Comment by enjo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by enjo | Hacker News Reader

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This is a really good point.

To add to it, WFH has one clear massive weakness: the lack of face to face interaction leads to quite a bit of atrophy when it comes to team cohesion. I've been managing WFH teams for the better part of a decade and I've yet to find a satisfactory solution other than getting people together every couple of months to work on hard problems together and build some trust.

I'm really bullish on the hybrid model right now. I think having an office designed more like a co-working space that can serve as a central meeting place for teams is what the future of software development looks like. No expectation that everyone is in the office every day, but rather reimagine the office more as a place where people come together when they really need (or want) too.

We're experimenting with that now in my organization and the results so far are pretty good. Some people come in every day. Some people come in every now and then. Others come in when their teams needs them. We're continuing to use all of the best practices for remote work and I think people are finding a really good balance right now.

I don't understand how the "work from the office one day a week" thing would work. If you mandate it's the same day for everyone then the office is empty 80% of the time. That's a huge waste of money. If you don't mandate everyone come in on the same day then all the benefits of being face to face disappear because the person you need/want to be face to face with chose a different day.

It is for sure a challenge, especially where people work across multiple teams and each team has a different 'standard' office day. That unfortunate individual is now compelled to come into the office multiple days.

And folks that work across teams like that are often gluing the organisation together in subtle but vital ways, so anything dis-incentivising it is a dark pattern.

As far as I know, no one is mandating that every comes in the same day. So you can reduce the office space by some percentage, assuming people come in on different days and not all at once.

If you have 10 teams of 5 people each in an office, in a 3/2 hybrid setting you can expect you'll have 30 people in the office. You can pad that to go to 40 people in the office on any given day -- this gives you a 20% reduction in required office space.

I think the important distinction for us is that it isn't "work from the office one day a week". It's work from home unless your team needs you. Our ask is that team leaders work very hard to limit the days that people need to be in the office and that when they ask folks to come in there is a clearly articulated reason and objective. Basically the idea is that we want coming into the office to feel valuable and therefore worthwhile.

In reality most teams don't need people to come in that often... I'm concerned about some long term drift where some teams never come in and others find themselves schlepping into the office a lot, but I think it's something we can manage with good coaching for our team leads.

WFH and working onsite are two polar opposites, and I personally think that hybrid models are bound to lead to either model being used 100% fairly quickly. Either work and communication is structured in a way that it can be done fully remotely, or it’s not. If it is, then what‘s the point of onsite? If it’s not, well then everybody needs to be onsite.

„Your team needs you“ is a far too unspecific constraint to implement btw. That’s an invitation for extrovert team leads to pull in the whole team for minor issues.

The way my team (informally, management isn't in it) was to create a Discord with several rooms. If a couple of you are working together, you can jump to a different room and screen-share. If you want a chat, move to a busy room. If you want to do some head-down work, mute and deafen. It's been really valuable, especially for someone like me who joined during lockdown.

>>> atrophy

Have you consider team atrophy as a pre-existing/chronic condition which maynot have cure?

Probably not, because as with many of these studies, people that can impose their preference will do it and rationalize their preference.

There was a study about US companies moving headquarters in the 60's. There would be planning committees, analyses, the whole shebang.

This later study found that almost invariably the new HQ would be closer to the CEOs home/hometown/home state. Some of these companies even failed because obviously people working at the NY HQ would not necessarily want to move to the Texas HQ.

In Romanian we say: "cine împarte, parte-și face": he who shares (does the sharing/gives things out), gets his share (cut).

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