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Comment by jstx1 | Hacker News Reader

My impression from previous discussions is that people like what they like whether it's remote or in office and there isn't a lot of convincing that we can do to each other.

Given the above, how do companies move forward? Make some % of your employees unhappy because they're either dragged back into the office or forced to work without one? Hybrid models? They seem like the worst of everything and they don't look like a stable solution. Maybe through quitting everyone reorganises themselves into the type of company they want (remote or in-office) and then everyone is happy?

What options do we have here?

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Judging by the historic job changing trends in the last few months, I think your suggestion that "through quitting everyone reorganizes themselves" is already happening.

The only question that remains to be answered is whether remote or in-office companies have structural advantages over the other type, and it will probably take a decade or so before there's enough data to conclusively call it.

What's so wrong with letting every employee make their own choice? Then, after 6 months or a year or whatever (to get everyone a chance to get used to it and be confident in their selection), survey everyone to find out who wants to keep working from home. Those that don't - allocate them a desk in an office. Add some additional hoteling desks for travelers or normal WFHers who need to visit, and then adjust the size of your office space to match.

> What's so wrong with letting every employee make their own choice?

You're inevitably forcing your colleagues into your own way of working to some extent. Imagine a team of 6 people working on the same product:

If 1 is in office and 5 are remote, then the benefits of the office are largely lost even for the 1 person. That 1 person is still working in a remote model just from a different location which happens to be the office.

If 1 is remote and 5 are in office, the 1 person will inevitably miss out on a lot of the ongoing in-person communication. This was a well-known thing before the pandemic - the most common advice was to be remote for entirely remote companies/teams but to avoid being the only remote person on an office-based team.

If it's 3-3, then some of the communication is in person and half of the team is missing out on it but all meetings still have to be online.

I don't doubt that some companies will do this but it doesn't seem stable in the long run.

Maybe I'm just used to it already. My team has employees in several different states (due to having offices there through a series of old acquisitions), as well as contractors both in South America and Eastern Europe. So, even before COVID, our meetings were already online-centric.

In fact I started working remote full time because after our company moved us to a fancy new open-office floorplan in the city my commute went from 20 mins to 75 and I realized I was wasting all that time just to be on virtual meetings in the office, so I stopped going in. Even when we were all in the office, meetings tended to be online anyway because the company did not build nearly enough conference rooms.

Having an online-first culture even before COVID never seemed to be a big problem for us. Obviously YMMV.

Those are Hypothetical anecdotal problems.

Don't fear the idea just because in your mind there are purely hypothetical situations where it might not be optimal.

The direct opposite of your opinion & posited hypothetical situation may exist in someone else's mind.

>>> You're inevitably forcing your colleagues into your own way of working to some extent.

This was already the case even for 100% on-site. It was just woven into the culture, so it didn't seem anomalous.

Before the pandemic, people still had to accommodate people with different working habits. This is where we got ideas such as hierarchies and "silos." There were unwritten rules about who was more important than who, whether they could have an office with a door, who could be interrupted and who couldn't. There were multiple channels of information that were not accessible to all.

I noticed that during the pandemic, there was as much or more communication among the rank and file, because it was easier to get lost without staying in touch. I had to be more careful about getting good information before proceeding on faulty assumptions. My group also became more global.

Oddly enough I'm back in office now, but in an isolated lab where I'm alone 90% of the time. And my team's boss is in another state.

Is it actual teammates the in-office crew wants, or do they just want to work around other people? In that case you aren't "inevitably forcing your colleagues into your own way of working" if you can find something that works for everyone, such as the in-office crew having a coworking site, or relocating that team to a common city if the team can accommodate it.

In fact, the refusal to acknowledge the truth that alternatives exist (albeit out of the box alternatives) strikes me as a common way for in-office advocates to shut down the WFH conversation.

I think individual employees are just figuring it out themselves. The free market can solve this issue autonomously. This causes a lot of short term pain for the companies themselves, but who cares? They're not even sentient beings.

Remote work is a sink. If even 30% of people are remote everything must adapt to remote-first, and a 70% full office is not really useful, it s like a work during august. So inevitably things will adjust to 98% remote over time. so knowledge based work should prepare for remote-first

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