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Comment by Johnny555 | Hacker News Reader

That's one reason for sure, but even if my house was a 10 minute walk from the office, I'd still rather only go in for meetings. At home I have my own private office with a nice view. I have a nice set of speakers and can play any music I like. If I want to go for a walk, I'm in a quiet suburban neighborhood with hiking trails nearby. The kitchen is always stocked with snacks I like plus freshly prepared healthy lunches (prepared either by myself or my wife). My dog spends most of the day in the office with me.

At the "new" office, no one has an assigned desk, so I have to take everything I need with me to my desk and pack it up at the end of the day. My company is distributed so I spend half the day on zoom meetings with people in other offices... and even with relatively few people in the office it's already hard to book a room for a meeting. There's enough background noise in the open office that I keep headphones on most of the time while I'm at my desk. We do get free lunches at the office which is a nice perk, but food is prepared off-site, so menus tend to be designed around food that stands up to this model of food that can be prepared hours ahead of time.

My commute is less than 30 minutes (one-way) and is a pretty pleasant drive.... it takes an hour out of my day, but it's not the primary reason I don't want to go to the office.

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>There's enough background noise in the open office that I keep headphones on most of the time while I'm at my desk.

I still don't get how we as a species went "this is fine". The complete loss of audiovisual privacy is such an immense drain. I'll buy the "being close together works better" argument, but I still can't grasp how that offsets all the distractions in the modern office.

I used to keep the clip as a joke, because I was constantly going into the office early so I could get some work done before the constant chatter.

https://youtube.com/shorts/4whlr2dVDws?feature=share

I really wish stuff like this was illegal. It's so disgusting to wait at someone's house just to harass them every single day, celebrity or not.

I did the same and I barely function before the sun is up. Got a solid 1-2 hours in doing way better work than the hours spent not half asleep but with the noise. Was able to do it the other way around a few times and found my late hours were even better, but managers were a little eager to apprehend me for coming in "late".

Yes I might think about finding a job on the other end of the country, that would allow me a sleep schedule that feels less forced.

I feel like the unicorn where I both enjoyed my colleagues in the office and had a lot of fun. Was it _more_ productive? Hard to say but I could easily put on my headphones and work. The lack of visual privacy I realize but I would never say it hindered my work. Then again nobody was on me if I went on reddit for a bit because the tests are running.

I think a bunch of people on hacker news are discounting how much more you can learn in an office with helpful colleagues. When I was a new developer I absorbed so much information in the office just from being able to ask people questions in person. Just from people overhearing a conversation I was having and saying "I think you probably want to do it like X instead" and explaining! In my opinion many people are discounting the development of newer engineers. I'm sure it can happen remotely but remote work requires more intentional coordination and that's one area that I doubt it's happening more effectively than in an office (on the whole). I'm not saying in person meetings are awesome but comparatively, interacting with other people is easier and more enjoyable as opposed to having the same meeting digitally.

I'm with you. I was at least as productive, and much happier. I never had audiovisual privacy, and it never bothered me. If I really needed to do something in private I could go to an empty meeting room or booth, or even just find a secluded couch spot or something.

I was also able to learn a lot more from my peers and to build work type relationships much more efficiently, many of which have paid dividends over the course of my career.

I can also clearly see that the junior engineers at my company are developing much slower than they did when we were in office. I'm pretty sure that can be rectified with better process, but I think it's really significant that being remote makes those sorts of things much harder, and when things are hard orgs will often get them badly wrong.

If individuals can function under these circumstances or even like it, cool, fine, great. I just don't think it should be assumed everyone functions under these circumstances, or that someone who doesn't is dysfunctional, as pre-COVID almost made it seem. Managers seemed all to eager to discount anyone as "not a viable programmer" the moment they balked at the sound of an open office.

>I think a bunch of people on hacker news are discounting how much more you can learn in an office with helpful colleagues

It's tradeoffs, which I alluded to. It's not "you're forgetting X", it's more "are you really, really sure trading X against Y is the better deal here?" I'm young enough to have started in open offices, it was okay in the first few weeks and afterwards I started wondering whether being open to literally any passerby was worth the upgrade from IM to physical presence.

The moment I heard open offices reduced personal interaction compared to cubicles was the moment I casted doubt on anything regarding open offices and their efficacy.

Sure I totally agree that people have different preferences. Do you have a link to the study which showed that open offices reduced personal interaction? That wasn't my experience and I'm wondering what their methodology was.

I loved aspects of my open office job. I had a few really good friends, and we'd play ping pong, video game, Frisbee, just goof off a whole lot. But I hated actually trying to work there.

I think this varies dramatically based on many factors, such as ADHD, introversion, etc. When I really wanted to get work done, I'd go home even though work from home wasn't allowed. They never fired me or even reprimanded me because I think they knew the office environment was BS. Also, I was one of the most productive employees in the entire company, and that was due largely to me working from home.

I agree, but it depends on a few factors.

A hot desking setup where you can't sit next to your colleagues like OP described is a total waste of time.

I agree entirely. As a relatively misanthropic person, this was one of the many reasons why working in the office was miserable for me, and why the covid era has been the best time of my entire life. Moving forward I will exclusively consider remote positions, and I think other people should consider the benefits of doing so too.

Because "we as a species" evolved to work in groups. Humans are not loners. We eat, work, recreate and live in groups. To ship any complex groundbreaking product, you have to collaborate closely with a big group.

Only in the last few decades, and only a minority of Human population in that period, has there been so much emphasis on "privacy".

To ship any complex groundbreaking product, you have to collaborate closely with a big group.

My company shipped several ground breaking projects during COVID enforced WFH where there was not even the possibility of getting together in person.

And now as we've grown we've added teams all over the globe (3 offices in the USA, one in Canada, 2 in Europe and one coming online soon in Australia), so collaboration on a complex project means communicating with teams that are asleep during your working hours.

During COVID, we relied on the existing relationships and the shared context to get things done. In fact, it was a once in a century event and was easy to rally troops, the same way it is easy to unify a society when there is a war.

Now that most of the team is churned, I am observing a steep drop in productivity. New members have neither any shared context nor any meaningful bonds between them. If I were to bet, I would put my money on in-person teams easily outperforming fully-remote teams. Looking forward to see some data in the next few years.

This is exactly right.

At the start of the pandemic, my company (a large well known Bay-Area tech company) saw improvements in our developer productivity metrics.

Over 2020, they faded.

I'm at a new company now, we have done a lot of hiring, seen a lot of churn, and it is really hard to get "think big" projects running.

Are you saying that collaborating closely online is not collaborating?

Meanwhile family and pets provide social companionship. Why do you consider that inferior?

Family and pets are some of the greatest form of companionship.

Online collaboration is pretty lame. It is very transactional, builds very shallow relationships and takes immense effort to agree on complex decisions. I have been doing fully remote since March 2020 (duh) and have met almost all the new colleagues since then in person for work offsites. Most common sentiment is that no one misses commute but otherwise, in-person is so much better to work with each other.

Funnily enough, my company toots the horn of fully-remote. But execs have started meeting in person regularly. It’s just not advertised broadly, but bumping into one of them occasionally and being friends with their assistants reveal so much about “remote for proles but in-person for execs” setup.

I think you’re right that humans work best in groups, but there is a difference between collaborating with a group and being physically proximal to a group. You can collaborate with dozens of people over the internet, or you can be the only programmer in an open office with dozens of co-workers who can’t help you.

Many of the most complex (software) products in the world are open source: web browser engines like Blink and Gecko, operating systems like Linux and its various distributions, compilers like GCC and LLVM, nearly every programming language, etc. Nearly all of that work is done collaboratively within a group, but it is not done in physical proximity to the rest of the group. Which works fine!

For the open source work I am familiar with, the initial work to get the project off the ground is done by a small group of people who are physically collocated. Same with startups - I am seeing a lot of founding teams these days where founders are physically near each other and eventually plan to scale up with remote teams once the product has some traction.

Happy to bookmark this comment and check back in 2025 if startups are getting created in person or are fully remote right from the genesis.

> I still don't get how we as a species went "this is fine". The complete loss of audiovisual privacy is such an immense drain.

Throughout history a huge chunk of us as a species did not have audiovisual privacy at work, and a massive percentage of the jobs throughout history never had it and still don't. Its immensely rare for us as a species to have full audiovisual privacy at our workplace, and has been for a long, long time. Do teachers have audiovisual privacy for the majority of their workday? Chefs? Construction jobs? Factory workers? Retail workers? Even back in the day tons of white collar jobs had large spaces with open desks for "computers" (the people, not the machines) or typists or drafters.

Do these scenes of design spaces and other offices seem like quiet places with private offices for each worker?

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/cb/02/98/cb02981dccefb68f67cd...

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/99/d5/b9/99d5b92533e332fbaa5c...

https://i.pinimg.com/474x/8d/c1/45/8dc145b0a90fb4509238aa145...

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/30/17/07/3017075666fb55b875bc...

https://www.officemuseum.com/IMagesWWW/UWA_Dexter_Horton_Nat...

And those are just of "white collar" office workers. Do these look like private spaces?

https://www.tshaonline.org/images/handbook/entries/TT/textil...

https://www.history.com/.image/t_share/MTU3ODc5MDg2NDM0NzU1O...

Sure, doing repetitive thoughtless work is more fun with other people milling around. But when you are at your cognitive limit trying to consider various ways this code could be failing, conversations about weekend plans are immensely distracting and rage inducing.

I'm mostly going against the extreme hyperbole of "we as a species" as if software developers in private offices are a species on to themselves. The percentage of humanity who did not have a private office for their main workspace vastly outnumbers those who did, and its been this way since probably the beginning of civilization. Its absurd to suggest that "open offices" are some recent fad from the 90s or even 80s...offices have had open spaces with multiple people in them since we've had workplaces! And even then, many of those offices had highly skilled people working on difficult engineering problems, and they often didn't have private offices either. Plus, its not like non-repetitive thought-engaging work is only done in offices, tons of challenging work is also done in the field or in labs or elsewhere.

Are brickmakers and steelworkers and mechanics and factory workers and lab techs and pharmacists a different species because they never gave up the loss of audiovisual privacy at their workplace? No. Its an absurd and vastly insulting statement BlargMcLarg was making.

And it isn't just conversations, it is the guy sitting right behind you constantly bouncing his leg up and down and you can't quite ever ignore it.

Cubicals were much better but they were "lame" and "soulless."

agreed. My favorite office environment was a cube farm, and I’d argue that it was less “soulless” than the myriad open offices I’ve worked at since because people actually personalized their spaces.

I hated cubicle offices back in the days when I had one -- and we had the nice high cubes that you couldn't easily see over. It didn't offer much auditory privacy (I could easily hear coworker's calls), and limited real privacy since it had no door and anyone could stand on their toes and peer over the top. But at least I had my own personal space, I could pin photos to the wall and make it my own.

Now when I go to the office, I sit in a row of 6 desks, with nothing blocking me from the person in front of me but a monitor, I long for the days of cubicles

> I'll buy the "being close together works better" argument

No, it's some real estate agents convincing spineless C-level execs that they need a new office because Facebook did it. Having a small team, say less than 8 in the same sufficiently large room may work great, assuming that synergy translates to 30+ people who neither know nor care for each other is beyond daft.

The magic of open space is the same for me... but without the "perks" (food is pretty horrible from the comment I have, and it's 1 hour of traffic jam to get there). All that to do Teams meeting at my desk, with the noise of my other colleagues also in call. That's, to put it simply, hell.

And then you have to be under constant surveillance, "why do you leave so early?" (I've been there for 8 hours already, so, fuck you very much)" and the "why do you go to a private cell for your meeting? (to not annoy you)"

The worst part? I sometimes do meeting with half of my colleague sitting right next to me in the same call. With my headset. Why?

There aren't any meeting rooms at your office? I think every place I've been, even the startups had some kind of conference call mic setup on the table, although I don't think every place had a cam. It's possible for the "room" to join the call and those who must join over video.

We have a number of those rooms and a greater number of one or 2 person "phone rooms", even now without everyone back in the office, those are fully booked at some times. It was a big problem before COVID too -- we'd usually do 1:1 meetings outside because it was easier than trying to find a conference room -- you'd have to find an open spot in each person's schedule and an open room at the same time, which was hard to get.

A conference room full of people is a nightmare for remote meetings - audio quality is horrendous and it’s very hard to make out what people in the speakerphone setup are saying. Everyone having their own headset makes for a much better experience for everyone. Unless the meeting is primarily in person with a few remote participants - then those get left out and have trouble catching up.

Hybrid remote doesn’t work - go either fully on-prem or fully remote.

I haven't had that experience but I'm sure quality setups don't come cheap. Actually... the polycom setups don't seem that expensive.

Idk, I guess I haven't experienced major issues with that personally.

I can't tell you how many times I've been on a call w/ a room full of people & a PolyCom system... and then the Zoom meeting is hosted on some asshole's laptop mic.

It's hard to do the right thing sometimes.

But you're still in a meeting room on a video call, so why not just be on a video call if the rest of your day is spent in isolation with headphones on with all the inconveniences of office travel. What is the upside? Especially when there are open office plans with no assigned desks (as has been mentioned above - luckily, I haven't actually worked at a "non assigned desk role yet), which is f'ing dehumanizing.

Sounds like you're asking what's the upside vs wfh. I'm saying if y'all are at the office anyway, get into a room for the meeting instead of taking the call at your desks.

If you're wfh anyway, yeah just call in over video.

Oh, I'm just asking, if you have to set up a video call in the office anyways (which is often the case, these days, due to multiple teams working in other parts of the country and off-shoring) and the rest of your time is spent siloed with headphones to block out noise, due to office distractions - the reported upsides of the office (collaboration, community, teamwork, shared sense of purpose, closeness to fellow coworkers, etc.) all seem to fall away. What then, becomes the real argument for having an "only work at the office" policy and reviews not be based on the metrics of work done and quality of work?

And you are correct, my question was horribly phrased before =)

EDIT: and just for reference, I lead a small team and am not really management and we're still remote. We seem to do well and these are the metrics we go by, so I'm generally kind of curious about this. Occasionally my manager asks about hours worked, and I'm vague about it, but our output is better than most teams and of a high quality, so she doesn't peak inside too often =/

> My commute is less than 30 minutes (one-way) and is a pretty pleasant drive.... it takes an hour out of my day, but it's not the primary reason I don't want to go to the office.

Focusing on "reasons why I don't like the office" is missing the point, IMO. A lot of folks are betting on the long-term results of a short-term dislocation, but ignoring why things were as they were before the dislocation. It's sort of like the commentariat who come up with hot-takes in the aftermath of a natural disaster, and conclude "life will never be the same"...but within a few years life is, almost always, pretty much the same.

Yes, there are obvious upsides to working from home, but there are also fundamental reasons that we used to go into the office, and dismissing them all as "the old way of doing it" is facile. I think, in the "long" run (i.e. the next few years), the same forces that led humans to form cities throughout all of human existence will prevail.

Said differently: offices sucked before the pandemic too. The technology existed for remote work before the pandemic, too. Yet even in the most remote-friendly work environments, we went out of our way to make time for in-person communication. There was no sudden shift in technology or quality here. We did some short-term things to deal with a short-term circumstance, and now we're seeing the hangover of those choices. But the forces at play are largely unchanged.

If I had to wager, I'd bet that being in the office will be how you get noticed and advance in your career. Making on-site visits will be how you get the sale. Having in-person communication will offer productivity gains over video chat. The incentives to in-person communication will therefore accumulate over time, until we're back to where we started.

"being in the office will be how you get noticed and advance in your career. "

In every job I had working from the office I didn't have to get noticed before quitting for a better job and advancing my career.

The exception makes the rule. If you're truly working a job where you only advance by leaving, then you likely aren't in a position where you can advance at all. Or you are in such a job, but you've neglected the value of visibility to your career growth (PSA: this is far too common amongst programmers).

It certainly happens, but it's not a counterargument to what I'm saying.

I'm not the exception, I'm the rule.

If you want to make big advances in your career and/or compensation, getting a new job will get you there faster. Advancing within a company is almost always a very slow process with minimal rewards - you get to move to a new salary band, but that doesn't result in a big jump in salary.

Sure. But there are other steps that matter on the way. Want to get on the interesting project, which lets you put the big accomplishment on your resume? Want to get more responsibility, which lets you tell the recruiter that you've done the $essential_thing they're seeking for that better job?

It always helps to be visible, even if your long-term plan is to job hop into infinity (though I have to say this as another PSA: job-hopping will eventually stop working. It's a notably programmer-since-2012 phenomenon to assume that leaping from place to place will result in a monotonic increase in your salary and/or prestige forever and ever.)

>Want to get on the interesting project, which lets you put the big accomplishment on your resume?

Smart managers pick the best people if the project is important, they certainly won't pick a mediocre developer just because he shows up in the office every day. Attendance is no replacement for hard work and aptitude, unless you are in high school.

>It always helps to be visible

It does, but filling a seat in a cube isn't the best way. The best way is to solve business problems.

>It's a notably programmer-since-2012 phenomenon to assume that leaping from place to place will result in a monotonic increase in your salary and/or prestige forever and ever.

I don't think anyone thinks it's forever. There's certainly a cap to how much you can earn as a software developer/engineer/architect/x working for someone. There are exceptions where you can negotiate some equity or percentage of revenue, but you almost certainly can't do that outside the initial offer phase. In other words, you won't get it at the company where you are already employed; the negotiation window is most likely closed forever.

I doubled my salary 2x from 1998-2001. Then the dot bomb happened, but it's not a new phenomenon. Companies that hire for x amount only give y% when giving out raises. It's pretty close to inflation. The trick to having a larger salary is to get hired with a larger salary, full stop.

I wish it wasn't that way, I usually like staying at a company for a while, but as long as traditional raises are 2-5%, that's what the hiring market wants.

Programmers advance by job hopping. There is more budget for attracting new talent than retaining old talent. It's sad but true.

> being in the office will be how you get noticed and advance in your career

That's a classic move. Businesses could offer a significant premium over remote roles to attract candidates, and could easy afford it if you take their in office productivity claims at face value, but that costs money, much easier to make handwavy, unfalsifiable (at least with the information you have as an employee) claims about how you will be rewarded someday in the future.

I think you're attributing too much intent to the process. Monkeys gonna monkey.

As you note, you can do things to try to fight our fundamentally social nature, but it's like fighting the tides.

I'm not complaining that the people in the office are getting promoted faster. Far from it, I hope they get something for all that wasted time.

However I know how promotions tend to go in most companies, and 9/10 you are better off interviewing at another firm and getting promoted that way on a hours worked/pay received basis. With that knowledge I see this as a rather empty incentive.

> I'd bet that being in the office will be how you get noticed and advance in your career

I think this is true, somewhat. But I also will say that as remote work has become more commonplace, it is less true. In my mind, it's mostly about social norms, more than some universal absolute. It used to be the word on the street that if you wanted to get ahead at any FAANG you had to move to the Bay, rather than working in NYC, Austin, et al. That's hasn't been true for awhile, and with remote work now commonplace it's no longer true you need to be in the office to get ahead.

I've been perm remote for quite some time, and in that time I've shifted from Eng to PM, and have moved ahead in my career quite significantly. A lot of that is due to remote becoming more socially acceptable over time, and part of that is that I learned remote skills in how to appropriately communicate my successes so others know about them without needing to hear about it at the watercooler.

Different work environments require different processes for self-promotion to be noticed, but it's still definitely possible while remote, and it becomes more possible the more remote work becomes the norm rather than the exception. I see no reason that we require RTO for people to advance their careers other than butt-seatism managers who mostly should just retire at this point.

>Focusing on "reasons why I don't like the office" is missing the point

Well, that depends on whether the point is my own job satisfaction, or my employer's belief that making me work in a different environment is better for him.

I'm at the point in my career where I can focus on the first point.

The status quo was never to attempt remote work by default as much as to get employees to be productive even when they're at home, on vacation, when there's bad weather etc.

I agree that the technology have fundamentally changed and that it's difficult for companies to revoke the benefit of working from home after it was granted. I do think the needle has shifted now that there are metrics to support or oppose permanently working from home for specific positions.

Knowledge workers went to the office because we didn’t have the internet and computers. You had to access paper and people to get work done. That’s it. It’s not deeper than that. If Peter Drucker saw what was happening today with the Cloud / video / etc he would think it absurd to spend a ton of money on office space and hours sitting in traffic draining energy from the system.

I think this is a wrong take which will be proven by time.

The past is not a predictor for the future; if so we would still all be using horses instead of cars.

Big reason that there will likely be a fundamental shift to more remote and hybrid working options is that just there is a mountain of inertia from the Industrial age which carried over to the Information Age.

The pandemic has initiated a great experiment which individual companies would have never tried for risk-avoidance reasons.

> At the "new" office, no one has an assigned desk, so I have to take everything I need with me to my desk and pack it up at the end of the day.

Which is the opposite direction. I don't mind being in the office, especially on a hybrid scheduled. But I hate not having my own office. I hate having to share a giant room with people.

I had a small house that happened to be in different years: at a 10 minutes walk from my office, at a 1h 15m commute from my next job, the place where I've been working when I became self employed. With hindsight (which I didn't have) I would go to the office close to home for meetings and probably go out to lunch with colleagues (it foster careers.) But nothing beats working from home with one's own customers.

> At the "new" office, no one has an assigned desk

Yeah, somehow management has conveniently forgotten that an "office" has a door. If it doesn't have a door, it's not an "office".

With open floor plans, it's hardly a surprise that nobody wants to come back to the office.

Pretty sure most workers don't have ideal working conditions at home.

For me, it's the separation of work/home and seeing people in person. That said, there are also nice benefits - view, lunch/snacks, EV charging, better lighting and ventilation.

You are one of the very few people to have no kids and a seemingly utopian home. This does not seem like an experience most would have.

It's exactly reversed for me. I have a nice private office at work and snacks and it's next to a nice path and all that.

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