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Comment by explaininjs | Hacker News Reader

I saw a Twitter thread about this that I didn’t want to engage in there, but figure I might get more intelligent discussion here. Basically there’s a motif like “we should allow people to work where they’re most comfortable and productive!”, but what about the folks that are most comfortable and productive in an office surrounded by other folks also working on the same product as them?

On one hand I don’t think people who don’t want to work should be forced in, but on the other it seems like a lot of companies are taking this as an opportunity to get rid of offices all together. Just look at recent “who’s hiring’s”: the majority are exclusively remote, leaving folks like me who would prefer to work with others and don’t mind moving no options.

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This doesn't seem like a hard problem, if you want to work in an office seek out companies that are working in the office. What's the issue here? Plenty of companies require it and are slowly enforcing it. I don't know where you live but plenty of companies in Boston, which use to be remote, are requiring more people to come in the office now (DataDog, Klaviyo, Chewy, all the finance/insurance companies, DOD contractors, and lots of the satellite big tech offices like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, SalesForce, etc are requiring it).

Are you upset that more interesting companies/problems to work on are mostly remote teams? Remote work is one of the few hard, real, and sought after benefits people want that a company of any size can provide to stay competitive in the labor market.

As for me, I have no problem working in an office but the commute needs to be less than an hour of walk + subway/bus otherwise it's too much of a negative externality. Maybe there should be more offices where people live and not massively congregated into a single location? You can blame poor planning for that. There's no reason why there can't be more mixed developed neighborhoods.

Having worked across the full spectrum of company shapes and sizes, the absolute most fun I’ve had and most productive I’ve been (and my entire team has been) is in startups where everyone is working together in the same office, passionate about the same project. This has coincided with places I can easily walk to/from work.

Yes big companies are still in-office, but they’re dull and slow by comparison. The type of experience (and level of productivity!) I’ve had with the micro-to-small scale startups in-office seems all but gone.

At large companies with distributed teams, work from office makes no sense. Post pandemic, I started commuting in, only to sit outside or in a hallway on zoom calls, and then eat (excellent) cafeteria food that is bad for my health.

I traded that for a full remote job, and 4 hours for exercising a week. My watch says all my health trends have been markedly improving ever sense.

I wouldn’t mind an in-office job with a strong, 100% local team, but that’s rare these days, especially since I don’t want to move across Silicon Valley or deal with anything longer than a bike commute (and I am not the only one!).

My org became remote during covid, we are split across 4 cities, 3 of which in the same country even. Now we are told to go back to the office 3/5 days ... only to use the same tools to work remotely. In the office, there's none else from my team; and the only other person I know is my skip manager.

I have expressed multiple times here that I like the office, and I go 5/5 days with some exceptions, because the 45 minute commute on foot allows me to decompress and relax. I know that when I reach home, there's no more work.

Funnily enough, I prefer it like this because I have fewer interruptions.

I was thinking that way, then I realized I could take the 45 minutes (in my case, 48 minutes), and use it to jog, bike a beautiful hilly trail, or strength train, and get 5x the benefit for the same amount of time.

Do you have a spare office room?

Yes that’s my exact problem - I’m sick of all the damn zooms. I watched as my team went from 15 minutes of standup where everyone was literally standing up face to face and the rest of the day was a mix of dedicated work and ad-hoc collaboration to literal hours of just sitting in online meetings, but exclusively those of the least productive sort. Ugh.

The product reflects it too - in the year since I’ve left no new significant features have come out.

It seems like a very unusual desire to specifically want to work in-person with people on the same project, rather than working in close collaboration with friends/coworkers you get along with. There are many people I've worked with that I absolutely don't want to be in the same room as, and some that made lab-type environments fun.

You don't get to choose with in-office. Everyone's forced to work together. Is there something about working on livestream/groupchat video that you don't find as an acceptable alternative? My office has a dedicated session for that once a week if people want to join, though it's been pretty empty since lockdown lifted.

I don't think it's that unusual. I generally like my colleagues, and given that the work I do is highly collaborative I have a strong preference to reducing all barriers to communication. I don't know anyone that claims the quality of communication they have remotely is at the level of in-person.

Have you never interviewed your team before accepting a position? That seems to be the missing part here. And working with friends and family is fine I suppose, but working with people who you share goals with and can actively collaborate with is better in my experience.

The set of people I may have to work closely with is in the dozens. I certainly didn't meet all of them during interviews or even ask to arrange it. Statistically I'm just not going to like every single one of them on a personal level, even though we can work together professionally.

Oh, most people want people to be able to work the way they work best. Many companies leadership are morally opposed to a remote work environment as they view it as a degradation of their direct power over people, a refutation of how they became successful, impinges on their preferred way of working, and diminishes the stage they can perform on. But this is an argument of passions. On the other hand, once the passions die, what you’re pointing out sets in - and it was setting in before the pandemic. Real estate is expensive, and if you can offload office space to the employee, you improve earning per share materially. In the end this is all that will matter. But it’ll take a while for the dinosaurs in charge to retire enough that enterprising directors of finance can pitch the board successful the end of mass corporate real estate holdings. Forward thinking companies will keep smaller offices and coop work spaces for those that truly feel a deep need to be in the office. The rest will require you to BYOO (bring your own office)

Unless your investors also own commercial real estate and need its value to stop going down.

My guess is that established companies (esp. those with existing offices) will require on-site work, new companies without will more likely not... more flexibility for founders and reduced costs if they believe in remote.

That should leave everyone with plenty of options, but on-site + startup combo would have fewer positions and vice-versa remote + established company.

Otoh, over time I could see a profound shift to remote if these new companies were to start replacing old ones and remote worked for them. But there might be a limit where a certain company size favors on-site.

Unfortunately the best work experiences I’ve had are in micro-small scale startups in SF/NY where I walk to work every day, sit in the same office with a couple/handful of people who I know are passionate about the same problems I am, and we all have the opportunity to brain-dump in person at will. Arraigning zooms will never compadre to the fidelity of a face to face interaction.

I like working in office and working at home equally. I have a more comfortable setup at home. I have a proper home office. Working from home allows me to do my best work at peace.

Working in office with people gives me a sense of belonging. It also makrs a clear distinction between working and non working hours. But my commute sucks. It's 1.5 hours one way! Moving closer is not an option. I would prefer to go to office on alternate days so I can have the best of both worlds.

I think this is it. I prefer in the office but I have a pleasant 20 minute cycle into the office. The commute is actually a highlight of the day. Then I have my own office, and a bunch of insightful conversations that I wouldn't otherwise have had.

If I had 1.5 hour commute well of course I'd feel differently!

Definitely agree on the hours - I remember the days I’d leave work at 6-7 and not even have the ability to work any more until the next day at 9-10. Contrast that to pandemic where suddenly everyone is expected to have the capacity to be on any time.

But 1.5 hours? Sheesh!

Would you like to join my company? They've only been getting stricter on WFH policies. My company absolutely cannot stand WFH for some reason.

In a thread about a large employer forcing its employees to switch back to in-office work, you couldn't pick a worse place to make this point.

I’m more interested in startups, as I mentioned all of the “who’s hiring” are remote only.

> leaving folks like me who would prefer to work with others and don’t mind moving no options.

This reminds me of when Christians in America say they're being persecuted, when of course, they're dominant. I think it would be a good idea to acknowledge that "wanting to work with others in the office" is the norm, not unusual. If this is truly your preference, don't worry, you aren't losing your dominance any time soon.

Check the “who’s hiring”. The dominance is long gone, especially for start ups.

The thought that a HN hiring thread proportionally represents office work is pretty funny to me. Quite the bubble, my friend.

Many tech start ups post there. Those are the jobs I’m referring to. A bubble sure, but one I’ve explicitly selected.

I think there is a general acceptance in the leadership of most established companies that fully remote isn't ideal. Obviously there will be companies that don't want to spend the money for an office space and there will be employees who seek fully remote, but I don't think that will be the only game in town by any means.

Personally I wouldn't consider a fully remote job.

It's like the paradox of tolerance, right? You can pick the best working environment for yourself, except to the extent that your choice infringes on your coworkers' ability to pick the best working environments for themselves.

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