Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

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> "Want to talk collaboration and productivity? Let's see if a company bans zoom for office days (but none will)"

This wouldn't even be practicable - pretty much every BigTech company has offices spread all over the country, if not the world, and the odds are you work day-to-day with someone who sits nowhere near you.

If you are forced to come in and you weren't allowed teleconferencing, you'd literally get nothing done.

The idea that you can staff whole teams of people (and their dependencies!) in a way that they're all guaranteed to sit within a short walk of each other is straight-up madness. Beyond a certain scale this is quite impossible.

Heck, even in the same city this isn't practicable. When I worked at Google we frequently had teams and their dependencies spread across building all over campus. Even if everyone involved sat in Mountain View, in an office, you still can't get away from teleconferencing since it takes half an hour for someone to commute from their building to yours!

So you’re saying, being remote is okay as long as that remote in another office?

"It's okay as long as you willingly participate in the theater and power dynamic."

The problem isn't really remote as much as employers having the ability to grossly change working conditions on a whim with no worker recourse. C-level doesn't have any proof on site is a superior operating model, they feel it is, and they believe that's good enough to call the plebs back.

Who was the last person you knew who gave up substantial power willingly?

Hah, that does seem to be what the companies are saying, which is entirely silly.

My personal take is that RTO mandates are sorely misguided. Let the people who want an office work in them, and let the people who want to be remote be remote! The net difference is pretty close to nil, especially at large companies where meetings are teleconferencing-by-default!

If anything productivity has increased in the remote era. You no longer burn the first 5 minutes of every meeting kicking the previous person out of the conference room. And then another 5 minutes to wait for someone who had to sprint from halfway across campus to make it to the meeting room from their previous meeting room. Plus the mad dash scramble to claim meeting rooms since there obviously aren't enough for everyone.

In the remote-first world I just... click a button to hang up. And click another button to join the next call. Everyone is on time, meetings start and end on time. People are more inclined to take minutes and notes. It just seems to... work better.

[edit] Also, again, to be clear: people who like working from offices should be allowed to do so! There is nothing wrong with making friends with your coworkers, going to lunch with them, grabbing beers after work, or anything like that.

I just shouldn't be forced to do these things with you! I have a family I want to get back to! I resent being forced to have parasocial relationships with colleagues so they can fulfill their need for social contact! They should find other people who want to do that with them, because forcing me to be there just so I can fulfill someone else's parasocial need is honestly pretty twisted.

I feel ya!

At this point I just don’t see how it’s anything other than control or sunk cost of office space.

Your perspective is flawed, it’s about further headcount reduction without severance, making good on tax break criteria, and building up a blind core of missionaries.

A large amount of EC2 team for example is in Cape Town South Africa, and the other is in Seattle.

> The idea that you can staff whole teams of people (and their dependencies!) in a way that they're all guaranteed to sit within a short walk of each other is straight-up madness. Beyond a certain scale this is quite impossible.

If the world has been mostly remote well before the pandemic, what does this say about the idea that outstanding results can only be produced by the serendipity and (alleged) increased efficiency of in-person collaboration?

Oh I have many thoughts about that, especially because I ran a team that was spread over 4 cities pre-pandemic and we made it work!

There is IMO well-justified use cases for in-person collaboration. As much as technology has reduced the effects of distance, the penalty is non-zero for some things. It's unfortunately still a lot easier to do some things remotely.

The trick IMO is that there's a big gap between "sometimes we feel the need to be in-person" and "we should be in-person all the time/most of the time". I think the latter statement is incredibly poorly substantiated.

The answer to all of the above is pretty straightforward: scheduled, reserved in-person time where the entire team meets. You kind of have to do this anyway! If you have developers in New York and Chicago and San Francisco and Tokyo who are all in-office, you still need to do meetups!

Have a travel budget, set up in-person sprints on a cadence that works for your team!

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