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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

2 days a week in an office is useless. Either make it 5 days a week in the office with up to x weeks of remote or make it full time remote. When an office requires 2 days a week in an office, you get none of the alleged benefits of in person work as everyone chooses which days they want. In a part time remote situation, the office ends up being 60% empty all the time anyways, and it's almost always a waste of time to hold a meeting in an office if even one of the attendees is remote, which is extremely common in modern software teams.

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Agreed, but for other reasons.

Even 1 day a week in the office is useless. It means you HAVE to live near the office or in the same state even. It's either remote or it's not.

The two days a week crew generally has two designated office days

But what about the other 3 days - office sits empty

but you can round-robin the teams

We have a coworking space and out dedicated rooms are shared between other teams and areas of the company. One day we might have all of the devs in, another day it might be all sales, etc.

Yes. But it would be half empty all days or empty some days. So you either rotate teams between days (but everyone will want the mid week days most likely). Or you accept a half empty office. Or you downscale the office. It's really that simple. I mean there are tons of reasons to be in the office. Doing remote or not depends on whether those benefits outweigh the drawbacks. But obviously "keeping the office full" isn't really one of the benefits.

But there still are benefits from being allowed to work from home, even if it's just 3 out of 5 days.

And the days in office can be with your team.

I don't understand how allowing some remote work makes it 100% useless.

Because there are advantages and disadvantages to remote and in person work. But one of the biggest advantages to remote work is being able to source from a talent pool that is 50x. By having 1 day a week of in-person you are giving up the single biggest advantage to remote work.

The reality of meetings is that they're all a waste of time. I'm starting to think the same about Teams meetings.

Video chat (for screensharing) with colleagues? Wonderfully effective. 64 people in the one Teams meeting? 100% seems to be "manager who can't bring himself to write a more then a 1 paragraph email and instead thinks too highly of his oratory skills".

Which has led me to my grand hypothesis that if you're calling a meeting just to give a fixed speech, write it out first and then decide why it's not an email...or decide just not to send it at all. If you think you need a meeting, then prepare the topics for discussion ahead of time and solicit an initial round of feedback.

We have 1 day where everyone related to the project is present, which is nice. The other day is useful for the junior we hired recently so we can support him better, but otherwise a waste.

My commute is 3 hours both ways. Bearable 1-2 days, but not 5. 1 day is enough to have most periodic meetings in person if everyone on the team comes the same day. To make office less empty different teams can come on different days so much smaller office can be used. The problem is many companies bound by long term contracts so a large office is a sunk cost.

this is not my experience.. our team does 2-3 days in and 2-3 WFH and it works really well.

My team does 0 days in and 5 days WFH and it works really well, especially since we're located in 15 different countries and 37 different cities.

I have a team split between 5 cities and timezones using modern software development work practices. I offered to comply with my employer's 2 day in-office mandate, but made it clear that on in-office days I wasn't going to work extra hours to support my teammates who were offshore. I was given an exemption.

My team does 0 days in and 5 days WFH and it works really poorly. Terrible communication and extreme siloization.

Disagree.

Just decide that you meet e.g on monday, so you can plan everything

and spend rest of the week actually doing the work without disruptions

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