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Comment by Zacharias030 | Hacker News Reader

This article simply doesn’t reflect my personal experience. I‘m rather at the beginning of my career, but feel like personal growth, enjoyment and satisfaction with the work is much higher when I go to the office and when my colleagues do the same (we have full freedom to never do though).

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>> I‘m rather at the beginning of my career, but feel like personal growth, enjoyment and satisfaction with the work is much higher when I go to the office and when my colleagues do the same

I had a fast-growing career trajectory and it was definitely due to the magic of working in close quarters with my co-workers and especially bosses and mentors.

That was 20+yrs ago. I do wonder how that would work now -- I go into the office and i'm on Zoom calls for 6hrs of the 8 or 9hrs. The Zoom calls are with overseas team members.

Even the folks in the office on the same call are on Zoom, each of us in separate rooms to prevent microphone reverb. It feels nothing like the magic of 20yrs ago when we were all elbow-to-elbow in war rooms.

I think RTO makes sense, but we need a lot of breakout conference rooms. We also need to be opinionated about scheduling meetings so there is actual facetime IRL rather than just facetime via Zoom while in office.

Conversely, I grew quickly over the pandemic because using a lot of written communication played to my strengths. I never learned much from my seniors. Being remote made it so I could create a working environment more conducive to concentration and fully develop self-sufficiency when it came to learning skills and solving problems.

With RTO I’ve found that people are communicating a lot less over chats/docs, but not communicating well in person either because half of the people are remote or in other offices. Personally I believe we need to all be remote or all on-site for things to work properly.

Hybrid triples your communication surface, but people typically only think it doubles the surface.

Hence why the communication sucks.

> That was 20+yrs ago. I do wonder how that would work now -- I go into the office and i'm on Zoom calls for 6hrs of the 8 or 9hrs. The Zoom calls are with overseas team members.

> Even the folks in the office on the same call are on Zoom, each of us in separate rooms to prevent microphone reverb. It feels nothing like the magic of 20yrs ago when we were all elbow-to-elbow in war rooms.

That sounds like my life at GE. I worked there 2002 - 2010.

> magic of 20yrs ago when we were all elbow-to-elbow in war rooms

Yeah, I also like to reminisce of my youth, playing video in LAN centers and having endless energy to go do pointless things like commute in traffic, and have nearly 0 responsibilities outside of taking care of myself (which is easy when you have a young and fit body).

This is completely orthogonal to the pros and cons of RTO though.

Having the option to work remotely doesn't mean that in-person work must be eliminated. Even considering only the people whose jobs can be done remotely, it's entirely valid to want to be around people. But requiring people to be in the office when their jobs can trivially be done remotely is silly.

I speak as someone who likes to work in the presence of others, so I mostly do, but I appreciate the option to work remotely and make use of it regularly. The notion of "the office" isn't going extinct, it's just evolving, and in this case I think it's evolving in a good direction.

Onboarding, new hires, even teams getting together when possible/practical some of the time are the things I hear even from execs who are generally supportive of letting people continue to work from home whenever they want to.

I happen to be on a very distributed team and the person I'm mentoring lives in a different city anyway, so it's impractical for me. But I'd actually go into an office now and then if it were convenient and I'd know people there.

To each their own. It is reasonable that the company may provide some physical common space for workers like yourself. It is totally moronic however to force people who do not want to to be there.

Same for older employees like myself actively recruiting younger employees to replace us: it's much harder with full remote. For many younger parents or long-commuters WFH is perfect but if you're rebuilding a workforce those Zoom only coworkers don't connect the same way.

Honestly, it's a first world problem to solve. It's great that we have the flexibility, just need to figure out how to avoid long-term negative repercussions that have not fully been felt yet.

I'm also at the beginning, and I started right when COVID hit. :D To me, it seems like an intense gray. There are upsides and downsides to both in-person and remote, and they balance each other out almost perfectly.

I have a great home situation, though (it's better than my office physically), and most of my coworkers are older than I am, so they're less keen on interpersonal connection and rarely ever go to the office.

I'm the same as you, having the option is necessary for those like me who prefer remote

I think WFH primarily benefits "older" workers and parents with young children; it also allows them to live where there is more space for their kids without having a huge time-wasting commute. For many workers in their 20s, for example, working at the office is often a better experience, they're happy living small downtown flats, and WFH can be lonely.

I think it depends on your colleagues and workplace. Most of my coworkers that go into the office are too shy and quiet for it to help much. My company also doesn’t really lend itself to collaboration so much as delegation or being delegated.

So when I go into the office, even though I’m pretty extroverted for an engineer and would love to collaborate on stuff, it’s just as lonely as WFH.

And that's what WFA's whole thing is. We have an office, come in if you like -- we have snacks, high speed internet, and (hopefully) fewer distractions. It's where it's forced everyone in some fixed days a week 1-5 that eliminates most of the benefit of actually working anywhere.

> It's where it's forced everyone in some fixed days a week 1-5 that eliminates most of the benefit of actually working anywhere.

I sorta feel like you do lose those few actual benefits of being in the office together collaborating though, if you don't all come in on the same days. E.g., Mike comes in on Tuesday, Sarah comes in on Wednesday, Marks come in on Thursday--when this happen no one actually gets that benefit of in-person collaboration and mentorship.

So I think some structure is necessary to get real value out of hybrid RTO. Otherwise it feels like this ham-fisted management RTO crackdown is really just about control and justifying expensive downtown leases and not actually about trying to get people working together.

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