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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

I think some sort of highly flexible model is long overdue. So, not a complete abandonment of the office, but people will no longer be forced to go in.

There's things that are hard to communicate even over vidconf, and thus it's useful to have at least some human contact. On the other hand, it's very useful for people with families to be able to shift their working hours around, and a fair few jobs would allow that.

I foresee a lot of firms reducing the offices, maybe making what's left a bit nicer, and then letting people take care of their own time. Perhaps something like a day or two in the office for meetings, the rest of the time work from home but be in contact.

Managers will have to let go of the desire to see that everyone is in their seat.

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There are so many issues at play. However managers is a very narrow and should be expressed as Management. This goes all the way to the top and involves compromises as even a CEO/President is not going to be absolute in authority to declare one way or another. You don't get to that level without compromise.

The fear many have is they already know they have problem people and that the option to work from home will not fix this problem and instead possibly make it worse. This means the lack of action on management's part beforehand is going to brought to the forefront, unless of course they want to continue to kick the can down the road and ignore people they should have dealt with already.

Plus my favorite, for those renting space it comes down to how prestigious the address is. Quite a few in management derive a lot of status from where they work. Then throw in the companies that own their sites, that investment is hard to part with and many have dolled up their interiors to impress both visitors but also employees.

Then comes the majority of people who have jobs which will never work from home. It would be interesting to run the numbers to see how many jobs in a country could even be done remotely.

>It would be interesting to run the numbers to see how many jobs in a country could even be done remotely.

Around 34%

https://news.uchicago.edu/story/much-us-staying-home-how-man...

I bet that number skyrockets once you remove the jobs that only exist to support an "in office" economy.

Food workers for lunches. Clothing workers for suits. Automotive industry +public transit for commute. Construction and maintenance for offices. Furniture (where duplicated from the home). "Office managers"... On and on it goes. Those jobs will disappear and so the denominator shrinks, increasing the percent done from home.

That's actually kind of scary. This means that if the WFH trend continues after COVID, many of the jobs lost will never recover.

I live in a planned work/shopping/living area, and I've already seen several of the traditional office lunch places close for good. I'm sure the high end suit place is not doing well at all.

> Managers will have to let go of the desire to see that everyone is in their seat.

Was it front-line managers who thought this or directors and VPs? Front-line managers have a better pulse on what their team(s) are doing by keeping an eye on Github/GitLab/VSTS checkins, PRs, and kanban boards than by seeing who has a butt in a seat. It's usually the more senior (and disconnected) managers who get nervous when they don't see their domain fully staffed between 9am and 3pm.

It’s been mostly the C-level people in my experience. Before covid, I worked for a company that required everyone to physically be in the office for 8 hours and asked us to set our arrival and departure times with the director of engineering. That was a pretty extreme case, but that all came down from the CEO, who was obsessed with “visibility == productivity”.

At a previous job the CEO visited an office on a Friday and found a half-empty office due to many people taking a WFH Friday

So they cancelled WFH Fridays

I wonder what they think of WFH now

I remember my VP saying one time "the CEO is going to be in our office this week, everyone needs to be here, no questions".

We have a rule in our office that, if you leave the office, you leave your light on.

We have an administrator who gets visibly upset if it appears that we are not in our office 8-5 at least.

And the programs I work with (outside of tech) work offsite. If they're here, they're prepping. The real work happens out in the community.

Old timey work mentality = broken.

> I foresee a lot of firms reducing the offices...Perhaps something like a day or two in the office for meetings,

would you invest in wework if they become the biggest provider of these prefurnished, time-share offices?

If they did a good job to ensure a sense of safety (making sure everything is cleaned and sanitized all the time etc) yes.

The fear I have going back to the office is people just touching stuff, door handles, glassware in the kitchen, etc. Being on top of every tiny violation is a new concept and a huge lift for any small/random company. So who knows, maybe this could be a good opportunity for wework.

Even if you think WeWork will disproportionately benefit... (And I'm not sure it does; do you want to be mixed in with employees from different companies that may have different rules about travel, behavior, etc.) Commercial real estate is likely to be an overall bloodbath.

Well, investment has a price, and there's always some level where a viable business is not a good investment.

I do think that WeWork offer something useful. I've been in them, they have a good vibe, and I think certain segments will decide it's worth using them.

But the comparables are firms like Regus, which is valued like a ordinary business with a known business model that is quite similar. They even have their own startup-vibe buildings.

Could they ever generate positive cash flow doing it? They are leasing general office space and customizing it to mark it up? If that’s ever profitable to do won’t their biggest competitors be their own landlords?

I think WeWork is one of the biggest losers of the pandemic. They have a massive amount of lease obligations, likely biggest in the world, right at the moment leased office space became far less valuable.

Even as the pandemic eases, do you think being in a shared office environment with strangers is going to be popular? I can’t count on people wearing masks at a restaurant, do I really want to share with a never masker in an open floor plan when I don’t even have a door or a wall?

> Perhaps something like a day or two in the office for meetings, the rest of the time work from home but be in contact.

On the last days before covid WFH I was still going into the office (against better judgement) because we had meetings

When I got to the meeting room I found I was the only one there. The other attendees were either in a remote location or WFH

Would you want everyone from the same team going i to the office on the same day during a pandemic? Probably increases contagion risk.

Would a company want everyone from the same team in the same location?

Established companies with well-defined processes seem to have adapted to WFH. I wonder how early stage startups are doing with WFH as communication is much more frequent in their case.

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