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Comment by Jcampuzano2 | Hacker News Reader

They want people to RTO because it gives middle management who can't get up to date with how to manage a remote team a job to do: micromanage, and because execs have 0 trust in the people they hire.

It essentially all comes down to this, they're worried about people not working when they can't keep their eyes on them at all times. What they can't seem to grasp is that people are already not working much of the time even in an office due to a variety of reasons - smalltalk, watercooler chats, distractions from the all too common open office environment, coffee breaks, useless events/activities that give HR teams something to do, people taking longer lunches due to having to drive somewhere etc.

Additionally real-estate value even though none of them will mention it. People not in the office lowers the value of their investment.

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I am someone who went out of their way to find an on-site job. Our current hours are Mon-Thr, 10 - 2:30 pm, with remote on Friday, which is a really great balance.

Smalltalk, coffee breaks, etc, are a productivity boon. Random conversations about what other people are working on are much more likely to occur in person as opposed to online. You can’t tell me that the social interactions on Slack even remotely approach the social interactions in person.

Working remote is lonely and erodes a foundational element of sociability. You spend a good portion of your waking hours at work. Your coworkers are your friends.

Also, there is no doubt in my mind that people take longer HN and Reddit breaks while at home than they would at the office with their coworkers having a view on their screens. This isn’t about the panopticon of the management class and more the impetus to be pulling your weight.

There’s just something that is enhanced about any interactions that happen in person. As a broad social trend we need to fight against the retreat from actual human interactions.

>Working remote is lonely and erodes a foundational element of sociability. You spend a good portion of your waking hours at work. Your coworkers are your friends.

Thats where you do need to explicitly make effort outside of work to fill that gap. You could also make the argument that commuting 90 minutes a day is a regular time suck for you that could be spent doing other productive things.

>Also, there is no doubt in my mind that people take longer HN and Reddit breaks while at home than they would at the office with their coworkers having a view on their screens.

oh, so smoker breaks lol. as long as they're getting the work done, why do you give a shit?

>As a broad social trend we need to fight against the retreat from actual human interactions.

There's nothing stopping you from doing that outside of work, but you need to be more mindful about doing it

> you do need to explicitly make effort outside of work to fill that gap

On the one hand, I don’t disagree. On the other, I think this is something that is easy to say, and really hard to implement in practice.

The workplace has been a critical part of the social fabric for a very long time. And the opportunities for finding social connection outside of work are very unevenly distributed, and for the tech industry in particular, we tend to be less likely to have the personalities/skills to create a healthy social life on our own.

Does this need to change? Yeah, probably. I know I’ve personally had to work hard to cultivate social connections. But we should not underestimate the impact of just removing one of the largest social building blocks wholesale. Even if people can adjust, that doesn’t happen magically/automatically.

> There's nothing stopping you from doing that outside of work

There are many things that stop people. If you work a stressful job and/or have kids, your energy may be gone. If you’re a socially anxious person, your anxiety tells you it’s better to stay home. If you live in an area that doesn’t provide many social opportunities, you have that to contend with.

The reality is that society has been trending towards more and more isolation, and while I agree that we can each individually try to do something about that, I don’t think we should underestimate the challenge or assume that it’s just as easy as being “more mindful”.

Some of these issues are systemic, and in the same way you can’t tell a depressed person to just “look on the bright side”, we need to be discussing the deeper issues that are exacerbated by fully remote environments. I’m not saying blind RTO mandates are the solution either, but neither should we discount the challenge people face as the social fabric goes through these massive changes.

This is how I understand your position:

At core, it is about prioritization of strategies to facilitate mental health. In office work makes it easy to not explicitly or skip prioritizing socialization because its already there, for the most part. Without that prioritization, it can be easy to become undisciplined in maintaining those strategies for mental health

Been there a few times. For me, I love biking and trail riding. Its two wheel therapy for me, particularly on trails because you do need to pay attention. If your mind starts wandering, you'll be ejected over the bars real quick.

And there's hobbies that you can do outside of work, if its a priority for you. But like physical fitness, that's self-driven, and really easy to slack off and lose gains if you don't keep up with it.

But if you take into account the implied requirements for in-office work, that means time lost in commute, and needing to sync travel plans, vehicles, etc. that's the problem I have with blind mandates, they often are benefiting the person making those decisions, regardless of the people who need to implement and execute projects and goals.

> At core, it is about prioritization of strategies to facilitate mental health.

I don’t think I’d simplify it to this. I think the workplace is one way people have been filling a mental health need.

In another comment [0], I described some of the other reasons I think time in the office is valuable. More broadly, my position is that there are numerous aspects of time in the office that need to be explored and understood, and that a better argument against blind mandates is to identify and work towards suitable alternatives.

> In office work makes it easy to not explicitly or skip prioritizing socialization because its already there, for the most part. Without that prioritization, it can be easy to become undisciplined in maintaining those strategies for mental health

I think it goes beyond this, and I’d reframe it slightly. I don’t think it’s so much about becoming undisciplined, but about the erosion/collapse of long standing social structures without obvious replacements.

The end result may indeed be that we each have to start being disciplined about getting social time. But for a fundamentally social species that launched society to today’s technological heights on a foundation of social systems undermined by that progress, we’re now flailing about in the clouds unsure what to do about it because we’ve largely forgotten how to build IRL communities at a time when we need them most.

I agree that blind RTO mandates are no good. I agree that there are tradeoffs involved like commuting. I’m mostly advocating for a position that doesn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater while society catches up to our new reality. Realistically, this probably involves some hybrid model. Blind mandates are no good, but I think there’s a failure mode at the opposite end of the spectrum as well.

- [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39875309

If 10-2:30 jobs were more common, you might find more people agreeing with you. Unfortunately, those are exceedingly rare.

Smalltalk and coffee breaks can be exhausting for introverts. Some people prefer to concentrate for long on a single task, too.

And for what concerns the time spent working, well, being in an office means nothing as there are plenty of ways to lose time and screw around.

What about we stop treating workers as children that need constant supervision and size them by the quality of their work.

As you grow up, it becomes clear that no size fits all.

> "Smalltalk and coffee breaks can be exhausting for introverts."

Exhausting or not, introverts need to network _more_ than the average person. Not having built up a personal network by the later stages of their career will leave them high and dry in an industry downturn.

Yeah, yeah, "my work speaks for itself" is true in theory but, given an equal work record, even an introvert is going to favor the co-workers they personally like more.

Work is exhausting for everyone.

> Smalltalk, coffee breaks, etc, are a productivity boon. Random conversations about what other people are working on are much more likely to occur in person as opposed to online.

That's a problem with an easy cultural solution: sounds like you need an always-on team video call which people commonly drop into when they are having a break! (During Covid, my team started every day this way, with an open call which was usually used for random chat, or sometimes just for silently working in if nobody felt like chatting.)

I actually wrote some software for our team to use at the start of lockdown that was just this, always-on group video and audio chat rooms, loosely modeled on the audio rooms in Discord:

https://github.com/williamcotton/present

> Working remote is lonely and erodes a foundational element of sociability. You spend a good portion of your waking hours at work. Your coworkers are your friends.

This statement particularly irked me. Because you’re making the condition of someone being a friend contingent on “amount of time spent with them”.

Tomorrow I’m meeting someone I haven’t seen in about six months. He helped me get out of a very dark place a few years ago. I’m meeting him tomorrow because I want to.

I choose to spend time with my friends. I choose spending three hours on a Wednesday night speaking to a group of friends. I choose to travel for six hours to see my friend in London every few months.

I do not choose my co-workers — the company chooses for me most of the time.

(Yes, I can switch companies. I know that’s a thing).

Working remotely doesn’t have to be lonely. It’s only as lonely as you make it. Go do your work in a coffee shop or something I dunno.

Where did you meet most of your friends? Grade school? College? Church? Did you pick them as well? The truth of the matter is that most friends are friends of convenience.

Are you apt to make friends in a coffee shop? Most people are much more guarded and less social in a coffee shop because they're clearly busy and on a completely different team.

Is this a Silicon Valley thing? I've certainly never thought of a coffee shop this way. I sung along to a bad 90s rock cover at one once with about 30 other people. It was a great time.

Who pays people to drink coffee and chat about Netflix?

Not successful businesses or businesses with any sort of audit requirements.

Or are you hoping the employees do that “small talk” off the clock?

Lastly, open office layouts suck. That’s where smalltalk happens. It doesn’t happen when everyone is in their own office.

I agree that some of the reasons behind RTO boil down to control.

But I don't agree that this is the only reason, and I think we need to be discussing the reasons RTO can be beneficial, so that we can have a more productive conversation about how to replicate the benefits without blindly applied RTO mandates.

> they can't seem to grasp is that people are already not working much of the time even in an office due to a variety of reasons - smalltalk, watercooler chats, distractions from the all too common open office environment, coffee breaks, useless events/activities

I don’t think that framing this as “not working” gets at what’s happening. Humans are a social species. Working effectively as a group is directly benefited by this kind of “non work”. If you restrict the definition of “working” to just the moments in a day where someone is creating some kind of measurable “productive” output, I think something important is missed. The company is still made of humans. These humans are working on highly complex and interrelated tasks, and fostering an environment of social connection is arguably as important as doing the “strictly work” parts of the job.

Prior to COVID, I was remote but I still went to the office periodically. Those office visits were like filling my gas tank. More communication and collaboration happened during those hallway and water cooler conversations than hours/days of emails and meetings could accomplish. There was a fluidity to it. Start a conversation with Person A about <Project>, arrive at a realization that we need to take to Person B, walk to their desk and bring them up to speed, they know another key stakeholder and pull them in, and 20 minutes later we have consensus on something that would have taken hours or days to align on everyone’s schedules. Multiply this times dozens of complex issues, and the easy access to direct conversations was invaluable.

Getting back home was also important because I could then go deep on tasks that required long periods of focus.

I’m not saying I think RTO is the only answer. But I have yet to see anything close to the kind of collaboration and connection that is possible in a collocated environment. Companies have proven that it’s possible if it’s baked into the core of their culture, e.g. GitLab, but the reality is that most companies aren’t built this way, and many people aren’t built this way.

So yes, I agree that RTO for the purpose of control is a problem. It’s also not the only reason for RTO, and we need to broaden the conversation to find solutions to the human social collaboration that has been lost.

> But I have yet to see anything close to the kind of collaboration and connection that is possible in a collocated environment.

The head of data science came over to my flat for an afternoon on two separate occasions in the last year.

Without a shadow of doubt, those were the most productive meetings I’ve had in the last year.

And that included full afternoon workshops in a rented meeting room with the executives.

Co-located collaboration doesn’t need to mean “working in the same building which the company is paying rent on”.

If we had a bigger team, hell, I’d be happy for them to all come over and hang at mine for an afternoon while we get stuff done. I’d buy coffee, order some food, make copious cups of tea for everyone! Put on some records, show off my synths. Make a fun day out of it.

So, I agree. Colocated collaboration is important.

It doesn’t need to happen in a stuffy open plan office though!

Alternatives do exist… but the “suits” will never, ever, agree to things like this ^

Completely agree that this kind of collaboration can (and probably should) be done in new ways.

I do think this kind of focused work is distinct from the kind of hallway catchups that happen organically that just don’t in a remote environment, but even just having a standing “we all meet at <place> at <interval>” would go a long way.

i am remote since 2010. I used to love to go to the office each 3 months, spend a week there. Now office is empty, company decided to down-size it, moving to another place and people go just to office in Summer to abuse the air-conditioning.. It is said that we lost the office, which use to be the place where we used to build a strong team spirit and have important discussions or team events..

This would make sense if the managers were in the same offices as the workers, but at least from my experience, they aren’t. You still have VC all your meetings.

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