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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

What I am puzzled about is companies that are sending mixed messages. On one side they want people to return to the office because people are just more productive. On the other hand they want to save on office real estate so are not providing enough desks for everyone to be in the office, mandatory hot desking (so you can't customize your desk or leave anything at the office), and so making it unpalatable to work in the office. And they want people to come on different days of the week, which negates one of the principal benefit of an office: seamless access to people / informal conversations.

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"people are just more productive" is not the case for everyone. That relies on a lot of variables; type of work being done, as you mention the office environment, whether the people you're working with are in that office etc. My home office is far superior to any environment I've ever been given by an employer. I have multiple large screens, control over the heating, a door I can close and most importantly a cat to stroke whilst thinking.

Anecdotally I find extroverts prefer the office and introverts prefer home. I find that seamless access to people can be really distracting especially when I'm doing focus work.

I think you're correct if people are given a good work environment, are in on the same days and are all in the same office this makes sense. The reality is that in many large organizations this isn't the case.

> What I am puzzled about is companies that are sending mixed messages.

There's a difference between mixed messages and incompatible desires.

My 8 yo wants to go on the roller-coaster and to eat a giant tipple-scoop ice-cream at the same time. I am stuck explaining why this isn't going to work out well, but she's insistent that both things can happen together.

A mature mind is able to join-up the dots and see the need to prioritise or prune. Modern corporations are not like that. They're a collection of colonial homologous zooids (departments) like Physalia-Physalis (Portuguese man o' war) that from the outside give the appearance of cohesion because they have a PR department, a logo, a company number and so on.

That's why it's meaningless when we read "Google says..." or "Facebook thinks..", because a bunch of sub-organisms that happen to occupy the same offices do not constitute an "entity". When dealing with them, like a patient with DID, you need to know which bit you're talking to.

> What I am puzzled about is companies that are sending mixed messages.

What you call "mixed messages" is what I call "incompetent management" that has no clear idea what it wants.

You're assuming company leaders know what they're doing. Very often it's the lower level employees that save the day due to company incompetence. It's just that the narcissistic tendencies of senior leaders will fail to highlight this to themselves. They are surrounded by yes-men usually.

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