Ask HN: Why are companies pushing working from the office? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why are companies pushing working from the office?

25 pointsarunharidas50 comments

Why the companies are doing so, when the employees are comfortable working from home.

With WFH I can think of many advantages to both the companies and the employees. - No commutation, leads to less tired employees - Healthy food - No rent - if they are working from their own house, rather than renting a flat near to the office. - Flexibility of timing - Employee could work little longer if they want since there's no commutation. - Finance - rent & fuel - Happiness - since they're with the family.

Is it just a corporate management disconnection from the reality or something else ?

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It is no surprise to me - I have been 100% remote my entire IT career (decades), almost always working with 100% onsite people.

With lots of newly-minted remote workers I have seen HUGE drops in accountability and performance, including many, many folks who just seem to 'disappear' for hours and days at a time, and nobody knows that they are doing.

Yes, you can be unproductive in the office - but the temptation and opportunities to do next to nothing on a daily basis are too big a temptation for many people, and becomes a nightmare for the people that are supposed to manage the slackers.

Some people are just as productive at home, some people are more productive, but in my experience, the number of people that have become unproductive outweighs the benefit of the relatively smaller number of people who either stay the same, or are more productive.

It's unfortunate, but if you have ever had to manage large numbers of people, you know not all folks will work just as hard when nobody is watching.

My company has let at least a couple people go since the start of the pandemic - people who would just disappear for hours, would spend hours/days working with very little to show. I'm curious - do you think that time management is a learned skill? Is working from home biased towards people who are inherently better at managing time? When the pandemic started we had a drop off on productivity as a whole, but we've since improved and have reached levels at least equal to where they were 2 or 2.5 years ago.

I don't think it is just about time management - all skills can be learned - but sadly there are a non-trivial percent of people in any organization who will simply get away with anything they think they can.

These people, for the most part, aren't any better when forced to work onsite - but it is harder for them to hide from their managers and co-workers.

> Do you think time management is a learned skill?

Time management is mostly about emotion management. For example, procrastinating on asking for help overcoming a roadblock on is often a symptom of fear of appearing stupid or annoying. In-person interactions often help smooth over these sorts of problems. For example: If you are having lunch with someone, it is easier to trust him to be non-judgemental about you running into a package management error.

> people who would just disappear for hours, would spend hours/days working with very little to show.

Were they productive in the office? It feels like "being in the office" is a form of productivity. You didn't actually have to do very much as long you were visible.

We went from people disappearing at Starbucks to people disappearing on Slack.

you sure they weren't working 2 jobs?

I suspect several were.

Working remotely is not just about time management. It requires a level of discipline and most importantly, Integrity and Honesty. Unfortunately, some people take advantage of the situation and try to game it. I have hired many people over the years including remotely and I have some of our best employees that work remotely (I never worry about them) and some real bad apples who were outright liars and cheats.

The challenge with remote work is that it requires more discipline and the ones that can truly work remotely are totally worth it but it does attract bad apples who frankly won't do anything (they wouldn't be a good fit in office as well but it is a lot harder to hide in office)

In our team, we have some great remote workers but I had my share of some real bad ones including outright liars. I am very careful if hiring fully remote because frankly, it sets the barrier high and you need to demonstrate that you are dependable to do shit on your own. One person was most likely working 2 jobs concurrently even though I cannot prove it for sure. However, they did not deliver a single thing in 3 weeks and were hired as a senior 10+ PM. When asked why, I was told that I am "too much". Whenever we will message on slack asking a question, they would respond 10-15 mins later almost 90% of the time.

> Whenever we will message on slack asking a question, they would respond 10-15 mins later almost 90% of the time.

in fairness tough, i do that too sometimes, but it's because i'm in the middle of something and i don't want to lose the focus.

when i see the slack notification if it's not about an outage or something similar, i try to finish the thing i'm doing (or at least reach a state where i can commit to git) and then reply.

and by the way, remote work should exploit asynchronicity. forcing people to always reply within 15 seconds is going to burn them out (and would do the same in an office)

I purposely respond with a delay (~15 min) to IM messages to not encourage the expectation that you’ll get an immediate response, otherwise I’ll never get anything done with constant interruptions. Boundaries are important, and when set, must be enforced.

Unless it’s an emergency, an IM doesn’t require an immediate response, and I'm unsure how anyone would get focus work done with an expectation of <5 minute responses to IMs consistently.

"Whenever we will message on slack asking a question, they would respond 10-15 mins later almost 90% of the time."

I thought that was really good, I was expecting more like 30 - 60 min delay on average. That chat isn't real-time communication afterall, personally I have all notifications turned off.

Well for us it is very rare that your progress would be blocked by not having a question answered, that is why we (try to) have well-specified tasks and daily meetups in the morning.

The work either gets done or it doesn't... how is this so hard for managers to observe?

Manager of remote teams here.

Like any sane manager, I don’t pick an arbitrary bucket of tasks at the beginning of each week and declare “Finish these by Friday” and not care if it takes 10 or 100 hours.

Instead, we work with the team to do things like sprint planning with input from the team’s velocity. We target a reasonable workload assuming people are at their desks for a normal workday amount of time.

The problem is that for some people, individual velocity plummets when they go remote. Their estimates skyrocket because they either know their productivity is down or they think it will be easier to get away with if nobody can physically see them.

Obviously this doesn’t apply to everyone as I have some great remote teams, but I’ve also churned through some otherwise good engineers who were great in office but admitted that they just couldn’t focus at home.

Also, if you have anyone WFH with school age children then velocity drops come summer time like clockwork. We work around it and plan it in, but it’s another reminder that remote is hard for even the good remote workers.

Finally, not everyone’s work is 100% isolated and asynchronous. More often than not, people have to work together on things and be available to answer questions, fix things, or otherwise stay in the loop with updates. When people are disappearing for hours every day during the team’s core working time, this all gets slowed down immensely. I don’t care if two people who work together agree to work together at 3AM or noon, but the teams have to be present and available to cowork on things.

> Also, if you have anyone WFH with school age children then velocity drops come summer time like clockwork.

Why?

Use your imagination, maybe you can figure it out.

> I don’t pick an arbitrary bucket of tasks at the beginning of each week and declare “Finish these by Friday” and not care if it takes 10 or 100 hours.

I’d say that’s your first problem. Isn’t this the whole (popular) idea of creating a sprint, then not modifying the sprint as it’s ongoing?

> velocity drops come summer time like clockwork

I don’t see how this makes things harder to measure. The very statement of it implies you have measured it and know it to be true.

> Finally, not everyone’s work is 100% isolated and asynchronous

This is true of in-person work too. If anything, someone being at a desk means that the collaborative work is probably not getting done in that scenario.

not all jobs are as simple as counting how many widgets did you make today.

Nevertheless, one does not get hired to sit there, they are hired to do a work. If a job’s output is totally unmeasurable/unobservable you probably shouldn’t have hired a person to produce that output.

Five years ago I worked on implementing a custom Bluetooth interface to act simultaneously as a Central and Peripheral for a smartwatch. The first several months of the work was spent reading the massive documentation and reading the driver source code and spec sheet and example programs from the chip vendor and getting the development environment set up. Some work has absolutely no real observable measurable output.

And the last several months? Hopefully you can see what I’m getting at. A job doesn’t exist if there is no observable output to it, at least not for long. Your manager would know if for those months you were supposed to be reading docs, that you were actually slacking off, because come time to implement the thing, you wouldn’t have been able to do it. Thus needing to spend another few months reading documentation, and there definitely is a cutoff point where if you have been reading documentation for many months and producing no output, you just get axed.

Incidentally, another reason for managers to be capable ICs. If your manager was getting frustrated with your speed at executing, he/she could always step in and “show you how it’s done,” or at least teach you about Bluetooth details themselves to spare you from having to spend time reading the docs.

Otherwise, they don’t really have a leg to stand on and it’s just shouting into the void like Vizzini yelling at his giant to climb up the cliffs faster.

Real world example: iOS team has one guy who gets it done in a week. Android team has two guys who get the same work done in two weeks. All of them work remotely and are known gamers.

Is work getting done or isn't it? How do you tell?

Wait until one of them takes vacation, see if productivity gets cut in half. Alternatively, ask one of them if the other guy isn’t doing anything.

If you bring on a new teammate and they can do double the work of the other two, then you start asking questions.

Also, this is why managers need to be able to do work themselves. The amount of work a task is should not be a mystery, especially in retrospect.

First off, don't judge on one task like that, there's just too many variables (for example: Maybe it's something built-in to iOS while Android requires writing a custom library or working around a broken API). Assuming this is a pattern, though, there's lots of ways to get more insight.

For example, next time, have the iOS guy work with the Android team, and vice-versa. It'll help cross-train and promote different ways of solving problems, but also give great insight into what's actually happening. This could just as easily apply to someone from the backend team or whatever.

Another way is daily standups. Is the Android team getting stuck on something for days a time? Are they constantly blocked by another team or bad process? Are they making progress on whatever tasks they are doing?

Looking at commit and PR history is another way to judge, provided it's someone who can code who's looking and judging. Is the amount of work accomplished for the velocity of check-ins reasonable? If people are consistently only doing a couple lines a day that's a good hint something's going on -- and is worth having a discussion about. I want to emphasize though this needs to be a pattern. Some of the hardest bugs I've fixed that have taken days to narrow down are basically a single-character change (< instead of <= for example).

Depending on the situation, it might be possible to get regular demos, eg: every few days. One way to do this is break down feature work into smaller iterative chunks/stories. Beware though, it's a thin line to becoming an obnoxious micro-manager.

> Yes, you can be unproductive in the office - but the temptation and opportunities to do next to nothing on a daily basis are too big a temptation for many people, and becomes a nightmare for the people that are supposed to manage the slackers.

It seems if you have a large number of employees who are unable or unwilling to do their job, asking everyone to work from the office isn't the optimal solution to the problem.

How has being remote in a non-remote first company affected your career?

There is an old fart hierarchy. reminiscent of Ford in 1920, timeclocks, bullying, dominance etc who want to be the top bull in the herd, I suspect many fear for their jobs long term? The jobs suitable for online performance are also suitable for online measurement and supervision (the very etymology bespeaks 'overlook'). They fear a disturbance in their force, and many rightly fear having to learn to say 'do you want fries with that' = relearn a new career at their age! Many can not, but those that can be, should be, from now on. The pandemic simply jumpstarted the process - now is not the time to go back.

I'm going to add a dimension I don't see often to this.

College grad/New Hires are super difficult to onboard remotely. It's already difficult to go from school to a tech job, but add in that you now don't have any sense of what's going on and it's easy to get forgotten even with a good/active mentor.

Also lots of young people don't want to stay in their hometown and move to Seattle/SV/SF, and without the office it's very easy to literally have no friends. When I got a job and moved out to the west coast I had to very actively find people to meet up with, I know a bunch of coworkers who didn't and either ended up leaving frequently to go back just to combat mental health issues, or just sitting home alone. Not saying that ALL of your friends need to come from work or whatever, but if you're new to a city and single it's much easier to seed those friendships.

Lots of people don't buy the innovation, "talk about x by the watercooler", argument, but I think on a macro scale it's a bigger deal. How many startups are started because two people became friends in SV, lived together and started a new project. That only happens with talent density that you get from tons of smart people being colocated. (And it's something lots of ambitious young people move out to the west coast to get, where I came from most of the best jobs were trade schools, construction and trucking lol, not too many promising startups come from a small town in the middle of nowhere just because there's noone to work with.)

So there's def some demand from young people to go into the office which puts a pro in the return to office column for the pointy hairs. Not saying that specific policies are good or bad, just want to outline a datapoint.

I'm not a researcher, but I do have some thoughts on this. Some managers assume that if they can't see you, then you aren't working. This is possibly true for some employees, but I believe bad employees aren't only bad if they work from home. They're likely just bad employees all the time and now they can't be monitored. People want to "get back to normal", which could include working from a shared office. However, there can be disagreement on whether what used to be "normal" was really good for everyone. Also, managers need to manage. That is, some people think their job is to make up rules, so if they make up more rules then that gives the appearance that they're really working hard. There are some real benefits to sharing an office. It can make some types of meetings easier to facilitate. It can be easier to get to know your coworkers if you're in the same place.

I personally hate having everyone working from home - how many times have you been on a zoom call with a team, someone gets asked a question, and the inevitable response 'sorry, I was multi-tasking can you repeat the question? (i.e. they were doing something else unrelated to the meeting) - it happens over and over on a daily basis on calls I am on.

If these people were all in the same room, they wouldn't get away with it for long - but somehow it has become acceptable.

That said, I am a big believer in WFH for people that cam manage their time and dedication just as well as if they were onsite - but so far, in my experience, that is about 20% of people.

I've never had that happen.

Your team is either incredibly rude, or they're too polite to say that they're zoning out because the meeting is a waste of time.

right - and rude people wouldn't be tolerated in an in-person meeting, on a zoom call, especially without video - a lot of people don't pay attention or engage like they would in person.

In my experience, people zone out or check their phones all the time in in-person meetings.

Some of us actually like working from the office.

I could just buy a rack and make a home gym but the actual gym is better for a number of reasons, same with the office.

It's a dedicated place. My home is for relaxation.

Maybe it has to do with managers seeing stuff like this:

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220329-the-coasting-w...

and thinking that having people in the office will reduce that situation.

Because not everyone can work remotely

Not effectively

It really does take a certain combination of personality type, personal drive, and interest in the work to be effective at remote work

I was at a big tech company during COVID. The simple fact was that entire teams had checked out.

It was a similar conversation I had with several mentees, not sure about whether they should just switch teams or leave the company because things weren’t moving forward, and they had no control over the situation.

Everyone blamed WFH since the significant decrease in productivity happened after WFH started.

A global pandemic that affected everyone's lives also started at the same time.

My last company (non-tech and small to medium in size) bought a floor in their building and spent a lot of time and money on making it "welcoming". They fitted it with new desks and chairs, a large kitchen, common areas, small meeting rooms (some for small groups and others for individual phone calls, and more). I got to visit the floor twice before I switched jobs.

I'm guessing that the company's interested in gradually moving away from a hybrid work approach and getting people back in their seats. It's the type of company (and industry) where face-to-face communication is deemed as highly important for everyone (those in staff and line positions).

And to my point on the shiny new office, I'm sure the ET wants to get their money's worth.

By occam's razor, it's likely that companies have come to the conclusion that work from office works better in most cases. Nothing more or less than that. Now you can disagree with the conclusion, but it does seem to be a growing consensus

To reduce staff without formally having layoffs. I just came across this - https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1512068287768653829?...

> when people quit on their own it’s not layoffs. There’s no lawsuits. No bad press. No questions on the business model. No risk of not raising the next investment.

Companies with more intrinsically motivated people seem to do better with WFH, companies with mostly extrinsically motivated people seem to do worse with WFH, that is just my personal observation. Even big tech companies have tons of extrinsically motivated people, people who grinded exam prep for a year to join FAANG just to become a cog in the machine doing not very interesting work, i'm sure there are tons of those people.

We went in for the first time in over 2 years, out of 500 desks about 10-20 desks were occupied, at the end of the day the management sent a email changing onsite policy from 2 days/week to 2 days/month. GG.

Google “Ed Zitron” and read his articles.

Looks like he has a few at The Atlantic [0].

Can you recommend anything specific?

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/author/ed-zitron/

his substack articles. he’s been writing a lot about remote and managers pushing return to office lately.

https://ez.substack.com/

Too much real estate sitting unused.

That could be a driving force, but I’m not convinced that it’s the main driving force. I think it rather has to do with challenges in managing a remote team/remote departments. I’m not saying those challenges are insurmountable, but the challenges there are at least somewhat different from managing people in the same office.

Real estate.

Real estate becomes worthless if nobody is willing to rent it.

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