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Comment by ajkjk | Hacker News Reader

Every single article on HN that is remotely related to WFH has the same two camps coming out to.. state their case.. again.. to the crowd.

Group (1) loves WFH and can't understand how anyone would ever want to work in an office and will only work remotely from now on if they can. Group (2) hates WFH and desperately needs the interactions an office provides and will be quitting any job that permanently works from home.

These two groups are two totally different types of people. They will never understand each other. It is probably not productive for each of them to keep rehashing their stances to each other. I don't know what the relative ratios of the two are, but I imagine we're gonna live in this two-types-of-employees world forever and ought to get used it. And we should probably stop belligerently pontificating to each other; nothing is going to change and it is just going to keep being a cycle of failing-to-communicate.

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I'm in group 1.

I'm ok with people wanting to go to office. Just let me work from home.

I'm also ok with people saying "I'm ok with WFH. Just let me work in the office".

I'm not ok with people saying "everyone needs to WFH" or "everyone needs to go to the office".

I don’t know many WFH advocates who want to close all offices and force everyone to work from home, but many (most?) WFO advocates want to go back to the office AND have everyone else go back too. This includes almost all company execs who are pushing for a return to office. I think that’s the big difference between the camps.

There are good reasons to go advocate for as few people in offices as possible though. Keeps people off roads, less traffic and pollution, those previous offices could be reused as homes that most cities desperately need.

I also don't see the point of an office when you only have a fraction of the people there.

Isn't it a better idea to work on public transportation and housing to actually fix those problems? Simply forcing everyone to work from home will probably alleviate traffic, but also introduce its own myriad of problems.

Public transportation seems to always bother someone. That's why we have nimby. It's the best solution when people have to go somewhere. If there is a solution that involves not even needing it in the first place, why wouldn't you advocate for that. Public transportation doesn't comes for free, there's still pollution involved and often runs at a loss

I don't know any WFO advocate who thinks that everyone must work from an office. Managers saying their workers must work from an office doesn't do that from the perspective of an WFO advocate, but to make their workers more efficient as they think that office workers perform better. Similarly managers who forces all their workers to WFH (by not having an office) doesn't advocate for everyone to WFH, rather they think that it is more efficient to work from home so that is how they run their team, there is no grand social statement about this.

What is the distinction between what you say and being an advocate? If they truly believed one way is more efficient, and managed accordingly, how are they not an advocate insofar as their team is concerned?

An advocate tries to convince people to do something without forcing something. CEO's doesn't try to convince everyone that working from office is great, they just say that if you don't come to office you are fired. A CEO advocating WFO would be if he was trying to convince other CEO's to also adopt WFO policies. But doing something yourself doesn't make you an advocate.

You're being obnoxiously literal with this. Words typically lead to action but action is the stronger proof. They don't need to be literally "advocating" anything if they're already showing it through action.

You can't be a Bossy McBosserson and get big bossy promotions if you can't poke and prod your employees in person all day.

Yea this all screams 'I need someone to scream at'.

Was a satirical article posted here a while back about a CEO wanting his people back so he could feel powerful again, and IMO that is 99.9% of the reason for management/C-suite's push.

Management becomes redundant/useless and c-suited only have each other to boss around, and we can't have that.

Or, as my grandparents used to say 'If everyone is rich(powerful), no one is rich, and no one would do the work.'

Also cognitive skills like reading comprehension become really hard to fake when you are at home interfacing with text only. It is much easier to fake competence when you just float from meeting to meeting all day.

Y’all work in some weird places.

Large orgs have many of these people.

> "everyone needs to WFH"

never heard of anyone who ever said that. is it simply there for rhetorical purposes?

It's a thing. My employer (Dropbox) has mandated it, for instance, and no longer has offices at all.

Surely they have some offices? As a small company that has no offices, I actually run into problems at times because we don't have an official office address. For example, some financial and other types of companies want things like a copy of an office lease or a utility bill in the name of the company.

Probably not an issue for a public company like Dropbox. I suspect they have an official address and SEC filings ought to demonstrate they're real as much as an office lease.

Was that before or after COVID ? Because Gitlab for example was always remote by principle. We are talking here about companies that were mostly in large offices in the first place.

Very much after.

> I'm not ok with people saying "everyone needs to WFH" or "everyone needs to go to the office"

I think that's the rub, as most people/roles who want to "work from office" also mean be surrounded by their coworkers.

Surely you'd want to be surrounded by other people who also want to be around one another, not by people who would rather be somewhere else.

I dislike this way of thinking about it. This take on things splits up people into two groups, and implicitly (or in this case explicitly) makes it seem like it's different "types of people". There's us, and them. There's the ones who think like me, and the ones who don't.

Reality is more complicated, nuanced, and doesn't easily split people into two groups, which is a good thing! It makes it easier to empathize.

For example, a few people in thread have already stated they like a hybrid approach (whether it's twice a week in-office and the other days from home, or even WFH most of the time but in-person meetings a few times a year).

For another example, most people will have different preferences at different times in their career and/or lives. Just starting out? Maybe it makes more sense to be around other people to lear more. Live far away and have a long commute? Maybe WFH is better. Have young kids but live in a small apartment? Office might be easier.

The truth is, this isn't really two ways of "being". This is dependent on personality, yes, but also on circumstance.

And btw, being a manager and meaning that your job is more effective if people work from the office is also a circumstance, and a legit one, despite many of the people on this site somehow implying this is somehow wrong. (Not that I'm saying managers should always get their way, but it's a real, valid concern).

That seems like an oversimplification, I guess I am in group 3 if I don't mind going to the office a few days per week 2-3 depending on what I am doing?

I do however have an issue with others trying to sell me their preference as some kind of objective truth when in practice software development is so diverse these days that one's reasons to go (or not) to the office are often irrelevant to someone else.

That being said I like to see that discussion happening on HN and I don't tire of reading the different takes.

I also like hybrid.

I actually wrote more about this exact topic on my blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/remote-working-and-the-elep...

Personally, it feels to me that these personality types are simply incompatible - conditions in which the first group will be happy will be disappointing for the other and vice versa.

The logical conclusion for all of that in my eyes is a split culture - certain companies and teams will go remote first, while others will go back to the office when safe, and the respective people will sooner or later migrate to the environments that are better suited to them, as long as such positions can be found.

However, this is not just an utilitarian decision but also something impacted by the people in management positions, who in my experience err on the side of the more traditional in person work. If it were not for the pandemic, remote work wouldn't be as prevalent nowadays.

I’m sure there are people who do want to drive 220-440 hours per year (SoCal) to bring their laptop to a cubicle. I am not one of them and I admit I do not understand them.

But I do not doubt they exist.

I just wish group 1 and group 2 could coexist without forcing the other group.

This is going to be the tech version of The Dress[0]. We're all seeing the same thing, yet half the population sees it one way and the other half sees it the other, and no one can understand why anyone wouldn't see it that way.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress

(It's white and gold, I don't care what reality has to say about the matter)

For those who do care about what reality has to say:

"The dress itself was confirmed as a royal blue "Lace Bodycon Dress" from the retailer Roman Originals, which was actually black and blue in colour"

Unfortunately, in the case of work environments, there is no objective reality we can appeal to. Different people prefer different kinds of environments. The best solution is the one that fits each person to the environment they are most productive in.

I have been nearly 90% WFH, on a different continent from my office, for more than 10 years now. But I feel those last 10% of in-person interaction are important for team chemistry, so not having had the opportunity to meet the rest of the team for more than two years now (before COVID, there were family related reasons) has been rather difficult for me.

Me too... Not 10 years but about 4. I can't imagine not WFH but finally I'm starting to see that I should probably force myself to do some physical interaction. I guess the brain didn't evolve for us to sit alone all the time, as much as I love that

The interesting thing for me is that I deal with group 2, but I work in a place with multiple head offices, and they've been like that since the early 90s.

Remote working, in the sense that very few medium or large businesses have a single location, is the norm. It always has been. What has also been the norm is shitty ways of dealing with that - creating a de facto priveleged class of decision makers in one location, flying people around, and the like.

I agree there's not going to be a reconciliation between people who mostly want to work where-ever suits them (whether that's home or a satellite office) but a rational response to reality would be to do a better job of dealing with what was already there before COVID.

You pretty much ignored hybrid WFH which is palatable to big chunks of members in both your groups.

> I imagine we're gonna live in this two-types-of-employees world forever and ought to get used it.

We won't, it will be hybrid in companies with collaborative work and WFH In others (to save costs + attract people).

Right now, now one can really say that WFH works at scale because going into current WFH there was a lot of momentum. You would need studies for new teams that are entirely WFH to really understand if WFH is good enough or not.

Totally agree that every single WFH post ends up like this. I'd really like to see discussion on how to reconcile the fact that these two groups exist and now have to work together somehow, rather than just being angry that the other side feels differently.

if you want reconciliation the office pushers need to stop acting like they have the authority to decide for other people.

Can you not say the same about the the WFH pushers? Sounds like you’ve dug in to a side and see the other as “the enemy”.

WFH advocates just want choice for everyone. WFO advocates, which include managers and execs, want everyone back in the office.

I’m a WFO advocate, I can’t care what you do, I just like the office better. So that’s a bold faced lie you tell yourself.

It feels especially jarring to me because I first came across this article via space Twitter, where it sort of fits into a broader recent collection of articles (from Sheetz, but also from Eric Berger at Ars Technica and others) generally railing on Bob Smith and his terrible management of Blue Origin, and I didn't really even register this article as being about WFH per se, as opposed to the poor handling of WFH policies just being the latest example among many of managerial ineptitude. I confess I don't really understand this being the one thing that catches the HN crowd's attention.

> Every single article on HN that is remotely related to WFH has the same two camps

Not a HN limited phenomenon. Pretty commonplace now

I'll go out on a limb and say this is pretty much most popular threads on HN. All interesting discussion is either 1) downvoted for going against the grain 2) disappeared as people see this place being diluted to nothing more than rehashing same points over and over.

This place is dying.

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