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Comment by w10-1 | Hacker News Reader

People dedicated to working at home haven't worked in a good office.

That was: an office with a door, and a big open space where people from a kind but competitive group had free-wheeling discussions.

The main thing was that we together were shaping the product; if you convinced others, you could have an impact. And to convince others, you needed to do your homework (in your office).

So it's not really the office or the desk but the rhythm of coming up with an idea and seeing it take root in your peers (or not) -- the opportunity to contribute.

Nowadays, it's open desks or cubes and product managers, and any collective discussion is shot through with politics. When initiative is squelched and mutual respect is replaced by influence, the only thing to maximize is slack -- which makes working from home the absolute best.

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I have worked in the environment you describe. It’s still worse than working from home with a team that communicates over written mediums even semi competently.

The problem with what you describe is it still requires either coordinated interruption of your peers or working effectively remotely anyway.

There is an inverse relationship to the people available for arbitrary “free-wheeling discussions” and how busy they are actually working. Getting a bunch of do-nothing flap-jaws to give you quick feedback seems productive but it’s actually worse than no meeting at all.

> People dedicated to working at home haven't worked in a good office.

Or, alternatively, some people work better from home and some work better in an office. And basing "all truth" off your anecdata isn't really reasonable (the same is true of those that say everyone would be better off working from home).

The biggest problem is that the people that work better in an office tend to see that benefit because there are co-workers there. And if half the people are working from home, the co-workers aren't there. So you can really only make one group optimal, and the other one suffers.

> The biggest problem is that the people that work better in an office tend to see that benefit because there are co-workers there. And if half the people are working from home, the co-workers aren't there. So you can really only make one group optimal, and the other one suffers.

That is exactly what I noticed in 2020 mostly. The people who kept going to the office were almost screaming and crying on the internet about working in an empty office and basically begging everyone to come back and keep them company.

All this time we'd accepted that as the norm. Dare I say it, the world favored extroverts. And in 2020 for a brief few months, it didn't. It was interesting seeing the table flipped.

Of course that's kinda exaggerating. Lots of people are "fine" in either situation. Lots of places were closed for a while and even after, there was still a spooky vibe to it, so WFH wasn't quite as nice.

I love socializing and stuff. TO me there are other reasons I prefer WFH - for example, the business district my company HQ is in, is very VERY pedestrian unfriendly. It's basically a corner of 2 super busy 6-lane streets. Walking to get lunch is impossible. Getting parking is a nightmare. The commute to/from the office is awful. I don't even like the town the office is in lol.

> People dedicated to working at home haven't worked in a good office

This is a crazy generalisation. I am fortunate enough to have a job doing something I enjoy, and I try hard to be a productive and reliable part of my team. But work is still just a means to an end for me. If I won the lottery tomorrow my notice would be in before I even cashed the cheque. I’m dedicated to working at home because it minimises the impact work has on my life in so many ways.

> People dedicated to working at home haven't worked in a good office.

I agree.

> The main thing was that we together were shaping the product; if you convinced others, you could have an impact. And to convince others, you needed to do your homework (in your office).

This is not. Shaping a product is not a collaborative work. Thus, product is something different, we talk about the real work environment.

> So it's not really the office or the desk but the rhythm of coming up with an idea and seeing it take root in your peers (or not) -- the opportunity to contribute.

This is another not. Office has nothing to do with that topic.

> Nowadays, it's open desks or cubes and product managers, and any collective discussion is shot through with politics. When initiative is squelched and mutual respect is replaced by influence, the only thing to maximize is slack -- which makes working from home the absolute best.

This is office chatting. Product development is done inside the computer. You don't need an office for that.

On one hand, product-development on the computer is a lot better when people actually use the computer to the best of its abilities. A lot of people will just leave shit in people’s heads or request one-offs to be done EOD because, I swear, this was a last second client request and we really need it. On the other, I’ve done a lot of painful product meetings with PM seatwarmers who refuse to type anything at all into their tickets and devs who barely comment on important things like ticket size or whether or not something should be prioritized differently based on technical factors. I’ve met only a handful of good PO/PM types, and whether or not they work in person has had little to do with it.

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