Hybrid work is doomed

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/07/work-from-home-rto-flexibility/661495/

by pseudolus • 4 years ago

44 124 4 years ago

theK• 4 years ago

All in all I think the article starts by meaning well but hinges its position on flawed premises. From the article

There, among the scrolls and codices they copied, religious professionals sat at desks and performed skilled labor that couldn’t be done elsewhere.

That is correct, the office as an institution was created to

1. cluster work and

2. enable work to be done that could not be done elsewhere (because of machinery/materials, etc)

The first cause, clustering and organizing work has been disolved by the organizing capabilities of the modern web.

The second cause has (at least in knowledge work) lost importance due to digitalization.

I think all in all the office as an optimized for work space will endure, companies will still have them and nippy small startups will still share them somehow in the future but I do not think our usage of them will ever return any where near what it was pre 2020, especially not with the commuting lifestyle

selfhoster114• 4 years ago

I disagree that point number 1 has been resolved by technology. As much as I wanted to believe otherwise, following some mid-pandemic soul searching, I decided that digital communication isn't a substitute for personal presence. In-person meetings allow much richer and higher bandwith inter-personal information transfer. You don't always need it, but when you do (for example, during whiteboarding), it's a huge boon.

ajford2• 4 years ago

I've found having camera on full-time during meetings and making use of a $50 usb drawing pad has been a very acceptable substitute for in-person meetings and whiteboarding.

Being able to see the faces and body-language of your colleagues by being on-camera during the meetings solves most of that higher-bandwidth comms that in-person brings, and using either a simple drawing app or even something like MS Teams' Whiteboard app lets you get that whiteboard like experience.

usrn3• 4 years ago

I agree it isn't a substitute but for software dev you really don't need it.

Plenty of stuff gets built with just email and IRC. My team never turns on their camera because it's just an extra hassle and we get plenty done. Most of our collaboration happens over IM and PRs along with a short scrum at the beginning of the day. We used cameras for a few months and it added nothing to the meetings.

A lot of people mention whiteboards. I only do white boarding a few times a year but IME the best is to get a cheap (under $50) drawing tablet and use a whiteboard app (webex even has one built in, I use whiteboard.com for my side projects and tutoring.) One of my coworkers tried pointing a camera at a physical whiteboard and it was super hard to see much of anything.

_benj• 4 years ago

So then employees need to return to the office because The Office must subsist? It truly seems like that is what many companies are saying, showing in the clearest way that they haven’t ever really cared about their employees and all the “great culture” and “we are a family” is all hot air just to take even more from the workers.

I’ve been gauging the values of a company lately based on their return-to-office mandates, because now, like seldom before, we have a very clear metric of what the company values.

A company that truly cares about the well-being of it workforce makes for very effective and highly motivated employees that lends itself to higher productivity and, if managed correctly, increased profits…

_Offices have never been about increased efficiency. Instead, the office has acted as a brake, slowing down a company’s mission to sell products or services_

I think this could signal yet again for disruption in industries. If a company is intentionally throwing away the effectiveness of a happy workforce, a competitor with some common sense could capture that and start killing dinosaurs that might be due to die already.

Anyways, just my two cents :)

jleyank• 4 years ago

If they force their staff back into commuting, it sorta undercuts any green initiative they went on about. Unless, of course, everybody is walking or biking. SV, in other words, is whatever the opposite of green is given its commutes.

jahnu• 4 years ago

“we are a family” is all hot air

Is and always has been nonsense. Team? Yes! Family? Families members don’t get added and removed based on market value. Also the heads of the family don’t split with a huge chunk of the family treasure when a certain goal has been reached, leaving the rest to call someone else father and mother ;)

Always cringed at that one, even when meant well.

slfnflctd• 4 years ago

"family"

It certainly can feel more that way when the majority of employees have worked together in the same place for decades, when management has gone out of their way multiple times to accommodate individuals as difficult personal issues arose, and when most of the staff aren't constantly searching for better pay elsewhere. I have seen it.

However, I think that sort of situation is very much an increasingly rare exception, and unfortunately most of the managers using this kind of language are blowing hot air. It's like success or 'greatness', if you feel compelled to keep telling everyone you have it, you probably don't.

ryanbrunner2• 4 years ago

Even "team" is inaccurate, if they include execs on that team. Execs aren't on the same team as you - if we keep the sports analogy, they're the owners. You shouldn't expect comraderie or putting your team above yourself from the people managing you - if it's cheaper and more effective for you not to be on the team, or for your team to move to a different city, that's what's going to happen.

benibela• 4 years ago

And family cuddles together

blisterpeanuts2• 4 years ago

Employers should offer incentives to work onsite: free (good) coffee and other drinks, free lunches (at least occasionally), responsive facilities management (my chair sucks/my cubicle is too noisy), shuttle buses, maybe a stipend to offset rising transportation costs.

Just demanding people come in, and suffer a decrease in quality of life, is dumb and will backfire.

SkipperCat2• 4 years ago

I find it odd that a professor would not see the value of human interaction that happens when people are in the same room. That's barely touched upon in his article.

Sure, there's a lot of value to working from home. But there is also a lot of value from being in the same room as your co-workers. Engaging in face to face conversations, bonding, joking, etc. I've gained some of my best friends thru work and I just don't think that would have happened over Zoom.

For some individual contributors, 100% remote work is perfect. For some, it's solitary and unfulfilling.

Upgrayyed_U• 4 years ago

Counterpoint: I've actually made some of my best work friends during the COVID working from home era.

A lot of that was due to good leadership. My PM and tech lead setup a Discord for non-work-related discussions and encouraged its use by posting in there regularly. So we were able to replicate, to some extent, the hallway jokes, conversations, and bonding experience. We also had some infrequent but still valuable face-to-face meetups when COVID was at its low points, which also helped with relationship-building. Importantly, most of our face-to-face meetups were social and not work-oriented, so they left a lot of room for developing friendships.

To date, it's been the closest group that I've worked with by far. Many of us still hang out regularly. In fact, I just had drinks with one former coworker and his girlfriend last night. And I enjoyed the company so much that I wound up coming back to it after a short break.

My point is that it's still possible to create meaningful human interactions via Zoom and other digital tools. You just have to be more creative and hopefully work in a environment that properly supports it.

whoomp123424• 4 years ago

it takes proactive effort, but you can create human interaction remotely. It starts from the top with leadership like any culture.

Disclaimer, I am not talking about forcing employees to sit on a zoom call with a glass of wine in their hands on a friday afternoon. That is the most tactless arrogant stupid shit I have seen in a long time.

I am talking about structured, planned, continuous mentoring and fun in the small moments.

cardanome• 4 years ago

So you really think people can't bond online? There is literally people falling in love playing MMORPG's together. I have personally gained a few good friend from good old IRC chats.

You are allowed to bond and have fun on calls. Yes, you can't smell or touch people but that is not something you want in a business context anyway.

Last company I worked with was fully remote and we where super close to each other even though I have never met them in person. I never felt alone. Currently, I am super isolated. The issue is that my current company simply refuses to learn how to do remote properly, so it sucks.

I think it is often simply an ego thing of people who found socializing in the office easy and refuse to learn how to do it remote which has different rules and requires a different skill set.

SkipperCat2• 4 years ago

Not saying that doesn't happen. I hear about it all the time. It just doesn't work that way for me. I learn, grow and bond more in person than I do online.

I hope the people who thrive with remote work do not lose it. But I also hope we don't forget the value of being together.

ruh-roh• 4 years ago

Last Spring (21) when we thought the pandemic was subsiding, we started optional in-office days. I went in one day, stopped by the kitchen, and bumped into a peer I had not seen in a year. Not even on Zoom. Our teams had worked together on something a year or so prior, but the paths of our products diverged. We never had a reason to interact after.

And I'll tell you what -- it was _amazing_. A typical "5-second good morning" conversation turned into a 10-minute catch-up. Which turned into a 30-minute system design discussion. I loved it, we were both juiced. If you could guarantee that all in-person connections in an office would go like that, I would give up remote work in a heartbeat.

Unfortunately, that's not how it works. People get used to the grind, the commute, and their office environment. They don't (generally) bring that kind of impromptu excitement every day. Our interaction was a mix of curiosity, pandemic anxiety, and joy in our work. You can't snap your fingers and expect that to materialize every day.

The bean-counter in me can't justify the millions of dollars in the annual office spend to (hopefully) enable connections like that. Which is why I am fully on the quarterly-or-semi-annual-retreat train. Ditch the office, and point that money towards infrequent in-person events. Pay for people to come in from wherever they are (if they want to). I suspect that's a _much_ better ROI.

thenerdhead• 4 years ago

I think there’s more of a generational shift happening here. People from iGen/Millennials are now old enough to be middle managers and understand the true value of remote work as everyone got a taste of it.

Even with the examples of Microsoft or Apple campuses, think about the miserable traffic on the 405. Employees who live even 30 minutes away are expected to be stuck in traffic for at least an hour one way. All for what? To take one or two meetings that day in person and the rest with people around the world?

People like deterministic days. They like being able to not have to waste their weekends on cleaning from the week beforehand because they’re too busy at work.

I don’t think hybrid work is doomed, just that those who choose to go into the office may be outnumbered by the next generation who prefers to not.

chadcmulligan6• 4 years ago

My current choices are wfh with my nice stand up desk, good chair lots of space, fresh lunch when I want it, healthy snacks, no one looking over my shoulder, no need to worry about my colleagues personal hygiene issues vs returning to the office, the chairs are poor, no standup desks, food choices are limited. Also the lost time in travel - say 2 hours a day I can spend walking, looking at the clouds, listening to the birds. I do miss the interaction in the office, but why would I give up the comfort of work from home.

I think this is a big part of the argument that is not discussed, the office environment is so awful you can take my wfh from my cold dead hands, make the office environment better then we can talk.

smcleod• 4 years ago

You took the words right out of my mouth. For all the exact reasons plus the fact there's far less distractions at home and the really big one:

I get _so_ much more work done working from home, the extra wins I get each week actually makes me more enthusiastic about my job, I have more time so I have less imposter syndrome and because I'm getting more sleep - I remember more.

coffeefirst3• 4 years ago

Yep. I can't help but notice almost everyone who wants to go back has a private office with a door.

Obviously, home office space quality varies wildly, but a whole lot of people who spent their careers until 2020 in open floor plans suddenly got private offices with a door.

I'm not saying I'd never go back to any office, but I'm not interested in a bench desk in big open space again.

turbinerneiter3• 4 years ago

You could also reverse that. All the people who work from home have a house with a separate room to use as homeoffice.

I live in 50 m² flat, my homeoffice is my bedroom. Tiny desk, one monitor. Here in the office I have a huge table with 2 monitors, the electronics lab and the workshop is right behind me and my team sits here.

Not all jobs are the same and not all people are the same. There is good reason to like working from the office. The fact that you prefer working from home doesn't mean that only people with private office at work want to work from the office.

otabdeveloper4• 4 years ago

I don't have a private office with a door in my home.

(At least the office doesn't have screaming kids in it.)

usrn3• 4 years ago

I think I'd be more willing to go to the office if I got a large pay raise to but only because there's cheap housing within walking distance of mine. If I had to commute every day again I'd be pretty upset. Maybe if I could count the drive against the 8 hours I'm supposed to be in the office (so it would be ok to get there by 10-11am instead of 9 and leave by 3-4pm instead of 5.)

blisterpeanuts2• 4 years ago

Also, coffee. Offices usually offer either Maxwell House drip brew, or K-cups. Increasingly, the latter. To me, Keurig tastes like powdered instant. As for sweeteners and creamers, the selection is a bit random.

At the home office, I make coffee exactly the way I prefer. If I want variety, I can take a 10 minute break and pop down to the Bucks or McD’s.

Office kitchenettes… feh.

coffeefirst3• 4 years ago

Oof, I forgot about the kitchenettes. And most importantly, the sponge. I've never seen an office kitchen without a grotesque sponge that was about a week away from becoming sentient and attempting to make awkward small talk.

voisin• 4 years ago

I think this is a big part of the argument that is not discussed, the office environment is so awful you can take my wfh from my cold dead hands, make the office environment better then we can talk.

This is where the conversation needs to go. The office could be great, if businesses invested in the best space and furniture in the most vibrant locations, with a variety of working options. Solitude at home doesn’t breed a good culture, but nor does being forced to go to a shitty building in a soulless location to be uncomfortable for 8 hours a day just because an employee needs a paycheck.

chadcmulligan6• 4 years ago

But this costs money and its easier to just gaslight

cmiles74• 4 years ago

In my opinion, making the office great should also cover a change in how office work is managed. Didn't the work-from-home of the pandemic highlight just how many office workers really do not need to be so closely observed and managed? Perhaps as part of the process of convincing people to return to the office, more control over schedule and the elimination of busy work like TPS reports could also be considered.

ghaff9• 4 years ago

most vibrant locations

Presumably you mean interesting urban centers? That's fine for people who live in the city. It's mostly awful for anyone who needs to regularly commute in. I worked in the relatively nearby major city for about 18 months a few days a week. I even had a pretty convenient commuter rail line. But it still involved getting up before 6am and spending about 4 hours a day to commute.

I don't care how nice the office equipment is or how great the food options are but I couldn't have susstained that long-term.

kcplate• 4 years ago

Here is the thing…WFH became the new normal. I did WFH for 3 years in 2008-2011, went back to office in 2012 until Covid. I hated it…at first, then settled in to the new normal…commute, shitty chair, noise, bad coffee, no afternoon power nap, the whole banana. In time the pain and complaints fade.

Companies may hybrid for a while while WFH jobs are plentiful. Sooner of later, the WFH opportunities will dry or fill up and back to office will be the new normal. Then hybrid will slowly diminish to nothing and in office will be the new normal.

maccard5• 4 years ago

I have a very similar home office setup to you, but not all office environments are 20 year old chairs with burnt nescafe that you pay £1/cup for. My previous job had independent standing desks, modern aerons, noise cancelling headphones, bean to cup coffee, a few floors above a gym, surrounded by varied lunch options.

Also the lost time in travel - say 2 hours a day I can spend walking

My commute to the office was a 35 minute walk each way through a park and a historic city centre. Of course YMMV, but it rubs me the wrong way when people who decided to take on long commutes for better pay talk about how it's being taken away from them and everyone should feel the same way, when lots of people make the compromise of living in a city to not have those problems.

sph3• 4 years ago

My previous job had independent standing desks, modern aerons, noise cancelling headphones, bean to cup coffee, a few floors above a gym, surrounded by varied lunch options

Yeah that sounds nice, but it is more comfortable than your own home?

piva00• 4 years ago

My commute to the office was a 35 minute walk each way through a park and a historic city centre. Of course YMMV, but it rubs me the wrong way when people who decided to take on long commutes for better pay talk about how it's being taken away from them and everyone should feel the same way, when lots of people make the compromise of living in a city to not have those problems.

And for that in a hybrid setup you still have the option to walk to work. You can't expect every soul in an office to be able to afford a central place where you can walk to the office, it's simply not feasible. YMMV a lot, not sure why your anecdote should be taken as an argument, very few people have the privilege to afford a central location to live in, many more have to commute.

scambier• 4 years ago

it rubs me the wrong way when people who decided to take on long commutes for better pay talk about how it's being taken away from them

Sure, everyone happens to live right next to several good potential employers in their field, but instead choses to take a job further away because money.

chadcmulligan6• 4 years ago

My previous job had independent standing desks, modern aerons, noise cancelling headphones, bean to cup coffee, a few floors above a gym, surrounded by varied lunch options.

I have never seen an office like this, except on TV.

whoomp123424• 4 years ago

its about control. Those managing and directing are drunk with das power

anothernewdude• 4 years ago

I just moved cities to one that is nice, cheap, but doesn't have any jobs. Because I'm all in on remote.

I get less sick, can live near nice walking tracks, and don't need to commute.

I genuinely think most very big cities will slowly die, just like they slowly grew.

thefz• 4 years ago

Plus: soundscape hygiene (I can have silence, or music, or anything in between) and of course your own toilet.

selfhoster114• 4 years ago

In no possible universe am I planning to come back to the office full time. My WFH setup is convenient, much better equipped than my hotdesking space can ever be, and importantly - my commute to work is all of 30 seconds.

I like going to the office, I like meeting people there, I like having some meetings face to face. There's a time and place for everything, but for the office, that is no more than 2 days per week.

maccard5• 4 years ago

but for the office, that is no more than 2 days per week.

Agreed, however the problem with this is it only works if I'm in the office the same days as everyone else, meaning we need enough desks for everyone _anyway_ otherwise I might as well just be at home.

selfhoster114• 4 years ago

At my office, people are free to remain 100% remote if they choose to, so some rarely set foot in the office. Those that do choose to meet on the same day, usually meet within the boundaries of their small team - so no more than 16 concurrent desks at one time.

Hybrid work has many possible variants with different trade-offs, that can be tailored the needs and wants of each specific team. It's a branching tree of options that can be sliced every which way, not just a binary choice. Unless it's thought of as a binary choice by the management.

somehnacct3757• 4 years ago

The argument for dooming hybrid is much simpler than this. Hybrid work asks you to live nearby, and to commute; in return you get to escape your home life (kids, spouse, family), and you get access to free cans of soda and bags of chips.

That's all the pros and cons. It doesn't fundamentally change the work experience itself because in any given conversation at least one other person will be having their remote day, forcing the interactions to take place in a remote-friendly way. You can sit at home or sit in the office, but you're still a remote worker. Many people, especially younger ones, won't take the deal. They have no family burden to escape and everywhere else to be. Therefore the return to office is all or nothing.

Any company doing hybrid right now really wants to be fully in office. And they'll boil the frog to get you there.

More interestingly, what will new companies do? Financial momentum is in favor of remote work. The burden of proof is on new companies to justify why they should reduce their runway by 25% and limit their hiring pool by investing in an office in some place. If there really is an advantage or an efficiency to in-person work that could otherwise be remote, we will find it shortly.

DebtDeflation• 4 years ago

Hybrid work asks you to live nearby, and to commute

Only because people insist on defining hybrid as "n days per week in the office where n = 3 +/-1". Let teams and their leaders decide what works bet for the team. My team lives all over the country, and once every 2-3 months we meet in the office for a week. Yes, this involves flights and hotels, and I'm not saying it will work for everyone, but it's working for us in a way that 2-3X per week in the office absolutely would not have.

ghaff9• 4 years ago

Get together a couple times a year was pretty much the situation with my broader team (distributed across at least a couple continents) pre-pandemic. (Travel is still more limited than it was.) I get that some people have an allergic reaction to traveling at all and spending nights away from family. Which is of course perfectly fine and they need to find a zero-travel job.

All that said, tech is something of a bubble with respect to this discussion while hardly completely unique. The few times I've had to go into the nearest major city (not to my office), my take is that rush hour traffic is essentially fully back to pre-pandemic levels--although public transit including commuter rail still seems pretty light.

zeckalpha• 4 years ago

This author's writing style is hard to read at first: do they support in-person work or remote work? Unclear.

Their last few sentences clarified the whole thing for me. The office is an institution separate from where it is physically, and management will work to recreate it (possibly in a new form).

cs1372• 4 years ago

There's a certain rhetorical device being employed here where a hopeless situation is being presented, followed by an intimation that, if workers fight for it, things can be different.

He's right, on the whole. The Office, the institution, gives executives a sense of place and purpose. What fun is it to be in charge if you can't make people squirm? It's not about money for these people (they have enough). It's about power. Of course they want their favorite toy back.

This being said, the Soviet system didn't fall immediately after Chernobyl and neither will global capitalism after Covid-19, but the process seems to be starting. It's possible that things will fall right back where they were; it's also possible that there will be opportunities to force change. I don't think we're even halfway through the Covid era, even if (as I hope) the worst of the disease itself is over.

danielrpa2• 4 years ago

I'm an Ian Bogost fan, but this is a very mixed article. It correctly identifies the need for control of office fans (and companies) and the reluctance of Big Tech to abandon their massive investment in all-inclusive officeplexes. Nonetheless, it provides nothing concrete for supporting that this reaction will endure.

I think there is no way we are going back to the 100% office life for most workers, as we are not going back to horses and carriages.

I'm a hybrid worker departing my position to go full remote. It's not that I hate the office, but it's so wasteful for me. My worst work is done in the office, and my best at home. Coming to the office feels like an anachronism - collaboration is inefficient because of the noise, meeting rooms are crowded (and I waste 5+ minutes to resettle on a new room) and peers are annoying when they chitchat (including passerbys distracting me).

Junior team members, the ones that are supposedly most eager to come to the office, are working from home more than the allowed maximum.

The only exceptions I'm seeing wanting to come every day are brand new hires who need constant help, the odd office environment fans and people who have poor work environments at home (small children).

I think it would be misguided to completely discard the office, as they can serve well in some scenarios including occasional "bonding get togethers" . And for that we'll see highly flexible hybrid, or largely remote, becoming more and more common.

jbigelow76• 4 years ago

Junior team members, the ones that are supposedly most eager to come to the office, are working from home more than the allowed maximum.

Ha, I've seen the same thing. I have two junior-ish reports, and when we started the discussion of eventual return to office last year they both said they would be in all the time to soak up the team building and culture establishment they missed out on. We returned to voluntary office work for those that wanted it three months ago and neither one has made it in a single day, they have stayed full remote (and they get their work done so I couldn't care less.)

neon_electro• 4 years ago

Have you asked them why they ultimately didn't value going back to the office? Not to convince, just to understand.

illiac7862• 4 years ago

massive investment in all-inclusive officeplexes.

This is only true for the biggest offices of the largest companies.

The massive majority of firms are just renting something they could easily stop renting.

They just won't because the decision makers are too used to working on the office and scared of the change. It's really that simple, a simple habit bias of the decision makers.

Question is, how much will they be able to change back before a new generation comes in with less of a dogmatic view.

neilwilson• 4 years ago

It's fairly obvious what Hybrid is.

It's the "Secret Persuasion Mind Trick"[0] to get you back in the office full time.

[0] https://youtu.be/ydchCy5WF_I

thedougd2• 4 years ago

I'm pretty cynical about corporate life and I generally agree. Most places are probably using hybrid as a warm up. However, to my surprise, my employer went the other direction. After six months on the hybrid plan, they found folks were coming in less than they expected. In response, and to my total surprise, they reduced the required/suggested number of days in office and gave most the option to self-elect as fully remote, permanently.

ghaff9• 4 years ago

Anecdotally, what I've seen happening is you have a cadre that really does want to come in most days for whatever reason. But others coming in part-time do their commute to a pretty empty parking lot, hardly know anyone who is in the office, and incrementally come in less and less unless there's some specific coordinated reason to do so on a given day.

cs1372• 4 years ago

But to get there, office workers must organize, and take the goals and power of the Office into account. It does not want to be flexible, and it cares little for efficiency. If the Office makes concessions, they will be minor, or they will take time; hybrid work is not a revolution.

This is the central point, I think. The office can be changed, but it won't emerge through the gradual processes (invariably, out of a worker's favor) preferred by capitalism. The bastards in charge didn't even want remote work in March 2020; it will take a nasty motherfucker of a fight to get anything from them.

The problem is that five-day-per-week WFH is mostly a dead end. It can work if you have an independent, international reputation (of the kind that no employer, except in academia, wants a worker ever to get... and that, if you have, you will constantly be accused of favoring over your assigned duties) but otherwise, it's going to put you at a ceiling. If you're WFH all the time, there will be no investment in your career; you will not be perceived as a "go-getter" or a "high potential worker. You are just trading time for money, which no one really respects. Of course, 90% of y'all aren't going to get managerial investment in your career even if you do go into the office, but the fact that the creeping mutual disengagement isn't acknowledged is what keeps you in a job.

At the same time, spending 40+ hours per week in an office where managers (sometimes unintentionally, often deliberately) fuck with your fight-or-flight mechanisms is extremely unhealthy. So, five days per week of ass-in-chair is no good either. And for half of the population, the long-term illnesses it causes cancel out the benefits. Will it go away? Maybe. I'm worried, though.

I think WFH always be something you have to negotiate for. It'll always be "a privilege". (Reminder: under capitalism, housing and food are privileges.) You'll have to do what people did before 2020: start out on 5 ass-in-chair days, perform well, scale up (you're implicitly allowed one day/week of WFH per year) and perform better on your WFH days (feel free to down-moderate your performance on in-office days). That strategy will remain open, and the public sector may move to a more forgiving structure... but private-sector managers are always going to want, at least, the "right" to demand 5 ass-in-chair days as, if nothing else, a way to punish perceived low performers.

I hope I'm wrong. On the outside, I'm an athletic and good-looking middle-aged man, but I'm invisibly disabled (PTSD, digestive issues, Ashkenazi risk factors for even more serious diseases related to stress, etc.) and, while I should be able to live a pretty good life if I can avoid pointless [1] stress, ten years more of standard corporate culture would almost certainly kill me. I fucking hate corporate capitalism and would fight in a war to end it. Realistically, though, I don't think the office is going anywhere. RTO-ers will get the promotions and they'll make the new rules, and if the last fifty years are any indicator, the new rules will be engineered to seem like improvements but be subtly worse than the old ones.

----

[1] The funny thing about stress is that real stress is a lot less damaging to the body than the low-level dysphoric stress of office life. Being in a life-threatening situation isn't nearly as damaging as spending thousands of hours surrounded by people who have malevolent intentions (i.e., a willingness to deprive you of income, even for the slightest personal benefit) but being able to do nothing about it. It's being trapped that fucks people up.

SilverBirch• 4 years ago

For a very long time I've taken the view that things are almost never as much the way they are as we think they are. We're in a constant state of veering from over to under estimating things.

When the pandemic happened there were a lot of people (especially on HN) screaming about how the office was over and we were all free, we'd be sipping Martinis on the beach in the Bahamas whilst logging on to zoom. Then the pandemic started to recede and a drum beat emerged of how everyone will come back to the office in the end.

I think the truth is neither. Technology and infrastructure has evolved significantly in the last 2 decades bringing us to the point where we can do significant parts of our jobs from home. And for some people that'll be their preference, and for some companies that'll be a preference too. Either because they see it as a way to win and retain talent, or because they find ways to cut costs.

One of the hilarious side notes to this is in the UK where a particular politician decided he was going to insist every civil servant return to the office - leaving passive aggressive notes on their desk if they were absent. Naturally, this politician isn't a details man, and so wasn't aware of the slightly inconvenient fact that the British Government were saving shed loads of cash by not needing desks for everyone and in some sectors, like the Department for Education, the number of employees out number desks by a factor of 2:1.

Hybrid work is here, it's been here for a while. The pandemic just brought more attention to it.

mouzogu• 4 years ago

i always seen hybrid as a trojan horse for back to office.

i think all us desk monkeys with borderline (or fully) bullshit jobs have no good reason to be in an office full time.

zmmmmm• 4 years ago

Well I thought it was going to make a more nuanced point which I semi agree with. I do think "hybrid" work is very challenging because it's half-half - an unstable tipping point. What is the point in half the people being in the office if the other half aren't? You still all end up on video calls and interacting remotely / electronically etc.

So I sort of agree but I think its going to tip the other way: companies will try to do hybrid and it will prove to be hard, annoying, expensive and generally a waste of time so it will tip back the other way to full WFH - possibly with some sort of "satellite office" or "shared office" model which is more distributed and flexible so that when people really want to meet up they have somewhere to go.

roca3• 4 years ago

To a large extent this is what happened at Mozilla pre-pandemic. It was always a remote-heavy group because of its open-source roots, and over time office attendance just eroded away in many locations. I expect this to happen at a wide range of companies as they try to do this "hybrid work" thing.

nathias• 4 years ago

Software developer corpo culture is really weird, there is so much talk about life/work balance startups promote their culture with ping-pong tables, gaming etc. yet none of the engineers even gets an office ...

INGSOCIALITE2• 4 years ago

no commute does it for me 1000%

INGSOCIALITE2• 4 years ago

not having a commute does it for me 1000%

anonymous3442• 4 years ago

One top reason why i quit my job as programmer was that doing the remote days were so difficult to beg every time after the pandemic of 100% remote work perioid. Yet there were 99% no reason or gain for me or for the company that I commuted 2 hours to office every day. Maybe for the other employeers who did not have sufficient office space at home as I have. When I asked the reason why I cannot continue remote work got just mumbojumbo answer and when asked clarification to that.. "cannot explain that right now, it's complicated"

thanks and bye, i'd like to keep my dignity

anonymous3442• 4 years ago

And must add that after returning to the "back to office" strategy, all the employees were super super sick, vaccinated and non-vaccinated, maybe the vaccinated ones 3-4 times longer and sicker. like there were some kind of zombie belief that office work must now start...no matter what..

JofArnold3• 4 years ago

Engineering manager here.

A significant fraction of the people we've been interviewing has asked for hybrid. All 15 engineers in our office prefer it, as well as the 60-odd sales, marketing etc. Working purely remote can be effective for focus time and some personality types, but on the whole I've seen that it's lonely, alienating, worse for developing a group culture and only works for a privileged few who have a separate working space, aircon etc. Worse, it dehumanizes and turns some employees in some companies into basically faceless mechanical turks who are measured only on their output.

I will never go back to 100% remote.

chadcmulligan6• 4 years ago

who are measured only on their output.

How else would you measure an engineer?

JofArnold3• 4 years ago

Good question... onE that people have written countless essays on! Maybe I'll turn it back on you though to give you an idea where I'm coming from: how would you measure the quality of a friend? Some things are measurable, some are not.

Personally, I'm not hiring based on "number of algorithms written per day" or "number of Jira tickets done in a week". For one, I'd almost certainly not get the kinds of people I'd love to work with day-in day-out for years. For another, it strips people of their humanity and autonomy whilst also discouraging contributions outside of measurable work. No doubt other EMs thrive running a faceless sweat shop, but it's not for me.

carschno2• 4 years ago

I wonder why this aspect seems to be neglected in the whole remote vs. office work discussion:

Yet even now, as office space expands like poison gas into our homes, [...]

I am not a big fan of working at an office every day, but I consider effectively giving a part of my home to my employer (so I can work for them) as a significant disadvantage of working from home. Does everyone else just have a spare room which they can use, fully equipped with ergonomic desk and chair, screen etc.? Don't they have partners, house mates, family etc. who would also like to have a say on what happens with that part of the shared house?

What if multiple people in a household have gone to working from home? Does each of them have their own office space at home?

teddyh2• 4 years ago

Where I live, I believe you get a tax break for any extra room and/or equipment you buy but use for work-releated purposes only.

carschno2• 4 years ago

Not sure what you are implying. Some monetary incentive is of course nice, even though I am not sure why the office I use for my employer should be subsidized by the taxpayer.

Anyway, I doubt that compensation would be enough to move to another apartment that does have an extra room which can be used for an office (for each member of the household, if needed).

ghaff9• 4 years ago

In the US, it was always borderline unless it was really dedicated space--which it isn't for the vast majority of people--and going into an office wasn't an option. My tax guy always counseled me against taking a deduction because he said it was a red flag. Opinions may vary of course.

In any case, my understanding is that relatively recent tax law changes make it even less applicable for most people.

roca3• 4 years ago

There are (at least) two powerful forces that will make "hybrid work" evolve into "WFH" at many offices.

What I saw at Mozilla with a remote-heavy workforce is that declining office attendance is a vicious cycle. The fewer people there are in the office on any given day, the less incentive there is for those people to keep showing up.

You can mitigate that to some extent by requiring people to be in the office on a few specific days (as many "hybrid work" programs are trying to do). The problem then is the company has a lot of expensive real estate that's only being used 3 days a week. That seems wasteful. I predict that as leases come up for renewal, and as they get more used to remote work, a lot of companies are going to look at their office investments and downsize or eliminate them. The super-rich Big Tech companies and the like will continue to spend eye-watering amounts of money on lightly used office space and services, because they can, but I don't see how that's going to work for normal companies.

mwcampbell2• 4 years ago

What I saw at Mozilla with a remote-heavy workforce is that declining office attendance is a vicious cycle.

Just curious, are you implying that you think declining office attendance is a bad thing, or just writing from the point of view of someone who does?

usrn3• 4 years ago

Vicious cycle is just dynamic systems jargon. It means something is going to naturally shrink if it gets small.

roca3• 4 years ago

I'm just saying that declining office attendance is self-reinforcing, not making a judgment whether it's good or bad.

FWIW I think remote work has many good effects. It's let me live in New Zealand and do interesting work, for example. I think it's good for communities. I'm generally very pleased by the explosion in remote working. But after working from home exclusively for six years I'm enjoying being in an office.

whoomp123424• 4 years ago

In a compromise, everyone loses.

whoomp123424• 4 years ago

I own a pool. My anxiety has decreased significantly as a result of working from home. Its NOTHING to go and run a test mid day. Its nothing to drop off the pool robot cleaner so it cleans for a few hours when I notice it needs something.

However, when I drove to work, the pool was the last thing on my mind until it was a huge issue.

No thanks to on premise, I am so much happier & productive like this.(its like they WANT us to be less productive lawl)

thedougd2• 4 years ago

Suggestions for executives frustrated with their return to office plans:

1) Recognize that you're paying people for different types of work. You spend most of your days in meetings, but hopefully the majority of your company is heads down on product and services. Different jobs have different needs.

2) Provide incentives! Give your employees a reason to return to the office. Have lunch catered once or twice a week, or more. Provide decent coffee. Add EV chargers. Open a game room or gym.

3) Listen to your employees and try to appreciate _why_ they're asking for something different than what you're offering. Solve their problems.

4) Make sure your network is up to the job. Aggressively fix connectivity both away from the office (e.g. VPN) and at the office (Wifi, Ethernet, etc). Upgrade the damn MPLS that's running an office building with 50 MBps for 500 people, that routes all traffic back through your data center regardless of destination.

5) Fix your conference rooms. Are they easy? Do the gadgets actually work? Can people on the phone cut into a conversation? Can all parties hear each other?

6) Fix the AC that's frosting windows in one office and melting furniture in another.

7) Visit your sites without notice to ensure they meet standards. Eat in your cafeterias occasionally. The food isn't the same as in the executive dining room.

8) Completely rethink the open office space and your other floor plans.

CoffeeCollector• 4 years ago

Remote work is one of the biggest labor corrections, restoring a significant chunk of compensation to workers, since the 1970s. The time saved, avoided fuel costs, and quality of life improvements are huge. The green movement and publications that support it (like The Atlantic) should back remote work 100%. The interests that leveraged the internet to create massive value for their companies don't want you to use that same internet to improve the quality of your work life. This piece by The Atlantic, an otherwise friendly source, is designed to create long established precedent for the office as a place where people gather to work, forever crystalizing it as a physical place for bodies rather than allowing it to transform to a logical collective for minds. Interesting how much work gets done on the Linux kernel, VSCode, and other projects across the globe on GitHub, but somehow we must return to physical offices? No.

belval• 4 years ago

I went back to the office this summer for a month. I came in every day, but there was only a handful of people at any given moment. My commute is 5 minutes so I didn't really mind.

It was awesome, really enjoyed working in an office without all the distractions from home.

Then on a few days a lot more people came in and it was so loud I had trouble focusing (idiotic open-space WeWork office), and I remembered why I disliked working in an office in the first place.

For some reason in software engineering there is an insane level of disrespect for the workers. We get big empty rooms with +50 desks. The overwhelming majority weren't from my team so the ever present chatter wasn't even relevant to me.

I love interacting with people from my team, but the current office situation is simply too pathetic for me to forgo my quiet home office.

ghaff9• 4 years ago

That used to be quite common for rank and file in engineering (and presumably other professions generally. https://images.app.goo.gl/AUmJgX6DsJCDJapg8

And, yes, white shirts and ties too. Hardly something unique to modern software engineering.

anotherhue• 4 years ago

The only distinction that matters is: Do you have a good home office?

Many do not.

cheradenine_uk• 4 years ago

I think Sinofsky is the best thing I've read on the "office" subject:

https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/creating-the-future-of...

This really resonated with me:

  "It will be tempting for some to continue to believe we will return to the old normal and operate as we once did.

  It will be tempting for others to search for a few changes and make those permanent and hope the rest will go back to normal.


  Still others will firmly believe that some approach that picks the best changes and just adds them to what was going on will be the path to the future.


  If these patterns sound familiar it is because they are the patterns of a failed response to a disruptive change. The idea that everything stays the same except for a few changes around the edges caused every incumbent to lose in the face of step-function change."

TYPE_FASTER• 4 years ago

Over the last 20yrs, productivity gains enabled by IT have resulted in some form of IT being almost a requirement for most companies. Even when SaSS replaces some function of internal IT, specialized IT takes its place and enables further gains in productivity. It has been really hard for companies who need IT to compete with newFANGled companies when hiring. If Apple and Google do force people back into the office, remote work will be a benefit to those companies who need to hire.

Apple and Google have invested heavily in real estate. Google has over 1mil sqft in NYC. What's going to happen to all that space? My guess is it will take about 5yrs to know. There's going to be some big change to commercial real estate would be my guess.

hn_version_0023• 4 years ago

Ultimately, the choice most people seem to be making is this:

Do I want to devote nearly all my waking hours to work or do I want to have some modicum of personal time that isn’t devoted to making other people money?

When looked at through that lens, the “WFH debate” seems wildly stupid. The C-suite better wake up to the fact that this is the choice, not the BS narrative they’re pushing. Collaboration isn’t what feeds their egos. Controlling the lives of others is what does, and we can all see it now. The flimsy protests otherwise only make execs look petty and small. The jig is up bros.

kkfx• 4 years ago

Few sparse considerations:

- WFH to be done well demand a home office, witch means a room with electricity, connectivity, A/C|heating, furniture, ... and a lockable door. This room should be offered to the company in exchange of a contracted fee and then the remote work can be done. This means not all potentially eligible for such jobs can do that in their own actual accommodations and demanding such kind of home office is a good way to make WFH a serious way to work instead of a temporary setup or a way for modern tertiary sector slavery;

- hybrid work is a NONSENSE because demand under-utilized offices and people living near enough them, double or movable gears, commuting etc. Oh hybrid does not means of course meeting sometimes to form new teams etc.

- offices are not a break to innovation are just a way to work, one needed in the past, far less needed now and being in a transitional phase habits play a bad role and that's the real break...

albertopv• 4 years ago

From march 2020 to june 2021 I worked from home almost every day. My daughter and wife also stayed at home. Due to space issues, noise (I live near a military airport) etc, my home office was in the basement. A totally unpleasant experience. I changed job also to go back to a real office.

xtiansimon• 4 years ago

My office had a policy of flexible home/work before Covid. The default attendance was at work, but working from home was possible at any time provided you worked out any issues which normally require your in person attendance.

This flexible policy is evidently very progressive. How many people could say that was the case before Covid?

Today managers have answers to the unknown factors: employee home office setup, employee competence for maintaining their home computer, and de facto productivity.

I don’t see how we ever go back.

illiac7862• 4 years ago

Reading this article, it feels like the first "return to office" was when Louis XIV ordered all the nobility to come live in the Versailles castle. Politics, power plays, control, structure...

Simply it was not a "return" but a "first time in the office".

I'm sure he had to squash some relictance as well.

Hybrid work is doomed

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