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Comment by throwaway892238 | Hacker News Reader

I decided I will never again work in an office, for the rest of my life. It's a lifestyle choice. I refuse to put up with the B.S. anymore. I'm lucky that I've had a long career and my skills are very much in demand, so I will always be able to find a remote job somewhere.

People doing jobs with more qualified candidates in the pool will probably have a harder time, and that sucks. For them, I hope they can band together as a union and force companies to hire them remote. There is no excuse anymore about it not working, because the whole planet did it through a friggin' pandemic, and work actually improved. We just have to stick to our guns, because the suits will continue to try to ruin our lives as long as it benefits them.

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> and work actually improved

Not just work but also profits (except of course where profits depend on people’s physical custom, such as restaurants, but that is no longer an issue). So basically a lot of these digital product and service companies are shooting themselves in the foot. Also not commuting meant fewer expenses meaning more disposable income. Essentially a free economic boost.

> I'm lucky that I've had a long career and my skills are very much in demand, so I will always be able to find a remote job somewhere.

Yep, this is exactly who WFH benefits, and nobody else.

Uh? WFH benefits a whole lot of people:

- The people who need to stay home to take care of their children and family members.

- The companies who can't find [good] enough local talent, or can't afford them.

- The people who can't find jobs locally and cannot move, due to financial, familial, environmental, or other reasons.

- People with diverse needs who require a flexible schedule and safe space.

- People who live in dangerous places where commuting could put them at increased risk. (see: can't move because of X) (also: commuting is actively dangerous to your health; constant sitting, danger of traffic collisions, being robbed at bus stops, etc)

- Anyone who wants to live in a cheaper, less dangerous city, or doesn't want to commute a long time.

WFH can benefit everyone, but they have to learn how to work a completely different way, and most people are lazy as hell so they don't.

You're right, I left out a lot of life situations that could benefit. Let me be a little more specific:

- if you're young you probably want to be around others to learn from.

- if you're not well established, you want others to know you and see your impact.

- if you're struggling financially or to find a job, you probably don't want to compete with the whole world for basic employment (especially against low cost of living countries.)

So yes, if you just need a paycheck for skills you already have, and that can be done remotely, that can be convenient. If you are looking for more you need to consider these kinds of tradeoffs.

The young people I know hate going into the office, it's all the older folks that want to go in. I've been almost entirely remote since I've graduated and haven't missed being in person at all. I've developed my skills more being left alone and having time to read and learn on my own than I ever have being forced to sit in an office and struggle to be productive. I'm absolutely not established, but I've had no issues convincing others of work of my impact. You simply need to take writing seriously and learn how to communicate your work.

Companies are just learning they have terrible onboarding processes and documentation. Turns out those things are important and being in-person is an expensive and poor quality bandaid.

Yeah, the only young people who I know want to go into the office are interns and fresh-grads. There is a lot of in person upskilling that happens in those years, but after that, learning is effectively self-guided.

There are 2 kinds of jobs in tech. Demanding jobs and chill jobs.

Demanding jobs involve effectively resigning your life to the company for 5 days of the week. The hours saved on commute and ability to actually get chores done between at-home downtime allows people to put a lot more hours from home than from an office.

Chill jobs on the other hand, lead to a terrible commute vs hours worked ratio. You're in the office for 40 hours of the week, but spend 5 hours commuting, 5 hours chilling during lunch break, and another 5 hours waiting in line to select one of 10 fancy coffees. That's effectively 30 hours of work, 10 hours of in-office loitering and 5 hours of out of office mind-numbing commute. Make those same people work 'real' 40 hours from home and you'd see a 30% productivity increase just from hours saved. Remote employees take meetings during lunch, coffee is instantaneous and there is no commute.

People complain about how much better in-person meetings are. But, have we even tried to make remote work palatable. Slack and Zoom are terrible tools for remote work. Give every employee a 2000$ digital whiteboard. Make them stand and give their presentations using better cameras. Use gather.town to make collisions feel more natural. Guess what? with remote work, all your meetings & interactions can be captured. You can send out meetings summaries & key screenshots for every interaction without ever lifting your finger. But nope, remote work is relegated to having the same in-person secondary tools (zoom, slack) without leveraging new primary tools that work well for remote work.

> if you're young you probably want to be around others to learn from

You can easily learn from coworkers working remotely, I personally have had no issues doing so. The idea that you can't is a weird one and I have no idea where it comes from.

> if you're not well established, you want others to know you and see your impact.

So make others know you through your impact. Your work speaks for itself. If you have to be in person to demonstrate your impact, are you actually having an impact, or just making a show of having one?

> if you're struggling financially or to find a job, you probably don't want to compete with the whole world for basic employment (especially against low cost of living countries.)

Low cost of living countries come with plenty of their own barriers that prevent hiring, and out-sourcing isn't some new concept that has emerged from the pandemic era of WFH. On the contrary, what has emerged is the ability for those capable of WFH to move from high COL areas to low COL areas, or for those in non-traditional hubs to gain access to high paying, high quality jobs they didn't have access to before without relocation. Its a huge boon to those struggling financially.

Don't you think full remote is kind of selfish? I mean, I also love it, but what about new hires and junior? How are they going to learn and improve if each time they have a question, they need to post it on slack and just wait...

Mentoring, pair programming, calls, code review, etc

Slack is no different than the desk if you're using it like that.

You can hop as easily to huddle as you'd do an interruption. Of course, a junior interrupting ALL the time in real life would be a terrible thing so you definitely need to strike a balance.

But I see most arguments for office is better from people who just don't know how to communicate effectively through tools and potentially are bad at cross location team collab, which happens all the time in big companies.

I'd argue remote is way better, if you share screens over google meet or similar it is far far better than physically sitting around a single workstation. Also, by default it encourages respect of people's time rather than tapping people on a shoulder or an interrupting them (don't get me started on open plan offices).

Vscode live share beats the snot out of traditional pair programming. I can view where my colleagues are on the side while looking up something else, and vice versa. If a colleague is writing a function or something and needs to know how some system works, I can go and look it up while they're working, and not break their flow. Traditional pair programming, with a single terminal, makes this impossible

Did it occur to you that there are people who were hired during the pandemic, who had full virtual onboarding experience? How did they survive?

Actually I myself joined my current company after March 2020. I can't imagine a 5-day, in-person experience would be any more effective or productive. If anything, I was able to completely pay no attention the mandatory training of "corporate value" nonsense -- it felt great to be "in" the meeting but spend the time doing actual development or doing some household chores.

I joined a new company in September, and most of my colleagues were fully remote. I have enough experience and was able to handle myself, but when I imagine this situation in my first year, I'm sure it would have been much harder.

It’s different, and harder in some ways, but easier in others. I just think we need to get better at accepting the new paradigm which is clearly better for many people, instead of lamenting what we might have lost. Onwards and upwards!

I see this argument all the time, but I've onboarded like a dozen new hires and juniors since going fully remote in 2020. It's fine. The tools and processes are different, but fundamentally it's still just about communicating and working together. You genuinely do not have to be in the same physical room to do that.

That said, the problem I do see is that the folks hired into a fully remote environment have a significantly lower "attachment" to the company. Working together in an office fosters a sense of belonging to the group (over time) in a way that remote work cannot. This is the thing that isn't getting attention, IMO - but maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe we were all overly attached to our jobs anyway :)

Well, these people were lucky to have you. Unfortunately, many people just want to not be disturbed, and it's much easier to ignore someone through Slack than in person.

That's a question of culture and organization. Onboarding a new hire is a job, and someone has to do it. Same for mentoring juniors. If you're relying on in-office for that, because the newbie needs to tap physical shoulders to get attention, then I'd argue the setup is not good to begin with.

I've spent years now in a fully remote team, and we had no problem getting people integrated and productive, and bonding everyone into a real team. Likewise, I was the newbie in in-office teams before and have felt like an outsider who needs to beg for help for months.

In my experience, remote or not is not the deciding factor for onboarding and team building.

What's the big deal?

fully remote requires rethinking collaboration and working together to some extent.

if slack is the only way remote companies communicate, they’re doing it wrong imo.

What other mechanisms would you include?

Nobody has the right to interrupt you while you are doing your job, to ask you any question they feel like, at any time. They can talk to you when you have office hours, they can schedule a meeting to talk to you, they can post it on slack, or they can interrupt you for critical concerns.

The lack of structured times to communicate and collaborate is a big reason working from an office is counter-productive.

A cultural shift needs to happen if people aren’t getting responses via Slack. If someone is reaching out for help, people need to respond in a timely manner, and it’s up to leadership to make sure that happens, ideally by being a good example.

I have many team members who work extremely well in this kind of environment, but there will always be some who don’t. It’s both a choice and a skill to function as a part of the team, and leadership needs to cultivate that culture. I don’t see this being any different in person, though it may not be quite as visible to the folks making the return to office decisions.

New hires and juniors can easily learn by taking an active part in their own education. Firing a question into a public slack channel waiting for someone to answer is the laziest attempt to actually get an answer. Better is identifying someone who can help you and asking them a question directly. Take the time on your own to figure out what it is you don't understand, make a list of questions, and ask them directly, or better yet, hop on a quick video meeting and ask. The most effective way to learn in person isn't any different. What you are describing is in fact the laziest way to learn, which is to try nothing on your own, and expect everyone else to tell you exactly what to do.

Requiring everyone to be in an office because your personal learning style involves no personal effort and requires everyone else to enable you to be effective is in fact selfish.

I made a similar decision. I decided I will never ever work in an open-plan office ever again. However, I guess I would be ok with working in an office, if an employer offered offices with 4 walls, a door and a window with some natural light.

How does it benefit the suits? what you just described is lower cost and higher productivity under WFH

Having butts at desks allows them to do things like manipulate people to stay at work longer (Google perks), monitor them closer, discriminate, and justify lavish office expenses that they want for image rather than productivity. They literally don't know how to manage work or workers so they just stick people in the same place because they only know how to use their eyeballs and ears.

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