What Bosses Lost in the Fight Against Empty Offices: Leverage | Hacker News Reader

What Bosses Lost in the Fight Against Empty Offices: Leverage

nytimes.com

29 pointsBadCookie45 comments

I guess I am the anomaly. I like being the office! Working at home is great too. But the office offers a mental refresh that I can’t replicate elsewhere - working with/talking to people about my day-to-day with all of the nuance that comes with in-person communication. I know I can go for walks, or garden, or use my own bathroom, but there is something zen about taking the train to work (suburb to NYC) to feel the energy of the city and the office, even if it isn’t jam packed with people.

I think the train is the key here. I love the office but car based commuting is extremely un fun.

I've lived in Tokyo. Train based commuting is extremely un fun too.

I'm glad we both have a choice.

Or just any nice commute. My current commute is either a 20min lazy cycle or 40min run through a park. Nice showers at either end. Very few cars, lots of trees, flat paths. Often the best part of my day.

I agree - having to drive somewhere really destroys the appeal for me too. Used to do it, glad I don't anymore.

Awesome! The you should probably support the ability for people to choose on their own.

Well sure, nowhere did I say I didn't support that.

Office work is dead, if it is not actually needed.

How do you cope when you are onboarding people?

And how do you keep a semblance of work culture if you’ve never actually met half your team?

This is a real struggle, I feel old when I see myself and just a few other mates coming back to work to have a nice coffee discussion, bouncing around ideas and printing a meme for people to see in the toilets and raise a chuckle. We’ve lost track of 80% of the rest, they only come say hello every 3 or 4 months. There are people in our dev department (45 heads) that I won’t ever see because we don’t share the same domain.

How do you concile this with 90% of people working remote? Am I that old? (I’m 36)

I'm listening to people lie to me all day about productivity.

Remote happy hour, garbage. Remote school, garbage. But somehow remote work is just dandy.

Wait for the next recession. All this nonsense will evaporate.

Why can open source projects like the Linux Kernel function through remote work but the rest of us can't?

Because the linux kernel is not a company.

It's mainly built with people employed in bigger companies, where they have fruitful exchanges with their company peers. The contributions they push in the kernel is part of a larger effort in their respective companies. And the mailing list is the way they communicate around the kernel. They still have physical colleagues in their day jobs.

You don't need be around your peers physically in order to create fancy shit.

I've been playing games / hacking with people that I've never ever seen for over 14 years

and trust me, you can definitely be creative in such a environment

Or maybe it just doesn't work for adults?

So is it your opinion that no company can successfully compete in the market with WFH?

> somehow remote work is just dandy.

because "somehow" there are different incentives and reason to do each. Remote work has been a thing for a long time. Wait for the next spike in gas prices, all of the chair-warming will evaporate.

Just because you don't like remote work (or if remote work doesn't work for you), doesn't mean that everyone who favors remote work is lying and that remote work is nonsense.

> Wait for the next recession. All this nonsense will evaporate.

During a recession companies will have to cut costs wherever they can. So they might start with high cost office space. So yeah, office nonsense will evaporate. In the same way banks cut costs with less branches, more online banking. Or how cars are now being sold without dealerships.

When cost reduction comes along, human nature will cause people to circle the wagons and protect their own. Depending on the office culture, being remote might result in being left out of certain crucial social groups.

You can be social remotely, even in groups, just start a chat or a Zoom. Google used to have video places which were always open and connected and anyone that joined them could interact with anyone else there. That could be a meeting, but also a coffee room place, a hallway place, a smoke outside place, etc. If "crucial social groups" are what determines whether your job is at risk and not your actual work, then you can spend lots of time on Zoom not doing work and interacting with your crucial social groups.

I spent many years telecommuting and got creative at it. I helped people troubleshoot electronics remotely, had them point their camera at circuit boards, shared screens to examine code, logged into a common remote server so we could both edit, compile, and debug the same code, and a lot more. The one thing I found difficult to do remotely was to reset hardware, I would often ask someone to reboot a computer or flip a physical switch. But that can be automated also, with a dedicated device or maybe it would be a good use case for a simple robot. You could even hire a lower wage worker to go around the office flipping switches when asked to. With good technology, interaction between people can be the same as being there in person (unless you want to create a baby). The only reason to be somewhere in person is if something physical needs to be done, or you just want the personal experience (traveling to a foreign country). This vague "value of being in the same room as the person I'm talking to" benefit CEO's talk about seems to be entirely bogus, except for specific situations (e.g., a musician in a band who needs to be able to see the other players to stay in sync.) What exactly is it the managers are learning from our body language? Next time someone talks about this benefit try asking them to quantify it in a spreadsheet or even define it in sociological or psychiatric terms. If they are forcing people to come back to work ask to see the productivity numbers, did they go down when people physically came back to the office? I think it's basically a distrust of other people ("you'll slack off if you are not here physically") and if they don't trust you, don't trust them; they are likely projecting their own inclinations.

My guess is that managers don't like remote interaction because _it_can_be_and_is_recorded_. Once everything is documented then sleazy decisions are also documented and can be trotted out when trouble ensues. Being held responsible is what managers fear, they want their dictums to go undocumented so they have deniability and so they don't look as foolish when they make mistakes. They don't want to be held to the same standard they hold their employees.

"Cost reduction" basically means the managers screwed up and haven't protected their people in case of unforeseen circumstances and have to shrink their personal empire.

I’m not making a judgement regarding the effectiveness of remote work. But, there are intangible changes to the social dynamics that develop. People overhear and share jokes, develop office friendships, etc. which becomes harder to do when everything is “on the record”, or physical distance gets in the way. From a political perspective, I have seen firsthand how being local can keep you in fresh in the mind when new projects are being discussed and assigned. In years past, it was always considered better for one’s career to be “closer to the mother ship” than a satellite office. I suspect that this was/is at least partially human nature, rather than a learned anachronism.

I've been working remotely for nearly a decade. We built a successful startup from the ground up, 100% remote from day one.

The communication and workflows are different, but it is not garbage.

Why do you think I'm lying to you?

What’s your evidence that people are lying? Plenty of actual studies show productivity improving with WFH.

So you like to be in the office. Many don't. Is the work getting done? That's what matters. What does office culture mean in practice?

It gest done but it takes so much time and effort.

I mean that I'd wager about 90% of my great ideas were not found during technical meetings in remote, but rather by bouncing ideas with my collegues in our work space during informal pauses. We don't have that anymore: I have meetings at a certain hour, to discuss a specific subject, and in between I am alone in front of my screen at home. I eat alone and watch $shitty_youtube to pass time at noon, and I get back to work. There's no incentive to discuss things informally, and whatever things we tried to motivate people quickly died: we had a "coffee google meet" for people coming online before 9, but this meet is now empty all the time; we have IRL meetings but people are now wary of taking the car to come (25km) because they are used to their comfort and only the local minority bothers to come.

The company culture is going down the drain, people don't know each other anymore and the retention is starting to wither: why stay in a company where I don't have anything other that money to gain? Seeing each other twice a year in seminars isn't going to spur much camaraderie, if the next day it's "wake up, walk 3m, sit at desk, eat at 12, back at desk, shower, sleep".

Also, the communication was way more fluid when all my team was at work in the same room: people didn't expect me to answer if I wasn't at my desk; now I get notifications even at 8PM because people started to work strange hours at their home and expect everybody else to answer when they need them to. Whereas in our room, 5 people were constantly bouncing ideas, problems, and possible solutions. We would draft things on the walls (they are writable) and reach conclusion fast. If I needed an answer from another team they were a room away, and I could quickly pass the head and get a chat. At 6Pm I could go home, have a wind down on the road, and switch contexts to have a meaningful exchange with my kids an wife.

Now I have to summon everybody in a google meet for 30 min, preferably with 1 day forewarning. Half of the invitees don't even bother to put their cam, and if I forgot to invite somebody, there's 80% chance that he's unreachable, doing whatever, and I have to send an email to get an answer later during the day.

Maybe I'm one of people that like the human aspect of work? Am I a minority?

> why stay in a company where I don't have anything other that money to gain?

Unless you're the founder or equally invested, don't be fooled - companies do not care about you.

Ridiculous. Its not zero sum. I can get money, and coworkers, and engagement, and growth, and mentoring.

If I'm going to be by myself all day. Why work here when I can actually interact with humans and grow.

You assert the company doesn't care about me. WFH coworkers don't care about me either. They make work worse, because they only care about their immediate desires.

> why stay in a company where I don't have anything other that money to gain?

Because for some of us that's all we want from the company!

> The company culture is going down the drain, people don't know each other anymore and the retention is starting to wither: why stay in a company where I don't have anything other that money to gain? Seeing each other twice a year in seminars isn't going to spur much camaraderie, if the next day it's "wake up, walk 3m, sit at desk, eat at 12, back at desk, shower, sleep".

Sounds like the comp is getting too low for the market.

WFH does have cons and you've expressed them well here.

While I still think the pros outweigh the cons, WFH does make it more difficult to connect with colleagues and develop that team and company spirit.

Personally, I think a hybrid approach is best.

You can set up informal fun time meetings on VC. We did that at my last company. 1/2 hour fun time, rotate through people and each of them tells something about themselves, shows a few pics, to encourage friendly chatting. It worked well. Start with someone friendly and they can encourage everyone else.

> How do you cope when you are onboarding people?

Coming from an org which is de facto remote and also growing rapidly, one thing that helps is comprehensive, accurate written documentation. It's available immediately as needed and from any location, good for remote, but also it prevents critical information from staying implicit/siloed and cuts down on interruptions/time burden on key technical people. This is useful beyond remote work re: bus factor, productivity impact of being interrupted to answer the same common question to a different person, etc.

Typically technical onboarding involves working through the relevant docs until hitting questions/gaps, then meeting with the person who knows the things and editing the doc as part of that meeting

Pros of working from home:

- My own bathroom

- My own kitchen

- No commute

- Incredible flexibility

Pros from working at an office:

- Someone can print a meme and post it in the bathroom for me to look at

More pros for working in an office:

forced to engage in "funtivities"

mandatory lunches with people who find mayonnaise too spicy.

spend your money and time commuting

we've got a mandatory meeting at 6pm, so you're gonna need to find your way back to the office after you're done.

Yep. And these sorts of activities were devised by people who build their social lives around work. The office is full of productivity killers.

I hate offices (open-plan offices being particularly hellish) but there are some advantages:

- possibly fewer home-based distractions and interruptions

- not living at work

From management's perspective, working at home has major disadvantages:

- increased privacy for employees

- increased autonomy for employees

- increased flexibility for employees

- neutralizes many office-based company rules and restrictions

- makes employee surveillance more difficult

- undermines supervisor role of monitoring and control

- public shaming, punishment and abuse tactics are less effective

- less visibility for supervisors

- less empowering/status-enhancing for supervisors

- possibly smaller and less important role of company in employees' lives

etc.

Also you can work from a restaurant and be surrounded by food and young women instead of the office where you're surrounded by cubes and grumpy old people.

I've been WFH from a new job for a year now. Before that I was WFH since 3/2020 at a job I had been at, in-person, for 4 years.

I have met most of the dev team that I lead. One person is out of state so I've never seen him, the rest I've met once. I haven't seen anything that I could consider a drawback to not being in person with them, or having seen them for more than the few minutes that we've actually met.

FWIW, I've been in this business for about 30 years. I do embedded systems, so occasionally I do have to go into the office to get updated hardware/fixes for broken stuff/etc. But on average I'm not in the office more than 1-2 times a month, rarely for more than 4 hours at a time. Granted this may change if I move to a project that has physically large systems that I can't take home, but for the last few years it's worked just fine for me.

I mean, this morning I took two meetings while sitting in the Service waiting room at a car dealership. The convenience can't be beat.

If “work culture” is forcing me to waste years of my life and untold money commuting and essentially living in a boring office so people can hang memes in the bathroom, I can do without it.

The vast majority of work "culture" is horrible. Asshole tolerance is higher when you can just mute them. Anxiety is lower because you don't have to deal with all the culture crap that interrupts flow.

Why do people think this is so hard? I was onboarded remote. They send you a laptop and you do scrum and pair programming over your chat app.

I’m going to have a stab at actually answering the questions, rather than just taking the opposing point of view.

There is another way: organising regular off-sites for the employees to meet up, get to know each other, build relationships, share culture and attend workshops so that they can learn the common tools and techniques that are valid across an org.

I would argue this is a better way to onboard new staff too, if you can hire them to coincide with these off-sites.

Even if the off-site is 2/3 week-long all-expenses-paid trips pa, this will probably work out cheaper than hiring office space for a year

How do you cope when you are onboarding people? Hire decent people

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