are at the same level as every other team member on the org chart. The whole boss/report dynamic tends to inhibit clear communication, because circumspect people tend to to communicate less-than-candidly with those who hold the power to advance or inhibit their career progress.

My company promotes themselves as a “flat connected organization” yet our CEO has adamantly stated that work from home will not be possible as long as he is CEO. This is despite the company doing better than ever. He leans on a belief that some ephemeral energy and cultural value is being sapped away from working remotely and that we are “running on fumes” through COVID. I don’t believe any of it, and the company has continued making management changes and major acquisitions throughout the pandemic, fundamentally altering any concept of a pre-existing work Nirvana.

Our regional president also is anti WFH. He claims that WFH would eliminate quality mentorship that he experienced and the ad hoc conservations over lunch that lead to friendships and new business opportunities. This is a better angle, but it’s also not something that happens for everyone, everyday, or can be used to justify 5 days in the office.

I’m so tired of this “ad hoc water cooler chat” suddenly being elevated as the most important part of office work. It’s never in the past been valued by these execs, and on the contrary sometimes punished (hey, quit socializing and get back to work!). But, now, all of a sudden when these execs are scrambling to find some reason to return to the office, they trot out “serendipitous hallway conversations” as the great holy reason for the office’s existence. Sorry, but I call bullshit.

When you can't point to something quantifiable, I guess you point to something like "water cooler chat!"

My feeling is the same: while random interactions are important, they aren't exclusive to an office setting. Weird logic. It's been surprising to me how much ink has been spilled about this, and how few solutions have been offered.

Exactly this. I've had as many "serendipitous hallway conversations" in the last year as I had in the years before - just this time, they happened on IM, on videocalls, and in code review comments.

A small group of co-workers willing to sometimes go off a tangent in a conversation is all it takes. Doesn't have to be face to face, much less in a hallway or in front of a water cooler.

This. You know what happened the first week I was back at the office? Non-work chit chat taking up hours of time.

If it's really valuable information, write it down so even more people can be exposed to it! It's like that saying about meetings: "this could have been an email."

> running on fumes

I think management people are likely running on fumes … it's like the inverse of what introverts feel when they have to be in-office 5 days a week I suspect.

I'd add that the second take is also kind of outmoded, in that it assumes that mentorship, friendship, business opportunities must flow through your company. I've actually found more of this during the pandemic, and apart from my company …

True, serendipity (e.g. water cooler conversation) is harder in remote environments, but not unsolvable …

It's not (mainly) about introverts vs extroverts, it's about high status vs low status.

I guess not having your ass kissed daily must feel like "running on fumes".

The upper management folks also have big, comfy, quiet offices with floor-to-ceiling windows, and an assistant right outside the door to bark orders to.

The people working in cubicle-hell or open-office purgatory generally aren't the ones clamoring to get back inside the building. If offices were redesigned to give more rooms with doors to the people who want them so they can do some quiet focused work, even if it's not an assigned space, I think you'd see much more eagerness to return.

> an assistant right outside the door to bark orders to.

And that same assistant will screen time with the boss, something us plebs don't get.

Fair. My comment did imply that managers / those who feel "drained" by remote working are extroverts, which may be untrue.

On that: I think extroverts can tend to derive value from external factors, which may make them more hungry for praise (especially public).

(Edited because earlier version was murky)

I'm sure the vast majority of managers are extroverts, and introverted managers would be more ok with remote-work.

This is key. These aren’t bad ideas. Face time is important, non work proximity is important (ie lunch). None of this requires 5 day a week presence.

> This is a better angle, but it’s also not something that happens for everyone, everyday, or can be used to justify 5 days in the office.

It's not, really.

To think of it another way: what would happen if your mentors left for better jobs, got hit by a bus or even just retired? People need to be documenting things so that knowledge isn't lost and can be passed on to many more people. If it's really that valuable, just think of how much more of an impact it will have when it doesn't have to be passed on one-to-one.

Typical management structures seem to be focused on minimizing down-side risks rather than expanding upside returns.

If you have 10 employees, 5 are much happier and productive at home, 4 are the same, and 1 is completely taking advantage of it, old school companies seem to focus on that 1 person, rather than the 5 that are happier and more productive. They'd rather have nobody able to take advantage of the system than to terminate the 1 employee that's taking advantage of things.

The communication skills and preferences that are best for remote teams are different than those for in-office teams. Until you can retrain your staff or transition to different staff, a manager might be better off asking people to come back to the office.

> Until you can retrain your staff or transition to different staff, a manager might be better off asking people to come back to the office.

Meanwhile, those who already have remote work skills won't stick around to have their time wasted by being forced to work in an office.

I suppose a manager might be able to handle that by forming different teams with varying policies.

The company I work for actually suggested getting rid of our office and going 100% remote for our group. We actually voted on whether to keep leasing it after Covid or not. We voted to keep it as we generally like our office and it's nice to have a place to meet face to face sometimes. Since we voted to keep it corporate has told us we have to come in at least 3 days a week after Covid. So for us it's less an issue of trust and more an issue of we are paying for this place so you better use it.

That's a good approach.

I think a lot of companies are going to downsize their office space in the future. Having a company place to meet is a good idea. I predict there will be some variants of WeWork which will focus on this concept, basically providing rotating company spaces - possibly complete with branding and decorations which would be swapped out each morning for the "company of the day".

Branding can be done with screens. Logos can be done with screens. Fascinating idea, basically a pop-up company..

My company was so ahead of the curve they decided to get rid of the office a full year and a half before the pandemic started!

Of course that was just to save money, since it was an expensive lease, apparently, but it did have the benefit that I didn't have any worries they'd force me to come back into the office once the pandemic started, or I'd have to go back to pack up my desk like my wife eventually had to when she changed jobs.

Other than a really rocky shift of our in-house data center into one of the main corporate data centers, it hasn't resulted in much difference as far as productivity, in fact we've been getting away with about half the staff maintaining the same systems (probably to our detriment if people end up leaving, we don't have much redundancy anymore).

Just makes me a little hesitant to find a new job because after three years I'm really used to WFH and I'm worried most other companies are itching to get people back into physical offices (like my wife will probably need to by the end of the year at her new job), even though there's not really any more room for me to grow at this organization in the next year or two based on what I've heard lately.

Your physical space may be nice, but if not... would they have allocated a budget to pay for dedicated space at a local coworking facility? I totally get wanting face time with people as needed (or wanted), or just needing a change of place from the house. That option may be less expensive than a 'full office', but still give you all what you need - space for shared meetings and work.

Wouldn't be wiser to get rid of the original office and rent some much smaller space, maybe only meeting rooms?

I have a hard time wrapping my head around why companies are mandating 100% return to office.

I doubt it lasts, at least in software. Talented people are going to have lots of remote options making it harder to find good people willing to show up for daily cubicle warfare.

I was someone who preferred to be in the office every day prior to the pandemic. But after adjusting, I really, really like working from home. Truth is, I can't imagine I'll ever take another job that expects me to show up to an actual office everyday. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

> Talented people are going to have lots of remote options making it harder to find good people willing to show up for daily cubicle warfare.

I worry a lot about how this cuts the bottom rungs off the ladder for junior developers. Senior developers can be very productive without frequent access to in-person help, and are valuable enough that they can get work-from-home if they want. But junior developers have more frequent questions, need to absorb software engineering culture, and need to have more work and task structure created for them. Remote work is really hard for them.

Engineering culture should be disseminated via documents rather than oral lore.

If it's disseminated via oral lore it's expensive to change and is often misinterpreted across a large enough org.

A silent killer of engineering orgs is bad practices that stick around because that's the way it's always been done. No one knows why because it wasn't written down. The only way to fix that is for someone high enough to provide blessing, but maybe none of those things are individually disruptive enough to get the CTO involved. So everyone eats the costs in perpetuity.

Much easier to just write everything down.

Increased difficulty for juniors to ramp up when you are remote is a symptom of a culture with lots of overly complicated processes that are not well documented.

> Engineering culture should be disseminated via documents rather than oral lore.

I'm always startled by comments like this because it's so counter to how I understand humanity. We are social mammals. No amount of good grammar and excellent font choice can substitute for sharing the same physical space together, an act that has been core to what it means to be human literally since we first speciated.

Yeah, writing stuff down is important. But engineering culture is a culture in the real sense of the word and trying to transmit that entirely through text sounds to me like raising a baby using a six-axis robotic arm.

Personally, I find it hilarious to use "humans are social animals" to justify office oriented mandatory wage labor.

Humans are social animals in the sense that they thrive when being social with whoever and wherever they want to be social. I don't know about you, but I have more time to be social with the people (friends, family, neighbors, volunteer groups, etc) that I actually want to be social with when WFH. Being forced to drive to an office under the pretense of "this is how our evolutionary ancestors preferred it" is low key gross.

You can - and should - be able to disseminate engineering culture through digital means.

> they thrive when being social with whoever and wherever they want to be social.

At almost no point in human history has that ever been true. Only in the very recent past has any notion of mobility and sufficient population density existed where one could choose who they socialized with. For all of our evolutionary history, you lived and died within your tribe.

I am equally startled by comments like this implying our nature as social mammals is so limited in ways to be appeased, or expecting the only way to be human is to work with colleagues of the same craft on an almost daily basis.

Socializing can be done with people outside that very limited circle. Meanwhile, I can get my knowledge-sharing itch by looking up new techniques on the internet, going to conferences, etc.

I participate in multiple online communities where the "culture" has only ever existed through text.

Just because it doesn't involve beer or seeing each other's faces doesn't mean that it's not a real culture.

That's not to say that any particular group's culture will translate seamlessly from in-person to text/video chat, but the idea that having and sharing a culture in a text format is somehow lesser than having one in person doesn't make sense to me.

I grew up on BBSes, USENET, email, LKML FFS! I really don't get people who make provably false claims that online culture doesn't work.

I guess medicine is a failure in that regard? Everything is documented to the letter. Perhaps we should let go of it to see what marvelous processes each individual hospital will come up with.

"sounds to me like raising a baby using a six-axis robotic arm"

No it's like raising a baby using advice you read from books that are peer reviewed and revised over time vs. just listening to what your parents say.

No, it's like raising a baby using advice your parents wrote down for you because they were parenting remotely. "Peer review" is your stepdad quickly skimming through your mom's PR and saying 'sure looks good'.

Yeah, GP has apparently never heard of Dr. Spock's books.

> We are social mammals.

We are sentient beings that have had writing for thousands of years. Perhaps we should start acting like it.

> Engineering culture should be disseminated via documents rather than oral lore.

A million times this! If there's anything that WFH has done, it's exposed the big gaping hole known as "institutional knowledge."

> Increased difficulty for juniors to ramp up when you are remote is a symptom of a culture with lots of overly complicated processes that are not well documented.

Or no process at all. Even on small teams, even on projects I start from scratch by myself, I GD document things. It's not that hard once you start practicing and make it a habit.

I swear, if a programmer had zero comments in their code and said "just come by the water cooler if you have any questions", they'd be fired within a week, yet we put up with this ephemeral bullshit for other things.

When I was a junior dev, my team was on the east coast of the US, but we worked daily with people from Ireland. This meant every meeting had a Skype link, and everyone was well equipped to screen share and collaborate remotely.

The benefit was this also made them amiable towards WFH situations. Big snowstorm? Everyone can WFH for the week. Want to go visit the west coast for a few months? Sounds great, we'll see you online.

Point being, as a junior dev I never felt left out in the cold. Some of the best pair programming sessions I ever had during that time were with a dude from Ireland while we alternated screen sharing. So as long as the team culture is supportive of remote collaboration, I think junior devs will be fine.

I'm not sure this is true. It's a reasonable concern, but in practice I don't think it turns out this way.

Two points, entirely anecdotal:

1) A few years back, I sort of "restarted" as a Salesforce developer. I had well over a decade of web dev experience, but I was new to SF. Everything about it was unique to this environment. I worked in an office, but my boss worked from home (ironically enough). So I was effectively remote working with him from the get go, and I found it worked really well.

2) My kids learn a remarkable amount of stuff on their own: Minecraft, Roblox, Scratch. All these programming environments that they've become really proficient at, and entirely on their own. This is effectively remote work. There was no one holding their hand.

I think the bigger issue is going to be getting employers to trust that the junior is working well. In truth, most junior employees probably don't have the maturity and discipline to be productive remotely. I certainly wouldn't have back when I was 18-22. I would have taken every chance I could to goof off, and not even considered whether that was a problem.

That kind work ethic (i.e. a bad one) tends to get beaten out of you pretty quick in the early days of a professional career. But a lot (most?) people fresh out of college still have that student mentality of viewing "adults" (bosses, teachers, parents) as authority figures to be rebelled against to some extent. I wouldn't trust someone with that mentality to be productive unsupervised.

The natural counter point is that if you can't be trusted, you shouldn't be hired. But I think that's a mistake. There's an awful lot of talented and smart young people who need a break or two in order to develop the appropriate work ethic and achieve their potential.

All of which is to say, I share your concern about opportunities for junior developers (and junior workers in general), but for different reasons.

As much as people don't like it, our current culture of having a video conference open all day with everyone in (breaking out into smaller calls when necessary) brings down the level of "hey, can I ask you a question?" bc we can see if someone is at their desk.

I think this is something that would work for more junior people as well, and I'd be happy to break out / share a screen as needed.

Wow, all day? That's a lot!

My team and others have been having "office hours" meetings where everyone is just working, but often the cameras are off, mics are muted most of the time, and we only do it for a few hours a week.

I definitely agree that there is a lot of value in being able to jump in and ask questions in the moment. That's a big benefit of having these calls for us.

Maybe we should try having them more often. :)

It's really not been that bad - we had a few people who were remote initially and they had the cameras on in their home office so we could shout over and ask questions and it would feel like they were in the office.

Now we're all remote so we keep the same meeting open. I guess people have differing levels of comfort.

> having a video conference open all day with everyone in

This sounds absolutely horrible.

Honestly, it's fine. Most of us are on mute for most of the day. In a trading environment, you need a hoot, and this is pretty much our equivalent.

It works well and (at least with how our team works) it's not invasive.

Being watched by all colleagues all day is extremely invasive. I would definitely not want to work in this environment.

You just described every open plan office ever. At least this way nobody can look over your shoulder at your screen. And you can turn your camera off if you want a break.

Yes, open plan offices are horrible. No need to reproduce something just as horrible and intrusive when working from home.

I would just turn both microphone and camera off; if somebody wants something they can message me, like a sane person.

> This sounds absolutely horrible.

And now you know how it feels to work in an open floor plan or cubicle where someone can come along and break your flow causing you to have to waste over 20 minutes getting back into it.

The key with the all day video conference is you can mute it and set your status as away when you need to do deep work. Can't do that in an office environment.

Or, you know, since I'm already working from home I can just not be in a "digital office". An open floor office is already bad, so there's not need to reproduce it.

It's simply intrusive and unnecessary.

> our current culture of having a video conference open all day with everyone in

this is incredibly bad for the environment. i just hope it's at least not as bad as commuting

When I was a junior engineer I preferred remote work. It was easier to screen share with a senior and talk about the problem over a computer screen where I could actually see the code, than it was to squint from over their shoulder. It also gave me the chance to drive and for the senior to correct my mistakes / give me feedback.

No you're certainly not the only one. I've found a good way to filter recruiters is to tell them up front, "I will only do full remote with occasional, non-regular office visits."

Once you've tasted freedom...

I've been doing this for 20 years now...

Surprisingly, the recruiters are starting to answer "sure - no problem..." :-)

> I doubt it lasts, at least in software.

History suggests that talent is not a cause to warp office culture. Office culture will out weather a loss of talent until the business implodes. If the need for talent becomes clearly paramount then it will be outsourced.

> I have a hard time wrapping my head around why companies are mandating 100% return to office.

Beliefs and dogma. Amazon's justification was "Amazon is an in-office culture." That ultimately boils down to circular reasoning; the key decision maker (whoever they are) has demonstrated an immense lack of critical reasoning. Continuing this practice is in the same realm as continuing other hostile workplace traditions, although it is one of the less serious ones.

In my opinion, it is wasting a lot of money in the form of productivity. Every employee who commutes to the office has an overwhelmingly high likelihood of having some of their mental resources drained. You're wasting a good hour or two of superior employee performance in the morning, and possibly some near the end of the day when employees start dreading the journey home.

> biggest factor is creating a culture of inclusion

This is a very important point. One of the major ongoing reasons that women are passed over for promotions is that they are the traditional/dogmatic caregivers. Home-first equalizes this, much like paternal leave does. If a home is unable to afford child-care, then men have just as much responsibility and distraction during work hours.

Some people may struggle to afford commute, for example, people escaping homelessness. Being able to work from home would reduce the burden on these people.

In addition, those who cannot causally/physically complete their job offsite (doctors, construction workers, tellers, baristas) won't have roads and public transport congested with people who have no business traveling to work.

> Dedicated offices were set up as "conference rooms"

We need conference rooms as an API. I should be able to add (and be billed for) a physical room to a meeting request as easily as adding a Zoom/GMeet - for when in-person collaboration is really needed. WeWork was in the ideal position to do this, it's a pity they doubled down on big corporate clients instead of "gig economy rooms."

> We need conference rooms as an API.

Is this not pretty much how things work on Google Calendar or Outlook?

Only if you own those rooms.

> I have a hard time wrapping my head around why companies are mandating 100% return to office

Informal communication, informal collaboration, a culture of apprenticeship. To the extent that the organization values these they are all served much better in person than remote.

All companies and all people are different. There isn't a one size fits all. But it's not like there are no benefits to in person.

Informal communication, informal collaboration, a culture of apprenticeship. To the extent that the organization values these they are all served much better in person than remote.

This raises two obvious questions;

- Were those things definitely happening in a way that actually benefits the company, or were people simply assuming they're happening?

- Why can't those things continue to happen in an environment where people work remotely?

Without satisfactory answers to those questions it's impossible to assert comms and collaboration are actually reasons to return to the office. For example, my experience of remote working (many years before lockdown, and during lockdown) has taught me that informal comms actually causes more ambiguity and moving to remote often means people are prone to "over communication" where they leave very little out. That has led to pain for some because there's a lot more email and messaging to deal with, but it also means everyone has a greater understanding of the project. Overall I'd argue that the 'formalization' of comms on a project that comes from everyone being remote and asynchronous is more of a benefit than a cost.

Ad hoc, accidental communication simply doesn't happen in remote work environments.

Coffee breaks are a shockingly productive element that simply work better in person, at least in my experience (and this seems to be a common sentiment at my software company).

In-person conversations don't have technical difficulties, there's much better engagement which allows people to better read the audience and adapt presentations/design conversations appropriately.

Surveys among colleagues seem to agree -- hybrid seems good, remote only simply is not as productive nor enjoyable.

> Informal communication, informal collaboration

This has been happening with greater regularity when we have been working from home. All the time we will have informal communication on slack or jump on an informal unscheduled zoom call to mob on an issue. I worked on campus for 18 years prior to starting to work from home last March. I cannot remember a single time informal communication or informal collaboration happened. For some reason people are much more open to it over slack and zoom than they ever were in person.

No one has ever overheard someone else’s Zoom conversation.

Now that does happen in open slack channels but it seems to me far less frequently.

I don’t think informal means overhearing. I think it means unscheduled.

> Informal communication, informal collaboration, a culture of apprenticeship

You're right of course, those qualities don't naturally occur remotely.

However, and I know I'm slightly taking your use of "culture" out of context, but "Culture" is often code for any number of implicit biases in a workplace. Known or unknown. If you don't fit in, for whatever reason, can you still not be a productive asset in the corporation?

> but "Culture" is often code for any number of implicit biases in a workplace

I'm old. Tell me about it. I am not a "cultural fit" in companies, these days.

So I am doing my own thing. I'm extremely fortunate, in being able to do this.

I'm also never going into an office, or relocating, again.

"You're right of course, those qualities don't naturally occur remotely."

In my experience, they do... It's how a project like Krita has grown naturally for over twenty years, bringing in new people, teaching them, having them become productive.

Of course, meeting in person, once or twice a year is important. But there's no need for offices for us.

“A culture of apprenticeship” shares the word “culture” but isn’t at all the thing that you’re concerned about.

>I have a hard time wrapping my head around why companies are mandating 100% return to office.

Because most managers have a reactionary style of management. They are like IRQ handlers. Their state doesn't change until they receive an email from their boss or a phone call from a customer. At that point they react to it by running down the hall to find someone. Now, because they do not understand cooperative multitasking they preemptively interrupt YOU and now your day is f*cked.

2 ways I can answer this:

1. Personally, working from home has been a mixed bag. When I'm allowed to focus on one single task, I can do pretty well. The comforts of having my own office room, high quality monitors, keyboard and speakers listening to music are very nice. The additional latency accessing my remote workstation not so great (and that is required, because of company rules not allowing source access outside of corp network). Also, anything that required a lot of human interaction has been pretty bad, video conferencing is a poor substitute, I've found (as someone who doesn't really enjoy socializing) and depending on where you are in the project (is the team already established, do they know each other IRL, the tasks are clear or are you just starting a new team for a new project, scoping up tasks and everything) it requires more or less interaction. At the beginning of a project there is a ton of little details that get missed in the initial plans which can be resolved very fast in person and which always seem to resolve slower remotely, no matter how good use we attempt to make of all the tools available (team chat, video conference, etc). As such, whenever my company asked in WFH surveys how I would rate my productivity, I always rated it lower than 100%, around 60%-70%. In terms of commute, it's a wash-off: yes, I don't spend time commuting now but the extra time I have I just spend it in longer videogame sessions at night (so not exactly the best/most healthy way to use that extra time) and when I was commuting to the office I'd often commute by bike (at about 100 miles biked per week) while now I barely bike a third of that because I force myself to get out on the bike every weekend to at least have some physical activity.

2. Company wide, based on the the surveys done, it seems most people have rated their productivity lower than when in office. As such, it is no surprise to me that the company is looking at an accelerated schedule to get people back in office.

The companies mandating 100% office time are doing so because their particular executive teams are nuts about it. See Netflix.

Netflix is now hiring full time remote for engineering, reporting to the office post COVID is optional.

Source: I’m a full time engineer happily working out of the PHX suburbs.

Personally, I have no intention of returning to the Bay Area.

That's cool, I guess Reed Hastings saw the writing on the wall since his September screed against remote work.

Hey Neighbor! I'm in Mesa :-)

There's dozens of us...dozens :-D

To me it is a cost issue. Living within 5-day-a-week commuting distance to an office is expensive for the weighted majority of technology jobs. You are trading space/rent for facetime.

That is fine, but the salaries for 5-day-a-week-from-office jobs need to compensate for this -- not just for execs, but also for normal workers.

Living in a 1br was charming as a 25yo, and not so much for someone with a family. Driving for 1hr+ is also not so charming.

As a former co-founder, i'd happily take this trade --

1. Not compete on city salaries

2. Employees 100% WFH, work from wherever you want. NO salary grading based on metro area (that is so unfair)

3. Quarterly on-site, paid for by company

4. Invest in processes to enable good WFH productivity

No salary grading, at least within a country, is easier when you don't try to compete at the high end. And it's effectively what a lot of companies do anyway even if they don't say so publicly. If someone can get a job with one of the big tech employers in the Bay Area and they want to work there, a lot of companies won't even try to salary match.

Your trade assumes that none of your employees will want to live in a high cost of living area if given the opportunity to WFH. If their age / hobbies / etc. make city living attractive you will need to compensate them appropriately or be unable to attract them.

I love living in the city. If work wants to keep me remote, I need an extra bedroom or dedicated office space.

>> Your trade assumes that none of your employees will want to live in a high cost of living area if given the opportunity to WFH. If their age / hobbies / etc. make city living attractive you will need to compensate them appropriately or be unable to attract them.

This is a fair point. Not sure if you're from the US, but I'll note that the weighted majority of all US technology job opportunities are in cities and major metro areas. If someone wants to live in a high-cost-of-living area, thats a great problem to have, because probably half the tech jobs are already there in the Bay Area especially. There is also no shortage of compensation in such high-cost-of-living areas.

Trust issues. While 80% of employees could be more productive remote, 18% could have serious issues with productivity and 2% might actually turn nefarious while remote (steal company IPR or something like that). Or I would imagine thats what the fear is.

People underestimate how unproductive (or nefarious) one can be in office.

I feel like it's much easier to not do anything when it looks like you're doing something at your desk all day. Mix in a few meetings and random chats, it's very easy to go incognito, productivity wise.

I think we've all had days where we've gotten to the office and had a problem we're working on that doesn't get solved that day. It is actually really taxing and feels really bad to not accomplish anything, as if you've wasted the day.

I've found that the ability to more strictly control distractions at home--not needing to deal with the pressure to chat with co-workers and eat lunch together, for example--has led to far, far fewer days of no-solution. At the same time, it becomes even hard to "give up" on that day's productivity and clock out, since there's no real leaving the office.

It's pretty easy to get two full time programming jobs and do both remotely.

Being in the office at least ensures you're not in another office.

Being in the office at least ensures you're not in another office.

How? If I'm willing to work another job while I'm at my first job, no one would know if the code I'm working on my screen belongs to job #1 or job #2.

The employer could use screen monitoring, but then they could do that while I'm at home and see that either I'm working on a second project, or that my computer is idle for long periods of time when I'm supposedly "working".

Though I'm not sure it matters - if I can work 2 jobs and still provide adequate productivity to each employer, then why do they care?

I have so many meetings every day that I'm sure that I couldn't get away with working 2 jobs at once, even when fully remote.

> Though I'm not sure it matters - if I can work 2 jobs and still provide adequate productivity to each employer, then why do they care?

Measuring programming productivity per person is very hard.

Measuring 40 hour attendance is easy.

So while everyone agrees that A would be better, in reality the approximation of B will have to do.

Companies often make employees sign agreements stating they won't do work for a second company while on the first company's property or while using the first company's equipment. So if you were going into the office and using one company's computer for two jobs, something like that would probably apply.

Man, I would fail those screen time monitors so badly.

I still work out some things on paper—I think well that way. Other times I have to get up and walk around to work something out in my head. I'd look like a constant slacker.

Sure, you can't have two physical jobs at the same time, but I've worked in multiple offices with people with more than one job. It's almost a given that everyone has some sort of side hustle nowadays.

Plenty of people have productivity issues in the office and "steal" time there (slacking off), so it probably more than balances out.

> 80% of employees could be more productive remote, 18% could have serious issues with productivity

My experience has been almost the inverse of this. I wouldn't quite say 80% of people are less productive at home but I'd think at least above half? For various reasons mentioned elsewhere here (disruptive home environment, can't communicate effectively with co-workers remotely, etc). Many people just become very unproductive if they're not physically in the presence of other people being visibly productive.

I'd like to see some formal studies into this to get the true split.

Your made up numbers could be said for people working in an office. I had one exec ask me years ago when I was pushing to transition to remote friendly, "how would we know if someone was working when they are at home?" My response, "how do you we know they are working now?"

The numbers are probably close to the same in office too, only the 2% (or whatever percentage it is), ends up with more access to physical capital to steal in office.

Personally, I hope the future for work becomes as remote as possible as near to a 4 day week as possible.

Isn't this a process failure? At least for that hypothetical 18%. If you have a product roadmap with well-defined milestones and good weekly accountability, it should be clear very quickly if someone is underperforming. There may be people who don't want to work remotely, but that's again why having a flexible+hybrid WFH approach seems like the best of all worlds.

> I have a hard time wrapping my head around why companies are mandating 100% return to office.

Only reasons I can think of is as follows. - Someone in the CEO's direct reports is tasked with making a decision. - They start a survey on how satisfied the managers are on the work performance. - The survey does not go to individual employees. - Rightfully, the survey results wildly support return-to-office. - Decision is made.

Some other company may decide to be data driven, and use metrics which may or may not fully reflect the tradeoffs between work-from-home vs. office.

Or, the top leader makes the decision for the rest of the company. No questions allowed.

> Cost issues aside, I've always maintained that the absolute best experience is a hybrid/flexible schedule and location policy.

Agree. This should be the way.

The top level policy is often butts-in-seats but supervisors typically just let people do what they want to do. The VPN is there, we all have laptops...no one is running around complaining about Bob or Jill working from home when they feel like it. This is my observation of many knowledge workers' departments in various companies.

> I have a hard time wrapping my head around why companies are mandating 100% return to office.

Will they though? If some companies don't, that will be a major reason to change jobs for the better employers (who value your flexibility).

a lot of the big tech use their footprints as political power. who wants to bet California goes less after big tech if they keep their hq in San Francisco fully staffed?

A few really need it; most don't. Their managers and executives put their own desires ahead of the best interests of the organization, and what they desire is to have their ego stroked.

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