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Comment by TheRealDunkirk | Hacker News Reader

In my view, none of the "return to office" rhetoric has anything to do with actually doing the jobs. It's a problem with new hires. Without at least meeting someone face to face, and talking to them from time to time, there's no context for any of your other interactions. There's no chance to build any camaraderie or rapport. That's fine for one-off calls with IT support, but it's not for a team of people centered on doing a particular thing. I'm one of the more introverted people around, but even I see the need for at least some in-person interaction. Our group has hemorrhaged people over the past 2 years (and the software I write has greatly helped to at least partially make up for this), but it's not a situation that can last forever.

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Yeah covid hit in my last semester of my university degree, so I graduated (sans ceremony) and found a job remotely. I was able to get up to speed perhaps a bit faster than some recent graduates because I had done a year-long internship at a company with similar technologies to what we're using at this new job, but I still didn't really feel like I knew anyone until they started doing a hybrid work setup (1 week per month with your team in the office) and I met people face-to-face.

Being a new hire and you're just sitting in your room/home office with Teams open on a laptop and trying to just hop into work is difficult. You're gonna have a lot of questions, and instead of leaning over to the person sitting next to you, where they can point to your monitor and it'll take 5 seconds now becomes finding someone to message and typing out your question to them, and if they can't answer it over text then you start a call and go through the "can you see my screen" rigamarole where they can now help you but they can't point or use your keyboard. And if you're having a lot of questions, it's daunting to ask a person you just met if you can repeatedly pull them into calls. I've noticed it happening several times with new hires where they'll just be sitting around struggling with a task they're given and not asking for help because they don't want to pull people away from their work.

This is an onboarding/training issue, not a WFH issue.

In office, this would be highly disruptive to whoever was sitting next to you, unless they were tasked to being your mentor. I used to work next to some coworkers who were very intimidating and used every question I had as an opportunity to "demonstrate" their superior intelligence or experience. Luckily, I was assigned both someone to onboard me to the company and to my role. This person was trained, had been with the company a long time, and was well suited to introducing new hires to a large corporation. This could have easily been done remotely.

my timeline is exactly like yours and i only got up to speed because of my manager/mentor. if he left me to my own devices i would do very little even today. manager's need to change their approach, simple as. if they can't adapt than it really just hurts them to have under-performers underneath them.

Counterpoint: my team has onboarded two new hires, and it’s gone well. Mostly because they are not depending on work for their social life, so normal daily interactions via video calls has been sufficient for them to integrate.

>Mostly because they are not depending on work for their social life

I've heard this a lot. It seems a point of contention. I don't see how people don't depend on work for some level of social interaction. How can one want to spend 1/3 of their life not giving a fuck about the people they work with? How can someone want to sit at a computer banging out useless shit for faceless corporations and not have the conciliation of suffering through it with people you know and like?

At my last pre-covid job, once covid hit, my team of 10 or so would do voluntary virtual happy hour (VHH) and we would, for several months, be on zoom for hours and hours after work on Thursdays, drinking, playing music over Zoom, Among Us, and so on. And work was about 10x more enjoyable than whatever it is I do now, in large part due to that comradarie.

Even before that, part of the success of my job was through socialization. I don't mean climbing the ladder or kissing ass. I mean getting to know people on different teams through running into them, working in the same area, and spontaneously chatting about their work and how our teams affect each other. That kind of communication and collaboration is much more difficult to scaffold on Slack.

I know that a lot of movement into IT and within IT was through this kind of spontaneous meeting of people when walking through the halls or running into each other at the coffee shop. Work was a community of diverse roles and individuals, a microcosm of society where people could see how others work and be part of something bigger than our team. It sounds cliche, but that's how it felt.

Now, we have #team-chat and #diversity-and-inclusion and @manager.

TLDR: Social interaction at work is healthy; social interaction at work helps people enjoy work, learn about other roles and have job flexibility and helps them do their own job better; The thing you spend 1/3 of your life doing should have a human component.

There is human interaction while working from home. The difference is that is that folks aren't trying to fill the entirety of their waking hours worth of human interaction within those 8 hours of work.

I work for a tech company based out of a cornfield (only a slight exaggeration). I've seen too many co-workers who burned out during quarantine because their entire social circle was based around the office and their colleagues. After hours sports were played in the office gym. Two out of the three daily meals were eaten in the office cafeteria. Multiplayer gaming sessions were done in the office game rooms.

>> Mostly because they are not depending on work for their social life

> I've heard this a lot. It seems a point of contention. I don't see how people don't depend on work for some level of social interaction. How can one want to spend 1/3 of their life not giving a fuck about the people they work with? How can someone want to sit at a computer banging out useless shit for faceless corporations and not have the conciliation of suffering through it with people you know and like?

I'm hired to do a job or a project. I am required to get along with my colleagues, so I will try to help foster a friendly environment that doesn't make them want to commit acts of violence!

However, nor do I want "convenient work friends" that will dissipate to nothingness when I eventually leave the position. Doing that will leave me alone if that's all who I foster friendships with. Naturally, there's a small handful that will be real friends, but in my experiences that appears to be the exception.

Instead, I focus on extrawork activities that aren't bound to where I spend 40h a week. And right now, I'm doing 2-3 activities a week, slowly gaining more friends that aren't connected to work... So when I eventually leave, I still have those connections.

The more sardonic comment I have is "I'm paid to do shit, not to make friends. Don't use that as a wedge to get me to stay in shitty jobs."

> I don't see how people don't depend on work for some level of social interaction. How can one want to spend 1/3 of their life not giving a fuck about the people they work with?

This seems to be setting up a false dichotomy.

On the one hand, you have someone saying people "don't depend entirely on work for their social life".

On the other hand, you are saying, "how can you manage if you care nothing for your coworkers".

There's quite a lot of room between those.

I think there's also a big difference between expecting people to get all or most of their social interaction from work, and making sure that any remote members of the team have a good digital social environment with their coworkers—a strong presence on some kind of real-time text chat system (Discord, Slack, IRC, etc), regular not-entirely-serious email exchanges, whatever works for your groups.

The problem comes when you've got an organization that's been 100% in-person for its entire existence and neither knows nor cares how to actually support people when things go remote.

>I've heard this a lot. It seems a point of contention. I don't see how people don't depend on work for some level of social interaction. How can one want to spend 1/3 of their life not giving a fuck about the people they work with? How can someone want to sit at a computer banging out useless shit for faceless corporations and not have the conciliation of suffering through it with people you know and like?

I have enough social connections with family, my girlfriend and friends made in university, other activities, school, etc. I don't need to make friends at work tbh, I understand if others do, and that is one motivation to return to the office but please for the love of god, don't make me waste 3hs of my daily life because you need that.

YES! I am friendly at work, but outside professional references, I don't really speak to co-workers from past jobs. There are afew I keep in touch with, but I have enough on my plate and honestly many of them are not the kind of people I enjoy being around.

A good argument for WFH has always been commute -- and rightfully so, because 3 hours with your family/girlfriend is worth a lot more than an hour in traffic -- it makes sense.

It seems people need to bridge/gap that loneliness by having/creating their social structure outside of work. I think it's more painful because it requires you to deal with social anxiety, social planning, rejection, etc. but it's much more rewarding.

> How can one want to spend 1/3 of their life not giving a fuck about the people they work with? How can someone want to sit at a computer banging out useless shit for faceless corporations and not have the conciliation of suffering through it with people you know and like?

It's pretty easy, I just can't connect with anyone at work. This was the case for me when I was in-office pre pandemic too. At 5pm the people I work with cease to exist and at 9am the following day they're back again.

I can't understand how people make friends with their colleagues, the environment in the workplace could not be worse for getting close to people imo. I cannot relate at all because everyone's essentially masking all day long, who wants to make friends with some else's work-sona?

Different people require different levels of social interaction. I'm one of those people who require less than the average. Once I had the opportunity to work from home I spent quite a bit more time socializing outside of work than before - not because I had insufficient socialization now, but because I had more energy to put into cultivating those freindships I cared about. Working from an office I was constantly burnt out entertaining my co-workers who required more socialization than I did, and couldn't make time for the friends of my choice.

I see 'mandatory back to the office' talk as a demand by extraverts that their introverted co-workers subsidize their need for social interaction, and I feel resentment at the imposition on my limited social energy. To support a position touting the benefits of workplace socialization I'd need to see it presented with an attitude of 'the option of meeting your co-workers face to face is a costly perk I hope many employers will continue to offer', not an entitlement to my friendship.

My experience has been that if your org doesn't intentionally do something to build rapport and relationships among remote staff, it's probably not going to happen, and consequently interaction will feel mostly transactional and clinical.

As a previous new hire who got into a new job during full blown Covid, I had no problem whatsoever building a good relationship with my colleagues. Regular routines were setup, the team communicated frequently. Frequent calls. Eventually mMemes started to be shared, and we built a good work/personal friendship exclusively online.

I didn't miss face-to-face in the slightest, nor did i feel like i didn't belong, or that I was lacking support. We have plenty of online trainings as well.

Face to face being needed for new hires is another myth that needs to go.

I was able to develop a great working rapport with a person who I'd never met personally and only ever discussed things via email. This model is also common in open source projects and seems to work fine. In person camaraderie and rapport do not appear to be essential.

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