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Comment by flying_whales | Hacker News Reader

I feel that my mental health has improved after going back to (voluntarily) office. It was no good being stuck with myself at home all the time. That said, I've worked out of some toxic offices and I don't miss that.

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Smart employers will allow people to come into an office only if they want to. It doesn't have to be a binary. They don't need to lose people like you just because other employees want to be remote.

Smart employees will reject going into the office to just video chat with everyone

Any other solution?

Meetings with part in office, part remote, are so cumbersome and awkward compared to all in office or all remote. The cadences between the two conversations are totally off, making it odd to try and sync up and have natural organic discussions.

In my experience, I've found that to be the case when the meetings are already effectively pointless and not well organized. One solution is to make meetings more structured and important. This has the benefit of also making them rarer. When I've been in meetings that have clear goals and an agenda/talking points to go through so that people stay on topic, I found them to be far more bearable with mixed remote and office employees.

The problem is that even if everyone is in the office, they are often in different offices. I currently work at a company with people resourced into projects from two other countries (soon 4), with a plethora of customers on other sites in my country. We have three offices in this country as well, and the head office is in a different country again.

Almost every decision (which requires a meeting) requires someone from this diaspora. So we are on video no matter what.

If I had a quid for every “you’re all muted now, I can’t hear anything you’re saying”

The average hn person presumably does get at least a quid for all the connection faff every meeting

Hah. Fair point.

Man, we used to waste so much time running from one conference room to the other. Not having to do that saves a lot of time for natural organic conversations.

Smart employers will embrace Conways law, and make sure that the in-office guys mostly collaborate with each other, and give the out-of-office people projects that are self-contained and well specified.

I actually am someone who would go into the office part time but I would still want to maintain the ability to have 100% remote work.

I am bothered a lot by people at home. I’ve been remote pre-pandemic so the affliction of people thinking your being at home means you can run their errands is not new. The pandemic made it worse because now I am bothered all day every work day.

You’d think, “stop bothering the person paying the mortgage” would be a motivator but it’s simply not the case for me.

I know many people in this position so it is worthwhile to have empathy for people who really need an office.

And of course to reiterate, that doesn’t mean that a return to office should be mandatory.

Your complaint about errands is kind of oblique and I find it confusing -- are you speaking of housemates, or your family, or who?

I've seen the errands and expectations problem from family. Clear boundaries can be difficult to maintain if one makes too many exceptions. Young kids especially can struggle to understand why a parent is visible on the way to the bathroom or for water but otherwise forbids interruption.

It takes diligence, patience, soundproofing, and sometimes locks and a detached shed / workshop.

I have the same issue and am really struggling to resolve it. I’m the sole income and have young kids. I’m constantly interrupted by the kids who want to come see me. I try not to turn them away because the advantage of WFH, or so I believe, is that we don’t miss all the things our kids do while we’re slaving away at an office. However, this requires me to push things to later in the day. Then there are appointments and things that my wife usually has covered, but with another adult in the house “can you take the baby for a couple minutes”. I tried explaining the concept of context switching but so think I just come off like an uncaring jerk. I’m looking for a 1-2 time a week space away from my home office because I can’t keep looking at these same four walls day in and day out. I used to be so much more productive in the office, but felt like a terrible father. I’m really trying to come up with a way to have my cake and eat it too.

Don't do video chats? They're pretty worthless.

Smart employers?

Let's do a bit of math:

- if you are NOT full remote but also NOT full in office you need to pay both an infra for remote workers and offices;

- or you give double gears of you made some workers really unhappy moving their gears back&forth (remember you can easily move laptops BUT normally you do not move docking for them with external monitor and keyboard and mice for working in comfort;

- since potentially ALL workers can came back you can't save money for a smaller office neither...

Are such hybrid employers smart?

Oh, on the other side it's the same:

- why coming back to the office, so live nearby the office instead in more affordable and nicer places if you WFH more or less frequently and potentially you can WFH 100%?

- why having a home with a workspace if you work from the office more or less frequently?

Hybrid is HORRIBLE and should be there only for a very limited transitory period of time to let anyone change habits, definitively not something smart.

I never said anything about hybrid. I said that employees who want an office should be offered one.

That's essentially hybrid, it might not sound for the individual workers who choose home or office, but for the company point-of-view that's hybrid works and for all workers means being able to work in both configs...

Smart employers, I think, will share workspaces. I can't remember the last time I really needed a piece of paper (I carry a remarkable for that) and as long as I can dock easily, with a decent screen and keyboard/mouse combo, I am kind of happy as long as it doesn't take ages to setup.

So you do not care at all about infosec, like keyloggers and co planted in shared places by who know who?

Or for the employer the joy of sharing some loans to find some others do not pay and he have to pay on their behalf than loose time in Court hoping there is something to recover?

If employers allow some work from home and some work in office, after a few years, there will be lots of reports to claim the statistical differences of wage and promotion between those two groups are discriminations. And demand those two groups to have the same outcomes.

The can demand all they want, but such discrimination is not illegal.

Caving to the demands from a small group is not uncommon. Also, they can always link the difference to race/gender etc. Say, if there are more women or racial minorities chose to work from home, and then working from home leads to less wage increases, then the company will be in trouble.

It's not about allowing or not allowing. You let everyone work remotely if they want to, and then you pay for a small office for the people who choose it. Remote should be the assumed default.

This semantic difference does not seem to be relevant to my point.

If say you choose to work from home and then you find out your coworkers working in office get more wage increase or promotion than you do, would you be OK with it?

Why would anyone be okay with that? If you flip it around do you expect it to suddenly be okay?

You would be Okay with it because you like to work from home and others choose to take all the trouble to go to office so that they can have more chances to get familiar with the bosses and learn about things not online.

But that’s just one narrative framing. Would you be okay if remote people got promotions more often because they didn’t waste two hours a day commuting, got more done, and met with their managers in more casual settings like pubs and restaurants and so had more time to shoot the shit?

“Not going into the office” != “never seeing coworkers face to face.” Being remote has forced our team to be more proactive about seeing one another and so we’ve ended up socializing more than we ever did at the office. It’s easy to fall into the trap of not doing anything other than working chat and water cooler conversations and never actually socializing because “we see each other every day.”

I am OK with either way, because my political philosophy is personal choice. It really does not matter which specific option leads to better outcome. My point is that there are people who do not hold this philosophy and they will demand for equal outcome. Read my top comment, it really doesn’t matter which way it goes, some people will make it a political issue.

Also, they can always link the difference to race/gender etc. Say, if there are more women or racial minorities chose option A, and then option A leads to less wage increases, then the company will be in trouble.

This is how things already work. Companies like Google and Facebook are not shy at all about cutting your pay significantly if you move to some location they think doesn't merit the same level of comp as the bay area and nyc.

We reopened our offices. Some people went in on the first day. Five people caught COVID. Offices are closed again (temporarily).

Same here.

It’s interesting how all this plays out at the individual level.

My employer is reopening as a “hybrid” workplace this week but teams also have the freedom to choose their own approach (including staying remote) for now. Some people are thrilled to get back in, others (like me!) are remaining remote with some mild hand wringing about how long we’ll be allowed to do so.

As a parent of young children (who can’t get vaccinated yet) the pandemic has been quite trying for us but the switch to remote has been insanely good for my mental and physical health.

I have filled the two hours a day I used to spend commuting with things like running, biking, strength training, reading, more time with my kids, etc. and this has led to improved fitness and diet, more energy, better sleep, _and_ increased output at work.

At this point I just can’t even imagine going back to having a commute.

On a normal day, I spend about two and a half hours commuting, but two thirds of that time are actually a brisk walk to/from the railway station(s) and the rest is a train ride which I spend reading. I would have walked and read regardless. But this is an untypical constellation of factors, yes.

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