Hacker News Reader

Comment by tbragin | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why "big tech" is forcing tech workers to go back. Have they specified the reasons? Perhaps at bigger companies, it is easier to "hide" and not be productive, while working from home? Or is it because, if for some team members remote work is not productive (e.g. due to the surrounding environment), then it is better for the whole team to be co-located? Honest question, because I really can't say. For the past 8+ years, I've now worked at two fully-remote companies and found it to be a perfect fit for me personally.

View on HN

At least in my experience, communication has gone down the drain. We have an office which some people chose to use and some chose to WFH. But I find myself basically only working with the other people in office because getting any response or collaboration from the WFH crowd is like pulling teeth.

When I need to really get stuff done like merge critical changes now, in office is massively faster because you can just look around and find someone free to review your PR as soon as possible rather than waiting 4 hours for the remote crowd to get to it.

I've worked remotely for most of my career, both as an IC and an EM, and across the board if it took someone 4 hours to respond to a crisis during their normal working hours it would be viewed as a serious failing. Of course if your company chooses to let remote employees get away with murder the end result will be remote employees getting away with murder! If you needed someone who was working in office and they were missing for four hours you obviously wouldn't just accept that as the way things are.

Sure, partially it's a failing of management. But all the management is WFH and unresponsive as well. So it's easier for me to just ignore whatever team I'm in and work with the people sitting around so I can actually get stuff done.

Fair play, I imagine I'd do the same in your situation, sorry to hear your management is asleep at the wheel -- I'm a big advocate of WFH but it does require people (especially managers) to change how they work and communicate in order to work successfully.

WFH is a two way street. Communication is key. It doesn't necessarily have to be synchronous, but most WFH companies are built around synchronous Slack communications. But whether synchronous or asynchronous, communication has to be thorough and responsive.

How do you coworkers expect to get a promotion and/or survive the next round of layoffs? Responding on Slack is the new "butts in seats" for bad managers, and good managers notice good communication.

If you're the type of guy that is always helping out your colleagues, that's behaviour that was often counter-productive. It too often wasn't noticed, and didn't show up appropriately on your 6 month review. But when you do it on Slack, it's noticed, or at least is more likely to be.

1. Commercial real estate.

2. The executives are also landlords. Requiring WFO means an increase in the rental costs.

Allegedly, creativity has gone down because of the lack of face to face interaction.

In other words: the RTO crowd has settled on a justification that is conveniently very difficult to measure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com