Why return to the office if you’re just Zooming all day anyway? | Hacker News Reader

Why return to the office if you’re just Zooming all day anyway?

computerworld.com

51 pointsCrankyBear29 comments

Because commercial real estate leases are long and chances are your company doesn’t want to pay to break it. Not really a good reason, but a popular one I’d be willing to bet.

Also sales people. More specifically sales managers. Who, incidentally, often go on to occupy executive level positions, taking their beliefs about the supremacy of face to face meetings with them.

Commercial real estate is cheaper when the lights and HVAC stays off and no cleaning services are needed.

Most companies I've worked for were actually sub-leasing at some point, so it also isn't actually necessary to break the lease at all and could only have administration costs as long as the rest of the market is maintaining the pretense that office space is going to stay valuable. That's actually a good reason to line up a sub-leaser with a contract early.

How can they put their thumb on you and squish you, if they can’t put their thumb on you?

I often wonder if the benefits of automation in the corporate environment have yet to be realized...

Perhaps a good fraction of the executives and board members could be replaced by autonomous AI systems with little effect on profitability and productivity, indeed perhaps a positive effect?

The remote office setup might just be making this a more visible issue.

That's its own dystopia that some companies have chosen to ramp up in the last year and a half.

What metrics do you think represent a productive employee? How many minutes are spent in Zoom meetings? How busy their calendar looks? How often they wiggle the mouse?

There's plenty of surveillance-ware companies have to already track those and more employee metrics. There's plenty of social media posts going viral of surveilled employees excitedly learning they can put a mechanical watch under the laser input of their mouse just so they can use the restroom or stretch their legs without getting dinged for being "unproductive" on "company time".

For the average HN reader unless you have a strong collaborative process that requires face-to-face most likely you don't need to return to the office. RTO is being driven IMHO by extroverted people who were already on planes and in face to face meetings prior to the pandemic and that's how they're used to working. I remember reading in the press that one person lamented losing business to another company because his was still in lockdown and the other company's salespeople got on a plane and closed the deal.

So for a certain kind of person there's probably a mix of FOMO and also for them face to face was always how they did business and it's hard for them to understand there are plenty of people who just don't need to operate that way and never did.

I've returned to the office for the two days per week that have the fewest meetings, and it feels like the right balance. There's still an opportunity for whiteboard time, getting up early 2 days in a week feels more like adventure and less like a slog. I'm actually surprised, since I thought I'd be one of those that needed to be in the office every day.

I'm fine with remote work - people don't all need to be in the same place. I'm just tired of work from home. Internet speed, work/life balance, space for desk and monitors, etc.

Hopefully WeWork etc. can fill some of that need.

I was forced to get a private office because my internet connection at home is terrible. It really is the best of all worlds— it lets me separate home from work effectively, I’m not worried about kicking my legs up and watching some YouTube videos when I have downtime between meetings, let’s me concentrate on my work away from my wife and kids, it has a gym that I use everyday after work and is right next to a golf course where I play a round every Friday when we don’t have any meetings or I don’t have anything pressing to complete before the weekend.

There's probably a business model in subleasing this fully built-out office space that's unused due to WFH and doing short-term rentals to companies/individuals who need temporary space.

> As a recent article from The Washington Post put it: “They’re still spending most of their time isolated and glued to their computers for Zoom meetings, email, and Slack.”

At all companies I have worked for, teams sit together and talk directly. And Meeting rooms are full of people talking face to face. There are also international meetings, but that one are two or three meeting rooms with a team in each one, not people sitting individually.

You may like to work from home or not, but this opinion piece is based in the authors personal experience, and it is at least different from mine in all companies I worked for.

> Companies currently renting office space are just throwing money away if all of their employees are still doing the same thing at home that they were doing at work.

I agree with this sentence, and if your company is doing this you should work from home if you want. I just do not think that it applies so widely as the article suggests.

They're talking about the new normal, not the way things worked in your past jobs. For a current example, my girlfriend works at a huge corporation and has to return to the office now for at least 1 day a week. While in the office they are told not to hold meetings together, but to Zoom into meetings, even when everyone is in the same building.

That is not what my company is doing, first time I heard that a company does such a think. I agree that it makes little sense.

I was brought back to the office early September on a one-day-per-week basis to facilitate “face to face” communication.

Since then, we’ve had exactly zero in person meetings. We each use Teams even when in the office.

The one time I suggested meeting in a conference room, the consensus was “it’s easier to see the presenter’s screen over Teams”.

I enjoy talking to my nearby colleagues and having a little adventure one day per week, but it’s clear that the management motivation for this is not in person communication, but stems from the same lack of trust and need to micromanage that prevented frequent WFH in the first place.

I enjoy coming into the office, hanging with my colleagues and drinking the coffee.

Sure, my home-office setup is probably better in every way, better keyboard, better monitors, better chair, faster internet connection, the ability to blast music at high volumes...

But I'm not a social person, I have one friend, we hang once a week, and it's great, a weekly highlight. But I like that there are people around at the office, that I can optionally goof-off with, people with my kind of humor, people who know about endianness beyond Lilliput but also know about Lilliput.

No problems there. The problems start when people try to force others into the office to match their own preferences, or to help them with their personal problems.

"I like getting out of the house because..."; your inability to make your home an enjoyable place is not my problem, unless you make it problem.

This is the way I've worked for ten years in offices. We stopped even bothering doing standups and staff meetings in the conference room because it was easier to take things from our desks.

Because for many leaders, keeping their workers in the office comes down to asserting control.

edgy!

In my opinion, most office jobs are redundant. When the world went WFH, these jobs were exposed.

One of the great understated problems of remote work is conflict resolution. Quicker to handle face-to-face and just drags on over zoom. I absolutely love WFH, but much like any long distance relationship, dissonance lingers which is unhealthy for any organization.

Because I want to actually see and interact with human beings...

Have to bully wage slaves

Do the Linux kernel devs use Zoom? Do they work together in one building? How about any of the BSDs? Do they use Zoom or work together in one building — aside from hackathons?

No, but the rest of us are supposed to put up with this bullshit? Bosses and CEOs will literally force workers to Zoom from the office instead of going to therapy.

> No, but the rest of us are supposed to put up with this bullshit? Bosses and CEOs will literally force workers to Zoom from the office instead of going to therapy.

Hashicorp is fully remote, they're always hiring, and I highly recommend the culture [1] (to name one enormously successful, remote first org). Lots of other orgs to pick from [2].

You can't convince executives, who are dead set on return to office, on remote work anymore than you can convince a southern baptist there is no God. These are strongly held belief systems, not data driven decisions. Don't swim upstream; vote with your feet and don't work for orgs that make arbitrary requirements about where knowledge work is performed.

Another path is legislation/regulation requiring businesses accommodate remote work when able (because, of course, you can't trust that they'll offer it out of the goodness of their hearts), but that takes more time and collective effort to accomplish [3].

[1] https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/remote-culture-at-hashic...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28719320 (Control-F remote)

[3] https://www.euronews.com/next/2021/10/03/which-countries-pla...

I’m entirely unconvinced that legislation is needed here. If remote-first is a winner, firms using it will outcompete those who don’t. Forcing businesses against their will to make an accommodation isn’t likely to put those accommodated workers onto an equal footing with those complying with return-to-office wishes. So you then pass more legislation as a bad patch over your first ill-advised patch.

Remote and in-office can both exist. If one is wildly better than the other, it will become dominant.

No need to convince anyone or write new laws. If remote work is more efficient then it will win in the market eventually.

Not without whole generations of executives and managers dying off.

Do you want to wait another sixty years before remote-everything is the norm? Forty years?

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