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Tragedy of return to hostile offices
- bgidley 3y agoPage is struggling - https://archive.is/yn6rk https://archive.is/yn6rk
- oofta-boofta 3y ago[dead]
- rpastuszak 3y agomirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20231113133642/https://benjiweber.co.uk/blog/2023/11/12/tragedy-of-return-to-hostile-offices/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231113133642/https://benjiwebe...
- zx8080 3y ago> Mediocre teams compromise on their ways of working to avoid conflict; sacrificing their team’s potential on the altar of individual autonomy. Order the team to work from office 996. Unlock their potential, don't compromise! Kill the individual autonomy. </s>
- mdgrech23 3y agoI think at the team level most individuals do want to make change and work in the most efficient way possible it's just at big multinational corporations what you can modify about your environment can be extremely limited.
- ghaff 3y agoMaybe. I do think there are a fair number of people who recognize there are downsides to never seeing coworkers in person. But, given the option, it's a tradeoff they'll make so they don't need to commute.
- oneoff777 3y agoI don't understand why it is always either working in the office or "never seeing coworkers in person". I work remotely full time, and every three months, we gather with my team for a couple of days. Those gatherings are great. Working with my team remotely is also great.
- ghaff 3y agoThe team is very distributed at this point and budgets pretty much preclude traveling for team get-togethers. (Which I agree can be a fairly satisfying alternative to coming into an office 2 or 3 days a week.) But as it is, probably most of the people I work with I have never met in person.
- kjkjadksj 3y agoImo if you have video conference thats good enough, not like you get more information out of conversation in person vs on the phone or zoom.
- willcipriano 3y agoI don't even need video. Worked closely with a guy for a couple years, only when I left the company and added him on linkedin did I learn he was black. There really wasn't a need for me to know much about him to get our work done.
- ghaff 3y agoNo. But you probably do if you go out to dinner or some event with them. Over the years,I found that I could have most of my contact by phone but it really helped to have spent some some with someone in person.
- willcipriano 3y ago> Optimising for individual happiness can result in less of the joy that people find in teams that achieve great things together. I'll take the happiness thanks. You can keep the joy, let me know when you can share in the rewards of those achievements more robustly and I'll consider sacrificing for it.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoYou can’t fix or change people who live to work or think the work is full of meaning at the cost of quality of life. Deeply ingrained belief system like religions (and we know what kind of mental autoimmune response occurs when those are challenged). You can only institute guardrails against them.
- oneoff777 3y ago[flagged]
- lobsterslive 3y ago10x VC returns!
- oneoff777 3y ago[flagged]
- toomuchtodo 3y agoEvery cult uses something different to pull in true believers.
- nerdponx 3y agoIf achieving great things doesn't mean the American dream of a house with a vegetable garden, a wildflower meadow, and a little patch of grass for kicking a ball around, I'm not interested.
- tristor 3y agoOne of the primary reasons that remote work improves productivity is that it allows employees to tailor their environment to their needs, rather than be forced into a hostile office space that requires kafkaesque bureaucratic bullshit to make even minor changes. I once had a former employer force me to take an espresso machine home that I had brought to work because it created a situation where a different shift was coming to our teams area to use it when we weren’t there and they were concerned by the liability. Very non-specific concerns, I might add. So rather than ensure teams had access to real coffee they banned employees having their own coffee equipment so we can all commiserate together over the bottom dollar filth in the break room. This is the type of basic shit most companies can’t get right, much less the far more complicated challenges involved in creating positive team dynamics. I have no faith that any sufficiently large company can make an inviting office environment, and this is a major reason why I am a staunch remote work advocate.
- AlexandrB 3y agoI think this is correct. It's why, before the pandemic normalized remote work, offices were popular. What's disheartening is that a lot of "return to office" plans I've heard of from friends involve conditions even worse than what was there before. For example, hot-desking replacing the previous (also terrible) open office. I'm too young to have lived through the golden age of engineers actually having an office to work in. But my best experience (besides WFH) was at my first job out of school, in a cube farm - at least you had a little bit of privacy and space to put your stuff. Every office trend since then has been for the worse.
- vladvasiliu 3y ago> For example, hot-desking replacing the previous (also terrible) open office. I doesn't actually replace it. It's an additional horror on top of all the old ones.
- ericbarrett 3y agoI keep saying—if you want me to return to the office, give me an office. Or even a cubicle. Why even enforce a hot-desking setup when the space is 20% full? It makes no sense at all!
- rossdavidh 3y agoSo, I have often worked remotely, think it's fine, and makes sense in some cases. But, honestly, this is a professional-class issue, and every article about it seems written from a viewpoint that has forgotten about most of the population. The waitress and cook never had the option of working remotely, nor did the factory worker, the construction worker, the taxicab driver, the truck driver, etc. etc. Most of the population never had the option of remote work. The professional class bemoaning that they are being "forced" back to the office (translation: they won't pay you to work at home) is beyond a 1st World problem; it's a 1st World professional class problem. Even surgeons and nurses and dentists have to be "at work" in order to work, for the most part. The longer we bemoan being forced to go to work in order to get paid, the more the rest of the population becomes convinced that the professional class is entitled and a bit spoiled.
- Hackbraten 3y agoIt's an existential issue. Carbon emissions are literally killing people, and are bound to kill many more millions if we don't change our ways. So if the cooks and nurses and truck drivers have no choice, then I'd say that it's our duty to work remotely in order to do our part in reducing emissions.
- analognoise 3y agoExactly - these same cooks and nurses are so anti-worker that they can’t see fellow workers having a positive outcome and be pleased, while simultaneously dealing with less traffic? Press X to doubt; sounds like billionaire brainwashing noise to me.
- itishappy 3y agoYes, we need more tech workers to save the world from all the cooks, nurses, and truck drivers out here literally killing people with their emissions.
- Hackbraten 3y agoNot sure what your point is.
- lobsterslive 3y agoHaving your own private bathroom is a really underrated perk of WFH. There are of course many more benefits to WFH, but using your own bathroom is something no office and their disgusting communal bathrooms could ever compete with.
- francisofascii 3y agoEven more important to me is a private, fully stocked kitchen.
- amelius 3y agoWe really need a closed-loop video system with AI to inspect bathrooms after use, with an alarm of course. Something like: https://brnskll.com/shares/didnt-wash-hands-alarm/ https://brnskll.com/shares/didnt-wash-hands-alarm/
- kjkjadksj 3y agoIts not even that they leave it a mess. Some people sound like artillery fire in there and the smell makes you want to puke.
- Zigurd 3y agoThat's the output side. Ii could do without a $15 tuna sandwich from Tatte, too. That adds up.
- klooney 3y agoI never want to piss next to a man on a zoom call ever again.
- black-adder 3y agoI just rip a huge fart for entertainment purposes.
- gardenhedge 3y agoTo add to this, when there are annoying things like that in the office.. most places there's no people in charge. There are facilities teams but they don't really care if the toilet flush is not powerful enough, or if one of the taps is leaking, or a quarter of the chairs are wonky.. and you can't really say it to your direct manager since it is not work related.
- manuelabeledo 3y agoIn some ways, OP’s suggestions are a recipe for building hostile teams! Why would I be entitled to interrupt someone to review my code, just because they are sitting next to me? Always on zoom? No, thanks. It invariably devolves into micromanaging. Constant KPI awareness? Most companies cannot even agree on how a valuable KPI looks like. Remote pair programming? Honest question here, is pair programming still a thing?
- Zigurd 3y agoPair programming isn't widely practiced for obvious reasons: It looks like you just made your code twice as expensive. There are studies justifying the cost by showing it can be recovered with less testing, code review, and bug hunting. But that evidently hasn't been persuasive. Also, anyone familiar with statistical quality control (SQC or SQA) would look at pair programming and see 100% inspection. Very suboptimal in manufacturing. Still, pair programming makes sense in the abstract: Coding is not manufacturing. Applying SQC to code is nonsensical. Under the circumstances, 100% inspection is all you've got. Pair programming probably makes sense in cases where minimizing bugs at every step, right down to the creation of every line of code, is needed because the cost of a bug explodes the longer it exists. Probably rare cases. But worth knowing to know that coders are not working on a production line.
- chasd00 3y agohave you ever done pair programming? like actually sit there and be forced to do it? It's absolutely infuriating to anyone who values anything. I spent 20min trying to convince my "pair" that it was ok for a comment to be a sentence fragment and not a complete sentence. Every keystroke is the same conversation over and over. After that experience, i pulled rank and said i will never pair program again and haven't since.
- skulk 3y ago> It's absolutely infuriating to anyone who values anything It's not really your place to say what's infuriating to others when your pair programming experience with a _single_ (somewhat neurotic) programmer was irritating. In my experience, pair programming has been a delightful two-way share of ideas that was both refreshing and productive (but I'm not going to claim universality or such an experience). Pair programming probably does suck when one side is extremely impatient and overbearing.
- Devasta 3y agoI work in Cork, Ireland. My boss is in Dublin, his boss Singapore, my staff in Nova Scotia, Devs in Manila, clients in London and New York. I'm always working remotely, no matter where I am, as is anyone who works in any multi office company. The RTO is being entirely driven from the top by institutional investors wanting to avoid losses on property investments and from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers. The return to office has nothing to do with productivity, trying to look at things through that lens reflects a total lack of understanding of whats going on.
- pid-1 3y agoHow does that work? Are institucional investors writing "plz return to office or we are going bust" emails to every company?
- eptcyka 3y agoThey don't need to explain themselves. Big enough shareholders just can express their needs to the board, a vote can be held and, if the decision is not implemented, courts can get involved.
- TheCoelacanth 3y agoCourts getting involved over something like that isn't realistic. A more likely outcome is board members getting fired.
- AlexandrB 3y agoNo they just have board meetings where they stress the importance of being in the office for "spontaneous exchange of ideas" and "culture" while also floating think pieces in business magazines about how important having people in the office is to success.
- voisin 3y ago
- hotnfresh 3y ago> Mediocre teams compromise on their ways of working to avoid conflict; Yeah, well, conflict with the corporate overlords tends to be pretty one-sided, so we’ll need to attack that problem if you want that to change. There are proven approaches. But this isn’t “compromise”, it’s workers having their work environment dictated to them. > sacrificing their team’s potential on the altar of individual autonomy. Oh wow, uh, that was not the direction I expected the rest of that sentence to go. > I’ve experienced some of my most joyful work in teams working together in the same space. I’ve benefited from flexibility and inclusion with remote work. I’ve also been able to contribute as part of larger open source communities where I couldn’t even know everyone by name. On the topic of knowing everyone by name: so very much easier remote. Real people don’t have a name tag next to every statement they make, or hovering under their face at all times. Much harder in person.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lawn 3y agoI have two wonderful examples of a hostile work environment, both caused by the same boss: He had the habit of playing music really, really loud from his speakers. It got so bad that they tried to relegate him to different floors and build a separate office, just for him and the lucky few that worked with him (me included). Another thing he did was being his dog to the office despite there being people allergic to dogs in the office. And people are trying to force everyone nack to the office because of "collaboration".
- awalias 3y agoI wrote a bit about why we’ll stay remote at Supabase (https://supabase.com/blog/why-supabase-remote https://supabase.com/blog/why-supabase-remote), there’s plenty of drivers both on the company side and on the employee side.
- varispeed 3y ago> Working physically together, in the same space, as a whole team, can be extremely enabling. I am still not convinced "in the same space" makes any difference. I couldn't care less if co-worker is sitting next to me or on the other side of the country. But in person, you get an extra cognitive load of being around people. Someone brings smelly sandwich, someone else forgot to shower then another one keeps chewing gum and making loud mouth noises. > Supporting a joyful environment. One man's joy is another man misery. Certainly having people making morning journey from across the country and then observing how they "work" may be joyful experience for a manager feeling insecure. Best compromise I saw is that if someone can't work at home, company gives them vouchers at their local co-working space of their choosing. No commute and office experience.
- bilsbie 3y agoI still remember the time we had no space for an intern to sit so we had to put him in an empty VP office. But only senior people could have windows so they covered his windows in cardboard …
- x86x87 3y agoHahaha. If I didn't know exactly how this happens I would say this is made up.
- harryquach 3y agoMade up or not, I got a laugh thinking about that situation
- francisofascii 3y ago> But only senior people could have windows I once worked at a company where almost the opposite was true, or at least they prided themselves on not factoring that in and in moving desks several times a year. Managers and senior people tended to be near the center of a very crowded office space, away from the windows, I suppose to be closer to the "action". Newer or less important folks tended to be near the windows.
- sebstefan 3y agoOn the flip side it's getting increasingly easier to find top engineers when your company is fully remote
- baz00 3y agoI love the discussion we had about RTO at my company: Company: What are your thoughts on returning to the office? Staff: What are your thoughts if we all say fuck off? And that was decided.
- watters 3y agoIf RTO drove actual, material benefits to results, companies would be explaining RTO policies by connecting those dots. At this point, I haven't seen a single attempt from any company to offer such a rationale. We can reasonably infer that such policies are not rooted in any evidence-oriented analysis.
- x86x87 3y agoRTO has benefits, just not for employees. Commercial real estate, businesses downtown, municipalities, they all benefit from this slow moving trainwreck.
- watters 3y agoHence my choice of phrasing: "benefits to results". There are certainly perceived benefits to management and/or related to real estate interests, including but not limited to: easier observation and suppression of employee organizing, different legal exposure profile as fewer people are casually creating business communication that may later be sifted during legal discovery, propping up commercial real estate investments, etc.
- DiggyJohnson 3y agoI don't see how those relate to a company's revenue or bottom line, which is usually what we imagine company's to care about above all else.
- x86x87 3y ago1) Investors in the company are also investors in CRE. So they pressure the company into this BS 2) Municipalities give all sorts of tax breaks and incentives to companies, but only if people are in person helping the local economy.
- watters 3y agoVery large household-name companies often own or otherwise control significant amounts of commercial real estate, which sit on the company's balance sheet. If commercial real estate in general loses value, the value of these assets is also reduced, which will eventually be reflected on their balance sheets. Even in cases where the real estate is leased rather than owned, the future rents owned are liabilities that are also a part of the companies' financial reports. If the demand for commercial real estate goes down, they won't be able to fully offset liabilities by subletting or selling their commercial real estate, which will show up as losses, write offs or write downs.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoThe author really doesn’t help their point by dwelling on the sacrifice of the individual for the team. A team that doesn’t maximize the value of the individuals by finding ways they complement each other in their differences will always be less than it could be. And too much have we asked individuals to sacrifice for too long for too little. The way we used to work is an emergent reality that had begun to fray long before the pandemic, see multilocation strategies, selective remote working options, hotel seating with over subscribed occupancy. The cost of commercial real estate was already being eyed carefully. As a senior executive in multinational mega corps I can tell you definitively “bring your own office” in 2019 was seen as bigger than “bring your own device” in terms of potential to reduce cost, increase productivity, and maximize EPS. The biggest barrier was the 5-10 year real estate development and tax abatement cycles, but you were already seeing compression of available seating and over subscription with a 10 year plan to compress to only essential coworking. Further, while panned now, the WeWork model was seen as the future - essentially elastic occupancy as opex, burstable cloud like office space flexibly located where the talent lives. The pandemic accelerated this stepwise from 20% to 100% overnight. I could see it in the eyes of the CEOs as they saw the culture they understood disappear overnight and the emotional entrenchment that “this can’t be allowed to persist.” Despite all the prior plans and agreement, an emotional reaction took hold. They saw the productivity improvements and were unswayed. It wasn’t about money, it wasn’t about productivity, it wasn’t about efficiencies. It was about a way of living being threatened, a way the CEOs were manifestly beneficiaries of, and was the only lifestyle they knew and understood. They didn’t want things to change. To buttress their desires, tax abatements and leases obligated use of the real estate. But make no mistake, the RTO movement is almost entirely driven by a near maniacal gripping onto a way of life the decision makers benefited from and can’t let go of. Joy of the team, sacrificing the individual for the greater good, watercooler serendipity, “think of the kids,” etc, are all smokescreens for the real motivations: fear of an unraveling of the emergent reality that todays leaders owe their entire successful career to, and at that level, that’s all they have in their life. That office culture is literally the cornerstone of their identity, and being more or less all narcissists, they believe their identity is the cornerstone to the world. The rest of the article is pretty good. I wouldn’t stop reading based on the intro. The essence is there’s a continuum of work styles along a two dimensional system (in office - remote / sync - asynch). Each quadrant has its own benefits. They seem to assert the middle, hybrid, is the worst of all worlds, and it’s better to pick a style and lean into it. They offer a variety of ways to lean into a style. IMO I think this is overly simplistic and the most efficient reality, and likely the emergent one we land in within 10 years, is a mixed reality. Coworking works well for some, doesn’t for others. The skills for a remote workplace benefit a multi location team, a hybrid team, or a fully remote team equally. Some tasks are async, some are sync. Once a team has one person not on site, the team only functions as a remote team; otherwise the person not onsite isn’t a part of the team. Recognizing that any team level work would be handled as if everyone were remote. There will be a contingent who work best in an office. They will continue to have one, albeit a smaller space with fewer and fewer amenities as the occupancy cost / person is squeezed. Those that work best remotely will land at a place that values them for the way they work best. We will continue to refine our work protocols to accommodate this new way of working. The CEOs of today will become the CEOs of yesterday. The new CEOs will be the ones who emerged ahead during the pandemic. The new mid level will be the ones who excelled in remote school and remote entry level. Bring your own office will become the buzz word. Boards will see the cold hard reality of occupancy cost per head in office rising relentlessly. Tax abatements and leases will have frayed. Then, either the weworks of today or its replacement will have its day.
- iteratethis 3y agoA lot of people work virtually regardless of their location. You can return to the office but it doesn't stop. You still work as if it was remote because there will always be somebody in the meeting that isn't there. They could be at home, in a different building, or a vendor in another country. Such is the consequence of complex organizations and outsourcing, as well as employees increasing demands to have a say in their schedule. When you really think about it, collaboration is the problem rather than the solution. The modern distributed nature of work means that you need a huge amount of collaboration to even figure out what to do, when, and to resolve all dependencies. So it's pretty maddening that managers call for more collaboration. We need less of it. The perfect workflow is where you tell me with clarity what to do, and then let me do it without distractions or changing everything halfway-through. Modern employees spent half their time in email, chat and meetings. Not producing anything. And that's generous, quite a few have to find actual productive time in the fragmented 10% of their schedule. It's as if we've all become managers.
- tcgv 3y ago> collaboration is the problem rather than the solution Spot on. > The perfect workflow is where you tell me with clarity what to do, and then let me do it without distractions or changing everything halfway-through In traditional manufacturing processes (i.e., physical goods), this is possible and often achieved. Productivity can be easily measured by dividing the physical output - like the number of items produced - by the factory headcount. Innovation exists in cycles that precede manufacturing, since changes to the factory layout are expensive and often require interrupting production. Software development is a different beast. Innovation is intermingled in the 'manufacturing' process. Requirements change faster, and we need processes to accommodate that. Work happens in smaller time frames (e.g., two-week sprints). Productivity and delivered value are harder to measure. Paying customers are in the loop and provide constant feedback we need to filter and incorporate for our 'product' to succeed. The software development challenge is more consultative in nature than the manufacturing one.
- just_boost_it 3y agoMy dream is for the entire industry to start demanding this perfect workflow. Then I will be even more valuable wherever I go.
- walthamstow 3y agoThe majority in my company have forgotten what used to be quite standard office manners before covid. Hot food in the desk area of the office used to be a real no-no, likewise having notification sounds coming out of your laptop constantly.
- cityofdelusion 3y agoMy office has the exact same problems, plus we have people playing music out-loud and people taking personal phone calls for what seems like 20+ minutes in the working areas. The other week I got to hear all about someone's family get-together while trying to fix production issues.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago> Hot food in the desk area of the office used to be a real no-no I've never encountered this perspective before. Why was/is this disliked?
- gedy 3y agoThe smell
- mk89 3y agoI see this tragedy every day I wake up and from my living room window I see hundreds of cars waiting at the traffic light(s). This wasn't the case during covid, of course, and also during the beginning of post-covid. It seems all is behind us. Not sure what the value of all this is, except for some people telling others how they have to live life.
- paulcole 3y ago> except for some people telling others how they have to live life Don't act like this is a one-way street. If you're working remotely then your employer is also telling its employees how they have to live life. It's just that in this case you happen to agree with them so it's A-OK!
- tomashubelbauer 3y agoPeople who prefer the office can band together and get one with WFH. People who enjoy their homes or even still an office, just their personal one, don't have that choice with RTO.
- paulcole 3y agoYou're making a pretty standard mistake often made by people who are pro-WFH. Many people who prefer working in an office prefer to work with other people who are also in an office. They do not want to interact with people who are working remotely. Just to be clear, this is a 100% fine preference to have. In this case, a company saying, "Yeah get a coworking space or whatever and meet with the remote people on Zoom" is telling these employees how to live, exactly the same as telling a WFH employee to come into the office due to RTO. And again, just to be clear, neither of these are bad things. It just depends on your perspective.
- jdbernard 3y agoI'm sorry, but you are the one making the "standard mistake," logically. It's the incel argument. You're trying to say this is a two-way street, that the dynamics are the same in both directions. That's obviously false. It is a one-way street here. The people who are wanting to RTO are trying to exert active control over the lives of others. "You must change your habits of life to accommodate my desires." This is not what the WFH position is doing. The WFH position isn't trying to force the RTO people to do anything. You complaining "your unwillingness to come to the office is forcing me to remain lonely in the office" is exactly the same kind of argument, structurally, as the incel argument "your unwillingness to have sex with me is forcing me to remain a virgin." Yes, there are some things that you cannot do alone, but that does not entitle you to force me to accommodate you.
- 0xbadcafebee 3y ago> Most of all I get sad when I see ineffective teams with no ability or motivation to improve—whether remote or co-located. This. I get that remote isn't always practical or effective, I do. But it's the staunch insistence on one way of working, and the denial that it needs improvement, that pisses me off so god damn much. If I could actually get more work done in an office, of course I would go back. I have a huge backlog of shit to get through! But an hour commute isn't making that easier. And we all have been in the office where half the team is spread out just because they want to get away from noise, or to find a more comfy place, or they need heads-down time without interruptions. We've all been in meetings where 3 people are remote just because they needed to let a repair man in at noon, or their daughter's sick, or something's going on. And that is fine. So what's wrong with keeping that the same, and just not requiring people go in? Then there's all the other dysfunctional shit that has nothing to do with an office, where the office is the excuse to never fix it. We can't figure out our online communications? No problem, just buy a big room and shove people in it and they can just walk up to each other all the time. We can't properly organize our documentation? Big room, shove people in it, walk up and ask where something is. No documentation? Big room, shove people, interrupt, ask how it works. Need to decide something but don't want to have a meeting? No problem, just interrupt 5 people at once and have an impromptu meeting. Who needs to improve their business process when they can just have people interrupt each other all day and never write a single thing down? Remote doesn't magically work well either. You have to do specific things to make remote successful. I'm pretty sure the reason for mandatory return is just that they don't want to try. Even if half the workforce wanted to work in an office, they could buy a smaller office and let workers do what they need to do. But that would still require improvements to get the remote half to work well with the in-office half, so let's just avoid that extra work and force everyone into the office. That's easy for management, but sucks for the workforce, and the business.
- karaterobot 3y agoI like the phrase "serendipity is not a strategy", it gets to my biggest complaint about the arguments for going back to the office. Your shitty open plan office was never MIT Building 20 before the pandemic, and it's not going to become a womb of creativity after the pandemic just because you want it to be so. The way I know that is because you have to threaten people to come back to it, if it was special at all they'd come back on their own.
- jibbit 3y agoI've never worked in an office where the thermostat wasn't controlled by a sociopath
- paulcole 3y ago> Every successful company needs to have the most talented people. The most talented people no longer live in, or want to live in the same place Completely false. There are more successful companies than there are most talented people.
- mortallywounded 3y agoI once worked in an office where one of our engineers ended up moving out of the open office into an office of his own. He would often get offended in the open office around the other engineers. Why? Language. He once asked me not to say "damn" around him because he's very religious. It was a C/C++/C# codebase, so that was never going to happen.
- lr1970 3y agoI am curious that nobody has not mentioned a great movie "Office Space". A brilliant sarcastic comedy about office culture in the late nineties. I think the time is ripe for a sequel.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 3y agoIt is a classic for a reason. Consider watching "Corner Office". It is not in the same category and frankly it is a little weird, and the jokes are a hit or miss, BUT.. there are moments that capture office life a little too well.