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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

IMO the cat is out of the bag at this point. People know that working from home is a compelling benefit, even worth taking a salary hit for. Management knows workers want this. Recruiters know it. All it will take is one major company to say "screw this, lets offer wfh and reap the rewards" and then they win the title of best company to work in that sector and well qualified candidates are leaping from the curmudgeony competition right to them. Employees who have had experience working from home are like a dog thats gotten a taste for blood at this point. They will always be a flight risk if they don't have it. This is the new world.

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> well qualified candidates are leaping from the curmudgeony competition right to them.

When I asked "well qualified candidates" what they prefer, there was a split between hybrid, remote and in-office with hybrid winning a plurality. People like hybrid because that allows them in-person brainstorming. Much easier to tackle complex design over a whiteboard than trying to do so over zoom. In-person beats video when it comes to transferring thoughts.

Don't bother. This is a religious topic.

People who are pro WFH will defend it to the death, those pro RTO the same and God[1] forbid you want a hybrid regime.

[1] God of offices, of course.

The difference is that pro-RTO people want to force RTO on everyone, whereas pro-WFH are not.

Pro-WFH people absolutely want companies to embrace fully remote. I haven't yet had a discussion where, after traversal of enough rabbit-holes, everyone agrees that only viable options are (A) fully-remote, (B) fully-office, (C) hybrid where everyone is in office on the same days.

Just to give one specific example - if half the team is in office huddled around a conference room table and the rest half is dialing in via Zoom, the ones in the common room will have far better connection and the remote members will feel neglected.

> Pro-WFH people absolutely want companies to embrace fully remote. I haven't yet had a discussion where, after traversal of enough rabbit-holes, everyone agrees that only viable options are (A) fully-remote, (B) fully-office, (C) hybrid where everyone is in office on the same days.

I have not had a discussion at all with anyone, that says "people should be banned from the office". I have not met a single WFH person who has said anything other than "people should not have to go to the office if working in they are more productive at home".

I don't know where this "the only options are A, B, or C come from" when quite clearly "people who don't need to be in the office don't need to come into the office" is what every WFH person (I guess outside of nonsense "thought" pieces from random people trying to get press coverage, rather than actual employees effected by these choices) has wanted. "Hybrid" plans are entirely about trying to mitigate the unrelenting harm caused by mandatory RTO.

We even get that some times it would be useful to be in the office - but again, non-mandatory RTO folk are not banning offices, whereas RTO folk are banning WFH.

> Just to give one specific example - if half the team is in office huddled around a conference room table and the rest half is dialing in via Zoom, the ones in the common room will have far better connection and the remote members will feel neglected.

If this is how your company operates continuously that sounds like a horrific work environment. Also, people who are working from home are not feeling "neglected". Again, if someone is unable to handle online communication they can go to an office - for larger companies they clearly aren't going to be alone - but you can't project their feelings of neglect on to others. I want to be clear here, "Mandatory office work because I need X, therefore those WFH people must need X as well, and the only solution is to force them to come in to the office" is projecting your personal feelings on to other people, it is not "caring" about those people, and framing it as such is dishonest.

Here is what my "hybrid" work week looks like:

    * I get paid for 40 hours of work

    * I am now required to spend 12 hours driving to and from the office each week.

    * I am not paid for that time, nor are my deliverables reduces.

    * I am spending ~25-30% more hours on work, but am not getting paid any more. Hence I've taken a 20-25% cut to hourly income.

On the plus side there are some huge benefits:

    * People can knock on my office door to interrupt me

    * I contribute to the economy by having to pay for a dog walker, having to buy an additional car, etc

    * I get the comfort of working with a mask on for four hours. It's only four hours, because if I head to or from the office earlier or later my commute would increase by an hour or more each office day.

Seriously, I understand that for some people the opportunity to socialize in person in the office is necessary, and they can do that. But for people who don't need to do that, mandatory return to office is horrifically expensive in numerous metrics, and has literally no benefit.

If half the workforce is in the office and the other half is remote, remote is going to suffer in their career progression. Not because that is "right", but simply because we are all "humans" who place a higher value on in-person interaction and physical proximity.

As a specific example of tyranny of remote workers, I have worked at a company which had the idiotic rule of everyone dialing in from their own laptops even if many of us were in office and some of us were remote. Just to ensure that remote workers are on a level playing field. Needless to say, that policy never worked in practice.

> If half the workforce is in the office and the other half is remote, remote is going to suffer in their career progression. Not because that is "right", but simply because we are all "humans" who place a higher value on in-person interaction and physical proximity.

"I will punish people who don't work in the office, because I want to be in the office and everyone else must also do what makes me happy, regardless of impact on them"

Again, I am so tired of listening to people who are incapable of working outside of office environments claiming that their own weaknesses apply to everyone else as well. Just because you can't deal handle not being in an office doesn't mean others can't, just because you can't communicate outside of a conference room doesn't mean others can't (otherwise the last 30+ years of open source development is fiction), and just because you need your work to provide you social interaction does not mean other people need it.

I get it, for you an office is better, but ffs stop then claiming that it must be better for everyone else, and that anyone claims otherwise is basically lying.

> As a specific example of tyranny of remote workers, I have worked at a company which had the idiotic rule of everyone dialing in from their own laptops even if many of us were in office and some of us were remote.

Unless the point was to keep groups of people from collecting in small poorly ventilated rooms during a pandemic I can't imagine any other possible reason for this policy.

I guess it could also be some portions of the company recognized that some of its management and employees were not able to do their jobs well enough to recognize the value of work done by their coworkers and instead rate performance based on other metrics - looks, how chatty they are, etc. Of course if we weren't having the mandatory office discussion we could also ask "are people who aren't able to rate coworker performance when they're remote using the same BS and biased measures for determining performance when every one is in person as well?".

It goes without saying, that based on everything you just said, that you are saying that it's reasonable to discriminate against people with medical reasons that actually prevent them from returning to the office. After all, if you're immunocompromised, you should know that you aren't as good a worker as that person who wanders around disrupting everyone in the office.

> I have not had a discussion at all with anyone, that says "people should be banned from the office"

Just look around, most of the threads here have someone chime in saying "i'm 10x productive at home with my wife and my dogs by my side, so my RTO CEO is an idiot". In plenty of these discussions, people don't even think about anything but themselves, in the most narrow way.

...your example is a person saying that they are more productive at home, and saying that forcing them to return to the office is stupid.

It is not a person saying "offices should be banned".

Because you seem to have difficulty with this: a person saying "forcing everyone to return to the office is stupid" is not "don't allow anyone to work from an office". Your preferred alternative "force people to come into the office" is definitionally "ban wfh".

I do appreciate that all the "I need an office to do my job" people seem to try to denigrate anyone who disagrees as in your example "i'm 10x productive at home with my wife and my dogs by my side" which is clearly intended to make this sound false. Rather than more realistically:

  * Commuting for a mandatory RTO essentially a massive pay reduction: unnecessary but mandatory commuting is fundamentally unpaid labor. For me "hybrid" RTO is essentially a 20-25% reduction in per hour income.

  * Office environments are filled with people who routinely interrupt their coworkers. It's hard not to imagine that there's an overlap between this group, and the mandatory RTO folk who insist that work is for socializing.

To be clear, I have two dogs, one of which is still relatively young and an idiot, and he is less distracting than many coworkers that I have had. It goes without saying that my wife isn't a distraction because that whole mutual respect thing.

I understand, there are many people who need an office environment to work, for a variety of reasons (focus, home distractions, or not having any other social environment). The problem is that this group of people - which I'm taking to include you - isn't saying "I need this, so I'm going to RTO", it's saying "I need this, therefore everyone must RTO". Oftentimes this argument is coupled with an implicit or explicit "I need RTO for this reason, therefore those other people do to and the only reason that they don't want to RTO, is that they don't want to work".

Again: No one is saying "ban offices", they are saying "offices are not necessary, and mandating them for everyone is at best equally productive, often times not, and certainly makes work much less pleasant for many of us".

A real hybrid system where people don't have to come to the office for no reason makes things better for people who do want/need to RTO as well: fewer people in offices means less doubling of offices, or less dense seating in open plan pens (noting of course that open plan and similar have only ever been shown to be worse for productivity).

But just knowing that both camps exist is important, because it means the "benefit" of fully remote is only seen that way to a subset of candidates. It makes it kind of tricky to quantify when thinking of say total compensation.

> When I asked "well qualified candidates" what they prefer

Not sure if I'm "well qualified" to you, but I assume I am...

When I was searching for a job, I basically told the recruiter/manager what they wanted to hear (after research them). I can work wherever, and since I'm located in a city, a commute is easy. There's a benefit to telling someone what they want to hear so you seem like a "culture fit".

Realistically, I like hybrid but not the 3/2 per week breakdown we see a lot. I want to WFH for 2 weeks doing my work in peace, then go to office for a few days of busy planning and socializing. This is especially helpful around holidays, vacations, etc where my schedule is disrupted and I don't want to be forced to commute. Being told in-office only would be the worst option, because the flexibility of being remote for package delivery, family events, travel, etc is too important. I understand the value people profess of in-person work, but its one of those things that benefits the company more than the individual.

Based on your nuanced reply, you already seem "well qualified" :-)

> I want to WFH for 2 weeks doing my work in peace, then go to office for a few days of busy planning and socializing.

That's a reasonable take.

> its one of those things that benefits the company more than the individual.

I disagree on that one. In-person connections are very valuable to climb the ladder faster, particularly in the early stages of one's career. They are also helpful to forge bonds with senior leadership once you are at a higher position. That typically happens with casual hallway or watercooler conversations, occasional coffees or just while waiting in line at cafes for lunch. I have seen people liking other people more once they have spent some time in person.

> People like hybrid because that allows them in-person brainstorming.

Hands down.

But I'd like to see approaches like "two weeks a month" rather than "three days a week". Start the month off with planning, brainstorming, collaboration, integration, then end it with heads-down focus.

I wonder what the breakdown would look like flying an employee in on a $250 airline ticket and renting a conference room for a day vs paying for an office that sits unused half the month?

I think it would also be interesting to see what ends up happening when cal hsr is finished. Now you can live in merced and could end up in sac, la, sf, san diego, anaheim, population and job centers all over the state really for a lot less hassle and cost of flying. Trains are generally more spacious and comfortable for getting some work done on the laptop as well, maybe you can bake the train commute into your working hours since you'd essentially be in an office that moves at 220mph around the state.

It costs a lot more than that. Airline tickets are routinely 500-700$ (eg. SF-NY or SF-Miami). Then you need a couple of nights of hotels on top. Add 2-3 meals per day. And suddenly you are looking at 1000-1500$ per person. For a team of 40-50, that's ~50K budget for 1 day of productive work.

Now compare that to an office lease where you can get. At an avg density of 200 sqft/person[1], you'd need 10,000 sqft. You can get that for ~500K$/yr[2]. You use that for 10 times in a given year and you are breaking even.

[1] https://aquilacommercial.com/learning-center/how-much-office...

[2] https://www.loopnet.com/search/commercial-real-estate/san-fr...

No go because they need to "manage" this. Everything needs to be synchronized, people need to be aligned. All the busy work needs to go somewhere.

Well it's more people can now say: I can do my job without commuting, so requiring commuting is a corporate choice. Hence, commuting is work time.

Mandating RTO is therefore very clearly a 20-25% pay cut.

There are more than enough people who prefer the office or who are neutral to it that allow them to start bringing things back to normal.

If that were true, then why mandate it?

I find this trend in every thread talking about mandates that people will come along telling us that REALLY employees WANT to be back at the office, but the thread is about a mandate so self-evidently that isn't true.

I say let it be optional and let the problem solve itself. If people want to be back: Go right ahead, and if people don't then so be it. Let the market decide.

> If that were true, then why mandate it?

I joined Google on the first "RTO" day (April 2022) when they tried to mandate it. My team only saw like 1/3 regularly go back by the end of the month, and it's still not better. I would have preferred my teammates be there to help ease onboarding. When no one went back, it reduced the value for me to return, regardless of my preferences. I stopped going in to office to reclaim my commutes, because there was no value in the office.

For better or worse, the value of in-office work is the co-workers. If the important co-workers are remote, then the office isn't valuable. Mandating it is the only way to do it company wide. Thats not to say that in-office is better, but in office can only work if everyone is there. We see this "laissez faire" suggestion all the time, and i'ts willfully missing the point.

On the other hand, this is your perspective as a recent hire. Your coworkers who have not returned have signaled that they think differently than you, that the costs for them to return to the office are not worth what they get from it.

Obviously with competing needs and perspectives, you can't please everyone, so it comes down to how to please as many people as you can and rectify the issues with the displeased people as best you can. Chances are, a company that has been around for a few years is not all new hires on boarding, so the majority of employees might be like the coworkers of yours who don't feel the need for hands on learning time or want more focus versus new hires who really do like that sort of direction and attention. That doesn't mean you leave the new hires dry, that means you reevaluate how you onboard people in this new remote world so that your new hires do feel confident about their situation and how much training they are getting. This latter approach is all too rare unfortunately; its a lot easier to throw your hands up and say you've tried nothing and are all out of ideas than to work thoughtfully on something that doesn't directly relate to your profit centers, especially when the try nothing idea is so popular in business news.

Absolutely! Before I changed jobs, I happily worked remote (95% of the days). Once I fully onboarded, I happily worked remote again.

The needs of the business are not always the needs of the employees. It’s beneficial to have your employees in office, it’s beneficial to have the flexibility to be a remote employee (social and home life preference aside). I think a reasonable reality is that you need to be paid to commute and you should plan for your employees to be together at least once a quarter but not expect it daily.

Of course, but given that there are also a certain number of people who very much seek it out, and the fact you save money as a company, seems to suggest to me that going forward, most jobs that can be performed remotely will more likely than not be performed remotely. Thermodynamics favor working from home, versus cultural memory and emotion favoring working in the office. Thermodynamics always ends up governing life's processes long term, at the micro and macro level.

No one is complaining that the offices are open to people. They're complaining that because some people want to RTO, every one else must also RTO - personal health, safety, and work-life balance be damned.

There's also a nonzero risk to health while commuting. It seems like for every big snowstorm there is at least one multicar pileup with injuries or worse thanks to people having to commute when its unsafe. I bet if you limited travel during snowstorms to emergency related jobs only, pileups would be a thing of the past because there just would never be enough cars sliding in one place to even pileup.

This is a great point. Commuting to work by car is by far the most hazardous thing most office workers do all day. I bet remote workers have a measurably higher life expectancy purely from the reduced commute-miles.

> one major company to say "screw this, lets offer wfh and reap the rewards" and then they win the title of best company to work in that sector and well qualified candidates are leaping from the curmudgeony competition right to them

Silicon Valley has a habit of taking every discussion and injecting it with religious zeal. Not everyone wants WFH. Not everyone wants in-office, or even hybrid. There are team dynamics unique to each configuration, with the relative costs and benefits depending on context. Beyond that, there's a spectrum of options, from remote-only to in-office only, to RTO on fixed days a week to RTO a couple times a year.

Of course not everyone wants to work from home. Not everyone wants parental leave either or a good school district to live in, since they have no kids and it would be irrelevant to them. Doesn't mean that things like parental leave or schooling or working from home aren't huge massive factors that a lot of people think about when it comes to choosing where to live your life and how it should look like. Like I said, the cat is out of the bag.

For me, its like the earth has went from a 24 hour day to a 26 hour day, what an invention in human efficiency these two hours have been! When is the last time we gained two hours of free time as a civilization, when we went from animal to mechanical power for transportation?

> When is the last time we gained two hours of free time

I'm searching for a job now, and one of the things I'm starting to see - and place value in - are 4 day work weeks. I'm willing to take the pay cut, I don't care what day a week is the free day (but friday is the best IMO).

My mother was a very successful engineer in the 90s but went to a 32hr work week to raise me (matched school hours). During the summers she would work 8x4 instead of 6x5 and take Fridays off. She said it hurt her career for the first few years, and she had to work extra hard to re-prove herself but once she established herself, she much preferred the reduced schedule, and continued it even after I moved out.

> Not everyone wants parental leave either or a good school district to live in, since they have no kids and it would be irrelevant to them.

Do very many people think that the quality of education in their area is irrelevant to them? You shouldn't need children to see the benefits of living in a community of well educated people.

> When is the last time we gained two hours of free time as a civilization, when we went from animal to mechanical power for transportation?

That's easy:

1. The 2 day weekend.

2. The 40 hour workweek.

Considering the increases in productivity over the last 80 years I'd say workers are long overdue for some additional time off.

No one is mandating WFH any more.

RTO people are mandating RTO for everyone: "I can't work from home and/or use work as a proxy social life, therefore _everyone else_ must make me happy by wasting hours every week coming to the office for no reason - I don't care if they're functionally taking a 20% pay cut, what is important is what I want".

> No one is mandating WFH any more.

Fully Remote orgs (either full firms or subordinate organizations) exist, and I’d be surprised if it wasn’t more both absolutely and proportionately now than before the pandemic.

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