Hacker News Reader

Don't forget not being able to have meetings due to a lack of free meeting rooms, not being able to communicate so you don't bother your coworkers in an open office, and not being able to concentrate because some coworker is talking!

My company does hybrid work, so it has fewer desks than employees. If you don't arrive early enough on event days you'll spend your day working on a sofa with your laptop on your legs. How productive!

Executives has larger, permanent desks (or offices) that don’t get bothered, and never get kicked out of a meeting room — but their assistants will kick you out of yours. The problem is invisible to them.

In my opinion if you go open office everyone should go open office even the bosses. A previous company did this. Often you would sit next to the CEO in the open office

That's not practical at any company of a decent size. High level executives routinely discuss highly confidential information which cannot be shared with lower level employees until the right time (if at all). That's the reason why they have closed door offices. They need them.

When HP made a big push towards open plan offices, one of the CEOs at the time, Meg Whitman, also moved into a “cube”.

It’s fair to says hers was bigger than average, and access to her meant walking directly through the desk areas of two assistants, however it was undeniably a cube without full-height walls and in the style of everyone else’s at that worksite.

Meg also had a conference room nearby reserved for her use, and did a fairly typical amount of travel (a lot!), but it wasn’t a purely symbolic gesture, the few meetings I had with her where we arrived early she often arose from her desk in the cube and walked over to the conference room. It seemed the desk got used.

At that time HP was doing around $120B a year in revenue and had 330,000 employees but she didn’t say, “I need a closed door office”.

> Meg also had a conference room nearby reserved for her use

If someone needs to hold frequent meetings or be on phone calls, there's nothing wrong with giving them a closed door office.

Sure… but I feel like symbolism like this isn’t without merit.

What is the merit here?

To some degree, a gesture towards fairness and solidarity. Don't ask your people to work in conditions that you won't.

I think a gesture is actually worse. They can say, hey look, I'm just like you. If I can work like this so can you. So buck up. When in fact they can go into their reserved conference room any time they want. Or not even use their bigger cube with 2 assistants. Just get the corner office and keep your gestures.

I'd agree that attempts at such gestures are a calculated risk, and when they backfire the result is worse than doing nothing. But I expect it's at least possible to sell it hard enough that you win over most of the people most of the time.

If someone needs a quiet space to focus, there's nothing wrong with giving them a closed door office.

Is that really that different to the "open office door" policy that Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard espoused in "The HP Way" for decades?

My last employer (a large British FTSE100 insurance company) did exactly this and they solved it by having a couple of boardroom style meeting rooms only they could book for discussing confidential stuff - it can work, it just requires a bit of preparation.

Mark Zuckerberg sorta did so- he had a Regular desk in a semi-regular building (that floor had some more security presence, but your standard badge would get you in, and you could walk by his desk row, though I definitely got the impression if you tried to linger or bug him security would step in rather quick). He had a private meeting room right behind him, but there were plenty of times that I walked by and saw him at his desk.

All that said, I don't think that's the norm even at Facebook, just a carefully maintained illusion.

Ah man I forgot about not being able to find meeting rooms. That was such a time sink! Hilarious.

Clearly there are pros and cons of remote work. Let's not pretend one is better than the other in every way.

There are, but most tech employers made working in the office worse and worse to the point where it's now both unpleasant and unproductive.

Lunch is a big one. Working remotely since the pandemic started I haven't ate this healthy in almost a decade. (And I don't need a coffee after lunch to not be sleepy) Also I've seen much higher quality 1:1 meetings.

Seriously. Trying to keep oneself functioning after work vs just taking a nap and getting back to work, refreshed is sooo good.

After work or after lunch?

welp, meant after lunch

The only benefit of being on-site (the only one!) Is that the meetings aren't scheduled _exactly_ one after each other, but you have the possibility to switch room, grab a coffee before the next meeting starts and also doing smalltalk.

But being full time in an office is counter-productive as hell

I haven't seen that played out. When someone looks for open calendar availability, all they're looking for is an open slot for all attendees. Not 10 minutes after 1 or some of the attendees have finished a prior meeting. So you very well could have 1 meeting end at 10am and another start at 10am.

There’s an understanding that people may be a few minutes late because of travel time. I have experienced a shift in expectations, where being in a virtual meeting at the exact start time is more expected now, than when meetings occurred on site. Also I recall people going out to lunch together. At least where I work, work from home means no “lunch hour”.

I had a good laugh when one of my previous employers tried to solve that with an Outlook plugin. You know what that plugin did? It scheduled half-hour meetings to be 25 minutes long, and 1h meetings to be 50 minutes long. It was actually advertised as a "feature": "Never be late for your next meeting" :)

This setting in google calendar is called "speedy meetings" and my workplace turns it on by default even though we're full remote. People need bathroom breaks.

I’m a pro-remote manager but this is ridiculous hyperbole.

Hacker news absolutely loves ridiculous hyperbole.

The point still stands, there’s so much distraction and waste in-office. While it may not rise to that level at most places, it most definitely does. I’ve seen it as well.

I think it can depend on job duties and home environment. If you’re a manager and have a family or live with a SO, home is probably less productive.

If you’re one of us who write code or build things, and you live alone, it’s almost 2X minimum productivity boost working at home.

Yea, at home your kids, your pets, your TV, your chores, your neighbors, your phone... definitely not distractions.

dont have kids, pets or a tv. my phone is with me in the office. chores are taken care of in short breaks which i need to take anyway. not sure how neighbours would distract me.

dont assume everyone else lives like you

No kids, pets or TV? You're the outlier. Your bosses know that, and that's why more of them are demanding people return to the office. Don't kill the messenger, dude.

Most of us learned to manage that 3 years ago when this all started

If that was true, your CEO wouldn't be requiring employees to return to the office. They know most people are more distracted and less productive at home, and are doing something about it.

It couldn’t possibly be that the CEO is out of touch with the reality of their workers’ daily lives or they simply enjoy flexing their power, right?

Of course it could be. But the CEO makes the rules, so tough luck. Unfortunately your options are either to quit or stop complaining.

So you agree that it is nothing more than a pissing match?

No one has yet to come with actual hard data to prove workers are less productive. Studies have actually shown the opposite.

Unfortunately for you, life experience and common sense show that when people aren't being observed or monitored, they take shortcuts, work less, cheat, etc. You are welcome to meet with the CEO and show him or her your "studies" but I doubt they will be very persuasive.

“Life experience and common sense”. You’re a waste of time.

Here are my "studies" to complement your "gut-feeling" (which I'm sure is easy to ascertain with the proximity of your head to them)

- https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/publications/d...

- https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200519005295/en/

- https://owllabs.com/state-of-remote-work/2021/

Weak sauce. Any boss with the bare minimum of critical thought would reject your assertions. Two of your studies are from companies that build remote-work software. 100% biased. The other looked at call center metrics from China. Is the work you do mindless like that of a call center? Are you expected to collaborate with others? Is your productivity as easy to measure as calls answered per hour? Did US or Europe ever limit the number of children parents (employees) could bear, and thus need to care for?

These weak sauce sources are better than any (read: none) sources you've been so kind as to share. To your point, I am better at mindful activities when I'm alone in my quiet home office with a comfortable chair than I am in a noisy cube farm with Jeff trying to talk to me about his weekend plans or asking me to head to the next-door Mexican restaurant for lunch. Plus, I work longer when I don't have an hour of commute to worry about. Eat breakfast and I'm ready to work.

Kids - at school TV, chores, phone (...) - people who have problems with willpower and distracting themselves are free to go to the office. All the rest can stay home.

> All the rest can stay home.

Apparently not, if you work for Amazon, according to this article.

Thus reinforcing the stereotype that managers don’t understand what their employees are actually doing.

If you think that's hyperbole, then you're not really competent enough to appreciate just how productive coding work can be when not continuously disrupted by managers (pro-remote or otherwise).

You've never seen great products built by teams that work together in an office? You clearly need to get out of your house more. Maybe in-office will do you some good.

The isolation has drove him mad

I am not isolated - I have a great social life; I just don't need work to be social as well.

Never said that! I said that I've never seen great products built by micromanaged teams!

I've been working remote for the past seven years and I'm much more productive than ever before. I'm intermittent fasting right now, so I wake up early after a good night's sleep, do my morning routine, go for a walk and exercise. Then I hit my home office and get busy. I can get a lot done before lunchtime, always much more than I ever did when I was working in an office. Then I have lunch (for me it's really breakfast) with my family. After that, I set aside the afternoons for reading or learning something new; it might be Rust, a foreign language, writing, or a musical instrument. It's my personal investment time.

The biggest savings for me are, of course, time. No commute saves a lot of wasted time, as well as avoiding a huge number of meetings that should have been an email, interruptions from people in the open office, micro-managing, DEI performativity, &c. Software engineers need large blocks of uninterrupted time in order to focus and get significant work done.

I also know some people who are just playing video games and doing household chores 5 hours a day while working from home, and just respond to emails throughout the day so it seems like they are working.

Sounds like the company was unable to measure work expectations before other than attendance. I've played DF at work, I've programmed on my own laptop sitting at work, with nothing to do in my nice suit (JP Morgan Chase). Hell, I've been at companies where the Engineering team does NOTHING and has no expectations for days (Tiger Logic in Irvine, CA). I've seen engineers with Twitch up all day or Xena Warrior princess for multiple days as a marathon in an open plan office (doing a rendition of the IT Crowd). WFH is not the root problem, if the company doesn't have a problem with low expectations.

I've been working in remote environments for 20 years. Productivity issues do not magically go away and are rarely just "people being lazy" unless you're not interviewing well.

And what do you imagine these lazy co-workers are doing from home?

Why does he have to imagine? He can see the results of their work.

Have you considered working multiple remote jobs at the same time? If you're salaried, seems silly to be putting in the overtime on just one job

That all rings true, however the whole industry (or most of it) managed to be built 'on-site' pre-2020. It's not clear where "policing" comes into the discussion here. I actually think the executives calling for more on-site time actually _want_ their workers to take their free lunch, make breakfast and chitchat with their colleagues.

The problem is the people you are talking about aren't going to work more at home. They will work even less. They ruin this for people like you and me because they can't be disciplined. If they aren't at an office they can't get their job done.

So fire them. Everyone is hired to do a function. If someone can do that function with a minimal amount of time, why should they waste their extra time on performative work? Give them more to do, or accept they don’t need the amount of time in the standard work week to complete what you hired then to do.

If they are goofing off at home and not completing their function, fire them.

If you can’t even tell if the function is being done or not then the functions that aren’t being performed are those of management. But ensuring everyone comes to the office doesn’t solve that problem.

Large companies can’t fire people as easily as you might think. Just look at the outrage on HN when a company lays off 10% (even though their numbers are still higher than in 2021).

On other hand most people put even less time in while WFH. They still cook breakfast- only now it is for them, their spouse and kids. Then they need to feed the kids and probably also take the dog out. The we have a daily stand up and they start to think about going to the store to pick up something they forgot so they can start making lunch - again for whole family and feeding the kids. Then they get a little bit of work in with the same food coma as you described until its time for “remote coffee hang out” to make up for the lack of social interaction. And after that their spouse goes to a walk or to the gym with the neighbor so they need to watch the kids while still on the clock.

Active work done per dat hovers around 1-2 hours and most of that is done while a kid is watching cartoons on full volume in the same room and constantly interrupting.

Or they do what I do. Take my kids to school before work. Come home and skip breakfast (or just have a bowl of cereal). Then at the end of my shift, I go and pick up the kids.

They could, but since their spouses are on maternity leave their kids can’t get to the government provided kindergarten and they don’t want to pay for private sector while the mom is at home and supposedly taking care of the kids

And yet with all of these scenarios you've described, the world keeps spinning.

I've yet to see an example of of a company or product that has suffered due to knowledge workers realizing they can use WFH to put in fewer hours and make time to handle their actual important life tasks.

Or we could drop these people and have other people do their jobs

I’ve been doing this for over 2 years. We have shipped stuff that brings money to the company. I have been promoted and got raises as well. As long as one produces the expected outcome, I see no problem.

Well… you say that but we are currently in middle of change negotiations with couple hundred people losing their jobs.

Kids are at school way before software engineers start work - same applies to kindergarten. I don't cook, my kids never had lunch during weekdays at home as they eat at school. School starts at 5 years of age, so, unless you're breeding constantly, what you describe is a fringe case. Also, I use Instacart, DoorDash grocery delivery, Shipt, Costco Same Day, and many others and do not set foot at a grocery store (sometimes I do pickups) - I only physically shop at farmers' markets where we must cherry-pick the produce. Also, I don't cook, my wife does in the evenings, and I've been doing IF for 15+ years, so, my first meal for the day is at 4-5 PM. I don't have pets as I would rather spend that money supporting a child in Latin America or Africa using the various sites such as Compassion.com. Anyway, I'm a fringe case as well.