Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?

356 pointsdevoutsalsa900 comments

Many of us were remote, and now many of us are being asked to come back? Knowing office workers all work with remote people in other offices, and there’s not much in-office dynamic like maybe there was 20 years ago, what are your primary motivations dragging us back into the office? Nearly every meeting I’ve had in an office since 2014 has been a video conference with remote people.

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I'm in my 20s. I live alone in a city where I don't know anyone. Remote work destroyed my mental health.

All I wanted was to be able to go into an office and talk to a real life person. I would go weeks at a time not talking to a single person in real life.

I don't think people understand the plight of the young office worker until they've experienced the torture of solitary confinement. Day in, day out. All alone. I don't have a girlfriend, friends, or a life in this city.

I tried to join clubs and a maker space, but no time - I was working all day. The maker space closed early. I'm creative, I like working. I just wanted to go to an office. That's all I wanted. I wanted a routine. I wanted to commute and people watch. I wanted to feel like I was living life. But no, I had a remote job.

I got a new job that's supposed to be 3 days a week in office. Guess what? My team can't get enough remote work - they're not going to go into the office. And here I am, again, in the torture of solitary confinement.

I've been thinking about getting a new career, going into the trades. Anything that would allow me to have consistent interaction with other people.

I've become anti-technology, anti-society. I'm an optimistic person, yet I slip into depression because the only thing I want - to be able to go into an office - will not happen for me.

I think you're the most honest pro-office person here. Everyone else is making justifications that dance around this idea that they need the office for the human connection. What you describe is very real and I understand that it hurts.

I think what's happening is that we're in the shaking out phase where companies are deciding whether they'll be remote/hybrid/office. Each company will make that decision based on the preferences of the people with the most influence, and because opinions vary so widely there will be lots of diversity in outcomes.

And that's a really good thing. It's unfair that those of us who can't stand being in an office were made to go into the office to satisfy the social needs of other people who aren't getting enough socialization in their personal life. But it's also not right for people like you to feel like you have no choice but to be isolated.

What we need is for people to not feel trapped in a job that has the wrong balance of remote and in-person. If you are the only one of your coworkers who feels the way that you do, maybe the answer is to find a company where the majority of employees share your desire for in-person work. I know that sounds overwhelming right now, but once you've made the leap once you won't be stuck in the wrong alignment again.

Working in person isn't the issue here -- not having friends is the issue.

People do make friends at work, and that's a good thing. But it should never be your primary place of making friends. (Friends and family won't lay you off like a job might. Having a network outside of work is critical if that ever happens.)

Asking your coworkers to come into the office just so you can get some needed face time with other people doesn't seem fair to them. They have social lives outside of work and aren't being paid to be someone's social outlet.

I hear you and doubt nothing about your plight, but frankly that feels like a you problem. I can sympathize while also rejecting the idea that I should have to come into the office so your not lonely.

Have you considered a co-working space? It seems like that could get you what your looking for. Beyond that I'd look to get creative around finding ways to get social outside work. A martial arts or social dance class for example. Frankly I think it's much healthier if your coworkers aren't the core of your social life.

FWIW I too had this problem at the start of the pandemic. My solution was to build a gym and workout with my friends 3x a week. Obviously this isn't a solution for your plight in a new city.

Same and same. Also, I hate how these days it's somehow shameful to even think about making friends at the workplace, that somehow work friends are work friends and can never be your "real friends". Looking at my parents' generation, most of their current friendships are people they met at work. In fact my parents met each other at work.

We go to school and make friends with other people at school. Why is it wild that you'd want to go to work and make friends with other people at work?

“I was working all day.” Are you getting paid to work 16 hour days? If not then stop giving your employer free work. You’re devaluing your skill.

Go for a walk outside. Say hello to a stranger.

Volunteer at the library e.g. helping illiterate adults learn to read, or helping English as a second language speakers by chatting with them.

Go to a game store. They usually have open board/card/rpg games you can join. Some bars also have this.

Look online for activity groups in your area e.g. a photography group that walks around the city together. A gardening group. A sewing group. A painting group. Some of these might be advertised at your local library. Some might even meet there. Can’t find one your interested in? Make your own.

Look at public events in your city. Some of these are run by non-profits that would love if you volunteered to assist. Be careful about what you volunteer for though. Since you are looking for human interactions do not offer to help with their website, for example, since that is solitary work. These events need plenty of on-hand help.

So I'm supposed to deal with the hassle of commuting, losing hours of my day, because YOU are starved for human connections? Get out of here...

Relating to this a lot. I've barely had much in person social interaction since 2020, where college for me ended up remote for the pandemic. Was a relief when classes went back in person a year later, but too little too late for me to build up any meaningful social interactions there, and now I'm in a remote job to the opposite end of the country (and other parts of the world with even more disparate timezones), so I'm pretty much in a similar boat of no meaningful in person interaction.

I like technology as an auxiliary means of communicating with people, but having pretty much 95-100% of my interactions occur over texting and calling (people don't even usually bother to turn on their cameras) has been a personal hell, and honestly has soured my opinion of the entire internet. Beyond just work, what few personal relationships I do have at this point are usually also remote, so actually spending real life time with people is this far distant tertiary form of interacting, when it's the natural bloody thing we're evolved to do as a species.

Now you have companies like Meta investing in the metaverse "future" where we sit in VR headsets, trade crypto for fake digital goods, have romantic relationships with virtual avatars, and sit in virtual offices so our twenty-poly character models can discuss around a fake whiteboard. I just want to be around people again.

I have every sympathy for you--social contact is a basic human need. But I see this argument here and there and I feel like I have to point out that this is an argument for you to get social contact, not to make millions of people commute to/from work every day.

Getting on the social on-ramp is hard, especially if you live in a culture where overwork is praised and normalized. I had that problem too (I moved from the US to the Netherlands and this was one of the major reasons why). I super suggest taking a step back from work--it's clearly keeping you from doing other things that are critical for your mental health--and then using that time to invest in other parts of your life.

The problem is that the solution is entirely within your grasp, but you've decided that the only way to solve your problem is through in-office socialization.

Find co-workers who are local and suggest meeting for lunch or dinner on occasion. Hopefully you've developed some level of rapport through video calls and chats so this won't feel weird to you. Your company/team should be organizing regular get-togethers anyway. If not, they are failing at doing remote work. I hesitate to say "find a new company where they are better at this", but that's better than "require everyone to come into an office to fix your social life".

Beyond that, don't center your social life around work. Go to meetups dedicated to topics and activities you're interested in. Just get out and walk!

> I tried to join clubs and a maker space, but no time - I was working all day. The maker space closed early. I'm creative, I like working. I just wanted to go to an office. That's all I wanted. I wanted a routine. I wanted to commute and people watch. I wanted to feel like I was living life.

That seems to be a problem you've created for yourself, and it's a bit selfish to want to require everyone else to go to an office in order to make your choices work for you.

Stop working all day. Set boundaries with your employer. If the maker space really closes by 5pm, negotiate a more flexible work schedule where you get to take a 2-hour break (or something) around lunch or in the afternoon so you can go to the maker space, but then you work later into the evening, or get up earlier in the morning to start work. Also, I'm not sure how any of this would have changed if you were working in an office: the maker space would still close early, and you still would be working all the time and be unable to get there during their open hours.

If you want to people-watch, take a 30-minute walk in the morning and in the evening, to replace what a commute would be like.

> I'm an optimistic person, yet I slip into depression because the only thing I want - to be able to go into an office - will not happen for me.

This is a bit much, frankly. If you really truly are so inflexible that you can't imagine a good life without an office job, find a new job that has an office you can go to! This isn't rocket science. These jobs exist. Stop advocating making life worse for all of the people whose lives have been markedly improved by the extra opportunities for remote work, just because you can't figure out your own life.

My story is very similar to yours. Used to be ok with remote work but then I had a break up last year and need to get back to the office. Unfortunately all the tech jobs are in other cities of Australia so I can only get remote jobs.

Made the decision this month to pack up everything and move to Melbourne so I can work in the office among other things.

You're completely right to feel this way.

Reading about your struggles made me reflect on my twenties in tech and what a day to day looked like. Most mornings would start on a tube commuting into central london, getting to see how people dress, was anyone attractive on my route? what music should I listen to on the way? Then getting into the office, I worked with with engineer that was a developer at roscosmos and escaped the soviet union. We would walk the streets of london and discuss what problems we were going to solve that day and have a morning espresso while doing it. The city was always buzzing with traders and office workers. Work was tough but I had a lunch outside to look forward to with my team. If it was thursday or friday most of us would head to a pub for a late boozy lunch or end up at bricklane for a curry and the night just went on and on.

Amazing time and when I compare that to the last few years of remote work it cant even come close to the interactions and experiences I gained during that time. My day to day has been wakeup, grab a coffee, walk into my office and start responding to emails. I then try to squeeze in time to walk my dog and then get back to continue more meetings and zoom calls. Once the day ends I'm pretty exhausted and try to get outside to ride my bike or go to the gym. I physically interact with less than 2 people a day. My wife and the barista at the local coffee shop.

I completely empathize with how you're feeling!

Are you me? Jesus I took a regular job in January 2020 because I was over being a contract developer working at home. No luck now..

I agree fully with you. I'm in my 30s though everything else the same. I would definitely feel oppositely if I had a partner and kids (like my brother) but I don't.

People saying it's a "you" problem are missing the big picture. For a lot of people, the workplace is a primary context in their life.

I'm in my early twenties and still studying, but working as well, for around 15hours a week. Fully remote. Much worse, the only human interaction I have during this time is a weekly 30min team meeting.

It's two days a week for me. Mostly alone, just sitting in my bedroom and working on my own tiny project.

I'm lucky because I do have social interaction in the university, but I feel just how much of any job-related motivation this kills. If I would be full time amployed, this would be driving me into a depression as well.

I'm sure that you will be able to find some nice people to hang out with and talk to.

This is actually a symptom of a much larger problem with our society as it exists today, which is that we've systematically dismantled all our communities and support systems outside of work and the (immediate) family.

Humans are social creatures, and for the vast majority of human history, we've existed in communities of various shapes. Evolutionarily, psychologically, and even physiologically, it's not healthy for us to be going to work for 8 hours—with or without people—then retreating to a home with just our immediate families 5 days a week, (nearly) 52 weeks a year.

The shift in zoning after WWII to heavily prioritize hard separation between residential and commercial areas (motivated, in no small part, by racism) is a major culprit in the creation of this new lifestyle, and disruption of previous forms of order. (Though I believe the first big shift was probably the Industrial Revolution.)

I don't have much of a solution to offer in the short term, because it's not a short-term kind of problem. However, I do know that there's a movement called Intentional Communities[0] that's supposed to be working on counteracting it; perhaps you could look them up and see if there's anything in your area.

[0] https://www.ic.org

I slip into depression because the only thing I want - to be able to go into an office - will not happen for me.

There are tons of companies that still have offices. Get a job with one.

Blaming the fact that you don’t have any friends or romantic partners or a “life in this city” on remote working is absolutely absurd. Relying on a corporate office to bring you those things is most likely going to end in disappointment. Get a job that doesn’t demand your entire wakeful life on this earth and find some hobbies you can share with people where you’re not constrained by the weirdness of office politics and culture.

Your feelings are shared by many others our age. Friends at work are important, especially if you're living alone. I live alone in a city with friends within reach, but only having friends outside of work is not enough social interaction for me.

Consider how much social time there is in high school and college. There was barely a moment to be alone. Classes are full of discussion, meals are eaten together, and shooting the shit with siblings or roommates fills in all the other time. If you forego social interaction during work hours, I don't see how the math adds up to get back to the baseline from high school and college.

It sounds like you have an office to go to even though your team doesn't come in often. This is the case for me too, but luckily I'm at a big enough company where there are people my age on other teams. At first, barely anyone came in, but someone has to break the deadlock so I kept coming in every day regardless. Fast forward a year and there is a group of 20-somethings that come in every day. I've formed some of the best friendships of my life here. I recommend going into the office every day even if it's going to be empty. It's a good routine anyway to get out of the house.

While I don't have any personally, I'd also recommend housemates. A lot of my friends from work have housemates and I feel like it's an easy way to build a large friend group since you can share each other's friends. It especially seems to help those who are new to the city and don't have a friend group yet. Your housemates can also easily become your friends!

I really sympathize with your situation. You're simply asking for what used to be normal to return. Don't lose hope - there are so many of us like you and we just need to find each other.

Just wanted to say I relate completely. Moved a year before pandemic to a completely new place straight out of school and struggled making friends. COVID ruined what little social circle I had started to form.

If you (or anyone else reading this) are in the SF Bay Area in a similar situation and are looking for potential friends, hit me up at my profile email

I've been thinking the same, for me, it's also the work hours were to get ahead I have to do 60 hours on the business side AND homework to get more skills. Even just a part-time job or something to have a mental reset, money would be tight but every angle I see it could be easier to be happier.

I have no opinion on whether or not remote is good (I work alone, at home, and I'm fine with it, but I also understand the draw of office life).

I would strongly suggest volunteer work, as a way to socialize. Geeks have extremely valuable skills, and can give a great deal, to most volunteer efforts.

In my case, I have been involved in a fellowship, for my entire adult life, and it richly satisfies my socialization needs. I also do a great deal of tech volunteer work for it.

I wish you luck, but I'm not sure that returning to the office would fix things.

I was a remote worker for an earlier part of my 20s as a consultant.

What you have to do is you have to be proactive about your social activities and find a thing that allows you to do that. I ended up starting my own social group off of reddit. That helped a lot and taught me a lot about groups.

Couchsurfing was great for the social aspect. Another thing to note: Just because you are around coworkers it doesn't mean you'll relate to them well. Some have a tendancy to stab you in the back.

Wow, this hits close to home.

I just moved a thousand miles from school to a new state. I live near work, which is about 30 miles from the nearest city (no public transit to speak of). If there's any spots for young people to socialize nearby, I haven't been able to find them.

My long-term girlfriend has a career near where we went to school, so many weekends I'm traveling there, or she is here. Both of which are great, but neither of which are conducive to making friends in this new place.

I'm really excited about the job, and I'm a late sleeper. I tend to work 11am to around 9pm.

I've had some roommates, but they've been pretty uninterested.

Luckily, work is fully in-person, and it's a very young office. The first few months were rough, but I've finally made friends with people, I had a barbecue, we went skiing, went to see a co-workers band perform.

My personal situation could be a lot worse, but it could have also been a lot better. Compared to the last year of my Masters program, the adjustment period was very painful, and I think not having human interaction would have made it worse.

-- Though, (and I'm just realizing it now), if the job were remote, I could have just stayed in the part of the country where I had many friends. Sadly, I work with hardware, so that's probably not going to happen.

I feel ya, try being a remote area drillers offsider. Week after week, in the dark on night shift. No radio to even hear another humans voice because there isn't any reception in the middle of nowhere. No one to talk to. Hella wrecks your mental health.

Makes you appreciate the jebus out of f2f hands on trades. Stuff where your actually involved with people and the results of your work aren't a constant reminder of how detached from society you truly are.

Similar happening to me as well. I thought remote work will bring me freedom of time and place but spending 2 years at home without any interaction with outside people made me a negative and depressed person for a few months.

But I somehow found the balance by going to a co-working space, going to the gym and playing any physical sport.

PS: I live with 6 people but it still happened to me.

From the employers PoV imagine a world where you have an influx of junior employees and interns. They need a higher level of structure and need the social outlet of work. If you're trying to build up this talent, it seems easier to do in the structure of an office. Imagine a junior employee even potentially moving somewhere for a job?

Currently, the economy is not aggressively hiring at the junior level. But this could change. What does that world look like when junior employees go into a fully isolated and remote setup? Either we need a structured central place for supporting those employees or society needs to solve these social and economic problems in a completely different way.

Remote work is easier for senior employees with families or a more established life. I think many here probably fit into this category. After even 4-5 years of life in an office, you probably lose the need to regularly see employees. But being junior / early on, it's a VERY tough road to be fully remote.

What is your office environment like?

I too would like some in-person time with colleagues, but I also know that with an open plan office it can be so noisy that I know that nothing will get done.

Prior to 2019 a well used phrase was "I need to work from home so that I can get stuff done" and we all understood it. A lot of actions have been taken over the years to ensure that we know who the boss is, Taylorism is the cause and the boss gets an office. We have had decades of research showing that open plan offices increase sick days by 30%, and reduce productivity.

Unfortunately you are right at this inflection point where those of us who have suffered the worst of it are fed up and want change. The best we can do is work from home.

Have you told other members of your team this? I don't need to see my friends every day to know they are my friends, but would once a week or fortnight help, even if it was to pair with one other person?

> Day in, day out. All alone. I don't have a girlfriend, friends, or a life in this city.

You expect to find a girlfriend on the job? I don't mean it as a snark. But in office means that work and communiting takes even more of your life. Unless she comes from the job, which is unlikely in male dominated profession, being with team won't get you girlfriend.

> but no time - I was working all day

This is your problem. The rest is a red-herring.

I've been in the same place you are now. I completely agree with the need for a healthy routine to be able to keep depression at bay and not having a environment to socialize robs you of key experiences we all need to have in our youths in order to be well adjusted later in life.

Having said that, you're in a great place to make a few key changes that might help! I moved to another country and learnt a new language and a whole new culture when I was in the same place as you!

Perhaps that's not a option for you, but maybe you could travel to a new city for a week or two! Trial out a few places and see what fits you. It takes a bit of effort and persistence, at the cost of routine, but having a fresh start might be the thing that gets you out of this.

Edit: You might want to look up Croissant to go and meet other remote co workers, there's a fair few of us around the world ;)

I am there 100% too. And yet every time I bring it up somewhere like reddit I get responses like “just deal with it, I’m not coming into the office just because you are lonely.” Chances are that these are not the people that I would miss in an office environment in general. I probably wasn’t having fun office conversations with them.

I need my habits and routines, and I just don’t make myself stick to the routines when I stay home. Less of a reason to shower at the same time or at all, less of a reason to take walking breaks during work hours.

It has come down to me being able to handle a bullshit job when I like the people I work with and see them often enough to where we are inbetween work friends and real friends. But a bullshit job where my coworkers aren’t even interesting or nice to talk to? I’m just not gonna want to work with them ever again.

If you're in NYC and want to grab lunch let me know

> I tried to join clubs and a maker space, but no time - I was working all day.

Benefit of remote work is generally that its flexible and you can schedule time in the day to get out and do things than otherwise the usual office grind would prevent.

Your employer shouldn't care that you're out at noon but working at 7pm instead as long as the work is getting done.

Sounds like you also have boundary issues where you're working all the time and killing yourself, quite voluntarily, for your job. You should consider just stopping doing that. You probably won't fall behind.

If you have remote work and a rigid schedule like you're constantly oncall and dying because of the work, then find better and more human remote work.

I'm the exact opposite way - I want a remote job but I can't find one. I'd be happiest in an office of my own making with the hours of my own choosing, and I'm very good at creating boundaries between work and life at home. I loath having to sit in a cube, with people that might stop by and break my flow of concentration with small talk (What even is small talk? How's the weather? How about them dodgers? What?)

But I don't know anyone who would hire me to do remote work. Nor how to find one reliably. I'm getting depressed at the thought that I might have to go work in a physical box again.

I left the tech sector because of the same issue, although I have a family and friends. I'm poorer and my situation is quite unstable. But I no longer have to endure this depressing loneliness during work hours.

As someone that has worked in the office and now from home I wouldn't consider making "friends" at the office to be a substitute for making friends outside of work.

Check some of the event type apps such as meetup, they usually have quite a few fun things on there with cool people to meet doing all sorts of hobbies.

Then again, it is true that tech can be quite lonely and solitary work, so as you mentioned a career shift may be in order.

It isn't just you, but also consider that this kind of situation is somewhat common now and probably won't last

> And here I am, again, in the torture of solitary confinement.

If you spending time alone is torture, is it torture because of the loneliness or is it torture because you aren't at peace with yourself?

I get that connection is needed, but if you're in a situation where it's inconvenient or hard to find you shouldn't be attacking yourself because of this

I think this is a transitional phase. If remote work takes over, there will be a rise of co working spaces for mates to work in together. Young people will use them to find friends and partners, and young parents will use them to share babysitting shifts with other young parents.

That will actually be better for social life, because people won't need to lose touch when they change jobs.

People were stuck at home by the pandemic, not by remote work.

> Guess what? My team can't get enough remote work - they're not going to go into the office.

This may sounds crazy but I actually like to go to the office when I'm team isn't there! The place is lively and there are other people who aren't in my team, and I prefer to interact with them (perhaps it's less stressful as we're less likely to talk about ongoing team work, or they won't require my assistance).

As a lifetime introvert that doesn't really care for human interaction I have never really thought about this perspective before. I have worked remote for years and commuting all the way to another building just to do the same thing I was already doing at home would feel like a pointless hoop to jump through at this point. I wonder how many people demanding that everyone return to the office are just lonely?

Thanks for your very honest comment. At my office we’re hybrid and people oscillate between the home and in-office for the same reasons as you - sometimes it’s just nice to hang out with people, even if you’re working.

I would hope you wouldn’t have to abandon your career and maybe a little job hopping is in order. I don’t think the world will go full remote, even if that’s personally the way I enjoy it.

While my reaction isn't the same as yours, I'm in roughly the same position. You didn't mention it so I wanted to ask, have you tried going to coworking spaces? That seems like a solution for the "let the people who want to work at home work at home, let people who want company have company" issue... I haven't myself yet so I'm curious.

Maybe try switching to another field in engineering - software development is certainly the most remote friendly discipline. Mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, civil engineering, there are lots of great on-site careers and they are a much better use of your existing skills

I understand this completely, having worked remotely since February 2019. Can't wait to meet people more often.

From those of us with kids, many just want to do our jobs and get a paycheck. Work lets us live, we do not live to work. We are not looking for some third place or a dating situation.

Go to a climbing gym or get a dog or something if you want to meet people.

I'm self-employed in eCommerce but what you said was 100% true. Best thing for my mental health over the past year was getting a dedicated office space and a couple of staff members. Just no longer feel alone when doing my job.

> I tried to join clubs and a maker space, but no time - I was working all day.

This is the problem in my opinion. Not the fact that you were working all day, but generally that our work now bleeds into personal lives or leaves no time for it.

Your priorities are all wrong if you live to work. You need to make a life unconnected to work as you might be fired any day. People I work with are coworkers, nothing more.

My solution is to go to the pub once or twice (or thrice) a week

I recently moved into a share house and extremely recommend the experience. I think it would help with what you seem to be dealing with. Best of luck!

Why get paid while your socialising with people in a work environment when you can isolate yourself at home and talk to randoms on the street or join clubs at your own expense and time. Friends can be made anywhere BUT work now apparently.

Why do kids need to go back to school? They can sit at a desk at home. They can make friends elsewhere and they don't need to go to school for physical activity. They can do that in any club, group meet, sport, hobby whatever. Schools for learning after all, not making friends.

I have the same feeling of solitary confinement. I now dream of working at Costco or Whole Foods to have some social interaction.

Office friends aren’t necessarily great friends. Great people is found while doing great things

Work for the government, or finance with a strict "no remote" policy.

> I tried to join clubs and a maker space, but no time - I was working all day

That’s your decision. Very convenient for your employer. Perhaps not so convenient to you, given that you are getting depressed.

> My team can't get enough remote work - they're not going to go into the office.

That’s their decision.

Can't really type here but: I feels ya.

This should be a problem of your therapist, not your coworkers.

I tried office work and enjoyed meeting coworkers. Made some friends there. I'm working from home and like it so much though. I somehow live my best life alone during the day for work and see people several times in the week outside work, but I personally think that's a great way to both avoid commute time. I live in a city where I have a lot of friends, and it was always clear to me that remote work would work for me only if I could meet people regularly. I also practice piano, and I am in a choir with a hundred people that allows me to constantly meet people. I need to see people and would not like spending days without seeing anybody.

You can't bet only on work for meeting people. It can work by luck, but an ex coworker of mine recently left my ex-company and the city, because he was only seeing coworkers and didn't manage to meet people in the city, they ended up feeling lonely, aka work from the office didn't fix their loneliness. It's also a matter of social skills, and joining groups, and stuff like this if you don't have an established social group yet.

I also think remote work is not for everybody, and preferences might evolve during someone's life. I guess there will be office-first companies for people who prefer being at the office, remote-first companies for us preferring remote work, and hybrid ones if they manage to pull if off. That's very hard but somehow my current company is very successful in this, but you will need to have remote-first habits in such an hybrid setting, like using the chat / mail / whatever even between people at the office at the same time for many things.

So I have four pieces of advice for you, each one can suffice:

- move to a city where you already have friends - make sure it allows you to meet new people too.

- join clubs, do stuff outside work. Work is a mean to have a good life, don't spend all of your life at work, that's nonsense, unless it's absolutely what you love and you are happy, but that's not your case

- join an office-first or hybrid company. You don't need to stay at a remote company if you don't like it

- you can still be at a remote company, but go to a coworking space. Try it out! I have a coworker who does this. You can have a routine, meet the same people everyday and have breaks / eat lunch with them, etc exactly like coworkers, just that you don't work on the same things. Not the same thing as working at the same place with people who you work with but I guess that can be enriching / rewarding too in its own way.

Finding a coworking space was my plan B if I figured I didn't like working from home in the end. My company would be willing to pay for it. Hasn't happened yet but I personally think that's a great way to both avoid commute time, see people during the day, address the loneliness of remote work, and not be limited by the choice of whatever companies are near you.

Good luck, I hope you will find a solution that works out for you!

There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.

That’s the sort of thing that isn’t immediately obvious, but becomes more noticeable as time goes on. The first months of the pandemic people were able to coast on their existing connections, but it becomes harder years on, especially if half your team has _never_ met in person or come to company HQ.

In the before times, good remote companies would be intentional about having regular company meetings in a single location. That is a good alternative. But if you already have an office and already expect everyone to be relatively close, why fly everyone to London or SF?

Finally, everyone being remote is really bad for younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship, company culture, etc.

P.S. if you do a good job arranging your life (as most software engineers absolutely have the means to do) you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy separation between your work and your life.

Edit: full disclosure, I’m not an employer but I sympathize and spent a lot of time thinking about these things as a scrum master, trying to mitigate some of these problems in 2020. Now I’m not an SM and largely work independently, but I love being able to walk to the office every day (30 minute commute). I used to do hybrid but now I’m really enjoying the separation and am loathe to work from home, except on weekends.

I’m also an Urbanism nerd and don’t want to see cities revert to the 70s-era trend, which is clearly and noticeably happening, destroying decades of progress on livability. Unfortunately there’s a collective action problem; people will miss having nice cities to visit, but don’t make the connection that there is a “use it or lose it” aspect to great shared spaces.

"There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes."

I've seen this idea repeated many times, but in over 20 years in the tech industry, I've never once seen a meaningful collaboration spring up in a kitchenette or hallway. It's invariably "how was your weekend?" fare. Don't get me wrong, there's value in connecting that way, but it's never the sort of thing that directly leads to any of the productivity gain that the anti-remote crowd would like you to believe.

> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.

I echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work. Do you have specific examples of valuable collaboration in one of these environments?

> Edit: full disclosure, I’m not an employer but I sympathize and spent a lot of time thinking about these things as a scrum master, trying to mitigate some of these problems in 2020.

What about being a scrum master would give insight into what hallway conversations are valuable from an engineering perspective, in an engineering org? Or did you find that process improvements came out of these conversations?

> I’m also an Urbanism nerd and don’t want to see cities revert to the 70s-era trend, which is clearly and noticeably happening, destroying decades of progress on livability. Unfortunately there’s a collective action problem; people will miss having nice cities to visit, but don’t make the connection that there is a “use it or lose it” aspect to great shared spaces.

Why didn't cities have this problem before the rise of big employers that utilize dense downtown construction? Additionally, if neighborhood livability improves at the expense of downtown livability, why should I be overly concerned with how downtown livability is?

Every element you mention as being part of an in-office experience has been completely absent from my career.

Never made a connection that proved valuable later on. Never received any mentorship or even any guidance, I was always simply given a task and expected to complete it. Company culture doesn't even feel like a real thing outside of HR blurbs. Spontaneous collaboration was outweighed by interruptions and meddling from management.

Maybe it's just because I've never worked at a FAANG or BigCo, but I have a hard time believing these points.

If you can connect or collaborate in a hallway, you can also do so in a Discord channel (or whatever tool).

There are also several good applications for internet collaboration that simulate a rich shared 2d or 3d or video space.

Or things like GitHub issues and Wikis.

Networking, mentorship, company culture, etc. can all happen over the internet. You make it part of the company culture to use the remote collaboration tools for these things routinely.

So if it's someone's job to mentor someone else then you tell them and the other person getting mentored. That 100% can be done with a text chat. But you can also do screen shares, remote code collaboration, voice and video chats, or simply an at mention in a GitHub issue. If one or both employees cannot or will not use the tools and accomplish this mentorship then you warn them and if they continue to refuse then you fire them.

Sorry but this sounds really bad (and frankly, a bit entitled). Not everyone can afford to live 15 minutes walk to work w/ Bay Area, Seattle, etc housing prices. Not everyone wants to spend 30 minutes or more each way in a car just to get to an office that has a demonstrably worse setup than what they have at home. I have a healthy separation between work and home, it’s called closing the laptop lid and walking away.

> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.

I’ve literally never seen this. I’ve seen people sit around and gossip about coworkers or talk about the latest TV shows or movies or sports, though. (And nothing wrong with that. We can’t think about work for 8 hours straight.)

> That’s the sort of thing that isn’t immediately obvious, but becomes more noticeable as time goes on. The first months of the pandemic people were able to coast on their existing connections, but it becomes harder years on

That’s the exact opposite of my experience. The first few months were awkward because it was slightly new and assumptions were made that we’d be back in the office in a few weeks. But as time went on, everyone became much more productive. But that’s just my office, not everyone else’s.

> Finally, everyone being remote is really bad for younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship, company culture, etc.

That’s total speculation. When I was first hired out of college, I had 1 colleague I was kind of close with, but rarely interacted with outside of work. The majority of my friends were people I met in real life around town.

> if you do a good job arranging your life (as most software engineers absolutely have the means to do) you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy separation between your work and your life.

Or you can just turn off your work computer and do something else to create that space, like hang with your family or friends.

> you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy separation between your work and your life

Everyone is picking on the rest of your arguments, and I can sympathize with some of them, but not this one. Never had, nor can I envision, a commute with a healthy separation of work and life or that wasn't orders of magnitude worse than, you know, reclaiming that time for whatever I want.

All these commenters are unfairly picking on you. There IS value in personal connections and it is different when you have been in the same physical space with the other person instead of an avatar that can send texts and emails.

Spontaneous conversations happen every once in a while to creates an opportunity for collaboration, or maybe someone is working on a problem that another colleague worked on, so you can connect them etc. IMO, Happy hours in front of the screen are boring and feels like more work.

I don't want to go back to the office on a regular schedule, but I actually miss having stronger connections to my coworkers. I think the regular company meetings in a single location is an excellent alternative

> Finally, everyone being remote is really bad for younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship, company culture, etc.

Thank you for mentioning the importance of this. I graduated and entered the job market during the start of the pandemic. Getting a job was super difficult because every company suddenly implemented a hiring freeze. I managed to find a job at the company I interned at because they lost many developers due to the company being in the travel space (they didn't want to find themselves jobless in a pandemic, travel related payments were tanking). They were so desperate for bodies I got waived through because I was an intern one whole year before.

I quickly found myself in an empty office trying to onboard myself through the process, with a handful of tired devs trying to do the work that before had a team of 30. I spent my first few months in panic because nobody could find the time or patience to work with me, and the business logic was quite dense. It was still my first job and I hadn't worked up the courage to ask for help, and it was x10 harder when we worked from home. I could ask my fellow desk-mate because I could judge how busy they were, but it was torture asking people over teams and interrupting their flow.

Now almost 3 years into my job, I can definetly see how my anxiety kept me from progressing and I grew a lot. But WFH as a new person into the workforce, it was difficult until I found my footing and a routine. And a nice mentor. I am not ashamed to admit that it took me quite a while. Now I have more experience and I can work a bit more independently, so I appriciate our 2 wfh days. But most of our collaboration work is done best in the office.

> I’m also an Urbanism nerd and don’t want to see cities revert to the 70s-era trend, which is clearly and noticeably happening, destroying decades of progress on livability.

There's more demand than ever before to live in NYC, as evidenced by record high rent prices. Cities don't need to be about offices.

> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.

As an employer it's your job (via delegation) to facilitate how people (can) collaborate with each other. Relying on people doing that for you during their breaks is just lazy and poor leadership.

I'm with you 100% but we're fighting an uphill battle. For the couple of years pre-Covid, I alternated between a 15-mile bike ride (each way) and a walk->train->walk commute. It was wonderful, and great for my mental and physical health. I felt like a part of the city.

At the start of the pandemic we went full-remote and it worked, because we all knew each other well. Yet even then, I felt the loss of informal (sometimes work-related, sometimes not) communication with coworkers.

Time passed and now I'm in a fully-remote job. It's alright, my coworkers are nice, and things get done. But it's not the same. I don't feel like a part of anything. I'm constantly subject to the distractions of being at home -- there's lots of interesting stuff to do here, and my ADHD makes it tough to ignore.

More than likely, I'll retire early rather than finish out a career that's some mix of WFH or going to a nearly-empty office.

> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.

I used to work at a job where I was required to go into the office (Florida). My teammates were 1. offshore (India) 2. in Nebraska 3. in Atlanta.

My manager was in Atlanta.

I had 0 teammates in the office in Florida.

What's the justification there?

I also had to do a lot of 2am-3am on call.

Our laptops were also tracked with Sapience Buddy.

I no longer work there.

> everyone being remote is really bad for younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship, company culture, etc.

I've personally found mentorship is much easier remote since you can more easily dedicate your entire focus on a person rather than just catching up real quick before meetings.

I had a team member who was really struggling with isolation. Mentioned it to me briefly in chat and I had him give me a call. That turned into regular bi-weekly meetings where we chat about work issues and whatever topics are interesting to us. It's helped us both tremendously.

The only reason for anyone to suffer remotely is deliberate ignorance by senior member of the team.

And because of the more private nature of remote communication, I've found colleagues are much more willing to open up about concerns and frustrations they have about the office.

Sure remote means that if you're a senior member of the team and want to abandon your responsibilities it's easier to hide, but some of my best working relationships have been founded remotely.

For the purpose of enabling more “spontaneous connection” in a remote environment, could managers not simply foster an environment in which bandying around ideas in Slack or Teams is just encouraged?

I can see how employees existing solely in the Slackosphere can be crippling to the sort of shop talk that can spur new ideas, but I see no reason why it has to be that way.

This whole "spontaneous collaboration in a shared space" thing was a myth started by Google to sell the idea of open office layouts, and something the rest of the industry latched on to after that. This is not how software development works.

> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.

I can't believe the amount of people here denying this exists or that they've ever seen it. I wonder if they are the type to neglect social dynamics over cold, detached, ultimately flawed and incomplete metrics? They can't even conjecture about unseen forces and subtle influences, a sort of butterfly effect where an off topic conversation about the weekend leads to different technical decisions? Because all that stuff does happen. It can be very hard to quantify or understand.

That's one reason I hate cultures they put too much weight on performance reviews. They think they can measure individual contribution and productivity. They don't get the less obvious things that arise from group settings and informal collaboration.

> you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy separation between your work and your life.

Unhealthy separation: spending 45-90 minutes (one way) in traffic, polluting the planet.

Healthy separation: the 6 vertical meters between me working in the attic and my kids playing downstairs in the living room

> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.

Those spontaneous connections yielding noticeable results are probably an urban legend. 25 years in the business and I've never seen this happen. You're talking with people in your team/project anyway in regular meetings, so there is no reason to drag that into the hallway. Talking biz to people from other projects/teams is mostly impossible - would take hours to explain a specific problem to get a meaningful contribution. Never goes beyond basic griping and commiseration.

If you think those meetings are essential for company success you REALLY should examine your process.

I feel like this isn't really true in the SF Bay Area, it's too expensive even for most software engineers. We're not all making L7 @ Meta money.

> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes

If your business success is predicated on random encounters, then your business success is just pure luck compensating for a lack of planning and communication.

If you actually plan and communicate well across teams & orgs then your business will work equally well in person or remote (or a hybrid).

> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.

I agree, but not with the hallways and kitchenettes part. Sorry, never have I ever seen anything productive done in a hallway.

But I wholeheartedly agree with the "spontaneous communication" part, but *in the office, at the desk*. There are many things that are much easier when you can just come to a desk of your colleague (someone on the team, or your manager, or your direct report) and discuss instantly, then maybe grab another person into this discussion, make a decision, etc. Yes, I see that happening all the time in the office. Just not in a kitchenette indeed.

Now, I agree that maybe not every team needs it. Consider the two extremes. One is when your daily work is mostly "executing tasks”. In this case, whatever is more *comfortable* is the best: for some it would be working from home, for some it may be working from the office. Or, on the other end, if the team is in the early stages of making some important decisions. In this case, I truly believe this team needs to be able to communicate spontaneously. If this team is Okay with Discord - fine. Or if this team prefers being in the same physical place - fine as well.

Bottom line: being in *the office* is *one of the ways* to create an environment for spontaneous communications, which works wonders for making a series of small decisions fast.

P.S. I currently work in a flexible hybrid environment: we just agree with colleagues when we go to the office, if we want to.

I can see why you would think that but might I offer another perspective: we are better off without cities being built as commuter hubs for suburbanities.

Cities in the US are often located in very valuable real estate, most of which is used suboptimally for office spaces, which are occupied only during certain time on weekdays. I would like this to change. American cities should build a TON more apartment towers and dense housing in city centers that no longer need so many office buildings. Let the young, the weird and the creatives live in the cities and make them great.

In fact, I am seriously happy about the reduction in traffic to/from suburbs. Every weekday, most American cities turn into traffic severs, mostly commuters getting in/out of the city. This is just madness! And no doubt makes our cities more polluted (air and noise) and less desirable to live/work in.

>There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.

It has been certainly be nice distraction, and I definitely knew more people by name but I haven't noticed anything actually profitable for company happening there.

The things that did happen is that I could just catch the few people needed to push things forward, drag one to the other and clear the roadblocks but grabbing a quick call on the communication system of choice isn't that worse.

The brainstorming on problems was better when in person tho, but that might be the mix of tooling and platform company I work for chose (MS Teams, need I say more?)

> Finally, everyone being remote is really bad for younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship, company culture, etc.

Yeah, the one remote work experience that has been my benchmark (in startup) had us meet every 2 weeks and just had half-party, half socialising, half-brainstorming thing. I feel like there is heavy underuse of tooling, back then our standard was voice only but screen sharing via ancient methods (screen session) that worked well, editors like IDEA also have very neat "editor sharing" feature that I rarely seen talked about

I’ve never ever ever have had all my team in one place. I’ve worked in two different countries and six different cities. Not one team has had everyone in the same area. Water cooler conversations always ended up isolating and creating in-out group dynamics. We always had to fight to force communication through async global channels as much as we can to make sure people don’t feel left out or lack important context. It is a challenge.

Pandemic changes in work has thrust into the open the challenges with remote. But you ignore it at your own peril or curl up to the familiar return-to-work ass-on-the-seat model and be left behind.

Btw, if you need good ideas, you schedule and organise a brainstorming session or create an idea board org wide. You encourage challenging assumptions and involve your team in decision making. All of this need to happen irrespective of whether your team is local or scattered. Might as well use modern technology when you can and support remote and local discussions.

> P.S. if you do a good job arranging your life (as most software engineers absolutely have the means to do) you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy separation between your work and your life.

Clearly you don’t live in the Bay Area. My commute was 2hrs each way. That’s 4hrs a day, just gone.

I think this boils down towards being extrovert and introvert. you seem to cheering lots of "people interaction" and thrive on it while "the remote crowd" can get by just doing work without the need or pressure for in-person interaction.

From the about 1 year i spend in the office about 10 years ago it was mostly annoying to have to "connect" (and the worst thing was force "team building", after 8h spend together in the office). Sometimes we had fun and laugh aut at the end of the day work is just work. everything beyond that is some weird, twisted invention by the HR and corporate mumbo-jumbo (especially part about "corporate culture") - remember, you don't own anything to the company, you are not a slave and corporation doesn't own you anything (which was shown by the recent lay-offs)..

I remember when I first started my career, my boss told me "Don't miss meetings, don't miss deadlines. Otherwise, I don't care when you're here."

I thought it sounded great. Spent most of my time out of the office for the first 3 weeks. Quickly felt the downsides and got back in the office for the remainder of my next 2 jobs. Networking alone was more valuable for my career personally than anything that we actually accomplished in the office by being there together.

I don't know that the company benefited, but I felt like I did.

At the larger company though (business telecom), it was a lot easier for them to secure the network by controlling all of the devices and endpoints in the office, including camera access and building access. Dealing with all those employees on remote devices over a VPN would have been a huge security headache IMO.

> you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy separation between your work and your life

May be true in some small, limited segments of the States. The vast majority commute by car. Traffic accidents are the leading cause of death. Very pleasant!

"for younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship, company culture, etc"

To be fair, most of this doesn't happen in the office either. I don't see any real mentorship going on in my 10 years at the company. Comany culture is a joke in my experience. Management doesn't really care about the culture as long as it facilitates getting work done and keeping people in line. Networking might be easier in person, at least for some people. I personally think networking is toxic since it effectively means that outgroups remain outsiders and potentially promotes cronyism.

I've absolutely managed to have non-structured zoom meetings which have been productive. Often its just a spillover of standup where me and a coworker take over the end of the meeting and basically let everyone else drop off (or not) and we start bitching about something horrible to fix. Sometimes it resulted in something meaningful, sometimes it was just a bitching session. I did this mostly with other coworkers because I'm an introvert. If you're aggressive about hopping on zooms with other people then they can happen with external people. I've gotten dragged into zooms with customers, via the customer services team airdropping me into some horrible customer issue, which later solidified the direction the architecture should go based on the obvious struggles the customer was having. My coworker at prior job was better about inserting himself into those kinds of virtual discussions.

And there's a major advantage to being able to operate that way since you don't have to be geolocated with your customer or your customer services folks and you don't need plane tickets and you can get it done with an hour or three virtually rather than having to take days out of your schedule to do an onsite.

I'd be curious to see a study done comparing the extent of happen-chance that occurs in-person vs digitally.

Digital hallways exist in the form of private messages.

I'm supposed to move whenever I change jobs?

I think there's some value in actually meeting one's teammates, but I've found that the collaboration I have works just fine if they know they can IM me to talk when they're having issues. I have lots of people from many different departments who just know what kind of things to IM me for. I don't always have answers for them, but I can usually point them to someone who does.

When I hung around in person, we'd chat with them about totally random stuff. You can learn from that, but it's not nearly as business-centric as intentionally talking to people about work stuff.

> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.

I call bullshit.

This is the claptrap that upper management always uses to to justify RTO or keeping separate bus lines or whatever, but it doesn’t match reality.

In 25 years of professional experience, I have never seen collaboration done by random encounter. At most you’ll ask a question you were already going to ask. And guess what? In 2023, that happens over Slack.

> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes

That's an interesting way to say "office politics."

I feel similarly. WFH has killed my city.

I personally enjoy it and generally work remote 2-3 days a week, but it’s awful for the organization. At this point I keep doing it as I expect there will be some incentives offered to come back.

On the productivity side, There’s way too much babysitting and people in certain roles doing errands. On the work relationship side, units with turnover struggle as new hires don’t get assimilated well.

Not good enough.

In fact, a counter example: people regularly spawn random threads of conversation like the one you mention in Slack channels. A lot of times nothing comes of it, but some of these threads tag senior executives and managers within the company who have followed insights from threads into new cost improvement or even revenue generating ideas.

These conversations are unlikely to happen in passing hallway conversations and even if they did would likely not develop further than a couple remarks without forcing people to creating meetings to discuss topics that may or may not be important, which quickly gets overwhelming and makes people lose interest in further discussion. Having people sit around all day at an office in case such a conversation spontaneously happens is very inefficient when it can be done online in asynchronous fashion.

The central tenet of your argument is thus unraveled and the conclusion you must come to is that we don’t need offices. Accept it. Office workers aren’t here to serve as NPCs to fill your pretty little cities.

> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.

I love reading things like this, because it tickles my hypocritical funny bone.

Where is the evidence for this? Where is the hard data showing that these "hallway conversations" ultimately generate more sustainable long-term revenue for the company? Because at the end of the day, that's the only reason a company should ever mandate anything that employees don't want: because it either generates more revenue, or saves them money. If you can't prove that requiring employees to be in-office accomplishes this, then there's no reason to do so.

Regarding hypocrisy: I recall as an individual contributor all the times I've been required to justify -- with hard data -- things I wanted management to support because I believed it would increase developer happiness and comfort, and thus increase productivity (and reduce costs). It was always hard (or impossible) to do this, especially before the fact, so management would often turn me down. And yet, we have this completely unsupportable statement -- "everyone in-office creates better connections that leads to higher productivity" -- that management is all-in on enforcing.

I think the real reason for "return to office" initiatives is mundane and obvious: ego, power trips, and an unreasonable lack of trust.

> But if you already have an office and already expect everyone to be relatively close, why fly everyone to London or SF?

If you already have an office and expect everyone to be relatively close, you don't have to fly everyone anywhere. You just have "come to the office" days. Depending on the level of remoteness of your workers, that can be as often as once a week, or once a quarter.

> if you do a good job arranging your life (as most software engineers absolutely have the means to do) you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day

False. You're not taking into account the myriad ways people choose and need to live. I wouldn't do the SF<->south bay commute ever again (used to do that 10+ years ago daily). Are you telling me I'm required to move to take a job that's a 60-minute drive away? That's ridiculous.

> I’m also an Urbanism nerd and don’t want to see cities revert to the 70s-era trend, which is clearly and noticeably happening, destroying decades of progress on livability.

Ah, I see. So basically you see "people are leaving cities in droves" and think the solution is "make people come to the office". Another unsupportable statement, and also unreasonable to ask of people. I live in a city, have no intention of leaving, and value the fact that I work from home, even though any job I'd take would also be in the city. I hate sprawl and would never go back to living in a suburb.

Maybe some people don't want to live in cities, though. Your "solution" to this problem is to require people do that (through completely unrelated employment considerations), just to keep cities healthy? How selfish!

fine, i'll come in but you have to rip out all the desks and turn every bit of space in the office into a hallway or a kitchenette to maximize opportunity for collaboration.

The point is choice. Most compagny should allow both remote and not remote

What was the 70s-era trend?

Employer here. We had a fancy brick and timber office. It was beautiful and centrally located. I let the lease expire in 2021 after everyone went remote for the pandemic. There has been no sign of any decay in productivity.

It is true that hanging out in person develops a sense of human connection that feels good. But is that needed for effective work? I’m not so sure.

Brainstorming and creative collaboration activities seem more effective when done in person, so we have periodic “off-site” retreats for a day or two, or we meet at a conference. But most of work is just grinding. That works perfectly well from a home office.

>Brainstorming and creative collaboration activities seem more effective when done in person

Let me tell you, I hate these. And I will take vacation days to avoid going to them. And I also think they're not very productive no matter how many 'How To Run A Sprint' classes the organizers take.

> It is true that hanging out in person develops a sense of human connection that feels good. But is that needed for effective work? I’m not so sure.

Especially questionable in an open-plan office, everyone is trying just to concentrate and are wearing headphones.

Regarding brainstorming, I was reading “Quiet” recently, and the author quoted a study that indicated that brainstorming worked better on almost all metrics when it was done in isolation, and then the group discussed the ideas afterwards.

I’m a CTO at a small startup, not forcing RTO on anyone BUT the vibe I get in my peer group is that managers don’t know how to manage remote teams, don’t want to do real performance management, and they personally have some loneliness issues they solve by working from the office. I work from an office with my cofounder 1 day/week, and it has been great for my mental health to leave my living room. I think broadly speaking that the path of building and managing a remote team successfully is different than in person in that (1) it should be more transactional, less relationship based, and you should be more comfortable and active in routinely cutting the bottom performers. Remote work does genuinely change the labor relation to be a step or two closer to the contractor model (extremely transactional and performance based, not culture/family etc). Remote work gives power to capital/management and it seems like most managers who graduated Stanford/MIT and learned to run teams in a zero interest rate env are not comfortable exercising this power on behalf of the companies they represent. (2) Managers should be hiring in low cost areas, you don’t need a team in NYC/SFBA for most things. There are great engineers in Latam. You can find very committed senior talent in latam for 120-160k, the US equivalent would be 180-250k, and the latam folks are less likely to job hop or negotiate a higher comp in month 12. (3) a lot of senior leaders don’t want to learn a new playbook (remote management). They have a playbook that worked, they used it for 10-15 years, and they want to turn the clock back to that time. Even if 30% of senior leaders at a company feel this way, that’s usually enough to “roll back” to how things were. The remote enthusiasts who haven’t taken on the new management style whole hog don’t have any wins to show, so the revanchist old managers are winning the hearts and minds of CEOs. The companies who mastered remote and learned how to do it right aren’t doing RTO BUT remote done right definitely is not paying a globally average Bay Area engineer locally competitive salaries for globally average work.

Man I do get it, cost of labor sucks as a business.

It’s always disheartening to me though that it’s just so easy for people to justify undercutting labor in just a few swift sentences like this, especially because the nuances of culture are very different, for one, and for two, there are downsides to this form of recruitment that never gets acknowledged from issues with time zones to acceptable quality standards and other things.

Maybe I’m just old, but it feels almost heartless to be compared by the numbers that someone should just “hire in Latin American because they have less leverage”.

Just treat your employees well. No you don’t need to hire in traditionally geographical Silicon Valley areas every time or by default, but you don’t have to go all the way to latam either.

I hope people in other areas of the world wise up to this and ask for 1st rate salaries and benefits

> the vibe I get in my peer group

You acknowledge you are a cofounder of your company, therefore you and your cofounder named you as CTO (as opposed to an existing company where somebody was promoted or hired into the position by someone else). I'm just curious who your "peer group" is, the ones you believe "don't know how to manage remote teams" and have "loneliness issues" -- other self-proclaimed CTOs? Or a wider group of people? And what experience do you have that makes you so much of an expert? What are the long-term consequences of an engineering team that you assembled at a discount?

> You can find very committed senior talent in latam for 120-160k, the US equivalent would be 180-250k, and the latam folks are less likely to job hop or negotiate a higher comp in month 12

Disagree. Quality engineers will ask for their worth regardless of location.

Also I think indexing on "less likely to job hop or negotiate salary" is short-sighted thinking. You're asking people to do a complex job where the key skill is critical thinking and self determination. Those skills go hand in hand with people willing to demand their worth from you. Sure, save a little bit of money now. But you're going to be building a brittle, disposable product with a brittle, disposable team for what ultimately will amount to a brittle, disposable company.

> They have a playbook that worked

The playbook worked for them, but that doesn't mean it worked for the people they were managing, or the company they worked for.

My experience with managers and "the playbook that worked" for the past 50 years is that 80% of it consists of "if the employee is in their seat, and not visibly goofing off, that means they are working at 100% productivity; anything else is stealing from the company."

It's effectively rooted in an assembly-line mindset (where if you weren't at your post, you clearly weren't working, and it was pretty easy to see whether you were working when you were at your post), in addition to treating subordinates like robots with no mental, emotional, or even physical needs while they are at work.

"You can find very committed senior talent in latam for 120-160k, the US equivalent would be 180-250k,"

You can find devs in the US for less too. $160k for a senior dev in the Philly region is generous.

"culture/family etc"

That's really just a veneer for "transactional and performance based"

Whenever I hear a company say that they are like a family, I run. In a family, you don't lay off family members. As a matter-of-fact, if it is a family run business, and there's a business downturn, they will lay off all workers and leave their actual family members working.

In reality, saying it is "family" is just a machiavellian ploy to pretend a business actually cares about the employees, in order to make them loyal to the company, without the loyalty going the other way. I've read so many stories about how owners were always talking about the company being "family" but when push came to shove, they shoved the employee out the door. But like so many companies, all the ones that are shedding employees, they never seem to fire the C-suite, somehow.

As far as culture goes, all companies want to create a culture that is maximal efficiency for the company. That's all the culture is in a corporate world. It's transactional. No company is going to have a culture of 5 hour picnic lunches every day, followed by an hour foot massage for everyone so that only 2 hours of work get done a day. That would be silly. ALL business cultures exist to maximize shareholder investments. To the extent that cultures are different is just a different way of trying to maximize employee output. Nothing is wrong with it, but it actually is transactional. To the extent people talk about "culture" that is really just trying to polish the turd.

I agree with everythinig else you wrote.

See this is the thing that really confuses me about this whole kerfuffle.

The more we collectively push for remote work, the more likely it becomes that our compensation takes a huge nosedive. Engineers in Brazil or El Salvador will LOVE working at even 30% of total FAANG comp (while enjoying fewer worker's rights and fewer benefits), and they are by and large technically competent.

This whole thread has a very "I got mine" vibe to it.

> ...most managers who graduated Stanford/MIT...

> ...you don’t need a team in NYC/SFBA for most things... There are great engineers in Latam

> ...globally average Bay Area engineer

There are two sides to the kind of broad strokes generalizing you are doing.

It has been my experience, and the experience of everyone else that I know, that the Ivy League US-SF-NY people we work with are far and wide smarter, more productive, nicer, and way fewer problems, fewer emotional problems especially, than others in engineering and management.

Go ahead and run a LATAM team. Nobody really cares. It will not turn out to be the management superpower / huge insight you are making it out to be.

This has been my experience too. The transactional vs familiar thing is a tradeoff IMHO and people will have different preferences.

Also: I'd like to ask you a few questions on Latam remote work. My email is in my About if you have the time!

You can have really senior talent in Latam, starting at 60k. Don't let any intermediary believe otherwise.

sounds like it would be effective if the cto was in latam too

You’re c-suite material all right. A natural hate for someone asking for more compensation. Hope your startup fails.

(CTO here, 100m€ public company in the EU, 200-person development organization. Anonymous to let me speak more freely)

1) I don’t care about per-dev productivity. Might well be some teams are more productive fully remote, looking at some numbers I suspect they are. But our biggest problem is not “cranking out lines of code faster” - it’s making sure we are doing the right projects, not wasting time on the wrong things; and dealing well with all the cross-team dependencies. I’m quite consciously making the trade off that I think devs will be more frequently interrupted and get less work done … in return for which they will be much better informed about what the company is doing and we can focus our efforts more effectively.

2) because this development organization works and I want to keep it functional. This is a public company, we have analysts looking over our shoulders and constantly querying our strategy. We have potentially hostile acquisitions always around the corner. If I am running a fully remote organization then I can’t justify a physical office space in the EU and there’s a very clear route to cost-reduction which is “push all the work out to low CoL countries” And honestly it won’t matter whether that is actually feasible or not, the logic looks too compelling and there’s a risk it would be forced on me, which would be a massive headache because I know it won’t work well. On the other hand, if as a dev organization we are mostly back in the office, it is much easier for me to make the argument that offshoring wouldn’t work.

I've worked remote for several years as both a senior engineer and team leader, these are the problems with remote work I haven't yet found good solutions for:

1. I don't know how my employees are doing; many times in my career I've had to tell programmers to "go for a walk" or "time to go home" when they get stuck on a frustrating task or fall in to a flow state far past leaving time. Solutions I've found to this put onus on the employee or create more restrictions that hinder in other areas

2. Brainstorming whiteboard sessions are harder; the issue with remote meetings is that you need each person to finish speaking before the next person can start, which IMO slows down collaboration. Also I still haven't found a great tool to replace the whiteboard, Miro / Figma (Figjam) come close but also are slower at spinning up a flow diagram or sequence diagram or describing a stack.

3. Juniors / Grads need handholding; I've written frameworks to train newer developers in a remote setting but the remote divide creates an invisible barrier between the seniors and juniors for base support. I used to purposefully sit them next to eachother to enable the quick "do I use this or that?" questions or, better, have the senior look over and spontaneously create a learning opportunity related to whatever the junior is doing.

I guess the themes here are speed and spontaneity

(I haven't had my coffee yet so I hope above made sense)

For #2 what you need is just budget $500 to get everyone a podcaster mic and a pair of open-back headphones for calls. It gets rid of the "half duplex" thing, and with the headphones plugged into the mic as a monitor you hear your voice in a different way and don't speak so loudly reducing fatigue a lot.

For #3 I just recommend pair programming. Pairing is already a skill that needs to be learned and remote pairing is a more difficult one. But the tools for it are better than they were a few years ago and are good enough, and it's an excellent venue for naturally exchanging a lot of that sideways knowledge and mindset that makes more experienced engineers so effective.

For #1, 1:1 will help a lot but it will take time as you need to build the relationship enough for them to open up to you.

But I agree with #3. The problem is getting the seniors to RTO just for this express reason. Though having an always-on call for that day would help with adhoc questions from juniors.

Mob programming, aka the juniors sit and watch the senior do the thing, 2x1 hour per week is the solution.

For 1 why not let them take off extra time the next day? No point interrupting a good flow state!

Microsoft did a very interesting research about this amongst 60k+ employees. Read it to find out why serendipity is a good thing and hardening already existing relationships is not good for the whole:

“Furthermore, the shift to firm-wide remote work caused employees to spend a greater share of their collaboration time with their stronger ties, which are better suited to information transfer, and a smaller share of their time with weak ties, which are more likely to provide access to new information.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01196-4

That resonates with my experience.

It’s usually the executive class of employees making these decisions, and they want to convey business as usual to the board and others that they report to. They also work differently than almost everyone else. They usually have meeting all day and the topics and decisions being made benefit greatly from the in person dynamics. They also get a lot done by just dropping by other peoples desks and quickly having an impromptu conversation.

They’re pretty removed from the way you work as a non-executive and don’t really care that you can accomplish your job just as easily remotely. In their mind, it’s not best for the company.

They’ve also lived the mandatory WFH days and the whole decision making processes slowed down or they just put a lot of things on hold because it couldn’t fully or appropriately be decided without difficult meeting logistics. These are things you’re unlikely to be aware of as a non-executive.

I think it’s mostly this! And it’s not necessarily malicious - the exec folk have lost sight of the way most people work. To them it’s “obvious” that the office is better, because it IS better for their type of work.

Managers schedule VS makers schedule.

Add to that exec level are usually already rich enough that they don’t have commute or schooling problems to deal with. So they just can’t understand why RTO isn’t popular!

I think a lot of people are abusing WFH. Some make it obvious like doing meal prep during refinement but others are just kind of ghosts during the day. Even as a fellow team member reviewing code it's hard to tell how much my coworkers are working. Assume my EM has less of an idea than I do and anyone above them is totally in the dark.

I'm working within minutes of waking up, and shower during my lunch break -- taking about 20 minutes total, instead of the hour spent on an office lunch. I take a minute or ten to do chores like laundry, meal prep or dishes, usually no more than twice a day -- in the office, I take similar length breaks and often end up socializing with others. I often find overlooked solutions during my breaks, which are spaced out to prevent eye, neck and wrist strain, or to blow off frustration with a difficult issue. That isn't abusing WFH, it's using time wisely. I can't speak for the people ghosting, but doing chores is not abusing WFH.

Caring about the raw amount of time people put into their jobs sounds like a middle management thing to do -- rewarding showing up and putting in hours like it was PR.

If the results are there, and in accordance with the employment contract, time shouldn't matter.

They are. My former employer briefly had WFH due to COVID. It ended with a small number of people getting fired and the rest coming back 5 days a week. People just weren’t working, and they had some astonishing IT stats that hinted at how bad it was.

Over at Google, there’s an internal study that shows raw code checkins have dropped dramatically since WFH. I’m pretty sure Sundar’s 20% more productivity comment came directly from the numbers in those slides.

It does not surprise me that Zuckerberg and Benioff have gone the length of calling out their employees’ productivity directly. I’m really surprised this comment is this far down, when it’s been painfully obvious at the couple companies I’ve worked at through the pandemic that productivity is the elephant in the room. Some CEOs dress it in corpspeak about collaboration, but if Google, Meta, and Salesforce are all complaining of worker productivity, I think that’s the true reason. I think we’re too afraid to take an honest look at how productive we are, which will ultimately be the demise of WFH we want to defend so badly.

I know someone who basically only actually works 3-4 hours a day. The rest of the time they do other personal things but are still available online. They get told they're doing a great job and hit all the important targets.

This person also routinely ignores/mutes as many meetings as possible and frequently multi-tasks in the gym, house chores, etc. Had that person been in the office they'd have had their time wasted on useless all-hands meetings, etc., so now everybody's happy (because that person hasn't had to quit, because life's too short).

Working based on hours doesn't work remote. It should be based on deliverables.

> it's hard to tell how much my coworkers are working

In a rare occasion I get a desk anywhere near a coworker when we are in the office, I also find it hard to know how much they are working.

The physical presence in the same city, building, or even sat right next to each other, goes not give me any information.

You shouldn't need to measure your company's productivity in output based on these things. Are people getting the necessary work done? Your measures are wrong if you feel worried about not being able to tell if people are "actually working". It should be painfully obvious if the necessary work isn't getting done.

Some of my teams were fully remote about eight weeks in 2020, while others have been remote the entire time. I don't believe in full RTO, just hybrid.

1. The last few years have demonstrated that projects with teams that are primarily remote require a higher degree of project overhead staffing. I think this is most evident with very small teams. For example, it's fairly easy for a small internal tool team to coordinate their work without a project manager, design, or business analyst if they are in close phyiscal proximity. The struggle is when you distance that team from larger products/project. Even in the minimal case creating visibility for that small team into larger workstreams requires overhead itself. With the macro environment and with leaders being forced to tighten the belt, this is less and less possible. All communication has to be structured fully remotely. That structure requires management.

2. I've found about 20% of people have the ability to maintain a professional work environment at home. I'm constantly seeing in meetings where highly compensated employees are providing childcare during working hours. I'm all for flexibility, but it becomes a distraction.

3.Junior employees have little to no ability to develop skills from seniors. I have hired entire classes of employees in software engineering roles that started in a fully remote environment, realized they weren't learning anything, and then came to work in a hybrid setting.

> I'm constantly seeing in meetings where highly compensated employees are providing childcare during working hours

Do you really think it's good, and that people should be separated from their children for 8-10 hours (or more if commuting) each day? I don't.

Also, since you don't want your employees to get distracted by childcare, does your office offer daycare for their children?

Edit: And yes, they daycare question is also met with awkward silence from the management on each all-hands I've heard it asked before.

> 3.Junior employees have little to no ability to develop skills from seniors. I have hired entire classes of employees in software engineering roles that started in a fully remote environment, realized they weren't learning anything, and then came to work in a hybrid setting.

How often were they mentored by senior engineers? Daily meetings? Weekly? Who developed the training program? Who wrote the documentation?

1. > All communication has to be structured fully remotely. That structure requires management.

As opposed to work from office where management does not required because... Managers already present in the office?

2. Erm. From my exp 20% of people have to learn to how to maintain a professional work environment at home. Thats just a skill, nothing more.

3. Agree.

> I'm constantly seeing in meetings where highly compensated employees are providing childcare during working hours.

If you think that's bad, you should've seen what they did at the office during work hours for their kids when they were required to leave the house.

I'm an employee and I've been working remotely since long before the pandemic. But occasionally I'll roll into the office when they have free lunch, because I know a bunch of people will be there. And when I do that, I always get a chance to meet up with some coworkers and end up getting a lot done.

And sometimes we have a leadership meeting where I fly into the corporate HQ, as do my coworkers, and we have an all day in-person meeting with no one remote. And it's amazing how much we can get done in a day.

Sometimes it's just a lot easier to discuss a contentious subject where we don't all agree in person, and see body language, and not have to deal with the weird gaps that happen with online meetings.

That being said, I won't ever return to the office full time. The boosts in productivity only happen because it's not a regular occurrence, and it's a huge hassle to get there and back.

But I do see the upside to occasional work in the office.

Also, I used to work at a company that had no remote employees, so we were all in the office every day. That was nice, because if you needed to talk to someone you could just wander over and hash out an issue right then and there, and you could have meaningful hallway conversations, and we were just generally closer as humans. But that only works if you have no remote employees, and I'm not sure that's feasible anymore, at least in software. People got too used to remote work. But if I ever found a company like that where everyone came in every day, and it was close to my home, I'd be willing to do it.

People need social connections with their peers to work together successfully. It's much easier to build these connections in the office than virtually. Seeing each other a couple times per quarter for an extended period could also work, but it's easier--if you already have an office space--to bring people together in the office once or twice a week.

Five years in office. Five years fully remote with a team of dozens of fully remote engineers. I find the latter, in my experience, to be strictly superior in all ways including working together successfully despite being remote.

I think we overrate the need to build in-person social rapports. Just be a professional. I think there’s a concept where often work colleagues become friends and we misidentify that as being a key part of the work dynamic. I’m not sure it’s necessary. Most of my work colleagues are not my friends and I’m quite fine with that.

Why not just get rid of the office space and use the money saved to get people together twice per quarter for an extended period? I bet in almost every case it would be a significant cost savings for the employer.

Unless, of course, there is some other reasoning than what you state in your comment, like for example, middle management feeling irrelevant or sunk cost fallacy on office space?

"People need social connections with their peers to work together successfully."

Our team doesn't, are we anomalies? People need to be mature, reasonable, responsible and accountable to work together well.

People need social interaction, sure, people also need to have social interactions outside of the office.

What we are seeing is a large swathe of people who use the office as their social life, and they’re taking the position that their inability to socialize out of work is important enough to inflict the negative consequences of returning to the office on people who don’t treat the office as a fun zone for personal sustenance.

That happens through zoom. Half my team (including my manager) is remote. All of our meetings are over zoom, even when half the team is on campus at the same time. I go to campus, I find someplace to sit (we don't have assigned places to work), I hop on zoom calls as needed, I work, I go home. I never talk to anyone on campus - so my social connections are entirely the same whether I'm working from home or working on campus.

> It's much easier to build these connections in the office than virtually.

This isn't self-evident to me at all.

More important role of those connections is that they promote inertness in the employees so they will remain employees even when they are disadvantaged because social component will hold them back from moving on.

OP pointed out that meetings and projects have happened remotely anyways for a long time - an experience I share. The peers you describe aren’t in the same place as yourself even if you’re both in some office.

> People need social connections with their peers to work together successfully

One size very much does not fit all, and that’s the entire point that those who prefer remote work are trying to drive home.

This is just conjecture, post some evidence for your claims

Love these soundbites with zero evidemce. Absolutely not true, plenty of us enjoying remote, we can socialise in a bar/restaurant. No need for an office.

That sounds like a reason why an employee would go to the office. But not really something employer would care about - they don't care about employees social lifes in other contexts.

You can do this through any video conferencing platform. Or do we need to smell our coworkers for teamwork to work?

I think that in our field people work better together - more collaboration, knowledge transfer, teamwork and ultimately better solutions delivered.

I also believe that people are more motivated and engaged, and work harder and with more focus in a shared workspace outside of the home.

I was on the fence going into the remote work experiment, but everything I’ve seen since supports my feelings above. I’ve seen less of the good stuff and a lot more slacking off.

I think the level of flexibility we had before was about right for knowledge work. I could always get a day or two from home when I wanted some solo focus. I could always shift working hours to fit around life, or take a few hours out of the office for a personal errand. That was enough flexibility for me even though office was the focal point. I don’t think being asked to go back to the office with that kind of dynamic is overbearing or in any way unreasonable.

That does not require being in person, pretty much the entire OSS community demonstrates that.

Honestly I’m beginning to find “we need to be in person to collaborate” to be a red flag for unable to communicate and “will interrupt people working all day”

can confirm!

the culture at the company you co-founded and i worked for would have absolutely 1000% not existed if we were 100% remote.

we did amazing things, and i believe a lot of it was due to us being able to work together in person.

Far too many of these posts since the pandemic, it's OK if you personally feel more productive at home but if you seriously can't understand the benefits of working together physically then you have a serious mental block. There's some emotional reason why you don't want to hear why people find office work productive. You should at least be able to recite an opposing argument if not empathize with it (let alone agree with it). If you can't do that then you can't make a logical decision and instead you're making a faith based decision. A plug I make to everyone and I'm surprised more engineers don't engage in it; therapy is usually helpful in debugging what's going on in our brains and how our emotions are affecting our ability to navigate with logic.

> you seriously can't understand the benefits of working together physically then you have a serious mental block.

But we working together, just remotely. Could you explain please, for us with "serious mental block" why do you feel that you need to be near me physically to do any work?

Not an employer. But I believe most employees simply put in less hours when working from home, and most employers aren't very good at rewarding people for their results, not their hours.

Opposite for me. At home I start working when I wake up and often don't stop until the evening. When I go into the office I have to get ready and commute, and then at the office there are so many distractions - our campus has fantastic fitness facilities and I'll often spend a few hours each day over there. So, at home I probably work for 10 hours. When on campus I probably get 4 hours of work in, if that. Plus, I am so much more productive at home. I have a quiet private office with a much faster internet connection and better equipment. On campus, people don't know how to shut up, so it is hard to get work done with people around me discussing things that have absolutely nothing about work - the other day, 2 people spent an hour discussing how much butter is in Danish cookies! Right next to me!

That hasn't been my experience. With a home office, it's hard to tear myself away from work. Commuting is a waste of my time, and a "clean break" ends up costing my employer several hours a day. I'm salaried, so that isn't a monetary cost, but I've seen a real benefit to productivity.

Of course, employers want both butt-in-chair metrics and 24/7 availability without increasing pay. Don't give them that.

> But I believe most employees simply put in less hours when working from home

What do you have to back up your belief? I work from 8-6 on most days +/- 30 minutes. Lunch is a walk downstairs, grab something and eat it at my desk. That's pretty typical of the group of engineers I've been working with remotely on/off for the past 15 years. I don't think we're exceptional in this regard.

With three out of three different employees so far, all slowly did less and less work the longer they worked from home. I’m 90% sure one of them had an additional job, and another one admitted it when he quit. I don’t like to micromanage so give developers a lot of freedom. Few people have as much long-term integrity as we like to pretend we all have.

> I believe most employees simply put in less hours when working from home

From my experience and observations I've gathered from my teams, my conclusion is the opposite of this. I have to regularly tell folks to watch out for burnout and it's ok to wait until Monday.

I've definitely been on the other side of this. If I have a 5pm train home to catch and a 45 minute ride to disconnect from work, I'm not likely to log on later and get more work done from home. With remote, there is at least the temptation to continue working longer, especially if I have a lot of work to get done or a deadline.

Over the past 2 years many studies have actually shown the opposite. People work during what was their commute time, they work when they are sick, during lunch break.

Less distractions tho.

Remote is high risk, high reward. If you’ve built a great organisation filled with talented, motivated and trustworthy people who have autonomy then remote work can be a fantastic boon to productivity because it’s an extension of the autonomy that helps the workers thrive…

…if you’ve built an average organisation filled with people who are demotivated by bad management who have no autonomy and struggle to drag themselves through the day, then remote work will shred what little value you’ve managed to extract from a dysfunctional organisation.

Remote work isn’t the problem, the problem is further upstream: if you work for a company that is restricting remote work, whether you love to work remote or in office, it’s a sign to leave.

I love working in an office and do so every day, and consider in-office collaboration to be very valuable, however, autonomy is far more valuable.

So, from a managers perspective: if your organisation is struggling with maintaining output while permitting remote work, you can either radically rethink your entire organisation and engage in a multi-year project to undo years of mismanagement… or you can just ban remote work. Of course, the latter is just kicking the can down the road, but kicking the can down the road is usually the only real option without buy in from the board.

I heard from one large tech company that was pressured by the city to bring people back in order to prop up the city's downtown service sector.

The company caved because they depended on city approval for some licenses.

The person who told me this was an analyst tasked with cherry picking data to justify the decision that had already been made on political grounds.

(This was after a few drinks and has not been independently verified)

The desire to not be involved in professional cherry picking was a big factor in my decision to steer clear of data engineering / data science jobs early on.

The problem, of course, being the city's discretionary approvals

Remote work requires a certain culture and skillset. You must be a good writer, type quickly, be self-expressive online even when not prompted by management. You must self-document and self-promote.

Believe it or not, many, many people are not good at that or don't fit that mold. Yet they can still be productive. They just require more supervision and the ability to express themselves in a manner that suits them.

If remote work suits you, and doesn't suit your management or your management's culture, don't try to change your whole company. It won't work. Instead, search for a company that is a better fit for you.

> You must be a good writer, type quickly, be self-expressive online even when not prompted by management. You must self-document and self-promote.

This right here. One of the failings of remote work being talked about in the comments here is, IMO, easily attributable to the company's focus on spoken (whether in-person or via Zoom) communication rather than written.

I have a strong preference for written communication with regards to work, whereas most of the companies I've worked for have preferred spoken. My preference isn't superficial, it's based on what appear to be obvious advantages -- past communication can be referred to again later, planning and documentation kind of organically occur via written communication, complex ideas can be given more time to be developed in an email vs off the cuff/probably worse explanations when spoken. The few times I can get people to actually just read the long email I just wrote, outlining a whole plan and my justifications for certain decisions, everything is super smooth.

But most of the time, peoples' eyes glaze over and they go "wow this seems like a lot, let's plan a Zoom meeting to discuss." The meeting happens somewhere within 1 - 10 days, usually being pushed at least once, I explain everything I wrote (often times just reading straight from the email), but then at a certain point peoples' eyes glaze over once again and they say "sounds like we're really getting into the weeds here, do you mind typing this up into an email that I can read later?" I then proceed to scream into the void.

Rinse and repeat, and after literal weeks, finally the contents of a perfectly cogent email that could have been read and understood in ~10 - 15 minutes have finally sunk in. It is absolutely maddening.

A strong culture of written communication is now one of the single most important things I look for in a company. I'm not against spoken communication, far from it -- having actual in-person or at least Zoom time is nice, and for brainstorming or discussing a plan, written communication isn't as good (though I've had quite a few great Slack brainstorming sessions). I'm not a shut-in, very sociable, and I enjoy a nice balance of remote and in-person work. But for work, which is by definition something for which I strive to minimize time spent/sanity lost and maximize income received, written communication is far and away my preferred method.

I wonder if there is a bias towards WFH on HN because the type of person most likely to like WFH is also the kind to post a lot on internet message threads. I think most people feel most productive spending at least some time in the office with other people, face to face. Further, I assume many people are like me and feel like some pressure to actually go to the office is good, or I'd too often make the short term easier decision to WFH.

Related, in my city (I sit on some citizens advocacy groups for public transit) - I’ve noticed the city’s planners that work at the department of transportation are still full remote after all this time. Almost all of the work this department has been undertaking has stripping half the lanes from MAJOR surface streets and putting in bike lanes nobody uses. The bike community is very active online and knows how to brigade people. I wonder if being remote all this time has made it so that they are hearing the loudest voices (bike advocates) and not talking to working people who have to commute everyday (online these people get bridgaded by bike people, they are also not as active on social media)

Basically think of it was having your worldview warped by r/fuckcars

that's a really, really interesting take.

Some problems are solved faster by multiple people getting together in front of a whiteboard and drawing. For those kinds of problems it’s useful to have people in the same room until we have AR solutions that can fill that need. Also for some people, not leaving their home caused significant issues in their performance. People aren’t solitary creatures, so for some - the office fills that role. For others, home office works perfectly well. There isn’t a yes/no answer here. I should perhaps add, that coming to the office was always voluntary in my company, way before Covid.

Sorry but in my opinion you can't beat free styling with Excalidraw and a bunch of nerds leaning back in their own basements and home offices thinking deeply and being critical of ideas.

The overhead of having such meetings is next to nothing in remote compared to the office. No one has to get up to go to a meeting or book a meeting room.

Did you just have a eureka moment 5 minutes after a meeting ended? No problem! Ping the group chat and get on a call in less than 15 seconds while the idea is still hot in memory.

Oh you want to pick up where you last left off? No problem, upload last meetings Excalidraw file and start editing.

Ha the good old tale of people gathering around the whiteboard to solve hard problem.

IME, it's usually 30/60 minutes during which the Architect listens to himself, draws some nice boxes and arrows, overlooks all the edge cases and nuances and then everyone goes back to their open space desk. And the next day you realize that the solution doesn't work and you start a Jira comment thread.

> Some problems are solved faster by multiple people getting together in front of a whiteboard and drawing.

I hear this often, and it makes sense, but I am not sure how frequently do people solve problems with whiteboarding? Is it such a frequent problem that we need to be in the office every day?

At my company we have the worst of both works with "hybrid office". Employees need to come to the office 3 days a week, each team picks one day for the entire team to be in-office, the employees can choose the other days.

The team day is mostly consumed with in-person meetings with others on your team, so no individual work gets done that day. The other in-office days are either spent heads down with headphones trying to focus or trying to book one of the limited conference rooms to have a zoom meeting with coworkers that are working from home or in a remote office. It's hard to book meetings before 10am or after 4pm because someone's usually commuting during that time.

Companies should either pick full remote or full back in the office, Hybrid doesn't seem to work well.

Or just provide actual offices to people, the kind with doors that shut. Make the office actually an attractive place to work.

"each team picks one day for the entire team to be in-office, the employees can choose the other days"

If a team were to adopt a common set of three days by consensus things might be better? Perhaps some teams have already done this?

Good luck with it

Let's talk about resources and overhead. If you WFH, then you're paying rent, utilities, you have a kitchen, you may well be BYOD, your ISP is a consumer-grade connection, you've got renter's or homeowner's insurance covering your stuff.

That's all miles different from working in an office. They've got cleaning staff and a maintenance team. They've got an enterprise-class high-speed redundant Internet connection (and the on-prem servers are on your multi-GB core network.) There's a break room and free sodas in the fridge. The engineers don't need to clean their own toilets.

I mean, if you think about it, it may be crazy for companies to insist on RTO because of costs of all that overhead they're saving, except for the simple fact that you get what you pay for. There are reasons people work together in offices and not from their homes, there are economies of scale, and there are efficiencies that happen.

I've been waiting for the penny to drop for some time now. Since COVID-19 locked everyone at home with a consumer-grade ISP, I've had plenty of time to read my TOS and service agreements. And you'd be hard-pressed to find such an ISP that actually permits "commercial activity" or WFH to occur on their connections, which are intended for gaming and entertainment. In case you haven't noticed, consumer ISPs don't really care when your connection goes down. The SLA is 0 CBR, best-effort delivery. So, enjoy your WFH infrastructure, but you get what you pay for.

My Site B is the public library, where I've been assured that I can conduct my WFH activities on their network, even in a private study room. That's the best I've got for now. If you're RTO--count your blessings. I have no office to return to!

> That's all miles different from working in an office. They've got cleaning staff and a maintenance team. They've got an enterprise-class high-speed redundant Internet connection (and the on-prem servers are on your multi-GB core network.) There's a break room and free sodas in the fridge. The engineers don't need to clean their own toilets.

By saving on office costs you can just offer those benefits to your remote employees. You can hire someone to clean a residential bathroom too!

> There are reasons people work together in offices and not from their homes, there are economies of scale, and there are efficiencies that happen.

Such as?

I work as an engineer at NASA in Cleveland, Ohio. We went from 100% in person work to completely remote work for a year and half due to the pandemic, and now the work environment is mainly in-person but remote work is much more common. I often work in a lab with physical hardware which obviously requires me to be present. Additionally, we don't produce anything per se, we do tech development. I'm not cranking out widgets/code/whatever where my productivity is easy to objectively judge.

Here are some reasons I could imagine in-person work may be advantageous:

-I think there is probably an increase in camaraderie when people can interact with each other in-person.

-Spontaneous unstructured collaboration and innovation absolutely increases in-person. We rarely have informal asides after a Teams meeting, but it happens a lot after in-person meetings.

-Hiring new inexperienced people who are from out-of-town and having them start 100% remote is generally a bad experience and they pick things more slowly.

-People that working from home abuse it and multitask by running errands, watching their kids, etc. This is great for employees and I would guess that it is a large part of the reason that many employees are loathe to go back to work 100% of the time. Productivity can be difficult to track.

-The NASA network is very reliable and under our complete control. Remote work depends on each person's home internet connection/router/wifi and it's MUCH slower and less reliable. I often deal with large quantities of data and and the only way to work with it is locally on the same network it's produced on. Sure I can remote in, but then we're back to depending on public internet infrastructure. Sometimes things break so I guess I can't work on that today.

A related thought: -If large percentage of the workforce depends on the complex public internet infrastructure to perform work, that creates a possible weak point in their operations that could be affected by adversaries or maybe a natural disaster or something. I get that many people here do work that would cease to have any purpose if the internet disappeared so there's less disadvantage to remote work. But most industries use the internet for convenience, it isn't fundamental to their existence and everything they do could be done without it.

Certainly regions which have been neglecting internet infrastructure directly or indirectly will be at a disadvantage, including economically. This is hardly news. The pandemic also made it more obvious to many people that fiber build-out is a must, since latency and upload also matter for remote conferencing, not just download speeds.

As for adversaries or natural disasters, internet rarely works without electricity. In the small scale, my guess would be internet barely increases the weak spot that is already present via electricity. In the large scale, it doesn't matter if someone is in the office or an hour away.

Pre March 2020 almost none of my meetings in the preceding 5 years included a single remote person. I liked that better for working. I felt more connected to my colleagues and more in tune with what was happening around the firm.

Of course I also enjoy some of the flexibility of WFH.

They want you in the office because

a) they are thinking that you are slacking off when you are working remotely. This might be true or not.

b) they are unable to quantify your work and decide if you are successful or not, which is an indication of unfit management. By forcing you to go the office, they can justify their own existence, claiming they are managing "their" people.

In my 25+ years working at US companies, I encounter the latter case with managers, who came straight out of the army, doing noting but but barking orders at their subordinates all day long. They were under the impression that corporate America was managed the same way. I personally put a couple of them in their places, in those days.

CEO of the company I worked for, straight out of college, one day, gathered up all 120 or so of us, new hires straight from the school and and gave a speech. One thing he said still sits with me: Good managers want to work with people who are smarter than themselves. Others want to work with mediocre or worse people, because they do not want their decisions to be questioned by their subordinates.

The people who want you back in the office are not good managers. They are "the others"

For those who are replying with "all my projects were remote before anyway" or "I was on video conference before fully remote work too!" - how many of these co-workers on video were at another office site, or had worked at an office site before "going remote?"

Before 2020, I also had video attendees in almost every meeting, but they were either at another office site where they still had a peer group and some co-located team members, or had a long tenure at the company and had been "allowed" to work remotely.

In my opinion these previous remote-attendee situations are totally different dynamics from running a fully remote team. There is a special, major challenge in managing a team where many team members have never met one another, a coworker of any kind, or their management in person. It's a surmountable challenge and I think some of this can be explained by the cynical "employers would rather let remote employees go than learn something new" take, but working in and managing a remote team is still a unique experience IMO.

I’m unsure why an engineer would want to be back in the office. There are a lot of distractions and unnecessary stress.

From my point of view, engineers who depend on others to get their work done like to be in the office. Because it makes it look like they are collaborating and getting work done.

From a manager point of view, this looks like collaboration as well. And would benefit the project. This is why they want people in the office.

I disagree with it. There are engineers who like to manipulate other people and it is far less likely to happen in a remote environment.

Just my observation, not 100% facts in all cases.

Not an employer myself. But still taking a jab.

"We have set unrealistic expectations and those aren't met. So we conclude that employees are slacking. Thus we want you back"

"We pick lower-tier employees who won't work until they are forced to."

Additionally to all the comments, I think it is a challenge for most middle managers and up. Because it becomes obvious who can manage people and who can not. Who is capable of planning tasks and who is not. They have less personal/social leverage => they need to be professionals... and 50% are not ...

In the office there is always an illusion of control and it's easier to come up with ad-hoc tasks.

But in my opinion, managers who don't know what their employees do via remote. They know even less what happens in the office. But sure every one looks busy when the boss is walking the floor... :D maybe that gives them a good feeling.

I personally prefer a mixed week, like 2 days in the office and 3 days remote. But I would say the remote days are more productive in a sense of getting stuff done.

I'm an employer, but my opinion would be the same regardless.

The script is something like this:

Person1: Arg! This thing!

Person2: What ya working on?

Person1: <...> is giving me trouble.

Person1 then figures it out while trying to explain it, or Person2 has a helpful idea. Happens multiple times a week. If you were working at home you wouldn't even know you were missing out on this interaction.

Also, WFH is also just too distracting if you have a family/roommates etc...

I'm sure there are plenty of jobs where regular, informal face to fact interaction didn't help me solve problems faster, but not in my line of work.

I have some interaction with Federal employees too. They have been out of the office for a long time. You now have more a problem getting a hold of someone who is nominally 'at their desk'. I don't know why this is, but its a fact.

I'm not a direct employer, mostly an investor and solo entrepreneur who has low likelihood of ever employing people again. Used to be a big employer until sold my company.

Personally I have seen lots of different work in my previous work, and I just don't believe that remote work provides as much value for the shareholders. Productivity is likely better as remote, but the communication and trust issues cause problems. People often end up working on wrong things.

Personally I won't be investing in remote-only companies, unless it is somehow extremely stellar project.

Not an employer but the answer is obvious: control.

It is true you can get some organic team-building and spontaneous collaboration but the cost of that is so high, it's no justification. Not having to commute, being able to live in a lower cost area, having flexibility to run errands, etc are of such monumental value to people.

But the real lesson here I think a lot of people are learning to their surprise is that tech companies are really no different to any other companies.. Moves like forcing you into the office and all the entails (commuting, face time, regular hours, no real breaks, unpaid overtime) has the same motivation as layoffs for the "recession": to suppress labor costs.

15 years ago we had collusion by Apple, Google and otehrs to suppress wages through collusion not to "poach". Now? Other companies laying off 5-10% of staff gives every other company the freedom to do the same. It's all the same: to suppress labor.

So forcing you into the office is both about control and increasing organic attrition. Some people have made new lives in the last 2 years and can't just come back to the office. A certain paercentage of those will quit. Great. No severance.

Many tech workers with so many good years and high-demand for our services have fallen into the trap of thinking they're somehow above the adversarial (exploitative) pressures other people are subject to. Fancy offices, Herman Miller chairs and "free" food play into this delusion.

I really don't care - whatever works for you. But there are a few things I observed, due to which I believe remote work will not be default work mode in the long run.

* There's significant rise in burnout rate and LOTS of people looking for professional help with psychological issues. Many times more than in previous years. Some returned to the office and got significantly better, because they simply lacked human interaction (both their and surrounding opinion).

* There's group that prefers to work from the office for various reasons (people, work/life separation, small/noisy home).

* Both groups make significant part of our teams. Due to that some additional people decide to join as they feel they are missing out on part of the discussion and team interaction. This tends to snowball.

* Then there's elephant in the room: I know some people (personally, but outside of my org), who will hire at a few places (three or more) and bluntly lie about being full-time dedicated to each of them. They'll actively delay work giving false reasons, to maintain that illusion. Some employers will react by implementing group responsibility, when they find out.

Disclaimer (I had that discussion before): if you have steel-strong psyche, prefer people from outside work, have great communication skills, can sleep 2h a day and work 16h or have negotiated terms of employment that allow to be hired at a few places - good for you. This comment is mere observation, not attack on your life choices.

This topic comes up a lot, and the biggest pro return to office argument is essentially social. People want more human interactions that online do not give them.

This I think is more indicative of society, and I think is something that is a gap in society / business opportunity. WeWork, which was poorly run, I think really has a foot into this, but not to the full extent. In urban design there is this idea of a third place, somewhere that is not work or home that people interact. These places have massively declined in the west, especially in the united states. People used to have many many third places. People had work, and home, but then they would also have church that they attended weekly or more, they would have union halls, taverns, social organizations (masons, elks, knights of columbus, vfw, etc). A lot of bars and restaurants are a lot louder and more consumer focused than they used to be I think as well which has hurt.

Public Libraries are another place that could step up, try and get more people to work from there and socialize, but most libraries have pretty bad hours and are undefunded or have strict silence requirements. But I can see a need for some kind location, that is open a lot, 7am-10pm or something, that you pay a membership fee for. That you can go anytime, and drink cheap coffee or beer and work / socialize in them.

Not an employer, but work at a pretty big company where the CEO made a pretty big tell: he mentioned that remote work seemed to cause a loss in overall productivity. But then almost all engineers chafed, and he had to clarify: we was talking specifically about the sales organization.

My sense is that leadership making these decisions simply isn't really tuned into how engineering operates. And that's mostly it; they're focused on the business, and probably are dialed into the sales pipeline. And that probably leads to tons of questions and one-off-style clarification sessions where video chats and Slack just aren't great, to be frank.

At the same time, I do think there are significant tradeoffs between a remote team and a "shared meatspace" team. With remote teams, cross-team relationship building is really challenging, and I've noticed that there's a natural tendency to focus purely on your team. With all teams in a same physical location, it's easier to actually just pop by and clarify complex details. But, I did work at a place that got hundreds of engineers together about 3x a year, and that seemed to be enough to build significant bridges across the org.

Ultimately though, in my experience, these kinds of decisions are just because upper management is more aligned with sales organizations than engineering.

I can't speak directly for the people you're actually asking. I'm involved in these meetings at my workplace. I don't agree with the call to bring everyone back to the office even though I like working from an office. I've been fully remote since before the pandemic but I like seeing coworkers. I'd like to think I can "see it both ways." I voted against bringing people back but I lack the all important "C" or "V" in front of my title so my opinion carries little weight.

From my company's discussions, my take is that it's hard for the C suite to feel connected to employees without face to face time. Why? Probably the very basic issue of 1 on 500 or 1 on 5000 communication, which is hard in person and even more so online. I don't mean 1 on 500/5000 presenting, I mean the exchange of ideas and gaining understanding of the people that work for you. If you're a front line manager or sufficiently senior on the IC track then you likely had to learn new techniques to communicate in 1 on 10 and 1 on 20 engagements. It's harder to scale that to 1 to 500 or so.

If you hold the power of sword and purse, then it's "easier" to mandate that people work from a location you can easily travel to.

I'm not answering this directly as an "employer" but just a few imperfect observations...

Many people do not need social connections and interactions to be productive and happy. I find that most of the people who want WFH or be entirely remote fall into this group.

Many people so need social connections and interactions to be productive. They find value in dealing with people 1:1. Its how they socialize in-part, how they make friends, and provides variety in their day. They may like to WFH on occasion, but the office interaction is integral.

So... it is (IMHO) mostly the first group that we hear from in these discussions. I would argue that OP is in the group. That second group is often ignored when these questions are framed in such an abolitionists manner ('this works better for me so it must work better for everyone').

Its not just 'employers' making arbitrary decisions. It is not a simple question to answer and a whole host of other factors come into play (company culture, company size, history of remote work, location of teams/people, timezones, and so on).

(Minor note: I find myself in the first group but I appreciate that there are many sides to this)

Employers are locked into all these commercial real estate transactions and since it's a big part of the budget, they have to utilize it. The alternative is a realization that without the performative part of office politics most of the stage is unnecessary since in most companies the core business ultimately is done by a small group of people. Often similar with tech teams... Management and middle management without the meetings and performances to prove their need and value require everyone in the office to be in attendance as an audience. Otherwise it's just even more obvious how much is needed for the core business to be profitable and succeed.

So far Twitter has been a good example. Now for workers, it's important to go back for other reasons. Remote workers reduce your power negotiating as an employee and it's a much larger pool to even get hired. Being able to be in person becomes an emoloyment advantage at that point.

Working closely with a number of pro-office senior leaders it basically comes down to a few thing:

1. It is very hard to steer a giant organization and get everyone on the same page under ideal circumstances. Work from home makes that even harder because people aren’t as tuned into what is happening beyond their job. If the business needs to pivot it takes longer.

2. Most senior leaders spend 6-10 hours a day in meetings. It really sucks when they have one or two people on Zoom and everyone else is around a conference room. Wait, your mic is muted, Ted. Oh, no it is the conference room speaker is off or something, I don’t know…20 minutes later someone fixes it, but it wasted 20 minutes that all those people don’t have in their day.

3. Usually senior leader, C-suite folks, got to where they are at, in part, because of how good they are in the in-person meeting / 1:1 in-person. It is their super power. You take that away and they feel less effective.

Answering the direct question in a simplistic way: because this is the preferred style of collaboration for these employers you are talking about. Let me elaborate.

It is not good or bad, effective or ineffective, nor it is the case for all employers.

Here is my take: the preferred style of work (office, remote, hybrid, flexible) needs to be shared between the team members. Not unlike people's values. If the vast majority of people on the team share it - you are golden. If everyone has their own - you have got yourself a problem. By all means, please, ask it on the interview! (Goes both ways, for the employees and for the employers.)

Now, I understand that right now there are probably more pro-office employers than people willing to accept it. Whether it is true or not (do we have some reliable statistics on this? are we a vocal minority instead?), I think only time will create an equilibrium (new generation of middle managers, etc.)

I'm an academic in the humanities, and we've had working from home (except for teaching) for decades. You have a range of people from those who just come in to teach during term time and otherwise work from home 2.5 hours away by train, to those who are in the office all day every day. We also have big get-togethers in the form of conferences.

My experience since 2020 has pushed me against working from home, in particular research seminars are far worse online. The quality of questions is much worse, and engagement is visibly worse than when we have them in person.

As for research... a lot of research ideas come from corridor chat. If you have an idea for a paper and Dave down the corridor is an expert in the area, it's much easier to test the idea out on him as you walk back together from a seminar than to email him. Maybe it shouldn't make a difference, but it does.

Shitty management/lack of processes.

That's it.

And I think it's understandable. Management is hard.

For many (most?) it’s fairly clearly about demonstrating power over the plebs. For some there’s making it look like their investment in shitty open plan offices wasn’t a waste of money.

Of course they dress it up as collaboration, much like they do open plan offices, and much like open plan offices it’s BS in this case as well.

Obviously there are some people who desperately want to return to the office as they use the office for socializing, except that of course they’re taking the position that their socializing /lack of non-work life is more important than everyone else’s life.

Also chatty coworkers isn’t productive, especially in open plan offices. Oh and of course now you get to have coworkers coming to the office size and giving you plague as they did prepandemix, only with an exciting new plague option as well.

It's a combination of the following: 1. Hr and management Karen's/Joe's looking for control 2. People who hate their families and want a socially acceptable way to get away from them. 3. Corner office types who spent their careers trying to get one just to have COVID and cloud services make them realize it was all a mirage anyway.

At least this is what I've seen. I don't have a problem with hybrid schedules but the last in office place I went to did a Monday, Wednesday, Thursday hybrid week. FFS, it was awful. Id have all of this go juice for Monday, lose it for work from home Tuesday and be miserable for Wednesday and Thursday. Just do Monday through Wednesday in office or Tuesday through Thursday. Just keep all the in office days together.

>Nearly every meeting I’ve had in an office since 2014 has been a video conference with remote people.

C-level leaders at my company set a mandate for our "distributed sites" to be relatively autonomous with their own missions and roadmaps. But middle and line-level managers keep making exceptions, finding it expedient to use India and LatAm teams as extra hands for projects run out of the US, for example. So as an employee you experience most of your collaboration being remote. Your EM and your skip get it. But HR and the CEO don't.

We're in a situation now where almost nobody knows anyone in their management chain who cares about their attendance, but the CEO and HR have made clear that they will be firing people who aren't badging in.

The management class is dominated by extroverts, who cannot imagine not needing in-person interaction to thrive because it is what they need.

Sadly, the biggest employer motivation is some have very long leases and don’t want to look stupid to the board for having signed up for useless office space with a decade still on their lease. Others are motivated by ego, being able to walk down isles watching their minions tools away. However, never meeting people IRL definitely reduces collaboration and performance on highly iterative and collaborative projects compared to everyone going and meeting IRL. Meeting at least quarterly for 3-4 days can make things work, but time in an office is better. Again, if you work on a team. If you are and IC, quarterly if probably fine or entirely remote might be fine too.

Junior and some mid employees seem to do worse - at least in the small amount of data I've seen since the pandemic. This is likely part culture, which emphasizes individual performance rather than team performance. If you're a netflix-style organization that only hires seniors then this is less important.

I think hybrid, with ~2 days a week - one dedicated to any team meetings and the other pure work is a good compromise plus regular in-person summits if you have a geographically distributed team. Don't just get in-person to meet, working together allows you to learn the the many subtle things about people's workflows that may be good or bad.

Maybe does not apply to high-tech companies but I personally witnessed fintech company employees slowdown almost to halt. They stopped working and did not finish many of the tasks unless managed in person. Majority of employees find ways to watch netflix/hulu/youtube even on company laptops (or play games). They miss the first minutes of meetings, you can hear them eating stuff and plate sounds in the background while talking to them. Unless the employees are career driven, they stop working and find ways to do bare minimum to get their paychecks. That's why.

Because there are people who can self-drive and get themselves to work and become productive without having to be reminded/ridden.

Then there are people who need someone over them (and that's ok).

Most people think they are the self starting type. Most people are LYING or WRONG about their ability to self start & self manage. Most people simply are NOT more productive but think they are. The numbers state otherwise. I'm all for remote work for high performers and self starters but everyone places themselves in that category and it's only true for a small percentage.

I'm not in the position to set policy but if I had to give a reason: mentoring of juniors. This could be done over chat and webcam but it appears to me this is not a great fit for everybody.

I remember an interview of Blockbuster long time ago who claimed that their business will never go out of business because people come to their store for the people connection, chatting with employees, walking around the isles searching for videos, and ultimately the experience of even going to the store.

I was actually in agreement with them at the time. But fast forward 10-20 years and with Netflix and YouTube, looks like they were wrong about the whole thing.

I think the same is playing out here with the in office vs remote work.

Banks are offering almost 40% more than they offered me last year for 2 days hybrid. It's amazing.

Remote communication is not as good as in person. One zoom meeting is not the end of the world. But after 1000 zoom meetings, the problems start to compound and matter a lot for any team that requires a lot of communication.

If you're maintaining legacy software, the requirements are relatively clear, everyone is experienced and knows what to do, and you're not in a hurry to ship, bearing the extra communication overhead of remote work is probably not a big deal, and you get the benefit of hiring people where the cost of living and wages are lower.

On the other hand, if you have a fast-moving project where you still don't know how to solve the problem, you need cross-functional collaboration, speed is important, you don't have time to spell out all the requirements in writing, you're trying to get junior people up to speed, etc, remote work makes that very challenging. It doesn't make it impossible for a project to succeed but it makes it less likely.

Ultimately, the measure of productivity should not in the number of lines of code written or tickets completed, but in delivering value to the customer. Many of the projects I've worked on in the past couple years have ended up failing and were a huge waste of time and money, and I think a lot of it comes down to communication problems.

I think we can categorise employees into two: Experienced professionals and everyone else.

The experienced professional has a track record of coming up the ranks in both position and skillset. He doesn't need to talk to people as much to get work done. He has a good understanding of the domain and has strong analytical skills, able to break down complex problems by himself or with another experienced engineer.

Then there is everyone else. Everyone else does not have the above characteristics. They do not have the skills needed to work by themselves or even learn by themselves. Juniors get frustrated because they don't have the necessary number of synchronous experiences, relying on async forms of knowledge without the ability to piece it together (or at least do it quickly). Furthermore, everyone else accounts for a bigger percentage of the organisation. Most people do not have the skills I mentioned above.

To conclude, some people manage equally well or better remotely. But it's not the case for the whole organisation.

Follow on question: I wonder what the long term effects on company juniors are of working fully remote. I estimate it takes each individual 3-5X more time to get upskilled.

As a counterpoint, I (like many other) love working from home.

I still get to see colleagues maybe once every few months for an all-hands/drinks after, and I consider some colleagues to be friendLY, but I wouldn't consider myself friends with them; my friends are the people that I have around every week for movie nights/gaming sessions. Colleagues can become one of those people but they generally do not (& in fact probably like most people I haven't stayed in contact with the majority of people from previous jobs).

In terms of mental health: I feel much better working from home for so many reasons, I don't have to commute so I can get a little bit of extra sleep when needed, nor am I contributing to mass pollution of the environment with my needless travels. I can have packages delivered and be there to collect them, tidy the house or cook myself a proper lunch over my break. I can do other chores like put washing on in the morning and be able to hang it to dry once it's done. When I'm being social in the evening we can start a lot earlier; no need to wait for everyone to get back to their respective homes, shower and get ready and then travel all to one place - because they're already at home. If I'm feeling ill, but still ready to work rather than going to the office and giving everyone a cold, or staying at home on a sick day and being bored out of my mine I can still just work. I can itch, scratch, cough, blow my nose, fart, sit in a relaxed manner without social repercussions. I can control my working environment in totality - if I want to listen to music on a speaker I can, if I want to put my desk next to my window I can, if I hit a brick wall and want to take a quick breather to make myself a coffee and decompress for 10 minutes then I can do that without looking "lazy".

I do still think for more junior developers that it's important to have an "office day" once a week or fortnight especially for mentoring purposes.

What a lot of people forget (including myself at times) is that a very high percentage of polite & friendly coworkers behave that way ONLY because of the contractual settings. IRL they wouldn't give you the time a day.

Funny story: I had a coworker one time who would come talk to me every shift (I never went to them), they wanted to know every detail about my existence, pick my brain, had surprisingly interesting things to say and tell, made funny jokes, laughed at my jokes. We would revisit topics and talk about them some more or exchange new found insights. Then when I quit I asked if we should stay in touch and the response was: why the hell would I want that? I'm like, why do you come talk with me every day? Oh I was just being polite. Apparently it was important for all of those people they didn't like to like them. It was entirely political!

I wasn't hurt or anything. More like amazed by the quality of acting. A format like: "Oh? you like pokemon! I like pokemon too! Let me impress you with my perfectly faked pokemon knowledge while thinking: o god, another one of those pokemon people & if only I could remember where I put my pokemon shirt.

These aren't real people people.

This is the area my startup is in (hybrid working) and i've been exposed to work practices and decisions at several hundred companies. Unsurprisingly, the common theme is that it's a massive culture shift. You're looking at breaking something that's been the norm for a LONG time, and almost breaking it overnight.

I've spent quite a while trying to formulate a response that covers everything but it's a deeply complex subject and touches on physical space constraints, employee development, cost (both to employee and employer), speed of decisions and response, and (all) employee wellbeing.

For every positive, there's a negative and if people aren't sure what to do I think they just default to what they're familiar with and knee-jerk back to what was the norm.

I think we're only getting started with remote working, my feeling is that there will always be office only companies (in the same way there's always been remote only companies). And the most common will be 'remote first' model where you can work where-ever you want but you're expected to attend certain meetings in the calendar in person.

I worked for 5 years for a group that was located on a different continent; I was the only one not in that office. My performance was stellar based on official evaluations, but career was stagnant, I was almost a myth than a real person with a real career. Salary raises were limited by the level in the company, so that had a ceiling too.

Then I was the manager of others for even more years and we were part of a geographically distributed team. I asked the people to come to the office a couple of days per week, mostly to discuss face to face the stuff not so productive on audio (we almost never do videoconferences) and to have lunch and keep the feeling of being part of a team. This was only because of my previous experience.

The result was during the summer most of the team was in the office most of the time (the request was only for 2 days), while during the winter the people with complicated comute were coming only a few days per month. Some of us were walking, cycling or motorcycling to the office, so weather was an important factor and traffic is usually very bad on bad weather, working from home was the right choice.

A full work from office makes no sense, in my opinion, for most IT people except local helpdesk that interacts with people, from replacing a laptop to fixing an app for the business people, as IT people usually self-service their problems. At the same time I believe that a 100% work from home is not good for many people, especially new hires and people that thrive in a community.

There is also the aspect of performance: if a bad performer is just a name, a person you never met and don't care, it is very difficult to empathize and the tolerance for their mistakes or slowness is very, very low.

A lot of the comments here are binary. Why not advocate for hybrid, 3 days in, 2 days out, or vice versa, giving junior people opportunities for exposure and mentorship and giving everyone time to build culture together, but allowing people time away for deeper work? And then why not invest in your office space so people aren’t treated like animals at a trough and be in actually good locations with walkable amenities?

Employee here, I really enjoyed full remote work during the pandemic, but I have to admit after 6 months I started to feel pretty lonely. I think for mental health reasons employees should be encouraged to at least do hybrid, but I do expect my workplace to also provide flexibility to suit everyone's needs. If I had kids I'd probably try to be remote as possible.

The company I'm with since 2015, was founded in 1989 and has been fully remote since that time. As a remote working for 8+ years, I found the initial transition difficult (came from brick and mortar) but now I cannot imagine going back to that. The collaboration and spontaneous connections work just fine remote, at least they have in my experiences.

I’m a middle manager in my 40s. I’ve been going into the office since the fall, but was fully WFH during covid before that and made the decision to go back in purely due to personal convenience. My company continues to offer employees flexibility and has not mandated RTO.

That said, we have a lot of team members in the firm in their early 20s, their first jobs. I’ve noticed a preference for those team members to RTO (at least a few days a week), and that a good deal of learning and camaraderie result. It is certainly far easier for me to mentor such folks in the office (especially since most aren’t on my team) than when we’re siloed at home.

More senior folks prefer remote — it’s generally easier to balance family demands. But ones who’ve joined the team having been fully remote from the start have even expressed difficulty coming up to speed, despite everyone on the team being transparent and working to solve the issue. It takes new habits and they’re hard to learn.

I think that within a few years this question is going to be much more nuanced. There are numerous tools for remote presence, from chatting to real-time code windows, 2d RPG-style shared spaces, and 3d and VR shared spaces.

My assumption is that within say five years the question is more often going to be something like, how often (if at all) are you required per day or per week to "teleport" into the shared AR/VR collaboration space.

We should anticipate putting on a pair of normalish glasses or maybe goggles that can then integrate a very realistic virtual room into your home. There will be eye contact with what appear to be real people. These will make heavy use of AI for compression and realism. This is just extrapolating from existing research or enterprise devices and software that have most of these capabilities already.

Many people will view this in the same way they do going to the office. They will either think it's essential or a total distraction.

I'm not currently an employer.

I think over time remote is going to lose. Once the revolution is over and things mature remote working will become far more invasive and controlling than it is now. Then on-site companies will start out-performing remote, especially very large companies.

I reckon many employers make the same calculation and want to head it off.

Because going remote first is hard.

Because "you", as an established worker in your industry don't need hand holding guidance.

Remote first will never replace the way impromptu mentor sessions happen in person or after hours. I am extremely glad I had the opportunity for this, and I want to replicate it for the juniors just entering work.

Not an employer and I'm not a fan of RTO personally, and I've figured out how to remote work.i do help with interviews and I do have to say our success rate of good hires kind of went off a cliff with WFH, hires that we would have expected to excel absolutely flopped. Now it may be that we as a company or group are not geared with our processes to properly bring up ppl in this environment,becaus we expect a basic amount of integrity and work ethic from people, which is starting to look like a bit much. We actually have a very relaxed culture, no unpaid OT generally and unchecked flex hours...all on an honor system, I see a lot of abuse from the COVID hires and I worry. So I see why management isosing faith. Even I'm starting to pitch office days to get people moshing.

If you live in any medium to large city there are countless young professional organizations available. Join one or two and get involved. Be willing to volunteer for committees and participate in events and you will quickly have a full social calendar. Junior Achievement is one great organization. Jaycees is another organization.

Young Republicans or young Democrats are a couple of great organization. Want to meet young people who are going places in their life? You will meet them in these organizations.

Do you like exercise and fitness. Look into Team in Training. This is a fundraising arm of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Sign up for one of their races Go through the training and fundraising process. You will me lots of other like minded people. After your race consider becoming a Team in Training coach.

The possibilities are endless. If you are lonely it’s by choice.

Short answer: Control.

Traditional employers want their employees back in the office since they are unable to control them otherwise. Employers and managers who have failed to grasp the concepts of remote working, lack in async communication, and have trust issues with their staff, want to keep a physical headcount of the sheep

There aren't that many actual employers responding, but I read several of these comments, and kinda starting to see a pattern: clichês, anecdotes, no nuance, no acknowledgement that the world has changed, or that teams, jobs, and people, can be different then your own experiences

Y'all are not looking good, bosses.

I want people to be around each other enough that they are comfortable interacting. Some of my most painful experiences in management come from having to mediate a low-level dispute between people who work together but never interact on anything other than work. They are quite often on the same page but have different ways of expressing themselves that can cause friction. This often happens as part of having a highly interdisciplinary and international team. It is incredible how much a few shared lunches or coffee breaks can relax people and help them cohere.

I see in-person work as one of the only opportunities for scheduled casual interaction. Mandatory fun time is not a real solution, but the fact that exists often speaks to the perception that casual interaction is an essential part of building a team.

I suspect HN skews senior/established in our careers, but it’s interesting comparing the sentiment of people on here (almost universally pro-remote) with candidates I’ve talked to when we’ve listed roles. A lot of candidates, especially more junior ones, explicitly want an in-person office culture.

20 years ago I was on a lot of conference calls early or late in the workday, offshoring my job to a time zone 11.5 or 10.5 hours off, or with sysadmins 1 hour off.

The only thing that's changed in 20 years is Zoom or WebEx vs a conference bridge. There wasn't an in office dynamic then or now.

I'm a wfh proponent. However, could the mission to the moon have been done from home, today? In the timeframe that it was completed? I'm sure there's good arguments on either side. But there's something special about the face to face connection that you can't replace with emails and video conference. I believe humans are more effective at getting things done, in person.

Another fact is that today's managers are all from a time before cellphones existed... For the most part. If you're 30 something years old, you remember when you still picked up a book or hung out with your friends at the mall. Which makes me believe that it will take a generational shift for us to truly abandon the office... Whether that's a good thing or bad.

None. 100% remote for 8 years with a team of 40 in the cybersecurity space. It’s all about control.

https://www.defiant.com/truly-remote-vs-total-control-wordfe...

1) Managing remote employees is harder. Managing in person is easier.

Both are doable, but managing someone remotely requires either the manager and/or the employee to be really good at remote comms.

2) in person spontaneous collaboration

3) my experience is most people get less done remotely. Some do more, but most do less

It is much easier to perform the display of “valuable manager” when you can hover over people.

Employees that perform just fine without being micromanaged are a threat to the livelihoods of people whose entire jobs are scheduling meetings and arranging office pizza parties.

I see a lot of “good” answers where good translates to reasonable business or social goals. But I can think of quite a few bad reasons.

The top reason is, management wants workers back in the office because managers never learned how to manage people, so they practice management-by-walking-around, aka interrupt-driven behavior. Many companies have a culture of MBWA, and it’s a hard curse to break.

Another bad reason is, distanced work has led to a substantial reduction in workplace unfairness behaviors such as sexual harassment and race-based favoritism. And this, logically, has made female and minority employees more valuable and better performers. But in many workplaces, favoritism is the order of the day, and women and minorities were not the favorites. The favorites are now performing worse than the people they stepped on to be unfairly promoted, and it makes incompetent executives look, well… incompetent.

Another reason is that many people, particularly executives, have more authority, respect, or control in the workplace than they do at home. For quite a few people, their office has become their primary social outlet. And taking that away has proven unlivable for them.

The other reason that immediately came to mind is that executives are, by and large, older than the rank and file, and they (we) come from a time when building, maintaining, and overseeing an office space was both a critical part of the job and a source of pride / ego. For older management, offices are still a real-world manifestation of the success of the company that signals to other people how effective the leadership of the company is. People are less able to derive the same sense of awe from abstractions like sales numbers. If people don’t return to the office, it will not continue to make economic sense to have flashy offices, and this ego outlet will disappear.

Are these good reasons? They are not. But these reasons, honestly, ring truer to me than “hallway collisions.” In the real world, all motivating reasons are self-centered reasons, and executives simply don’t benefit from hallway and breakroom magic or mentoring of the young. They do perversely benefit from showy offices, discrimination, avoiding overt displays of their lack of skill, and forced social conduct, though.

Here at ardour.org "head office" (my home in a small village in new mexico), we just had a 5-6 day hangout of myself and the other main developer. We have spent years collaborating online on this large project, but in those few days we were able to resolve some high level design issues (well, we hope we resolved them) that have proved resistant to online discussion.

This experience isn't enough to justify the idea that we (or anyone else) should work in close physical proximity all the time. But it does point to one of the plusses of doing this at least occasionally.

Not an employer but:

- Older execs are too stuck in their ways

- Busy execs __need__ a work family to rationalise their commitment

- Hard to make a culture when remote

- Hiring is one of the hardest task in most companies and it’s made harder by remote. Not being able to nail onboarding and the face to face getting to know someone can be lethal

- In the 1% of times, when shit really hits the fan, remote is best because you can have zero communication delays, command management etc. As an “exec” these are the moments that you optimise for

- Bad eggs leave such a bad taste in the mouth.

I’m not an employer and not even exec level. So I may be totally off base. Just my observations.

We don't - at least not all of us.

I have a mandatory 1 day in the office for the staff, the office is there for anyone to work from at any time - no one ever takes it up, they are very comfortable working at home.

And I get it - I prefer working at home too - I also love our 1 day in the office where we can have a laugh with each other, get lunch together and generally bond as a team, but as the CTO of a company where pretty much my entire dev team are introverted , its not a big priority for me to have to get people back into the office.

It's not about the productivity, it's about the culture and the shared experiences. It would be tough to argue that those two things don't matter for the success of a company.

My guess:

- the communication aspect (I've noticed projects with people who are physically in the office progress much smoother than when I have to schedule a meeting or reach out via chat; the friction to ask someone is lower when you run across them and can see that they're not busy vs. pinging them and then not getting a response because they actually were in a meeting)

- some people treating WFH as "part time, work a few hours between child-minding, chores and other non-work tasks" or a fear of that happening

I have 4 employees. We're in person because the extra 1-2 hours of programming they do here, they do on issues I urgently raise and directly affect the bottom line.

And while I would trust any of them to work remotely, I would never hire someone to work exclusively remotely.

I have only met one person in my life, ever, who has asked for exclusively a remote arrangement and wasn't trying to take advantage of us, and the guy was practically a wizard of engineering and deserved whatever arrangement he wanted.

Because they have assets sitting there empty and accountants are like wtf you gotta make use of this were stuck in the contract for x years. There ya have it. Simplified but mostly the cause, if ya company rents space to operate and tells you reasons other than above they are probably lying through their teeth at ya. It's got zero to do with what they think is good for you the worker or some water cooler innovation bs and everything to do with profit,loss and expenditure.

I would love a fully remote job (currently looking, in Germany), and I understand that, for some people, the office is the place to meet others and socialize. I like socializing, but I have my wife, cats, and after work hours I have online friends who I do online projects with.

I understand the loneliness, and I've certainly been there, but learning to find people and things to do outside of work is the key to "surviving" a remote job.

> Employers, why do you want us back in the office?

Because we're all paranoid that the other companies will somehow gain some sort of economic/productivity advantage from bringing their guys back into the office and leverage this to push us out of the market.

Even though we keep seeing research that this absolutely isn't the case, the only way to be sure is to preemptively bring our guys back into the office too. Ya know.. just in case.

I’m not an employer. I’ve worked in academic research as a software engineer and research scientist for 20+ years. I don’t think great research can be done without some kind of regular in-person collaboration. Serendipitous, chance interactions are part of this. But for me, there’s no substitute for whiteboarding in the same room. Now of course we also need lots of time to do focused work by ourselves.

I dislike remote work, because I live in a small apartment which means I don't have a special room for work and that leads to the fact that my work and my free time sometimes aren't clearly separated anymore. I also think that there are people who are good at remote work and people who aren't, the people who aren't mostly abuse wfh, while the other group strifes in it.

Dragging us back.. says it all really. The majority of companies weren't supporting remote work as a new flexible way for their employees to work. They were supporting remote work because it was the only way to get ANY work done at all during the pandemic. There is always value in face to face interaction and compartmentalising work from our personal lives.

I have a very hard time believing people are so out of touch with reality that they don’t understand why employers want people in the office.

You’re not in back to back meetings from the moment you start work until you finish. Not all meetings involve teams in other geographies and even ones that do might still be one where most people in the call are from one city.

While in office, every single person talks to coworkers at many random times throughout the day. That builds comradery within and across teams. That, in turn, means each employee cares more about their job and the success of the people around them. That in turn, makes it harder for them to look for other jobs because your not just completing some tasks from day to day like a machine. It’s not just boring chit chat either. You’ll sometimes briefly turn your chair or walk a few steps to get someone’s opinion/ideas about something you’re stuck on with your work and vice versa.

Aside from this, having people in the office reduces the number of people who slack off during the day. This point shouldn’t be glossed over. Not only does it hurt productivity, depending on the type of job, that will put extra burden on others on the team. A slacker could at the very least take on some of the work of others and that reduces overall stress and improves overall morale.

I love remote work and would hate having to go back to the office more than a couple times a week. That said, I can still be objective and understand the viewpoint of someone running a company and wanting in person collaboration.

People are missing the point. Remote work is about judging you by your results. In person is about your manager watching you.

I don’t think work culture has broadly attuned itself to working from home and how companies operate hasn’t shifted enough to leverage its advantages and mitigate the disadvantages.

Companies that do figure this out will thrive of course, as it seems that this is something employees are willing to stand up to management over

Not an employer but if I was, I would absolutely be full remote. Employees mostly want this and costs / headaches are far lower. I don’t buy into the “water cooler” thesis. If you want people to collaborate more, ask them to work together. This is where I find the best connections are formed.

Well, see 4 years ago we invested in this new office building with lots of open office space and small conference rooms with shiny whiteboards. Now it's all empty and we need to make sure we can tell corporate it was a good decision. Therefore, we need as many butts in seats as possible asap.

78 comments as of now and I can't find one from an actual employer, only people speaking for employers.

1. We generate trust faster and stronger when we are physically present.

2. Teams with high trust tend to be happier and deliver better and more.

3. Some people need to be in the office. Hybrid approaches (some people at the office, some not) suck. So full-office, or say goodbye to the people that need the office.

In this thread: lies, fabrications, misinformation, disinformation, deception, skullduggery, wayward words, dirty deeds, and a case and a half of the finest bullshit you’ll ever read.

They want you back in the office to make the management happy, to make the corporate rent make sense, to make the banks happy, to feed the giant machine whose primary purpose is 100% unequivocally NOT getting stuff done (tm)

If your team isn’t getting stuff done remote, investigate a protocol for communicating the business and product needs to the developers, and maybe skim some commits.

If you are being threatened with back to office and you don’t want to go, make them fire you, use your resources, and I’d estimate there’s about a 95% chance most of you can find a higher paying position elsewhere, or at least equal pay & remote-first. The world is changing, don’t let them play tricks on you.

I’ve fought with DC traffic for twenty years, I’ll be damned if I’m ever going to show up in an office for less than a client-vendor situation or L5/6+ all hands. If it’s on fire, you better call my work phone and make sure my deposits are up-to-date.

I know it’s tougher for the younger bucks out here, and that loans and rent and everything might tip the scales a little further away from you. Do your best, do what you can, but I strongly recommend putting up the fight for more comfortable work arrangements.

If we’re all gonna be obsolete in ten years, they might as well be paying us right and speaking to us right for the next nine!

Of course to control better and coordinate effort for the profit better! There is no but in the most of coding business. We all know we have access to the information needed on the internet. This is something aimed for PROFIT. Not for your lives to make better!

My reasons:

- I like easy access to my crew

- I feel like people goof off when WFH. I know I do.

- For most people (not all) office work is better from a mental health perspective than WFH.

- For most jobs (not all), the work is more easily performed at a high level in an office environment with easy access to colleagues and resources.

Big organisations are lead by people that hang out with other people in big corporations. Some of these other corporations are friends with people in big organisations that own office properties or do office cleaning or whatever. These corporate leaders have common interests in office workers being at the office and justifying paying friends of friends and keeping them happy.

If you're a bigwig and cut down on office spending other bigwigs will be less likely to help you out when you need a new position, among other things.

To explain the 'hallway talk is great' myth: it's from the masters of process, owners of product, and other similar people, that work relatively closely to the people actually building and maintaining the systems that make dah mahney. These people learn a lot and get a lot of things explained that they otherwise wouldn't and that makes them feel less nervous about not having any actual control at all over the output and functioning of the 'team'. They could of course ask over asyncronous chats or email but they don't know what to ask and they're scared they'll irritate someone, so they prefer sucking it out of smalltalk by the coffee machine.

And then there's the 'but how will I ever manage to take a walk or bike if my boss doesn't tell me to'. If this is you, get help. You have some executive dysfunction that will eventually be unhealthy somehow, probably when you're unemployed or have a lot of spare time for some other reason. Fix it before you realise you've spent amazing free time that you yourself got to own on doing none of the things you know makes you feel good and strong. How to do it varies, it could be therapy, it could be to move to a less polluted place, could be something else.

Remote is here to stay. Fire your boss if they insist on you spending more than two days a month at some office for no good reason.

Solving the in-person/remote work problem is becoming intractable.

The people who prefer remote seem to strongly prefer remote. Any arguments against it are dismissed as RTO bootlicking. See the top-level comments here from people who will absolutely not give up remote work and are giving people advice on how to live in a remote-only world. (Just get a hobby, bro! How hard could it be? Can't make friends after work? That's a you problem!)

The people who prefer in-person strongly prefer in-person. They think that this is the ONLY way to build a community culture and foster spontaneous collaboration. Moreover, the kind of work the people with "power" in these organizations (executives, salespeople, marketing, etc) have is almost entirely face-to-face, and they are also raising families and dealing with traffic, so there's willful lack of empathy there too.

Hybrid work environments make it easy for the "minority" to miss important context.

Either extreme (RTO, or full-remote) leads to serious backlash.

I think that a mostly-full RTO will win out for the same reason that chain layoffs happened this year.

The biggest companies are all _very_ pro return-to-office. I don't know of any big companies that stayed full remote after vaccines were viable.

The smaller startups that can do full remote are vying for acquisition or to go public. In both cases, the power dynamics will shift towards making people go back into the office because that's what the people in charge want. (Again, their jobs are mostly face-to-face, and they also raise kids and deal with traffic and doctor's appointments, so empathy is lacking there.)

For the industry in general, "hybrid work" at a coworking space may be a compromise worth considering. Whole regional teams can be in the office a few days a week and the company need not commit to a long, expensive lease agreement.

I couldn't work in a modern office without my noise cancelling headphones. In fact, as I look up from my desk, I can see dozens of engineers all wearing them. We commute into the office to sit in silence with our headphones on.

Not an employer but I noticed that after 2 years of working remotely I feel like I have enough. Not just enough of working remotely. Enough of working at all.

Then again I don't think I ever stayed in any company for more then 2 years so that just might be me.

How about just reconfiguring bullpen office back to semi private cubicles or tiny phone room offices? Make the office a place to come to for a better work environment.

Let’s be honest- these bullpen setups suck and very few people want to “return” to that.

> there’s not much in-office dynamic like maybe there was 20 years ago

Yeah, because folks like you insist that office culture has nothing to do with productivity. I wonder if you've ever worked somewhere productive.

> dragging us back into the office

Dragging? Are we slaves now?

Perhaps those of us that would enjoy some in person socialization should meet up in person? If you’re in the Bay Area I’d be happy to get coffee as a group, maybe even make it a thing where it’s available frequently.

The elephant in the room for return to office is commute. If the office was <20 mins for most employees, I doubt there would a huge hue and cry over going in 2-3 days a week.

Am employer, but only after covid- during covid i wanted to get back to the office as soon as i was vaccinated. The reason for that is that i missed my coworkers. I missed the spontaneous connections, the conversations, the hang outs. People are social beings, and being fully remote means a lesser emotional connection. I don’t like that.

> what are your primary motivations dragging us back into the office?

The truth is, for a great many jobs it's impossible to measure work well enough to tell if you worked 1 day or 5 last week.

You're debugging a memory leak? Well, maybe it was very difficult to find. You're reviewing grant proposals? Who's to say how carefully you read them? You say it was very difficult to make this page work on chrome, firefox and safari? Well, if you say so.

Meanwhile, employers have read articles about "quiet quitting".

I suspect employers fear we're on the golf course, working a second full-time job, or reading HN. Sending people back to the office assures them that's not the case.

> not much in-office dynamic like maybe there was 20 years ago

what’s an example?

Security. It's easier to secure a small set of networks than it is 10/100/1K/10K/100K network connections. We're at Quantum. It's that simple.

Not an employer, but my read is this:

When I'm in the office, I have little, off the cuff conversations I can't have online, where I can express and develop a thought that would otherwise be gone as quickly as it came to me.

IRL, I have thousands of opportunities during the day to get 10 seconds of feedback, online I'm not likely to get a response because of the context switching overhead.

I don't want to be 100% in the office, but the one day a week we have at the moment is definitely positive for the whole team.

Tl;dr: the creativity that can be achieved by having people to bounce ideas off is multiplied when they're in the same room.

Scrum Masters (and equivalents) have gotten lonely and don't feel quite as useful without in person interaction.

Whiteboards !

None of the online whiteboards equivalent tools work as well a old fashioned white board and markers.

Real estate.

Probably because we are not as tough in-person as behind a screen.

I feel most people love the office but hate the commute..

Not an employer, just a mid dev. People waste their time so much remote. In 2021 it felt like almost noboby was getting any work done. You need good managers to handle that, and they are rare.

People slack off when they r at home

Communication bandwidth.

Because there are people

I like the office...

its difficult to micromanage remote employees

I'm not from the US (EU) and we're doing hybrid model (wfh if you want to, work from office if you want to, combine both as you see fit, no requirement to notify anyone on your preferred model).

I like to work from my office. What I hate about remote work is often waiting for responses from multiple people. Something that used to take ~60 seconds to deal with now takes up to an hour while waiting for everyone to answer. I dislike video calls and I prefer to use written text as a way of relaying information crucial to engineering / configuration / infra.

I never cared about office and having to work from the office, but it's noticeable that a lot of people don't have sufficient self-control or work ethics to be as productive from home as they are from the office.

TL;DR:

1. people work less efficient from home 2. it takes a lot longer to receive information

Serendipity.

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