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I did the same and it was as unbelievably worthless as I recalled from before the pandemic. You know what really stands out in the office? How sad it all is. Th
by fartcannon 5y ago
I did the same and it was as unbelievably worthless as I recalled from before the pandemic. You know what really stands out in the office? How sad it all is. The frowns on the subway, the fake smiles in the office, the pretending, the posturing. Bleh. I'm resigning.
- JohnBooty 5y ago
- walls 5y agoIt's very likely you're the kind of person who makes everyone want to wfh.
- JohnBooty 5y agoWhat is going on in this conversation thread?
- ByteJockey 5y agoThere are two camps that want something mutually exclusive (work from home vs work in office). Additionally, in order to get what they want, they need the other group to comply.* The struggle is spilling over into the comment threads. * If everyone works in the office, and the work from home people are still remote, they get passed over for promotions and basically have a good chance of tanking their career. If everyone works from home, the work in office people lose a lot of human interaction that they need on a human level.
- JohnBooty 5y agoI still find the replies to my personal experience very baffling. I didn't say what anybody else should be doing; I didn't present it as a universal truth. It seems very clear to me that there is room for a variety of workplace types. Strictly in-office, hybrid, and strictly remote. I said I enjoyed getting together with my coworkers; I also said my ideal situation would involve spending a majority of time remote.
- walls 5y agoRequiring any amount of office time completely eliminates the most meaningful advantages of working remotely.
- lumost 5y agoIs that really true? Even a quarterly offsite can be accommodated from almost anywhere on the world.
- zarzavat 5y agoIt’s loss aversion. Many people perceive office environment to be unpleasant for various reasons (long commute, psychopathic coworkers, noisy, lack of privacy) and so now they have tasted freedom they have a strong negative reaction to losing it.
- JohnBooty 5y agoI just said I enjoyed one week in the office. After four years. I'm not advocating for folks to stop working remotely. I'm not advocating anything. I'll certainly never share another personal experience on HN, that's for sure.
- ByteJockey 5y agoAt this point, the mere existence of the other group is a danger to what the first group sees as their interests. The human instinct is to minimize the other group, making their group appear larger, and strengthening the argument that their interests should prevail. Someone who wants to be completely untethered from the office is threatened by someone who wants to work in the office a couple days a week. It means they will have to choose between moving and having job prospects within a much smaller area.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- poink 5y agoI think there’s a lot of WFH folk who are worried less about promotions than they are the availability of WFH jobs in general. People who favor that style of working viewed COVID as a transformational event, and are going to push back hard on anything/anyone suggesting a return to the previous status quo, where WFH was something you had to be a relatively special snowflake to be afforded by many/most companies.
- ByteJockey 5y ago> I think there’s a lot of WFH folk who are worried less about promotions than they are the availability of WFH jobs in general. I feel like this was covered in the "tanking their career" part of my statement, but fair. It's rather important, I guess it deserves an explicit call out.
- walls 5y agoResentment from people who have been held mentally hostage by their socialite coworkers who wander around interrupting others for a significant portion of their day.
- JohnBooty 5y agoI enjoyed one single week of office work after four years of being fully remote, and plainly expressed my preference to continue being remote a majority of the time. I also don't interrupt others in the office, thanks very much. I've worked with those sorts of people (who hasn't?) and I resent them as well. You enjoy being remote 100% of the time? Cool. I think there is clearly room for a variety of employment arrangements: fully remote, hybrid, fully in-office (yuck). I think you should do what's best for you.
- poink 5y agoThat’s not how this works. There’s an extreme bias toward butts-in-seats. “Everyone should do what’s best for them” is a nice sentiment, but not how the world works at all. There are a lot of people currently enjoying remote work who are rightfully worried about being forced back to the office for what they perceive as zero benefit. I’m not one of them, but I get where they’re coming from.
- JohnBooty 5y agobut not how the world works at all. Counterpoint: competition (and coexistence) between various approaches is most definitely how much of the world works, much of the time.
- lumost 5y agoCompanies succeed by hiring the best people and setting them up to do great work. I think the future in many large firms will be to pair full-time remote folks with others who enjoy full time remote. There are sure to be many hybrid and full in office teams as well. A similar transition occurred a decade ago when companies moved* offices to cities and away from suburban campuses. * for some definition of “move”
- cudgy 5y agoMaybe it’s due to working with people that want to go to work to work with people instead of working.
- thirdwhrldPzz 5y agoDisliking contemporary office life is not equivalent to not liking working with people.
- chottocharaii 5y agono need to be rude
- fartcannon 5y ago
- JohnBooty 5y agoIt wasn't an apology.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nophunphil 5y agoCrazy, I could have sworn you started the sentence with “I am sorry” So what did you mean by this?
- renewiltord 5y ago“I am sorry that you have X” is either an expression of sympathy or pity. For instance, in general, “I am sorry to hear that your father died” means “I am feeling sympathetic to you for your misfortune”. It does not mean “I apologize for the death of your father” except in the extreme case where I was responsible.
- dang 5y agoPlease don't take HN threads further in the flamewar direction. We want the opposite here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dang 5y agoPlease don't post in the flamewar style to HN. We want the opposite here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- JohnBooty 5y agodang, I think you are the best moderator I have ever known, but respectfully strongly disagree with who you've fingered as the "flamewar-style" poster in this conversation. I, at worst, restated the parent poster's rude comment and stated I found it regrettable. Additionally there are many other unbelievably rude replies to a small, positive anecdote I chose to share. However, out of respect for your judgement I'll bow out of this discussion entirely.
- dang 5y agoI made a point not to single out one poster. Like most online conflicts, it was a co-creation. Your original comment was great! And it got mostly positive responses, IIRC. The problem is that negative responses hit harder than positive responses. If three people give you flowers and one explodes a bomb, the bomb makes the impact [1]. Unfortunately, the dynamics of internet discussion guarantee "bombs" on any divisive topic. If you're not used to it, this has a dysregulating effect [2]. One gets sucked into a feedback loop where one can't help but respond to the outrage of being treated unfairly, but that just fuels the feedback loop. From my perspective, this is what happened here. The important thing to understand is why your comment attracted negative responses in the first place. It had nothing to do with you, or your comment, or the community. It was just a mechanical consequence of it being the top-voted comment in a thread on a divisive topic—that's how the mechanics work. And it was the top-voted comment because it was interesting and thoughtful discussion (up to the point where it got derailed). Good things lead to bad things, so here's a cap on how good things can ever get [3], and all we can do is try to encourage the good and mitigate the bad. [1] Lots of past explanation on that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20dislike%20notice&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] And getting used to it sucks—it's like being bitten by mosquitoes and wasps all over your body until you finally develop some sort of partial immunity to them, partial immunity being the best one can hope for. Most sane people wish to avoid that experience. [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20cap%20good&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- icedchai 5y agoI miss in-person activities, especially going to lunch with coworkers, trying a new restaurant, or one of our old favorites. Remote has become pretty old.
- fartcannon 5y agoWhat stops you from doing that now? You still get lunch breaks when WFH.
- icedchai 5y agoNothing, but it's more than exception than the rule now.
- mylons 5y agothe opportunity this presents is getting lunch with people that aren't ephemeral and transactional. you can experience something OTHER than work on your lunch hour, expand your horizons, and build meaningful relationships. of course you will on occasion get one of those relationships from the office, but they're the exception to the rule imo.
- closeparen 5y agoHow are you going to build more meaningful relationships with a collection of people that’s essentially random (neighbors) vs. one with a lot of built in common ground (coworkers)?
- micromacrofoot 5y agoit used to be incredibly common, in fact normal, to be friendly with your neighbors… dine with them, hang out with them… this has changed dramatically in the last 30 years
- mylons 5y ago