Comment by Brystephor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Brystephor | Hacker News Reader

I graduated from school in Spring 2020 and started working in Aug 2020. In that timeframe, I had not been inside an employers office more than 3 times. Since Mar 2023, we've had a "mandatory" 4 days in office every week. Here's what I've experienced since going the office:

* Occasionally I'll get a good conversation with a teammate or manager about something technical, but the frequency has not gone up. The technical conversations are still scheduled on a calendar and happen at the same frequency. I really haven't experienced many people stopping at my desk and I think I've only stopped at the junior engineers desk to check in.

* Socializing at work has not been my strong suit. I am pretty introverted when it comes to strangers (e.g. anyone who has not been introduced to me). I find the socializing to be more energy draining.

* I walk to work. I like that typically. The walk can be... disturbing to say the least since I walk through downtown Seattle.

* A lot of people in the office prefer to speak to each other in languages other than english. Everyone on my team (my manager + all my coworkers on my team) prefer speaking something other than english and do so unless I'm involved in the conversation. This surprised me and at times I find it frustrating because I wish I could know what they're chatting about when it's technical (certain keywords I can pickup on since they're the name of internal things).

* working in office 4 days a week has given me something to really look forward to each week, and that's the WFH day.

* I don't think my productivity has gone up. Some days it's definitely worse. Now there's an obligation to go sit and eat with others for 30min-1hr a day. Previously, I'd just bring my lunch to my desk and continue to work.

I don't think my experience is the norm. But I certainly miss the pure WFH days.

I’ve experienced the non-English thing in a few different contexts and while I love the diversity of languages and speak a few myself, I think not mandating an official language to be used in the office is a mistake.

Your case is the obvious one: if most people speak Finnish but you only require English of your hires, sooner or later you will have people unfairly excluded from the social part of the office. Even if you’re in Helsinki, you need to either require that work conversations be in English, or make obtaining Finnish fluency an official part of the job. The latter being the much harder route.

However, in real life this requires a more enlightened C-suite than you probably have (cf. butts-in-seats order), so you might consider carving out an hour a day to quietly learn whatever language is being spoken by the rest of the team. It’s probably easier than Finnish and it could help your career!

They speak Mandarin. I don't know much about other languages, but I've heard that's notoriously difficult to learn.

It's also not just my team. I see other tables at lunch and other teams having conversations in what I assume is the same language. I have a hard time differentiating based on sound.

Gotcha, my bad, yeah that's probably even harder than Finnish. :-)

But correspondingly more valuable if you end up learning a little!

> A lot of people in the office prefer to speak to each other in languages other than english. Everyone on my team (my manager + all my coworkers on my team) prefer speaking something other than english and do so unless I'm involved in the conversation.

If you're based in the US, this is just extremely rude.

I feel as if people have changed. I'm back in the office twice a week now and the good conversations and socializing parts just don't seem be happening like they were previously to the pandemic. I'm not sure what to think of it and maybe in some time, things will be more like it used to.

Partly because a lot of these companies “return to office” took away all the cool stuff like sitting next to your team, having an actual desk of your own, etc.

I just want one single place that is actual 2019 normal. None of this BS hotdesk crap.

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