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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

> many still spend large parts of the day on video chats they could have done from home

This has been my experience of "in the office" post-pandemic. I end up on a video call for almost every meeting anyway. And being on a video call meeting in an open-plan office with an internet connections that's trying to serve 10s of video calls is a considerably worse experience than being on one in quiet environment with an internet connection that only needs to serve 1 or 2.

Being in an office when other people are on video calls can also be quite unpleasant.

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My wife's company returned to the office. Even if all or most of folks on a video chat are at her location, everyone takes the call from their own cubicle or office anyway. So she never interacts with anyone in person even while in person at the office.

"Oh are you in? One minute, I'll come down and sit with you"

This is not a hard problem to solve if she wishes to.

If there are only two people on the call, sure.

It's harder when not everybody is physically present, because there are 1 or 2 people either working from home, or from a different office, or who are external to the company and are working from their company's office.

Even when I go to the office I prefer taking video calls than in-person meetings anyway.

I find in-person interactions a lot less effective. Video calls force people to not stray from the subject and be more concise.

That's a rather sad office. Maybe I'm just lucky, but my experience is that if you're in the office, you will meet people and have casual chats with them.

The physical environment things makes sense, but uplink contention isn't an inherent feature of office buildings. It means that someone goofed and underprovisioned your infra.

The physical environment thing isn't an inherent feature of office buildings either. But space for people to have individual offices, sufficient meeting rooms and video conferencing equipment for all meetings to be able to use one), and internet connections that can handle significant numbers of video calls are all expensive.

The entire point of the article is about underprovisioned infrastructure.

This was my experience even before COVID. Most of my meeting were video calls due to time zones and different offices.

avoiding video calls is not why they did RTO so not sure how that's relevent. They are just sick of ppl walking their dogs, going to the "dentist" , doing laundry, taking a nap, cooking lunch, going to the post office, going to afternoon spin class and still logging off at 5pm. And these are not even half the things i do on weekly basis.

Source?

My guess is either apocrypha, rhetoric, or experience with people who aren’t doing their jobs, which in my experience isn’t most people working from home.

In my decade+ of working from home I’ve personally only encountered one or two people who fit the offered description. Most people do their work, irrespective of daily schedule.

Are these things a problem? All of this was promised by capitalism.

The problem isn't what the things are, it's what they aren't.

So now people spend their time on their phone or on "HN" or both. Much better.

When people want to avoid work, it is not glueing them on an office chair that will change the attitude.

Let's pretend that people actually work when they are in the office.

It's a lot easier to procrastinate in the office, actually, when everybody just assumes you are working just for being there.

At home I actually feel more pressured to show results from what I am doing.

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