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Comment by rpmisms | Hacker News Reader

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.

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 ;)

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).

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.

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