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Comment by chadash | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why there has to be such a divide. There can be a world where some companies are remote and it's a competitive advantage (ability to recruit from a wider pool of people) and other companies that are in-person and that's a competitive advantage (better social dynamics among employees, easier collaboration in certain ways). I personally like working in person. And I completely understand people who like working remote. I think it's great that we've gotten to a point where people can pick and choose what is best for them!

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> I think it's great that we've gotten to a point where people can pick and choose what is best for them!

They often can't, though. Companies change policies after being hired (mine did), the job market is hard (my son has had his start date pushed back 2x now for a total of over a year), and a lot of time this "choice" of job is not in a context you can deal with. I want to go into the office, but I'd have to move to do it. I want to WFH, but I can't find anyone to hire me for the $ I need to live where I do.

Moving isn't an option for many.

This is why it's good that we're finally starting to see a resurgence of support for labor power, and a wave of unionization.

Those are all reasons why things will take time. And in the transition period a fair number of people won't be very happy with their situation (which is often the case anyway).

> > we've gotten to a point where people can pick and choose what is best for them!

> Those are all reasons why things will take time.

These 2 things are at odds, which is why I posted. I agree with you, but we're not "at a point"... yet. GP might be, and to some degree I am too, but this is hardly universal nor even as widespread as GP posits.

I suspect that we end up in a world that is still more hybrid than before; I remember the days of having to commute into an office even through a fairly bad snowstorm. That is probably mostly gone for office work. I find even outside of work people are often quicker to jump on a Zoom call than get together in person.

However, that world will also have companies that are much friendlier to full-time remote where practical and companies that mandate coming in a few days a week at least. And people who prefer one or the other will naturally gravitate to different work over time if they haven't already done so.

Right now we're going through a phase where things are changing and people feel that they're not getting what they bargained for whether staying remote or getting back to a before-times office.

>I don't understand why there has to be such a divide. There can be a world where some companies are remote and it's a competitive advantage (ability to recruit from a wider pool of people) and other companies that are in-person and that's a competitive advantage (better social dynamics among employees, easier collaboration in certain ways).

Because chances are this world is not our world. In our world the former companies have an advantage, but there are a lot of financial interests put on not going down that route.

People can pick and choose what is best for them... only by changing the company they work for unfortunately. The company I currently work for gives me little choice in the matter: I can always go to the office more than 3 days per week, but not less.

How did that happen? Technically my job has a 3 day a week recommendation but it's completely ignored by everyone. The management tend to be older than most of our staff and as such have homes and families far out from the city centre. It's much harder to get them into the office than the 20 somethings. Even the 20 somethings who did initially start coming in a couple of times a week have dropped to a couple of times a month in our work place.

I will paraphrase a quote from old country post-communism comedy intended to parody communism as a system:

"Thing is, we need ones that want to be here and ones that don't want to be here."

Context kinda matters, but the gist remains valid. WFH might not need to force RTO on others, but RTO absolutely does.

Because leadership in companies tends to be a bunch of baby ducks. They'll latch on to something they think is the mama duck of good business practices and follow it off a cliff.

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