Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

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From what I have seen, layoffs tend to go hand in hand with pushing for more work from the office (which companies hope will help them get rid of some employees without severance), so if being in the office helps combat layoff paranoia and depression, there's that.

I personally don't have less paranoia now I am in the office 3 days a week (and probably won't have less when I will soon be forced to come in 5 days a week either), but I only talk to "my" team via Teams no matter if I'm at home or in the office, because they're spread over several locations (and no, it doesn't make sense to do RTO in these conditions, but that just reinforces my certainty that all the talk about "increasing efficiency" is just BS and they simply hope to get rid of people, no matter how competent they are). In the meantime, I don't really care one way or the other, but if they want to get rid of me, they should at least offer me some money for it, I won't do them the favor of just leaving voluntarily (especially not in this economy).

You say your team is remote "anyway", but RTO precisely is about connecting with other people OUTSIDE your team, working on internal politics, and you act as an interconnection point between the remote team and the local network.

I think the two of you are thinking/talking about two different things.

In most workplaces before ~2020 individual teams had designated desks/islands - all team members were sitting next to each other, actually every individual had their own permanent desk.

And you could have a quick chat, pair program, and even adhoc whole team meeting by just removing your noise-cancelling headphones and talking to each other.

Though of course bigger/longer meetings would still be better in a meeting room because of big screen, not being nuisance to other people ...etc.

Most workplaces now do some variant of flexi-desks. At best a group of teams is allocated some specific area/desks, at worst it's completely random which desk you get.

And to have a chat/meeting you often need to still do it via conference call, or get into a meeting room.

Between that, and usually having some people from the team still WFH on that day (many workplaces don't even have enough work desks or cafeteria - for everyone to come into office on the same day) - you now need more meeting rooms than before.

And for some reason they didn't add more meeting rooms, even when redesigning office buildings.

Actually, you both misunderstood what I wrote: the team is spread across multiple locations in three countries. They all work from their respective offices, but for meetings we still have to use Teams. That's especially galling: my company is more than ready to embrace remote working tools when it's to its advantage, reassigning people as it sees fit, but it now completely denies the advantages of remote working/home office to its employees. Actually, because of budget restrictions, I have never seen any of the team members (except the one I'm in the same office with) in person. My company is one of those typical multinationals that grew through mergers and acquisitions and now has offices all over the world - but I'd bet it's not one of those that come to your mind, somehow it managed to fail to build any sort of brand recognition, mostly because it's a B2B company.

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