Comment by benja123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by benja123 | Hacker News Reader

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This makes a lot of sense. I don’t think offices are going to disappear but instead companies will mostly move to a hybrid approach where you are expected to be in the office 2-3 times a week.

Most companies and a large amount of their employees were never able to make the jump to remote work mode. That is, they were trying to recreate the office experience while working remotely. The result of this is employees that are exhausted from being on zoom all day and a complete disappearance of work life balance. Moreover I suspect that the lack of in person meetings has also led to a lot of cases of misalignment and in some cases even conflict between different teams. Management sees this and they also get a lot of requests from employees that want to go back to the office which leads them to the conclusion that remote isn’t the best long term solution.

But like I said, this isn’t the fault of remote work but instead the result of companies not adjusting to a remote work mode.

With the hybrid approach they will get the best of both worlds. People will be able to have “meeting” days and “maker” days, which should lead to an increase in productivity without burning out the employees. At least that is the theory, only time will tell.

I see the hybrid model as being the worst of both worlds. Your house/apartment needs to have a room dedicated to working, just as if you were fully remote. However, you still need to live within commuting distance of the physical office, so you can't take advantage of working from somewhere with a lower cost of living.

I assume most people will be allowed to come in every day or most days if they want to. On the other hand, if something like a 4 fay home-1 day office model is commonplace, I'd also expect a lot of companies to switch to hoteling type seating arrangements.

And an arrangement where you have to come in on a weekly basis is certainly going to be much less attractive for remote workers who want to move to lower cost, mountain town, beach, etc.

I agree. The big appeal of remote work for me personally is the option to move somewhere that I can afford. A hybrid approach doesn't offer that.

One nuance of hybrid that often gets dropped is that there's a distinction worth drawing between fully remote and "WFH."

Coming in a day or two a week is only possible if you're still basically commuting distance from an office. It can in principle be a longer commute. But I'm probably not going to hop on a plane or drive 8 hours once a week to come in for a day of meetings. (Though I could once a month for a few days.)

I work at a company that's pretty distributed and remote anyway but I do know people who used to come into an office regularly who have moved out of commuting distance.

Yah. I do think companies will also be more willing to accept fully remote workers, especially ones from niche or high demand fields. But what will ultimately happen is that a fully remote worker in a mostly hybrid company will be at a disadvantage when it comes to promotions. Overall I think it is a good thing, because the option to be fully remote will exist

The big thing that companies won't get with the hybrid approach is the ability to reduce their office space expenses, though -- unless you go to significant amounts of hotdesking (which will be pretty unpopular I expect) then "all our employees are in the office 3 days a week and WFH for 2" still means "we need to provide space for a desk for every employee and our office rental costs are the same as if everybody was still in the office the whole week".

Overall I agree with you though that mostly offices are not going to go away but that there will be an increased degree of willingness to allow 2-days-WFH and similar arrangements, especially in sectors like tech where attracting and retaining good employees is difficult -- it's a relatively cheap perk to offer and the last year has raised corporate awareness of its desirability among some employees and that it isn't actually impractical.

Personally I hope we move to a hot desk approach since it will lead to much less waste, but I do agree with you that it won’t be popular. At least not right now.

Still there is a chance that in two to three years everything goes back to normal and the hybrid and remote model mostly disappear despite its benefits.

What I actually hope happens is that the governments and municipalities encourage companies to adopt a hybrid or remote model. The more people who work from home means less traffic and the need for less transportation infrastructure which could save billions.

Yes, hot desking in a nice new building with open areas and break out pods and all sorts of shit you don't care about, but not enough lockers for staff to store their things so you have to carry a ton of crap back and forth to work hoping a locker will become available one day.

Whenever someone pegs an arbitrary number to the amount of time you have to be in office it reminds me of the government trying to plan the economy.

The goal of hybrid models is to have people in the office when they need to collaborate, then work from wherever for individual work. But it seems like this will be hard to pull off.

If everyone is in the office on different days, then of course you lose the benefits of in-person collaboration. But if everyone is in the office on the same days, then it's harder to meet with people because their schedules might be full or you might not have enough rooms for all the meetings. Sure, you can try to align schedules by related teams, but it will be hard to get perfectly.

I just started a new remote job and have rented an office 45m from my house. The need to do this is related to school drop-off and pickup, but the benefits include:

- no part of our house needs to be dedicated to work

- work starts and stops at regular times

- I have at least 30m of language study time in the car (accounting for conversations with my daughter which will be a priority)

- my office is 5 min from trails I can run at lunch

Working from home, as in the spare bedroom, is a challenge and a buzzkill.

Having a nearby office is brilliant, if you can afford it.

For the last three months, my partner and I have rented an office 3 minutes from home.

The office is huge (88m2 / 950 sq ft), has a kitchen and toilet and separate telephone room, plus has a beautiful outlook on the Amsterdam canals.

No way can I go back to squeezing into the London tube to commute to Oxford Circus or Canary Wharf.

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