7 ms·

I don't think it's just about management style. It's also about the preferences of the employees. Some people are really motivated by the social life and comra

I don't think it's just about management style. It's also about the preferences of the employees. Some people are really motivated by the social life and comraderie at the workplace. I work in a coworking space that's full of self employed people and startups who could work from anywhere, but choose to go to a bustling office to work. But this only works if everyone goes to the office. My partner works in a company with a pretty liberal WFH policy, but prefers to go to the office. But when she does, the office is half empty, and she hates it. So you can't make it right for everyone. You have to pick: Either the company is remote first, or the company is office first. A compromise sucks for everyone.

noisy_boy 3y ago
> But when she does, the office is half empty, and she hates it. And those who prefer to work from home dislike working in a noisy place filled with people like her. Why does her choice gets to win? How about let those who like face to face interactions go to office and discuss away while those who prefer to wfh from home are allowed to do so? It doesn't even have to be a 100% strict thing - the firm can say that every employee must come to office once a week so that face-timers can get their appetite taken care of (even though video calls already cater to that) without overwhelming the wfh-ers. Nobody is denying that there are genuine circumstances when hashing things out face to face can be more efficient and quicker. It just doesn't have to be the default mode.
- yulaow 3y ago
  I personally only consider full remote position because even policies like "one day in the office every two weeks" would force me to live quite close to the city in which the office is and I absolutely want to avoid that if I can (and the market says I can) To be on the safer side, I try to consider only offers from company that have no physical office at all, so it's quite impossible that in the medium term they call a "return to office" policy... I mean, they could always decide to buy office space out of the blue, but usually in those companies all the upper management is there exactly because they want to WFH for life
- hellweaver666 3y ago
  I think that "hybrid" is the worst of both worlds. If you attend the office you spend most of your time on video calls to people working from home. Need to run a workshop? You still have to plan it in a hybrid way using Miro and video conferencing for the couple of people who will make an excuse not to come into the office.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    And at bigger companies, you're almost certainly dealing with people in multiple locations and even timezones anyway. For many of us, we could go into an office and it would just be a desk we made phone calls from.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > we could go into an office and it would just be a desk we made phone calls from. This has been every place I've worked for the last decade, honestly. Even before WFH was a thing, all meetings took place over videoconferencing and most discussions took place over email and chat even with the people in the cube next to yours. Working from home didn't seem like a major shift to me because no work or communications flows changed with it.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        I suspect a lot of people very invested in the remote/non-remote question are either at a smaller company where everyone is on a floor or two of a building or are on very self-contained co-located teams at a larger company. As you say, my situation for the last decade has been working with people who are in three different office locations + remote, my being on the road a large percentage of the time, others being on the road a lot, etc. I drove into the office sometimes (it's not that bad a commute). But really I could go in and not see anyone I knew on a given day especially as the company grew. I basically stopped going in at all maybe 6 years or so ago.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
    I am sure there are individual situations where it works great, but I am currently hybrid ( 4 remote ;1 in office ) and it is genuinely killing me in terms of messed up body rhythm. Wednesday ( my day in ) throws my entire week into disarray as I try to fight it with extra doses of caffeine. And given that I am now finishing a messy project that necessitated some allnighters, I am now constantly behind on sleep debt. I am frankly fed up to the point that I am looking for a new fully remote position so that I can show it to my manager ( who is not really on board for remote work, but begrudgingly accepts some exceptions ). It is only now that I am restarting my normal body cycle again. I should not have to put up with that bs.
- gtirloni 3y ago
  > How about let those who like face to face interactions go to office and discuss away while those who prefer to wfh from home are allowed to do so? If you have never worked in that way, let me tell you it's the absolute worst situation. I'd rather go back to the office instead of having it work like that. People at the office will have hours of discussions that are not recorded anywhere, might even make decisions without your input and you are always playing catch up. If a company has remote workers, the company ought to be remote first otherwise it's horrible for everybody and resentment is the only thing you reap from it.
  - InCityDreams 3y ago
    > People at the office will have hours of discussions that are not recorded anywhere, might even make decisions without your input and you are always playing catch up. Er, they've been doing that even pre-pandemic, and even when I'm in the same room.
  - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
    >People at the office will have hours of discussions that are not recorded anywhere, might even make decisions without your input and you are always playing catch up. That happened a lot even during the in-office days as well. People with more seniority and influence would whiteboard new ideas and then bring you up to speed on the next daily standup on what they decided. If you were indeed that vital to the engineering effort they would definitely rope you in for the whiteboard session. It's not the end of the world if you find out the decisions the next day. If you have some stellar feedback, you can bring it up then and I'm sure they'll consider it. And honestly, roping in everyone to attend every single impromptu meeting just so you're up to speed on everything would be a huge time sink in terms of interruptions and I assure you you would complain about that too. Seems like you can never please developers: If you don't invite them to attend all the meetings, then they're offended because they feel left out from important decisions. If you invite them to all the meetings then they're angry because you're interrupting their productivity with useless meetings. You can never win. Developers should cut out the Mary Sue, and come down to earth for a bit, we're just cogs in a machine doing work for a paycheck, that's it, and even without you, your company and projects will still go on. You're most likely not the be-all end-all of your company as you imagine.
- paulcole 3y ago
  > Why does her choice gets to win? It doesn’t unless the company makes the decision to let it “win.” Some people prefer working at companies that are 100% in person. Some prefer 100% remote. Some are OK with some type of hybrid arrangement. If a person is working at a company with policies they don’t like, either they work to get the policies changed, they find a job with policies they do like, or they live with the policies they dislike and keep the current job. Just like people who prefer in-person work aren’t going to get their way at all companies, people who prefer remote work aren’t going to get their way at all companies.
  - re-thc 3y ago
    > It doesn’t unless the company makes the decision to let it “win.” If only it was that simple. There's pressure everywhere. Even governments try to push people back to the office with some mantra about e.g. saving the city. If only it was just a choice. At the end of the day most management never come into the office all the time. They do what they like. They have 0 implications so if they have dinner with a government official and was told it's best to ask the staff back then they do it. That's all.
ResearchCode 3y ago
Office workers want to push the office on everyone. Remote workers are not trying to push office workers to work from home.
- jon-wood 3y ago
  We (I squarely place myself in this group) kind of are pushing office workers to adjust how they do things though. If you've got a few remote attendees in a meeting then you're running a remote meeting, for it to be effective for everyone you can't do things like scribbling on whiteboards, and you have to run it from a space where video calling actually works. Post-pandemic I worked with a few project managers who hated this, and would constantly complain about people not coming into the office for meetings because now they had to actually plan things, rather than just finding a random corner and talking things over. I even kind of get it, semi-remote meetings are the worst of both worlds, with the people in a meeting room wanting to draw on a whiteboard, and the people who are remote often struggling with audio from whatever crap microphones are in the room. I suspect, after another few years of having this same discussion every few weeks, things will eventually settle down with some companies choosing to be co-located companies, and others choosing to be fully remote. Similarly to how you might select which company you work for based on what they do, or the personality of the people you interviewed with, people will also take into consideration how they want to work. I very much doubt there'll be many companies which routinely have both remote and co-located employees.
  - re-thc 3y ago
    It’s a thing pre-pandemic for larger teams anyway. You often have someone in a different timezone / office maybe in another department and remote or not, it’s a video call. If the problem as you say is that managers are too lazy to plan then they should do their job instead of making it worse for everyone. Unplanned meetings are the worst because you get forced into decisions no 1 has thought over. The managers assume we’re good because they don’t understand the implications.
    - jeffwask 3y ago
balfirevic 3y ago
> the office is half empty, and she hates it. That sounds decently full actually? Just treat it as an office with a generous square footage per employee.
- bluefirebrand 3y ago
  But not a generous enough number of people to chat to all day to look productive.
jleask 3y ago
I notice this too. Introverts or those that do lots of work that requires focus prefer WFH and extroverts prefer to be in the office.
caskstrength 3y ago
> My partner works in a company with a pretty liberal WFH policy, but prefers to go to the office. But when she does, the office is half empty, and she hates it. Why? Half full office sounds like she should have plenty of other people who prefer to chit-chat near the water-cooler whole day to socialize with...
detaro 3y ago
> My partner works in a company with a pretty liberal WFH policy, but prefers to go to the office. But when she does, the office is half empty, and she hates it. So make the office smaller. Although many people going to office probably prefer to have a bit more space and quiet, given how widespread criticism of open offices etc is.
JohnFen 3y ago
> But when she does, the office is half empty, and she hates it. If they halved the office space so that the office is full, would that make her experience better? I know it sounds like a flip question, but I am asking it earnestly. That could be the compromise position.
- newaccount74 3y ago
  The problem isn't the amount of people, the problem is that 50% of the people she needs to work with aren't there, so she ends up in Zoom meetings anyway and might as well have worked from home.

noisy_boy 3y ago

> But when she does, the office is half empty, and she hates it. And those who prefer to work from home dislike working in a noisy place filled with people like her. Why does her choice gets to win? How about let those who like face to face interactions go to office and discuss away while those who prefer to wfh from home are allowed to do so? It doesn't even have to be a 100% strict thing - the firm can say that every employee must come to office once a week so that face-timers can get their appetite taken care of (even though video calls already cater to that) without overwhelming the wfh-ers. Nobody is denying that there are genuine circumstances when hashing things out face to face can be more efficient and quicker. It just doesn't have to be the default mode.

yulaow 3y ago
I personally only consider full remote position because even policies like "one day in the office every two weeks" would force me to live quite close to the city in which the office is and I absolutely want to avoid that if I can (and the market says I can) To be on the safer side, I try to consider only offers from company that have no physical office at all, so it's quite impossible that in the medium term they call a "return to office" policy... I mean, they could always decide to buy office space out of the blue, but usually in those companies all the upper management is there exactly because they want to WFH for life
hellweaver666 3y ago
I think that "hybrid" is the worst of both worlds. If you attend the office you spend most of your time on video calls to people working from home. Need to run a workshop? You still have to plan it in a hybrid way using Miro and video conferencing for the couple of people who will make an excuse not to come into the office.
- ghaff 3y ago
  And at bigger companies, you're almost certainly dealing with people in multiple locations and even timezones anyway. For many of us, we could go into an office and it would just be a desk we made phone calls from.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > we could go into an office and it would just be a desk we made phone calls from. This has been every place I've worked for the last decade, honestly. Even before WFH was a thing, all meetings took place over videoconferencing and most discussions took place over email and chat even with the people in the cube next to yours. Working from home didn't seem like a major shift to me because no work or communications flows changed with it.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      I suspect a lot of people very invested in the remote/non-remote question are either at a smaller company where everyone is on a floor or two of a building or are on very self-contained co-located teams at a larger company. As you say, my situation for the last decade has been working with people who are in three different office locations + remote, my being on the road a large percentage of the time, others being on the road a lot, etc. I drove into the office sometimes (it's not that bad a commute). But really I could go in and not see anyone I knew on a given day especially as the company grew. I basically stopped going in at all maybe 6 years or so ago.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
  I am sure there are individual situations where it works great, but I am currently hybrid ( 4 remote ;1 in office ) and it is genuinely killing me in terms of messed up body rhythm. Wednesday ( my day in ) throws my entire week into disarray as I try to fight it with extra doses of caffeine. And given that I am now finishing a messy project that necessitated some allnighters, I am now constantly behind on sleep debt. I am frankly fed up to the point that I am looking for a new fully remote position so that I can show it to my manager ( who is not really on board for remote work, but begrudgingly accepts some exceptions ). It is only now that I am restarting my normal body cycle again. I should not have to put up with that bs.
gtirloni 3y ago
> How about let those who like face to face interactions go to office and discuss away while those who prefer to wfh from home are allowed to do so? If you have never worked in that way, let me tell you it's the absolute worst situation. I'd rather go back to the office instead of having it work like that. People at the office will have hours of discussions that are not recorded anywhere, might even make decisions without your input and you are always playing catch up. If a company has remote workers, the company ought to be remote first otherwise it's horrible for everybody and resentment is the only thing you reap from it.
- InCityDreams 3y ago
  > People at the office will have hours of discussions that are not recorded anywhere, might even make decisions without your input and you are always playing catch up. Er, they've been doing that even pre-pandemic, and even when I'm in the same room.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  >People at the office will have hours of discussions that are not recorded anywhere, might even make decisions without your input and you are always playing catch up. That happened a lot even during the in-office days as well. People with more seniority and influence would whiteboard new ideas and then bring you up to speed on the next daily standup on what they decided. If you were indeed that vital to the engineering effort they would definitely rope you in for the whiteboard session. It's not the end of the world if you find out the decisions the next day. If you have some stellar feedback, you can bring it up then and I'm sure they'll consider it. And honestly, roping in everyone to attend every single impromptu meeting just so you're up to speed on everything would be a huge time sink in terms of interruptions and I assure you you would complain about that too. Seems like you can never please developers: If you don't invite them to attend all the meetings, then they're offended because they feel left out from important decisions. If you invite them to all the meetings then they're angry because you're interrupting their productivity with useless meetings. You can never win. Developers should cut out the Mary Sue, and come down to earth for a bit, we're just cogs in a machine doing work for a paycheck, that's it, and even without you, your company and projects will still go on. You're most likely not the be-all end-all of your company as you imagine.
paulcole 3y ago
> Why does her choice gets to win? It doesn’t unless the company makes the decision to let it “win.” Some people prefer working at companies that are 100% in person. Some prefer 100% remote. Some are OK with some type of hybrid arrangement. If a person is working at a company with policies they don’t like, either they work to get the policies changed, they find a job with policies they do like, or they live with the policies they dislike and keep the current job. Just like people who prefer in-person work aren’t going to get their way at all companies, people who prefer remote work aren’t going to get their way at all companies.
- re-thc 3y ago
  > It doesn’t unless the company makes the decision to let it “win.” If only it was that simple. There's pressure everywhere. Even governments try to push people back to the office with some mantra about e.g. saving the city. If only it was just a choice. At the end of the day most management never come into the office all the time. They do what they like. They have 0 implications so if they have dinner with a government official and was told it's best to ask the staff back then they do it. That's all.

ResearchCode 3y ago

Office workers want to push the office on everyone. Remote workers are not trying to push office workers to work from home.

jon-wood 3y ago
We (I squarely place myself in this group) kind of are pushing office workers to adjust how they do things though. If you've got a few remote attendees in a meeting then you're running a remote meeting, for it to be effective for everyone you can't do things like scribbling on whiteboards, and you have to run it from a space where video calling actually works. Post-pandemic I worked with a few project managers who hated this, and would constantly complain about people not coming into the office for meetings because now they had to actually plan things, rather than just finding a random corner and talking things over. I even kind of get it, semi-remote meetings are the worst of both worlds, with the people in a meeting room wanting to draw on a whiteboard, and the people who are remote often struggling with audio from whatever crap microphones are in the room. I suspect, after another few years of having this same discussion every few weeks, things will eventually settle down with some companies choosing to be co-located companies, and others choosing to be fully remote. Similarly to how you might select which company you work for based on what they do, or the personality of the people you interviewed with, people will also take into consideration how they want to work. I very much doubt there'll be many companies which routinely have both remote and co-located employees.
- re-thc 3y ago
  It’s a thing pre-pandemic for larger teams anyway. You often have someone in a different timezone / office maybe in another department and remote or not, it’s a video call. If the problem as you say is that managers are too lazy to plan then they should do their job instead of making it worse for everyone. Unplanned meetings are the worst because you get forced into decisions no 1 has thought over. The managers assume we’re good because they don’t understand the implications.
  - jeffwask 3y ago

balfirevic 3y ago

> the office is half empty, and she hates it. That sounds decently full actually? Just treat it as an office with a generous square footage per employee.

bluefirebrand 3y ago
But not a generous enough number of people to chat to all day to look productive.

jleask 3y ago

I notice this too. Introverts or those that do lots of work that requires focus prefer WFH and extroverts prefer to be in the office.

caskstrength 3y ago

> My partner works in a company with a pretty liberal WFH policy, but prefers to go to the office. But when she does, the office is half empty, and she hates it. Why? Half full office sounds like she should have plenty of other people who prefer to chit-chat near the water-cooler whole day to socialize with...

detaro 3y ago

> My partner works in a company with a pretty liberal WFH policy, but prefers to go to the office. But when she does, the office is half empty, and she hates it. So make the office smaller. Although many people going to office probably prefer to have a bit more space and quiet, given how widespread criticism of open offices etc is.

JohnFen 3y ago

> But when she does, the office is half empty, and she hates it. If they halved the office space so that the office is full, would that make her experience better? I know it sounds like a flip question, but I am asking it earnestly. That could be the compromise position.

newaccount74 3y ago
The problem isn't the amount of people, the problem is that 50% of the people she needs to work with aren't there, so she ends up in Zoom meetings anyway and might as well have worked from home.