6 ms·

Sometimes on HN i see these articles about "return to office" and its a little confusing for me because I dont work in an office job, im a mechanic in a diesel

Sometimes on HN i see these articles about "return to office" and its a little confusing for me because I dont work in an office job, im a mechanic in a diesel repair shop that likes python and technology. Can anyone break down why these companies want/need people to come back to the office at all? as far as I know, and from everything ive seen, office workers can do this stuff anywhere (even in our shops waiting room.) meetings are all on zoom and VPN is a thing. Office workers dont "make" anything. i know that sounds rude but i cant think of another way to describe it...office workers "work" is all between their ears? I have to be in the shop, dressed in my PPE and work boots, and ready to fix stuff that actually exists. If i work from home, trucks dont get repaired because thats what i do. When some office tech worker logs in, everything they make is already in front of them...its everywhere and nowhere all at once. Just let them all work from home and be done with it. less road congestion means lower prices to ship stuff in the USA because trucks dont wait as long or waste as much fuel idling in gridlock. ambulance response times improve, carbon emissions go down...i mean the whole damn thing seems like a real no-brainer. The rule aught to be: If the heaviest thing you pick up in your workday is a coffee pot, then stay home. EDIT: so the "social" aspect isnt something i considered because ive never had a zoom that ever lasted more than 5 minutes (i had to talk to a doctor during covid i think.) Im sorry i didnt consider it before, but is work really a great place to do social stuff? as an example, my jobs loud and busy. typically im shouting at my coworkers or using a radio. at the end of the day we're all a little tired. sometimes there are tasks like millwrighting or crane work that cannot include a social aspect for safety reasons. but! twice a year we put down the air tools and meet up at a local park. our foreman is a decorated BBQ enthusiast, so he cooks up a mess of food to eat. His daughter is an 'aspiring' DJ so she picks the tunes and takes care of requests. We all sit around a rented out park shade and shoot the breeze over beers and bratwurst. its really great. Can/do office workers do that?

exe34 3y ago
Rich and powerful people invested in real estate. They can afford to run a campaign to keep those investments productive. That's all there is to it. Whenever you're confused about a situation, ask yourself who's going to make a profit from it, and it'll start to make sense.
Jcampuzano2 3y ago
They want people to RTO because it gives middle management who can't get up to date with how to manage a remote team a job to do: micromanage, and because execs have 0 trust in the people they hire. It essentially all comes down to this, they're worried about people not working when they can't keep their eyes on them at all times. What they can't seem to grasp is that people are already not working much of the time even in an office due to a variety of reasons - smalltalk, watercooler chats, distractions from the all too common open office environment, coffee breaks, useless events/activities that give HR teams something to do, people taking longer lunches due to having to drive somewhere etc. Additionally real-estate value even though none of them will mention it. People not in the office lowers the value of their investment.
- williamcotton 3y ago
  I am someone who went out of their way to find an on-site job. Our current hours are Mon-Thr, 10 - 2:30 pm, with remote on Friday, which is a really great balance. Smalltalk, coffee breaks, etc, are a productivity boon. Random conversations about what other people are working on are much more likely to occur in person as opposed to online. You can’t tell me that the social interactions on Slack even remotely approach the social interactions in person. Working remote is lonely and erodes a foundational element of sociability. You spend a good portion of your waking hours at work. Your coworkers are your friends. Also, there is no doubt in my mind that people take longer HN and Reddit breaks while at home than they would at the office with their coworkers having a view on their screens. This isn’t about the panopticon of the management class and more the impetus to be pulling your weight. There’s just something that is enhanced about any interactions that happen in person. As a broad social trend we need to fight against the retreat from actual human interactions.
  - dd82 3y ago
    >Working remote is lonely and erodes a foundational element of sociability. You spend a good portion of your waking hours at work. Your coworkers are your friends. Thats where you do need to explicitly make effort outside of work to fill that gap. You could also make the argument that commuting 90 minutes a day is a regular time suck for you that could be spent doing other productive things. >Also, there is no doubt in my mind that people take longer HN and Reddit breaks while at home than they would at the office with their coworkers having a view on their screens. oh, so smoker breaks lol. as long as they're getting the work done, why do you give a shit? >As a broad social trend we need to fight against the retreat from actual human interactions. There's nothing stopping you from doing that outside of work, but you need to be more mindful about doing it
cjpearson 3y ago
The standard argument for office work is that there are some intangible benefits to in-person work and communication that can't be effectively replicated over zoom and slack. The cynical argument is that managers like being able to walk around the room and count their worker bees. The conspiratorial argument is that corporations are in cahoots with commercial real estate developers. There are debates on all these arguments, but your coffee pot standard is the opinion of most hn users.
yodsanklai 3y ago
Because our jobs are collaborative by nature, and zoom can't replace in person interactions. It's also not only meetings. Social interactions are important too. Some of my colleagues became friends, or at least people I feel I can trust in the workplace. This would be hard to achieve purely remote. Now I'm not saying everybody should return to office, and I've been full remote for several years now, and I'm a bit worried that it's not going to last. But objectively, there's value to work in the office. It's not all black or white.
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  I have found that what can replace in-person interactions for discussion of thought processes and ideas is medium- to long-form writing. A lot of people either don't know how to do it or hate doing it (so they don't do it), but I believe that it is necessary to have a culture of document writing if you want to be successfully remote. That is a big part of the cultural divide I have seen on remote work. A lot of people who are used to doing long-form writing are very comfortable working remote and building a remote culture (see Hey and Oxide for two big examples). People who do not like long-form writing and want to have meetings instead (eg bank executives and the current YC partners) are pushing for the office. The social stuff is true - a lot of people used to use the office to find friends and romantic partners, and that is not going to happen over zoom calls or essays.
  - The_Colonel 3y ago
    Long form writing, while very useful, is no silver bullet. Sometimes the most effective way to make a decision (or just clarify misconceptions) is to get people into the same room and talk things through.
    - pclmulqdq 3y ago
      That's why you write some position papers and then get people on a zoom call with that specific topic when you need to talk it out. No ambling daily standups or weekly standing "progress update" meetings - use focused meetings with a specific topic. This is how many successful engineering and knowledge organizations through the years have functioned (s/zoom call/meeting/).
steveBK123 3y ago
It's also clearly a result of the job market turning for tech employment. The moment the job market stopped being red hot, companies started becoming more and more draconian with RTO. I think a lot of them see it as low risk with possible upside for the employer. Of course for employees who have been remote/hybrid for 4 years now, it's often upending lives for questionable benefit. Your employer doesn't care about you wasting 5-10 hours/week commuting that could be otherwise split between work & family.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  Good point. If it were customary (or required) that companies pay for time spent commuting, they'd be less thrilled about mandating return-to-office. As it is today, an employee's 2 hour commute each way doesn't cost the company, it costs his family.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    A similar pet peeve of mine are execs who spontaneously demand entire orgs/divisions/teams attend some earlier than normal start time meeting.. or worse, to do so for a new weekly series. It's like a manager time vs maker time thing. Execs tend to be later in their career without young children to attend to, making enough to have a non-working spouse (and/or some "help"). Further they tend to be early risers and while they start the day earlier I observe they end their day earlier too, becoming unreachable long before I punch out for the day. So sure for exec rolling into the office for a 7:30/8 meeting is no big deal. They've already checked train times to ensure it works for THEIR schedule. For everyone else they suddenly need to re-arrange things like school/daycare drop-offs, coordinate with their working spouses work schedule, might need to wake up 2 hours early to buffer for train schedules, etc. Has knock on effects to both spouses schedule the evening before as well. All so the big guy can pontificate.
dataflow 3y ago
> Can anyone break down why these companies want/need people to come back to the office at all? as far as I know, and from everything ive seen, office workers can do this stuff anywhere (even in our shops waiting room.) meetings are all on zoom and VPN is a thing. As an IC whose manager is nowhere to be seen in the office: I find these questions puzzling. Do folks here notice zero difference when their coworkers are present at their office vs. when they aren't? Claiming you "can" do this stuff anywhere feels similar to claiming you "can" fulfil your body's nutritional needs through drinking Soylet every day. Just because you might be able to that (and maybe you prefer to do it personally) that doesn't mean it's enjoyable or a good idea for everyone.
- dd82 3y ago
  There's a difference between being remote friendly and remote first. the former is "yeah, you can work from home, but you're going to miss out on alot if you're not at the office" the latter is "we consciously make sure to integrate everyone in collaboration, regardless of location and have tooling/procedures for collaboration" If you're asking this question, it might be that you're in a remote friendly environment with explicit lack of communication or collaboration support
  - dataflow 3y ago
    No, not every conversation is a "collaboration". Do you dial into Zoom during lunch and coffee too? When you grab a coworker passing by do you start a Zoom call to make sure the whole team can spectate your random conversation?
    - dd82 3y ago
      No, but you also make sure to bring it up in slack or whatever to fill in your other teammates when the material is relevant and useful. Or just because?
      - dataflow 3y ago
        That's... not how it works for any human being. The whole point of a conversation is that you can engage in it while it's happening. You make a point in the middle when it's relevant, and someone replies with something else they feel is relevant. When you've already had a 30+-minute conversation over lunch, no human is going to remember it and copy to Slack, no remote worker is going to go through and respond point-by-point as if they'd been there in person, and no human who has already invested that time and energy in the conversation is going to re-start the conversation at every juncture just to explore alternative directions it could've gone in person. What actually happens in the best case is you give a few sentences of summary if you believe it might impact your coworkers' work, and then schedule a meeting if there's more to discuss. Which (ignoring the fact that even the best people don't always do this) is great, except you could be entirely wrong about whether there was anything beneficial for any coworker to hear. That junior engineer on the team might've been able to overhear how you fixed a problem that was second-nature to you, but now they don't. That dude who just returned to work might've been able to tell you they were interested in picking up the work you were overloaded with, but now they don't. That team lead on the adjacent team you would've grabbed during lunch with might've told you they were planning to handle the larger problem next quarter, but now they don't. etc...
ccppurcell 3y ago
Read "Bullshit Jobs" and you'll understand immediately.
silverquiet 3y ago
I'll throw my two cents in here. First off, I come from a blue-collar background, and actually enjoy building and repairing physical things, though I hate getting under vehicles. So if you enjoy that kind of work, then remember it because working on increasingly abstract systems can (at least for me) feel increasingly pointless. I'll say that in person work has the highest bandwidth for collaboration. You're correct that all the work is done between ears, but in large, complex systems, that means multiple peoples' ears. I'm introverted on a level that most people find weird, but when I need to solve a problem that crosses domains in the systems I work on, typing text into a chat client is painfully slow. I want to get everyone involved on a call. What is best is when we're all together at our desks with access to whiteboards; I loathe trying to whiteboard on screens. There are also management pressures that people chafe against. If your manager just wants to see butts in seats because they want to survey their domain and feel powerful, that is indeed a good reason to reject RTO. But I think good leaders do understand the power of in-person collaboration and can try and ecourage it while also balancing the benefits of remote work. I see this at my current place - our CEO has made it clear that she would like to see people back but has never created any sort of mandate. But some people have returned to hybrid schedules on their own because they find some collaboration helpful. In fact one of the developers and I have made some good progress on goals that have been stalled out for a long time since he started coming in once a week. Interestingly I also see it in friends who are purely remote; they work for companies that do not have a presence in our town. They've actually started joining co-working spaces in order to get out of the house and get some sense of comraderie.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
blululu 3y ago
>> Office workers dont "make" anything. i know that sounds rude but i cant think of another way to describe it...office workers "work" is all between their ears? For some projects the entire scope can fit inside a single head, but as the scope and complexity increase the work happens between the brains. This is where the issue lies. Collaboration is critical for most projects of any real significance. This is where offices are helpful. If you simply think about an individual’s work and not the team’s collective output, then offices don’t make sense. I see a lot of people focusing on management in this thread, but in my experience collaboration is the responsibility of everyone. From an IC’s perspective, I found working at a remote company to be generally unpleasant. People would routinely engage in sandbagging, delays and it would be difficult to understand why things are blocked. I found that trust was lower, and people were far less collegial. This is true to some extent of remote teams as well, so I think there is just something in how the brain works that doesn’t click with taking orders from a television. There are many instances where being at home heads down is much better for getting work done and strict rto mandates are generally unhelpful in these instances. But ultimately the conversations around this typically end up trying to talk past the point or gloss over the bigger issues which is that a healthy and productive team is what matters.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  Good point to identify collaboration as the more important variable, but of course plenty of orgs figure out how to collaborate effectively while remote. In fact, almost every org that achieves moderate scale will have to figure that out. > From an IC’s perspective, I found working at a remote company to be… What was your control group?
  - khendron 3y ago
    > but of course plenty of orgs figure out how to collaborate effectively while remote. Some do, but most don't. Too many companies seem to think becoming remote means just installing Zoom on everybody's computers and sending them home. In reality, there is a lot more to it than that. No remote technology comes close to having collaborators together in a room with a whiteboard, with a well-defined agenda. But while remote collaboration is less efficient, it doesn't mean it can't work. You just have to recognize that things are going to move slower and consensus of opinion will take more time.
sroussey 3y ago
How did you learn to be a mechanic? As an industry, it’s important to teach new generations. A senior engineer with good self discipline can work from home. A great engineer will elevate their team and thus be more valuable than working alone. And this process helps juniors grow. You could learn to be a mechanic from books and then have a service that matches people with car problems with mechanics at home. Why do you need a work site?
- Loughla 3y ago
  OP works in a diesel repair shop. These aren't mechanics like the local tire and repair shop. My experience with them is from the first 30 years of my life as a full time farmer. They work on yuuuge machinery sometimes. They also do field work when the machine can't come to them. More often than not, these things have to take place at the shop because there are specialized diagnostic and other tools (like a mill or crane like OP says). These are not portable pieces of equipment. So your analogy sort of falls flat there. It would be like the server master (made that up just now and I like it). That person may not be able to work from home, because the physical machinery is important. Otherwise, yes, your point of teaching youth is important.
- archy_ 3y ago
  >Why do you need a work site? I can think of 3 good reasons: 1. Businesses don't want to remember a bunch of addresses and who sent what where. Even if it's dropped off at a central lot, you'd still need to arrange further transportation from the lot since a lot of the equipment is broken, doesn't even have tires, or is otherwise not street-legal. 2. Diesel mechanics don't usually work on consumer diesel engines - this is heavy equipment. These shops tend to be located along highways for a reason - they need the wide berths highways provide. You'll have trouble fitting a lot of this equipment in your driveway, much less your garage. 3. The shop insurance situation would be a nightmare.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
michaelt 3y ago
> Can anyone break down why these companies want/need people to come back to the office at all? If you rewind the technology job market back a few decades, outsourcing was the big trend. Why have your software written by these expensive American programmers when you can hire 3x as many programmers in Eastern Europe or India or Mexico for the same cost? For whatever reason, this didn't work very well. It wasn't a complete failure, but the results were definitely worse. People wanting to understand why it didn't work came up with a bunch of guesses - one of the most popular was the idea that synchronous, face-to-face communication is vital. Being able to get around a whiteboard and have a discussion, things like that. Meetings where you can see people's faces and see if they're understanding you, instead of just talking at a bunch of people on mute with their cameras off. And of course, if you were a low- or mid-level American manager with a team of expensive American programmers, this idea was popular with you. You want everyone to be convinced your team is great value for money. So we have a load of managers who've spent the past few decades convincing one another that in-office workers are much more efficient than workers who can only be contacted over Skype.

exe34 3y ago

Rich and powerful people invested in real estate. They can afford to run a campaign to keep those investments productive. That's all there is to it. Whenever you're confused about a situation, ask yourself who's going to make a profit from it, and it'll start to make sense.

Jcampuzano2 3y ago

They want people to RTO because it gives middle management who can't get up to date with how to manage a remote team a job to do: micromanage, and because execs have 0 trust in the people they hire. It essentially all comes down to this, they're worried about people not working when they can't keep their eyes on them at all times. What they can't seem to grasp is that people are already not working much of the time even in an office due to a variety of reasons - smalltalk, watercooler chats, distractions from the all too common open office environment, coffee breaks, useless events/activities that give HR teams something to do, people taking longer lunches due to having to drive somewhere etc. Additionally real-estate value even though none of them will mention it. People not in the office lowers the value of their investment.

williamcotton 3y ago
I am someone who went out of their way to find an on-site job. Our current hours are Mon-Thr, 10 - 2:30 pm, with remote on Friday, which is a really great balance. Smalltalk, coffee breaks, etc, are a productivity boon. Random conversations about what other people are working on are much more likely to occur in person as opposed to online. You can’t tell me that the social interactions on Slack even remotely approach the social interactions in person. Working remote is lonely and erodes a foundational element of sociability. You spend a good portion of your waking hours at work. Your coworkers are your friends. Also, there is no doubt in my mind that people take longer HN and Reddit breaks while at home than they would at the office with their coworkers having a view on their screens. This isn’t about the panopticon of the management class and more the impetus to be pulling your weight. There’s just something that is enhanced about any interactions that happen in person. As a broad social trend we need to fight against the retreat from actual human interactions.
- dd82 3y ago
  >Working remote is lonely and erodes a foundational element of sociability. You spend a good portion of your waking hours at work. Your coworkers are your friends. Thats where you do need to explicitly make effort outside of work to fill that gap. You could also make the argument that commuting 90 minutes a day is a regular time suck for you that could be spent doing other productive things. >Also, there is no doubt in my mind that people take longer HN and Reddit breaks while at home than they would at the office with their coworkers having a view on their screens. oh, so smoker breaks lol. as long as they're getting the work done, why do you give a shit? >As a broad social trend we need to fight against the retreat from actual human interactions. There's nothing stopping you from doing that outside of work, but you need to be more mindful about doing it

cjpearson 3y ago

The standard argument for office work is that there are some intangible benefits to in-person work and communication that can't be effectively replicated over zoom and slack. The cynical argument is that managers like being able to walk around the room and count their worker bees. The conspiratorial argument is that corporations are in cahoots with commercial real estate developers. There are debates on all these arguments, but your coffee pot standard is the opinion of most hn users.

yodsanklai 3y ago

Because our jobs are collaborative by nature, and zoom can't replace in person interactions. It's also not only meetings. Social interactions are important too. Some of my colleagues became friends, or at least people I feel I can trust in the workplace. This would be hard to achieve purely remote. Now I'm not saying everybody should return to office, and I've been full remote for several years now, and I'm a bit worried that it's not going to last. But objectively, there's value to work in the office. It's not all black or white.

pclmulqdq 3y ago
I have found that what can replace in-person interactions for discussion of thought processes and ideas is medium- to long-form writing. A lot of people either don't know how to do it or hate doing it (so they don't do it), but I believe that it is necessary to have a culture of document writing if you want to be successfully remote. That is a big part of the cultural divide I have seen on remote work. A lot of people who are used to doing long-form writing are very comfortable working remote and building a remote culture (see Hey and Oxide for two big examples). People who do not like long-form writing and want to have meetings instead (eg bank executives and the current YC partners) are pushing for the office. The social stuff is true - a lot of people used to use the office to find friends and romantic partners, and that is not going to happen over zoom calls or essays.
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  Long form writing, while very useful, is no silver bullet. Sometimes the most effective way to make a decision (or just clarify misconceptions) is to get people into the same room and talk things through.
  - pclmulqdq 3y ago
    That's why you write some position papers and then get people on a zoom call with that specific topic when you need to talk it out. No ambling daily standups or weekly standing "progress update" meetings - use focused meetings with a specific topic. This is how many successful engineering and knowledge organizations through the years have functioned (s/zoom call/meeting/).

steveBK123 3y ago

It's also clearly a result of the job market turning for tech employment. The moment the job market stopped being red hot, companies started becoming more and more draconian with RTO. I think a lot of them see it as low risk with possible upside for the employer. Of course for employees who have been remote/hybrid for 4 years now, it's often upending lives for questionable benefit. Your employer doesn't care about you wasting 5-10 hours/week commuting that could be otherwise split between work & family.

ryandrake 3y ago
Good point. If it were customary (or required) that companies pay for time spent commuting, they'd be less thrilled about mandating return-to-office. As it is today, an employee's 2 hour commute each way doesn't cost the company, it costs his family.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  A similar pet peeve of mine are execs who spontaneously demand entire orgs/divisions/teams attend some earlier than normal start time meeting.. or worse, to do so for a new weekly series. It's like a manager time vs maker time thing. Execs tend to be later in their career without young children to attend to, making enough to have a non-working spouse (and/or some "help"). Further they tend to be early risers and while they start the day earlier I observe they end their day earlier too, becoming unreachable long before I punch out for the day. So sure for exec rolling into the office for a 7:30/8 meeting is no big deal. They've already checked train times to ensure it works for THEIR schedule. For everyone else they suddenly need to re-arrange things like school/daycare drop-offs, coordinate with their working spouses work schedule, might need to wake up 2 hours early to buffer for train schedules, etc. Has knock on effects to both spouses schedule the evening before as well. All so the big guy can pontificate.

dataflow 3y ago

> Can anyone break down why these companies want/need people to come back to the office at all? as far as I know, and from everything ive seen, office workers can do this stuff anywhere (even in our shops waiting room.) meetings are all on zoom and VPN is a thing. As an IC whose manager is nowhere to be seen in the office: I find these questions puzzling. Do folks here notice zero difference when their coworkers are present at their office vs. when they aren't? Claiming you "can" do this stuff anywhere feels similar to claiming you "can" fulfil your body's nutritional needs through drinking Soylet every day. Just because you might be able to that (and maybe you prefer to do it personally) that doesn't mean it's enjoyable or a good idea for everyone.

dd82 3y ago
There's a difference between being remote friendly and remote first. the former is "yeah, you can work from home, but you're going to miss out on alot if you're not at the office" the latter is "we consciously make sure to integrate everyone in collaboration, regardless of location and have tooling/procedures for collaboration" If you're asking this question, it might be that you're in a remote friendly environment with explicit lack of communication or collaboration support
- dataflow 3y ago
  No, not every conversation is a "collaboration". Do you dial into Zoom during lunch and coffee too? When you grab a coworker passing by do you start a Zoom call to make sure the whole team can spectate your random conversation?
  - dd82 3y ago
    No, but you also make sure to bring it up in slack or whatever to fill in your other teammates when the material is relevant and useful. Or just because?
    - dataflow 3y ago
      That's... not how it works for any human being. The whole point of a conversation is that you can engage in it while it's happening. You make a point in the middle when it's relevant, and someone replies with something else they feel is relevant. When you've already had a 30+-minute conversation over lunch, no human is going to remember it and copy to Slack, no remote worker is going to go through and respond point-by-point as if they'd been there in person, and no human who has already invested that time and energy in the conversation is going to re-start the conversation at every juncture just to explore alternative directions it could've gone in person. What actually happens in the best case is you give a few sentences of summary if you believe it might impact your coworkers' work, and then schedule a meeting if there's more to discuss. Which (ignoring the fact that even the best people don't always do this) is great, except you could be entirely wrong about whether there was anything beneficial for any coworker to hear. That junior engineer on the team might've been able to overhear how you fixed a problem that was second-nature to you, but now they don't. That dude who just returned to work might've been able to tell you they were interested in picking up the work you were overloaded with, but now they don't. That team lead on the adjacent team you would've grabbed during lunch with might've told you they were planning to handle the larger problem next quarter, but now they don't. etc...

ccppurcell 3y ago

Read "Bullshit Jobs" and you'll understand immediately.

silverquiet 3y ago

I'll throw my two cents in here. First off, I come from a blue-collar background, and actually enjoy building and repairing physical things, though I hate getting under vehicles. So if you enjoy that kind of work, then remember it because working on increasingly abstract systems can (at least for me) feel increasingly pointless. I'll say that in person work has the highest bandwidth for collaboration. You're correct that all the work is done between ears, but in large, complex systems, that means multiple peoples' ears. I'm introverted on a level that most people find weird, but when I need to solve a problem that crosses domains in the systems I work on, typing text into a chat client is painfully slow. I want to get everyone involved on a call. What is best is when we're all together at our desks with access to whiteboards; I loathe trying to whiteboard on screens. There are also management pressures that people chafe against. If your manager just wants to see butts in seats because they want to survey their domain and feel powerful, that is indeed a good reason to reject RTO. But I think good leaders do understand the power of in-person collaboration and can try and ecourage it while also balancing the benefits of remote work. I see this at my current place - our CEO has made it clear that she would like to see people back but has never created any sort of mandate. But some people have returned to hybrid schedules on their own because they find some collaboration helpful. In fact one of the developers and I have made some good progress on goals that have been stalled out for a long time since he started coming in once a week. Interestingly I also see it in friends who are purely remote; they work for companies that do not have a presence in our town. They've actually started joining co-working spaces in order to get out of the house and get some sense of comraderie.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

blululu 3y ago

>> Office workers dont "make" anything. i know that sounds rude but i cant think of another way to describe it...office workers "work" is all between their ears? For some projects the entire scope can fit inside a single head, but as the scope and complexity increase the work happens between the brains. This is where the issue lies. Collaboration is critical for most projects of any real significance. This is where offices are helpful. If you simply think about an individual’s work and not the team’s collective output, then offices don’t make sense. I see a lot of people focusing on management in this thread, but in my experience collaboration is the responsibility of everyone. From an IC’s perspective, I found working at a remote company to be generally unpleasant. People would routinely engage in sandbagging, delays and it would be difficult to understand why things are blocked. I found that trust was lower, and people were far less collegial. This is true to some extent of remote teams as well, so I think there is just something in how the brain works that doesn’t click with taking orders from a television. There are many instances where being at home heads down is much better for getting work done and strict rto mandates are generally unhelpful in these instances. But ultimately the conversations around this typically end up trying to talk past the point or gloss over the bigger issues which is that a healthy and productive team is what matters.

ethanbond 3y ago
Good point to identify collaboration as the more important variable, but of course plenty of orgs figure out how to collaborate effectively while remote. In fact, almost every org that achieves moderate scale will have to figure that out. > From an IC’s perspective, I found working at a remote company to be… What was your control group?
- khendron 3y ago
  > but of course plenty of orgs figure out how to collaborate effectively while remote. Some do, but most don't. Too many companies seem to think becoming remote means just installing Zoom on everybody's computers and sending them home. In reality, there is a lot more to it than that. No remote technology comes close to having collaborators together in a room with a whiteboard, with a well-defined agenda. But while remote collaboration is less efficient, it doesn't mean it can't work. You just have to recognize that things are going to move slower and consensus of opinion will take more time.

sroussey 3y ago

How did you learn to be a mechanic? As an industry, it’s important to teach new generations. A senior engineer with good self discipline can work from home. A great engineer will elevate their team and thus be more valuable than working alone. And this process helps juniors grow. You could learn to be a mechanic from books and then have a service that matches people with car problems with mechanics at home. Why do you need a work site?

Loughla 3y ago
OP works in a diesel repair shop. These aren't mechanics like the local tire and repair shop. My experience with them is from the first 30 years of my life as a full time farmer. They work on yuuuge machinery sometimes. They also do field work when the machine can't come to them. More often than not, these things have to take place at the shop because there are specialized diagnostic and other tools (like a mill or crane like OP says). These are not portable pieces of equipment. So your analogy sort of falls flat there. It would be like the server master (made that up just now and I like it). That person may not be able to work from home, because the physical machinery is important. Otherwise, yes, your point of teaching youth is important.
archy_ 3y ago
>Why do you need a work site? I can think of 3 good reasons: 1. Businesses don't want to remember a bunch of addresses and who sent what where. Even if it's dropped off at a central lot, you'd still need to arrange further transportation from the lot since a lot of the equipment is broken, doesn't even have tires, or is otherwise not street-legal. 2. Diesel mechanics don't usually work on consumer diesel engines - this is heavy equipment. These shops tend to be located along highways for a reason - they need the wide berths highways provide. You'll have trouble fitting a lot of this equipment in your driveway, much less your garage. 3. The shop insurance situation would be a nightmare.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

michaelt 3y ago

> Can anyone break down why these companies want/need people to come back to the office at all? If you rewind the technology job market back a few decades, outsourcing was the big trend. Why have your software written by these expensive American programmers when you can hire 3x as many programmers in Eastern Europe or India or Mexico for the same cost? For whatever reason, this didn't work very well. It wasn't a complete failure, but the results were definitely worse. People wanting to understand why it didn't work came up with a bunch of guesses - one of the most popular was the idea that synchronous, face-to-face communication is vital. Being able to get around a whiteboard and have a discussion, things like that. Meetings where you can see people's faces and see if they're understanding you, instead of just talking at a bunch of people on mute with their cameras off. And of course, if you were a low- or mid-level American manager with a team of expensive American programmers, this idea was popular with you. You want everyone to be convinced your team is great value for money. So we have a load of managers who've spent the past few decades convincing one another that in-office workers are much more efficient than workers who can only be contacted over Skype.