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Comment by BeetleB | Hacker News Reader

I think if you're required to RTO, you should insist on not having Zoom/Teams/Webex on while in the office.

"Come to my cube if you need me".

Way before the pandemic, I almost never had those tools running on my work laptop - unless it was for a (rare at the time) cross-geo meeting. A coworker once sent me a screenshot of how I appeared in the IM tool - Last seen 120 days ago.

Sadly, that went away once we hired our first remote person.

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If you're required to RTO and doing it you probably aren't in a position to "insist" on jack shit.

You have to fully lean into it. Or at least pretend to. My company implemented RTO, citing the usual collaboration and culture, and I've suddenly turned into the biggest in-person sycophant every time they try to organise workshops online "because it's much easier".

We have offices on both sides of the Channel. It means travelling, which is expensive, hard to align, and really disruptive, but since the RTO mandate I suddenly realised _how valuable_ those in person interactions were, and how much more creative we were thanks to those watercooler chats.

I'm interviewing elsewhere, so I'm having a bit of fun seeing how far I can push the malicious compliance.

In the best case you might have all the engineers rolling up to the same line manager sitting in the same office, but those above entry-level are expected to spend a good portion of their time collaborating across teams (and therefore across sites).

Varies quite a bit by company. Pre-pandemic, we had phones in our cubes :-) Thus I could easily turn Teams off. My immediate team was physically nearby, and people elsewhere could email. They'd call if urgent.

No one else is in the office on the same days. I recently seeked out a job that was in-office. It was just a reminder that the model is dead beyond repair. These boomer CEOs can't be gone soon enough. I'm full remote now and the engagement, interaction and team comraderie are FAR better.

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