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Comment by al_borland | Hacker News Reader

I was told this before the pandemic. The whole pandemic kind of helped me out in that respect (at least so far).

The problem with most office mandates is that they just require a person be in an office, any office. In my experience, this means it is very possible to be in an office with a bunch of people that do completely different jobs, so all day is spent on the phone. If I need to be on the phone all day anyway, I might as well be at home where it’s quiet, so I can hear people, they can hear me, and there aren’t any distractions.

Forcing people to relocate just to sit alone in a cubicle on a phone all day doesn’t improve productivity, it just makes people upset.

I do think meeting people in person has a lot of value, but office mandates aren’t the only way to handle that.

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Yep. Current employer is doing the same. Team member goes into the office 3 days a week, and all our calls are now very noisy with other people in the background. There's only two of us in this location so all our team meetings are video calls anyways. What point is there to going back in at all in that situation?!

There’s no real point, not in a physical science way

It’s all contrived political points; contracts, socialized norms the elders in charge refuse to negotiate.

The stubbornness and selfishness of the gerontocracy, to serve the dying and dead is gross. Some kind of mental illness fueled by their huffing leaded gas and growing up in world war/Cold War paranoia made it so they cannot escape the idea life is 24/7 militarized economic production.

Why just elders? I see modern start ups and companies, ran by 30/40yo C-suite mandating return to the office.

Elders here I think means “the kind of people who care more about personal status than any actual value to the company”, so that means most C-suite asses.

This is always funny to hear and I agree.

I have worked remote for almost 20 years.

Just because remote is new to the masses doesn’t mean remote or hybrid is new.

Some companies started in person.

They are only so efficient in person let alone remote

They learned it from somewhere.

I think a lot of it has to do with justifying real estate holding, which have likely fallen significantly in value since the pandemic, as remote work had increased. Selling at the worst time is likely out of the question, so they try to make it worth holding on to.

Even before the pandemic, I went into the office mostly to work alone at my desk or go into a conference room alone to zoom with someone in another office.

The only benefit I got out of the office was lunches and hallway conversations, which do have some value to be fair.

This. If employers are asking employees to sacrifice commute and residence flexibility, the least they can do is also sacrifice hiring and team composition flexibility, so that you actually reap the benefits of in-person collaboration.

The place I work did RTO so I spend all day talking to people across the county and exactly 0 people in office. The main coworker I work with is outside DC and we spend a portion of the day on the phone together. Same as before.

Our company has two major locations, with redundant datacenters at each site. The colleagues I work with the most are at the other site, so going into the office does me no good. Now TPTB might decide to shut down the other datacenter (BC/DR be damned), but that's a good five years away.

You lost me with your last sentence.

TPTB = The Powers That Be BC = Business Continuity DR = Disaster Recovery

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