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Thank you for your point of view. It was lovely of you to share it.

I'm going to paraphrase:

>> Some are allowed to work from home, others aren't

I'm guessing the people who insist they continue working from home, if they bring in enough money to the company, they are allowed to and the ones who you feel needs to be managed, by a manager, old-school way, until they become such a valuable, income bringing member of your team, aren't.

I at least hope this will become old-school. I know that for me, I'm not going back to the open, life-crushing and money-saving open-office, ever. Yes, yes, I'm a privileged piece of this and that and I should be thankful that I have a job and all that. But on the other hand, since I'm once of those sought after persons, since I'm both a dev AND I've experience, I don't quite buy into that.

But this is just my personal feelings on the matter. Maybe I'm being selfish and I'm taking advantage of the situation, but so are you, I feel.

I hope to live long enough to see lots of change in the work place and I hope and believe you will enjoy them as much as I will.

All people are OK with such setup. It was shared decision of the team, not just management sitting up in their high castle and issuing a decree. It's a small company with less than 20 total employees and most "executives" still write code. I am writing those posts now, when a long processing pipeline is running.

I think that most people, who are strongly against hybrid work just have to live in a miserable place like SF for their good software engineering job. It's unfortunate that so many software companies are in the Bay Area with one of the worst real estate markets in the world, horrible commute times and drug/homelessness crisis. I used to work there for a few years and if I still did I also would probably advocate hard for the fully-remote work.

Most of people in our company are happily living close to the office for other reasons that just the job, so coming to the office is not an issue.

My friend, who still works in SF recently came to visit Warsaw, Poland (where our engineering office is located) and jokingly said "funnily coming from SF to Warsaw feels like coming from a third world country to a first world country".

>> not just management sitting up in their high castle and issuing a decree

That's great to hear.

>> In remote-only setting, everything requires setting up a meeting. That often formalizes everything, and less things end up being discussed.

That is something that can be worked on though, don't you think? We should be able to improve that bit of the "remote working" thing, I feel.

I'm currently with a client that has the type of problems that pretty much demands of me that I, or the PM in my team, responds to their chats within the minute. That means I have to keep an eye on the notifications all the time. That takes a bit of a toll on me, I have to say. But it's manageable.

Perhaps a devastating failure happens in production that we need to resolve as quickly as possible. First the client chats me up. Then we realize we need more info so we invite another person into the chat. Then we go video. We all turn our cameras on and we talk freely until we realize, we need top dog to approve emergency deployment of Very Important Patch, so we invite them and get their clearance and then we rock'n'roll.

I think we just simply need to become very good at remote communication, for this new world (that I day dream about) to become reality.

And that's not easy. But just because it's not easy shouldn't be enough to scare us away from it.

> I think that most people, who are strongly against hybrid work just have to live in a miserable place like SF for their good software engineering job. It's unfortunate that so many software companies are in the Bay Area with one of the worst real estate markets in the world, horrible commute times and drug/homelessness crisis.

Woah there, if you’re not actually from SF please lay off repeating third hand tropes.

Just like hybrid work is great for some, I’m a fan, but others do best with wfh, Some people love sf and it’s nowhere near as bad as the stereotypes claim. (Except the tenderloin and immediate vicinity)

There’s a reason people would live SF and take buses an hour south to Silicon Valley rather than living in Sunnyvale or Mountain View. Personally I’m actually moving to SF despite my ability to wfh, I’d rather do hybrid and live in sf.

> Spontaneous interactions: Someone complaining over the lunch [...] In remote-only setting, everything requires setting up a meeting. That often formalizes everything, and less things end up being discussed.

Our team scheduled a daily half-hour meeting early in the morning with no set agenda, to try to replace all these casual interactions until we can go back to hybrid. It's not perfect, but it helped.

We have daily dev (remote) standups at noon. It's about 9 people on the meeting, so even if someone gives quick update about what they working on, discuss a few top priority issues that came up, it still ends up eating up the whole 30 minutes pretty quickly. And it supposed to be 15 minutes in the first place.

Nice! We had a voluntary meeting early in the morning but we ended up dropping it.

What we do now is to encourage calling each other and also to encourage showing up for meetings early - if we want.

For all its warts, this is a thing I like about MS Teams: it shows a notification whenever someone else first enters a scheduled meeting so if someone enters a meeting 5, 15 or even 20 minutes ahead of time I know they want to talk and can join if I want to talk.

Talk before meetings can be anything both work and weather, but work has priority (I think).

We also have a voluntary meeting sometime after lunch where we aren't allowed to talk about work : )

Wow, that’s such a good observation about the MS Teams notification. That’s a great idea for people who just want to chat a bit.

We do this too. Plus async on slack (sometimes with huddles). Works out well and I don't miss a thing about in person.

As soon as a requirement is made that an employee be in the office on a semi-regular basis, remote works is no longer an option. Frequent WFH days are still possible, sure, but that is a different beast than remote work.

I wonder how much of the benefits you describe could be gained by instead flying everyone out for two weeks to work together in an office, maybe 3 or 4 times every year.

That would work well for people without kids. Kinda sucks for the people with kids. Now you not only have to find a nanny for when you go on vacation, you need a nanny for when you work. This is coming from a guy who doesnt any have kids himself mind you.

The two-weeks-away four-times-a-year thing absolutely wouldn't work for parents, but anybody with kids who's trying to do a full day's productive work from home long-term has got to have either a spouse watching them or some kind of day-care regardless. I can't imagine thinking "I don't need a nanny, I'm in the home-office."

With this policy, you'll keep the 20% capable staff. Anyone else (except a few both too afraid to leave and too comfy with their current pay) will leave.

That'll leave you with a few 10x staff, too lazy to leave, but capable, and a lot of ballast.

I think you underestimate how many people like the socialising in the office if you have a relativly short commute.

I used to like it. About 10 years ago I went into consulting from home. I've developed much richer friendships outside of the office and like to go out in the evenings with them instead of coworkers. I've also become more engaged with my local technology/software community. It's nice to be able to lose a client or job and not worry about losing my friends.

YMMV.

Now think about you when you did like it. What was your situation/life back then ? There are plenty of people who are you from that time. They do like going into office. So the argument here is that it is not one size fits all and just like there are plenty of arguments FOR wfh, there are plenty against it. YMMV

No need to be defensive, I agree with you. Both sides are valid. But according to the OP employers want to kill WFH, not vice versa.

I will say though thinking back to those times I was younger and more naive. I was a slave to that employer, often there until 8-9 at night. My life revolved around them. It wasn't healthy.

No worries. I am also not arguing for office only and if employers are trying to kill WFH completely, that is a bad move and will not work.

I prefer socializing with the people of my choosing

I forgot to add that our office is not in San Francisco, so you can get decently priced apartment within walking distance to the office, without people injecting heroin at your front door and a good public transport.

Your points weighs heavily on a lot of implicit parts of the value equation you left out.

1. That 20% number. What if it's 40%? 50%?

2. How easy/quick is it to replace the people you will lose who don't prefer this work style?

3. What percentage of your current workforce likes the environment as described? Maybe hiring off the street is 20%, but you've already selected for 80% through other selection factors.

Basically, at what point does the value gained from the in person work / setup overtake the loss of potential workforce? You're making an argument for why some people won't want to work there, but so long as the environment is not discriminating on things like race/gender/ability, a partial in person setup may actually be the right call for some teams/companies, without any "luring" needed.

I say all this as someone who primarily prefers to work at home now, but goes into the office once a week or so without any requirement to do so. I agree with OP's initial points a lot, though I think I would lean less towards requirements and more towards guides.

For 1 it's the Pareto distribution. I've seen it normal that 80% of the people do 20% of the work, and the top 20% do 80% of it. He's saying you'll keep the lower 80%.

Ah, I misunderstood then.

I see that as a total misapplication then, as it actually assumes way worse - that 100% of the people would not like this work condition described, which is evidently false as OP has a company of people working in that. The question still remains though: what percentage of people would choose to stay / join this environment?

Yeah, I agree with you and would push that point a little further to say that social interaction at work is necessary for a subset of humans. I know it is for me and I love having at least 1 or 2 days of social interaction that I don't even get hanging with my family.

We had one guy, who completely isolated himself from the world for 6 months during Covid. Total 0 interaction - he even ordered groceries online and he would wait a few days before unpacking them.

Before Covid he was great. During the isolation he developed mental health issues. We tried to help, offered paid sick leave for a while, but eventually we couldn't help. He is unemployed for last few months. I meet with him sometimes, but he is still unfit to work. I can't think of something I could do now.

I'm curious which was the cause and which was the effect.

I'm not. Solitary Confinement in prisons is so horrific to most prisoners, that they'd rather be in a den of predators with the possibility of getting raped than be in Solitary Confinement.

Solitary confinement is forced isolation. Not even remotely comparable to someone deciding for themselves to isolate.

That's rough, and I'm sorry to hear that about your colleague. No one is beyond developing mental health issues in trying times... but do you think it would have saved him if he had to come into the office once a week? I have my doubts.

Personally, I don't think having to do that would improve anything for me either. I love being full remote and after having gotten used to it even mandatory mondays seems like they would be an unnecessary burden... but all teams are created different.

>Some people are quite good at focusing at home. It varies person by person. We have some people, who are great at fully remote work.

I am really good at focusing at home NOW but it took lots of training to be good at.

People are taught to read and write or ride a bicycle but are expected to be productive working from home from day 1.

We developed a policy that Mondays are required, Wednesday are encouraged, rest is work from home.

I find this sort of policy fascinating. You say people are required to be on site every Monday, but what would happen if they said no? Would you fire them and go through the pain and expense of replacing them? Or is it "required" in the "we'll say it in the hope no one actually questions it" sense?

Some people are fully remote and only meet with a team once in a while and that's ok. You can say "I will WFH on Monday, because I am waiting for sofa delivery". It is not a big company and we don't have anything formalized. We have about 80-90% people in the office on Mondays, 50-70% on Wednesdays, 20-40% on other days and it works out OK.

I think what they were really asking was whether you're ok with an employee moving 200 miles away then rarely returning to the office in person.

That'd be interesting, but there's an obvious answer of "Of course not, no one should have to travel that far!" It's much more interesting to consider a case of someone who lives 2 minutes away from the office and just doesn't want to come in. Would they be reprimanded for refusing to comply with the 'requirement' to come in?

If they wouldn't then it's not a requirement.

If they would then I suspect many people at that company are job hunting right now.

That's not really answering the question.

Curious why this is downvoted, it seems like a valid question here of how to handle a situation that may arise. I like a lot of these rules but could see myself hitting these. What if I "can't make" 25% of Mondays. What about half? What's the general force behind the policy? That's a big part of the design here.

FWIW I was pretty sure full-remote (even Covid remote) would lead to less spontaneous interactions but since we’ve gone full remote (no office ever) I’ve found spontaneous interactions/ideas to have gone up. I imagine, as with anything, you get out what you put in and my company went hard on full remote. Also oddly my meetings have gone down (and I’m a lead dev) I think because of increased use of Slack and async work, means small meetings aren’t necessary.

> Maybe Morale was lower just because Covid was bad for everyone

Not for me. Best 2 years of my life.

No commute, no (horrible) office. More time with family and new babies.

I agree with everything you said but for the problem then simply becomes how do we do all that but do it remotely? Like why not just encourage more social chat? Have lunch on Zoom etc