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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the work from home conversation gets weird? different? when you are talking about tech jobs, and makes it a totally different situation.

It's easy to make a case for WFH when your job is basically "Work alone for 90% of the time hitting keys on a keyboard". Hell there are tech workers who are going on 20 years of remote work. WFH is an old concept in tech, because the work is almost custom tailored for it.

HN is out here hitting softballs in the battle over retrun to work. However, the overwhelming majority of white collar workers are not tech workers, and do jobs that require way more human interaction. This is where the actual strain between workers and employers is.

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It's not as different as you think it is.

Most people got used to zoom meetings and async interactions, and they too liked it more than open offices. Big companies have it worse - they have the cubicles/open offices and their coworkers are in other offices throughout the country. This is all too common, and WFH made life much easier on everyone.

This was less true for executives, who were suddenly on 10 hours of zoom calls a day, and whose jobs are most affected. I truly think they forgot that ICs have a very different life than them.

Perhaps the problem for execs is their focus on meetings. I would bet that at least 25% of meetings don’t have to be live, multi person events.

Async communication can be more effective when it causes people to think a bit before talking.

There are a few tradeoffs.

For executives, they are trying to gather more information. What are the power dynamics? Who is deferring to whom? Where is the unstated conflict that isn't on the page? Is there obvious dysfunction? Do people actually understand the problem to be solved in the same way as the executive, and how do these need to align?

(Is the conflict between the sales team director and the vp of engineering a personal conflict exposed as a business one? Is the sales org selling more than what the engineering team has delivered? Is the problem really that the wrong things are being worked on? All of this may be contextualized within something as simple as a status meeting.)

They are also usually brought in for conflict resolution. Conflict resolution has the same dynamics that show up off of the page. Sometimes, it takes a few sharp questions to cut through the stated conflict to find the real one or to align people on the greater business objective.

Finally, it is quicker to read than a meeting, but it is much longer to write. If you are being asked to talk with sixteen different groups in a day, you cannot write all of that.

I think your second point is largely correct, but one of the big problems it exposes is that a big chunk of execs and even employees don’t / don’t want to think much before talking. I’ve experienced many people who appear to make careers off of shooting from the hip, who will never respond to text based communication that is longer than one, maybe two sentences or maybe even not at all.

I dont think anybody really likes zoom meetings more. They just like the perks of WFH 10x more than they dislike zoom meetings.

Yep. I like working in an office. I prefer it! Just the working part, though.

I don’t like it as much as I like not: having an extra 30-60 minutes of (risky-to-life-and-limb!) driving 5 days a week, thousands in gas and wear & tear on a car, having to own more than one car (more expenses, takes up more of the garage), getting sick more often, not being home when my kids get home from school, not being able to do any part of starting dinner until 5:30 or later, not being nearby if a kid gets sick at school and needs to be picked up, not being able to listen to my own music without headphones, having a shared bathroom, and a billion other things that come with working at an office but are purely bad.

I do.

There are a very few circumstances where I find it more beneficial to be meeting in person. For everything else, I find Zoom (or other online video) meetings much more beneficial.

I don't have to plan extra time to get to wherever the meeting is.

I don't have to worry about the meeting room being too crowded, or noisy, or whatever.

I can have my headphones set to noise cancel, so any noise that there is in my space gets filtered out, and all I can hear is the meeting.

I am guaranteed to have my computer right there with me to take notes on or look up anything I need to reference.

In general, I get to take the meeting in my own space, with everything I need ready to hand.

I don't have to worry about the other people in the meeting spreading COVID (remember that? it never stopped being a thing).

Etc.

So unless the "meeting" is, for instance, an attempt to troubleshoot a tech issue on a computer that can't easily allow me to use Zoom's built-in Remote Control feature, tell me why, exactly, I should like Zoom meetings less than in-person meetings...?

10h of zoom calls per day sounds like absolute hell, from that perspective I can really understand why leadership is pushing for RTO

10h of meetings per day in person sounds worse

As someone who has been in 7 hours of zoom meetings averaged over a week, I promise that it is not worse in person. Your eyes start getting really tired when focusing on a screen.

In person you also have to worry about your stomach, your nose, your back, your BO, and in some cases, you still have to stare at some screen or whiteboard. Letting your eyes rest during a meeting seems a lot more manageable.

A lot of office workers have jobs that are mostly talking on the phone plus data entry. Lots of those are, if anything, even easier to do remotely than most tech jobs. And much easier to measure productivity!

Those employers also tend to be pushing RTO.

Strongly agree. My (no tech) job would barely even be possible at my house because of the impossibility of any kind of informal or spontaneous interaction with someone from whom I need to learn. This leaves aside the fact that I want to be able to set some boundaries. A short drive is worth it to have a separate, quiet space to work.

The IT world really made a mistake by creating a space that’s so unpleasant that it’s easier to work at home. I think if a significant share of tech workers had an office with a door we would not be having this wfh rto conversation.

> The IT world really made a mistake by creating a space that’s so unpleasant that it’s easier to work at home.

Yes. And it utterly baffles me! Even when employers were making an effort to improve the office environment, they did so in a way that didn't address the problems with it at all. Instead, they went for "perks" like game rooms, free snacks, etc. All of which are entirely orthogonal to what makes working in an office a terrible experience.

What would you change?

The easiest improvement would be increasing the square footage per employee enough that people can have offices with doors.

> All of which are entirely orthogonal to what makes working in an office a terrible experience.

I.e.: people

Yup. Joel from Joel On Software covered this years ago. He made sure all devs have a quiet, private office, with window and door.

The problem is, it’s cheap to just throw desks together in an empty room and call it a “fish bowl” or “open office section”.

Most companies don’t care that it affects morale, productivity. Just that they were able to seat 5 more people with a cheap trip to IKEA.

Can’t stop people taking the lazy, easy alternative.

The lazy alternative has a direct line to accounting expenses, vs the productive management alternative for devs a more ephemeral connection to the accounting lines - even though it actually affects the bottom line more strongly than the savings from open offices.

In the corporate world I've seen (across many countries and cultures) there is no such thing as a "separate, quiet space to work" unless you're fairly senior. The irony of course is that fairly senior folks are on zoom/teams/webex calls 12 hours a day and quiet introspection isn't part of the job.

The common pushback from employees forced into RTO is they are commuting to a significantly worse environment where they still just sit in teams calls all day.

Yeah. If I ever return to office, I’m going to demand an office with opaque walls and an opaque door.

Windows are fine; door will be open much of the time. It will be closed when I’m doing algorithm design, trying to plan out an N step refactoring to get some rust code to compile, or napping.

I noticed that some of the millenuals / gen z’ers in the old bull pen (16 person cubicle) would just shamelessly sleep at their desks in the afternoon. I occasionally nod off when reading, but this was full-on pillow on keyboard stuff.

So, I’ve decided the stigma around napping in the afternoon is misplaced.

On the risk of sounding ridiculously entitled, I'm not sure that helps. As someone kinda sensitive to being disturbed by people talking, the only solution would be an office with a door for every person, or maybe 2 people. Four is too much already and the others can't be pairing or it will distract. But four is not really better than 10, but I suppose the actual noise level would differ for every person. Also unrelatedly I find screensharing so much better than looking over someone's shoulder, or sitting in the same room as someone in the same virtual meeting. I guess I should use noice canceling headphones?

That said, I've never seen single offices for normal software developers here in Germany at any company I ever worked at, so the point is kinda moot. I'm also not sure I'd like it, because where's the benefit if I am walling myself off?

And then it's the question of equipment. Companies are either too stingy or too homogenized. Either I have better screens/chair at home because the company is skimping in general or I have better stuff because I chose what I want and not what was decided to be good.

Agreed. Once I’m sharing an office it’s not an office, it’s a shared workspace.

To note, human interaction does not equal work from office either.

A decent portion of the white collar workforce is sales. Lawyers and accountants, recruiters, real estate agents can also be traveling a lot and/or work at places that are not their offices.

I'd also argue customer support shouldn't need to be done in sweatshop style offices, though weak connectivity could be an issue in more decentralized settings.

Lawyer here; my office is a paradise and working outside of it is a huge drag. Who is going to teach me stuff or make my binders at my house? Am I supposed to be meeting with clients in my kitchen? Where am I supposed to keep all my case materials? Am I supposed to provide my own food?

I really think the key here is that VC has spent twenty years convincing you IT people that “the office” is a floor in a skyscraper with 400 cubicles and no walls or doors or services. If your office actually had any of the redeeming factors of an office, you might feel a little differently, no?

Serious question: Are you a partner or owner of the office or just a cog in the wheel like most of us?

I mean, if it was my company of course I would like the office I built to my standards.

I am the lowest of the low, a junior associate. One day I aspire to be a cog but right now I’m just trying to learn without causing problems.

I abused the term "office" to mean "shared office", but your point stands. If you're getting physical help for your work, including food, it's a pretty convincing proposition.

Honestly it's not really "tech jobs."

Even in software, there are some kinds of SW and development and timelines that are easy to do all or mostly remote. These tend to also be the kinds of work that, if not for language barriers, kind of offshore easily. They tend to involve mastery of a framework but otherwise mostly being a lot of glue code.

This is not true for all kinds of software and I think people really underestimate how important it is for some kinds of software to be arguing in front of a whiteboard and/or with massive schematics sitting out and so on or having different people drop in, quickly establish context, and reason through things.

I think a lot of HN tends to be - like most of the industry - basically web apps. Those don't have any problems with communications bandwidth or shared context because a lot of it is on rails and is mostly not interesting to discuss outside the user flows discussions around the UI. But that isn't true for a lot of software or high-value software.

There are successful examples of almost every kind of software you can think of that have been developed remotely, so I’m not sure it’s web development specific.

Even with software that is ostensibly developed by a team in an office, is frequently worked on by employees in different offices.

A friend is in sales, and went on leave at the beginning of covid.

They spent a long time getting dressed to sales standards for their first zoom call after coming back, and found that everyone had moved to just keeping the video off.

Sweat pants for the win!

(I get the impression productivity also increased, since their team also spent much less time driving across town when a phone call work suffice.)

Sales is pretty similar too - although they don't work from "home", they don't need to show up to office so much. I used to work at a small firm where our office was divided into two floors; and the second floor was just me and two salespersons. I used to be alone probably 15+ out of 20 working days of the month because the salespersons were out meeting prospects and customers so much.

> do jobs that require way more human interaction

And all of these interactions are fully possible in remote work. You just need to use the tools that support it- like normalizing video calls (with video on!).

The only reason we see so much "we all need to go back to the office" is that some senior leaders don't like this way of communicating, aren't used to it, and therefore everyone else must be in person as well.

Even tech jobs aren't really like that. I spend at least 1/3-1/2 of my day discussing the best way to do things, training people up, managing priorities, negotiating over openapi schemas, etc.

I did have one job where we only spent 20 minutes a day doing that and the results were not impressive.

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