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Comment by surfingdino | Hacker News Reader

Like all generalisations, this one is wrong. What companies need to do is work out a hybrid approach or prove to their employees that it is necessary to come to the office. If you are working on a prototype robotics project you do need to be in the office, but if you are writing microservices you do not need to come to the office to watch the chest thumping antics of your CEO or sales people. I don't write better code when I'm being told to crush it, I write better code when the specification for it is clear and makes sense. Nothing to do with being in the office.

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Agreed. The issue is that currently most hybrid approaches seem to be a basic "you work in office 2 days a week", which is not useful for, say, software devs: There is no benefits to anyone in coding in office vs. at home. Instead, days in office should be special, meaning days of personal interactions.

The problem is not that work like micro services can be done remote. The problem is remote workers end up doing other things than working. It makes a mess for meeting scheduling and collaboration. Effectively slowing the progression of the project down.

I work at a company who his hybrid and has remote. Every remote engineer is damn near impossible to work with, a forget anything happening on Mondays or Fridays.

“Oh sorry, the contractor is here” “Sorry, the lawn guy” “I will be afk, doing this thing I totally would never leave work to do, but it is so important now because I am at home”.

People simply can’t separate home life with work life, and the job becomes a hobby.

Surely if that's happening regularly then it's up to the manager to sit down individually with such employees and make it clear that it's no more acceptable to be regularly unavailable during the work day when remote than it is when at the office. FWIW, it's not a problem I ever noticed particularly. There are always occasions when the exact person you might need help from or to collaborate with at some particular moment isn't available, and undoubtedly some things are better done working together in person, but I've never experienced the situation of "damn-near impossible to work with" with any work colleague, even during extended periods of working remotely (which I've been doing on & off since about 2005, sometimes in entirely different time zones to my coworkers!).

That sounds like more of a managerial or organisational fuck-up rather than a problem with remote on itself.

Several companies I worked for used a very similar set of processes as when they were working in the office, paired with a set of wrong expectations with the employees.

Moving away from this and understanding how to work at best took several months, and entirely flipped around the team's ability to perform, to the point that being remote was even more productive both on a subjective and objective scale (e.g. lead/cycle time).

Some people are and will always be assholes, dishonest, crooks, borderline criminals. We shouldn't all be imprisoned in the office because management is incapable of at least dealing with these offenders.

After COVID we switched to almost 100% work from home. Office became mandatory 3 days a week but only on paper. In practice workers applied "passive aggressive" method, just didn't show up. And management didn't do squat since most of them were also working from home.

But I did have bad apples as colleagues. One guy in my team would be idle for long swathes of time although it would appear "green" on Teams - first sign someone's an asshole: they put a mouse move program but don't reply for hours. At least be honest and let your status be idle when you're not at your desk - we're all humans and I get that. Anyhow problem wasn't as much that he wasn't at his desk, when sometime I did manage to contact him in dire need of some crosscheck on the project we had to deliver, guy exceeded himself in being a passive aggressive jerk: he'd reply one or two questions then just disappear again IN MIDDLE OF A SENTENCE. For hours on end. Like I'm talking with him, ask him something, replies so I know he's there, immediately I ask him something else and he's gone. Sometimes until next day.

At some point I blew a gasket on him, called him on Teams when he was accidentally available and unloaded dicks and Christs and Gods and what else involves swearing in my native language. He was much more responsive for about two days then reverted to default behavior.

I thought of reporting him to my manager but I knew it would be useless. I tried naming things before in daily scrum with the management and upper management and didn't go well, reckoned what I need to do to keep my job. Eventually the company tanked and fired everyone (me included), so at least there's some divine justice. I found a new job in less than a week nevertheless, being around since the 1970s these guys might be more sensible than my previous employer.

I guess the moral of the story is: when bottom layer workers are dishonest, management pulls the strings and gets them in line. But what do you do when management itself is corrupted to the core? ... which I think is by far the rule rather than the exception. Who is policing "the police"?

> One guy in my team would be idle for long swathes of time although it would appear "green" on Teams - first sign someone's an asshole: they put a mouse move program but don't reply for hours.

Maybe his job was not to be on standby for your service 8 hours a day. Maybe he also had a job to do? Why would he be obliged to reply to your messages immediately?

The whole point of Slack / Teams communication is that it can be async, meaning you can ask people something and they will get back to you when it is convenient for THEM, not for YOU. If urgent, just call.

>> Maybe he also had a job to do?

Yeah, he had a second job, that's what he had. In parallel to running a brick and store business (set up a bar and organized events).

Sometimes I just leave people on read for a bit because I have more important things to be dealing with. This happens to me too sometimes with people leaving me on read,and I understand because there is almost always something more important than whatever someone is messaging about. If it were important, they would have told me explicitly or sent a meeting request.

I sincerely doubt everything you were asking this guy was very important, so perhaps you need to learn how to handle more of your own issues and ask more people for help other than that one guy. It is not that guy's job to do your job; it is your job to do your job.

Strangely that it worked well with the vast majority of other team members, except for liars and scum who couldn't even handle properly having multiple jobs and not giving a fuck.

This point is moot, because those people would be out of office on PTO dealing with those contractors anyway. At least they can hop in and out of the meetings when working remotely, which is an upgrade from them not even being there to be honest. If tools like Outlook or Google Calendar are not enough to help someone schedule meetings without a struggle, that is a personal failure.

"But remote-first won't be the default." doesn't sound like much of a generalisation to me, and indeed is arguably saying the same thing as you - that a hybrid approach is likely the best fit for most tech companies.

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