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Comment by KaiserPro | Hacker News Reader

I really don't understand the militancy of both sides.

Some people like the office, some people can't abide it.

A lot of programmers love remote because they enjoy the isolation to do work. Others do not, be that because they need to talk to people, or because the home situation sucks donkey balls.

I suspect the venom is because people are assuming that its a binary situation, you're either a remote company or not. They worry that their remote will be taken from them. I don't think removing the remote option is wise or healthy.

I don't think the future is fully remote _for everyone_, because fundamentally we are social people. On the flip side, I don't think full office 5 days a week is going to be the future either (caveats apply.)

The other point to think about is this: remote work is brill if you are enjoying it, but it licks massive donkeyballs if you don't. Having that dread of the workplace seep into where you are living is deeply bad for your mental health.

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This is such a great demonstration of the problem with "both-sidesing" things. You say all this as if "both sides" of this have equal power in the relationship, and this is something they can just politely disagree on and go on about their lives.

The reality is that if you need more flexible working arrangements, you are extremely subject to the whims of people who want offices to be the primary mode of work. If they don't want you to be remote, they don't need venom or arguments or to seem angry or even to seem to have much of an opinion at all. Simple inaction and lack of effort, followed by an "oh I'm sorry I forgot to tell you after we all got back from lunch" 3 weeks later is enough to make the remote person's situation untenable. Eventually the "oh I forgot you worked here. Just kidding hah hah hah" jokes kick in and then you know you're a couple months from being let go.

To have a successful working relationship with people who aren't in the office, work must be done by the people who are in the office to keep things working. Essentially, it can't work unless everyone adopts a remote-first approach where major discussions happen in writing out in the open.

The massive proliferation of slack and similar in the covid era certainly has and will continue to help establish this mode of working, but the people who don't want it because they feel uncomfortable when they don't see butts in seats 8 hours a day will likely put in a lot of passive-aggressive effort to bring things back to the old status quo.

This is a fantastic point.

The biggest hazards lie in the grey area between extremes. If everyone is remote always, everyone is on equal footing. Same can be said if everyone simply has to show up at the office every day.

Maybe the whole org doesn't have to be all on way or all the other, but you should at least be consistent within the teams that work closely together every day.

In practice, even most office jobs are remote. Everyone is wearing headphones & don’t want to be disturbed, so you gotta Slack them. If even one person on the team is in another office or at home for the day, then the meeting is over Zoom. For any type of 100% onsite job, when is it even 50% onsite anymore?

This is the case for software development, but I doubt that procedures like that are widespread in other areas. From anecdotes, people in remote positions are often just left out.

Everyone is wearing headphones & don’t want to be disturbed, so you gotta Slack them.

Or maybe don't interrupt the person who is deep in thought about a complex problem?

I've worked with clients who are fully on board with Slack (or Teams or whatever) and their culture doesn't really do email or phone so the most effective way to communicate with them remotely ends up being to join whatever channels the people you need to work with are on. If you all get along well it can be fun in the same way as any social network. But it can also be toxic to productivity because of the constant interruptions and if anything that effect is worse when everyone gets along because it's like everyone is in permanent water cooler mode as well.

I spent a few years in an office before going remote and this was 100% my experience.

The endlessly proclaimed, robotically repeated benefits of office work -- the vaunted "serendipitous encounters", "water-cooler conversations", and "impromptu lunchroom innovation sessions" -- they all involved nothing but small talk. All meetings were calls. No meaningful thinking or decisions occurred in-person.

When everyone joined me in working from home in 2020, the main thing I noticed was that people stopped trying to force down my throat all the mindless, unjustified, undocumented decisions they made in the office. I finally got a chance to use my voice to make the org stop being so dumb. And people were grateful.

I think people mostly make this "benefits of the office" stuff up to rationalize getting out of the house, away from their spouse and kids, and into the local urban center with all their favorite food trucks.

There are probably some industries where it has real benefit, like artistic ones, but for the most part I don't think SWE falls in that category.

In my experience there's a difference in the level you're operating at. What you've mentioned is familiar from IC level, whereas senior architect/tech director/cto roles many were done and made real progress through personal interactions. Often these things involve politics and personalities as much as situational specifics.

Haha, I can't help but find this humorous! I genuinely can't take this perspective seriously. What most people see is the 'architect' (read: [micro]manager) make 'important' interventions in others efforts...

I understand the role, I'm not ignorant of the purpose of these positions. But I'm painfully aware of how many people are b*llshitters and found their positions using these very office politics to get ahead. Their ultimate fear is being assessed on their own for their effort. Largely because they don't actually contribute much at all.

Fair enough, that kind of thing is toxic and I don't get involved with those kind of places.

Personally I moved back from Lead Architect/CTO roles to being a consultant mainly doing IC work where I deliver the entirety of a system myself. In other words I do deliver the goods technically, and happen to prefer that to working politically.

So it would seem my observation/perspective is coming from a different perspective than you were thinking of!

If the real work is done remotely then the work done at office isn't as important.

> If the real work is done remotely then the work done at office isn't as important.

If the real work is done, remotely or at work, then importance is irrelevant.

> You say all this as if "both sides" of this have equal power.

No, I said I didnt understand the vehemence.

> The reality is that if you need more flexible working arrangements

Yes, I don't think I'm going ever really go back full time. Currently, I come in ~twice a week.

I've worked with remote singular and remote offices for years(10+) before covid. Its been part of tech for a long time. Even my dad has be doing remote since the early 90s (if not more)

If you have decent planning, ticketing and retros then you'll know if your remote(or any other) team are not performing well.

> Essentially, it can't work unless everyone adopts a remote-first approach where major discussions happen in writing out in the open.

I just don't think that's right. Sure people need to be included in the "room" to make the decision, but that's not the same a remote vs office. Decisions are only a tiny part, the rest is execution and unblocking.

don't get me wrong, you need to have a culture of respect and brining people up to speed, siloing doesn't work well.

I recently reluctantly went back to the office and it was better than I had expected. Having that separation of work vs home was huge for me. I left work at work and didn't give it a second thought once I was home. I hadn't realized how much I was still in "work mode" while remote, even after working hours. It was hard to disconnect and clearly a source of stress that I couldn't really see.

Yeah, I don't like commuting, paying for gas, parking, and other stuff that comes with the office, but for me personally I think it's going to be good.

I agree, the best companies will let people choose to work the way they do best. Getting that right isn't easy.

> To have a successful working relationship with people who aren't in the office, work must be done by the people who are in the office to keep things working.

This is a massively underrated comment that needs to be highlighted.

I liked most of your comment until this last part:

> but the people who don't want it because they feel uncomfortable when they don't see butts in seats 8 hours a day will likely put in a lot of passive-aggressive effort to bring things back to the old status quo.

That is, in the first part of your comment basically says "Remote work isn't tenable unless in-office workers put in a significant amount of additional effort (e.g. always using written communication, impromptu conversations are verboten because you might be leaving a remote worker out, etc.)", but then you complain in-office workers just want to see "butts in seats" and are being "passive aggressive" if they don't put in the extra effort to make remote work tenable.

It could just (fairly) be the case that in-office workers don't want to put in the extra effort. I mean, a big reason many execs want people to be in office is because they see the efficiency in impromptu and verbal communication, and your post concedes that point by my reading of it.

> a big reason many execs want people to be in office is because they see the efficiency in impromptu and verbal communication,

Perceived efficiency. Like everyone is saying; for some jobs and some people it is apparently efficient (I have not seen this in practice much outside having a whiteboard with all in the room for brainstorming or solving a harder problem, but that really doesn’t happen that often and we can do that now with miro and/or VR), but for many it is just wasting time and annoying. I don’t mind hybrid if your team is all remote and the other teams are not; if you are part of a team that is hybrid, I don’t think it is very good in any case.

> impromptu conversations are verboten because you might be leaving a remote worker out

Most people on your team aren't listening to every conversation everyone else ever has. You should be documenting all meaningful communication for your project, regardless of remote availability.

> you are extremely subject to the whims of people who want offices to be the primary mode of work.

The idea behind working for a boss is that they can tell you what to do and how and where to do it. And if you don’t like it, you can go work for yourself or for another boss.

I would never work for someone with the mindset you espouse here. There's a lot that can be said about the role of management, but I think fundamentally I seek out and believe management should be facilitators. We all have work that needs to get done, managers are accountable for their team getting that work done. So their place is to provide workers with the resources they need to do that.

> I suspect the venom is because people are assuming that its a binary situation, you're either a remote company or not.

That's because it's true. You're either a remote company or the remote people find that they routinely hear about things much later than everyone in the office knows about them.

Yeah, hybrid is worst of both worlds. You still have to live near the office (so little labor market advantage), and remote workers become second class.

> little labour market advantage

The market advantage only works where there is a lack of labour. In cities with a big scene, there will be a lack of labour for a given industry.

everyone remote will depress your labour's value because you are competing against a much bigger pool of talent.

In tech its not so apparent yet, because there is a short supply of staff generally. But that wont persist for ever.

> In tech its not so apparent yet, because there is a short supply of staff generally. But that wont persist for ever.

There's a lot more programmers on the market right now than 10 years ago thanks to bootcamps and short degrees.

Honestly, for each one hired you generally need a proper engineer to cleanup the mess afterward. I'm not worried about an oversupplied of qualified engineers anytime soon.

> that wont persist for ever.

Being good tech staff is a hard skill. This idea that there will ever be enough just because the demand is high (and therefore there are many people getting schooling) is not healthy. Even when there are a lot of tech workers, there will be sourcing trouble. Instead of not finding anyone at all, companies will find very poor tech folks. In a very real sense this is already a problem today.

If anyone is remote everyone has to behave like everyone is remote. I have done this once with a company where I was the only remote developer and it didn't work at all. They did nothing extra to make it work and it made it impossible to do the job.

It's ironic because when I've worked in the office (basically all my life until covid) the management would often try to encourage people to more actively document their work in tickets or Confluence, and keep their ticket status updated in real time. It would seem that making the company remote-first would drive the exact changes that managers often want to make anyway.

In my experiences (multiple), in-person work is primarily about the appearance of work, and not nearly as much about the actual work.

I've tried to properly document basic reasonings and how-to's for future people in the roles, and told that wasn't really the work needed done. Then again, management failed to understand that onboardinng and more routine-ish tasks could be documented and sped up.

I jumped ship from my previous job (that was forced WfH with grumblings of returning any day now), to a 100% true remotework position. I'll *NEVER* go back to a hybrid or WfW job again.

Exactly! When we switched to remote at the start of COVID all our communication issues seemed way less important as people were communicating more on slack.

My current company is hybrid, and I haven’t found this to be true. But, it’s majority remote - maybe 1/3 of employees actually live elsewhere, and of the 2/3 who live in the same city as the office, most just don’t come in to the office super frequently.

I think this notion is built on pre-pandemic reality, when it was like 95% in office, 5% remote. Then remote was a 2nd class citizen, in-person conversations reigned, and remote ppl were fairly out of the loop. But when 50% or more of people are remote, everything is “remote first”, basically all communication happening in Slack (or at least being summarized online), and I just haven’t seen this happen.

We are still in the “pandemic reality” and just starting to transition out of it. If/when the majority of that 2/3 of people go back to the same office, remote employees will go back to being second class citizens.

Basically, I agree that your company is currently remote-first, even if they have offices and most people are in one location, but only time will tell if it stays that way after coming out of the pandemic (strongly depends on company culture and their policies).

Yeah, I agree that for companies that go back to ~95% in-person, remote will be a 2nd class citizen. But I think hybrid can totally work, as it’s currently working well at a tonne of companies. Remote has to be common, and the company has to be legitimately cool with in-person or remote, but if that’s all true, hybrid works great IMO.

It does need to be a culture of “remote first” communication, with the office primarily being a place for people who want a more social work experience. But I suspect this will be a lasting, common setup for many tech companies, that works well.

> the remote people find that they routinely hear about things much later than everyone in the office knows about them.

I'm not sure this tracks with my experience. It seems like the organizational structure of a company is what keeps people from learning about things, not their location. The common case I can think of is that some meeting occurs in which a decision is made, and that decision and the context around it are not communicated outside the meeting (in a timely or efficient way, that is).

Some people are "in the know" and others are not, but it's a function of who they work with, not who they meet in the hallway.

If you mean gossip, watercooler chat, that kind of thing, sure. But, I don't miss that stuff.

Maybe you're thinking of some other example that I'm not.

Decisions get made at the water cooler, at lunch, in meetings where no one is taking notes, when one person stops by another person's desk... In person there are many opportunities for this information to spread by grapevine, because you actively see what other people are doing and you can ask.

Being remote often means you have more unknown unknowns, because you can't see the daily goings-on. If you haven't experienced this, you're either very lucky or your company is a lot more remote-centric than you think it is.

I don’t understand this issue with remote people hearing about things much later than in office people.

Are you satisfied with your job? Are you being paid the amount you want? If yes, who cares? I try to avoid being too informed about certain things anyway because it ends up making me a target for added responsibilities that I don’t care about.

I'm not satisfied with my job if I'm not being consulted and decisions I should be a part of are made because the five out of six people in the team "had a chat over lunch", no.

So for you it’s not just about the money. It’s the prestige.

Yes, different people have different wants.

But why do you want prestige? What do you do with it

I exchange it for more money. Turns out that having people think highly of you is very lucrative.

It's also about stability. I've had decisions as major as what language to use for a project done without input from the whole team, and now I have to live with writing in a framework I strongly dislike and had good arguments against using because I didn't find out for 3 weeks that it had been decided without me.

You're not working on a team if decisions are made by 5/6 of the people most of time without even a consideration that the other person might have input. At that point you're a weird internal contractor, and to your point, if they wanted me to be a contractor and just deal with whatever choices the team makes without input, I'd expect to be paid as a contractor.

Was it your responsible to choose? Did you make your opinion know earlier? What makes you think your opinion would have changed things in person? Why didn't you arrange a meeting to discuss this decision?

Sometimes people use face to face as a crutch.

I mean, it clearly wasn't directly my responsibility since I wasn't consulted as a major decision maker, but I am an active co-lead developer on the project.

I was told the look into another language was part of "a bake off" between a couple options, and I assumed they'd have a more general meeting/decision before picking. I'd made my general opinion known earlier, but I didn't want to clutter meetings that weren't about the relevant decision by cramming my opinion on the matter into them.

I have no idea if my opinion would have changed things, but I never got the chance to find out. I'd have rather lost an argument where my point of view was heard than just had any objections overridden by default though.

I've asked about the decision later on, but that was after tens of hours of work had gone into the system I disagreed with, so making the case for throwing away most of a week of a couple dev's work is a lot harder to make than pushing to not "waste" that work in the first place.

I've been working remote for 2 years, and the team has been mostly good about it. I bring this up specifically because it's a good example of the pitfalls that can hit even a team that is otherwise doing a good job of remote inclusion.

The whole point is that not having folks as looped in to meetings and choices when you're remote makes it a lot easier to intentionally or accidentally cut people out of important decisions. In this case, now I have to be the disruptive jerk that's going "I don't like this. Stop." if I care, or I just have to go along with the decision.

To be honest, I am in a similar situation to you, and I deal with the lack of stability by creating instability. I keep interviewing all the time, looking for better opportunities. I also learn and improve my skills. But,at this point, I'm more likely to fire an employer than being fired by an employer.

If an employer is not willing to accomodate remote first and payme well as a contractor, I'll find another one willing to.

No, it is about having your considerationor needs heard and being able to participate as equal member.

It is also about being able to be effective. Because if they don't tell you things, your productivity goes down.

Productivity is the company’s problem, not mine. If I am unable to be productive I still expect to be paid my full salary regardless of output.

But, you won't get raise nor be in position to get more interesting work. You will be first to fired too, provided it is not super dysfunkctional.

I look at raises similar to how I see bonuses. When I really want more money I switch jobs and level up to the next tier.

> If I am unable to be productive I still expect to be paid my full salary regardless of output.

Sure, for a reasonable amount of time until either you are able to be once again, or they let you go.

> Productivity is the company’s problem, not mine.

I know this can feel hard to believe when you're stuck in a crappy situation, but there are many folks who value their output for its own sake.

You might also choose to care about your productivity because it can correspond with your ability to get promoted, earn more, etc.

There are other things that people might reasonably care about. Someone might honestly want to have influence because they care about the team's output.

The latter is what working at every multinational is like, remote or no.

Your company may not have any remote employees, but if four people on a team are at the company's US headquarters and the fifth is in the company's office in Ireland, expect the Irish employee to get cut out of the loop constantly.

This seems like a timezone problem at that point. Even remote teams can't function too well together if some of them are sleeping while others are working.

I only used "the US" and "Ireland" as examples. It also happens at companies where both offices are in the same timezone or if employees in one location work on the other location's time (the latter was the case at my last company: we had an office in the Philippines where most employees worked on US Central time to match with HQ, except for the support departments where they did shift work for 24/7 coverage).

You can switch jobs. Or you can stick it out until the boss realizes that they are losing employees to companies that didn't mandate in-office, and undoes the mandate. It's really quite easy.

Or the labor market will split into companies and employees who insist on in-person and those who demand/offer flexible arrangements. The question is what the size ratio between both markets would be.

What I've noticed is the local in person jobs are easy to get with very little interview prepareness. But they also pay local rates.

Remote roles ask for so much more interviewing but offer more money.

It's not really an "or" imo, that's been the case for a long time and will surely remain so short of something far crazier than the current pandemic. But agree that the question is what size ratio we'll end up on, as surely won't feature quite as much WFH as right now, and equally unlikely to go all the way back to pre-pandemic levels.

There is a binary component to this.

Proponents of remote work don’t generally oppose hybrid or in person for anyone else who prefers it, but those going to the office would find themselves effectively doing “remote from the office”, if enough people choose not to go.

This is the reason why I think hybrid is a bit dumb. Regardless of the social component, the hybrid model effectiveness relies on everyone who collaborates in the same field, to agree when and where to attend, most of the time. If not, it’s just an excuse to fill up cubicles.

This is why I don’t see hybrid lasting. It breaks what most like about their preferred option.

I think it can somewhat work with flexible timelines. A full 2/5 days a week in-office hybrid is decidedly the worst of both, but a "we come into the office every N weeks for 1-2 days to handle major meetings in person" feels both more fair and less disruptive to all parties. Expand it further where folks living further away are maybe only expected to come in quarterly for maybe a full week.

It helps to keep up some in-person social constructs - you can spend time with coworkers at lunch, or going out for a group activity if you want, but keeps the majority of the day-to-day focused on making remote work for everyone.

Coming to the office for 1-2 days a month would also be reasonably possible for people living far away.

Yea, it depends on the distance. I wouldn't want to demand that people fly for a few hours every months, and that's not really particularly environmentally friendly, but if it's in drive/train range, much more reasonable.

I agree this is a good counter argument. If many people are remote (or potentially even just a few) then you may lose the advantages of working in the office (e.g. spontaneity, easy ‘point at the screen’ or ‘just speak like a human being’ communication that doesn’t need to be intermediated by inevitably broken technology, avoiding some of the futile attempts at recreating an office environment remotely, etc).

The counter to that is then that lots of the ways one must deal with remote workers (e.g. more better written communication, getting tools to attempt to recreate some of the interactions that were previously in-person remotely, although the best-in-class tool is usually still terrible only people sometimes don’t say it because they don’t realise we ought to want tools that don’t suck) are good improvements to in-office working. And having people remote isn’t so different from having multiple offices (and is perhaps better than different offices separated by large time differences) although being beholden to whatever Internet connection someone can get and chooses to pay for in the place they choose to work can be frustrating and the quality of communication hardware/software is frankly abysmal.

Certainly there is something to be said for companies that try to take remote seriously (eg stack overflow had private offices which recreated some of the quiet and isolation and communication requirements of remote work within the office). But a lot of companies basically had their hands forced by the ’rona and I think significant culture changes are required to more thoroughly embrace and accommodate remote or hybrid work.

> Proponents of remote work don’t generally oppose hybrid or in person for anyone else who prefers it

This is true, but in most of the rhetoric I see, this gets omitted (I'll assume with benign intentions). There's also a lot of people on social media (e.g twitter) who wax lyrical about how it's only controlling management teams who want people in an office, and how everyone else wants remote. As an IC who hates remote on a personal level, it makes me feel increasingly marginalised and depressed.

We have a hybrid model and it has worked well so far.

A handful of people go to the office because they prefer it that way and/or don't (want to) have a proper work setup at home.

The majority is fully remote, but have signed a hybrid contract so they can be called to the office if there is a need. The only need so far has been a going-away party that involved a case of whiskey =)

I'm sorry but it's not that simple, people who want to work in the office tend to want everyone else to work at the office too. People who want to work outside of the office want people to use remote tools to communicate (otherwise they miss out on conversations). You either go full remote or you don't, I think most people would agree that hybrid is the worst of both worlds.

> The other point to think about is this: remote work is brill if you are enjoying it, but it licks massive donkeyballs if you don't.

I really don't understand this point of view, just pay for wework

> I'm sorry but it's not that simple, people who want to work in the office tend to want everyone else to work at the office too

I think both extremes want their own way. I don't want to force people in or out of the office. I want the option to do either.

> just pay for wework

You do see the inherent problem with that, its basically subsidising the facilities budget. If you have enough money to pay for a wework, you can pay for better home accommodation.

> You do see the inherent problem with that, its basically subsidising the facilities budget. If you have enough money to pay for a wework, you can pay for better home accommodation.

I actually think remote work places should start offering wework budget to employees. I agree that not everyone can be comfortable at home.

I've run fully remote teams for several years now and have worked remotely for 15 years of my career. There are some other things to consider as well, especially for people in this company.

Remote as an option doesn't work well for the remoters. They will be passed up on opportunities for career growth. The people who didn't show up when the CEO demanded it should strongly consider finding a place that is more remote friendly -- especially if their manager isn't one of the people who refused to go in.

There are a lot of unique challenges that come with fostering all remote teams. It would be easy to put the remoters on the back burner if I had a group of devs I saw face to face every day. That will be especially true for people working at a company that harbors active hostility towards those people who refuse to come into the office.

Exactly. Thank you for articulating this so well.

Nowadays people get either side of binary about all sorts of things. Then they fight for their side with tooth and nails without even considering ideas of other side of that binary. Truth is neither white or black it's millions of shades in between.

Agreed, the trend of the past 10 years to jump into a life and death binary opposition is costing us our humanity.

Saying we are a remote company or a mandatory office company is an attack on the individual to be subordinate to the collective. The pandemic upended this cultural norm and additionally made unprecedented demands on the individual by the collective on a global scale. In context it is not surprising to see visceral reactions and people drawing battle lines.

A rough idea I would like to see knowledge worker companies follow some sort of flexible model (not hybrid). That might look like a small hub office. Space at the hub needs to be reserved and people who use it less often are prioritized for seats (regular visitors may find themselves working from home occasionally to accommodate others). Travel to the hub is a 0 friction business expense if you have a reservation. Ideally this allows easy adhoc in person collaboration, creates norms that include individuals working remotely while also providing an accessible professional/social environment for people that benefit from those spaces.

I'd love to see some creative collaborative problem solving instead of an all or nothing battle between artificial groups.

For me it’s the forcing of an unnecessary decision.

It’s like there are cat people and dog people. If companies forced people to own a dog, or own a cat there will be lots of conflict.

I don’t want to see companies become tribal, but a company that tries to make me come into the office for random reasons will make me really angry and frustrated and probably make me seek out a non-stupid company.

Stupid because if remote works for me and I’m highly productive, forcing me to come into an office to do the same thing is inefficient.

I think this, in the end, will be what happens and companies will start to act like filters. Remote work or office work will be a filter for talent that companies will have to chase for talent if we stay in a market that needs workers, or if we switch to a market where workers are desperate for jobs, vice versa. Of course, companies like Apple and Google who have sunk massive cost into office monstrosities will want on-site workers to justify their cost.

From a socio-economical and ecological point of view, the insistence on pushing people back to the office while employers CBA to build/hire offices away from busy city centers is absolutely blasphemous. This goes way beyond just less cars on the road (imagine what less need for a car does once extrapolated all the way to parking spaces, asphalt, manufactory, etc.) Ironically, many of these companies would still claim they care about the environment in the same breath.

I don't necessarily feel the need to be militantly against in-office, but outside the elite bubble of fat TCs, loads of places expect juniors-mediors to just deal with it while giving them a pittance for what is otherwise a pretty difficult white collar job, to either settle in the city and make next to no savings / hope to further their life goals or live outside the city and erode one's sanity by dropping their QoL through commutes. Of course there's going to be some rebellion when the in-office crowd brings out BS arguments like "because it fits our culture better" which equates to "because we say so" with such a large benefit on the line.

There is not a militancy on both sides.

The WFH people are okay with other people going to work. The going to work people want everyone to come in for them.

> I really don't understand the militancy of both sides.

The loudest voices are the whiniest and most entitled, thus more likely to engage in online discourse about it. That in turn amplifies the team sports mentality that has become so pervasive in all aspects of society. I think most people have a moderate live/let live attitude toward it all, with the understanding that if they don't like it they will quit for something more suited to their interests.

I think you're right. Most people don't care. Remote is okay, in-office is okay, both have pros/cons. But people make it a game to shout their preferences as though the world will end if they don't get their way.

On this issue most do care. The loudest voices will win like in the case of CEO of Goldman. It will take a generation to turnover those c-levels until than it will be a battle with many employees not showing up when demanded back to the office.

Feels like we are in a 60s/70s cultural change period. People are battling over what they want the world to be. This is no different.

By "60s/70s cultural change period", do you mean the civil rights era?

One thing I haven't seen mention much is real estate. The "back-to-office" militants are usually corporate, and there's a lot of corporate money tried up with office real estate that would lose a lot of value if everything shifted to WFH forever

I like to work in the office, bc one of the reasons is that I get to chat with my boss, about general stuff or potential new projects. If you go remote, you are going to fully lose this kind of opportunities.

Does this create an unfair condition for remote workers? It could be.

>I like to work in the office, bc one of the reasons is that I get to chat with my boss,

Why? I can chat with my boss, he can share with me ideas he he has and I can give my opinion.

You mean in person or in text message?

Not the commenter you replied to, but I think my personality is such that I chat casually with my in-group and am a perfectionist with communication with outsiders. Back when I worked in-person, I had daily informal communication with lots of teammates as well as my boss. Since I got a new remote job during the pandemic, I tend to only reach out to those I work most closely with (just a couple of people). Certainly there's nothing actually stopping me from opening a new Teams message to my boss or other teammates and saying "hey, how's life?", but in practice, I don't. It's almost as if most of my team are now "outsiders" who I'm very deliberate messaging, rather than the in-group who I feel comfortable bantering with. It's something I'm aware of and am working on, but I definitely don't have the same level of intra-team communication now as I had pre-pandemic.

I've had the same from the manager point of view. As the manager I had the luxury of just forcing the issue by scheduling one on ones with everyone and flat out telling them I wanted to make sure I actually regularly spoke to everyone and I could just blame it on being "busy" and so wanting to block out time to make sure I had it set aside.

As an introvert, I resorted to that in large part because it removed my ability to manufacture excuses for myself or just forgetting because I rarely get the impulse that I feel a strong need to talk to someone.

But you can do the same yourself even if you're not in a position to demonstratively schedule actual meeting slots with people: Just put reminders in your calendar to talk to people without scheduling an actual meeting. If you want to make it seem more organic, just put in the right number of slots and keep a list to yourself that you randomise week by week. You can always tick people off if you have conversations outside of your schedule.

My boss is not my friend, why should I chat with him about his or my private life, I am an introvert so I never start this kind of discussion, but from the OP I understood he was refering to work related chat

Yeah, I'm not an "I need to be friends with my coworkers" person either, but I just mean the everyday stuff that is work-related or work-tangential. Who is meeting with who, how people feel about what's going on, etc. More than one might glean from a Confluence page with notes from a design meeting or whatever. "Oh, the real reason we chose technology X for this feature is just because Jim knows it well", "oh, the real reason we're adding this logic to the back-end is because the boss thinks the front-end devs are incompetent", etc. Things that get whispered in person, but don't get written in an email or wiki page.

Maybe some teams are small enough or well-adjusted enough for this not to be an issue, but I've definitely felt I've lacked this sort of context since having fewer informal talks with my boss.

Do you not set weekly one on one time or just do quick huddle calls to chat on simple projects? My boss and my team is just as buried in the office and full of meetings. So we are going to be talking on teams/slack anyway- not sure about what I personally view as FUD about these mythical conversations people have with their managers and peers. Maybe my workplace is more fast paced than most. We also have a huge slew of contractors and offices coast to coast.. so it's not uncommon to have to set meetings with resources on both coasts. For us remote work has been, well, pretty freaking normal. And cheaper we have already divested of a couple smaller remote offices.

Not every office is the same. We have busy days and not so busy days.

Gotcha brother, just curious I know wfh is a hit for some companies and easy as hell- bit for others it's like torture. I don't understand the latter.

I have had teams that were in the office but fully distributed, with only one of my team members even in the same country as me. People could, and did, still chat to me. The big difference is that it required discipline. Especially from me in order to deal with team members who were reluctant to speak up. I solved that by ensuring we always had at least one weekly one on one call scheduled to speak about nothing in particular. If nothing else came up, we'd discuss ideas or training or general improvements we could make, but on purpose those calls were always explicitly not for project discussions (if anything came up during these calls I'd schedule other calls for that).

Sometimes we'd have "nothing" to talk about until people realised I'd still insist on doing the call and it turned out they had stuff to talk about when I was there on the phone anyway and they didn't feel like they were wasting my time because I'd made it clear this time was already blocked out.

Doing fully remote requires managers who understand how to ensure they pick up on things from team members when they can't see them, and that will be an adjustment for a lot of companies.

But once you have that, and managers learn how to be available in the same way, it'll work just fine. Consider that lots of managers don't know how to be available in person either, but lock themselves away in offices and only emerge for meetings with agendas that does not leave much room for raising issues or general chat other than for a selected few, so this is not a new issue - just a different version of an old one.

My boss is fully remote as is their boss and both of them prefer it that way.

The only time either of them are at the office are new employee introductions and that's a half-day max.

I think the vehemence is easy to understand. No one likes to be told to do something they hate and to lose freedom of choice to be in the environment most conducive to their happiness.

I think the structurally advantaged management will let people work the way they work best and figure out how to smooth the rough spots.

> fundamentally we are social people

That's nice, but what does that have to do with your job? You can meet people anywhere and when you choose the venue and the context they may even have something in common with you. All anyone at your job needs to have in common with you is a desire to eat.

> I really don't understand the militancy of both sides.

Nor I, with the complete ridiculousness of "hybrid". And I support climate justice. Commutes to go to a workplace where someone is hacking coughing, and I'm still doing Teams meetings is fucking ridiculous. Never again.

> A lot of programmers love remote because they enjoy the isolation to do work. Others do not, be that because they need to talk to people, or because the home situation sucks donkey balls.

Standard introvert/extrovert justifications. People need to learn how to partition these things to create a hard delineation between work and not-work. Most whom I know who hate remotework don't have these essential skills.

> I suspect the venom is because people are assuming that its a binary situation, you're either a remote company or not. They worry that their remote will be taken from them. I don't think removing the remote option is wise or healthy.

It is binary. Either you're a remote-first org, in which where your butt's geographical location doesn't matter, or it does.

If you're remote, there's a LOT of positives including: uses no gas to get to work, less wear and tear on vehicle, climate benefits on massive scale, easily eat from home with food amenable to us, have access to niceties here at the house, pets, multitask with stuff like laundry (3 minutes activity with 1h waittimes), and I'm compensated the moment I log in versus commute.

WfW is bad because all the above aren't true. The major justifications I'm seeing with this revolves around business rents, middle-manager surveillance capitalism, and appearance of work vs work really done.

Hybrid it's worse than WfH or WfW. Now, most of the above are true, but in work's location, you're now having to also act remote.

> The other point to think about is this: remote work is brill if you are enjoying it, but it licks massive donkeyballs if you don't. Having that dread of the workplace seep into where you are living is deeply bad for your mental health.

That's the first real big change with remotework. YOU MUST SET HARD GATED THINGS BETWEEN WORK AND NOT-WORK. Me? I set my work laptops out at 8:55a and log in at 9a. I pack up my work laptops in their respective bags at 5p. I'll even do a short walk before and after shift as a "commute" and exercise. And sometimes, I'll even change clothes. The hard line is what's absolutely needed to partition work from not-work.

God this is such an insufferable post from someone who simply refuses to believe that they can be wrong.

> If you're remote, there's a LOT of positives including: uses no gas to get to work, less wear and tear on vehicle, climate benefits on massive scale, easily eat from home with food amenable to us, have access to niceties here at the house, pets, multitask with stuff like laundry (3 minutes activity with 1h waittimes), and I'm compensated the moment I log in versus commute.

Yes, if you live in a nice place with nice amenities. When you are starting out you're either stuck in your parent's house, or a shitty house share. (yes yes, if everyone is remote pricing changes. But it won't sort out inequity, if you're poor, your housing is going to be shit. )

> Hybrid it's worse than WfH or WfW. Now, most of the above are true, but in work's location, you're now having to also act remote.

I don't understand this. surly full time office is the worst? There is no flexibility, You have to optimise for the commute.

> YOU MUST SET HARD GATED THINGS BETWEEN WORK AND NOT-WORK.

Oh I'm a sysadmin, I did this already. If I'm not on call you're shit out of luck.

However thats not my point. When you are bullied, or have to accept cunts into your VC, or the work is just plain awful, you associate that feeling with your surroundings. It taints your living area. It leaves an emotional stain that's really hard to remove. Now with an office, you just YOLO to a new place (in know I know, its not always possible). a complete change of scene, no bad memories.

At home its a lot harder.

To conclude:

I am not arguing for exclusivity, I think its possible to accommodate fully remote workers, I've had at least one remote worker on my team (or a remote team) for the last ten years. Its never been an issue (apart from fixing hardware errors.) With decent planning tools and decent comms its perfectly possible to help people thrive remotely or onsite.

> Yes, if you live in a nice place with nice amenities. When you are starting out you're either stuck in your parent's house, or a shitty house share. (yes yes, if everyone is remote pricing changes. But it won't sort out inequity, if you're poor, your housing is going to be shit. )

Fresh out of college hires belong in the office. After a year or two it depends.

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