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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

There's arguments from both sides of the coin but, though I'm biased having worked remote for almost 5 years now, I think the remote-side usually wins the argument by simply being more reasonable. I see far fewer remote workers claiming that "everyone should work remote" and more in-office workers making sweeping claims that remote reduces creativity, reduces, productivity, or makes people lazy. The anti-remote folks even go as far as dismissing having the time to be around your kids or saving money by not commuting as being trivial benefits. Like, wtf mate? Nobody's telling you not to drive to an office every day.

Don't get me wrong, there are some remote fanatics that do the same thing, but they seem far fewer.

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That's very interesting. My experience has been the opposite, that people who are pro-remote are intense about it, that they often deny there being any benefits to working in an office and get angry and dismissive toward anyone who says they want to work in-person.

I would argue that the reason "remote wins" is that to get the full benefit of working in person you really need 100% of your team to work in the same building on the same hours. As soon as one person goes remote, the in-person experience is significantly degraded for everyone else.

Thus, as soon as company allows "hybrid", the people who prefer remote go remote and the in-person experience quickly degrades. This starts a spiral where people on the margin -- who still prefer 100% in person! -- decide it's no-longer worth coming in, which in turn degrades the experience further and pushes more people to give up on the office, until there are very few people left coming in.

It doesn't take very many people to set off this spiral: in my anecdotal experience, once a team goes 10-20% remote, the office is pretty useless.

So what I see is there's a "tyranny of the minority" effect. I think the long-term response is going to be more sorting of companies into all-remote or all in-person, with fewer companies in the "hybrid" space that's so common today.

> As soon as one person goes remote, the in-person experience is significantly degraded for everyone else.

Does the office fall apart when someone goes on vacation or is sick? If not, why then would one or two days away from the office have such a big impact?

If someone is sick or on PTO some things are assigned to another person and some things just wait for them to get back. And yes if the whole team has, for example, Mondays and Fridays remote, then some things just wait for Tuesday -> Thursday to happen.

The degradation I'm referencing is if you have one or more people permanently remote on your team. Then, just picking a few trivial examples, you can't take a notepad with you and make a team decision over lunch, or huddle around a whiteboard, etc., because those things don't work for the remote teammate. Even when you're in a conference room with a good video setup, it's still very common to have a lot of repeating things for the remote person, or having the remote person struggle to chime in etc., that make it a worse experience for both sides compared to the lowest common denominator of "everyone is on Zoom."

> That's very interesting. My experience has been the opposite, that people who are pro-remote are intense about it, that they often deny there being any benefits to working in an office and get angry and dismissive toward anyone who says they want to work in-person.

There is a difference between arguing that remote work is better and insisting everyone work remotely. I've seen lots of people say remote work should be an option. I have yet to see a single person, on Hacker News or elsewhere, insist that everyone be required to work remotely. On the opposite side of the argument, I've seen plenty of people argue that in-person work should be required for everyone on the other hand.

At a minimum, it should be illegal for companies to say you can work from home! and then back track. Employees that already WFH full time should at least be able to do so without RTO considerations.

Honestly, I'm not one for laws about these sorts of things, but given the state of climate change, there should be legal requirements that if a job can be done in a WFH setting, it should be an option for employees to choose. By quantifying what roles don't require in person by defining eligibility, as opposed to allowing businesses to set the eligibility.

I think the details could be worked out reasonably.

I have seen a few people claiming that companies shouldn't even have an office.

What doesn't really change the picture. Those are a few people, with most disagreeing, and not in a position of authority. But some do exist.

Would it be fair to say that you skew towards preferring in-person work? I think a possible takeaway here is that we notice people making arguments that we disagree with more than we notice people making arguments that we agree with.

All I can say is true for me, but as an introvert in a creative role (is it fair to call programming a creative role? I think so) being in an office around other people, especially open floorplan offices where we're all able to glare at each other from across our desks, stymies my ability to be creative. I just feel the pressure of being watched all day, and sometimes it clams me up. And then after work I go home feeling exhausted, mentally, and defeated for not getting what I wanted to get done. And when I need help on something in a remote role, I'm able to articulate the problem statement very easily over text, which my coworkers (one or two in particular) are very helpful at pointing me to a solution asynchronously while I hack away at it. So to your argument about the reason that "remote wins", I'd argue there are more reasons that it wins. But that's just for me, and I imagine many other people that also prefer remote.

I don't think in-person work is going anywhere though. I do agree with your perspective that hybrid work seems likely to not be ideal for people that prefer in-person. In fact, I'd argue that hybrid work is not ideal for people that prefer remote either. In my experience you usually have managers questioning your motives for going remote in those hybrid environments, making you feel like you're an inconvenience to the team, and pressuring you to come in some days on a commute that may not be convenient. And then one day some upper management changes, and the new person just decides they prefer an all in-person workforce and tells all the remote people to come back in or be let go. For your sake, I hope you find an opportunity that is 100% in-person. And I also hope those hybrid environments become fewer and farther between.

> I think the long-term response is going to be more sorting of companies into all-remote or all in-person, with fewer companies in the "hybrid" space that's so common today.

I think the long-term is going to be a small percentage of fully-remote (mostly new co's), a small percentage of full office (mostly legacy co's) and a big plurality of hybrid companies where everyone is mandated to come to office on the same days of the week. I am seeing more and more SV companies taking that approach.

Started a poll here to get more data - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36868543

> As soon as one person goes remote, the in-person experience is significantly degraded for everyone else

"Remote work" didn't start with "work from home" it started with offshoring and satellite offices.

Why is it acceptable to "significantly degrade the in office experience" when it benefits the company but not acceptable when it benefits the employees?

I call BS. I'm not commuting to an office just to be on calls with people in other timezones for a majority of my time there.

Completely agree. I've long believed that society is just "wrong" with the work/life balance these days. Socially i think we could drop to 6h days and life would improve dramatically (just looking at home time, that is) for most people.

For me, just giving up commutes and being able to do some basic chores on breaks or lunch alone brings a ton of this balance back into check. I work 8h but i gained so much "me" time back that it's like working 6h with a commute.

I would give up WFH if needed, but i'd be pushing for 6h days as a trade off. I now feel the added time in my life by not commuting is a massive boon. One that i can't give up. Do i prefer WFH? Yes, i'm on ~8years of it now. But the life that i clawed back by simply not commuting is by far the most valuable thing. One i am never giving up in i have options.

It all depends on need. The idea that everything needs to work the same way is unsound. Arguably, the company I work for doesn't need to bring everyone into the office every day; we seem to be doing quite well. Another firm that believes it sees better creativity when people are in the same physical room may be better off not having their workers be remote.

And like you say, not every company necessarily gets a benefit from having an 8 hour day. Depending on the nature of the job, the remaining hours of the day can be a diminished return, in which case one might as well give up on the game of charades and just allow their employees to go home.

> Another firm that believes it sees better creativity when people are in the same physical room…

“Believes” suggests faith-based decision making. Not sure if you meant to say that, but your weird choice aligns with the credibility of the justifications I see of in-office-only types.

I meant “word choice”. Too late to edit!

I think the idea of measuring productivity by hours spent is absurd.

I manage my teams by tasks accomplished. I really don't care if they were able to complete it in 2 hours and take the rest of the day off.

I simply acknowledge formally what happens in practice anyway. The average "8 hour workday" only contains about three productive hours [1].

For me, it varies wildly. Some days, I'll get in "the zone" and 12 hours / and thousands of lines of code will fly by. Then I'll spend the next day or two in a brain funk waiting to recharge.

I've learned to embrace my "bursty" productivity patterns and to structure my delivery expectations around them. If I get trapped into a X number of hours per day butt-in-seat situation, my overall productivity declines sharply.

[1] https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver...

> Nobody's telling you not to drive to an office every day.

reminds me of this meme that was going around Facebook during the last US election. It was an image of a line at a store like Target. The caption was something like "you stand in line at the store, you can stand in line to vote." You know, one of those absolutely stupid republican anti-mail-in-voting things. They apparently forgot that Amazon, one of the largest corporations in the world, exists. So no, I and the entire world do not stand in line at the store. And if you want to go stand in line all day to vote, you still can asshole. But I'll be dropping my ballot off at my mailbox.

As a hothouse flower of first world privilege erected atop an underclass who does everything for me, grocery delivery has been the best thing ever for me as well. ;D

> I see far fewer remote workers claiming that "everyone should work remote"

The presence of a remote worker on a team means everyone is working remotely, in that all meetings have to be video conferences in order to include them. It's just that some might be working remotely from an office.

This is exactly the problem. You have one remote member and literally everyone has to work around it.

That observation has nothing to do with fanaticism; it's intrinsic to the fact that in-office is all or nothing.

If you work in an office but your team is remote, you work remote.

The strategy applies collectively: will the team work face-to-face or not?

No one is justifying commutes because of the kitchen or the view.

You know what might make an incredible industry "remote Work Pods"

Recall all the "phone-closets" we installed in many large corp tech environs (I wasa designer on many large scale offices (FB, Goog, Salesforce, NAMCO, Lucas - to name a few - aside from hospitals, I have millions of SqFt under my belt)...

If a company wanted to focus a remote workforce, while reducing realEstate facilities costs, maybe a deliverable cubicle (returnable cubicle) - that was a sound box with all the tech req'd for job, might be a thing - think of it like the "ON AIR" red-light sign... (IF PERSON IS IN THIS CUBE, THEY ARE FOCUSED ON WORKING - DO NOT TOUCH, FEED, OR OTHERWISE ENGAGE WITH SAID PERSON IN THIS BOX)

Misery loves company

> Nobody's telling you not to drive to an office every day.

This argument doesn't work because it's not about being in aspecific physical location, it's about being in the same physical location as all the other workers.

When half the people you need to interact with are remote, there's no point going to the office.

That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. If half the people you're interacting with are in the office, isn't there something to still be gained by interacting with them in the same physical space? There might be a detraction by having the other half work remotely, but why would that outweigh the positives of working in-office? All you'd have to do is get the remote workers on a call or Zoom, which you'd do at home anyway, except you could also meet in-person with other coworkers. I guess I don't see how there's "no point." Apparently, in your example, the positives of just working at home outweigh the advantages of working in-office when both are proportionally 50/50.

One could easily argue the side that is saying we should stick to the working conditions we had all this while under which most people were hired, and only moved away from as an exception for a global pandemic, now that the pandemic is over.

Reasonableness has a pretty subjective definition in this context.

And even if we could all agree how reasonableness should be defined then it’s still a terrible metric to make a decision by.

> One could easily argue the side that is saying we should stick to the working conditions we had all this while under which most people were hired,

This is an appeal to tradition. It can be the right choice, but you need to be to justify it rather than say "That's how we've always done it".

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