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Ask HN: Is Hybrid Working a Ruse?

139 points by 5350-uiop-1130 5y ago

We've been asked to return to the office for two days a week "mandatory". I'm convinced that this is just the first part of a plan to eventually have people working 5 days in office again. The reason I am convinced is because there is no clear value proposition to even being in office two days "mandatory", which tells me that it is not really a gesture of flexibility but rather of temporary appeasement. What do you think?

_benj 5y ago
I’m slightly suspicious about the “mandatory” hybrid model. I’ve been working remotely pre-Covid and I really like it. With that said, I recently visited the office and met some people that I’ve had diverging opinions… and I was completely sock to find out how much was lost during the conversation and how a short chat face to face clarified so much! I don’t think is enough to justify working from the office but I’m now planning to make it to the office something like every other month. At the same time, even though I’m fully remote I’ll work from a coffee shop from time to time. Offices could become such company-provided hub/spaces for when a change of air, reliable internet, or access to physical resources (hardware) is needed.
faangiq 5y ago
Of course it’s a scam. We’re stuck with it until the great boomer/xer die off hits.
maxharris 5y ago
Just refuse. Hold out for something better if you have any means to do so.
incomingpain 5y ago
How many buildings are empty right now? Selling your large corporate building isn't going to go well. Nobody wants it because their workers dont want to be in the office anymore. But then again maintenance, utilities, toilet paper, sickness, taxes, etc are all burning a hole in their pocket. So better to force people back to the office? Worse yet, any big corp that announces back to work has an army of recruiters cold calling all their employees offering them exactly what they want. More money and work from home. It's an impossible situation for businesses. Flipside, what's more important to look at is only what you can control. You wont change your employer's mind on whatever bad decision they make.There are only bad decisions to make. You can control yourself. Do you even want to go in for 2 days a week? Personally I'm not interested in paying for parking, 1 ply toilet paper and pointless chitchat about moon knight or some other tv show i havent had the chance to watch. You can instead make the decision for what you can control. There's an awful lot of employers who will accept completely remote workers.
- gernb 5y ago
  The building argument doesn't seem to make business sense so I doubt that's the reason. An empty building is not consuming as much power as a full building so even if the business is wasting money on a building and has to because of a lease they'd still save money for employees to be remote. In other words. From most expensive to least * all employees at office * empty office, employees remote * no office, employees remote Business would do whatever is cheapest unless they believe they won't hit their targets. So it's got nothing to do with the buildings existing. Must be some other reason.
  - incomingpain 5y ago
    It doesnt make business sense for the normal case, but the unexpected covid lockdowns and inaction on immediately selling the buildings expecting to go back. Later to find out you aren't going back? Like in OP's pov, the intention is 2 days a week but as he expects, it's just to slowly ease back into 5 days a week. No doubt seeing that the lower cost being to take some HR losses is less than the huge discount in selling the building.
    - gernb 5y ago
      I'm still not following your argument. No matter what it's cheaper for the employer to allow employees to work remote. It doesn't matter if they already signed up to pay for the building for another 5 years or whatever. Rent + Monthly Expenses > Rent So an company who only cared about money wouldn't pull employees back into the office as that's more expensive for them than letting them say at home, even if they company is still paying rent. They'd need some other reason, like they believe employees are more productive at work. Short of that, they'd just let them stay home, even if they have to keep paying rent on an empty office it's still less money than rent + office expenses.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  > But then again maintenance, utilities, toilet paper, sickness, taxes, etc are all burning a hole in their pocket. So better to force people back to the office? That only makes sense if they derive value from people being in the office. Otherwise there is nothing lost by simply leaving the office empty.
pacifika 5y ago
Assuming the intention is not to miscommunicate, remote workers need access to the communication pipeline and decisions graph. With hybrid working, many of these are happening face to face, around the watercooler etc, and the burden falls on the office worker to duplicate this work digitally. That is not effective so eventually no longer happens, so remote workers lose out, and office work prevails. This is why good fully remote organisations decided to not have an office, and appreciate transparency, working in the open, supporting one another etc. Of course these values are not exclusively fully remote.
crate_barre 5y ago
Non-remote work is the same as hearing a low ball offer in negotiations. I’ll keep looking unless I’m desperate. And if I am desperate, I’ll leave as soon as I’m not, as is with tradition.
msarrel 5y ago
My thinking is that we're approaching this from what we would like to do, and our bosses are approaching this from what is of the most monetary value. They're paying rent. They really don't care if the software development business model no longer fits sitting in an office, they're paying that rent and we had damn well better get our asses in that office. They're willing to lie to get us there too. In case you're wondering where I'm coming from, my company switched to purely remote. Yet we're still renting a huge office, and we're told to go there every once in awhile. But we're purely remote. It seems pretty obvious that we're just remote until someone can crack the whip and make us go back so they feel like they're getting their money's worth on rent. I think the other thing worth mentioning, we're not alone. This is going to be done to all of us. Remote work is great, but it turns out companies aren't run for the benefit of the worker.
MattGaiser 5y ago
Companies have the problem that half their workforce wants the office and half wants remote, so I would say that hybrid is the truce. The alternative is massive losses of one side or the other. Although I think that it is probably better for companies to pick a side as neither will be happy with the arrangement as it (at least when i was at a hybrid company) just meant going on Zoom from our office desks.
- jefftk 5y ago
  Or, for companies that are large enough, we could have remote vs in-person at the team or product area level.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    I would be interested to see how well one company culture could handle that. For example, you can get away with crappy documentation for an in person team and just hope that osmosis handles knowledge transfer. That doesn't work with remote.
  - WithinReason 5y ago
    In my company it's on a per person level. You can work from the office 5 days or from home 5 days or anything in between.
- Jochim 5y ago
  Hybrid with mandatory office days also leads to massive losses. A friend recently switched to a company that announced mandatory office days and his entire team has basically left. Hybrid is the worst of both worlds, you're almost guaranteed to have someone calling in and you need to live close enough to the office that you can't really take advantage of cheaper house prices/more space.
jefftk 5y ago
Our office is Tue-Thr in the office, with Monday and Friday optionally. The idea is that this lets people collaborate on work that is best done in person, by having everyone present for the same three days. Still too soon to see how well this works.
- anoonmoose 5y ago
  We're doing hybrid with two (or less preferably but they didn't say that out loud) days WFH per week and it's clear most people chose Mon and Fri as their two days. I think your office's way would be better.
giantg2 5y ago
I sort of agree. However, I think they pretty much have to be hybrid to be even a little competitive these days. My company is piloting a full remote position because they're having trouble hiring.
gilbetron 5y ago
Depends on the company and their situation. My wife works for a university, and they are always struggling with office space for people and parking for people, hybrid work is a blessing for the university, as it greatly alleviates a lot of problems the university were struggling with. The company I work for has all kinds of beautiful, recently renovated and leased space in a giant city - they really want people back in the office (but true remote people have grown significantly as well, so I'm not that worried about it, being fully remote). General Motors is permanently letting a lot of people stay remote/hybrid, because they realized a great cost saving, and people are happier and work more because they don't have 2+ hours worth of commute each day. It will be interesting to see how the competitive advantages work themselves out. We'll see if in-person communication is as important as legend has it.
dougmwne 5y ago
I think a significant number of people get into leadership roles because they enjoy having power over others. The ultimate power is control over the bodies of others. Why settle for slack chats and zoom calls when you could have your employees sitting all around you at your beck and call? We individual contributors may not think about this much, but the absolute thrill of being above others in the hierarchy only reaches its fullness when the employees get out of the damn pajamas and into the open offices. Please pick me up a coffee while you are at it.
- api 5y ago
  There's also a direct threat to the jobs of a lot of middle managers from telework. The company's upper level management may realize a lot of these high salary managers are not necessary or that they obviously aren't doing their jobs well since the same value gets created with people out of the office. The push to get butts back in seats is 100% about job security for middle management and maintaining the value of commercial real estate. I've seen evidence of CRE leaning on the media and politicians to push a "return to work" narrative.
  - outsidetheparty 5y ago
    Maybe it’s just because I’m a teleworking middle manager, but I’ve never understood this argument that telework threatens middle management. Middle management doesn’t magically become unnecessary when employees are working from home instead of the office — if anything it’s _more_ important when everyone isn’t in the same physical location picking up their direction by osmosis.
    - jayd16 5y ago
      Not every manager is Dilbert's Pointy Haired Boss but some people just have that impression.
      - marcosdumay 5y ago
        Not every manager is Dilbert's PHB, but some are. And you can bet the pressure to go back to the office for tasks that don't require an office mostly comes from those.
ne0flex 5y ago
I agree. With hybrid work, one thing I noticed is that, at least among my coworkers and myself, is that productivity will be concentrated to those one or two days in the office and the WFH days will productivity will fall dramatically. When we were fully remote, productivity held consistently throughout the week. I'm willing to bet that the organization is monitoring this trend and will try to build a case for needing full back to office. Though at the same time, my company opted didn't renew their lease on two office floors (out of a total of 8 floors) due to hybrid work and employees not having a designated desk. So who knows.
hardware2win 5y ago
I believe that theres value in planning/meeting in person and coding at home
warrenm 5y ago
"Hybrid working" (partially in-person, partially remote) may or may not be a "ruse" For certain purposes, being in-person can be useful If the office space is already paid-for, it's silly (from a business perspective) to not use it If you have needs for scheduled all-hands or other types of meetings, doing them all over Zoom can be much slower / less efficient than doing it face to face
- Mister_Snuggles 5y ago
  > If the office space is already paid-for, it's silly (from a business perspective) to not use it This is known as the sunk-cost fallacy. Just because you have the space is not sufficient reason to use it. I agree though, being in-person can be incredibly useful, but it very much depends on the team, the type of work, etc. It's also just nice to see people in a less structured manner - e.g., water cooler chats vs setting up a Teams call.
  - warrenm 5y ago
    It may be a sunk-cost fallacy It may not Fact remains: if it has been paid-for, there's a strong justification for using it if you have it
miloignis 5y ago
I've been 2 days in hybrid for a while now, and it's worked out pretty well. Monday is most all meetings, then the WFH days are tech work, with the remaining in person day being a good catch all for if I have to work in person with someone on something technical.
pm90 5y ago
It’s definitely an appeasement. Pre-Pandemic, fully remote folks were at a distinct disadvantage since they would be cut off completely from the politics, relationship building etc. that would happen via people being in the office. This strategy is clearly aimed at discouraging people from being fully remote by making them aware of the “benefits” of working in an office. I feel sorta lucky because my team is distributed between two cities on the West Coast, so even if people are in the office you still have to video conference … making it somewhat pointless. I was talking to a friend at Apple who had been forced to work from their office. They are really unhappy; primarily they were so used to the peace and quiet of wfh that they’re having a hard time getting anything done in a loud (relatively) office.
gwbas1c 5y ago
I think there are some well-known horror stories of "hybrid" companies that some companies are trying to avoid. (Disclaimer: I have to telecommute, I've been doing it since 2014. Because of where I live, I can only go in about 2-3 times a month.) For example: I worked for Intel in 2005-2007. It was hybrid by necessity: They had offices all over the world, and were so large that it was impractical for everyone to be on one campus; and even if everyone was on one campus, travel among buildings was somewhat time consuming. Thus, many meetings were conducted via teleconference, and no one cared if you were in the office. (I would always take early morning calls at home and leave after the call.) While I was there, it became obvious that people were abusing the liberal telecommuting policy. My boss went on vacation for one week, and then "telecommuted" the second week. I quickly realized he had an agreement with his higher up to get a 2nd week of vacation as long as he checked email and kept up appearances. A few months later Intel cut out most telecommuting. The rumors that came back to me was that a lot of people were just goofing off; and even running 2nd businesses, like liquor stores, while on company time. There's also the story of Yahoo. This is well documented, so I'll leave it up to someone else to dig up links, but the general belief is that many Yahoo telecommuters were just keeping up appearances and not really working. The company cracked down because it was going broke paying people to do nothing. So, I don't think it's a "ruse." I think it's a case of a company doing what it thinks is in its best interests. If it's in your best interests to be 100% remote, or 90% remote, ect, have a frank discussion with your boss, and if they can't accommodate you, find a new job.
- ericmay 5y ago
  You can also avoid this by hiring the right people - so to me this is indicative of an even deeper issue within the company which is bad hiring, bad/poor expectations, no consequences for failure, etc. Remote/Hybrid/On-Prem discussions are just the symptom.
  - gwbas1c 5y ago
    I don't think a large company can unilaterally "hire the right people" to make hybrid work in all groups and departments. That was why Intel and Yahoo made work for home only on a case-by-case basis.
sys_64738 5y ago
It's all down to the individual company I guess. Some will have maniac managers who quickly want to reassert their authority and control but you gotta ask if you really want to work there. If an employer tells you something is "mandatory" then you can still decide for yourself. You don't have to do what they demand. you can either leave the building or ignore it and see what happens next. Employers don't own you.
thrrck 5y ago
We have something similar, the 2 days are not mandatory though, it would just be appreciated if people could make it to the office (this is just our team, other teams handle it differently). The two days were chosen as a team and we tried to accommodate everyones needs like childcare duties or and so on. We use the office days for collaborative tasks such as architecture reviews, peer debugging, idea brainstorming, drinking beer. And the days at home for actual implementation work, i.e. producing code. It has only been a couple of weeks and so far I believe it works quite well, we also said we will review if this is how we want to continue working in a couple of months. So it could be the same for you, but if you as an employee cannot shape it in any way and only have to follow rules, I would be a bit suspicious.
- 5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
  yes, we definitely don't have any say on the matter at all.
- sp332 5y ago
  If the drive to get people in the office is top-down, then I'd be suspicious. But if people are actually asking for it because some parts of the job are easier or just more enjoyable in person, then it might not lead to going back to the office full time.
- ryathal 5y ago
  Hybrid makes a lot of sense to me for these reasons. In person can be so much faster and simpler for heavily collaborative tasks. Five people in a conference room for an hour will accomplish more than those same 5 in a zoom call, and it's less likely for unnecessary people to be part of an in person meeting. Spending 4+ hours on Zoom/Teams calls in a day is also one of the most draining experiences I've ever had as well, full days of meetings in person are far more tolerable.
SheinhardtWigCo 5y ago
Former head of HR at Google thinks so: “The purpose of the ‘boil the frog method’ [is] to do it subtly and thereby avoid difficult questions and conflict” https://fortune.com/2022/04/04/former-google-hr-chief-laszlo-bock-hybrid-remote-return-to-office-work/ https://fortune.com/2022/04/04/former-google-hr-chief-laszlo...
- kevinventullo 5y ago
  FWIW, Google is also allowing people to apply to be full-time remote. In the few instances I’m privy to, it’s been approved.
ratww 5y ago
My company is hybrid, but coming to the office is entirely optional. Enough people naturally started coming back once in a while. The way they convinced us that it won’t change on a C-Level’s whim is by drastically reducing the office size so it’s not even possible for anyone to come back full time. But you can work at a co-working space if need be. The company saved a lot of money by not having an office and I’ve never seen such a productive team in my entire career.
- AlotOfReading 5y ago
  I wouldn't bet on C-levels respecting reality if it gets in the way of their plans. Mine recently decided that 700+ people could share <200 desks on the same days in a building that can legally hold ~500.
  - ratww 5y ago
    Well, we have laws for that over here, so ours are gonna respect it.
iamdbtoo 5y ago
I would assume that's the case if I were you. In my experience, compromises like this are really just the first step in a process to implement an unpopular policy. It would damage morale too much to do require the full week so they start there and take steps over time to minimize the impact.
bayareabadboy 5y ago
Maybe sometimes. I do think it’s very funny to use the word “ruse” unironically.
- mindcrime 5y ago
  I do think it’s very funny to use the word “ruse” unironically. Why so?
j4yav 5y ago
Hybrid is worse than all-remote or all-office. It’s essentially forcing you to come into the office to sit on zoom calls.
the_doctah 5y ago
Easy. Ask yourself, "Would my company have done this if the pandemic never happened?" If the answer is no, then there's your answer. It is appeasement.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  There are plenty of places that would never have gone remote without the pandemic, but when forced found out it's not a problem, and decided to keep it.
alchemyromcom 5y ago
I honestly think there are a lot of people that need some level of human interaction to function properly, and those are likely the people pushing for hybrid or back to office. Keep in mind, also, that not everyone's work from home situation is ideal. If you are already an established professional, and you have more than one room to create an office, then work from home is a dream come true. If you are a new hire, or student intern, sharing an apartment (even a crappy one) and your single bedroom is now your office, then work from home can feel a little like a prison sentence. But yes, likely hybrid work is a ruse, but also I wouldn't be surprised if work from home is also a ruse--imagine a scenario like this: "since your home is your office, we are going to need to monitor you on off hours and we'd also like you to start doing more overtime".
- 62951413 5y ago
  It's so much easier to discuss things face-to-face. I feel so much more energized by mere presence of other people (and I score high on any introvert/Asperger test) I was surprised myself in the last few weeks. I welcome the return to normality. Walking two feet from my bed to my desk got psychologically tough a long time ago. Even though I have the worst commute on my team I want to be in the office a couple days a week (it's going to be 3). But our campus is great, we have real cubicles and standing desks, and even free meals.
postalrat 5y ago
Reorganize teams based on who wants to be in the office and who doesn't. Seems like it won't be much fun or productive to be on a team where half the people want to work remote and the other half wants to be in the office.
hackitup7 5y ago
I am in leadership at a company and at least for us it is absolutely not a ruse. My team wants hybrid (or remote), people we want to hire want hybrid (or remote), I want them to be happy. As a result we're hybrid/remote and incentives are about as aligned as they can be. Things might change but I view this as a reasonably likely steady state and am doing nothing to change it.
alfl 5y ago
We're in the middle of leasing an office because the market for office space is flooded right now: way more supply than demand. We're getting a great price on a long-ish term lease. We did some in-office tests in a coworking space and productivity went through the roof. We seem to be seeing that offices are a kind of thinking and focus tool. Approx. half of our team is remote, so we're kitting out the office with TVs, cameras, and microphones to create a "hybrid space". We're probably going to add some practices like, "all meetings are video calls". Things like that.
lbrito 5y ago
There are many fully remote companies. Just pick one. Don't work at a company that presses rto.
richardwhiuk 5y ago
Is remote work a ruse to allow companies to outsource all of their work to cheaper jurisdictions?
- erik_seaberg 5y ago
  As appealing as remote work is, this is my worry. It’s one thing to compete with others who chose to relocate near Bay Area tech giants, another to live with high expenses but compete with the entire English-speaking world.
paxys 5y ago
Everyone is missing one key advantage (for the employer) of such a setup – mandating even a single day per week from the office ensures that employees live in the geographical area they are supposed to. So they can't "cheat", for example, by listing a bay area address and getting a bay area salary but actually working out of Mexico.
- gernb 5y ago
  I'm sure a few people were caught doing something like this but is this really a problem? Are 15% of employees doing this or 0.0001%?
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  Why is that 'cheating', who is being cheated out of what?
  - zeroonetwothree 5y ago
    I wouldn't call it 'cheating', but there are a lot of labor law and tax issues with having employees in different countries (or states in the US).
    - jodrellblank 5y ago
      Wouldn't "employee lies to unknowing employer about where they live" be legally different from "company deliberately employs someone abroad and lies to the IRS about it"?
      - paxys 5y ago
        It's different, but the former case is still a massive headache for the employer.
        greedo 5y ago
        In the States, payroll firms like ADP handle this all the time. For outside the States, make the remote worker a 1099.
chias 5y ago
On my team, a couple of us started coming in on (most) Wednesdays. Slowly, more and more of us just started coming in on Wednesdays because it was fun to have a day where we would all hang out together / have lunch together / etc. It's been really nice. So in practice, most of us are now "Hybrid Working" and it's working out great. That being said, if it was mandatory, I would have negative feelings about it.
paul7986 5y ago
They just tried that at where I work ... not many showed up and or went looking for another job. Management realized better just go full/permanent remote or lose our business and now we are fully remote forever. I was one who refuse to show up as its a 60 mile drive i use to do yet they hired tons of out state employees who will never go to the office and Im out of state (right across the line). I bet what happened at my work will happen at other places of work due to competition .. as if the business loses employees they dont have a business. Joe Biden can try to force employees back for the sake of the old America but that's a joke ... no one needs to work in an office and I wont ever work in one again!
donpott 5y ago
I'm not sure about a deliberate ruse. In my experience, that level of forward planning is rare in big companies. What is clear to me is that hybrid is the worst of both worlds: Incurring the many costs of having to come to the office, only to find that such and such colleague is at home, and there is little to zero added value to your presence there. So from that, it follows naturally that many companies will slippery-slope into full time in the office, aducing that it is an advantage over hybrid.
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  > "What is clear to me is that hybrid is the worst of both worlds: Incurring the many costs of having to come to the office" and the costs of having to maintain a home office. The costs of maintaining a commuting vehicle or transport ticket and office clothes, while not using them at least half the time. The time cost of commuting. The faff of a laptop, or the cost of two sets of equipment and the effort of keeping them in sync. It's the combined cost of working from home and working from the office, without the benefit of being able to work from a cheaper nicer home far away, or the benefit of committing to every day office work and having everyone in. Programmers love the "union of all the negatives, none of the individual positives" when it's called "cross platform compatible software" so why not rebrand this from hybrid work to cross environment compatible work?
- closeparen 5y ago
  Software engineering is a mix of collaboration and individual focused work. Zoom meetings are awful and the office is much better at supporting collaboration and human connections. The big loud open floor is a terrible place to think; WFH is much better at supporting focus. It remains to be seen whether we get the proportions right, or actually sort the right activities into the right settings, but it has the potential to be the best of both worlds. Many were actually hybrid working before the pandemic. Regularly sending emails like “I have no meetings today and need to get this done, so I’m staying home.” Still physically and socially part of the team.
- georgeecollins 5y ago
  > "What is clear to me is that hybrid is the worst of both worlds I don't agree with this because I think my office is nice and not a barnyard. I mean a door, a window, nice amenities and easy use of a conference room for meetings. I have worked for tech companies that had offices that were like these giant open floors or cubicle farms. There were all these reasons people said they were good but really I think it was that they were cheap and it was easy to circulate people through them in places with high turnover. I'm never working in a place like that again. My work is currently hybrid and what I like about it is if I want to work from home to keep odd hours or save time by not driving to work. If I want to have a particular time of focus, or host a meeting including guests, I can work in the office. Also, I should mention I have a short commute. Not everyone has all this, but this is what I think we should aspire to.
midnightmonster 5y ago
Sounds like temporary appeasement. ~6 years ago I switched from full time remote freelancing/consulting to full time at a local startup with just a handful of employees and 1 day/week in-person. Then 1 day became 2. Then we got a real office and 2 became 3 with a worse commute. Then 3 became, unofficially, if you want to be taken seriously, you should come in every day, or at least 4 days/week. You could still leave early on Fridays! I stayed at 3 days/week until I found a new, fully-remote employer.
jpcfl 5y ago
> no clear value proposition to even being in office two days There's plenty of value in in-person work. Body language is an important part of how we communicate. Spurious social interactions in the office are often the inspiration of important company initiatives. Async communication (e.g., Slack) is, IMHO, much less efficient than sync communication (e.g., tap on my colleagues shoulder). My company has also implemented a hybrid pilot program: 3 in/2 out, with 4 weeks of discretionary remote work. I believe the idea is that there is value in remote work, and there is value in office work. Let's see if we can benefit from both.
- 5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
  Yeah I was probably being too specific to my development role where we have managed (in fact company has grown in revenue) despite all communication being via slack or teams. I know there are cases where in person communication makes sense, but it should not be mandatory for all. This is why I say hybrid is a ruse because it applies to all and not just "flexible" for those who may need or prefer it.
  - jpcfl 5y ago
    > should not be mandatory for all. Yeah, I'm not a fan of hard-and-fast rules. If you think remote work is what is best for you and the company, you should discuss and arrangement with your manager. I'm sure the company is just setting these rules because they need to send a clear message, and they want to try and contain remote work. Keep in mind that working remotely is still seen as an impediment to career development. People who work in the office tend to get promoted faster. Their work is more visible, they are presented with more opportunities, and, for lack of a better word, they can "schmooze" more.
- sanderjd 5y ago
  Sometimes I think the different camps on this just break down on the "shoulder tap" line. I hate having my "shoulder tapped" (literally or metaphorically) and never tap on someone else's shoulder. A message saying "hey let me know when you get a chance to talk" is so much better for everyone IMO. But I recognize that other people feel the opposite and I have no problem with that. I'd like to be able to work my way and for them to be able to work their way.
atoav 5y ago
Depends on the job I think. For many roles it can be beneficial to have somebody physically present at least once a week so people can meet and talk and have face-to-face discussions about things. For other jobs or in different roles it could be totally unnecessary to be there at all. In my job, being there is part of the job, because I need to fix thing in the infrastructure of the house. I didn't even have a single home office week during the whole pandemic — I also managed to not catch the damn thing up to now. Yet I convinced my superiors that it would be beneficial to give me one home office day a week, precisely because people will not disturb me there. In terms of pushing out code it is easily the most productive day of the week. And it is friday on top of everything.
nowherebeen 5y ago
Are they paying for the office 2 days a week only? Probably not.
wokwokwok 5y ago
An across the board, “2 days mandatory” is a brute force HR policy to appease management; a genuine intention to continue to support remote working indefinitely would be phrased differently, like: Converting the office into a collaboration space for people who need a reliable internet connection and/or a less disruptive environment (ie. than a noisy family) to get work done in. 0 days mandatory in the office; days in the office by collaborative decision amongst teams. It’s quite obvious if you’re in camp A or camp B. If you don’t like it, just leave. Plenty of remote jobs open; the good thing about a remote first company is that they collaborate in person as required; not because it’s required by HR.
- sydbarrett74 5y ago
  THIS. I wish HN had the ability for us to upvote comments.
  - bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
    It actually does but you need a requisite amount of points, karma, whatever it is called here first.
    - seanw444 5y ago
      I don't think I ever noticed that period when I created my account here.
      - jen20 5y ago
        I also don’t remember not being able to upvote, just being unable to downvote until a certain karma score was reached.
    - bin_bash 5y ago
      For downvotes not upvotes
  - jimmont 5y ago
    gave you an upvote to get you that much closer, HN is a product from a time before the term UX existed, not that it would matter
sydbarrett74 5y ago
Managers who mandate hybrid work are employing a 'boil the frog slowly' approach. At first, two days will be mandatory, then three, then all five. Power over others is a drug, and they won't willingly cede those sweet, sweet dopamine spikes.
gernb 5y ago
So I someone that would prefer to be at the office. I like socializing and getting lunch with coworkers. I like casually asking question, running ideas by others, all things that, FOR ME, don't work remote. Unfortunately, at least so far, people in my area aren't coming in so I've shown up at the office and in my space few others are showing up. Also, getting rooms for meetings is no fun I don't know what I'm going to do but I will likely quit and find an in office team if things don't get better. Humans (most) are social animals https://www.google.com/search?q=humans+are+social+animals https://www.google.com/search?q=humans+are+social+animals
- acheron 5y ago
  I’m sorry you don’t have any real friends to get your socialization in, but forcing your coworkers to be your pretend friends is not the answer.
  - oblio 5y ago
    That's just a silly approach to life, sorry. You're stuck in an office with other people 8 hours per day, you might as well make friends. Over a working life of 40 years that's 40 x 45 x 5 x 8 = about 8 full years of your life. And no, those people don't have to be your direct teammates, especially in bigger companies. Just look for compatible people. Relationships are based on proximity, heck, even most marriages start like that: highscool classmates, college students studying the same thing, co-workers, neighbors, whatever.
  - freedom2099 5y ago
    To be fair some of my colleagues are among my best friends… we have been working together for a decade, we go out all the time, we have weekly DND night, we go camping, we travel together…
tapanjk 5y ago
> What do you think? I think so too. This is what I vented on Twitter a few weeks ago (pardon the tone -- in my defense, I don't have many followers): "You keep hearing about the hybrid model, but that is just corporate speak to lure you back into office. It is just a matter of time before they declare that they tried hybrid and it did not work, so it's going to be office only from now on." https://twitter.com/tapanjk/status/1510491733640896515 https://twitter.com/tapanjk/status/1510491733640896515
hatware 5y ago
At my last job, productivity took a huge hit when everyone went WFH, and everything seemed to slow to a crawl. The funny thing was, it was obvious as an IC, but management kept saying "Nope, things are moving as normal!" The team I was on needed a serious adjustment period because we worked with every other team in the company (1000+ employees). The synergy that existed in the office and allowed our team to be a force multiplier was drained almost immediately. Ultimately, I had to leave because the pace and variety of work was suffering and not getting better. The culture was also on its last legs from psychologically torturing folks for 2 years.
notatoad 5y ago
Hybrid work where you're required to be in the office 2 out of 5 days with no further requirement of which two days, I think that is as you say "a ruse", and management demonstrating that they dont trust you to work from home. If there's an actual stated purpose for those two days to be in-person days (like your team has designated day for in-person meetings or planning sessions or something, or there's some task that needs to be done in-person each day and there's a rotation of who is responsible for it) then it makes sense.
dibujante 5y ago
Definitely a ruse. The main value proposition of working remote is not needing to be within commute distance of the office.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  That may be true. But for people who are used to working 100% in the office, hybrid working has value of its own.
wyldberry 5y ago
IMO no. I think work that is creative + collaborative in nature (ex: entertainment) performs best with a few days where people are physically around. It's not just the act of meetings, it's how charged people can get when they are around other people on the same wavelength creating new things. I think for junior engineers, being in person is invaluable a few times a week just having a whiteboard around. Early in my career having a senior dev around to bounce questions off of, or work CTF problems together really, really helped me. Certainly there is some number of managers who just want control over people, but i think that's probably smaller than what some commenters are implying. The The questions i use for if a particular way of working is a ruse or effective is this: 1. What industry am I working in? If you work in an industry physically making things, you're likely to also benefit from being in the office some days. Same with creative work. 2. What's the ratio of "senior" to mid and junior level employees? 3. Is the company willing to let individual teams make more flexible decisions? I.e go down to 1 day a week, 1 day a sprint etc? My end goal is to understand the nature of the organization I work for, why it makes decisions the way it does, and if leadership wants to send a message, or if they are open to trying to find the way that is productive and keeps people happy.
thraway3837 5y ago
Yes. What did you think the future was? All remote and WFH? People are already running into issues where interpersonal conflicts cannot be dealt with effectively. There's no guidelines or ever been done before on how people who have never met each other can resolve conflicts. Long distance relationships don't work, so why would they for the workplace? I'm not advocating for going back to work 5 days a week, but remote only works when you have a solid relationship with your peers and leadership. But workplaces are stunted socially, with either non existent relationships, or fake relationships that's only self serving.
- greedo 5y ago
  Conflict resolution is no different WFH than in the office. You think people are going to solve their issues by wrestling in the parking lot? Or by being put in timeout by HR? Conflicts get resolved exactly the same why WFH as remote; you discuss the issue with your manager, they talk to the other person, and have a joint meeting if necessary. No needs for hugs and handshakes... The onus is on you to prove that remote work doesn't work.
TrapLord_Rhodo 5y ago
i've been working remotely since 2017 and around year 4 it gets old and you crave being back in the office again. I imagine this will be a cyclical thing in the media.
christophilus 5y ago
I'm not sure about your question, but I'll answer a related one: Hybrid teams are a ruse. If you're a remote employee, but most of the team is on-premises, you're a second-class citizen, and you'll be first to go if cuts are made. At least, that's how it's been wherever I've worked. I was never the one cut, as I was generally on-premises when in mixed teams. These days, I work only for 100% remote / remote-first companies if possible.
kkfx 5y ago
IMVHO it's just a stupid middle-ground who makes all unhappy to avoid making all unhappy. With hybrid works you need or fully portable gears or two set of them, witch means not just a craptop in a backpack but also docking station, monitor(s), keyboard&other stuff etc. Long story short or the company spend the double in hw or at home you'll probably use something from you, maybe also the entire desktop with all relevant security risks. Not only working less in the office, but still having an office the company spent essentially the same amount of money and the workers still have to live around, perhaps in an expensive area or in little houses since around the office perhaps there is no room for better accommodations and still need a home office to be in comfort at home. Personally I think hybrid will last for a short period of disastrous time and here the sole possible ruse might be provoking and using the hybrid disasters to state "look, remote working does not work, we need business as usual". After since we can't sustain the current social transformation in a classic way of life WFH will be the standard for a little slice of potentially remote workers, while others will be forced in the classic South Korean's Goshiwong model with a combination of hyper-stagflation and false environmental claims. Then the many who still can't understand that: - no, we can't continue as usual, we can't keep going on oil etc - no, the Green New Deal is green in the dollar and stereotypical chem waste corroded barrels not spring grass green. Will finally understand that the new neo-feudal society is now built and they are well f*ked up, too late to change anyway, as usual. Than we still see the reactionary cohort from today saying that we need to came back and the progressive ones saying that no the fault is having not done much more. That's the real "ruse" (and not much a ruse, since countless think tanks have published black on white since years) but hybrid work is just a small step not specially linked with "the plot"...
alexashka 5y ago
The problem with offices is who they are filled with. Solve for that problem.
spzb 5y ago
The thing that makes me laugh is that these managers insist on people coming into the office because "that's where they're more collaborative and creative". Before the pandemic they wanted to take us all off-site for an away day so we could be more collaborative and creative than when we were in the office!
- oblio 5y ago
  Both can be true at the same time. A change or scenery and atmosphere can boost creativity.
kodah 5y ago
Just leave. Most companies in high cost and high income areas are just doing this as a way to do layoffs, imo. My company recently announced that the three day work week, with hundreds of people asking how they were going to address the fact that our office is in Mountain View and that Staff+ engineers are having to get room mates so they can live less than an hour from the office. Our HR head basically said not my problem and then went on a lengthy discussion about the culture they wanted. This is people's callousness reaching heights as people who were able to secure things like houses that are now worth millions and big cashouts in tech are coming to the height of their careers.
- Melchizedek 5y ago
  They want a "culture" while I'm worried about being able to put a roof over the head of myself and a family. That will surely build a great culture. Psychopaths. The only thing they did to become millionaires was the completely non-productive act of borrowing money to buy property. Now the property values can't be allowed to depreciate so we must all commute into the office, the environment be damned. That's just inter-generational war.
  - _ktx2 5y ago
    I'd say less psychopath and more self-centered to a high degree. Folks that have been fed into prestigious schools, jobs, and general opportunities throughout their lives start to miss the smoke of what average folks deal with and go through. To them, the smoke blew away long ago, and the benefits they seek are often at competition with the benefits an average person might seek.
    - strikelaserclaw 5y ago
      I'd say this selfishness extends even to average people who make it. Most people are selfish, prestigious schools or otherwise, we need to build systems which take this fact into account.
iso1210 5y ago
Any 2 days, or 2 named days? If they want the entire company in for sat Tuesday and Wednesday, that could make sense - happenstance communications with people you don't normally talk to would probably be easier. If your team lead wants you all in for a specific day for meeting etc that could make sense too. We're arranging a meeting + beers for mid May for example. If it's any 2 days, then no, what's the point.
sanderjd 5y ago
Personally I think where this is headed is self-sorting into fully remote and fully in person. I think smaller companies will want to choose one or the other, and that larger companies could perhaps choose at the level of fairly granular orgs. I think "hybrid" and having different options within a single team is unlikely to be a stable equilibrium.
ltbarcly3 5y ago
Obvious ruse. They want you in the office, they are going to get you in as much as they can now, and they fully already intend to then adjust it to as much as they can later. Boiling the frog.
gerard1234 5y ago
francisofascii 5y ago
I think management wants to keep their options open. My company has been very vague about long term remote work plans. They clearly prefer that people come back to the office. They like being with people, and seeing dynamic office environments. But they also don't want to spook the employees into a mass exodus. So far they have set a mandatory two days a week policy, but it is not being enforced and less than half of the employees are following it. So as long as employees continue getting work done, it should stay.
IE6 5y ago
I'm in this right now and one big way this fails is that no one is on the same schedule. It's not uncommon for me to go into work only to join teams meetings anyway. I even stopped going to the room we all planned on meeting in because it would only be me in there anyway. The office furniture isn't that bad (somewhat modern, sit stand, somewhat ergo) so I can't complain but it doesn't compare to my setup at home - that's where the value prop suffers greatly.
twobitshifter 5y ago
I’m you from the future. We started on a hybrid office more than 4 months back. Hybrid was very weak with the requirement of 66% of the time in the office (1.5 days work from home?) Management has recently reported that it’s failing and is signaling that people need to return to the office full time. This is absent the evidence of any failures (only allusions to kpis) and with many people already having refused to return to the office for even a fraction of the time for hybrid work. If the company shows stronger resolve the only end game is those people leaving or being let go by the company. As another poster said individuals know the quality of their work and if they perform better remote or at work. The individuals doing well will never be convinced by management of the need to return.
jimmont 5y ago
It's a political, power game. It simply shows lack of trust and regard for our time, or reflects inexperience and inability to manage. Otherwise the situation would speak for itself and the question wouldn't have been asked.
robotburrito 5y ago
Is remote work something that could lead to solidarity between engineers? Union demands?
valbaca 5y ago
It's absolutely a "boil the frog" situation. I already see it on my own team. First, there were "no expectations" to come into the office. Then, it would be "really nice" if everyone tried to come in on Wednesdays "but only if you want to!" Then it became "highly encouraged" for everyone to come in for the three-year brainstorming. Now we're encouraged to come in to meet the other team. And now we're being asked how many days we would be comfortable to come back. It'll be one day, then 2 days, then 4, and finally fully back in the office before you know it. Despite EVERY metric showing that people are as-productive (and often more productive!) working from home, they just cannot stand the idea of not being able to enforce dress codes, and mandatory morning stand-ups, and being able to interrupt us and have us listen to the damn dog barking down the hall while someone's cell phone is going off because they forgot it and oh how do you get this conference phone to work I've only worked here for four years and make $500k can a techie person do this for me. I really really don't care about what you did over the weekend and don't want to hear about your kids when I'm just trying to get coffee or go to the bathroom. fuck I hate the office and I know we're going to be 100% back before the end of the year. And if anyone says "just leave" how about you try finding a Remote Job that is ACTUALLY Remote. Because I've not found a truly remote job. The "Remote" in posting is pure bait-and-switch.
- drost 5y ago
  I've been fully remote and out of state for ~8 months now. No expectation that I go into any office ever from my company... what kind of job are you looking for?
- 5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
  > try finding a Remote Job that is ACTUALLY Remote yeah I see this comment a lot. its not that simple for most of us to change jobs, for various reasons. not wanting to deal with 5 step leetcode interviews, not having access to the best job markets, having other commitments..
- sircastor 5y ago
  > try finding a Remote Job that is ACTUALLY Remote. Because I've not found a truly remote job. The "Remote" in posting is pure bait-and-switch I may be an outlier, but I did exactly that. My company was talking about coming back to the office (it was oscillating as COVID spikes came and went) and I started looking at roles elsewhere. I did not interview with anyone who wasn’t legitimately, actually, remote I took a job last October for a company on the other side of the US. My manager is in Toronto. His manager is in Scotland. It can be done. The companies are out there. I agree though, you need to be very specific upfront and make sure you’re getting what you want.
june_twenty 5y ago
Yes it's a ruse. Covid is still around so I expect when it is really dead, companies will demand a proper return to office.
freedom2099 5y ago
I love working from home but I have to admit that at my company most innovations are born during coffee breaks! We have an amazing cafeteria with nice couches and rocking chairs were we spend at least an hour a day discussing stuff! Working in the office a couple of days a week allows us to do this but at the same time enjoy home!
- june_twenty 5y ago
  What innovations are they? In my opinion, innovation comes from empowering people rather than chance meeting of minds in an office setting.
  - freedom2099 5y ago
    New products, smart and more efficient solutions. Simply talking to other people and exchanging ideas helps! And I managed to do the same with some during full telework only because due to “in person” work I manage to establish a relationship with them (some of my best friends are among my colleagues). On the other hand I barely interacted with newcomers that joined after the full telework started. It’s only after having to be back a couple of days a week that I got to know them and started to interact with them as well. At my company they amended our contract to have permanently 3 days telework and 2 in the office (before the pandemic we already had 1 teleworking day). The days in the office are spent mostly socialising!
perrygeo 5y ago
I worked at a company that was "hybrid" prior to the pandemic - deliberately, not because they were forced to be. 2 days in the office (same days for everyone) and 3 days remote. All meetings had a zoom link to support distributed work if you had to work from home for any reason. Some people worked in the office 5 days a week but they worked on hardware and shipping logistics, making presence a requirement. It worked wonderfully. The two days in the office were full of ad hoc conversations, lunches, whiteboarding, pair programming .. all the stuff that's good about office work. The other 3 days a week, we stayed home and focused on building all the cool stuff we'd hashed out together with almost no interruptions. It was very much the best of both world, allowing both introverts and extroverts to thrive. So hybrid working can turn out great IF it's a deliberate part of the culture. But in the general case of corporate America calling their workers back to the office, it does feel like a ruse.
- julianlam 5y ago
  Us too! We end up back-loading all of our meetings and team discussions to Friday, which is our in-office day, and it works really well to ensure that the rest of the week can be free of distraction. It takes commitment to intentionally defer items to the in-office day, so simply adopting a hybrid approach without doing anything additional is just cargo culting.
  - perrygeo 5y ago
    This sounds ideal (as an introverted IC programmer). But the discipline required to keep this schedule would require everything related to communication and decision making to be combined into a single day. I could imagine that being a source of tension among those that work at different paces - some wanting to move faster with more touchpoints, some slower with less. Either way, once or twice a week feels like a good "compromise".
dmitrygr 5y ago
Yes, to avoid instantaneous departures if they straight out came and said "office or GTFO" this lets them spread out the departures over a year or so, while various factions of people realize this and leave staggered over time.
lacker 5y ago
Personally, I think a schedule of 2 days in the office and 3 days wherever is pretty nice. You can regularly have important team meetings and 1-1s in person, you can get to know your coworkers face-to-face, but you can skip most of your commuting time. Different people have really different opinions though and I completely understand there are some people who prefer 100% remote and some people who prefer 100% in-person. Who knows what sort of people your executives are. Maybe your management is just doing temporary appeasement. You'll just have to wait and see.

_benj 5y ago

I’m slightly suspicious about the “mandatory” hybrid model. I’ve been working remotely pre-Covid and I really like it. With that said, I recently visited the office and met some people that I’ve had diverging opinions… and I was completely sock to find out how much was lost during the conversation and how a short chat face to face clarified so much! I don’t think is enough to justify working from the office but I’m now planning to make it to the office something like every other month. At the same time, even though I’m fully remote I’ll work from a coffee shop from time to time. Offices could become such company-provided hub/spaces for when a change of air, reliable internet, or access to physical resources (hardware) is needed.

faangiq 5y ago

Of course it’s a scam. We’re stuck with it until the great boomer/xer die off hits.

maxharris 5y ago

Just refuse. Hold out for something better if you have any means to do so.

incomingpain 5y ago

How many buildings are empty right now? Selling your large corporate building isn't going to go well. Nobody wants it because their workers dont want to be in the office anymore. But then again maintenance, utilities, toilet paper, sickness, taxes, etc are all burning a hole in their pocket. So better to force people back to the office? Worse yet, any big corp that announces back to work has an army of recruiters cold calling all their employees offering them exactly what they want. More money and work from home. It's an impossible situation for businesses. Flipside, what's more important to look at is only what you can control. You wont change your employer's mind on whatever bad decision they make.There are only bad decisions to make. You can control yourself. Do you even want to go in for 2 days a week? Personally I'm not interested in paying for parking, 1 ply toilet paper and pointless chitchat about moon knight or some other tv show i havent had the chance to watch. You can instead make the decision for what you can control. There's an awful lot of employers who will accept completely remote workers.

gernb 5y ago
The building argument doesn't seem to make business sense so I doubt that's the reason. An empty building is not consuming as much power as a full building so even if the business is wasting money on a building and has to because of a lease they'd still save money for employees to be remote. In other words. From most expensive to least * all employees at office * empty office, employees remote * no office, employees remote Business would do whatever is cheapest unless they believe they won't hit their targets. So it's got nothing to do with the buildings existing. Must be some other reason.
- incomingpain 5y ago
  It doesnt make business sense for the normal case, but the unexpected covid lockdowns and inaction on immediately selling the buildings expecting to go back. Later to find out you aren't going back? Like in OP's pov, the intention is 2 days a week but as he expects, it's just to slowly ease back into 5 days a week. No doubt seeing that the lower cost being to take some HR losses is less than the huge discount in selling the building.
  - gernb 5y ago
    I'm still not following your argument. No matter what it's cheaper for the employer to allow employees to work remote. It doesn't matter if they already signed up to pay for the building for another 5 years or whatever. Rent + Monthly Expenses > Rent So an company who only cared about money wouldn't pull employees back into the office as that's more expensive for them than letting them say at home, even if they company is still paying rent. They'd need some other reason, like they believe employees are more productive at work. Short of that, they'd just let them stay home, even if they have to keep paying rent on an empty office it's still less money than rent + office expenses.
nicoburns 5y ago
> But then again maintenance, utilities, toilet paper, sickness, taxes, etc are all burning a hole in their pocket. So better to force people back to the office? That only makes sense if they derive value from people being in the office. Otherwise there is nothing lost by simply leaving the office empty.

pacifika 5y ago

Assuming the intention is not to miscommunicate, remote workers need access to the communication pipeline and decisions graph. With hybrid working, many of these are happening face to face, around the watercooler etc, and the burden falls on the office worker to duplicate this work digitally. That is not effective so eventually no longer happens, so remote workers lose out, and office work prevails. This is why good fully remote organisations decided to not have an office, and appreciate transparency, working in the open, supporting one another etc. Of course these values are not exclusively fully remote.

crate_barre 5y ago

Non-remote work is the same as hearing a low ball offer in negotiations. I’ll keep looking unless I’m desperate. And if I am desperate, I’ll leave as soon as I’m not, as is with tradition.

msarrel 5y ago

My thinking is that we're approaching this from what we would like to do, and our bosses are approaching this from what is of the most monetary value. They're paying rent. They really don't care if the software development business model no longer fits sitting in an office, they're paying that rent and we had damn well better get our asses in that office. They're willing to lie to get us there too. In case you're wondering where I'm coming from, my company switched to purely remote. Yet we're still renting a huge office, and we're told to go there every once in awhile. But we're purely remote. It seems pretty obvious that we're just remote until someone can crack the whip and make us go back so they feel like they're getting their money's worth on rent. I think the other thing worth mentioning, we're not alone. This is going to be done to all of us. Remote work is great, but it turns out companies aren't run for the benefit of the worker.

MattGaiser 5y ago

Companies have the problem that half their workforce wants the office and half wants remote, so I would say that hybrid is the truce. The alternative is massive losses of one side or the other. Although I think that it is probably better for companies to pick a side as neither will be happy with the arrangement as it (at least when i was at a hybrid company) just meant going on Zoom from our office desks.

jefftk 5y ago
Or, for companies that are large enough, we could have remote vs in-person at the team or product area level.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  I would be interested to see how well one company culture could handle that. For example, you can get away with crappy documentation for an in person team and just hope that osmosis handles knowledge transfer. That doesn't work with remote.
- WithinReason 5y ago
  In my company it's on a per person level. You can work from the office 5 days or from home 5 days or anything in between.
Jochim 5y ago
Hybrid with mandatory office days also leads to massive losses. A friend recently switched to a company that announced mandatory office days and his entire team has basically left. Hybrid is the worst of both worlds, you're almost guaranteed to have someone calling in and you need to live close enough to the office that you can't really take advantage of cheaper house prices/more space.

jefftk 5y ago

Our office is Tue-Thr in the office, with Monday and Friday optionally. The idea is that this lets people collaborate on work that is best done in person, by having everyone present for the same three days. Still too soon to see how well this works.

anoonmoose 5y ago
We're doing hybrid with two (or less preferably but they didn't say that out loud) days WFH per week and it's clear most people chose Mon and Fri as their two days. I think your office's way would be better.

giantg2 5y ago

I sort of agree. However, I think they pretty much have to be hybrid to be even a little competitive these days. My company is piloting a full remote position because they're having trouble hiring.

gilbetron 5y ago

Depends on the company and their situation. My wife works for a university, and they are always struggling with office space for people and parking for people, hybrid work is a blessing for the university, as it greatly alleviates a lot of problems the university were struggling with. The company I work for has all kinds of beautiful, recently renovated and leased space in a giant city - they really want people back in the office (but true remote people have grown significantly as well, so I'm not that worried about it, being fully remote). General Motors is permanently letting a lot of people stay remote/hybrid, because they realized a great cost saving, and people are happier and work more because they don't have 2+ hours worth of commute each day. It will be interesting to see how the competitive advantages work themselves out. We'll see if in-person communication is as important as legend has it.

dougmwne 5y ago

I think a significant number of people get into leadership roles because they enjoy having power over others. The ultimate power is control over the bodies of others. Why settle for slack chats and zoom calls when you could have your employees sitting all around you at your beck and call? We individual contributors may not think about this much, but the absolute thrill of being above others in the hierarchy only reaches its fullness when the employees get out of the damn pajamas and into the open offices. Please pick me up a coffee while you are at it.

api 5y ago
There's also a direct threat to the jobs of a lot of middle managers from telework. The company's upper level management may realize a lot of these high salary managers are not necessary or that they obviously aren't doing their jobs well since the same value gets created with people out of the office. The push to get butts back in seats is 100% about job security for middle management and maintaining the value of commercial real estate. I've seen evidence of CRE leaning on the media and politicians to push a "return to work" narrative.
- outsidetheparty 5y ago
  Maybe it’s just because I’m a teleworking middle manager, but I’ve never understood this argument that telework threatens middle management. Middle management doesn’t magically become unnecessary when employees are working from home instead of the office — if anything it’s _more_ important when everyone isn’t in the same physical location picking up their direction by osmosis.
  - jayd16 5y ago
    Not every manager is Dilbert's Pointy Haired Boss but some people just have that impression.
    - marcosdumay 5y ago
      Not every manager is Dilbert's PHB, but some are. And you can bet the pressure to go back to the office for tasks that don't require an office mostly comes from those.

ne0flex 5y ago

I agree. With hybrid work, one thing I noticed is that, at least among my coworkers and myself, is that productivity will be concentrated to those one or two days in the office and the WFH days will productivity will fall dramatically. When we were fully remote, productivity held consistently throughout the week. I'm willing to bet that the organization is monitoring this trend and will try to build a case for needing full back to office. Though at the same time, my company opted didn't renew their lease on two office floors (out of a total of 8 floors) due to hybrid work and employees not having a designated desk. So who knows.

hardware2win 5y ago

I believe that theres value in planning/meeting in person and coding at home

warrenm 5y ago

"Hybrid working" (partially in-person, partially remote) may or may not be a "ruse" For certain purposes, being in-person can be useful If the office space is already paid-for, it's silly (from a business perspective) to not use it If you have needs for scheduled all-hands or other types of meetings, doing them all over Zoom can be much slower / less efficient than doing it face to face

Mister_Snuggles 5y ago
> If the office space is already paid-for, it's silly (from a business perspective) to not use it This is known as the sunk-cost fallacy. Just because you have the space is not sufficient reason to use it. I agree though, being in-person can be incredibly useful, but it very much depends on the team, the type of work, etc. It's also just nice to see people in a less structured manner - e.g., water cooler chats vs setting up a Teams call.
- warrenm 5y ago
  It may be a sunk-cost fallacy It may not Fact remains: if it has been paid-for, there's a strong justification for using it if you have it

miloignis 5y ago

I've been 2 days in hybrid for a while now, and it's worked out pretty well. Monday is most all meetings, then the WFH days are tech work, with the remaining in person day being a good catch all for if I have to work in person with someone on something technical.

pm90 5y ago

It’s definitely an appeasement. Pre-Pandemic, fully remote folks were at a distinct disadvantage since they would be cut off completely from the politics, relationship building etc. that would happen via people being in the office. This strategy is clearly aimed at discouraging people from being fully remote by making them aware of the “benefits” of working in an office. I feel sorta lucky because my team is distributed between two cities on the West Coast, so even if people are in the office you still have to video conference … making it somewhat pointless. I was talking to a friend at Apple who had been forced to work from their office. They are really unhappy; primarily they were so used to the peace and quiet of wfh that they’re having a hard time getting anything done in a loud (relatively) office.

gwbas1c 5y ago

I think there are some well-known horror stories of "hybrid" companies that some companies are trying to avoid. (Disclaimer: I have to telecommute, I've been doing it since 2014. Because of where I live, I can only go in about 2-3 times a month.) For example: I worked for Intel in 2005-2007. It was hybrid by necessity: They had offices all over the world, and were so large that it was impractical for everyone to be on one campus; and even if everyone was on one campus, travel among buildings was somewhat time consuming. Thus, many meetings were conducted via teleconference, and no one cared if you were in the office. (I would always take early morning calls at home and leave after the call.) While I was there, it became obvious that people were abusing the liberal telecommuting policy. My boss went on vacation for one week, and then "telecommuted" the second week. I quickly realized he had an agreement with his higher up to get a 2nd week of vacation as long as he checked email and kept up appearances. A few months later Intel cut out most telecommuting. The rumors that came back to me was that a lot of people were just goofing off; and even running 2nd businesses, like liquor stores, while on company time. There's also the story of Yahoo. This is well documented, so I'll leave it up to someone else to dig up links, but the general belief is that many Yahoo telecommuters were just keeping up appearances and not really working. The company cracked down because it was going broke paying people to do nothing. So, I don't think it's a "ruse." I think it's a case of a company doing what it thinks is in its best interests. If it's in your best interests to be 100% remote, or 90% remote, ect, have a frank discussion with your boss, and if they can't accommodate you, find a new job.

ericmay 5y ago
You can also avoid this by hiring the right people - so to me this is indicative of an even deeper issue within the company which is bad hiring, bad/poor expectations, no consequences for failure, etc. Remote/Hybrid/On-Prem discussions are just the symptom.
- gwbas1c 5y ago
  I don't think a large company can unilaterally "hire the right people" to make hybrid work in all groups and departments. That was why Intel and Yahoo made work for home only on a case-by-case basis.

sys_64738 5y ago

It's all down to the individual company I guess. Some will have maniac managers who quickly want to reassert their authority and control but you gotta ask if you really want to work there. If an employer tells you something is "mandatory" then you can still decide for yourself. You don't have to do what they demand. you can either leave the building or ignore it and see what happens next. Employers don't own you.

thrrck 5y ago

We have something similar, the 2 days are not mandatory though, it would just be appreciated if people could make it to the office (this is just our team, other teams handle it differently). The two days were chosen as a team and we tried to accommodate everyones needs like childcare duties or and so on. We use the office days for collaborative tasks such as architecture reviews, peer debugging, idea brainstorming, drinking beer. And the days at home for actual implementation work, i.e. producing code. It has only been a couple of weeks and so far I believe it works quite well, we also said we will review if this is how we want to continue working in a couple of months. So it could be the same for you, but if you as an employee cannot shape it in any way and only have to follow rules, I would be a bit suspicious.

5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
yes, we definitely don't have any say on the matter at all.
sp332 5y ago
If the drive to get people in the office is top-down, then I'd be suspicious. But if people are actually asking for it because some parts of the job are easier or just more enjoyable in person, then it might not lead to going back to the office full time.
ryathal 5y ago
Hybrid makes a lot of sense to me for these reasons. In person can be so much faster and simpler for heavily collaborative tasks. Five people in a conference room for an hour will accomplish more than those same 5 in a zoom call, and it's less likely for unnecessary people to be part of an in person meeting. Spending 4+ hours on Zoom/Teams calls in a day is also one of the most draining experiences I've ever had as well, full days of meetings in person are far more tolerable.

SheinhardtWigCo 5y ago

Former head of HR at Google thinks so: “The purpose of the ‘boil the frog method’ [is] to do it subtly and thereby avoid difficult questions and conflict” https://fortune.com/2022/04/04/former-google-hr-chief-laszlo-bock-hybrid-remote-return-to-office-work/ https://fortune.com/2022/04/04/former-google-hr-chief-laszlo...

kevinventullo 5y ago
FWIW, Google is also allowing people to apply to be full-time remote. In the few instances I’m privy to, it’s been approved.

ratww 5y ago

My company is hybrid, but coming to the office is entirely optional. Enough people naturally started coming back once in a while. The way they convinced us that it won’t change on a C-Level’s whim is by drastically reducing the office size so it’s not even possible for anyone to come back full time. But you can work at a co-working space if need be. The company saved a lot of money by not having an office and I’ve never seen such a productive team in my entire career.

AlotOfReading 5y ago
I wouldn't bet on C-levels respecting reality if it gets in the way of their plans. Mine recently decided that 700+ people could share <200 desks on the same days in a building that can legally hold ~500.
- ratww 5y ago
  Well, we have laws for that over here, so ours are gonna respect it.

iamdbtoo 5y ago

I would assume that's the case if I were you. In my experience, compromises like this are really just the first step in a process to implement an unpopular policy. It would damage morale too much to do require the full week so they start there and take steps over time to minimize the impact.

bayareabadboy 5y ago

Maybe sometimes. I do think it’s very funny to use the word “ruse” unironically.

mindcrime 5y ago
I do think it’s very funny to use the word “ruse” unironically. Why so?

j4yav 5y ago

Hybrid is worse than all-remote or all-office. It’s essentially forcing you to come into the office to sit on zoom calls.

the_doctah 5y ago

Easy. Ask yourself, "Would my company have done this if the pandemic never happened?" If the answer is no, then there's your answer. It is appeasement.

marcosdumay 5y ago
There are plenty of places that would never have gone remote without the pandemic, but when forced found out it's not a problem, and decided to keep it.

alchemyromcom 5y ago

I honestly think there are a lot of people that need some level of human interaction to function properly, and those are likely the people pushing for hybrid or back to office. Keep in mind, also, that not everyone's work from home situation is ideal. If you are already an established professional, and you have more than one room to create an office, then work from home is a dream come true. If you are a new hire, or student intern, sharing an apartment (even a crappy one) and your single bedroom is now your office, then work from home can feel a little like a prison sentence. But yes, likely hybrid work is a ruse, but also I wouldn't be surprised if work from home is also a ruse--imagine a scenario like this: "since your home is your office, we are going to need to monitor you on off hours and we'd also like you to start doing more overtime".

62951413 5y ago
It's so much easier to discuss things face-to-face. I feel so much more energized by mere presence of other people (and I score high on any introvert/Asperger test) I was surprised myself in the last few weeks. I welcome the return to normality. Walking two feet from my bed to my desk got psychologically tough a long time ago. Even though I have the worst commute on my team I want to be in the office a couple days a week (it's going to be 3). But our campus is great, we have real cubicles and standing desks, and even free meals.

postalrat 5y ago

Reorganize teams based on who wants to be in the office and who doesn't. Seems like it won't be much fun or productive to be on a team where half the people want to work remote and the other half wants to be in the office.

hackitup7 5y ago

I am in leadership at a company and at least for us it is absolutely not a ruse. My team wants hybrid (or remote), people we want to hire want hybrid (or remote), I want them to be happy. As a result we're hybrid/remote and incentives are about as aligned as they can be. Things might change but I view this as a reasonably likely steady state and am doing nothing to change it.

alfl 5y ago

We're in the middle of leasing an office because the market for office space is flooded right now: way more supply than demand. We're getting a great price on a long-ish term lease. We did some in-office tests in a coworking space and productivity went through the roof. We seem to be seeing that offices are a kind of thinking and focus tool. Approx. half of our team is remote, so we're kitting out the office with TVs, cameras, and microphones to create a "hybrid space". We're probably going to add some practices like, "all meetings are video calls". Things like that.

lbrito 5y ago

There are many fully remote companies. Just pick one. Don't work at a company that presses rto.

richardwhiuk 5y ago

Is remote work a ruse to allow companies to outsource all of their work to cheaper jurisdictions?

erik_seaberg 5y ago
As appealing as remote work is, this is my worry. It’s one thing to compete with others who chose to relocate near Bay Area tech giants, another to live with high expenses but compete with the entire English-speaking world.

paxys 5y ago

Everyone is missing one key advantage (for the employer) of such a setup – mandating even a single day per week from the office ensures that employees live in the geographical area they are supposed to. So they can't "cheat", for example, by listing a bay area address and getting a bay area salary but actually working out of Mexico.

gernb 5y ago
I'm sure a few people were caught doing something like this but is this really a problem? Are 15% of employees doing this or 0.0001%?
jodrellblank 5y ago
Why is that 'cheating', who is being cheated out of what?
- zeroonetwothree 5y ago
  I wouldn't call it 'cheating', but there are a lot of labor law and tax issues with having employees in different countries (or states in the US).
  - jodrellblank 5y ago
    Wouldn't "employee lies to unknowing employer about where they live" be legally different from "company deliberately employs someone abroad and lies to the IRS about it"?
    - paxys 5y ago
      It's different, but the former case is still a massive headache for the employer.
      - greedo 5y ago
        In the States, payroll firms like ADP handle this all the time. For outside the States, make the remote worker a 1099.

chias 5y ago

On my team, a couple of us started coming in on (most) Wednesdays. Slowly, more and more of us just started coming in on Wednesdays because it was fun to have a day where we would all hang out together / have lunch together / etc. It's been really nice. So in practice, most of us are now "Hybrid Working" and it's working out great. That being said, if it was mandatory, I would have negative feelings about it.

paul7986 5y ago

They just tried that at where I work ... not many showed up and or went looking for another job. Management realized better just go full/permanent remote or lose our business and now we are fully remote forever. I was one who refuse to show up as its a 60 mile drive i use to do yet they hired tons of out state employees who will never go to the office and Im out of state (right across the line). I bet what happened at my work will happen at other places of work due to competition .. as if the business loses employees they dont have a business. Joe Biden can try to force employees back for the sake of the old America but that's a joke ... no one needs to work in an office and I wont ever work in one again!

donpott 5y ago

I'm not sure about a deliberate ruse. In my experience, that level of forward planning is rare in big companies. What is clear to me is that hybrid is the worst of both worlds: Incurring the many costs of having to come to the office, only to find that such and such colleague is at home, and there is little to zero added value to your presence there. So from that, it follows naturally that many companies will slippery-slope into full time in the office, aducing that it is an advantage over hybrid.

jodrellblank 5y ago
> "What is clear to me is that hybrid is the worst of both worlds: Incurring the many costs of having to come to the office" and the costs of having to maintain a home office. The costs of maintaining a commuting vehicle or transport ticket and office clothes, while not using them at least half the time. The time cost of commuting. The faff of a laptop, or the cost of two sets of equipment and the effort of keeping them in sync. It's the combined cost of working from home and working from the office, without the benefit of being able to work from a cheaper nicer home far away, or the benefit of committing to every day office work and having everyone in. Programmers love the "union of all the negatives, none of the individual positives" when it's called "cross platform compatible software" so why not rebrand this from hybrid work to cross environment compatible work?
closeparen 5y ago
Software engineering is a mix of collaboration and individual focused work. Zoom meetings are awful and the office is much better at supporting collaboration and human connections. The big loud open floor is a terrible place to think; WFH is much better at supporting focus. It remains to be seen whether we get the proportions right, or actually sort the right activities into the right settings, but it has the potential to be the best of both worlds. Many were actually hybrid working before the pandemic. Regularly sending emails like “I have no meetings today and need to get this done, so I’m staying home.” Still physically and socially part of the team.
georgeecollins 5y ago
> "What is clear to me is that hybrid is the worst of both worlds I don't agree with this because I think my office is nice and not a barnyard. I mean a door, a window, nice amenities and easy use of a conference room for meetings. I have worked for tech companies that had offices that were like these giant open floors or cubicle farms. There were all these reasons people said they were good but really I think it was that they were cheap and it was easy to circulate people through them in places with high turnover. I'm never working in a place like that again. My work is currently hybrid and what I like about it is if I want to work from home to keep odd hours or save time by not driving to work. If I want to have a particular time of focus, or host a meeting including guests, I can work in the office. Also, I should mention I have a short commute. Not everyone has all this, but this is what I think we should aspire to.

midnightmonster 5y ago

Sounds like temporary appeasement. ~6 years ago I switched from full time remote freelancing/consulting to full time at a local startup with just a handful of employees and 1 day/week in-person. Then 1 day became 2. Then we got a real office and 2 became 3 with a worse commute. Then 3 became, unofficially, if you want to be taken seriously, you should come in every day, or at least 4 days/week. You could still leave early on Fridays! I stayed at 3 days/week until I found a new, fully-remote employer.

jpcfl 5y ago

> no clear value proposition to even being in office two days There's plenty of value in in-person work. Body language is an important part of how we communicate. Spurious social interactions in the office are often the inspiration of important company initiatives. Async communication (e.g., Slack) is, IMHO, much less efficient than sync communication (e.g., tap on my colleagues shoulder). My company has also implemented a hybrid pilot program: 3 in/2 out, with 4 weeks of discretionary remote work. I believe the idea is that there is value in remote work, and there is value in office work. Let's see if we can benefit from both.

5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
Yeah I was probably being too specific to my development role where we have managed (in fact company has grown in revenue) despite all communication being via slack or teams. I know there are cases where in person communication makes sense, but it should not be mandatory for all. This is why I say hybrid is a ruse because it applies to all and not just "flexible" for those who may need or prefer it.
- jpcfl 5y ago
  > should not be mandatory for all. Yeah, I'm not a fan of hard-and-fast rules. If you think remote work is what is best for you and the company, you should discuss and arrangement with your manager. I'm sure the company is just setting these rules because they need to send a clear message, and they want to try and contain remote work. Keep in mind that working remotely is still seen as an impediment to career development. People who work in the office tend to get promoted faster. Their work is more visible, they are presented with more opportunities, and, for lack of a better word, they can "schmooze" more.
sanderjd 5y ago
Sometimes I think the different camps on this just break down on the "shoulder tap" line. I hate having my "shoulder tapped" (literally or metaphorically) and never tap on someone else's shoulder. A message saying "hey let me know when you get a chance to talk" is so much better for everyone IMO. But I recognize that other people feel the opposite and I have no problem with that. I'd like to be able to work my way and for them to be able to work their way.

atoav 5y ago

Depends on the job I think. For many roles it can be beneficial to have somebody physically present at least once a week so people can meet and talk and have face-to-face discussions about things. For other jobs or in different roles it could be totally unnecessary to be there at all. In my job, being there is part of the job, because I need to fix thing in the infrastructure of the house. I didn't even have a single home office week during the whole pandemic — I also managed to not catch the damn thing up to now. Yet I convinced my superiors that it would be beneficial to give me one home office day a week, precisely because people will not disturb me there. In terms of pushing out code it is easily the most productive day of the week. And it is friday on top of everything.

nowherebeen 5y ago

Are they paying for the office 2 days a week only? Probably not.

wokwokwok 5y ago

An across the board, “2 days mandatory” is a brute force HR policy to appease management; a genuine intention to continue to support remote working indefinitely would be phrased differently, like: Converting the office into a collaboration space for people who need a reliable internet connection and/or a less disruptive environment (ie. than a noisy family) to get work done in. 0 days mandatory in the office; days in the office by collaborative decision amongst teams. It’s quite obvious if you’re in camp A or camp B. If you don’t like it, just leave. Plenty of remote jobs open; the good thing about a remote first company is that they collaborate in person as required; not because it’s required by HR.

sydbarrett74 5y ago
THIS. I wish HN had the ability for us to upvote comments.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
  It actually does but you need a requisite amount of points, karma, whatever it is called here first.
  - seanw444 5y ago
    I don't think I ever noticed that period when I created my account here.
    - jen20 5y ago
      I also don’t remember not being able to upvote, just being unable to downvote until a certain karma score was reached.
  - bin_bash 5y ago
    For downvotes not upvotes
- jimmont 5y ago
  gave you an upvote to get you that much closer, HN is a product from a time before the term UX existed, not that it would matter

sydbarrett74 5y ago

Managers who mandate hybrid work are employing a 'boil the frog slowly' approach. At first, two days will be mandatory, then three, then all five. Power over others is a drug, and they won't willingly cede those sweet, sweet dopamine spikes.

gernb 5y ago

So I someone that would prefer to be at the office. I like socializing and getting lunch with coworkers. I like casually asking question, running ideas by others, all things that, FOR ME, don't work remote. Unfortunately, at least so far, people in my area aren't coming in so I've shown up at the office and in my space few others are showing up. Also, getting rooms for meetings is no fun I don't know what I'm going to do but I will likely quit and find an in office team if things don't get better. Humans (most) are social animals https://www.google.com/search?q=humans+are+social+animals https://www.google.com/search?q=humans+are+social+animals

acheron 5y ago
I’m sorry you don’t have any real friends to get your socialization in, but forcing your coworkers to be your pretend friends is not the answer.
- oblio 5y ago
  That's just a silly approach to life, sorry. You're stuck in an office with other people 8 hours per day, you might as well make friends. Over a working life of 40 years that's 40 x 45 x 5 x 8 = about 8 full years of your life. And no, those people don't have to be your direct teammates, especially in bigger companies. Just look for compatible people. Relationships are based on proximity, heck, even most marriages start like that: highscool classmates, college students studying the same thing, co-workers, neighbors, whatever.
- freedom2099 5y ago
  To be fair some of my colleagues are among my best friends… we have been working together for a decade, we go out all the time, we have weekly DND night, we go camping, we travel together…

tapanjk 5y ago

> What do you think? I think so too. This is what I vented on Twitter a few weeks ago (pardon the tone -- in my defense, I don't have many followers): "You keep hearing about the hybrid model, but that is just corporate speak to lure you back into office. It is just a matter of time before they declare that they tried hybrid and it did not work, so it's going to be office only from now on." https://twitter.com/tapanjk/status/1510491733640896515 https://twitter.com/tapanjk/status/1510491733640896515

hatware 5y ago

At my last job, productivity took a huge hit when everyone went WFH, and everything seemed to slow to a crawl. The funny thing was, it was obvious as an IC, but management kept saying "Nope, things are moving as normal!" The team I was on needed a serious adjustment period because we worked with every other team in the company (1000+ employees). The synergy that existed in the office and allowed our team to be a force multiplier was drained almost immediately. Ultimately, I had to leave because the pace and variety of work was suffering and not getting better. The culture was also on its last legs from psychologically torturing folks for 2 years.

notatoad 5y ago

Hybrid work where you're required to be in the office 2 out of 5 days with no further requirement of which two days, I think that is as you say "a ruse", and management demonstrating that they dont trust you to work from home. If there's an actual stated purpose for those two days to be in-person days (like your team has designated day for in-person meetings or planning sessions or something, or there's some task that needs to be done in-person each day and there's a rotation of who is responsible for it) then it makes sense.

dibujante 5y ago

Definitely a ruse. The main value proposition of working remote is not needing to be within commute distance of the office.

nicoburns 5y ago
That may be true. But for people who are used to working 100% in the office, hybrid working has value of its own.

wyldberry 5y ago

IMO no. I think work that is creative + collaborative in nature (ex: entertainment) performs best with a few days where people are physically around. It's not just the act of meetings, it's how charged people can get when they are around other people on the same wavelength creating new things. I think for junior engineers, being in person is invaluable a few times a week just having a whiteboard around. Early in my career having a senior dev around to bounce questions off of, or work CTF problems together really, really helped me. Certainly there is some number of managers who just want control over people, but i think that's probably smaller than what some commenters are implying. The The questions i use for if a particular way of working is a ruse or effective is this: 1. What industry am I working in? If you work in an industry physically making things, you're likely to also benefit from being in the office some days. Same with creative work. 2. What's the ratio of "senior" to mid and junior level employees? 3. Is the company willing to let individual teams make more flexible decisions? I.e go down to 1 day a week, 1 day a sprint etc? My end goal is to understand the nature of the organization I work for, why it makes decisions the way it does, and if leadership wants to send a message, or if they are open to trying to find the way that is productive and keeps people happy.

thraway3837 5y ago

Yes. What did you think the future was? All remote and WFH? People are already running into issues where interpersonal conflicts cannot be dealt with effectively. There's no guidelines or ever been done before on how people who have never met each other can resolve conflicts. Long distance relationships don't work, so why would they for the workplace? I'm not advocating for going back to work 5 days a week, but remote only works when you have a solid relationship with your peers and leadership. But workplaces are stunted socially, with either non existent relationships, or fake relationships that's only self serving.

greedo 5y ago
Conflict resolution is no different WFH than in the office. You think people are going to solve their issues by wrestling in the parking lot? Or by being put in timeout by HR? Conflicts get resolved exactly the same why WFH as remote; you discuss the issue with your manager, they talk to the other person, and have a joint meeting if necessary. No needs for hugs and handshakes... The onus is on you to prove that remote work doesn't work.

TrapLord_Rhodo 5y ago

i've been working remotely since 2017 and around year 4 it gets old and you crave being back in the office again. I imagine this will be a cyclical thing in the media.

christophilus 5y ago

I'm not sure about your question, but I'll answer a related one: Hybrid teams are a ruse. If you're a remote employee, but most of the team is on-premises, you're a second-class citizen, and you'll be first to go if cuts are made. At least, that's how it's been wherever I've worked. I was never the one cut, as I was generally on-premises when in mixed teams. These days, I work only for 100% remote / remote-first companies if possible.

kkfx 5y ago

IMVHO it's just a stupid middle-ground who makes all unhappy to avoid making all unhappy. With hybrid works you need or fully portable gears or two set of them, witch means not just a craptop in a backpack but also docking station, monitor(s), keyboard&other stuff etc. Long story short or the company spend the double in hw or at home you'll probably use something from you, maybe also the entire desktop with all relevant security risks. Not only working less in the office, but still having an office the company spent essentially the same amount of money and the workers still have to live around, perhaps in an expensive area or in little houses since around the office perhaps there is no room for better accommodations and still need a home office to be in comfort at home. Personally I think hybrid will last for a short period of disastrous time and here the sole possible ruse might be provoking and using the hybrid disasters to state "look, remote working does not work, we need business as usual". After since we can't sustain the current social transformation in a classic way of life WFH will be the standard for a little slice of potentially remote workers, while others will be forced in the classic South Korean's Goshiwong model with a combination of hyper-stagflation and false environmental claims. Then the many who still can't understand that: - no, we can't continue as usual, we can't keep going on oil etc - no, the Green New Deal is green in the dollar and stereotypical chem waste corroded barrels not spring grass green. Will finally understand that the new neo-feudal society is now built and they are well f*ked up, too late to change anyway, as usual. Than we still see the reactionary cohort from today saying that we need to came back and the progressive ones saying that no the fault is having not done much more. That's the real "ruse" (and not much a ruse, since countless think tanks have published black on white since years) but hybrid work is just a small step not specially linked with "the plot"...

alexashka 5y ago

The problem with offices is who they are filled with. Solve for that problem.

spzb 5y ago

The thing that makes me laugh is that these managers insist on people coming into the office because "that's where they're more collaborative and creative". Before the pandemic they wanted to take us all off-site for an away day so we could be more collaborative and creative than when we were in the office!

oblio 5y ago
Both can be true at the same time. A change or scenery and atmosphere can boost creativity.

kodah 5y ago

Just leave. Most companies in high cost and high income areas are just doing this as a way to do layoffs, imo. My company recently announced that the three day work week, with hundreds of people asking how they were going to address the fact that our office is in Mountain View and that Staff+ engineers are having to get room mates so they can live less than an hour from the office. Our HR head basically said not my problem and then went on a lengthy discussion about the culture they wanted. This is people's callousness reaching heights as people who were able to secure things like houses that are now worth millions and big cashouts in tech are coming to the height of their careers.

Melchizedek 5y ago
They want a "culture" while I'm worried about being able to put a roof over the head of myself and a family. That will surely build a great culture. Psychopaths. The only thing they did to become millionaires was the completely non-productive act of borrowing money to buy property. Now the property values can't be allowed to depreciate so we must all commute into the office, the environment be damned. That's just inter-generational war.
- _ktx2 5y ago
  I'd say less psychopath and more self-centered to a high degree. Folks that have been fed into prestigious schools, jobs, and general opportunities throughout their lives start to miss the smoke of what average folks deal with and go through. To them, the smoke blew away long ago, and the benefits they seek are often at competition with the benefits an average person might seek.
  - strikelaserclaw 5y ago
    I'd say this selfishness extends even to average people who make it. Most people are selfish, prestigious schools or otherwise, we need to build systems which take this fact into account.

iso1210 5y ago

Any 2 days, or 2 named days? If they want the entire company in for sat Tuesday and Wednesday, that could make sense - happenstance communications with people you don't normally talk to would probably be easier. If your team lead wants you all in for a specific day for meeting etc that could make sense too. We're arranging a meeting + beers for mid May for example. If it's any 2 days, then no, what's the point.

sanderjd 5y ago

Personally I think where this is headed is self-sorting into fully remote and fully in person. I think smaller companies will want to choose one or the other, and that larger companies could perhaps choose at the level of fairly granular orgs. I think "hybrid" and having different options within a single team is unlikely to be a stable equilibrium.

ltbarcly3 5y ago

Obvious ruse. They want you in the office, they are going to get you in as much as they can now, and they fully already intend to then adjust it to as much as they can later. Boiling the frog.

gerard1234 5y ago

francisofascii 5y ago

I think management wants to keep their options open. My company has been very vague about long term remote work plans. They clearly prefer that people come back to the office. They like being with people, and seeing dynamic office environments. But they also don't want to spook the employees into a mass exodus. So far they have set a mandatory two days a week policy, but it is not being enforced and less than half of the employees are following it. So as long as employees continue getting work done, it should stay.

IE6 5y ago

I'm in this right now and one big way this fails is that no one is on the same schedule. It's not uncommon for me to go into work only to join teams meetings anyway. I even stopped going to the room we all planned on meeting in because it would only be me in there anyway. The office furniture isn't that bad (somewhat modern, sit stand, somewhat ergo) so I can't complain but it doesn't compare to my setup at home - that's where the value prop suffers greatly.

twobitshifter 5y ago

I’m you from the future. We started on a hybrid office more than 4 months back. Hybrid was very weak with the requirement of 66% of the time in the office (1.5 days work from home?) Management has recently reported that it’s failing and is signaling that people need to return to the office full time. This is absent the evidence of any failures (only allusions to kpis) and with many people already having refused to return to the office for even a fraction of the time for hybrid work. If the company shows stronger resolve the only end game is those people leaving or being let go by the company. As another poster said individuals know the quality of their work and if they perform better remote or at work. The individuals doing well will never be convinced by management of the need to return.

jimmont 5y ago

It's a political, power game. It simply shows lack of trust and regard for our time, or reflects inexperience and inability to manage. Otherwise the situation would speak for itself and the question wouldn't have been asked.

robotburrito 5y ago

Is remote work something that could lead to solidarity between engineers? Union demands?

valbaca 5y ago

It's absolutely a "boil the frog" situation. I already see it on my own team. First, there were "no expectations" to come into the office. Then, it would be "really nice" if everyone tried to come in on Wednesdays "but only if you want to!" Then it became "highly encouraged" for everyone to come in for the three-year brainstorming. Now we're encouraged to come in to meet the other team. And now we're being asked how many days we would be comfortable to come back. It'll be one day, then 2 days, then 4, and finally fully back in the office before you know it. Despite EVERY metric showing that people are as-productive (and often more productive!) working from home, they just cannot stand the idea of not being able to enforce dress codes, and mandatory morning stand-ups, and being able to interrupt us and have us listen to the damn dog barking down the hall while someone's cell phone is going off because they forgot it and oh how do you get this conference phone to work I've only worked here for four years and make $500k can a techie person do this for me. I really really don't care about what you did over the weekend and don't want to hear about your kids when I'm just trying to get coffee or go to the bathroom. fuck I hate the office and I know we're going to be 100% back before the end of the year. And if anyone says "just leave" how about you try finding a Remote Job that is ACTUALLY Remote. Because I've not found a truly remote job. The "Remote" in posting is pure bait-and-switch.

drost 5y ago
I've been fully remote and out of state for ~8 months now. No expectation that I go into any office ever from my company... what kind of job are you looking for?
5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
> try finding a Remote Job that is ACTUALLY Remote yeah I see this comment a lot. its not that simple for most of us to change jobs, for various reasons. not wanting to deal with 5 step leetcode interviews, not having access to the best job markets, having other commitments..
sircastor 5y ago
> try finding a Remote Job that is ACTUALLY Remote. Because I've not found a truly remote job. The "Remote" in posting is pure bait-and-switch I may be an outlier, but I did exactly that. My company was talking about coming back to the office (it was oscillating as COVID spikes came and went) and I started looking at roles elsewhere. I did not interview with anyone who wasn’t legitimately, actually, remote I took a job last October for a company on the other side of the US. My manager is in Toronto. His manager is in Scotland. It can be done. The companies are out there. I agree though, you need to be very specific upfront and make sure you’re getting what you want.

june_twenty 5y ago

Yes it's a ruse. Covid is still around so I expect when it is really dead, companies will demand a proper return to office.

freedom2099 5y ago

I love working from home but I have to admit that at my company most innovations are born during coffee breaks! We have an amazing cafeteria with nice couches and rocking chairs were we spend at least an hour a day discussing stuff! Working in the office a couple of days a week allows us to do this but at the same time enjoy home!

june_twenty 5y ago
What innovations are they? In my opinion, innovation comes from empowering people rather than chance meeting of minds in an office setting.
- freedom2099 5y ago
  New products, smart and more efficient solutions. Simply talking to other people and exchanging ideas helps! And I managed to do the same with some during full telework only because due to “in person” work I manage to establish a relationship with them (some of my best friends are among my colleagues). On the other hand I barely interacted with newcomers that joined after the full telework started. It’s only after having to be back a couple of days a week that I got to know them and started to interact with them as well. At my company they amended our contract to have permanently 3 days telework and 2 in the office (before the pandemic we already had 1 teleworking day). The days in the office are spent mostly socialising!

perrygeo 5y ago

I worked at a company that was "hybrid" prior to the pandemic - deliberately, not because they were forced to be. 2 days in the office (same days for everyone) and 3 days remote. All meetings had a zoom link to support distributed work if you had to work from home for any reason. Some people worked in the office 5 days a week but they worked on hardware and shipping logistics, making presence a requirement. It worked wonderfully. The two days in the office were full of ad hoc conversations, lunches, whiteboarding, pair programming .. all the stuff that's good about office work. The other 3 days a week, we stayed home and focused on building all the cool stuff we'd hashed out together with almost no interruptions. It was very much the best of both world, allowing both introverts and extroverts to thrive. So hybrid working can turn out great IF it's a deliberate part of the culture. But in the general case of corporate America calling their workers back to the office, it does feel like a ruse.

julianlam 5y ago
Us too! We end up back-loading all of our meetings and team discussions to Friday, which is our in-office day, and it works really well to ensure that the rest of the week can be free of distraction. It takes commitment to intentionally defer items to the in-office day, so simply adopting a hybrid approach without doing anything additional is just cargo culting.
- perrygeo 5y ago
  This sounds ideal (as an introverted IC programmer). But the discipline required to keep this schedule would require everything related to communication and decision making to be combined into a single day. I could imagine that being a source of tension among those that work at different paces - some wanting to move faster with more touchpoints, some slower with less. Either way, once or twice a week feels like a good "compromise".

dmitrygr 5y ago

Yes, to avoid instantaneous departures if they straight out came and said "office or GTFO" this lets them spread out the departures over a year or so, while various factions of people realize this and leave staggered over time.

lacker 5y ago

Personally, I think a schedule of 2 days in the office and 3 days wherever is pretty nice. You can regularly have important team meetings and 1-1s in person, you can get to know your coworkers face-to-face, but you can skip most of your commuting time. Different people have really different opinions though and I completely understand there are some people who prefer 100% remote and some people who prefer 100% in-person. Who knows what sort of people your executives are. Maybe your management is just doing temporary appeasement. You'll just have to wait and see.