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Comment by dan-robertson | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand I can’t wait to get back to the office. Less work cleaning my own bathrooms or worrying about loo roll, getting reasonably nutritious good food for lunch and breakfast without needing to plan for it, 20m of exercise twice a day walking to/from work, the social interactions, being able to wear pants because the office has AC.

The above is a little tongue in cheek but also true. I think it is important to acknowledge that different people have different lives and want different things. I can certainly imagine being in a situation where I would want to work remotely.

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Fortunately, organisations can cater to both sets of people. Take the money you would spend on an office and provide a co-working stipend to your employees instead. The people who like working from home can continue to do so and the people who like to work from an office can do so too.

People have varying needs. Some people are suited to office life and some people are suited to working from home. And some people like a mixture. Until relatively recently, organisations have had to put everybody in the same environment. Remote working isn’t good because you can work from home per se, it’s good because now the working environment can be tailored to the individual instead of forcing everybody into the same environment that is undoubtedly sub-optimal for a large proportion of the workforce.

a co-working stipend does not help me work with my co-workers who I need to collaborate with and who's back and forth decrease iteration times far below what they are remotely. Instead a co-working stipend just lets me hang out with strangers who are irrelevant to my actual job.

I get that not everyone needs to collaborate a way that requires face to face to be efficient but many do. As a simple example I'd expect a UX designer to be far more efficient to hand their phone to their co-worker and say "try this" instead of on slack "hey, sync to the latest version, oh you're in the middle of something? Okay, stash that, now grab my version, build....several minutes later....okay now navigate to this menu. no not that one. Pick Foo->Bar then scroll down and click the Moo button. Okay now, try it"

Someone will now pipe-in that Figma solves this. Fine, I chose a bad example. In my case it would be passing a game so Figma would not solve it.

> Instead a co-working stipend just lets me hang out with strangers who are irrelevant to my actual job.

doesn’t sound like a good use of your time, but for many people, it’s a third option that definitely has it’s pros/cons

I can see what you're getting at, but everything you described can be achieved by joining a coworking space.

It boils down to this: a 100% remote policy doesn't rob you of what you need, but a 0% remote policy robs those of us who prefer WFH from what we need.

The co-working workspace has security implications.

Also I think the current setup is working to a large extent because everyone is remote and playing field is even. It will be somewhat complicated after half the team is on-site and other half is not.

i’ll just continue to work for a company with the ability and desire to deal with those security issues, and whatever other problems my preferred way of working causes, since it makes me a happier and more productive employee. plus, in my experience, when you work from home, you don’t have to deal with an asshole control freak boss, since almost all of those don’t allow work from home in the first place, given a choice. ipso facto, one of the benefits of working from home is the opportunity to work under “better” management.

Nothing "robs" you. Companies make choices, employees do too. There will be a mix of companies offering everything from on-site only to remote-only and if you're skilled enough you will be able to dictate the terms of your employment.

If you’re good enough relative to what test?

I simply do not believe meritocracy can exist.

Our biological sensibilities are too easily confused by concepts we don’t fully grasp, and come on; there is so much rubber stamping and favoritism (even now I know the founder of my company is invited to private sessions in DC to hammer out rules that favor us and we’ve proven nothing).

This forum seems to have too much of a naive and weirdly trusting belief in such subjective and hand wavy ideas when literal reality is offering plenty of evidence to the contrary in the political sections of a newspaper.

This just isn't true. Office culture requires people and regularity. The ability to go and tap someone on the shoulder is priceless.

WFH makes businesses less effective.

> The ability to go and tap someone on the shoulder is priceless

Indeed and the annoyance I feel from that while I'm trying to concentrate is matchless.

Tapping on the shoulder can mean two things: "riddle me this" and "drop everything because I'm more important". The former can be replaced by a chat app. The latter is a stopgap for a failure to plan and goes with an adhocracy.

If a company became less efficient due to a lack of "drop everything" taps on the shoulder, it wasn't efficient in the first place.

> I think it is important to acknowledge that different people have different lives and want different things.

Absolutely. I've found mostly-remote with some office days works very well for me, personally, and this seems to be new normal in the bank that I work for. There are also times where we want large gatherings, too.

One thing that I feel gets missed around the idea that being in the same building builds collaboration: I personally find the opposite a lot of time. It might make for easy catchups for people in proximity in the building or campus, but it often leads to implicit decision-making by proximity, where people aren't included, even when they should be, if they happen to be on another floor or another building in the same campus.

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