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Comment by SamoyedFurFluff | Hacker News Reader

I’m kind of confused here: why can’t we just have teams self select? There are apparently over 700 people self selecting into a channel for in office advocacy: form teams out of them based on their roles and let them have their in-office teams, with relocation assistance as necessary to put them in commuting distance to the same office.

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The issue is that the people who perform poorly when working remote are often the most likely to select WFH if given the choice. WFH has become somewhat of a refuge for people trying to avoid interaction and work, which is the root problem driving other teams to want them back in the office.

In a perfect world we’d have a way to accurately evaluate everyone’s remote work and painlessly dismiss those who can’t handle it. In the real world, it’s not so easy at scale.

I personally work remote and on remote teams, but the successful ones were all hired and built as remote from the start. Whenever I’ve been on a team that started in-office and then tried to switch to remote, a significant fraction of the company ends up failing to adapt, avoiding work, failing to respond in a timely manner (e.g. replying 1-2 days later to simple requests), or otherwise just abused the situation. This quickly ruins remote work for everyone.

If you can’t tell who is and is not performing to expectation then does it really matter? They’ll be on Reddit in the office anyway.

But aren’t those who perform poorly easy to spot? I doubt they will perform better just going to the office.

In office yes, remotely not. Simply they are having a lot of problems, they can describe why this is a problem, they may miss Daily so there may not be an occasion to ask. It is also much easier to be busy working from home. Much easier to say that someone spend last 2 hours answering on questions on Slack or similar, or on e-mails, or was waiting for answer from somebody else (very often they will ask question before lunch break). In office team is doing self monitoring, remote it doesn't work so well. Especially in case where most of companies pretend to work from office working from home.

What about the people who hide their poor performance by being in the office? You can easily do 'water cooler conversation' for 6 hours a day if you can't be bothered to work, which doesn't fly when you work from home. An hours worth of coffee before starting the workday was the norm at my last job.

I say we put ‘em all on a rocket ship and send em to another planet. Middle management are the ones who want to go back (mostly). Let ‘em go. Won’t be long before they are using tree leaves as currency.

Like the golgafrinchans?

https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchans

If something goes from higher ups it is constrain, team can try to squeeze into constrains, some people will be unhappy but this is something over theirs heads so they will be able to live with it (especially people who joined company before COVID). If this will be left to teams in many cases there will be peer pressure, some kind of blackmail and similar, latter this will result in a lot of passive aggressive comments and behaviors.

You really don't want to do self select within a corporation, it creates a lot of friction; especially the self selected groups are basically in opposition to each other.

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