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Comment by mlang23 | Hacker News Reader

I cant wait until I can go back to the office 100%. WFH, while convenient, is something I never wanted. I didnt want it 20 years ago when I started to work, and I dont want it full time today either, even with the covid experience. Human interaction is not tradable, and online conferencing sucks even more then a real meeting.

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That's fine! (I've said this in another similar thread recently:) The push here (to the extent that it's organized) should not be "abolish offices, everyone is remote". It should be "trust people to choose the environment where they work best". If you like the office, then you should be able to choose a company that has an office for you to work in. I personally work remotely and find it suits me. But I wouldn't mind working in a hybrid situation either, where being in the office was occasional/available.

The problem is that the "I like the office and everyone else should too because it legitimizes and popularizes my choices" crowd will never say that out loud so you don't know which arguments are in earnest.

Well, probably a lot of "I like the office" implies "... because I like being around my coworkers" and that obviously falls apart if you're the only one.

And if the feeling wasn't reciprocated, maybe that's for the best.

> then you should be able to choose a company that has an office for you to work in

This is the key part though, this isn't an individual choice, it's a company (or at least team) one.

If the rest of your team is in the office, and you aren't, then you aren't going to be "in the loop" and you aren't going to be an effective engineer.

If the rest of your team is not in the office, and you are, well, at that point it's not really different from a coworking space. The advantages of in person communication simply don't exist.

So... expect teams changing from/to in office to be painful, people who disagree are going to have to choose over leaving or sucking it up, and that's not a nice choice to be making. Unfortunately this is somewhat viral between teams too, because your manager is effectively on the "manager team" as well as the local team, and people do move around between team...

Moreover there will be plenty of times were you want to work for company X for reasons unrelated to whether or not they work from an office, you like the company mission, the technology, etc. As a result even once things settle down you can't expect everyone to be happy with the office/no-office/partial-office choice that is made...

I would go back to office if my commute was like 20 minutes by bike and I would share a small office with one to three other people on my team.

But my commute is 1 hour one way, some people don’t get seats on the train, U-Bahn in Berlin is like a can of sardines during rush hour and the bigger part of my team is in another country and the customer is at the other side of Germany. And the office is one big open office with ~40 people working. You need noise canceling headphones to keep your sanity. I couldn’t focus without them.

I‘m glad they don’t want to force us to come back.

My commute is a 5 minute walk. And thats no accident. I very deliberately chose my flat to be quite near to work. Has saved me about 5000 hours of commute time so far.

I love how that's an obvious option for everyone else too! /s

I have a hard rule on myself - if the commute is more than about 20-30 minutes or particularly unpleasant, I must change jobs or move house. Life is too short to spend such a huge part of it in a commute you don't enjoy.

For those starting out in SV now, that’s usually a choice of giving up a great job or paying super expensive rent/putting all your savings in a house or packing in with roommates.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, my wife has a 10 minute commute by bike. I make her change her job, so I can be nearer to mine.

No, sorry, it’s great where I live. Great nature around the corner, everything walkable, still a town with restaurants, but there aren’t that many interesting full stack dev and devops jobs and they didn’t pay as good. So, I’ll stay remote as long as I can.

We need some way to support both preferences. I’ve also been working professionally for more than 20 years and I absolutely hate working in an office. This past year working from home has done more to improve my mental health than I could possibly imagine. Just the thought of having to work in an office again makes me sick. But I can also understand that there are people like you. I don’t really understand why you feel that way, but I don’t really need to as long as accommodations are made for both people like me and people like you.

We online conference for our meetings anyway, so mine as well do it from the comfort of our homes.

Good for you. Just don't be surprised if you're the only one at the office when you get there, though. You might need to find human interaction outside work.

Being the only one talking to the VPs and CEO in the office during lunch is probably going to be a great career boost. So don't be surprised when the people who go into the office get the nice promotions and you don't.

Interestingly my whole team is very much in favor of being in the office a few days a week.

Most promotions happen by moving jobs anyways, so eh.

And the best jobs go to personal referrals from those who are trusted. Which is easier if the VP you used to work with is vouching for you than if they don't know you.

I think a lot of people on the 100% remote side of the debate are heavily underestimating the value of relationship building and team cohesion (for most people). You can't replace the frequent face to face social interactions, lunches, and drinks after work with a Zoom call. We are social animals and the more channels there are in an interaction (words, voice, body language, etc...) the richer that interaction is, and the more we get out of it. A likely counter to this will be "well I don't care about those things", ok, that's fine, but that is not true for everybody.

Agree with this assessment. I don’t care what anybody says, zoom and slack cannot replace sitting next to your teammmates.

Lots of different valid opinions, here. I've worked about half my career remote. In terms of team cohesion, socialization, and communication, I've seen remote outperform in-person and vice-versa.

I think the counter is to use your new found freedom wfh to get real non-commercial social interaction. With friends, family, neighbors…

You’re at the mercy of your employer in more ways than one if you rely on them for such a core human need.

No one said your co-workers must or should be your only social connections. Simply that it helps if they are A social connection.

You're still going to deal with your co-workers eight hours a day. Dealing with people who think of you as a friend is a lot easier than with people who don't.

I want to deal with my co-workers as professionals, definitely not as friends. They are not my friends, I’m paid to work with them. Companies are more productive when you remove social drama, not less.

There's always social drama because humans are social creatures and not machines. Hiding your head in the sand doesn't make it go away but merely means you're at it's whims with no influence on it. The difference is that if you're viewed as a friend other people first give you the benefit of the doubt since they assume you had good intentions. If you're not they don't and then things can escalate very quickly and not in your favor.

It sounds like you’ve worked under terrible management if you’re having these problems. On a properly run team people don’t squabble and politic. It is possible to work in a healthy manner, remote or otherwise. The drama you avoid when remote stems from not being forced to co-locate with individuals for a large swath of your waking hours. That is a breeding ground for unhealthy behavior.

I have yet to see a non-tiny company that doesn't have political squabbles cross-team and especially cross-department. It's the nature of many groups competing for finite resources and diverging goals. I have however seen many engineers be utterly obvious to the politics going on and getting burned by it in the end.

The politics are greatly reduced when everyone is remote. No “in group” lunches or beers after work…

There are entire categories of drama that wfh eliminates.

It doesn't eliminate them, it just hides them from you.

No it eliminates them. In office drinking, office romances, listening to petty personal problems… all completely vaporized in wfh.

You're just not on those Zoom calls. Presumably the office romances/drinking sessions are gone, but politics continues unabated.

Perhaps this is fine for you, but I want to point out to others that just because you don't see this happening anymore, doesn't mean that it has actually stopped happening.

> Presumably the office romances/drinking sessions are gone

That’s a huge win and those aren’t the only detriments eliminated when you don’t force grown adults into a high school like environment.

For you. For the happy marriages that didn't happen, probably not.

I suggest that lots of this WFH/WFO stuff is super personal, and what benefits one may disadvantage another, so it'll be interesting to see how all of this pans out over the next few years.

Basecamp was a fully remote company that got enough drama to cause almost half the employees to leave within a single month. Remote doesn't prevent in-groups but rather it allows them to grow in really odd ways without anyone noticing until it's too late to stop cleanly.

This is utopia. Human beings are competitive and social, and to achieve your goals you need more than professionals sometimes- you need friends.

It’s unprofessional to suggest that you can only be productive if you are surrounded with friends. I will happily produce with a team made up of people I would never socialize with. It happens all the time as none of my real friends even know how to code. Not once has this impacted my performance.

friendship /= drama

Please never hire at a company near me, thank you

I wouldn’t hire you based on your comments in this thread alone.

Firstly, the context of what I wrote was building trust and team cohesion within the organization. I don't think having or not having friends and family is relevant to that.

Secondly, we spend a lot of our finite lives working, do you want that part of your life to be cold and robotic? Wouldn't life be richer with a wide range of human relationships?

WFH fosters far more trust than “I must see my underlings churning away to be comfortable”, which is currently the driving force for those trying to return to the previous norm.

Every contractor will tell you that you can be far more productive than normal employees because you don’t get quagmired in silly social drama. Look at open source software, it is absolutely possible to create great software without even knowing the other team members. This whole concept that reproducing high school in a professional setting adds to productivity is entirely unfounded.

"Team cohesion" can work against you if you don't fit (which can be caused by a large variety of reasons). So maybe people estimate it very well, and calculate that less interaction is better.

Can't you have multiple Zoom calls with some one-on-one rather than a single Zoom call?

Do you have good internet? If not, upgrading it might improve the video signal.

What about something like Discord with voice setup so you can literally chat every five minutes if you want?

Could you not use one of the VR programs on Oculus Quest that create virtual meeting rooms like Spatial?

What about playing a game together once a week online? Could be something that requires a ton of cooperation like Rainbow Six.

I'm not saying that real lunches or whatever are not great and a step up in bandwidth, but I feel like if you really take advantage of all of the possibilities then you can still have social opportunities online that can build real cohesion. Which I think you are not really trying.

Because in most companies, you're having lunch with VPs and CEOs regularly? I've only worked at one company where I regularly saw anybody at the VP level and up on a regular basis. Unless you're working at a small company, this example just doesn't have any basis in reality.

I was poking fun at them saying no one will be in the office by pointing out that if you're literally the only non-manager in the office then you've got some advantages.

Where do you work that the C-level people eat in the same place as the office workers?

I’ve worked at a Fortune 500 company for 20 years and I’ve never so much as seen a C-level person, even though we all work on the same campus. They have separate parking garages, separate buildings, separate fitness facilities, separate eating facilities, etc.

I know your comment was tongue-in-cheek, but some seem to believe this.

From what I've seen, its a losing game. You can kiss all the ass you want, socialize whatever. But when there is an opening in companies like that, it seems like the boss's son-in-law/college crony/etc. always gets the job..

Right? Hey bro, I really don’t need to interact with you. You think I give a shit about your need for human interaction when you’re making me commute daily and pretend to fake work half the time at a desk.

Fuck that, go to a bar, I don’t need friends.

Where I live, people are apparently not a chicken as where you live... Most of my coworkers are happy to go back to the office. I guess we have about 10% which would like to have full WHF. OTOH, I also dont care what the majority wants. What counts to me is what I want.

Yeah, something tells me the fact that your coworkers are more excited to be back in person doesn't have anything to do with how brave you all are.

Maybe consider that are other reasons besides fear for why people prefer to work in an environment that is productive for them?

So far, I only know:

* Doesnt want to go back to work because of fear of infection * Wants to go back to work because she cant stand the kids and her husband anymore

I havent heard any other stories so far. Maybe because I am not allowed to stay very long at the office...

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