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Comment by SOLAR_FIELDS | Hacker News Reader

I always hear of this legion of office lovers but when you ask for actual number splits it ends up perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly being that the vast majority of people want 100% remote. All you office people can go work together then, don’t make it miserable for the rest of us

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> I always hear of this legion of office lovers but when you ask for actual number splits it ends up perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly being that the vast majority of people want 100% remote. All you office people can go work together then, don’t make it miserable for the rest of us

A comment like this making claims about what happens when you see actual numbers should link to some actual numbers...

Anecdotally, my social circle is increasingly preferring hybrid, which loses one of the most-frequently-touted benefits of remote (make your home wherever you want, even potentially super cheap real estate). IMO remote will likely hang on at bigger, cog-in-assembly-line type information jobs, but some sort of frequent in-person meetups will be hugely valuable for high-ambiguity/collaboration/creative work. For me the difference between "0 days in the office and nobody within a hundred miles" for three years and now "1 day in the office a week" has been huge, productivity-wise.

Here you go:

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/remote-work-statisti....

Note that this is Forbes, who is probably going to be biased towards in office work so the actual numbers from an unbiased source would probably be even more dramatic

> For me the difference between "0 days in the office and nobody within a hundred miles" for three years and now "1 day in the office a week" has been huge, productivity-wise

Why draw such a false dichotomy here? This doesn’t feel like an argument in good faith. The company I work for does onsites twice a year and gives people optionally the budget to meet in person once a quarter beyond that pretty much anywhere they want. I’ve never felt that I needed more than that to do high impact work

> but some sort of frequent in-person meetups will be hugely valuable for high-ambiguity/collaboration/creative work

This is some vanilla scrum master bull shit, this isn’t how products or code get built.

It's because they are straight up lying. Like c'mon, you get your OWN PRIVATE BATHROOM when you work from home. The benefits are so obvious, I wonder if the in-office people are legitimate trolls at times.

One reason people like me might prefer working in the office: I don't have a room in my apartment that I can turn into a home office.

(Also, in the home I grew up in, I never had a private bathroom, nor did my parents. What kind of luxurious abode do you live in, and why do you assume that everyone has the same living conditions as you?)

Okay, you're on team office, got it.

This cardboard box living individual here has such terrible living conditions he longs to breath the air of commercial real estate. Does your bathroom have a stall? No right?

If you rent, your apartment comes with a private bathroom. If you have a roommate, at most one other person shares it with you. That's a pretty private bathroom. You ever been on line to use the bathroom before in the office? Do you think its fun to take a shit with 10 other people in the bathroom with you? lol

Stick a desk in the corner of your apartment and voila, home office.

Decent companies that offer remote will offer to cover the costs of coworking space for people like your use case. The company I work for does. It’s not office as the only alternative

I was happy to go back to the office because working at home is bad for my ability to concentrate, and I also need the personal contact with others. But my particular desk location has not given me noise problems or anything. I also intentionally moved to make my commute a 15-minute walk, because it's better for me to not spend tons of time commuting; I'm aware this isn't a serious option for 99% of people.

I've avoided talking about negative impacts from others' WFH because I don't want to encourage the company to take it away from them.

Also there is a bit of critical mass problem where if you’re something like 50% hybrid or more it suddenly is worse off from a career perspective for WFH people. What I mean by that is that the in office people end up inadvertently getting advantage over people that are remote in meetings, career advancement, etc.

Hybrid is tough to do right to prevent problems like this from happening.

I think the ideal model is 100% remote, cover the costs of a coworking space, do mandatory onsite sat least biannually, give people optionally the resources to meet with each other more often than that, and promote a culture where you meet frequently to collaborate remotely. Like we use Donut app on slack to randomly pair program every week and it works great

Ran a dev team in NZ (which had some brutal lockdowns). I would say it was about 1 in 20 wanted to be at the office. Even to the point of almost twisting our arms on lockdowns to be back in the office. That leaves 19 out of 20 on varying states of happiness being at home. On balance obviously most people prefer to WFH.

The ones that didn't : - Lonely - Impossible home environment to work in (noise/kids/distractions/lack of good physical environment)

I reckon it would probably even out in the long term to about 9 out of 10 preferring to WFH.

[edit - should I add I left ~18 months later to start my own SaaS and love WFH, can't imagine ever paying rent on an office again]

But but the free coffee! Sometimes there are even doughnuts.

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