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The piece of the WFH debate that I think is most interesting is the “I want X and for me to have X you all must do X too” mindset. It reminds me of my four yea

The piece of the WFH debate that I think is most interesting is the “I want X and for me to have X you all must do X too” mindset. It reminds me of my four year old, who insists his brother come play with him. People who want to WFH? Great! People who want to work in the office? Great! People who want to work in the office, but only if everyone else is there to fulfil their desired workday experience? That’s a problem. And I don’t think it’s symmetrical: WFH people don’t have a reason to insist that their colleagues WFH. There’s a very “my freedoms trump your freedoms” mindset to this.

sim7c00 3y ago
fully agree here. i often go to the office, then no one is there and i am sad. i used to be in that problem bucket. but its easy to solve. make good connections with colleagues and invite them for working days. ends up that sometimes more ppl are at the office, and alternatively i found people relatively close by are also happy to have me over at their house for a workday. super nice =). gotta think in solutions rather then problems!
- delecti 3y ago
  That solution works pretty well, but also has limitations. I much prefer WFH, but am happy to head to the office every once in a while (current rate is about quarterly). But COVID made it reasonable to hire fully-remote workers, and now that the office is open (and has been for a while), our coworkers thousands of miles away can't really pop in on short notice.
  - sim7c00 3y ago
    it does have it limitsfor sure. but those limits are mainly relatable to my own shortcomings as a person (in my experience). i am alone usually, so i am happy to be around ppl at work. not everyone suffers this. i work on it, and as i get better, those limits become less of a hurdle :). i just think that if i have an issue, i cant demand things of others to come towards that. however a lot of people are actually really kind, and do come towards others in their struggles. you can always ask but not expect or demand.
DylanDmitri 3y ago
I think workers will self select into WFH and office companies. Then everyone gets the experience they want. Just growing pains now.
- jwestbury 3y ago
  I think a lot of this has already happened; the problem is that some companies don't seem to realise it's happened, and are changing their minds after their employees have made a decision.
stephc_int13 3y ago
The problem is that mixed office/remote is the worst of both worlds. I think that companies have to choose a model, then employees will choose companies based on this criteria.
- j45 3y ago
  How we work and get more effective at working is more of an issue than something being inherently wrong with working remote, hybrid, or in person. I’ve worked remote for a very long time including cycles in and out of it. Some remote work principles come and go and others remain mandatory but are often ignored. Primarily, people are not as good communicators as they imagine themselves to be and don’t dedicate a great deal of effort to improving constantly. This is in person, online and remote. Underdeveloped communication skills play themselves out through attempting to over communicate for hybrid work but the core competency is not where it needs to be. One test is if someone can’t explain a slide deck using only a voice call, do they know the material at all? Doing hybrid/distributed work well requires a clean slate in terms of space design both at office and home, and technology that elevates communication to the point where it’s invisible. Since that’s rare, working with what’s in place at a company and will take work if both parties to be willing to do it. Employees also have to realize a pandemic created many of the nascent remote/hybrid practices and there is a lot of room for improvement. Since most places will never invest or obsess enough over both deputizing and empowering their folks to have an unstoppable environment both at home and work, most are doomed to fail at it. Generally, startups work at a quicker pace from the very start at one table, until enough is in place to start leaving the building and bring back insights. Some ideas will not need this as a must but also not be their full potential. Startups are more than features and software development ceremony. In many cases it’s establishing a new way tech will work for and care for users. Edit: grammar and clarity.
- mjevans 3y ago
  'remote work' requires expressly documenting and writing things out. This is what companies have _said_ they wanted since forever. (Probably to in theory make employees more fungible.) Done well, this promotes clarity and consistency. The water cooler chat model, that tends to lead to other outcomes. Maybe the core goal does see some innovation, but documenting that becomes much harder. There are also detractions to the everyone together models. Anyone with kids _will_ bring the latest mutations of colds into work. They'll vector out of daycare and schools through the parents and infect everyone in the office. Frequent Fliers might also have a similar effect based on their sheer exposure. Allowing WFH isolates these fault domains and minimizes the spread.
isykt 3y ago
The piece of the WFH debate that I think is the most interesting is the “I work for someone else but think I get to dictate where and how that happens, despite the mountains of labor laws that say the exact opposite” mindset. Negotiate what you want from your employer, move on to a different employer, or hang a shingle. Leave the entitlement out of it. This has nothing at all to do with “freedom.” Business is business. If you sell your labor to someone who chooses to buy it, you’re in business.
- screye 3y ago
  Every workplace demand could be cast into this mold. A conversation ender like this is not productive. Your manager is just as much an employee and so are the leadership. The owners are often a faceless populace or a small team of owners. That's it. The negotiation is between the preferences of 1 set of employees and another set of employees. Every workplace tries to regress to the corporate mean. The employees expressing their opinions and injecting friction is how workplaces gain their identity. In at-will-employment cultures, the owner does what is best for the company. It isn't entitlement, it is an expression of preferences and future actions. The owner then chooses what's best for him. The recent 'return to office' push has IMO, more to do with covert layoffs and ageism than anything. The kind of people who do not want to move have social ties and are demonstrating a strong preference towards a balance between personal life and work life. Most bosses are clueless, so the only way they can evaluate employees is by how long they spend at the work place. In their impression, they can use this excuse to fire all the employees who 'would log out at 5' or 'have a family', while replacing them with *equally* talented young employees. Ofc, I think this is a fallacy, because productivity & talent are complicated. Hopefully it leads to some people continuing to stay in their new chosen town, and we see new minor tech hubs develop.
- shostack 3y ago
  The challenge with this mindset is it leads to violent worker uprising when employers don't give enough compared to what they take. History is littered with examples of bloody workers movements. Perhaps companies should seek to find opportunity in the shift to a better balance. For starters, commercial real estate is a major liability on their books. How much of what we are seeing now is because they can't easily get that off their books so need to justify it?
nharada 3y ago
> WFH people don’t have a reason to insist that their colleagues WFH One potential reason is that some companies don't treat WFH employees as first class citizens, and due to various reasons in-person employees get ahead, get better projects, are promoted more, etc. I think I agree with the child comment saying companies probably have to pick one.
- throwawaysleep 3y ago
  I will happily give up all career progression for remote work. I am fine being in the bucket of impossible to promote.
  - undersuit 3y ago
    But you're not impossible to promote... maybe you also don't think that but also don't cast yourself as that if you're remote. The boss is choosing to find you impossible to promote.
    - hunter-gatherer 3y ago
      I get what he is saying though. Now that I work remote I am mich more content not making more money via promotions. There are costs to being fully remote, and if one of them is that my career progression is heavily stunted or even halted, I'm ok with that now, because I don't spend 1.5 hours in a car 5 days a week. Tradeoffs.
    - throwawaysleep 3y ago
      I want to cast myself as that. With remote, I don't care if you invest in me. I don't care if I get along with co-workers. I desire no advancement. I am willing to work on the boring dreck of projects. Give me remote and you can screw up everything else. I am happy being a lifeless drone while remote.
      - CBarkleyU 3y ago
        I might be the luckiest person in the world, but my first real job (full time), was during the pandemic and straight WFH (I have worked on premise for years before that. Part time, as a student). I feel such a good connection to my colleagues, some of whom I have never met in real life. Honestly thinking of inviting a few of them to my wedding. We always tattle before and after meetings, we have our own injokes, I've been welcomed and cared for really well as a new employee by them. Work is going really well, and even in stressful times I always feels like my colleagues have my back and I have theirs. And every once in a while when we do meet up, its like a family reunion. Jeez, now that I'm thinking about, I really do have struck gold. Maybe I should stick around a little longer before I make the jump to a (even) better paying job...
paulddraper 3y ago
> my freedoms trump your freedoms Weird language. The workplace is not about freedoms, it's about an effective team. Are in-office teams more effective? WFH teams more effective? The debate will rage on. For decades, the most successful companies in the world found value in geographic focus, despite high cost of living, questionable infrastructure, stagnant development, etc. Were they right? Are they right? IDK. Kaban? Scrum? Waterfall? Make your argument. Just don't reduce a good faith argument about team practice to toddlers. --- EDIT: FWIW, my 2c as a manager for many years, I notice some ICs focus narrowly on their individual "productivity" without considering the sum of the parts. (And I'm sure the reverse is true as well.)
jstx1 3y ago
You're glossing over the fact that your choice of WFH or in-office affects your coworkers too. WFH when you're the only one doing it and everyone has in-person communication all the time is much more difficult. Or if most of your team is remote, even if you want to go to the office, your communication will still have to be in chat and video calls, not in person, and you essentially end up being remote but from a different location. So it’s more complex than you’re making it out to be - you can’t just tell people to do whatever they want; you need to align with the rest of your team/company.
- foogazi 3y ago
  > Or if most of your team is remote, even if you want to go to the office, your comminication will still have to be in chat and video calls For anyone working at a company with either multiple locations, dealing with customers, etc your communication is going to be chat, email, video calls anyway Fail to see how you avoid that And you still fail at gp’s points: RTO folks wanting WFH to go back to the office
  - anotheritworker 3y ago
    > Fail to see how you avoid that You don't. But you interact with your own team 1-2 orders of magnitudes more than the rest of the company. So as long as your team is all in the office, you get a nice boost to communication and you avoid having to do all team activities on zoom.
- sowbug 3y ago
  I agree. It seems like a legitimate collective-action problem. Team network effects do matter, and the medium of the network does matter.
notacoward 3y ago
> WFH people don’t have a reason to insist that their colleagues WFH To insist? No. However, I think there's a reason to prefer that their colleagues WFH. Being the only WFH in a group that's otherwise all in the office together suuuuuuuucks, or at least it did in the several pre-pandemic years that I lived it. What I remember is constantly being informed of decisions that "we" had reached while I wasn't present, of every meeting being full of cross-chatter and lunch-eating so I couldn't hear, of not being able to see (let alone approach) the whiteboard, of being interrupted or cut off more than anyone else because of the latency, and so on. Most of this abated somewhat when the pandemic came along and everyone was remote, though the "hallway conversations" remained exclusive even when they were online. That might have been fixable with enough support from managers and other allies, but only if everyone had remained remote. "All remote" and "only remote" are very different experiences. > There’s a very “my freedoms trump your freedoms” mindset to this. Your pun is noted, and I think apropos because this does show up in politics too. The attitude that "freedom" exists only within a certain social structure with oneself at its apex, and that others' (well justified) rejection of that structure is an abridgement of one's own freedom, is unfortunately rather common.
- drewcoo 3y ago
  I don't think that was a political "pun." https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trump https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trump
  - notacoward 3y ago
    You are aware that a pun involves multiple meanings, right? Maybe it was intentional and maybe it wasn't, but the word "trump" certainly lends itself to such a pun and obviously that would have been one of the meanings.
gxs 3y ago
Paul Graham himself posts a bunch of crap himself on Twitter around why wfh is bad. I have 2 close friends that are co-founders/CEOs of big companies. One, funny enough, is a YC company as well. The YC is 100% remote only, the other is big on RTO and my friend has posted multiple times his strong feelings for RTO on placed like LinkedIn. Additionally, I work a decent size start up as well. A company where a couple of years ago they might have been bragging about record revenue growth during the pandemic but is now putting strict RTO policies in place. Their communication/announcements about this policy are almost comical. The messages are long and they never really articulate good reasons. They are of the flavor “research shows”, and then when people ask to see that research no one responds. I’ve genuinely tried hard to understand the RTO argument in more depth beyond the typical “relationships are harder to build remotely” or “people slack off”. I’ve asked my friend about it repeatedly, along with some of the execs where I work, on top of the numerous tweets and LinkedIn posts. I’ve tried but I’ve never really found anything substantial, I’ve never found something where I could say, “you know, I disagree with you and dislike, but you have a point”. Personally, the explanation that makes the most sense to me after all these discussions, is that it’s one of those subconscious biases that by definition they aren’t aware of. It really feels to me like employers just simply begrudge workers getting any sort of win, getting any modicum of control over how they work and more importantly where they work. That’s before going into the added leverage wfh might give people when looking for new jobs. Very much to your point - the people who feel “empty” when not in the office should figure out how to solve that problem for themselves vs trying to undo one of the very few decent things that came out of the pandemic.
- dboreham 3y ago
  The beatings will continue until morale improves line of thinking.
- JamesLeonis 3y ago
  > The messages are long and they never really articulate good reasons. They are of the flavor “research shows”, and then when people ask to see that research no one responds. Waiting for the "research" [0] is the Silicon Valley rendition of Waiting for Godot. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36258148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36258148
88913527 3y ago
If some people want to work places where everyone works in-office, it seems reasonable to permit that as option. If the marketplace has a gradient of options, workers can vote with their feet. We don't have the ability to say "everyone should do what I want" but there can be workplace-wide policy. I empathize for people who feel it's pointless to RTO when half their colleagues are remote anyways. It diminishes the in-office experience, and I can respect that other people may desire a workplace where all are present in-person, even if I don't want that, but I can self-select out of an organization with that policy.
- Zandikar 3y ago
  > If the marketplace has a gradient of options, Unfortunately, we're starting from a default position where there really aren't, not in terms of the scope of supply and demand. Instead, the base position is in-office work, and the RTO's and Management would all argue they're the ones doing what you're suggesting here, and it's the WFH people being unreasonable, afterall, the workplace policy explicitly says to come into the office, at exact times, with exact places for you to go and do your work, and that's a policy that's been the default since the modern incarnation of "employment" and office work came to be. So you can't just quit and go work somewhere else that matches your "culture", because the policies in place at most of these companies aren't crafted to fit, synergize or otherwise work with the companies culture. Their largely born out of legal liabilities and ongoing service contracts and legal agreements and leases and stuff that would be expensive to break. Doesn't mean it can't be done, but they take one look at all that and start to panic as that is such a huge fundamental shift in organization, because the worst shift of all for going WFH for existing offices is that fear that middle management has that their employees can't be trusted, because they haven't trusted them or treated them with respect or really treated them as anything other than a disposable cog in the machine. Sure, plenty of places do care, and are transitioning/embracing WFH great. But we're talking about corporate America here and the trend setters and large employers that tend to set the pace and policy of the rest of the corporate world. There is no empathy when the bottom line is threatened for many of these institutions, and while they may even agree the end result would be superior to the previous way, they all too often view the cost of transition too high to be worth it, or at least, too high to be able to sell it too investors. I am glad the discussion is happening though, that alone is such huge progress that me in 2019 wouldn't have expected in the next few years.
MayeulC 3y ago
> And I don’t think it’s symmetrical: WFH people don’t have a reason to insist that their colleagues WFH. Kind of, though. If a single person wants to attend a meeting remotely, that forces everyone to talk to them remotely, which may be seen as the worst of both worlds by people at the office: commute to the office, and get bad quality (often worse than everyone remote) remote meetings.
renewiltord 3y ago
> People who want to work in the office, but only if everyone else is there to fulfil their desired workday experience? That’s a problem. Well, not really that much of a problem. We're an in-office company and it's working quite well. We just select for people who want to work like that. It's been pretty good.
- smeej 3y ago
  This is a good point. The part of the WFH/RTO debate that seems to get overlooked is that people who were hired to WFH are the ones who are now being cajoled into working from offices. It's the changing of the conditions with the "take it or leave it" stance toward the workers that's landing like a lead balloon. If an office has only ever hired people to work in the office, a the people who worked for them remotely during the pandemic would be people who chose a job where they would be in an office. It's reasonable to expect they would prefer that environment and not mind returning (even if a few were converted to WFH preference by the experience). But any new hires chose WFH roles on purpose, and the conditions are being changed on them. I worked for a company in 2017-8 where my whole team was remote, but then they decided to open offices and hire people to do the same work on-location. They flew me out to train them, and it was a disaster. My manager said, "I don't know what your problem is. All these other people work fine in an office." I told her, "All these other people applied for an office job. They self-selected based on this requirement. I never, EVER would have. I do not work well in an office. I know this about myself, thus did not apply for an office job. Your temporary demand that I visit an office for two weeks is going exactly as I expected it would. I hate it, and it hates me."
  - anotheritworker 3y ago
    > The part of the WFH/RTO debate that seems to get overlooked is that people who were hired to WFH are the ones who are now being cajoled into working from offices. Let's not forget that the opposite is also true. Most of us were hired to work in the office (before COVID), but after COVID most (?) companies kept going in various forms of hybrid work. My team never went back to the office. I didn't sign up to work from an empty office and take every meeting on zoom, but that's what I got. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad remote work is more popular now because it allowed me to move close to family. But had I decided to stay in the city I lived for the last 6 years, I would have to leave a company I love and look for a new job because I absolutely hate remote work.
ren_engineer 3y ago
hybrid work is never going to work unless VR gets really good. If you aren't remote first as a company in terms of communication policy the remote people are going to get left out of the loop a lot compared to office workers. I don't think there is a good middle ground here, you have to go all in on remote or office The question is if any of the supposed benefits of office work exist, there's really no data I've seen . Remote has plenty of easily measurable benefits like no office costs, no commute, no office distractions, easier to recruit, salary arbitrage geographically, etc.
onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
I love that the FAANG companies claim to be "data-driven" and AFAIK not a single one of them has shared any data to prove it makes sense to RTO (because it doesn't, they're trying to get people to quit, not be more productive).
- nightpool 3y ago
  Incorrect: Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely. This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week. This requires further study, but our hypothesis is that it is still easier to build trust in person and that those relationships help us work more effectively. You can say whatever you want about the Meta analysis, but you can't say that they didn't do one and that they haven't presented the data.
throwaway22032 3y ago
I feel that perhaps you prefer, or simply didn't notice, the changes. Maybe you've always worked for huge companies. Remote work requires that Zoom calls and chat are used for almost everything, even if only 10% of people are not present. Prior to coronavirus this was not how any of the companies that I dealt with worked (small companies with <5 offices). Some meetings were remote, but most were in the break room with real faces. As a result, I left software development during the pandemic to pursue a life with more social interaction. The cerebral element was balanced out for me before, then it wasn't.
7speter 3y ago
Theres this assumption from the wfh crowd that everyone wants to wfh (and if you don’t want to youre some sort of scab) when that isn’t the case, for starters.
anotheritworker 3y ago
What a naive take. Simplifying the WFH discussion to be just about the physical location of people doesn't make sense. WFH fundamentally changes how teams and companies have to work. It's reasonable for people to be opinionated about how they like to work. Comparing someone to a 4yo because they might not like how remote teams work is obtuse at best and offensive at worst. (I say this as a 100% remote worker who's very glad of having had the opportunity to move close to family without losing my job) > And I don’t think it’s symmetrical: WFH people don’t have a reason to insist that their colleagues WFH. As if. WFH people might not care about the physical location of their coworkers, but they certainly care about what their teammates can or cannot do. Every team process needs to be tailored to remote workers. If you join an in person team and then request to WFH you are basically expecting everyone to adapt to your way. "But hey don't worry, you can still sit the zoom meeting from the office if you want". How generous. > There’s a very “my freedoms trump your freedoms” mindset to this. Pot, meet kettle.
croutonwagon 3y ago
There are some things that make this less black and white though. 1. If most work in office and one is constant WFH, they will almost always feel more distant and excluded. 2. Some folks want to work from home, but when they do, their performance and quality will tank, like immediately. But they arent necessarily self aware enough to see its not working. I think a place like this (Hacker News) is chock full of self-motivated higher achievers that are generally well suited for independant work from home and can overcome some of the negatives. But the reality is, there are LOADS of folks, especially in tech that arent that way, like at all.
- drewcoo 3y ago
  If #2 (performance problem) is real, how is it measured? If it can be measured, it can be addressed. Presumably that's what would happen in-office. If it can't be measured, maybe it's not real.
  - croutonwagon 3y ago
    Well yes of course. Its measured in quality of work, deadlines missed, projects stalled Week over Week, projects/upgrades that have basic steps missed that cause break/fix engagements etc. etc. And on the whole those things are higher with many of my remote staff than on-prem. Its all tracked in Jira. Also some jobs have ebs and flows of work and not everything is measured in binary pass/fail ways. And there are times when you need someone to engage even when it’s not traditionally busy. I have had my remote employees tell me things when a "fire"/break-fix event starts and we call to engage during business hours often when that employee has been online all day to that point but now needs to be in a position to suddenly collaborate or share their screen. "Power just went out" "I am in the car" "Internet is out" (we pay for their internet AND a mifi) "My kids is sick" Never gotten any of that from someone in office, worst case I have to grab them from the breakroom or they are clear cut out with a sick kid or helping their wife. Or they walk up unprompted and say they have to leave to deal with wife or kids. Those examples where a small sample and werent that, they werent unprompted my kid is sick i need to take the day they were said once something was assigned or they are asked to engage. Peers have had similar where their direct reports are awol and they start getting texts from constituents saying “have you seen or heard from so and so, it’s been hours” Again, I have some that are NEVER a problem and even more productive in the office. I totally support that. But since COVID I would say thats only been about 25% of my direct reports. It’s certainly not the majority. Some have, unfortunately, been let go as a result. Unfortunately Executive leadership is seeing this in the non-tech divisions too and are now mandating less remote work. My point of the original comment is to point out that the folks here may have a bit of bias as it tends to have very highly motivated folks that may even be more productive when given a wide berth. I do that too with the folks that can manage it. But on the whole those are not the majority and arguably even exceptions to the rule and its those that are abusing this that are causing it to become policies to return to the office. One of my takeaways from COVID is that many adults dont have the self-discipline or self-motivation to be fully remote 100% or even 40%. Again not everyone but many/most.
rybosworld 3y ago
I've been looking for a way to summarize this idea myself and you've hit the nail on the head.
Ferret7446 3y ago
Social compromise is an ancient concept. Some things require social contribution to work, even from individuals who don't want to contribute. This has always been a problem (e.g. taxes "I don't want/need the government to pay for roads/education/infrastructure so why should I pay", "why should I pay for healthcare for people who live unhealthily", etc.)
Gigachad 3y ago
The office is only useful if the other people you work with are there, otherwise it's just remote work from another location.
RestlessMind 3y ago
> And I don’t think it’s symmetrical: WFH people don’t have a reason to insist that their colleagues WFH. Of course it is symmetrical. While designing a complex system, I prefer talking to colleagues in person over a whiteboard. Even if 3 of us are in the same room and 2 remote, my company forces everyone to log in and chat via Zoom. Separately from our individual laptops. We are not allowed to dial in from a conference room where we can use a whiteboard.
- stormking 3y ago
  Your companies' rules are dumb, that's it.
valval 3y ago
What’s the solution to the problem you paint? I’m that person. I think an office is a place where people come do their work in the same way a construction site is. Another child offered the point of view that hybrid models are the worst of both worlds, which I agree with. Is the solution to go either or, and let workers pick companies based on the model they uphold? To me that seems like the way to go.

sim7c00 3y ago

fully agree here. i often go to the office, then no one is there and i am sad. i used to be in that problem bucket. but its easy to solve. make good connections with colleagues and invite them for working days. ends up that sometimes more ppl are at the office, and alternatively i found people relatively close by are also happy to have me over at their house for a workday. super nice =). gotta think in solutions rather then problems!

delecti 3y ago
That solution works pretty well, but also has limitations. I much prefer WFH, but am happy to head to the office every once in a while (current rate is about quarterly). But COVID made it reasonable to hire fully-remote workers, and now that the office is open (and has been for a while), our coworkers thousands of miles away can't really pop in on short notice.
- sim7c00 3y ago
  it does have it limitsfor sure. but those limits are mainly relatable to my own shortcomings as a person (in my experience). i am alone usually, so i am happy to be around ppl at work. not everyone suffers this. i work on it, and as i get better, those limits become less of a hurdle :). i just think that if i have an issue, i cant demand things of others to come towards that. however a lot of people are actually really kind, and do come towards others in their struggles. you can always ask but not expect or demand.

DylanDmitri 3y ago

I think workers will self select into WFH and office companies. Then everyone gets the experience they want. Just growing pains now.

jwestbury 3y ago
I think a lot of this has already happened; the problem is that some companies don't seem to realise it's happened, and are changing their minds after their employees have made a decision.

stephc_int13 3y ago

The problem is that mixed office/remote is the worst of both worlds. I think that companies have to choose a model, then employees will choose companies based on this criteria.

j45 3y ago
How we work and get more effective at working is more of an issue than something being inherently wrong with working remote, hybrid, or in person. I’ve worked remote for a very long time including cycles in and out of it. Some remote work principles come and go and others remain mandatory but are often ignored. Primarily, people are not as good communicators as they imagine themselves to be and don’t dedicate a great deal of effort to improving constantly. This is in person, online and remote. Underdeveloped communication skills play themselves out through attempting to over communicate for hybrid work but the core competency is not where it needs to be. One test is if someone can’t explain a slide deck using only a voice call, do they know the material at all? Doing hybrid/distributed work well requires a clean slate in terms of space design both at office and home, and technology that elevates communication to the point where it’s invisible. Since that’s rare, working with what’s in place at a company and will take work if both parties to be willing to do it. Employees also have to realize a pandemic created many of the nascent remote/hybrid practices and there is a lot of room for improvement. Since most places will never invest or obsess enough over both deputizing and empowering their folks to have an unstoppable environment both at home and work, most are doomed to fail at it. Generally, startups work at a quicker pace from the very start at one table, until enough is in place to start leaving the building and bring back insights. Some ideas will not need this as a must but also not be their full potential. Startups are more than features and software development ceremony. In many cases it’s establishing a new way tech will work for and care for users. Edit: grammar and clarity.
mjevans 3y ago
'remote work' requires expressly documenting and writing things out. This is what companies have _said_ they wanted since forever. (Probably to in theory make employees more fungible.) Done well, this promotes clarity and consistency. The water cooler chat model, that tends to lead to other outcomes. Maybe the core goal does see some innovation, but documenting that becomes much harder. There are also detractions to the everyone together models. Anyone with kids _will_ bring the latest mutations of colds into work. They'll vector out of daycare and schools through the parents and infect everyone in the office. Frequent Fliers might also have a similar effect based on their sheer exposure. Allowing WFH isolates these fault domains and minimizes the spread.

isykt 3y ago

The piece of the WFH debate that I think is the most interesting is the “I work for someone else but think I get to dictate where and how that happens, despite the mountains of labor laws that say the exact opposite” mindset. Negotiate what you want from your employer, move on to a different employer, or hang a shingle. Leave the entitlement out of it. This has nothing at all to do with “freedom.” Business is business. If you sell your labor to someone who chooses to buy it, you’re in business.

screye 3y ago
Every workplace demand could be cast into this mold. A conversation ender like this is not productive. Your manager is just as much an employee and so are the leadership. The owners are often a faceless populace or a small team of owners. That's it. The negotiation is between the preferences of 1 set of employees and another set of employees. Every workplace tries to regress to the corporate mean. The employees expressing their opinions and injecting friction is how workplaces gain their identity. In at-will-employment cultures, the owner does what is best for the company. It isn't entitlement, it is an expression of preferences and future actions. The owner then chooses what's best for him. The recent 'return to office' push has IMO, more to do with covert layoffs and ageism than anything. The kind of people who do not want to move have social ties and are demonstrating a strong preference towards a balance between personal life and work life. Most bosses are clueless, so the only way they can evaluate employees is by how long they spend at the work place. In their impression, they can use this excuse to fire all the employees who 'would log out at 5' or 'have a family', while replacing them with *equally* talented young employees. Ofc, I think this is a fallacy, because productivity & talent are complicated. Hopefully it leads to some people continuing to stay in their new chosen town, and we see new minor tech hubs develop.
shostack 3y ago
The challenge with this mindset is it leads to violent worker uprising when employers don't give enough compared to what they take. History is littered with examples of bloody workers movements. Perhaps companies should seek to find opportunity in the shift to a better balance. For starters, commercial real estate is a major liability on their books. How much of what we are seeing now is because they can't easily get that off their books so need to justify it?

nharada 3y ago

> WFH people don’t have a reason to insist that their colleagues WFH One potential reason is that some companies don't treat WFH employees as first class citizens, and due to various reasons in-person employees get ahead, get better projects, are promoted more, etc. I think I agree with the child comment saying companies probably have to pick one.

throwawaysleep 3y ago
I will happily give up all career progression for remote work. I am fine being in the bucket of impossible to promote.
- undersuit 3y ago
  But you're not impossible to promote... maybe you also don't think that but also don't cast yourself as that if you're remote. The boss is choosing to find you impossible to promote.
  - hunter-gatherer 3y ago
    I get what he is saying though. Now that I work remote I am mich more content not making more money via promotions. There are costs to being fully remote, and if one of them is that my career progression is heavily stunted or even halted, I'm ok with that now, because I don't spend 1.5 hours in a car 5 days a week. Tradeoffs.
  - throwawaysleep 3y ago
    I want to cast myself as that. With remote, I don't care if you invest in me. I don't care if I get along with co-workers. I desire no advancement. I am willing to work on the boring dreck of projects. Give me remote and you can screw up everything else. I am happy being a lifeless drone while remote.
    - CBarkleyU 3y ago
      I might be the luckiest person in the world, but my first real job (full time), was during the pandemic and straight WFH (I have worked on premise for years before that. Part time, as a student). I feel such a good connection to my colleagues, some of whom I have never met in real life. Honestly thinking of inviting a few of them to my wedding. We always tattle before and after meetings, we have our own injokes, I've been welcomed and cared for really well as a new employee by them. Work is going really well, and even in stressful times I always feels like my colleagues have my back and I have theirs. And every once in a while when we do meet up, its like a family reunion. Jeez, now that I'm thinking about, I really do have struck gold. Maybe I should stick around a little longer before I make the jump to a (even) better paying job...

paulddraper 3y ago

> my freedoms trump your freedoms Weird language. The workplace is not about freedoms, it's about an effective team. Are in-office teams more effective? WFH teams more effective? The debate will rage on. For decades, the most successful companies in the world found value in geographic focus, despite high cost of living, questionable infrastructure, stagnant development, etc. Were they right? Are they right? IDK. Kaban? Scrum? Waterfall? Make your argument. Just don't reduce a good faith argument about team practice to toddlers. --- EDIT: FWIW, my 2c as a manager for many years, I notice some ICs focus narrowly on their individual "productivity" without considering the sum of the parts. (And I'm sure the reverse is true as well.)

jstx1 3y ago

You're glossing over the fact that your choice of WFH or in-office affects your coworkers too. WFH when you're the only one doing it and everyone has in-person communication all the time is much more difficult. Or if most of your team is remote, even if you want to go to the office, your communication will still have to be in chat and video calls, not in person, and you essentially end up being remote but from a different location. So it’s more complex than you’re making it out to be - you can’t just tell people to do whatever they want; you need to align with the rest of your team/company.

foogazi 3y ago
> Or if most of your team is remote, even if you want to go to the office, your comminication will still have to be in chat and video calls For anyone working at a company with either multiple locations, dealing with customers, etc your communication is going to be chat, email, video calls anyway Fail to see how you avoid that And you still fail at gp’s points: RTO folks wanting WFH to go back to the office
- anotheritworker 3y ago
  > Fail to see how you avoid that You don't. But you interact with your own team 1-2 orders of magnitudes more than the rest of the company. So as long as your team is all in the office, you get a nice boost to communication and you avoid having to do all team activities on zoom.
sowbug 3y ago
I agree. It seems like a legitimate collective-action problem. Team network effects do matter, and the medium of the network does matter.

notacoward 3y ago

> WFH people don’t have a reason to insist that their colleagues WFH To insist? No. However, I think there's a reason to prefer that their colleagues WFH. Being the only WFH in a group that's otherwise all in the office together suuuuuuuucks, or at least it did in the several pre-pandemic years that I lived it. What I remember is constantly being informed of decisions that "we" had reached while I wasn't present, of every meeting being full of cross-chatter and lunch-eating so I couldn't hear, of not being able to see (let alone approach) the whiteboard, of being interrupted or cut off more than anyone else because of the latency, and so on. Most of this abated somewhat when the pandemic came along and everyone was remote, though the "hallway conversations" remained exclusive even when they were online. That might have been fixable with enough support from managers and other allies, but only if everyone had remained remote. "All remote" and "only remote" are very different experiences. > There’s a very “my freedoms trump your freedoms” mindset to this. Your pun is noted, and I think apropos because this does show up in politics too. The attitude that "freedom" exists only within a certain social structure with oneself at its apex, and that others' (well justified) rejection of that structure is an abridgement of one's own freedom, is unfortunately rather common.

drewcoo 3y ago
I don't think that was a political "pun." https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trump https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trump
- notacoward 3y ago
  You are aware that a pun involves multiple meanings, right? Maybe it was intentional and maybe it wasn't, but the word "trump" certainly lends itself to such a pun and obviously that would have been one of the meanings.

gxs 3y ago

Paul Graham himself posts a bunch of crap himself on Twitter around why wfh is bad. I have 2 close friends that are co-founders/CEOs of big companies. One, funny enough, is a YC company as well. The YC is 100% remote only, the other is big on RTO and my friend has posted multiple times his strong feelings for RTO on placed like LinkedIn. Additionally, I work a decent size start up as well. A company where a couple of years ago they might have been bragging about record revenue growth during the pandemic but is now putting strict RTO policies in place. Their communication/announcements about this policy are almost comical. The messages are long and they never really articulate good reasons. They are of the flavor “research shows”, and then when people ask to see that research no one responds. I’ve genuinely tried hard to understand the RTO argument in more depth beyond the typical “relationships are harder to build remotely” or “people slack off”. I’ve asked my friend about it repeatedly, along with some of the execs where I work, on top of the numerous tweets and LinkedIn posts. I’ve tried but I’ve never really found anything substantial, I’ve never found something where I could say, “you know, I disagree with you and dislike, but you have a point”. Personally, the explanation that makes the most sense to me after all these discussions, is that it’s one of those subconscious biases that by definition they aren’t aware of. It really feels to me like employers just simply begrudge workers getting any sort of win, getting any modicum of control over how they work and more importantly where they work. That’s before going into the added leverage wfh might give people when looking for new jobs. Very much to your point - the people who feel “empty” when not in the office should figure out how to solve that problem for themselves vs trying to undo one of the very few decent things that came out of the pandemic.

dboreham 3y ago
The beatings will continue until morale improves line of thinking.
JamesLeonis 3y ago
> The messages are long and they never really articulate good reasons. They are of the flavor “research shows”, and then when people ask to see that research no one responds. Waiting for the "research" [0] is the Silicon Valley rendition of Waiting for Godot. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36258148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36258148

88913527 3y ago

If some people want to work places where everyone works in-office, it seems reasonable to permit that as option. If the marketplace has a gradient of options, workers can vote with their feet. We don't have the ability to say "everyone should do what I want" but there can be workplace-wide policy. I empathize for people who feel it's pointless to RTO when half their colleagues are remote anyways. It diminishes the in-office experience, and I can respect that other people may desire a workplace where all are present in-person, even if I don't want that, but I can self-select out of an organization with that policy.

Zandikar 3y ago
> If the marketplace has a gradient of options, Unfortunately, we're starting from a default position where there really aren't, not in terms of the scope of supply and demand. Instead, the base position is in-office work, and the RTO's and Management would all argue they're the ones doing what you're suggesting here, and it's the WFH people being unreasonable, afterall, the workplace policy explicitly says to come into the office, at exact times, with exact places for you to go and do your work, and that's a policy that's been the default since the modern incarnation of "employment" and office work came to be. So you can't just quit and go work somewhere else that matches your "culture", because the policies in place at most of these companies aren't crafted to fit, synergize or otherwise work with the companies culture. Their largely born out of legal liabilities and ongoing service contracts and legal agreements and leases and stuff that would be expensive to break. Doesn't mean it can't be done, but they take one look at all that and start to panic as that is such a huge fundamental shift in organization, because the worst shift of all for going WFH for existing offices is that fear that middle management has that their employees can't be trusted, because they haven't trusted them or treated them with respect or really treated them as anything other than a disposable cog in the machine. Sure, plenty of places do care, and are transitioning/embracing WFH great. But we're talking about corporate America here and the trend setters and large employers that tend to set the pace and policy of the rest of the corporate world. There is no empathy when the bottom line is threatened for many of these institutions, and while they may even agree the end result would be superior to the previous way, they all too often view the cost of transition too high to be worth it, or at least, too high to be able to sell it too investors. I am glad the discussion is happening though, that alone is such huge progress that me in 2019 wouldn't have expected in the next few years.

MayeulC 3y ago

> And I don’t think it’s symmetrical: WFH people don’t have a reason to insist that their colleagues WFH. Kind of, though. If a single person wants to attend a meeting remotely, that forces everyone to talk to them remotely, which may be seen as the worst of both worlds by people at the office: commute to the office, and get bad quality (often worse than everyone remote) remote meetings.

renewiltord 3y ago

> People who want to work in the office, but only if everyone else is there to fulfil their desired workday experience? That’s a problem. Well, not really that much of a problem. We're an in-office company and it's working quite well. We just select for people who want to work like that. It's been pretty good.

smeej 3y ago
This is a good point. The part of the WFH/RTO debate that seems to get overlooked is that people who were hired to WFH are the ones who are now being cajoled into working from offices. It's the changing of the conditions with the "take it or leave it" stance toward the workers that's landing like a lead balloon. If an office has only ever hired people to work in the office, a the people who worked for them remotely during the pandemic would be people who chose a job where they would be in an office. It's reasonable to expect they would prefer that environment and not mind returning (even if a few were converted to WFH preference by the experience). But any new hires chose WFH roles on purpose, and the conditions are being changed on them. I worked for a company in 2017-8 where my whole team was remote, but then they decided to open offices and hire people to do the same work on-location. They flew me out to train them, and it was a disaster. My manager said, "I don't know what your problem is. All these other people work fine in an office." I told her, "All these other people applied for an office job. They self-selected based on this requirement. I never, EVER would have. I do not work well in an office. I know this about myself, thus did not apply for an office job. Your temporary demand that I visit an office for two weeks is going exactly as I expected it would. I hate it, and it hates me."
- anotheritworker 3y ago
  > The part of the WFH/RTO debate that seems to get overlooked is that people who were hired to WFH are the ones who are now being cajoled into working from offices. Let's not forget that the opposite is also true. Most of us were hired to work in the office (before COVID), but after COVID most (?) companies kept going in various forms of hybrid work. My team never went back to the office. I didn't sign up to work from an empty office and take every meeting on zoom, but that's what I got. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad remote work is more popular now because it allowed me to move close to family. But had I decided to stay in the city I lived for the last 6 years, I would have to leave a company I love and look for a new job because I absolutely hate remote work.

ren_engineer 3y ago

hybrid work is never going to work unless VR gets really good. If you aren't remote first as a company in terms of communication policy the remote people are going to get left out of the loop a lot compared to office workers. I don't think there is a good middle ground here, you have to go all in on remote or office The question is if any of the supposed benefits of office work exist, there's really no data I've seen . Remote has plenty of easily measurable benefits like no office costs, no commute, no office distractions, easier to recruit, salary arbitrage geographically, etc.

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago

I love that the FAANG companies claim to be "data-driven" and AFAIK not a single one of them has shared any data to prove it makes sense to RTO (because it doesn't, they're trying to get people to quit, not be more productive).

nightpool 3y ago
Incorrect: Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely. This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week. This requires further study, but our hypothesis is that it is still easier to build trust in person and that those relationships help us work more effectively. You can say whatever you want about the Meta analysis, but you can't say that they didn't do one and that they haven't presented the data.

throwaway22032 3y ago

I feel that perhaps you prefer, or simply didn't notice, the changes. Maybe you've always worked for huge companies. Remote work requires that Zoom calls and chat are used for almost everything, even if only 10% of people are not present. Prior to coronavirus this was not how any of the companies that I dealt with worked (small companies with <5 offices). Some meetings were remote, but most were in the break room with real faces. As a result, I left software development during the pandemic to pursue a life with more social interaction. The cerebral element was balanced out for me before, then it wasn't.

7speter 3y ago

Theres this assumption from the wfh crowd that everyone wants to wfh (and if you don’t want to youre some sort of scab) when that isn’t the case, for starters.

anotheritworker 3y ago

What a naive take. Simplifying the WFH discussion to be just about the physical location of people doesn't make sense. WFH fundamentally changes how teams and companies have to work. It's reasonable for people to be opinionated about how they like to work. Comparing someone to a 4yo because they might not like how remote teams work is obtuse at best and offensive at worst. (I say this as a 100% remote worker who's very glad of having had the opportunity to move close to family without losing my job) > And I don’t think it’s symmetrical: WFH people don’t have a reason to insist that their colleagues WFH. As if. WFH people might not care about the physical location of their coworkers, but they certainly care about what their teammates can or cannot do. Every team process needs to be tailored to remote workers. If you join an in person team and then request to WFH you are basically expecting everyone to adapt to your way. "But hey don't worry, you can still sit the zoom meeting from the office if you want". How generous. > There’s a very “my freedoms trump your freedoms” mindset to this. Pot, meet kettle.

croutonwagon 3y ago

There are some things that make this less black and white though. 1. If most work in office and one is constant WFH, they will almost always feel more distant and excluded. 2. Some folks want to work from home, but when they do, their performance and quality will tank, like immediately. But they arent necessarily self aware enough to see its not working. I think a place like this (Hacker News) is chock full of self-motivated higher achievers that are generally well suited for independant work from home and can overcome some of the negatives. But the reality is, there are LOADS of folks, especially in tech that arent that way, like at all.

drewcoo 3y ago
If #2 (performance problem) is real, how is it measured? If it can be measured, it can be addressed. Presumably that's what would happen in-office. If it can't be measured, maybe it's not real.
- croutonwagon 3y ago
  Well yes of course. Its measured in quality of work, deadlines missed, projects stalled Week over Week, projects/upgrades that have basic steps missed that cause break/fix engagements etc. etc. And on the whole those things are higher with many of my remote staff than on-prem. Its all tracked in Jira. Also some jobs have ebs and flows of work and not everything is measured in binary pass/fail ways. And there are times when you need someone to engage even when it’s not traditionally busy. I have had my remote employees tell me things when a "fire"/break-fix event starts and we call to engage during business hours often when that employee has been online all day to that point but now needs to be in a position to suddenly collaborate or share their screen. "Power just went out" "I am in the car" "Internet is out" (we pay for their internet AND a mifi) "My kids is sick" Never gotten any of that from someone in office, worst case I have to grab them from the breakroom or they are clear cut out with a sick kid or helping their wife. Or they walk up unprompted and say they have to leave to deal with wife or kids. Those examples where a small sample and werent that, they werent unprompted my kid is sick i need to take the day they were said once something was assigned or they are asked to engage. Peers have had similar where their direct reports are awol and they start getting texts from constituents saying “have you seen or heard from so and so, it’s been hours” Again, I have some that are NEVER a problem and even more productive in the office. I totally support that. But since COVID I would say thats only been about 25% of my direct reports. It’s certainly not the majority. Some have, unfortunately, been let go as a result. Unfortunately Executive leadership is seeing this in the non-tech divisions too and are now mandating less remote work. My point of the original comment is to point out that the folks here may have a bit of bias as it tends to have very highly motivated folks that may even be more productive when given a wide berth. I do that too with the folks that can manage it. But on the whole those are not the majority and arguably even exceptions to the rule and its those that are abusing this that are causing it to become policies to return to the office. One of my takeaways from COVID is that many adults dont have the self-discipline or self-motivation to be fully remote 100% or even 40%. Again not everyone but many/most.

rybosworld 3y ago

I've been looking for a way to summarize this idea myself and you've hit the nail on the head.

Ferret7446 3y ago

Social compromise is an ancient concept. Some things require social contribution to work, even from individuals who don't want to contribute. This has always been a problem (e.g. taxes "I don't want/need the government to pay for roads/education/infrastructure so why should I pay", "why should I pay for healthcare for people who live unhealthily", etc.)

Gigachad 3y ago

The office is only useful if the other people you work with are there, otherwise it's just remote work from another location.

RestlessMind 3y ago

> And I don’t think it’s symmetrical: WFH people don’t have a reason to insist that their colleagues WFH. Of course it is symmetrical. While designing a complex system, I prefer talking to colleagues in person over a whiteboard. Even if 3 of us are in the same room and 2 remote, my company forces everyone to log in and chat via Zoom. Separately from our individual laptops. We are not allowed to dial in from a conference room where we can use a whiteboard.

stormking 3y ago
Your companies' rules are dumb, that's it.

valval 3y ago

What’s the solution to the problem you paint? I’m that person. I think an office is a place where people come do their work in the same way a construction site is. Another child offered the point of view that hybrid models are the worst of both worlds, which I agree with. Is the solution to go either or, and let workers pick companies based on the model they uphold? To me that seems like the way to go.