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Comment by Kon-Peki | Hacker News Reader

> “You can interrupt each other without being rude when you’re in person,”

With a large pay increase and a promotion to “guy who remembers stuff so nobody else has to”, I would gladly come into the office and not feel like it was rude to be constantly interrupted.

But as it is, my job is “finish the work you asked me to do”, and constant interruption is quite rude, in-person or otherwise.

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I took a significant pay increase on a new job with the understanding that the role would be hybrid, two days a week. That was agreed upon above everything else.

Our whole team agreed to do the two days so we could have our project meetings in the lab and do our scrums in person. We also acknowledged that the days are shorter because of commuting time and productivity will not be as strong because of the office environment.

Hell, we spend half our time shooting the shit, eating lunch, and talking about non-work stuff. But we're happy to see real people. So far I'm not unhappy with the setup.

It sounds like a good setup, mostly because everyone knew ahead of time what they were getting into, and understood what in-office days were going to be like!

I realize I'm lucky that I found a group that picked a plan that worked for them. The company overall hasn't set an RTO plan in place, but we're predicting that will happen soon and maybe by demonstrating we already have a hybrid plan that's working, they'll leave us alone.

And maybe that's the solution, if you're willing to do a bit of hybrid work. Get a plan going before you have one pushed upon you.

It’s awesome that that was agreed to up-front! As COVID eased, a friend who works for a local software shop was worried about the fights they’d have over remote vs. in-office, as they’d had a super-strong in-office culture before. The company threaded the needle on it, though: because all the teams work in pods, the decision was that each pod (6-10 people) would decide by consensus whether to be remote, hybrid, or in-office. They then ran an exchange program to help re-home people on teams that wanted something different. It wasn’t perfect, but the willingness to let each team determine for itself what was best and trust them to make the right decision fairly really worked.

That is really nice to hear. I'm glad it worked out.

It's the complete opposite when you’re in person. It’s so much more rude as your demanding their immediate attention at a time that suits you. Remote you can manage your notifications and methods of contact which is so much healthier.

Exactly so. In-person interruptions, in the hands of manager who uses physical presense to feel superior, morph into intimidation.

Rather not rehash this discussion, but just a reminder that some people feel exactly opposite. In person disruption is really no big deal for me, but slack is a tool that destroys all productivity.

Notifications on Slack can be turned off.

Another mental burden to remember to turn off slack notification, and notifications of this other Collab tool whenever I do not want to be interrupted.

Also, at least for me, it's not black and white when I need quiet time. I might jot down something, brings another idea and suddenly I have a new idea to fix a problem which has been nagging at me for months and off I go for 10 hours.

I won't think about turning off notification until there is one - by then my mental flow has been disturbed.

But I do love home office, I just want to outline that managing notifications is not without friction.

Why not make it a default state?

My default is all notifications off. I understand that for some people that's not really an option but for most it certainly is.

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