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Comment by madduci | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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