Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sanguinaire | Hacker News Reader

Whether working in the office is preferable or even necessary is going to come down to individual teams, not whole companies. The employers who figure that out quickly will do well out of the current labour shortage. Any business insisting on 100% in office or 100% remote is limiting themselves to a subset of the eligible workforce, so it'll be interesting to see how quickly they get out-competed.

View on HN

When you go 100% remote, you have a massive potential workforce, orders of magnitude more potential employees than those that happen to live within commuting distance to the office. The reason you go 100% wfh is because then all of the systems and relationships are tuned to remote work, which when done right is far superior to the daily office grind, middle management hell, “how was your weekend” small talk, documentation via dropping by someone’s desk…

Wfh will ultimately win here because it’s far better suited to information work than being ever present physically in a pseudo-factory.

I think over a longer timescale (~a decade) I would tend to agree. In the short term, there are too many people addicted to face-to-face work environments; often I feel that this is more down to office politics than productivity, but it'll persist for as long as it is effective in giving a career advantage.

For a long time, it’s been true that the internet can help your career far more than whoever works in your office. Open source contributions, emailing people asking for advice, engaging people on social media… all the way up to raising money. The future was already here, it was just unevenly distributed. COVID forced some who were holding out to face reality of a global, distributed work force.

All fine for Big Tech workers, but let's not forget about the large array of others who work in more "pedestrian" parts of the IT industry, ie those working for enterprise shops who are still working through the early stages of cloud adoption.

If you want to progress your career, networking on the internet is far more effective than trying to grind the way up the chain in an old school IT company via in-office schmoozing. That is a dead end with or without WFH.

Again, depends heavily on the industry. Also, I'm not entirely sure this is a good thing; I see a lot of "Twitter famous" people fawning over each other at the moment in something resembling a white-collar version of the US tipping culture, but I don't think that kind of behaviour should be allowed to take root more than it already has. One of the other positives we should be taking from a remote-first culture is greater appreciation for the practices of other cultures (since they are now so much more accessible). I hope we're not sliding towards a world where American fake niceness dominates and more reserved modes of interaction are sidelined.

This is a very interesting take that I have not considered. I think you are right about this though. Thank you for sharing.

Documentation via dropping by someone's desk is much better than no documentation at all, which is what I have observed the effect of WFH to be (perhaps this isn't typical though).

Is it really so bad having small talk with coworkers? I don't know where one is supposed to find friends in this new society that prefers talking to strangers and aliases on the internet over talking to the person sitting right next to them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com