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Comment by mint2 | Hacker News Reader

The office vs wfh decision is one of no winners and no good compromise.

Previously office was the default and it was a bad fit for many but had some good points. Now wfh is the default and while I think it’s overall an improvement, it’s still a bad fit for many although perhaps not as many as office default. But it is still early days so nothing can be said conclusively, long term may be more nuanced.

But what seems impossible is a set up that actually works for both the office types and the wfh types. Hybrid has not been worked out. Going into a deserted office for zoom is not a solution.

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IMVHO the issue come about culture: WFH does not means "take this craptop and crapphone, you are ready to work" witch is a fairly common approach for most not-hyper-important-workers and substantially not different by "get this good set of tools and there you go" for some more valuable ones, nor does not means async works, by targets, now holidays or illness pause etc

The point is that WFH should, must means:

- on the worker side :: I give a locked room, large enough, silent enough, to the company I work for, for the duration of the contract, with a negotiated monthly rent, they give me furniture etc OR I rent mime to them. The rest is the same of any other job;

- on the company side :: we are hired someone from home, we have to check he/she give us a good enough, safe enough, served enough home office, eventually inspecting it, negotiate rent and work terms in it. The rest is the same of any other job.

This is hard to see in Europe at least. On both sides.

Secondly there is habit and tools: to work effectively we definitely not need metaverse virtual conference rooms, but we need to been able to talk out loud well, IF needed and only if with one or two cam (face + deck/LIM) retaining the ability to move a bit around like we do in conference rooms. Yes there is the hyper-expensive, buggy, unsafe Night Owl and something else equally crappy, expensive and unsafe, but not much really usable. Most company decide to use third party services for convenience because Zoom/Meet/Teams are far simpler than offer a homegrown BBB instance, a SIP service with deskphones, a VPN just to add a layer of isolation, ... that's another issue must be resolved: WFH must be equal to work in office so we must NOT need anything from third party if we do not need it in the office. Not to mention crappy WebUIs for various purposes from Jira to Alfresco. The entire software stack we use is NOT a real connected desktop software stack so we can't really work with it properly and WFH means relaying so much to desktops that such issue must go away.

It will probably take a decade of polemics, issues and schizophrenic moves before a stable WFH model...

have wfh, get a smaller office and have people fly in once a while to collaborate.

Come in if you want, we'll offer relocation assistance. Simple.

Does that solve “Going into a deserted office for zoom”? At best it makes it going into a maybe not deserted office for zoom, still zoom with team mates…

Does that solve other issues like wfh team mates feeling possibly justifiably left out if there is an actual tight knit office?

I'm fine going into a deserted office for zoom, as long as I'm not in some kafkaesque manner forced to do it (while all the people I'm meeting with aren't.)

> wfh team mates feeling possibly justifiably left out of there is an actual tight knit office?

That's the tradeoff they have to make, just like putting on pants and having to commute is the tradeoff I have to make if I want to come in to the office.

Come in if you want to come in, don't if you don't. If you have any particular asks for how your org should run to better accommodate either of these, it's fine to have a concrete discussion about it. What's less fine is bellyaching without action items.

So stay home if you want. I'll stay home if I want, and the social cost of that is on me.

For many teams there is benefit of in person interactions beyond the social cost, but those benefits are limited if part of the team is still remote. A white-boarding and planning meeting with one or two key players on zoom will slow down the process. Maybe some tool or process will come along that fixes that gap, but for now it still exists. The key players may be more productive individually at home, but when within a team, nothing yet beats in person collaboration.

I do think the right long term solution will be mandatory days in office for the whole team, but only for 1-3 days a week, and those days would be the same for everyone.

You're still cutting off truly remote folks at that point. I want to live in the middle of nowhere, there's no benefit (for me) to remote if I can't. Regular IRL team meetings are fine, that's a wise thing to do anyway.

WFH solves a number of different, somewhat unrelated problems, and not everyone suffers from each of the problems. It solves:

1. A crushing commute. If you're a mega-commuter like I was, WFH gives you back 4+ hours of your life daily. Maybe you actually like your office and in-person conversations, but not as much as you like to avoid the soul-sucking commute. For people like this, maybe the occasional jaunt into the office is bearable, as long as you dont have to always do it.

2. Needing to live in a high COL area. For others, WFH means you can save tons of money by moving to another town. For them, no amount of coming into the office is acceptable (except maybe 1x or 2x a year) because they are no longer in commuting distance.

3. Terrible, unproductive offices / social anxiety. For others, maybe they are already OK with their cost of living and commute, but they hate their loud, crazy office. Again, maybe infrequent trips to the office are acceptable, but then you need to accept severely reduced productivity during those days.

Probably others I don't think of. So, it's a solution to multiple problems. One size does not fit all.

I've noticed that WFO-proponents (especially entrepreneurs and senior execs) tend to downplay 1 (just move, lol), not care about 2 (isn't everyone rich?), and deny 3 (our loud open office is actually great for me).

I work with programming hardware devices which need interaction for work. I have never felt during this time i need people to babysit me or collaborate in person.

Most of the time, the work is split between our worldwide teams anyway, where one team sits in switzerland, other in germany, and then some in usa and canada. Even the support for our hardware is distributed in different countries and 99% of the cases totally works remote.

I think keeping it optional is the best way to leverage happiness/collaboration. Whwnever i need to collaborate with a team member we individually agree to meet up at office.

we had been doing home office way before pandemic, now all of a sudden businesses feel the need to have people a minimum number of days in office per week. I have actually seen hostile behavior from some employees to just come to office and chill all day during the ma datort office day since its a collaboration day anyway ;)

That doesn’t work. It doesn’t work like that. That wasn’t my point.

My point is it’s like Goldilocks and the three bears minus the middle bear. The soup is either too hot or too cold. It used to be one extreme, now it’s the other. There is no just right.

10 years ago. I spent 3 years going into an empty office to work with remote people. Then spent 4 years WFH for a remote company. Realized I had started thinking of co-workers as imaginary people that didn't really exist. They felt more like hallucinations.

Okay, screw this I need to go into an office. Did that for a year, loved it. Pandemic hit...

A good company would augment remote culture with in-person events.

Can one family not raise both healthy introvert and extrovert children? Well, if a parent is unwilling, then no …

But if they are willing?

The problem is choice. Once another choice is given, there is (almost) no way to go back.

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