[throwaway290]

Been remote for 15 years, recently started full time job, love going to office. No strict work hours but I come anyway, nice to chat with colleagues (and much more productive than those tedious calls or text chats). Also I was already making myself leave home at least daily for physical activity, so if I'm out why not travel to the office? There's a nice coffeeshop near there. Also the chair is comfy enough, desk is adjustable etc.

So no, to say it's "bullshit and everyone knows it" is just pushing for some agenda. I wish everyone can have their way, if you don't want to come to the office then don't, employers should make it possible, but don't make it sound as if everyone hates it, it's just wrong.

[variants]

As someone who works hands on so I have to work at the office I really wish more people fight to stay home, the commute was so much nicer with people working remote plus the office was much nicer to work in without all the noise and distractions

[grogenaut]

I agree with this but the obvious outcome is that if you're 1 person in a 200 person office floor, your company will consolidate 200 floors into one and it'll get noisy again. The same cost function still exists for office space.

I'm very with you on the commutes tho. I live in Seattle and Mondays and Fridays are like driving on Thanksgiving (a major holiday in the US when no one drives and even the roads in L.A. are clear), and Tuesday is worse than the before times. Wed/Thurs are a bit better than the before times though so I just go in on those days (that's also when we tend to have happy hours).

[throwaway290]

If you use public transport it works better (more cost efficient to run = more frequent) when more people use it, so my commute would not get better if people stayed home.

But I agree on the last part, I prefer it when certain coworkers WFH. TBH some days I strategically choose my office hours so I overlap with them less.

[jacobr1]

I've enjoyed both environments. Having an in-person, highly engaged, collaborative environment is fantastic. Having a remote first, well-considered remote team is great.

But having a mostly in-person, and some-people remote setup, where the remote folks are left out of the hallway conversations sucks. Having an "in-person" setup, where your team is distributed between building locations and remote sites, and you can't ever schedule conferences rooms and you are working in a cube-farms/open-office sucks.

The key is finding a way to be engaged with your colleagues remote or local, and figuring out how to scale that.

[grogenaut]

I was in a remote office from the main one before and about 30% of the time people would forget to dial in, and another 20% of the time the AV setup would be broken. They ironically got that all fixed during the pandemic, and it's great now. At the minimum the default is you will be on VC now and so it makes it much better for everyone, and everyone has the hardware all figured out.

We had a large onsite last week and a ton of the young engineers said to me "people told me stuff immediately in person that I've been trying to find out for months". Humans are still kinda humans.

[ryandrake]

It definitely takes discipline and a little culture change. I work for a company where teams are spread across many offices, so the company culture is: there's a video conference for every meeting. Period. End of story. When you walk into the conference room, you press one button and the VC starts. Everybody does this, and it's engrained. So, thanks to this discipline, remote workers are never left out.

Same goes for the "hallway conversations." You just got to get out of that company-habit where major decisions and information transfers happen in this ad hoc way. It takes discipline (often on leadership's part) to properly document and communicate. Again, where I work, we would never consider "Oh, I talked to Director Xyz in the hallway and he said our focus is on the Foo project rather than the Bar project now" to be any kind of official guidance. Totally unacceptable.

[strogonoff]

In-person, same-air is objectively different experience from a video or audio call—higher bandwidth, unmediated, spontaneous, visceral… not something one can “get out of” as if it was just a habit.

Perhaps some find IRL distracting, so they suffer less and have easier time compensating for the difference between in-person and remote. Meanwhile, some others are good communicators who thrive with and make the most out in-person, and for them it’s more of a challenge to WFH. I personally suspect many of those who want to WFH are naturally not that great at remote communication without realizing so.

I personally had insightful office conversations that started as tangents from semi-idle chance chats and would be impossible remotely, since in an online meeting you must be mindful of others’ time because you don’t know how busy they are (IRL you can sense if a person would rather be doing something else, but you know it can be perfectly faked remotely—so you will never have a chance convo; meetings must have agendas—culture!—and once the agenda is over, everyone gets to be free). Such random conversations can easily alter the course of whole projects.

I don’t see WFH vs. RTO as a black-and-white, high culture vs. lack of culture, good vs. evil sort of battle; more like people have different natural tendencies, life circumstances, desires, and everyone wants it to work best for them.

[grogenaut]

Yeah we didn't even have that one button integration until 2019 and it didn't work well and the mics were all broken. They started leaving usb jabra mics in the conference rooms to supplement the very expensive cisco setups. That's mainly fixed now.

Interesting on the hallway conversation thing. I have no idea how I'd handle that.

[GenerocUsername]

Sounds Nice. If my office was within 15 minutes of home I would be there frequently. Dropping in and out for chit chat and activities.

But it isn't.

The only housing within 35 minutes of my downtown office is small, expensive, high-rise apartments and condos. And there literally are not enough of those to serve the abundance of offices in that area, so it is literally impossible to provide even that meager standard to everyone.

[switchbak]

Similar here, been doing part time remote since '06, full time since '11. There's ups and downs to both sides.

I get "more done" remotely, in that I can usually have more time for deep focus. But then it's harder to get high-bandwidth knowledge transfer sessions, and overhear when someone has some particularly bad ideas (or roads you've already been down, etc).

I think I still prefer the remote side, and it's probably a better deal for the biz, but I would like to spend a few days here and there with like minded people on shared problems.

[nurettin]

You probably like people and are comfortable with whatever you excelled at. And you probably don't have an inner voice comically second-guessing everything you are about to say, causing you to act timid and awkward around others.

Qualities missing from most people at the office.

[throwaway290]

It depends on my mood. Some days I say hi and then only keyboard noise. I probably look like a robot then. Other days may talk more. And second guessing is a thing, but feeling good after social interaction is also a thing...

But it's a small open office. Probably in a big open office it can be worse if many coworkers are distracting. I can see how I would hate that and it would hamper work.

[and0]

That's totally valid, also. I do sometimes miss the office, particularly from when I worked in a healthy office culture, but would want it to be optional.

[harvey9]

You've made a reasonable proposal. But the writer of the blog wasn't offered anything so reasonable and that's why they're mad.

[throwaway290]

Exactly right, the real title should be "my employer sucks and working conditions are not reasonable".

But no, the writer titled "return to office is bullshit and everyone knows it", which phrased like that is patently false.

Return to office can be a problem if some other conditions are true, like your office sucks, you are made to clock in clock out at inflexible hours, commute is inconvenient, etc. Why not talk about that.