WFH is becoming a benefit again | Hacker News Reader

WFH is becoming a benefit again

62 pointssharemywin78 comments

Wonder if the war will push companies back to WFH to keep gas pricing and supplies in check. Hard make it to work if gas station is out of gas or there's a one hour wait.

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Been working remotely for a long time now and was beginning to feel that loneliness. So, I started going to a co-working space to be around people again. Two/three days a week I'm in the "office" with my new "coworkers". It's been great to get to socialize and talk to other tech folks who are working on interesting and different things.

But I also love that freedom of staying home whenever I want to. IMO, more offices should operate more like this.

> Two/three days a week...

This is the norm now for the past few years, and is one of the few ways to protect your job from being fully offshored.

People keep complaining on HN, but the reality is WFH during COVID proved async works, and if async works then there's no reason not to reduce hiring in MTV and NYC and shift to (eg.) Prague, Warsaw, Tel Aviv, Bangalore, etc.

The post above as well is predicated on a 1973 style consumer transport shock. At least in most developed countries, the average MPG has dramatically increased [0].

In 1973, the average MPG was around 12 MPG. In 2015 (before EVs were normalized) it was almost 25 MPG. In 2026, numbers would be significantly higher.

A more realistic prior is what happened in 2006-07: your boss will expect you to go to work.

[0] - https://public.websites.umich.edu/~umtriswt/PDF/SWT-2017-5.p...

Actually, there are reasons not to offshore. See near shoring as a trend for evidence. Places in South America are preferred over Europe and Asia for U.S. companies. Beyond that though, local workers are easier to communicate with, culturally compatible, higher skilled, and tend to behave better.

[Edit: source: I led a consulting team of about eighty Brazilians and Ecuadorians]

> [US] workers are (...) higher skilled

Looks like you have not done much work outside the US if this is what you believe

Source: having directly worked with people from about 60 countries for 30 years

There's definitely a more nuanced way to write that which would be far more accurate. I certainly have worked with fantastic workers from outside the US. There's nothing magical about living here that makes people better at their jobs. You are correct that I've never worked outside the US except for work trips.

Part of the dynamic is that with wages and costs here being high, the bar for acceptable is higher so there's a filter effect. Another part is that a lot of people emigrate and the costs associated means only the better people get to do so. If your international collaboration experience is from working in FAANG/whatevs or the best augmentation houses (e.g. Thoughtworks), you'd have very different experiences than are the common case. In that case you're not benefiting from financial arbitrage so much which is another relevant dynamic. That same dynamic means you're less likely to be outsourcing or nearshoring from other high cost of living places that tend to have better schools (although the US seems to be struggling on this). You could replace US with HCOL places and the statement would be improved. Further, those that are good who don't emigrate can demand wages on the global scale (even if adjusted for local COL) which means they aren't working offshore contracts unless they're early in their career and you got lucky (in which case their team isn't similarly great) or, again, you're working with one of the premium houses and outsourcing isn't a cost saving exercise. In the places where wages are strangely low (e.g the UK & some other HCOL parts of Europe) the industry draws a smaller proportion of the brightest minds because the premium is smaller.

So I believe your statement about your experience. I also think the general refutation of my sub-claim as distilled is correct. Yet the comment was in the context of outsourcing/nearshoring and implicitly about the median places, statistically speaking, looking to cut costs and exert downward pressure on wages. For those the local talent demanding the higher wages is higher skilled on top of having the meatspace/hand shaking advantage.

For the context: I worked for a US company in a very senior position in EMEA and APAC. I lived in several places. The company was huge and dynamic/innovative, until it was not anymore.

For two people with the same "work quality" let's say, one in France and one in the US and both wanted to work in a high-paced industry or startup -- the US is much, much better. From the perspective of the US person, hiring someone in France is a road of problems not because they are not good enough, but because they will be a bureaucratic burden.

For both US and France, hiring someone in India will be problematic because of major cultural differences, and given the size of the country, quality of work. There are very good Indian engineers, they are just much more difficult to find.

There is of course a lot of historical bias too, not to mention racism.

If you are in France today, it is economically better to hire someone from India, but the major differences in basically everything make it difficult. Hiring someone in Poland does not have this problem. The language would be the barrier, mostly (they would need to speak English, and our Frenglish is pitiful). So we hire for economic reasons, but the gap is closing quickly, especially for the top jobs (for the very top ones it is actually more interesting in Poland).

We could hire someone in the US but the salary structure is completely broken, and effectively we have people emigrating to the US (and sometimes coming back to France when they have a problem expecting that they will be taken care of, but that's another problem)

So yes, there are gaps between countries -- but not all countries.

Thanks for the extra detail. Sounds like we largely agree. I have definitely envied the vacation and other works staples of French colleagues. I'm glad you have it and for all "our" "negotiating power" we have some serious no gos in our negotiating space. Which is why I'm now my own boss.

Yes except for the Tel Aviv part. Hiring in Israel is a huge liability. Brand and war damage.

    > People keep complaining on HN, but the reality is WFH during COVID proved async works, and if async works then there's no reason not to reduce hiring in MTV and NYC and shift to (eg.) Prague, Warsaw, Tel Aviv, Bangalore, etc.

Async works because the same people you worked with before, are now on zoom just like when you were in the office. Because when you were in the office, you were on zoom most of the time because there were not enough conference rooms. The WeWork business proposition was correct; it was just implemented/executed poorly. Starbucks and other cafes can make a killing just by offering subscription/reservations based access to conference rooms for the day.

(WFH since ~11 years), the issue with remote work lay in the many who do not really know how to work in the present time. We're full of people who don't know how to use email even though they use it every day, or a chat app even though they're on it day and night; they can't use a bloody generic website even though they spend most of their lives online, and so on.

These people are simply a problem when working remotely, and while they're certainly present at the bottom of the ladder, they are particularly numerous among management. There are really very few who understand IT well enough not to cause issues and actually be productive.

The handful of people who have a financial interest in keeping the masses enslaved in the city, namely those with financial interests in office spaces, ready made food, fast-tech, fast-fashion, ... prey on this.

This is the real problem. The way out is to teach IT, not CS, not CE, at school, starting from early childhood, and to really teach it: FLOSS desktops, not cloud+mobile is mandatory. And since we don't have enough teachers, the only way is through video lessons, but to do something like that at a national level requires a level of understanding and commitment that currently seems largely absent among most people.

You're right.

I admit among my coworkers, for a few, I wonder how they manage to work remotely and be productive. These same people are the one who suck up all the oxygen out of meetings; and leave a bad taste in my mouth for the rest of the day.

My experience in corporate life has been that, as you go up the corporate ladder, you have to dumb down and goo-goo-ga-ga-ify information for managers.

Like, we have a log of all our work done, it's git. It tracks and timestamps each individual commit. But my manager can't use our git frontend. I guess it's too hard? Not sure. So, we then re-enter our time in Jira.

Of course, his manager can't open up Jira. So, we also create a word document every week documenting everything we have done. We actually also spell out and link the Jira issues (???). And then that gets sent to him.

Some of this I can understand. Reporting and distilling data is important. But nothing is being distilled, it's the same information just duplicated. This could all be automated but, of course, it's not.

That's genuinely funny

> This is the norm now for the past few years, and is one of the few ways to protect your job from being fully offshored.

Not necessarily true. A company that operates 100% remotely in country X not necessarily can hire people from other countries (and let them work there). I work for a french company, 100% remote. The company doesn't have branches in other companies, and so everyone works within France. This is ideal, because the HQ is in Paris, and many people don't (want to) live in Paris. Having to go to the office 2-3 times per week, makes it impossible for my company to hire outside of Paris... which is idiotic

> company that operates 100% remotely in country X not necessarily can hire people from other countries (and let them work there)

Can't speak for French companies aside from some players in DefenseTech and Quantum, but for most American companies this is a solved problem already - we already have a legal entity in most jurisdictions or the ability to spin one up within a couple days.

Additionally, if an organization is spending enough to open a dedicated branch in a country (even if it's only going to house 20-30 people), we tend to get FDI grants and subsidizes unlocked.

Pasqual did something similar when opening up their American campus in Chicago.

> Having to go to the office 2-3 times per week, makes it impossible for my company to hire outside of Paris... which is idiotic

There's no reason to - you aren't getting a significant cost benefit shifting hiring from Paris to (eg.) Toulouse, and are only incurring an additional operational headache.

At that point you may as well open a Francophone development office in Rabat or Tunis, or shift the office to Bucharest or Prague because the CEE countries can outcompete France in ICT hiring subsidies.

I work remotely following a divorce because my children live here. It's not something I would choose for myself and will be looking to move once they graduate.

The high performers are usually the first to leave under tighter RTO conditions

https://www.business.pitt.edu/return-to-office-mandates-dont...

Likely because they are fully aware of the power dynamics in a job and understand of when they are being taken advantage for performative theater.

Is there any increase in work constraints that wouldn’t cause this? It seems like it just means that industry interview practices are well calibrated and so high performers have an ease of finding another job.

High performers or non team players? No superstars under agile

I don't know about you guys, but RTTO was the biggest signal to me that corp america is lost and beyond recovery.

The benefits are so obvious, yet here we are.

I have heard a large impetus for the RTO push was to prop up commercial real estate. Permanent WFH would change the value of trillions of dollars of properties and reshape the commercial centers of cities.

A lot of people with a lot of money at risk got really scared and decided the easiest thing to do was to go back to the status quo.

The incongruent part of that theory is that the RTO push came from middle to upper-middle management (and some top-level ones on occasion).

The owners of commercial real estate are not these people. And it doesn't seem likely that these commercial real estate owners would have sufficient push by themselves to make such a large scale RTO mandate.

It came from the very top. The owners own both real estate companies and software companies and much in between. Many also copied the RTO directive to fit in.

There were a lot of downstream effects as well -- local businesses that depended upon those office workers being in the area. Those ripples hurt a lot of people.

That said, it shouldn't be the driver of RTO, it should be the need to actually have in-person collaboration.

True. Many large cities also depended on that tax revenue.

It's almost as if we should find an economic system that doesn't rely on forced consumption, waste, etc in order to be "prosperous."

A win-win in this regard would be to repurpose the empty office space into living spaces so that the local businesses would have local people and those tenants would be able to possibly abandon the need for car ownership if the density of the area fosters all the necessary services.

The smackdown of this idea is that office spaces have different requirements than living spaces and the conversion of those buildings is too expensive to make it viable. As an unrepentant optimist, I would hope that could be mitigated by supporting those transitions via tax rebates, collaborative zoning and permitting processes, and investing in methodologies that could address the infra needs (plumbing, etc).

>I have heard a large impetus for the RTO push was to prop up commercial real estate. Permanent WFH would change the value of trillions of dollars of properties and reshape the commercial centers of cities.

That makes as much sense as "people buy iPhones because they own Apple shares in their 401k (it's #2 in the S&P 500) and want to pump the stock". At an individual CEO level it doesn't make sense, for similar reasons. The CEO and the company can reap massive savings from not leasing an office, which is presumably also good for their careers and make the board happy. On the other hand the individual benefit that the CEO can get by ever so slightly increasing demand for CRE is negligible.

Those CEOs don't exist in isolation. There are boards of directors. Most tech companies have additional VC funding. The biggest myth of modern business is that the CEO is the boss. They're not. They're more often the person entrusted to curate the company which is ultimately for the interests of those who own it.

And those people own other things too. Sometimes they own commercial real estate directly. Sometimes they're just investing in it. But they all rub elbows with those who do own it. They sit on boards together. They have common interests and let me tell you -- those interests ain't about what's good for you and me.

Yep watch the economic forums if you want to get an insight into how these people think. They will absolutely be excited about AI but be a B2B SaaS that sells by the seat. They will move against their own interests if it in the pursuit of the next quarter regardless of long-term though.

Assuming this is an issue only in America is absolutely adorable. Signed, from Europe. In Austria a lot of corporations are overly generous if they give you 2-3 day/week WFH.

yeah, when you work in the office, there's no way to get your Costco shopping done.

I've been working fully remote for like 5 years at this point and I have to say I do get an itch to go into the office.

My pipe dream for the future of work is it's remote by default with in-office being a decision that's made at a team level. Ideally there would be no hard requirement to come to the office X days per week, it would be a team coming together and saying "hey, how about we all go into the office on Tuesday to collaborate on this thing" (this assumes buy in from the entire team).

My small company has an office in a coworking space that's about a 1.5 hour train commute for me. I don't go in much, but when I do, I have a great time. Some excellent conversation and product discussion happens there. I even go into a closer coworking space in my city a few times a week (typing from there).

All that said, working from home is so awesome. I'm more productive, have no commute, and get to do things like take care of background tasks like laundry and start my workouts at a reasonable hour after work.

Hybrid is a comfortable spot for me.

Same. It's been 6 years of "work from home", starting mid-March 2020. It has become very, very old. I would love to find a local startup that embraces hybrid work.

i am guessing you dont have kids. i get extra 2 hrs with my son that wouldnt trade for anything.

Agreed, over the last 6 years I have been able to spend lots of time with my two kids. Would not trade that for anything.

My kids are 12 and 13 - wfh was is getting very old for me, especially during the school holidays when I’m constantly in ‘dad mode’. Don’t get me wrong - I love them with all my soul but sometimes I really want a break.

I have kids and would prefer to work in-office or hybrid. There's lots of reasons people might want that.

I think the perfect set-up is hybrid, with 1-2 days office / 3-4 days home. Virtual meetings are significantly worse than in-person. But obviously the commute determines whether this is "on net" worthwhile.

> Virtual meetings are significantly worse than in-person

The problem is that "in-person" meetings are still Zoom calls for those that didn't come in, so it's the worst of both worlds.

That's definitely true - ideally, there would be one day where almost everyone comes in for the all-hands meeting. Whether that is realistic depends..

My team has at least one person in every continent (except Africa and the Antarctic, but we do have someone on Réunion), so meetings are and will always be video conferences.

I have a long commute to get to an office where everyone is wearing noise cancelling headphones for meetings...

Ha! That seems like a waste. As I said, commute time determines whether its worth it.

I've been WFH for 6 years since my local office permanently closed during Covid.

It's getting lonely. :(

I have been a consultant for well over a decade now: it's rare that I ever end up meeting clients in person. I have also seen just about every approach to "work from home".

Without an office, entire layers of communication get stripped out. The "ownership" of all those channels by your company only compounds the problem. You're not going to bitch about your boss, your PM, your project in the same way in slack as you might over lunch, with your co workers. Communication becomes burdened with layers of "nice". It is much easier to be brusk and professional in a request to someone you just spent the last hour eating with while you had a conversation about family, life, and what you did on the weekend.

Meanwhile there are entire layers of informal communication that can go on when teams intermingle. The cross pollination between accounting, customer service, design that can happen when you're in the same location simply wont occur when every one is on their own island.

I agree that ONE can be far more productive when stripping away the commute, and having the privacy that comes from NOT being in a crappy open floor plan. But it's a sub optimization problem: optimized parts don't always result in a better over all organism (organization).

Can it work: it sure can. Might it be optimal for you, maybe. But that doesn't mean it is applicable in every case.

I was a big WFH proponent, but I found the thing that I hated the most was the commute. Actually being in the office is pretty nice (assuming you work w/ nice people, have good culture, good coffee, nice desk setups, etc).

I've made the switch to biking to work about half the time and it's freaking amazing. I turn 20-30 mins of absolute dead time where I'm spending money, polluting, and using up infrastructure into 50 minutes of getting healthier and having a blast. It's a great trade, especially if you were going to work out anyway... which you should, of course.

I'm effectively spending 25 extra minutes of my day to get a 50 minute workout and save some money, and not pollute, and not contribute to traffic problems, parking congestion, etc. etc.

It's not necessarily easy to make this happen, cycling safely is a whole other can of worms, you kind of need a shower at the office (or take it easier on an ebike), but the benefits are massive if you can do it.

I walk to work everyday. I simply do not enjoy working from home.

Honestly the only thing that would making work from the office better is if the senior in my team _wasn't_ remote. Nothing against his decision, but I do feel like I've missed out on the organic growth opportunities from collaborating in person with them.

RTO would be much more popular if people were actually coming back to an individual office instead of the cubicle farm

Businesses and commercial real estate did this to themselves. I especially hope commercial real estate enters a death spiral and we stop building offices unless they are absolutely needed and free up some of the land for residential use (and not converting the buildings).

I miss the energy of being in the office, but I do not miss the commuting. If I could commute in 15 minutes or so each way I'd strongly consider an in-office role. OTOH, the ease of the home office is very nice.

I was discussing this with a friend last night. If fuel prices get high enough I can see it happening.

Articles about parts of Asia starting WFH to conserve fuel are already cropping up [1]. I'm seeing live trackers of the Hormunz pop up too [2].

I'm getting some serious deja-vu.

[1] https://fortune.com/2026/03/11/iran-war-fuel-crisis-asia-wor...

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/iran-oil-crisis-fuel-rationing...

[2] https://hormuzstraitmonitor.com/

I've never understood having an office when it isn't absolutely required. Why spend money on something you do not actually need?

If people can't make remote collaboration work, perhaps they should study how gaming groups achieve this.

> I've never understood having an office when it isn't absolutely required

A number of jurisdictions require some amount of office usage for subsidizes, it's harder for managers to justify not offshoring if everyone is 100% WFH, and some employees just suck (eg. Overemployed, exfiltrating data, quiet quitting).

In Texas where BCBS is based, the city asked them to re-instate in-office policies, as all those people drive a large amount of tax income in the city.

I personally think that Hybrid approach is best - My company has a good culture, in-person interaction gets things done quicker, more exposure, better camaraderie, etc. I see the common explanations for why post-covid RTO was pushed, which is probably a factor, but I don't really see people talking about the individuals who took advantage of WFH. 80:20 rule.

It's not just about gas pricing, it's also about housing. E.g., why live in Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Milan, if you can live in a cheaper (and way less populated) city? Going back to the office, even if it's 2 days/week completely defets decentralization of housing in most of Europe.

Keynes still has under 4 years to be proven right!

https://www.economicsnetwork.ac.uk/archive/keynes_persuasion...

At least where I live (France but not Paris) all the decently paid jobs in my field all seem to be fully remote. I’d love to go back to partial RTTO but it’s simply not financially viable given the paycut and commute costs.

I'm hybrid, but most weeks get called to site due to the nature of my job. Supposed to be 50/50 but often it's full in office. Air gapped networks that look like museum pieces are fun...

I think we'll start to see the effects once oil reserves get low and gas prices truly skyrocket.

Do companies give a crap about employees spending money on gas? I mean maybe for those that are traveling salesmen or something... but otherwise I don't see how it would bring it back...

Those pushing return to office have drank so much of the Kool-Aid that compliance with policy is worth any cost. You must keep collaborating and allegedly being productive in person.

It is usually the creeps that rush for it. They want the taste of power (forcing you to be in certain place and causing inconvenience) to sniff your perfumes when talk to you up close and clock your bum.

It's managers who want to feel in control of their peons reinforced by massive investment in corporate real estate and businesses surrounding them.

The last place I worked mandated 3 then 4 day RTO

After a year line managers were not enforcing it, despite repeated reminders

They started counting badge-ins, and lowering performance ratings for managers with reports not showing up.

They had to force the managers to act, almost none of them thought it was needed.

Management & their HR henchmen, sorry, henchpersons: "But think of all the in-person collaboration that gets missed without the in-office presence!"

The actual in-person collaboration in the office: 50-100 person open space office with everyone wearing noise canceling headphones all the time to drown out everyone else talking in zoom/teams calls, not talking to anyone in person, reading reddit and watching youtube on the second monitor while waiting to clock out for the day.

And there's the people that more or less require the use of headphones if you want to get anything done: the two or three people that continually narrate every aspect of what they're doing loud enough for everyone to hear, the handful of people who desperately need attention and validation at every possible juncture, the project managers having a ball pretending every day is an episode of The Office, and if you're really unlucky, the fire alarm that goes off at random intervals throughout the day that everyone's learned how to ignore.

Some older people don't hear well so they talk louder due to that. It's not that they intend to be loud, it's just they don't hear as well as younger people do. Many vets also having hearing loss due to service related injuries. So next time you hear someone talking loud... remember that.

Yeah, in my open space office there's an old guy that talks in Teams calls all day like he learned to whisper in a helicopter, and me and others complained to management about him disturbing everyone trying to focus on our work, and boss said "he's deaf, what do you want us to do about it, give him a private office?" and my answer in my head was "no, but have you heard of this wild idea called WFH where people can't disturb others or get disturbed by others talking too loud? Crazy idea, right?"

At my workplace, HR addressed RTO and said that even when people aren't working together, just seeing people around invigorates them. Kind of demeaning to think that part of my pay comes from HR enjoying seeing the back of my head while I'm hunched over my laptop.

>kool-aid

Nah it comes from them trying to keep their real estate "investment" relevant.

Honestly:

This WFH shit was the worst for me - Ive lost more than 20kg due to eating not enough at home, I like to go to the office: I can go out and have several lunch options and I dont have to cook for one person and then clean up 20 Min.

:-)

Couldn't you also go out to eat from home?

Not that easy: There is actually only one restaurant near me in 5 min walk, everything else is to take bus or subway 10+ min. That exactly is the reason why im sitting in an "inefficiency hole" here - its a very "un-alive" district, unfortunately :-(

I am also at the office almost every day because I think it's better for my mental health and food. But I also appreciate that for many, it's different, so actually having the choice individually is nice.

This comment <s>, maybe?

I guess, then, that one of the big benefits of my daily is that we don't swing wildly between WFH and RTO with whatever trend/fashion/panic/wind/fart is in the zeitgeist/ether/air/media?

With the exceptions of the occasional client meeting that must be onsite, or the occasional conference, and our monthly team lunches, I've been 100% WFH since mid-2020, not pandemic related (I was mostly WFH for since sometime in 2019 (waves vaguely), and it was changing from consultant to senior wage slave that sealed the deal).

Just like the rest of my team. OK, sure, we're small, and OK, sure, perhaps we use the available communication channels more effectively than others seem to, and OK, sure, while some of us are friends, I don't think any of us make the category error of assuming that coworkers are supposed to double as our social life, but seriously, if people are effective working from home, and we are, then let them.

The world started WFH, we changed nothing. The world started RTO, we changed nothing. The world started complaining about gas prices, well, those of us who own trucks and/or off-road did too, but we changed nothing about how we work.

Triple the price of 1Gbps fibre to the home and we might get a bit more upset. </s>

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