Ask HN: What do you think about 3 days a week work from office?

[samrohn777]

As companies are planning to return their employees to office, 3 days a week work from office seems to be the dominant option provided to the employees. Do you feel you will be more productive with this approach ? What are the other options provided by your company other than fully remote ?

[ketanmaheshwari]

I feel like a hybrid approach is the worse of all options. One will have to context switch and manage two work environments. It is fully WFH or on-site for me and I'd chose WFH out of the two.

[freetinker]

I agree with you. Though I'm hoping (or wishfully thinking) the law of unintended consequences will make hybrid work a winner. As amazing as WFH is, one drawback is the discipline to create and maintain work/play boundaries. I feel that 3 days in office will create an emergent culture which will effectively reduce the length of the work week and expectations around how many hrs a week one ought to work.

In other words, the "min 40 hrs per week" cultural standard will evolve to "24 hrs a week". I'm speaking broad strokes, of course. If you need to spend X hrs a week to do your job, that's what you'll end up doing.

[ShakataGaNai]

Hybrid remote, or part time... just isn't great. You end up in the office, in a conference room... each on your own Zoom call because half your team is remote still.

Better is full time wfh with an occasional visit in person, with an agenda. I'd much prefer to go to an "office" once every two weeks and have basically all meetings, then be able to go home and get stuff done for the rest of the time. Will there be other meetings other times, of course! But you can push bigger things, brainstorming type meetings, to be in person.

[Wowfunhappy]

My company is doing "all-in" days—so, the days the people come to the office, everyone else is in too.

I still don't think this is great for the reason given by ketanmaheshwari above, but certainly an improvement.

[el_dev_hell]

I was in the interested cohort of long-term remote workers before COVID.

One company I worked at attempted a hybrid remote experiment. It was awful at every level.

Having half a business in-person and the other half remote creates a massive rift between the "real" employees and the cogs (yes, it's company dependant and some business has probably made this strategy thrive, but it takes a lot of work).

Eventually, in-office was mandated. I quit a few months later.

I watched this partly unfold recently. Luckily, this company decided to scrap the office outright and now the entire company is distributed across the country (and a little international).

I would not accept partial remote as an engineer.

[leet_thow]

You'd still have to live in or near dangerous, overpriced, politically extreme cities. Fully remote will be the only acceptable arrangement for a substantial portion of experienced knowledge workers. This is the most quality-of-life progress I've seen in my lifetime to be honest.

[necovek]

I'd jump at an opportunity for 3 days a week even if the work was from the office :)

[Graffur]

I think an hybrid model incentivizes employees to work long hours at the office because 1) they have already made the commute and 2) it's visible to their peers and micro managers. I think those people will then slack off at home to balance their working hours. It will be like working compressed hours unofficially.

[muzani]

When lockdown was on and off, it had the opposite effect. People would slack off more because they were visible at their computers. And they justified slacking off at work because they just spent a couple hours commuting. You can't say that someone who's at their computer all day isn't doing their best, but the results were clearly showing that everyone was getting half as much work done.

Pull requests generally ping the whole team, so during wfh, some of them would do it well into the night to prove that they were working hard. It's probably a bit of politics to show that remote was more productive too.

[throwaway81523]

I very much want to stay away from sharing indoor space with other humans for the foreseeable future. All of them (including me) have to be presumed virus spreaders. If you have to be in an office, ventilation is important because the virus is certainly airborne despite CDC and others running away from this (acknowledging it would complicate a lot of protocols I guess).

You can get a fairly affordable CO2 meter (like $50, don't get the $10 kind that measures VOC as a proxy for CO2) and use that to indicate how much of the air you inhale was previously exhaled by someone else. School classrooms are showing 2000+ ppm of CO2. Ignoring the controversial topic of whether so much CO2 impairs cognition, that really does seem to be enough re-breathed air to spread infection.

I could handle going into an office at times of day when no one else was around, but that probably defeats the purpose.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/opinion/coronavirus-airbo...

[smartician]

I don't have to return to the office until January (for now), but am voluntarily going twice a week now, just to take advantage of all the amenities, bond with co-workers and have a change of scenery. I think I will be happy with 3x per week.

I could apply for full remote and would probably be approved.

[sethammons]

I worked 3 days in, 2 days remote for a couple years. I actually prefer it in a lot of ways. I've been full remote now going on my 4th year - I decided to move far away. I do miss the in person team feel. I used to do more meetings in the office and more heads down work from home.

[maxharris]

A better idea: if your company isn't remote, quit. Find a company that is, or start your own.

[jstx1]

That's if you like remote.

It works both ways - if you don't like remote and your company is forcing you into it, quit.

[marto1]

I definitely like the flexibility – and I can do 5 days in the office if I want to. Although full disclosure my contract did come with 2 days remote included pre-pandemic so I did in fact sign up for it :-)

[pwason]

3x 12hr days, then 3 days off. Over a year, the employees get more days off and more paid hours, and the employer gets more hours worked. Works for me.

[runjake]

I envy your ability to put in more than about 6 hours of real work in a day. Actually, even 6 every day may be stretching it.

[mickotron]

I quit my job over it. There were some other considerations, but that was a bit part of my decision.