Comment by zeptonaut22 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zeptonaut22 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'm the author of the post and just want to say: I think it's awesome that you work at a remote company and am glad that you found a role that fits your personality. It sounds like you're happier there and I'm glad that the option exists.

I think that the fact that there's more variety now in whether you can work remotely or in an office is awesome, and I hope that's not going away. (And don't think it will.) And no job should ever give you hell for staying home one or two days per week if your job is totally doable at home.

With that being said, there are a lot of people in the world that genuinely enjoy having in-person interactions with their colleagues every day and I'm one of them. I've been lucky enough to work in jobs with awesome colleagues and I don't want to be put up digital barriers between me and them. I also like the fact that I have some forcing function for getting more than 2,000 steps a day.

The main thing that I'm worried about is that companies are going to see dollar signs in remote work because they can cut office space expenses, only for employees to not be able to backtrack.

I enjoy the in-person interactions in the office, and I'll even argue that there's benefits and desirability to it, and office work and centralisation.

But my wife has worked at a company that did offsite kinda vacation/camp things, and gotta say, it ranks up pretty high there on the corporate dystopia cringe scale for us.

I work at a semi distributed organisation atm (several offices in different cities) and we generally used to have once a year offsite. while it was nice to see some faces in person, the experience of leaving my family to do so, and to have to go to locations and accommodation chosen by work, was again just a downer. I know other people looked forward to it, so horses for courses, but I also know there were people working long hours and liking the travel because they had nothing else going on in their lives.

I think the strengths of centralisation stand independent a lot of these practices, that make a lot of us shudder on some level.

My argument against that narrative is if you crave interpersonal connection, there are healthier ways to engage in that through actual friendships and hobbies, than within the forced artificial construct of corporate hierarchy, rules, incentives and power structures. I can't imagine as an independent contributor this would be productive or desired.

In my experience, I've found managers very enthusiastic to RTO as it gives them more validation, and increased productivity through monitoring - under the guise of building team rapport.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com