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One of the other issues is that I don't hate the office in principle.

However open plan, sales folks yelling on a phone, demands that I don't wear headphones to drown it out, is all so draining.

I remember the lead up to Christmas 2019, some fucking idiots decided that what we really needed in the open plan office, where I'm already positioned near the café, was removal of mini-meeting rooms, and 2 hours of carollers.

I don't want to listen to some people singing their echoing Christmas songs in a "jazzy" way. I still had to do calls and support other teams who I couldn't hear over the noise.

If working from the office actually meant having a small closed off space for my team so we could collaborate, have meetings, design sessions and planning it would be great.

If going to the office meant having other teams available to whiteboard their problems in an available meeting room, come up with a plan and roadmap the improvements it would be great.

However they got rid of offices for teams, they got rid of cubicles so that other people's calls would at least be muffled, they got rid of partitions between people's breakout spaces and the rest of the floor so I have to listen to inane conversations at other people standups.

If this kid wants an office because he needs social interaction, that's fine. We can do a hacking session once a week. We can go to the office to plan and design fortnightly. I've done paired programming, problem investigation, where we have just an open call between two people and a screenshare so that you aren't alone and we can talk it through.

In principle the office is a social space with productivity possibilities. In practice, most companies appear to want to make the office the most unpleasant location to be.

To paraphrase a coworker, they demand productivity... but then manage to make the office the most unpleasant, unproductive environment available.

An uncomfortable desk and ancient HP monitors, none of which I can upgrade or change; loud coworkers; tons of unrelated teams, for whom sharing space is unnecessary; and calls with people, most of whom aren't even in the same city (or timezone). Meanwhile I can do all of that at home, more effectively, with far more flexibility.

Yup, my home office has 2x 27" monitors, my camera is just right, as is the mic, I've got a deep, 2m wide real wood sit-stand electric desk, a Aeron chair, all my stuff is right here, it's quiet (though I can always play music loud if I want) and lighting is just right. I'm within 2 minutes walk of a shop and take-away.

No office I've ever worked at came close, the closest I've had was having dual monitors, as for shops, most offices took longer to get to the front door, never mind actually reach anywhere!

Like you, I appreciated his comment. It was honest, and I have been there. We are in the shaking-out phase of this change. The bigger problem is management isn't across-the-board good at determining productivity in-person or remote. Good managers are rare, and staring over someone's shoulder to make sure the work is getting done correctly is harder in remote work. The systems to provide this checking and oversight are still maturing - I don't mean employee surveillance.

I've been at the other end of the spectrum where I don't get work done in the office. I get involved in crosstalk between coworkers too much. We go to far too many pointless meetings. Everyone wants to share about their family while I'm working. I feel over-socialized and it affects my work and my ability to disconnect at the end of my day. This is a job. I get paid money for the work I do. I should not feel indebted to people who parody themselves as my friends (coworkers) who need this last-minute thing done by me at the end of the day. I'm off the clock and I want to disconnect. How many times have I worked through lunch? How many times have people called my personal number for non-emergency needs? The workplace infringes on my work-life balance, and remote work gave a large part of that back to me.

If we care about both groups of people (those over-socialized, and those isolated), we should give the worker the option. A good supervisor should be learning how to engage with the employee in the way they wish to communicate, as long as the work is getting done.

> I've been at the other end of the spectrum where I don't get work done in the office.

Open offices are what destroyed the experience of going to work.

When I had a private office (the first 17 years of my career) I loved going to the office. I had all the silence and privacy to get work done, but at the same time I could step out of the office 2-3 times a day and hang out with the team, chitchat about work, projects, life, hobbies and have a real human connection. When it was time to get back to work, could go back into the private office.

But open herd rooms these days broke everything. No concentration, no privacy, no in-the-zone ever, just forcefully being distracted all day. So now I just hate all these people around me making noise all day. Thankfully the pandemic put an end to that so I can concentrate on work away from the office. But I miss the human connection we had then everyone had private offices.

I'd go back to an office enthusiastically 5 days a week if I had a private office. But if you force me into an open office, I will never again want to go in person.

As a 49-year old software developer that had the real-office experience early in my career: same.

And the crazy thing is some companies are pushing for even worse than open-office plans and have moved on to "hot desking", all the same problems of an open office except you also don't even have your own desk space, just nomad your ass around the office and hope you find a spot to slap your laptop down.

The fact that some companies have mandated return to office and also have adopted a system where you literally have no space of your own at said office just seems insane to me and makes me wonder when the bunk capsule style hot desking is coming.

Just think of the office rent savings if we stack them 2 or 3 high! Nevermind the fact that the company thrived for 2+ years with almost nobody in the office at all.

I listed private office as a requirement for my current job. Now I'm in the office almost every day.

At one point in time there were talks of sharing the space. I told them I had other options. The talks died.

Don't only negotiate on salary.

I had an office at my first position that I shared with one other person, and after that a cube, and that was mostly fine as it removed the majority of the noise.

I don't need necessarily a personal office. But I need them to be reasonable.

A closed off space for just the 6 folks in the team would be fine, and a separate small space for someone to go to for a call or a 1:1.

I didn't put this together until I read your comment, but I resonate strongly with what you say here. it's been so long since I had an actual office that I had forgotten and, looking at it through this lens, it's true: what I like about working at home isn't so much the working at home part, but that I now have an office.

Put yourself in the executives shoes for a second, they're not stupid people, they know how large the risk of blowback is and how many employees they might disenfranchise or lose. They're that confident that remote work is a bigger threat to their long-term performance and they don't want to get lapped by the companies with an in-office culture

This argument is an appeal to authority that I just can't buy. You don't have to be a stupid person to succumb to your own biases, you just have to be human, and plenty of executives make irrational decisions based on their subjective feelings.

FWIW, I read GP's comment as more an elaboration of incentive structures rather than an appeal to authority.

You're still right that plenty of people make irrational decisions under whatever incentive structure they're in, but I think that the steelman version of GP's argument would probably go something like:

    If we see a large % of companies going full-RTO, then maybe there's something to be said for the bet that RTO is a long-term competitive advantage.

...or, they might all just be lemmings, too. It's hard to say just yet, but I think it'll be interesting to see if there's an effect on stock performance over the next 10 years based on what companies decide now. (I feel like that's probably how long it'll take for the full impact on company culture to play out.)

It's quite safe to say that whatever companies do next year or the following one is purely due to executives bias or lemming effects.

If there is a very strong impact on competitiveness, maybe we will notice in about a decade, if companies don't collude in stopping it.

As do the people being asked to commute. It’s the same base rate.

Not like you are providing any cogent argument. Execs sure have their own biases but they do have a lot of data to make important decisions like RTO policy. If you disagree with them, maybe it says more about your ignorance, blind spots and biases?

Sure, I'll bite. What's the data on remote work?

I was talking to a CTO at a mid-sized startup (200 people or so; private company; I think ex-YC but not 100%); been there for a decade type concern.

Person flatly said no one works in WFH. I am also a manager and responded my team busted their balls the whole time, and delivered results. My personal opinion is my team did 120% of their productivity. I also acknowledge that some people are not built for it and their productivity may fall. I believe a manager can deal with this (either creating the right task-incentive structure, or getting the person off the bus). After my impassioned argument, the person said ..nope .. people just don't work during WFH. This was a social event, just the two of us talking, so I am quite sure this guy was being honest.

I also ran into a different person in a leadership position (just not very high; more like technical leadership; ex-professor; stints at Google). He was convinced the real reason FAANG hired so crazily was because productivity per employee had dropped dramatically. His belief was no one worked during WFH. Again, my impassioned arguments and personal anecdotes did not really move this person.

Just replied to another comment in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34679651

TL;DR: if there is no data, decision makers are going to stick to what they know best. And what current execs / c-suite knows best is in-office. They haven't learned management techniques for fully-remote yet.

I also started compiling research showing the value of in-person interaction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34673235

Executives are indeed stupid people

> Workers with full schedule flexibility report 29% higher productivity and 53% greater ability to focus than workers with no ability to shift their schedule, according to a just-announced report from Future Forum. But do bosses trust employees to be productive when working out of the office?

> Microsoft released a new study, where it found that 85% of leaders say that the “shift to hybrid work has made it challenging to have confidence that employees are being productive.” More concretely, 49% of managers of hybrid workers “struggle to trust their employees to do their best work.” This lack of trust in worker productivity has led to what Microsoft researchers termed productivity paranoia: “where leaders fear that lost productivity is due to employees not working, even though hours worked, number of meetings, and other activity metrics have increased.”

So workers are more productive with remote flexibility, working more hours and managers and execs still want more.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/glebtsipursky/2022/11/03/worker...

There is a bit of a leap of faith between "Workers with full schedule flexibility report 29% higher productivity" to "workers are more productive". Everything else being equal, I would trust the managers more than the employees' self-assessment.

> Microsoft released a new study, where it found that 85% of leaders say that the “shift to hybrid work has made it challenging to have confidence that employees are being productive.” More concretely, 49% of managers of hybrid workers “struggle to trust their employees to do their best work.”

nothing about this figure from managers says employees are more or less productive, just that managers having a feeling workers are less productive, they can't trust them etc.

sounds like the managers are just projecting their feelings onto employees.

Yep, they are uncomfortable because they can’t fall back to idiotic / superficial metrics ie. “butts in seats” and it will require more work/introspection etc. to find actual better metrics and use them

Execs know that they have no idea how to measure performance so they can't risk someone taking a paycheck and doing no work, because they can't detect that.

You are making the dangerous assumption that these people know what they are doing. Time and again, winners and losers emerge of this and many of the top level executives turns out to be dead wrong.

And you are making assumption that these people are all stupid. What is your arguement?

I’m not making that assumption, it would be as dangerous. I’m making the statement to not assume their intelligence based on their position (high level c-exec)

Intelligence aside, do we/they have proper data on the topic to make an objective and sound decision in the first place? It’s not really something that can be just “thought out” like a step in a game of chess.

In my opinion and experience, coworker’s performance vary greatly in and of itself and we can hardly ever correctly measure a single person’s “productivity” in a non-faulty way. Many companies’ simply fall back on more-or-less subjective, textual analysis of their workers and base basically every decision on that.

> do we/they have proper data on the topic to make an objective and sound decision in the first place?

Let's assume none of us have any data to make an informed decision. Then what is our "default path"? In-office arrangement is something that has been tried out for decades if not more. The decision makers, who are typically C-suite or execs, are specifically the ones who progressed and thrived in that system. Guess what they are going to choose when there is a lot of uncertainty? Obviously an in-office setup, with maybe some concessions to working from home 1-2 days a week because that's comfortable even for them.

The only exception would be young founders who haven't learned any setting yet, and in fact who would like the allure of a "digital nomad" lifestyle more to embrace fully-remote.

stupid =/= incompetent

I've known math wizards, PhD mega-thinkers who would be terrible at leading organizations and pushing projects.

Lots of mgmt is incompetent, and there is a bell curve there just as bell-y and curve-y as other employee ranks. Like, basically by definition 50% are below average like anywhere else.

The missing piece is that plenty of these < 50th percentile can get jobs, often high level ones in respected companies. It's often who you know, how you make people feel, and what sort of connections and optics you bring to the table.

I think you're wrong, people are generally short-sighted, stupid and selfish, including executives.

We used to have diversity in work environments in the US and then allowed everything to become monopolized by a handful of big corps who demanded hyper normalization at the office.

I agree with what you said at the end though, but would add OP needs to do the work of building a life outside of their job. Doing so is “work” in a physical science, vanilla dictionary sense. What we do to play Society: The Game is a job and coworkers have lives that do not revolve around other coworkers. Adult life is going to suck for OP if they don’t build a social network or even just general social skills outside of the office space.

I agree with your statement about him being the most honest person here. The most I can give him credit for is that you're already out and it keeps you from going back to your house.

Everytime I read that "humans are social creatures" it's a dog whistle for "i want to see people miserable and pressured to do it"

He doesn't want you back in the office. He wants people like him back in the office.