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Comment by windex | Hacker News Reader

Fuel prices, traffic congestion, cheaper rents, healthier air, are all advantages that cannot be taken away. Taking the commute out of my job gave me an additional 4 hours everyday not counting lower stress levels. Doing away with random cafeteria talk gave me 90 minutes back. As to creativity, I think the management view that everyone sitting in a room is more creative is not really true. I'd rather meet up people outside a stuffy office.

The clamor to come back to office is only from upper management whose primary concerns seems to stem from the fact that having control over physical bodies in an office is a sense of power. They also have nice offices, views, facilities, space and desks. The rent extracting industry is also going through a crisis of sorts and the political class is deeply invested in rent extraction.

COVID hasn't gone away. Long term effects (cognitive, cardiac) of a COVID infection are not being accounted for either. COVID highlighted the fact that you can get digital work delivered from anywhere.

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Having the illusion of control and illusion of good management more than power I think.

I once taught a course and the first thing I was told was to look for a green glow on people's faces: it meant people were playing solitaire on the class computers instead of listening.

A whole lot of managers knows only the work equivalent of that: they've learnt simple proxies for actual management that let them think they know when people are working well from walking rooms (or having people reporting to them do so).

People working from home means they actually have to figure out how to track output, and that takes effort. Effort many managers are not used to.

I had to learn a whole lot to start managing remote and distributed teams. It takes away a whole lot of lazy shortcuts to management.

Lucky for me I was forced to deal with that many years ago, but it was uncomfortable and a big change, so I'm not at all surprised that many resist it now.

> Having the illusion of control and illusion of good management more than power I think.

It's certainly true that managers are lazy and they would rather measure illusory proxies for work rather than work itself, but America also became a major economic engine of the world by exerting control over people's bodies without paying them. Even though that practice ended several generations ago, the attitude that equates "success" with "power over bodies" is still very common in America. Many states are now trying very hard (again) to control women's bodies with the force of law, to cite just one example.

They counter that you want to kill unborn babies. You counter that by either arguing that technically they're not actually human yet or that women's autonomy is more important. They disagree. You disagree. Brilliant segue.

I think you're leaving out the part where one group feels like they can intervene in someone else's life and decisions about health based on a difference of opinion. The default should be "we disagree, you do you and I'll do me".

In their eyes, you’re intervening in the life and health of the baby based on a difference of opinion (you don’t want a baby).

Abortion is a religious thing (for some reason - God killed lots of babies in the Bible, and also there isn't really much mention of abortion either) more than anything, but I guess you could also say that religion is just a way to control bodies too?

Slavery wasn’t some significant advantage for America (in a time when slavery was super common). It’s pretty widely agreed that dependency on slavery also set the south back economically by decades (look at the GDP north vs south for all of US history after 1800

Did the dependency on slavery directly set the south back economically, or was it the destruction from the civil war?

The South was already set back economically before the civil war. The plantation chattel slavery system hampered industrialization in the Southern US very much in the same way that the serf-owning nobility system hampered industrialization in the Russian Empire. The South, in turn, ultimately lost the American civil war because the northern states were far more industrialized.

As another comment pointed out this was the case long before the civil war (which started in 1861 and I was saying you could see this in the GDP difference even in 1800

> America also became a major economic engine of the world by exerting control over people's bodies without paying them.

The actual economic data doesn't support that. Slaves were never more than 17% of the population, slavery was only ever legal in certain regions, and use of slaves was mostly relegated to a subset of agricultural labor. Moreover, slavery was outlawed in 1865 and the United States would not be considered an "economic engine of the world" until at least the 1880s, and it would not be considered one for its agricultural output but for its industrialized economy.

Furthermore, countries in the new world (e.g. Haiti, Brazil, that practiced slavery for longer and on a larger scale failed to develop strong economies anywhere to the degree that the United States did, so the line from "had slavery in the past" to "became economically prosperous" is tenuous. In fact, slave labor (and adjacent systems like serfdom) historically tends to hamper economic growth, prevent industrialization, and stifle innovation.

I’ve been developing an opinion that it has more to do with propping up commercial real estate and protecting the value of existing investments.

See my other comment, but I suspect so too. Just listening to the rhetoric of my parent company about our clients (commercial real estate developers), a lot of companies are vocally fretting about what to do with their (expensive) office spaces when the BIS (butts in seats) factor is down to single digits.

I am 100% ready to shut down these attempts by asking if the company is paying for extra life insurance because I want my family to get a bit more when I catch COVID and die at the office.

I don't expect it to happen under current management but as we promote new middle managers, I'm sure we'll have a push for it.

I hate to be one of those people and I’m the farthest thing from an anti-vaxxer.

But all of the reliable evidence is that if you’re vaccinated, boosted, etc., the chance of you being seriously ill from catching COVID is really no more likely than the flu.

And statistically, everyone is going to get it eventually.

But if all of these vaccines aren't enough, "getting it eventually" doesn't mean you won't just get it again later. It's just a different form of immunity, a nasty enough mutation will still bypass it.

That's not to suggest no risks should ever be taken, but if going to the office in person is really basically pointless that's a very unnecessary risk on top of the inconvenience of it. May as well delay getting it as long as possible since it's constantly changing right?

That is the same for any disease spreading that way like the flu right? I do not want to get the flu either (I never had it badly; worst I had anything, including mono, was a mild cold. Oh and cancer, mild as well luckily, but I mean viruses). So why did we ever go to an office? Or school? I got my uni degrees and the tail of high school almost without ever going to classes. I studied and now work (for the past 30 years) in coffee shops and bars (sitting outside, always, even in winter) and have a rich social life because of it; I don’t and never did understand this forced cattle herding of people. And then even some people seem to enjoy it.

I think you are asking a very important and useful question, and one which seems like it could be a significant part of the conversation about climate change too...

I think we know roughly why K-12 schools are like they are -- teachers didn't know how to use computers much at all in the 90s when I was a kid and it's a running gag that they never really understood them. Now they do, so it's a new option that I think it's fair to recognize truly is new.

I do work in education and spent a ton of time figuring out how to make video lectures for instructors in the department that were effective, and tons of new online teaching tools were tested that there was never a huge push to play with before.

I don't think it's malice, it's simply that those professors have been doing it one way for 30 years and asking them to learn to do it a whole new way is a big ask. They have to spend all their time writing grants and other bureaucracy, mentoring students, and from personal experience I think it's fair to say that there is little appetite for changing everything to something no one knows how to judge the quality of due to lack of experience in an active classroom. It is the software equivalent of pushing a change straight to a live server, except in this case if you screw it up and do a bad job you're impacting the quality of education being provided to at least dozens of students who deserve better. It's really hard to just in-place make a change without the ability to actually test it.

I hope more people get something closer to your experience, I think the last few years have pushed a lot of people on that education side into a much more open mindset now that online classes are less risky. I think it does serve a purpose to have high school kids in person because of social things and the reality that a group of 20 kids will on average do a better job of finishing stuff they aren't really excited to do whereas one kid remotely is more likely to slip through the cracks. There's also issues with equity when internet and computers and space to learn aren't uniformly available.

But I think you're asking the right question. Let's get cars off roads and turn these stupid commercial parks into residential areas please, we need more affordable housing, not redundant space for people to work in when they're not at home... and the climate control for these giant unnecessary buildings... heck, the parking lots alone are a huge net negative especially if you account for the reality that many many fewer people really need to visit those buildings on any given day.

So how long are you willing not to live your life normally? Since being vaccinated in March of last year, we have been on three vacations (see another reply). I’ve also been on four business trips where we were all inside and maskless - 3 internal meetings and one customer meeting. I have two more internal meetings/trips coming up by the end of the month.

While I e hot working remotely, face to face time makes a huge difference and at least meeting your coworkers and customers occasionally. I work in the cloud consulting department at BigTech.

If seeing people face to face at the office is beneficial to you go for it.

It is often beneficial to me as well, I've been full time back in the office since last August.

It is often the case that going to the office is literally counterproductive, I get less work done, and I have to commute. Working at home is more comfortable, and far better for 60% of what I do.

If I also get the benefit of reduced risk of getting COVID for not doing something that I didn't want to do anyway and which was not helping anyone including myself...

well, if you consider that "not living life normally" I kind of prefer the new normal.

edit: for reference, I am immunocompromised yet still somehow capable of seeing balance in the risks I take (especially the unnecessary ones) instead of jumping to binary "live life normally" or not because life is never going to be fully "normal" for me. If I'm taking risks with my health I want them to be for a reason that actually matters at all.

Does that mean you will never get on a plane again? Go to a restaurant? Go to a concert? Never go inside an office even just once a quarter to spend time with your coworkers?

I already said I am back in the office full time, go to restaurants sometimes, have flown on planes, have gone to a concert, and am immunocompromised to boot.

Argue with someone else if you're going to make up a position for me to defend instead of reading my comment. Your argument style is indistinguishable from an antivax bot.

I am “don’t vax if you don’t want to”. Got vax with booster and very much a libertarian type. Got Covid, starting to feel a bit better at the, THREE MONTH MARK. Has disabled me pretty bad, wouldn’t be able to work if I didn’t have an accommodating job just from the mental fog. Enjoy this datapoint. I am still against any forced restrictions.

This is a common experience, it seems.

Another data point. I have “virus induced asthma”. Even a cold can cause my body to go into severe over reaction mode. It’s treated by psuedophredrine and asthma medicine.

Normally, my asthma doesn’t bother me. I did all of the safety protocols before vaccines were introduced and I got them as soon as I could.

But after that, we have been living life normally. I am considerate of other people and get tested regularly before I travel for business or to see my parents.

We went on cruise last year. I got Covid. I didn’t realize I had it until the test came back. I did my normal cold regiment - psuedophredrine and asthma meds[1]. I coughed like crazy for a couple of days, self isolated and by the end of the next week, I was back to exercising - at home in my home gym.

[1] this is the recommended treatment for asthma sufferers. But

> But all of the reliable evidence is that if you’re vaccinated, boosted, etc., the chance of you being seriously ill from catching COVID is really no more likely than the flu.

Citation for your health claims?

> And statistically, everyone is going to get it eventually.

That's not how statistics works.

>But all of the reliable evidence is that if you’re vaccinated, boosted, etc., the chance of you being seriously ill from catching COVID is really no more likely than the flu.

The best of my understanding is that the evidence indicates that if you're vaccinated and boosted, you'll likely test negative for covid. Testing negative seems great, but what if the whole story is that while you do test negative, you still end up suffering seriously from a covid-like illness you wouldn't otherwise have experienced if the pandemic wasn't raging?

Basically, there's not enough data out yet to say if those who test negative but get a covid-like illness fare better due to their vaccines in terms of hospitalization and death. But Chris Masterjohn is doing some awesome research to try to find out. In short, he's trying to figure out if the vaccines are worth taking at all. At the end of the day, people want to avoid suffering the symptoms of a disease and couldn't care less if they can merely pass a test.

You will very much test positive for Covid if you’re vaccinated and boosted. I’m not aware of anyone on either “side” that say anything different. I tested positive when I had it in December as well as most other people I know that got it.

But we do know that Covid isn’t going anywhere and we aren’t going to beat it like we did Smallpox. That isn’t a controversial opinion either. No one on either side has claimed otherwise. At this point, you will eventually get a strain of Covid unless you never leave the house or socialize with anyone.

But that goes back to my main question. What are you going to do except accept the inevitable and start living life like you did pre-2020?

The only thing I can do is follow the mainstream medical advice and get tested often just to be considerate of others.

At this point the only time I wear a mask is when it’s mandated or when I’m going to the grocery store or drug store. Those are places people have to be even if they are immune compromised.

>You will very much test positive for Covid if you’re vaccinated and boosted.

I'm not denying that some people who are vaccinated test positive, but I'm saying they dismiss people who test negative as not having Covid. So if vaccinated people catch Covid and test negative for Covid, their illnesses and hospitalizations are completely dismissed as if they aren't part of the problem and the pandemic. That means vaccines are being given credit for keeping a whole lot of people out of the hospital who haven't been kept out. They've merely managed to test negative whilst still being hospitalized with very serious symptoms. The data that shows this is that the vaccinated get hospitalized 6 times more often than those with natural immunity. Working vaccines would lead us to expect something closer to 1:1. None of these vaccines would have ever met the required 50% efficacy threshold to get approved if we started over today using what is known as a starting point. I still feel blessed I had the opportunity to choose NOT to try an mRNA one, just looking at my congenital heart defect and myocarditis risks I felt way safer with J&J.

>start living life like you did pre-2020?

I went so hardcore for so long, and was so sure I'd die if I caught it, I reached a breaking point August 2021 where I just didn't care and couldn't care anymore. March 2020 I had gone 100% on social distancing, I didn't speak to anyone for around 16 months. Flew to South Korea to hide when they had 30 some cases a day nationwide, spent 40 days in various government quarantines (Thailand's as well) to stay in hiding and out of high risk countries. I actually had anxiety about whether or not I'd ever be able to reintegrate into society and socialize again.

Commuting is fair more deadly usually. (citation needed)

Not just deaths but the health effects of even a minor accident can be life altering. And traffic deaths are up for whatever reason.

What if they agree? A bit of incremental life insurance is unlikely to cost them more than a few 10s of dollars per month unless you are elderly. No, the discussion about remote work should be centered around the pointless commute, not COVID.

I don't think there is anything else more illogical in modern society than waking up in building A, hopping in a car and fighting traffic for an hour to get to building B just to sit in front of a computer for 8 hours (perhaps with a few minimally productive meetings here and there), then commute back to building A 8 hours later.

Building B sits empty for 16 hours a day while Building A sits empty for 10 with both being heated/cooled for 24 hours. The employee wastes 2 of their 16 available waking hours in the non-productive commute while incurring significant financial costs (lease/insurance/fuel/energy) in order to support this patently absurd activity. Similarly the employer wastes time and energy negotiating leases, re-arranging offices, purchasing AV equipment for meeting rooms in building B in addition to paying the likely enormously expensive lease itself.

The impacts on the environment, the number of hours of human life wasted in commute, the pointless buildings and associated costs to employers as well as the public infrastructure to support it (roads, trains, busses, etc.). Surely, all of this could only be justified if physical presence had a dramatic impact on productivity. Yet, we cannot tell one way or the other if it actually improves outcomes. Let's face it, it's dumb.

There are a lot of ripple effects too: I suspect our largest local employer is getting a lot of pressure from the business community. The number of downtown businesses that are impacted by the absence of those feet & wallets is significant.

I have sympathy for the plight of businesses who are suffering from lack of foot traffic. There’s no conceivable way that would extend to “Welp, I better summon all my employees back to the office then…”

It couod if you were a bank and half those businesses owed you money.

I hope this finally ends the nonstop office space development in the bay area in favor of more housing.

That seems likely for the biggest tech companies, that spent $1 billion+ on offices.

If a company has their offices representing a non negligible portion of their assets/revenue, they’re either doing something wrong or they’re a property developer/owner as a business.

WFH is fantastic for ICs and misery for decision makers. You’re seeing pro-office bias from the latter because humans are optimised for building alignment when they meet in person. If you’re an IC that doesn’t need to build influence then, indeed, WFH is bliss.

Not all tech work is about sitting in front of a glowing screen, writing code. It’s about achieving a business goal that brings in revenue, and all the alignment throughout the org that’s needed to get that done.

Repository layout, test framework changes, factoring out core components to make a long term stable branch, persuading teams to collaborate at their bleeding edges rather than by internal releases, how to ship auto formatting code with the lowest negative impact on everyone else…

Decision making, even on technical topics, is a people-centric skill.

None of what you've described is impossible, or less effective, when performed over digital communication. If anything, digital is better for that coordination and influence gathering due to its recorded nature. Better still, because the digital communication is more time flexible the stakeholders and clients you need to coordinate have the ability to consume and process it at a rate that best suits them, rather than feign interest in yet another meeting packed with forgettable information that should have been an email.

Exactly this! I would also argue that an all digital communication channel leads to better (more objective) decisions simply because the communication channel is not “contaminated” with useless body language , posturing , height and weight differences , race difference and variety of things that introduces biases.

It feels like you are thinking of all the times it works well with people who engage positively and I am thinking of all the times it doesn’t with people who don’t. Like all of us here, I have had plenty of successful online and async collaborations to know it is possible and should work well. Not everything is perfect though.

The problem areas — and the reason you’ve basically all got to be in the office at some point — are decision making ones where a group of two or more people fervently believe in two or more mutually exclusive ways forward. Even when I worked remote for a company multiple timezones away, I would be in the office one week every quarter to first build social capital and later to cash it in when building consensus.

I also think back to one of my stakeholders was an underperforming SWE intern. The rate of online engagement that best suited them was zero, and yet — as with any intern — it was crucial to us that they left feeling positive about their time here. That stuff is really hard over the phone.

Collaborative online digital tools aren't simply adequate, they are vastly superior to analog alternatives. It is less effective, less efficient, to meet in person. Making in-person a requirement limits your access to talent, by excluding those in other time zones and those with differences in ability; and it isn't recorded, cannot be referenced or edited, cannot be a living document, and cannot easily include rich multimedia without finicking with AV gear.

And you force everyone to commute into the office.

I've been working remotely for 6y; we have multiple external business partners, and a team of over 50. We have team members and business partners in Russia, Finland, Sweden, Germany, UK, France, NYC, BC, Cali, Japan, and elsewhere; we operate without core hours. I, personally, regularly interact with people in all those listed locations every day.

Never once has there ever been a need for an in-person meeting. Never.

All the things you listed were already done over email, slack, etc. even before the pandemic. The moment I have to involve a second team, I have to do it over email, doing it in person is too disruptive to work.

Don’t you find though that people will eventually bring emotion / drama to a discussion on email, which immediately gets blown out of all proportion because email?

Those kinds of situations are much easier to keep on track in a call / video conference, and easiest in person, when you can have ad hoc conversations after the meeting has ended. (Video conference products I have used — all the standard ones — don’t really have a way of ending a meeting other than hard-stop-return-to-isolation for all participants, whereas in real life it’s much smoother and more continuous than that.)

We do all that, we do all of it remote and we wouldn't go back to the office (it is now impossible)

Every single engineering items were resolved by a well written design doc (ERD). 2-3 Google hangouts were enough to get alignment across team members.

> Taking the commute out of my job gave me an additional 4 hours everyday not counting lower stress levels.

While I'm a huge proponent of WFH-forever and eliminating the commute, I have to say that it hasn't increased my time much.

That's because with everyone commuting, we approximately never had meetings before 10am since everyone knew everyone might be stuck in traffic, so no point scheduling anything earlier. And certainly no meetings after 5pm since everyone had to hit the commute nightmare.

With the pandemic WFH, I'm seeing meetings as early as 8am and up to 6pm, since there is no "excuse" of having to commute. So the time I was sitting in traffic I'm now sitting in zoom.

Sure, I'd rather take zoom than traffic, but overall it didn't free up much time.

A 2 hour commute is insane. That's on you really.

On them and American urban planning. I agree it’s insane, though.

I suspect it has crept up on a lot of people as traffic has increased over time. In my last proper job I used to commute 24 miles in 30 minutes. The same journey now would be close to an hour.

I am not really sure whether you are suggesting people should move closer to their jobs, or to find jobs closer to where they live, but there are all sorts of externalities and life is rarely that simple.

Exactly, I'd rather work from home or from a wework or something, and then meet my coworkers for actual sessions of collaborations (or outside at a bar, or something)

Think what it also enabled is less office politics and promotions based on the output, not who you chit chat with in the cafeteria

A lot of people in upper management are there because they aren't concerned about the effect their decisions have on their colleagues.

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