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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

I had lunch, not too long ago, with a senior executive of a silicon valley tech company that was moaning about how much of a pain it was to get people to come into the office and how it felt like things would never return to the way they were. And I told them I actually knew of a way to get 100% of their employees to return to the office happily. When they asked what this magic bullet was I said, "Go back to offices, with doors."

It isn't that complicated. Even if you have to work out of your bedroom when you are home you can close your door and focus, that just isn't the same in open plan office space.

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So, you found simple solution for very complicated dynamic and you actually believe you solved this problem?

I don't care about offices with doors.

Sure, they're better, but still it doesn't solve my issues - I care about commute - time and money, especially time.

I've been commuting like 3h / day before WFH and I don't want to go back unless you pay me at least 2.5x

Only this would make me consider going back to the office: a 5 hour workday, paid as 8. The 3 remaining hours would be compensating for the commute, which includes the time to get dressed. Commuting costs and food should be compensated as well.

Nothing else. Even with the above, I would still prefer a hybrid or remote positions as long as I have a choice.

Standing on a crowded train is not something I want to do every day (once a week is plenty), there is simply nothing the company can offer to make me reconsider.

> which includes the time to get dressed

Thanks for mentioning this. It drives me crazy how people think of commute time as the time their engines are running, whereas the overhead of doing so is relatively significant.

Not just dressing or engine running but everything.

When wfh I can prepare breakfast during morning meeting wearing wireless headset. When going into office I either had to make food before I leave or go out of my way to buy something (on way to work or at work).

It's not hard to listen in on daily morning meetings and prep breakfast or same with lunch.

Do you guys actually WFH in your underpants?

Generally yes. I typically prefer just being in my boxers at home. No shirt or pants. Always strip down to that the moment I get home too.

Many times if I needed to be on camera I'd only put on shirt long enough to be on camera and make sure my camera was positioned high enough that if I stood up. My boxers wouldn't be seen. Buy even then it did happen from time to time.

I’m always in my home wear, t-shirt and shorts.

I am 1,000% with Chuck...

My best, most productives were in offices with doors and one other space-mate and we both liked the door closed and the light off. I rebuilt Compaq 4U rackmount servers in the dark in that office. I loved it.

I hated Intel cubes - even though the cube was ~7' tall and the ceilings were ~13' - they still sucked. (I forgot the humble brag ;; my cube and Pee Schedule was right next to Andy Grove - and for who-knows we always ended up peeing next to eachother (never spoke)

But I never went to my cube next to his (SC5)

And we just ran the game lab... (golden gaming of my life (about to start BG3) - but yeah I have had surreal tech experiences in my life...

I've hated every open office. (fb being the worst)

The WAYMO campus should just be little auto-driving "cubicle pods" that roam around and find the magnettic connection to the person you want to talk to and you both agree to meet - and then on the SmartMAC (like tarmac) the little pods just route you to eachother and dock.

Think Conways Game of Conferencing - and all the little pods can form SNAKE like elements, or TETRIS Rooms - gimme a big L!

I also don't care about offices with doors.

For me the main reason is I want to keep living where I live. Village near a small city in western Europe. Cheap living, lots of nature. But no big tech around. The closest "hub" with some tech corps is too far to commute daily.

There's no way I'm selling my house to go live in a shitty noisy, overpriced appartment in or near Amsterdam Paris, Berlin or whatever and spend double the current amount on groceries, dining etc. I imagine in the US this is way more the case even.

So if you insist on RTO, regardless of doors, you'll miss out on a large group of individuals who live too far away to commute.

Not to mention the people who have children at home, and the massive savings of not having to pay for daycare. That's major.

How is working from home able to replace daycare? That's a new one to me.

Yea that makes no sense. Maybe during the pandemic it made sense when daycares were closed down and people were worried about the health risks. But now, there is no way you can tend to a kid and be a productive remote employee at the same time.

I'm a relatively young parent and I've had (childless) friends tell me similar things. Some people don't understand how much work it is to keep a 4 year old entertained.

The article funnily mentions "pet or child care", with EY handing out 800$ per year for it. What's 800$ of childcare, like two weeks? One week?

Based on what I know, $800 is roughly two weeks depending on where you live. A full month at $1600 is not unreasonable for an 8 hour work day, 5 days a week at a reasonably good daycare. It can be perhaps as much as $600 lower a month in low cost areas and hundreds higher in major metro areas. This is for one kid.

But these costs are dwarfed by hiring a legal nanny for watching a single kid. To do it legally in most states requires making them a full time employee with benefits and insurance, which I suppose is nice and all except it makes the entire thing unaffordable for even upper middle class incomes. So of course plenty of people do it under the table, which has its own set of problems.

Childcare and modern parenting is actually fascinating and depressing. The answer tends to be money and/or leaning on family.

Also the government does some kind of tax savings account for daycare expenses but the total amount falls far short of enough to cover services for a full time job. An obvious policy tweak would be to do a means tested daycare spending account with caps that reflect realistic full time jobs and help low income folk. The current one is a joke.

Back on topic: an underrated benefit of WFH is you can set your own hours with some clever time management with a partner. A parent can get up early and do work, have the other parent drop the kid at daycare, and then the first parent can pickup the kid from daycare so the second parent can work longer. And there can be trading of time between the parents to accommodate deadlines. Having to physically go into an office on a regular basis screws this entire system up. The forced nature of in-office work is something I will fight against as much as I can, even though I very much enjoy gathering with others to work in person when it makes sense.

When the Children are basically old enough to be alone, but not old enough to be alone all day. Like 9-13

Yep.

And when they're 4 - 8, they can entertain themselves and just need a little bit of occasional help. So you can have kids that age at home and still get some work done with reduced, but not zero, productivity.

Can't agree more. I don't care about a personal cubicle with a door. But I care how much time I spend in traffic on my way to and back from the office.

Even if you pay me 2.5x. I don't want to. I like living out there. No traffic, no people around me. I walk outside an I'm in the desert. Solitude.

I always wondered (although never tested) if you could do this unilaterally. Which is to say, assuming you work 8AM to 5PM "nominally" (with an hour for lunch = 8 hours) and each morning got in your car at 8AM and got to the office whenever. Then when your favorite map application said "leave by x PM to arrive by 5PM at your home address" you left. It would certainly create some interesting tension right?

At one time Google was discussing live-in housing on campus so that people could live there. It was a non-starter due to zoning issues but their reasoning was they could create dormitory style housing like Foxcon did and pay people less actual money for more hours of their time. At its heart it was profoundly evil but the pitch was all "they are young, single, they don't want to bother with renting and keeping house they loved their college environment and they will love it here." And through the lens of the founders, for whom the best times of their lives was living in college working through the night on cool technical problems, it no doubt seemed like heaven.

I think this is a great comment.

> I care about commute - time and money, especially time.

I'm assuming you have done the whole draw a circle around where you live that represents your maximum willingness to commute and then apply for jobs in that circle thing? It was very popular in silicon valley during the dot com boom. When the commute circle comes up empty though, what do you do?

Not snark, 100% serious. Hired a consultant who was fairly specialized and she spent 6 months working for me and at the end quit but offered to come back in 6 months. Her solution was she would live in the Bay area for 6 months, renting an apartment, save her money and then fly back to Hawaii and live there for 6 months on the money she had saved. She had worked out what was, to me, an ingenious solution to the conundrum that there isn't anywhere near where you want to live that you would like to work.

There are a lot of reasons why people won't work in the office, and I get it, working from home is way better for the employee. One of the more interesting things COVID did was switch the "balance of power" from employers back to employees and so far it has been pretty awesome. In my lunch discussion my message was more "You are gonna have to make people be willing to work in your office if you want to compete for the best ones." The unemployment rate is low, but employees are a population, not a single type, their effectiveness falls along a standard distribution like most things. To compete for the talent you want is making management "cave" to things like offices. It has been relatively minor so far, but as work actions go the whole "I don't wanna go back" movement has certainly been felt in the Bay Area.

Organizational dynamics is a really well studied topic and co-located organizations are able to respond faster, and more effectively, to changing conditions. Consider firefighters who used to respond to a call from home, get to the station, and then head out. Versus ones that are living in the station and can start out immediately. It is a dramatic illustration of the principle but one worth considering if you are managing a large organization.

Reading the comments (which are great btw!) I have observed that a number of people haven't contextualized work yet. Specifically, an employer is an enterprise that employs people to achieve its goals. The employer has factors they can change and factors they cannot when creating an attractive place to work for people who can (in theory) choose to work anywhere. Some of those employers will say "work at the office or quit, your choice." with the expectation that some will quit but presumably most will stay (change is really hard after all and it's scary to jump into the abyss). They want you to stay of course, it is better for them, and this is a rare opportunity to suggest/demand they revert some of the things that made working in the office so awful. Yes, making such demands forces them to decide, and their decision might be one you don't like, but if you are true to your goals and needs you will be happier with either decision. It is just harder to recognize that future happiness in the moment when you're crushed by them saying, "Okay then, we will call Friday your last day then."

> Some of those employers will say "work at the office or quit, your choice."

Haha, god no, that’s constructive dismissal. “Quit or I make your working conditions worse, require relocation to a new area, or reduce your salary” is not something the law or the courts treat as a voluntary choice, they’re not quitting, you’re laying them off not-for-cause due to a shift in organizational strategy. You’ll be paying these people to go away.

The whole “RTO as a backdoor headcount reduction” has sort of been sold as this whole thing where it’s do or die, and the proper response is “well, if I choose not to do it, what does the severance package look like”?

The fact that you are making this offer org-wide and you don’t know who’s going to take it is your problem, it’s still a layoff like any other change in strategy.

That's a fair point. Depending on where you work you might have even more power than it seems at first.

A friend at IBM when they said "Okay, come back to work in the office" just nodded and gave positive sounding responses but never really went back to the office. Their manager decided not to push it to a point of separation. I suspect that IBM's understanding of their obligations in that situation were part of the equation.

> When <critical QOL factor> comes up empty though, what do you do?

As for anything, we settle.

Now, the physical circle example feels weird to me as we're talking about remote work. Sure no one is guaranteed to find a good remote work opportunity when looking for a job, but there is enough of choice for someone who was successfully employed for a while to find a decent remote position with reasonable trade-offs. It's at least a lot easier than finding employment at 200m of one's home.

> Consider firefighters

I'm not sure how relevant it is to our field, where very few people still have to physically move to a common place to do their job. Data center maintainers still have to go to the server racks to actually plug/unplug machines, but for most other roles we kinda see the reverse, where people can react to a crisis way faster from home than when having to go to an office in the middle of the night.

> this is a rare opportunity to suggest/demand they revert some of the things that made working in the office so awful

What's lost on me is this tireless search for a middle ground, when we have better options all-around. To get back to your firefighters example, there was a time they had contracts for specific buildings and wouldn't extinguish fires on places out of contract. Should we try to find a middle ground to bring back these contract systems in some way, removing some of the most awful parts ? Or are we ok to move on to a completely different system that better benefits the city as a whole ?

>Her solution was she would live in the Bay area for 6 months, renting an apartment, save her money and then fly back to Hawaii and live there for 6 months on the money she had saved.

so her solution was a gamble? get a job and hope they care enough to compromise in 6 months when she tries to move back? It's an interesting strategy, but not an ironclad one without a lot of street smarts. stuff that's hard to research when you're not a local.

>he employer has factors they can change and factors they cannot when creating an attractive place to work for people who can (in theory) choose to work anywhere. Some of those employers will say "work at the office or quit, your choice." with the expectation that some will quit but presumably most will stay (change is really hard after all and it's scary to jump into the abyss).

but it sounds like the executive of interest more or less lost this gamble as well. they hoped most people would stay, and they either didn't or it fell below expectations, perhaps lofty ones. I feel it's a two way road here: employers won't sympathize with an employee who wants to WFH when the company doesn't, why shouold it work the other way around?

Sorry but I can’t help but feel this comment smacks of consultancy. The facts of WFH don’t align with management desires. Management may think it’s the business but the business is bigger than management. This is true in two ways: 1) employees make a business and 2) investors begin a business.

Employees are happy to have a work solution that works for them. If you want the talent to make them productive you should come to terms with reality that WFH jsut works for a lot of people.

Investors are happy when a company is making money and a company is making money when it’s employees (not its management) are productive. Employees are productive when they are given a work solution that works for them

Saying “put a door” on their office completely negates what makes employees happy to come work for you given the new reality.

Adapt or die.

>I'm assuming you have done the whole draw a circle around where you live that represents your maximum willingness to commute and then apply for jobs in that circle thing? It was very popular in silicon valley during the dot com boom. When the commute circle comes up empty though, what do you do?

Well, no. There isn't many companies that need SE around me, let alone companies that pay well or do interesting stuff.

Before WFH I've worked for a few years at one company and then WFH arrived and I've started applying for interesting offers.

> I've been commuting like 3h / day before WFH and I don't want to go back unless you pay me at least 2.5x

I don't think this is even that crazy either. I do WFH but if I were to goto the office in NYC, here's what that 9-6 work schedule would look like when you're dependent on a train:

    - Wake up at 6am, eat breakfast, get cleaned up, prepare for the day
    - 6:50am, drive to the train station
    - Catch the 7:10am train to NYC which arrives at 8:30am
    - Walk 15 minutes to the office
    - Work until 6pm (no private offices, segments of open floors with desks and monitors to plug in a laptop)
    - Walk 15 minutes back to the train station
    - The next available train back is 6:40pm which arrives at 8pm
    - Drive home from the train station to be home around 8:10pm to 8:15pm

Here's the direct costs associated with that:

   - $268 a month for 20 train trips (a business week) with a discount applied
   - $150 for 10 lunches (I'm trying to average out things like a slice of pizza sometimes or something nicer and maybe you bring lunch half the time)
   - $200 for 10 dinners (half the time you eat near the train station while waiting because the idea of cooking after getting home is too tiring)
   - $15 a month in gas (kind of rounding here based on miles per gallon, etc. but this is close)

That's an extra $633 a month and the food budget is likely way lower than it would realistically be. It also assumes you never once take an Uber or the subway while in the city. Realistically this could easily be $900 a month not even accounting for wanting to do fun and cool things after work since you're already out there.

That's 6:50am to 8:10pm end to end (~13.5 hours) and you still need to handle dinner half the time. You also pretty much have to get up around 6am every day so you can't do too much at night. You're lucky if you manage to get dinner and fall asleep while watching a movie.

Compare that to working from home:

    - Wake up anytime before 8:45am to give you some time to get ready
    - Do whatever you want between 6am to 9pm if you wake up early
    - Work until 6pm (my own private office or anywhere within reason)
    - Do whatever you want until you decide to fall asleep

Your food budget is fully up to you. You can do optimized meal prepping to your heart's desire or eat out every day.

Pants are optional at any point during the work day. I say that as a joke but also kind of serious. Your work environment may require wearing pants even if it's 90f / 32c with 70% humidity.

There's also a huge amount of flexibility in the sense that maybe you have something to do between 2pm and 4pm like a doctor's appointment. You can still work around those hours when doing WFH and maybe eat lunch at your desk and put an extra hour in the evening to make it for it. Or maybe your job is ok with you just taking that 2 hours to do your thing and don't worry about it. That's not really an option when you have a long commute. You have to take the full day off.

So now you go back to the person I'm replying to who says they would need 2.5x to go back. That's not all that crazy. Your work day goes from 9 hours to 13.5 hours which is already 50% more. You can't just add 50% to your salary because you're going to get taxed on that, and all of that will be taxed at the highest bracket you're in. Your life transforms from "work with a decent amount of personal time" to "I can't really do anything except work and commute". That's priceless in value or at least requires a substantial increase to consider it given what you're giving up.

I get to have lunch with my partner every day and see them when I take breaks working from home. That’ll never happen at an office, and it’s more valuable than any comp to me. I would not entertain on site even at 500k/year (legit offer from a high frequency trading firm in downtown Chicago for an infosec cloud/iam engineer role). I can always make more money, and I only need so much to live well, but I have a finite amount of time and I’m spending the time I have left wisely.

https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html

I'm the same with this. Both and me my partner work remote, and we spend so much more quality time together, and are able to take breaks with each other. I can't see giving that up.

Hey, if you're somewhere near Chicago, we should meet up sometime. Long shot, but I'm down in Lake Saint Louis. (Rather far from Chicago, but I've been looking for an excuse to visit anyway.)

I’ll reach out, I’ll be in STL in the near future. Thanks for asking! Always great to meet other HN folks.

I will take that 500k offer. Got a link?

Drop an email in your profile and I will put you in touch with the right folks. No guarantees, but I will make the effort.

Not going to lie spending some "quality time" with my wife during the middle of the work day has been pretty freaking awesome and a very hard perk to cap.

I'm not sure that would be the magic bullet, but you're on the right track. If you want people to return to the office, use carrots not sticks.

I personally can't stand virtual meetings with more than 2 or 3 people. They are wildly more inefficient then in person. Add on top a meeting focused on brainstorms or discuss and it's a shit show.

Give people a reason to return, and have it actually be true, and people won't complain about being asked.

But just saying "you need to be back in the office just because" is just going to breed resentment.

The worst is "hybrid" meetings where some are in the same room and some are remote. It just doesn't work.

Fully remote meetings work for routine stuff like regular team planning etc. Where they fail is what I call the "magic meeting" where management types seem to think if they get the right people in a room together things will just magically happen. But those meetings never achieve much anyway apart from making people feel good for a while. A remote meeting just removes any illusion.

That might get more people back to the office, but still probably not the majority of them. I have a 1-2 hour commute each way to the office. I did it for three weeks while I was not staffed on a project, but as soon as I got staffed on another project I stopped going to the office.

My commute sucks, the office environment is way inferior to my home, and the lack of flexibility sucks. The only thing I looked forward to while I was commuting was trying out a new restaurant in the big city for lunch. I was practically pulling my hair out of boredom the last two hours every day (had work I could and did somewhat do, but I could no longer focus on it because I was so sick of the office).

Them giving me my own office at work wouldn't change anything.

Negative. Offices with doors are nice. But the reason people don't want to go into an office is the commute. You're asking people to just erase 30-120 minutes of their day (or worse, spend that time in a stressful uncomfortable environment), 5 days a week, in perpetuity.

I have an office with a door at home. Why would I want one I have to drive an hour to?

I go in the office every other week for a day when some other coworkers will be there. It's my least productive day, but it is good for planning with coworkers.

Pay for my commute (on top of salary) and I'll think about it.

Yes, if you want to return to office... I better have an office. Not a desk in a "modern open collaboration space" or what every they used to call them

The "everything is loud as fuck and echoes" area is the term. Headphones required all hours.

that would require folks moving back to the bay area. No way in hell I'd want to do that. That would require sacrificing my wife's career and our quality of life significantly.

> Go back to offices, with doors.

And invent a teleporter. The commute is absolute terrible.

It's actually a bit more complicated than you think it is.

I worked for over 20 years in open office environments that were thoughtfully laid out with over 9m^2 space between stations. I then changed to a company where it seems 'space was a premium' with a dense open plan workspace with different teams mixed in the same bull pen and it is absolutely horrendous. There are specific people that don't take social cues like turning back to your monitor when you want to try and focus on something, yet continue to chit-chat all day. I can't believe the c-levels don't see this as a problem. The WFH policy is still reasonable but I have heard the occasional "see... this is why Elon is strict on RTO for collaboration" and I just scoff internally as I know they are desperate to revert it all. Fundamentally there is a huge issue of trust in these organisations, mostly driven by insecure egocentric managers, and I think that trust is satiated only through fear and subjugation of the employee, and more often than not a fallacy - if they go completely RTO I am looking around and/or changing careers.

I would not care one bit about your office buddy.

Working from home I can take my kids to school in the morning, sometimes even pick them up, have lunch with my wife, always be home for dinner, live in a very nice low cost area, and I even get to start work much earlier than I would if commuting.

Your idea would solve nothing.

I haven’t had an office with a door in 20 years, but you’re absolutely right. Somehow a white noise generator isn’t quite the same.

Yeah no thats not a solution. Figure out how to get back the time and costs lost to commuting, then you'll have a solution.

Of course one does not exist, and theres zero reason (especially for a valley company) to force people into an office.

> And I told them I actually knew of a way to get 100% of their employees to return to the office happily

I guarantee this isn’t true. The remote work lifers would find a reason to think that private on-site offices was bad, too.

It’s something. It would fix a large complaint with most offices, and it shows that you’re really trying. You know what else would be trying? Offering other other incentives. Like increased pay to compensate for the commute time and cost.

Bringing in cupcakes once a month it’s not trying. Simply threatening layoffs is not trying. Saying the word culture 30 times is not trying.

The pandemic proved work from home works for a large number of people and many of them found at a serious quality of life improvement. trying to take that away and asking people to pretend it didn’t exist in exchange for some stupid token like adding a couple extra plants to the office so it feels more “homey“ shows employees that you don’t care about them AT ALL. Just like it did when you tried to force them back into the office during the initial height of a deadly pandemic.

They’re not bad. I would welcome the idea. However they cannot compare to every other benefit of WFH including private bathroom, 0 commute, ability to cook and eat my own food, more rested, time for exercise, more personal time for kids and sopouse, etc etc etc

It's a curve. Your goal isn't to convince people who are deadset on never stepping foot in an office again. The cost to try and change that mind is so extreme that you're only reserving that value to executive or fellows anyway. Who already have that flexibility.

But if they really do care about RTO and they want to incentivize people with a modest commute to come back... make the office better.

Well that, and a check sitting on the desk for whatever amount the employee wants to come back to the office.

I don’t want to work in an office with doors any more than I want to work in a jail cell.

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