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Comment by tapanjk | Hacker News Reader

A thought experiment, something you may not want to hear. Have you thought of playing along and see if you would actually like going back to office full time? Also, while you are at office 5 days a week, how about try to get to the next level before you switch? Many will leave (just like you are planning to) and hence it will be easier for the long timers to get promoted in an environment where there will be a lot of inflow of new employees at all levels.

I am not suggesting that this is the right way to think about your situation, but that it is 'another way' to think about it. Who knows, you might end up profiting from this adversity. Wish you all the best!

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It’s not always that easy. Many people over the last few years have reorganised their life under the expectation of continued hybrid working, and can’t trivially reorganise it back to full time.

I am one of these naive people who expected happy home office forever. It bit me hard, because I bought an old house outside of big city and spent the time I would need to commute renovating it. The return to the office happened, I quit. The other place was weird. It advertised generous home office ruling. But under very special manager home office was forbidden. It was just too stupid to file a complaint to HR and I left. So my construction site was stuck for 1,5 years and it was very stressful.

Found by accident a job near my home. Small company with private office for me and unlimited home office ruling. Use home office only when I am ill. During this period I found out, that I absolutely love my private office and hate daily commuting and open offices.

> Many people over the last few years have reorganised their life under the expectation of continued hybrid working

Why should an employer bear the burden of an employee's own poor decision making?

because it's true the other way

But you're not forced to work for a company that wants you in the office, you're free to seek employment elsewhere that matches your remote requirements similar how a company isn't forced to hire remote workers only. You are both free to choose the best options that fit your demands if you can find them.

Jobs and employers aren't for life. If you uprooted and reorganize your whole life based on the circumstances of a once in a lifetime global pandemic expecting things to stay like that forever, you've done goofed.

Friendly reminder that remote work in IT was a thing way before the pandemic. I for one started working from home full time in 2015.

Also your approach seems to be to just accept whatever employers throw at you. Have you considered that they might be colluding (in a sense) to deprive you of options?

I would like to know a rational reason why I should spend so much of my day travelling.

>Also your approach seems to be to just accept whatever employers throw at you.

Where do you see me saying such a thing?

>I would like to know a rational reason why I should spend so much of my day travelling.

Companies say it's for "better collaboration". You would do it if you had no other options if every potential employer would require you to be on site depriving you of remote options, but because the market is in your favor giving you options, it's difficult for you to empathize with the other situation.

> Where do you see me saying such a thing?

Your solution appears to be "choose a different employer" without any hint of "demand more from the current employer".

> You would do it if you had no other options if every potential employer would require you to be on site depriving you of remote options, but because the market is in your favor giving you options, it's difficult for you to empathize with the other situation.

You assume something that's not the case. I am of the opinion that everyone who can, should have this option regardless of the market situation and I think it's terrible people are forced to commute. It's like paid leave or health insurance - an achievement in workers' rights.

>Your solution appears to be "choose a different employer" without any hint of "demand more from the current employer".

That's only what you implied, not what I said. If simply demanding stuff from your current employer would just work then there wouldn't be so many unhappy workers everywhere. But that's not it works in the real world. The only language employers understand is the "F you, I quit" part.

>I am of the opinion that everyone who can, should have this option regardless of the market situation

That's nice but how do you propose that to happen? Did you see any workers rioting on the streets to have remote work as a guaranteed labor right? No? Then you can forget about it.

All rights and perk that labor currently has, like the 8h workday, free healthcare, paid vacation days, paid sick leave, have been won only through blood and conflict. It's not like your government is ever gonna hold a referendum and ask workers how many paid vacation days do you want to have and everyone gets to choose. If you want change you need to fight for it, physically with violent force, otherwise you'll be at the mercy of the "free market" which may or may not be in your favor depending how the wind blows. Perks aren't just gonna fall out of the sky for the working class, ever. The covid years were a fluke.

>If you want change you need to fight for it, physically with violent force, otherwise you'll be at the mercy of the "free market" which may or may not be in your favor depending how the wind blows. Perks aren't just gonna fall out of the sky for the working class, ever. The covid years were a fluke.

Which I think is very unfortunate, because working from home is a huge benefit to people who want to, while not being an actual cost to employers (in my opinion, not in theirs).

The part I'm struggling to understand, and please be honest here, is you almost sound a little smug that people are being made to return to the office. Maybe you have a good reason for that, or maybe I'm misreading your tone?

> But that's not it works in the real world.

Of course it does - at least wherever unions exist.

> Perks aren't just gonna fall out of the sky for the working class, ever.

That's defeatist. There are ways beyond violence and you're allowed to negotiate the terms of your employment.

I occasionally got perks from my employers because I was the only person who asked.

Also there's the less popular route - voting. Where I'm from actually helped over the years.

That’s not a good take. Compare/contrast: “but you’re not forced to work for a company that wants you to work in hazardous conditions without safety gear”. That’s far different from RTO, but the point is that there’s a huge power imbalance here and it’s not as simple as saying “don’t work there if you’re not happy with […]”.

IMHO, yours is not a good take. I get it, I also like to WFH if I can instead of commuting, but working from the office is not the same as working with hazardous substances both legally and as a apples to apples take.

Working in hazardous environments is outlawed (unless proper care is taken), working from the office is not outlawed. If you want working from the office to be outlawed as a health hazard you'll have to convince the government to do that as part of OHSA and labor laws but good luck getting any workers' sympathy that commuting to work in your cushy air conditioned office is not to your taste from the likes of those doing landscaping or roofing.

Otherwise we can stretch the definition endlessly to working with Windows, Agile, Scrum, Teams and Jira is a health hazard and should be also outlawed because I just don't like them, but me not liking something is not enough to make it outlawed.

Yep, those are indeed not the same thing, and that’s why I said they’re not the same thing. The point was that “if you don’t like it, leave” is a terrible reply to any complaint about a working environment. Especially when things like insurance are bizarrely tied to employment, a huge portion of people can’t just leave.

>“if you don’t like it, leave” is a terrible reply to any complaint about a working environment.

Why is it a terrible reply? What should you do if you don't like your job? What's your point here?

Most people on the planet do jobs they don't like, welcome to reality. Otherwise we'd all be racecar drivers, twitch streamers, musicians and painters and get paid for our hobbies, but that's not how it works for most people.

We do a job not because we always like it or like everything about it, we do it to pay for food, shelter and if money allows, to afford hobbies and leisure that make life nice. Venting on the internet won't improve societal issues or issues you have at your job, it's still up to you to change your situation to what fits you because nobody will do it for you.

> because nobody will do it for you

That's not true - you just talked about OSHA. What did they do before that? They did what you advocate - they left, or maybe lost a hand or two. Then we got this codified and boom! Now somebody else does it for you (thank god).

It's not just about like/dislike. There are real impacts. Thousands of tons of CO2, lives lost in car accidents, countless human lifespans wasted on a commute. These are real impact that you, yes YOU, will face head on.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. Unless the employee has hybrid working in their contract then the decision to reorganise their life around it is their own responsibility, not the company's.

I remember being surprised during the pandemic just how many people were uprooting their lives and moving to remote locations. Even though there has been a trend towards remote work over the previous decade I always thought there would be a bounce back and some of those people would be stuffed.

> It’s not always that easy

Where did they say it was easy?

They said maybe try going back to the office and seeing if you like it.

Heresy here on HN, I know.

That seems like it was a mistake. WFH was supposed to be temporary during the pandemic. Not sure what people were thinking…

"supposed to" depends on the company. The company I was working at announced immediately that we were work from home forever. They canceled leases on over a dozen offices across the world and let us come in and take the old furniture.

Pardon me but this is a stupid argument. If OP is working at amazon they’ve already been going three days a week. If they did not like going three days a week why should they like going five days a week?

> A thought experiment

> Have you thought of playing along and see if you would actually like going back to office full time

That is not a thought experiment. That is a "uproot your whole life" experiment.

“Hear me out, what if you might like sticking your hand in a blender?”

I genuinely miss seeing my pals at work and eating lunch with the gang. I genuinely do not miss the commute, the struggle to get things done with a million distractions around me, not having my dog sleeping in her basket underneath my desk in my home office, and seeing my kids before and after school.

There, thought experiment concluded. I didn’t like it.

Comparing working from the office to sticking your hand in a blender is such an absurd hyperbole that it completely discredits your argument.

but subtlety is usually lost at the folks here and this comparison will at least be understood. then again - the thought of having to go back to the office is evoking a feeling not too different from anticipating something quite painful. too many colleagues are just unbearable and the waste of time having to commute unpaidly ... maybe i'd prefer a quick blender session for another year of home office even.

Thank you. Sure it was hyperbolic, but it was in response to the notion that maybe we’re all too shortsighted to see that we’d like full time RTO if only we’d try it. There are certain things I don’t need to try before knowing that I won’t enjoy them. I’ve worked in offices enough decades to have sufficient data: I strongly prefer WFH. “Maybe you’ll like it this time!” is weak sauce. I’m not a delicate flower who couldn’t RTO if situations demanded it. I would not help me do a better job for my company, though, and I don’t want to.

This is academic for me. I have an amazing job at a company all-in on WFH to the point we just downsized a physical office we were underusing. I hate seeing my colleagues get dragged back to legacy offices for no compelling reason though.

Hand in the blender can be healed for a few tens of thousands of dollars and a year of rehab probably. Commute to office takes approximately one full month of human life every year, unpaid and uncompensated. So that's actually a very reasonable comparison. It's just most humans are terrible with estimating long term costs and benefits, so they tend to ignore the ridiculously insane cost of commute over whole career.

> absurd hyperbole

It's actually not, if you stop and consider the true cost of working and commuting to an office. It's just we're conditioned NOT to consider the true cost, so we externalize a bunch of the costs.

For example, you don't consider the CO2 from your car, or the time spent driving, or the risk of death. If you factor in just the time spent driving, suddenly smoking a pack a day is better for your lifespan than being in an office.

It is not "uprooting your whole life" to go back to working in the office, unless one was so foolish as to move away from the city their job was in. And yeah in that case it sucks balls, but I don't imagine most people did something that foolish.

seems more like very smart to do such a thing - but sometimes even smart decisions just don't work out.

Many people were hired as remote hires.

So buying own home/apartment to live in is a "foolish" idea now, right?

> unless one was so foolish

Making decisions is not foolish, even if they disagree with your idea of how they should be made. I quit my previous job over RTO, leaving a great team at a cool company. It was a conscious decision with pros and cons carefully weighed.

Amazon already has 3 days in-office requirement

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