Hacker News Reader

Comment by munchausen42 | Hacker News Reader

If you wonder why an argument might be controversial, it can helpful to imagine how it would sound like in mirror world:

Assume for a moment that working remotly and a flexible workday would have been always the default. And now some companies decide: Hey let's contractually enforce a 9 hour continuous workday where all our workers will be locked in a big ugly building that we build just for that purpose (Btw. at least one of the 9 hours will be unpaid because this is where people will have lunch. Also we won't reimburse anyone for their traveling expenses or their time spent during the commute).

Now read again the arguments you wrote to support this new idea.

View on HN

Disclaimer: I support fully remote work and will likely never be returning to office in my lifetime if I can help it.

Here I play devil's advocate. Even though it is a hypothetical world you've constructed, you still framed it from the perspective of this world.

I can do the same thing you did with a different bias.

Imagine a world where everyone is socially isolated, forced to work 8 hours a day from their living space where they're supposed to be able to retreat from work. They're not allowed to have social in-person contact with any of their peers, but they must login to show activity on their computer every 15 minutes or else be fired.

Then along comes the "office". An amazing centralized place where you can take frequent breaks to have social interaction with your peers. You no longer have to wait for everyone to join the Zoom call and turn on their cameras and ask "Can you see my screen?" — you all can just look at the same whiteboard in the same room! Need to get in touch with Bill? Just stroll over to his desk. No need to ping him and wait for a response. We'll even feed you for free, and you can play ping-pong on your breaks! You won't have to bother furnishing your home office with a standing desk and complicated technology setups. We handle all of that for you, and even have in-house IT staff to fix any issues that pop up.

It all doesn't sound so bad when you frame it differently (which is what the middle managers try to do). Again, I don't really believe these arguments, I'm just pointing out that the way you framed yours can easily be done by someone with a competing view.

> It all doesn't sound so bad when you frame it differently

I disagree, it still sounds bad.

It sounds like elementary school for adults.

> It sounds like elementary school for adults.

I think that sounds pretty amazing.

Sign me up, so long as there's nap time and recess.

My last couple of employers did, in fact, provide nap rooms for employees to use and they saw fairly frequent use.

do we get snacks and naps? I'm in.

To people that loved their school days the current office culture is probably already great. To people that did not, the office is just as bad. Except it is worse, because it feels like something you inflict on yourself.

So... a WeWork then?

I'm in a WeWork building currently, and I do kinda like it, maybe it's the novelty, but seeing so many other little start-ups and various micro-businesses doing their thing, often in shared spaces, is curiously inspiring and various other perks do make coming into the office attractive enough that I do it more than I technically need to or are even expected to (it helps that it's only a very easy 15-min bike ride away!). Plus for the team I work with, I generally do find it easier to get (and provide) help when in the same physical space, and it's rarely distracting.

Now throw in the fact that the workers may also have family (spouse + a little kid) living with them and present inside the house during the working hours. Suddenly, the idea to have a physically distinct place dedicated (almost) exclusively to work sounds very attractive and very sensible.

Of course, one could have a dedicated "study"/"office" room with a lock and sound proofing but that costs.

Now throw in minimum 0.5h + 0.5h commute or more realistically at least 1.5h total commuting time and suddenly you leave for work before your kids wake up and arrive back home 2-3h before they go to sleep.

Who do you want to spend more time during the day, your coworker Bill the senior Java guy or your child Charlie, who has just learned to walk but you were not there to see their first steps? I mean, Bill's a great guy, but I didn't marry the company.

> Now throw in minimum 0.5h + 0.5h commute

Minimum half hour commute? Definitely not a minimum. I've had a <15min commute practically my entire career. My current commute is 15 minutes by bicycle, 5 minutes by car, and my kid's daycare is on the way.

Minimum commute is more like 5 minutes. Sure, maybe average commute is a good bit higher, but then say average not minimum.

Thats lucky for you but you must be aware of how uncharacteristic that is. When you get a new job that commute disappears unless the new job is close to the old job or you up and move.

It might be a bit uncharacteristic, but it still doesn't change the fact saying commutes have to be a minimum of 30 minutes isn't true. Its not entirely out of the ordinary to have a <30min commute. Most people in my office have a <15min commute, with a few having a similar commute as mine (~5min by car). My wife's commute is 12-15min. Most of my friends have a 15-20min commute.

Many people have commutes much less than 30 minutes. Maybe 30 minutes is an average, I'd probably agree average commutes are close to 45 minutes, but that's an average not a minimum. Those words have two very different meanings.

This probably depends on your local traffic environment in your city. Depending on the time of day and exact routing, 7 miles in southern california can take you 45 minutes or more. If you take the bus like I do you are in for closer to an hour.

Sure, commutes in Southern California seem to be a nightmare. But most office workers don't live in Southern California, so using that as a global minimum of commute times is probably extremely biasing it.

> Now throw in minimum 0.5h + 0.5h commute or more realistically at least 1.5h total commuting time

This is what I'm responding to here. ihateolives is suggesting all commutes are a minimum of 0.5h each way, with 1.5h being a realistic figure. They make no mention about Southern California, they're talking about WFO in general. Would you agree that 1.5h commutes in general are realistic, or do you think that's pretty big hyperbole?

To me, 1.5h commutes are insane and are a massive outlier, and I live in one of the most sprawled out metro areas in the US.

You are wrong. Look up what average commute time is in US. 40+ minute commutes are uncharacteristic, except for a small fraction of Americans who live in a handful of metros.

> Look up what average commute time is in US. 40+ minute commutes are uncharacteristic

Emphasis mine. Average is not minimum. Those are two entirely different concepts.

I'm not wrong about my commute time, it's legitimately roughly 5 minutes. Since nobody is suggesting a lower commute time for WFO, I'd say that's probably a minimum. I totally agree the average is closer to 40ish minutes, but minimum is not average.

The commute is counted from the moment you exit your home door. It’s 5 minutes only if you work across the street.

My home door is the garage door, so I'm already in my car "door to door". The distance is <3mi. Assuming an average speed of 32mph (almost 1/3 of that <3mi is at 55mph, most is 40mph, I get that average speed often according to my car's computer) that's 0.5333 miles/minute. So that's then 5.625 minutes.

Sorry, I guess I was wrong, its 5 minutes and 38 seconds.

Next time use your watch and see how much time passes between going out of your door and entering your office. And your door is not the garage door, but the one you use to enter the garage.

I've looked at the clock before, it's been about 5 minutes. That's how I arrived at that value originally, as before needing to drop off my child at daycare I budgeted about 5 minutes to get to the office and was usually just about right. As mentioned, it's less than 3 miles on streets with 40+mph speeds. Sure, sometimes I get stopped on the by one of the two stop lights and it adds another minute and a half to my journey.

And ok, instead of my garage door it's my living room door 15 feet from my car door. Why not make it my bedroom door or shower door while we're at it.

Said space can also be rented in a dedicated co-working space (close to home or close to other place of interest) providing both the benefits of a space dedicated to work and the benefits of no commute, rent flexibility (you can choose a more preferable housing opportunity since proximity to work is not a factor), social mobility (you can choose to live in a different city) and personal security (a lot harder for physical harassment in a power imbalance context to happen when you are remote, a lot more likely for other forms of harassment to be recorded).

The fundamental drive of WFH is the opposition towards lords attempting to dictate how people live their lives. If a subset of workers want to work from the company office, good for them. If a subset prefer to work from co-working spaces, good for them. If some free spirits prefer to work from a tent in the mountains with a satellite connection and solar panels, good for them. If some prefer to switch environments, good for them.

This is the same as installing (side loading) apps on iOS. One group desires freedom (to install whatever from wherever) and does not care what others do (use only the official store). The other group (those who like the walled garden) prefers that all others do as they do (only use the official store and nothing else ever, preferably making it impossible or illegal).

I will actually express this in even harsher terms.

Mandatory WFO is a communist notion, it is fundamentally undemocratic and fundamentally un-American. It values uniformity the same way communism does. WFH values freedom and autonomy. So going forward, I will call all those who want to enforce WFO when it is not necessary: Commie-Bastards.

Do you get breaks to play pingpong and catered food at your offices? I've never worked anywhere that actually paid for food, honestly, and while a few places have had pingpong tables it's hard to justify leaving my desk to go use them when there's tasks I could be getting done.

A minor point, but I've always wondered if you're ever actually allowed to use the nice benefits like that, or if they're just something startups show off to investors to try and look more friendly to their workers.

> Do you get breaks to play pingpong and catered food at your offices?

Oh yeah, it was great ( billiards,pinball,foosball,restaurant catered lunches,beer fridays ). It never lasts, usually a company gets purchased and all those niceties are the first to go. This has happened to me three times.

It made for a fun workplace, those were definitely my favorite jobs.

Not gonna lie, the lack of free food in the companies I've worked for has left a chip on my shoulder, and this is after working at a place which pays slightly better than Amazon with the express purpose of poaching Amazon engineers.

I know it comes out to less than 10K per year, but I don't care I don't feel like an elite engineer until I get the damn free food!

In my opinion, it's the employers that are pushing us to view these as two opposing extremes. I suspect this is because for so long (as long as I can remember) they've had all of the power and control.

Clearly something more personal is the best solution, there's likely also an age component here as well. I know that with a child it's much more convenient to be at home most of the time.

Now that employers have given up some control, I bet it seems risky to a lot of people to start talking about going back to the office even one day a week. In my own experience, that small concession could easily lead to my employer pushing harder and before I know it, I'm looking at commuting for 90 minutes each day and sitting at a desk Monday through Friday: back where I started.

If employers want to retain talent and get some people to spend more time in the office, I think they should make some concessions to make that attractive. Putting some dollars in to offset the commute (and not just gas, maybe just pay people as if they were at work). Maybe throw away the old mid-height cube system and put something in that's taller and more like an individual office, etc. I'm sure other people have ideas out there, but just asking us to "go back" isn't reasonable.

> I suspect this is because for so long (as long as I can remember) they've had all of the power and control.

We are heading into a recession (if not there already). As the strong labour market deteriorates, this power imbalance will shift back to managers.

I'm not sure the specific labor markets we are talking about will deteriorate substantially.

There’s already layoffs and downsizing announced weekly. Even pausing growth will have an effect.

There are more jobs in tech than people to fill them, places are always hiring even if FAANG is laying off. One day that dynamic will change, it hasn't yet.

My thoughts exactly. Even if software devs still maintain a better than average negotiating position, companies continue to have the upper hand and it's just going to get worse for a while.

I think inside of five years 9 out of 10 people who work from home today will be back in the office. Against their will or not. The company just doesn't need most of us more than we need it, and that won't change. I think a lot of people in the IT field right now just haven't been around long enough, so they think the current employment environment will continue indefinitely. The last 15-20 years have been pretty good, but they are almost certainly the exception.

> Imagine a world where everyone is socially isolated, forced to work 8 hours a day from their living space

Advocates of WFH rarely care if people want to work in an office if they want to, as long as they don't have to.

So that'd be "Imagine a world where everyone is socially isolated, able to work 8 hours a day from their living space or an office if they'd prefer"

Imagine a world where people work from home but aren’t socially isolated because they spend time with their families, friends, and local communities rather than whoever they happen to be working with at the time.

If the office was so amazing you wouldn't need to force people to come in.

The only relevant difference is in which part you use the word "force" in the description of the hypothetical world.

In the real world, however, no one is usally forced to WFH. But we were forced to WFO.

> Need to get in touch with Bill? Just stroll over to his desk.

Sorry to be flippant, but to me this is one of the worst parts of office life summed up in one statement. The bar for other people to carelessly interrupt you can be unbelievably low sometimes.

It's not surprising that people who would do this happen to be the people who want to return to the office.

Agreed.

I am a fairly high level engineer. People would come over to my desk all the time to either discuss work or shoot the shit.

However I still have my own work to do. Most of the questions they came to me for are a short slack message. I’d often literally have a queue at my desk of people. I’d also be constantly running between meetings.

Having me work from home is better for everyone who deals with me.

I’m more reachable all the time. That queue of people no longer waste their time waiting on my time.

I’m insanely more productive because I am great at multi tasking when I’m not having to simultaneously hold a discussion in person.

It’s not hyperbole on my part to say that having me shift to working from home has been a force multiplier for everyone who depends on me for something.

> People would come over to my desk all the time to either discuss work or shoot the shit.

> I'm more reachable all the time

Does not compute.

You complain of people interrupting you, but you argue that WFH enabled you to be interrupted more, all the time.

It does make some sense to me! It's a lot easier to manage several slack messages simultaneously than several in person conversations (although the image of an engineer helping a bunch of juniors like Magnus Carlson playing a bunch of chess tables in a line is funny!)

I also like to move conversations to group channels so that even more people benefit from the conversation. It really is a force multiplier.

If remote work was all 8 hours a day with 15 minute checks, you'd be right. But that happens in offices too, so it isn't the key difference.

> Need to get in touch with Bill? Just stroll over to his desk

Yeah, this is part of the problem most WFH folks have with most WFO folks. We fucking hate this.

>they must login to show activity on their computer every 15 minutes or else be fired.

This is the stupidest thing, I think - I don't care if you're at your computer all the time I am at my computer, I care if you get shit done

it gets a bit tricky when you ask urgent question to colleague and he is not responding to you for 30 minutes.

What question is so urgent? What’s the consequence of waiting 30 minutes, or until tomorrow, for an answer?

> it gets a bit tricky when you ask urgent question to colleague and he is not responding to you for 30 minutes.

This type of interruption culture is very harmful both directly to productivity (it takes a long time to get back to focus from being interrupted) and also to mental health from the pressure of being constantly interruped and expected to jump at every slack message.

There should be no question that is so urgent that it can't be answered tomorrow. Do a full day of work and check & answer your messages once a day, morning or evening.

The exception is people on call who of course do need to respond to things within minutes but that's why being on call is so exceptionally stressful. Rotate that so nobody is subject to such stress very often.

You make some good points, but...

> They're not allowed to have social in-person contact with any of their peers

I don't think any companies with remote work policies enforce a 'no in-person contact' policy.

> they must login to show activity on their computer every 15 minutes or else be fired

I don't think most companies have this policy.

> An amazing centralized place where you can take frequent breaks to have social interaction with your peers.

Those companies with strict policies on activity monitoring for home workers are unlikely to allow 'frequent' breaks. The few short breaks you have are mostly spent in the toilet, or queuing to buy coffee.

> Need to get in touch with Bill? Just stroll over to his desk.

Have we asked Bill how he feels about this :D

> We'll even feed you for free, and you can play ping-pong on your breaks, [and we'll give you a] standing desk!

Relatively few companies do this.

Your framing is heavily subjective and seems to contrast the best, employee-friendly companies' in-person benefits with the worst micromanaging companies' remote work drawbacks.

OP's framing is less subjective. Although the number of hours, the paid vs. unpaid lunch break, and the ugliness of the building do vary, the principles are broadly more objective.

I found that the sweet spot is somewhere in between these two extremes.

After a week of working from home, sometimes I found that I hadn’t left the house for anything other than groceries.

In the mornings, I get up and get the kids ready. Then work. Then the kids come home. Family time, dinner and so on. Time to sleep. Rinse, repeat.

So yeah, I find going to the office from time to time refreshing. It helps that my team agreed that office days are for socializing and focused work is not expected.

I'm genuinely wondering if this is satire. No offense. I was just under the impression that the ping pong table has been the subject of enough startup-culture critique in popular opinion to put the idea that employees will actually see it as a meaningful perk to rest. Also interesting is the assertion that having to ask "can you see my screen" is enough of a problem for someone that it rivals waking up an hour earlier for a grueling commute...

That’s not at all helpful and in fact it’s confusing.

Going to a place of work is the status quo with one of the exceptions being bubbles in IT. Some offices are nice, some not. Some are within walking distance, others are not.

You are not locked in to your office unless you work in a literal sweatshop. The lunch hour is a legal right in Europe.

It’s your task to check that you have a reasonable commute before accepting a contract. Why should a company care that you picked a job on the other end of the city?

Jesus, I can’t believe how spoiled and entitled so many people are. But that will resolve itself once remote developers start getting replaced with cheaper workers which can develop apps or websites just as well.

>Jesus, I can’t believe how spoiled and entitled so many people are

The entitlement is called workers rights. People fought quite hard to get the ones we have right now. E.g. my grandfather was still working 6 days and 48h a week (same country as OP). Back then people also called the workers "entitled" who dared to ask for more than one free day per week.

As I see it, this movement will only be succesfully completed once people can rent your skills without also owning your body during that time.

I love this style of reasoning. Status quo bias is a severely strong psychological effect on some people in some cases. This is a nice way to "bust the cache" ;)

There's a really cool philosophy paper "The reversal test: Eliminating status quo bias in applied ethics" - using a reversal like the one you describe (imagine a world where the opposite was true). But then the authors also do a double-reversal (imagine the world is identical to ours, but there's a policy about to be implemented which will make it into "mirror world" and we have the option to do nothing and let it happen, or act and prevent the reversal). Great thinking tool!

https://philpapers.org/rec/BOSTRT

full paper PDF: https://nickbostrom.com/ethics/statusquo.pdf

Reply on news.ycombinator.com