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Comment by siva7 | Hacker News Reader

If you had colleagues you liked as friends then RTO is usually more fun. If not then there is no difference in productivity if your developer works from anywhere or in a cubicle. Mandating RTO comes usually from clueless managers who think they can get some control over the teams (hint: you won’t)

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More fun but less productive. Anecdotally my work friends and I do way more now that we cant distract each other constantly. We hang out on weekends now to waste time.

I got a new job recently and came into the office for the first few weeks for the novelty of it as I hadn't worked in an office for years. There are few people who swear by the office and complain that they can't work without it, no kids either, I think they like having a chinwag every day. Now we're moving offices so they are going to a coffee shop so they can work together, sounds like hell, I won't go back.

Well, you will get control over employees that show up. The rest are passed over until they leave.

If I had a choice to manage a team hybrid in person or manage fully remote, I would always pick in person.

I think it will naturally move back to more in person just because those are going to be the higher functioning teams with the higher functioning managers.

What evidence is there that they’re “higher functioning”?

You’re the exact type of manager I now screen for in job interviews.

If the whole team is remote then everyone is on the same level.

However, If any are colocated then there's going to be a rift, guaranteed. As soon as the majority is colocated then the all of a sudden remote workers start unintentionally getting cut out of decisions. I've seen it happen every time. It becomes a lot of work for the manager to stop everyone from talking casually in the office. Next thing you know they're making hiring decisions based on colocation.

So keep it all remote or all colocated is my advice. But if you have two teams, one colocated and the other remote, it's twice as much work for the remote team to do the same work as the colocated team. Not impossible, just really hard and a total waste of management brain cycles that could be spent thinking about strategy.

In what kind of industry are you to evoke seemingly without irony the phrase "get control over employees"? Manufacturing maybe? Agriculture? Definitely nothing where creative work is expected, right?

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