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Comment by notimetorelax | Hacker News Reader

I keep reading those comments where those proverbial managers want this or that. I don’t understand where it comes from - managers also people with similar needs to individual contributors. Myself, being a manager I’m not looking forward to us going to office and the teams are performing well as is. My peer managers are is a similar opinion.

Is it the banal they vs us, search for an enemy and cause of one’s unhappiness?

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I keep reading those comments that almost nobody wants to go to the office. In my (European) company, maybe ~80 SWEs, people were given the choice to either mostly go to back to the office (4 out of 5 days) or mostly work from home (3 out of 5 days at home, hot desking in the office). After 2 years of mostly having no choice and being forced out of the office, 80% of them decided to mostly work from the office after the pandemic. We always had a handful people working fully remote, and I think 1 or 2 asked if they could switch to that permanently to be able to live somewhere else. But otherwise people mostly want to be in the office. Notably people outside engineering seem to prefer WFH much more. I wonder why we are so special.

I would imagine in Europe compared to the USA there are a lot more people in very small apartments or share houses in the cities, they do not lend themselves well to home working.

Additionally thats one company, maybe you just have a particularly social group of swes who like each other and a good office environment

Hm, average apartment size in this city: 790 sq ft, average USA: 880 sq ft. Average household size my country: 1.99 ppl, average USA: 2.5 ppl. I guess we just have better working conditions in the office than average or in the USA.

USA houses are massive.

Space is ridiculously expensive in Europe and nobody is used to it, so the market rarely offer that.

A better comparison would be median single family home size in US, which is around 2,300 sq ft [1]. Over 60% of housing units in US are single family homes [2].

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/456925/median-size-of-si... [2]: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/ahs/data/interactive...

Can most of you walk or bike to work?

I guess ~15 people bike to work, the rest uses cars or public transport. I don't think anyone walks to work.

This, I have been working remotely long before COVID and even if I could stay at home I was going to the office to see friends / have lunch / hit the gym / grab a beer.

Nothing productive was getting done during those office days but they definitely made the job more tolerable and contributed to me not job hopping earlier.

US commutes are especially grueling for many Americans compared to Europeans, I believe. The excellent urban and suburban European public transit makes commuting even for an hour each way tolerable, because someone else is doing the driving. I’ve heard this advantage is substantially eroded for younger European generations who are effectively locked out of affordable housing within easy commute of public transit hubs.

That generational housing affordability factor might also help explain some of the WFH sentiment split between older and younger generations, and between management and IC. Older generations tend to as an aggregate have already locked in their housing cost basis in generally desirable areas with better commute characteristics, and be more represented in management.

Managers tend to be more extroverted and thus also more lonely at home. Several even admitted this to me. And so they want to make everyone come back to the office so they can have their social needs met. But the way they phrase it is, it’s easier to communicate and have meetings

Which is understandable. WFH people are more introverted so they want to have their needs met by staying home. I'm introverted WFH btw.

Whether one prefers WFH or the office strongly depends on ones personality. I wouldn't be surprised if the personality type that tends to become a manager also tends to prefer to work in an office environment.

Because mandates are coming from managers? Or are suggesting they are coming from ICs?

If your manager told you to push your team back into the office. Would you do that or resist?

That's my view that management are there to enforce the often unpleasant demands of those above. In most cases anyway.

that's something similar to my situation.

While I'm not "resisting" (I'm communicating that this is the organisational preference) I'm making it clear to the team that as long as they stay highly functional and get work done, there's going to be no mandate and people can make their own choices. They are all choosing 80% WFH.

But our office space sucks. I think it would be a little different if we had really nice space.

Upper management … you will ask your team to come to office as soon as you get the memo from upper management. <shrugs>

Someone in the management chain is making that decision.

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