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Comment by freyr | Hacker News Reader

This is the most frustrating part of being forced back to the Bay Area. Even before the pandemic, we always had distributed meetings, with people calling in from various buildings, conference rooms, phone booths, etc.

So nothing changes between last month and this month, except that managers get peace-of-mind knowing I’m calling in from somewhere on the premises, and I’m back living in a place where I can’t afford a house.

(I did have previous jobs where we worked on hard technical problems, and spending face-to-face time with a couple colleagues hashing out solutions at a whiteboard was invaluable. But that is not my FAANG job, where the whiteboards are rarely used for anything other than interview questions.)

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I had plenty of interactions at Google over lunch, in the hallway, while taking a break, etc that we brought to a whiteboard and either ended up with a potentially interesting project or saved us time by finding out something didn’t make sense. These often came from a series of multiple, low stakes conversations that were much more difficult to have remotely. I don’t contend they are impossible, but for me they were at least much less frequent during wfh.

Ultimate question is - was it with it?

this outcome can exist remotely, it simply requires effort and maintenance; the gains from working remote are the same scenario, just different context; I haven't figured out yet the specifics of what works because it hasn't been a priority, and what components of it are the quirky part and what are the catalysts for the same outcome (yet); my flaw is thinking outside the box, which managers and companies don't optimize for; in fact in exemplary situations where I led efforts that gained many times the cost of all my work for many years (millions in USD) they didn't notice or care, which I find hard to understand about US corporate and cultural norms; I'm sure there's a relationship between these things, I just haven't sorted it out.

Certainly, interesting work and effective in-person collaboration do exist at the these companies, it just varies a lot from team to team. The trope of PhDs hired to optimize button colors exists for a reason.

After a few years of remote working, me and some colleagues just randomly call each other with “watercooler conversations”. IE About once or twice a day, we are on slack and just call each other to answer and continue talking about random things and ideas

In my experience, this is the closest to just being together in an office without being in an office

I also had those by just doing my work and talking with colleagues about work. At home.

People love (my company included) to say office promotes those low-stake spontaneous conversations that result in something positive. Because these spontaneous conversations don't happen remotely, the argument is that then that something positive wouldn't have happened either. That's a false argument though.

Besides, if a company has responsible employees they will think about work, about their tasks. These types of brainstorming and thinking would come up anyway. And if not exactly this specific brainstorm that came from a lunch-topic, another one.

At the end of the day, right now most arguments are emotional arguments to force people into the office. Those findings that something didn't make sense, would happen anyway if people just think about work and do their job, in the comfort of their home, in the Bahamas, or wherever they choose to work.

>I did have previous jobs where we worked on hard technical problems, and spending face-to-face time with a couple colleagues hashing out solutions at a whiteboard was invaluable. But that is not my FAANG job, where the whiteboards are rarely used for anything other than interview questions

I hope that I get to work on some actually hard problems at some point in my career. Sounds fun :)

Grass can be greener on the other side. Usually hard problems are expensive to solve, and the business end wants nigh endless amounts of justification and planning for those solutions lol. You think you'll be designing cool architecture (and you will!) but you'll also spend a lot of your time making powerpoints and sitting in meetings to "touch base" and "tag up" and whatever lol.

It's odd isn't it? Git went from an idea to being benchmarked in about a month. But tell anybody at work you can rewrite something to fix a fundamental design decision causing issues and they will usually say that will be impossible, take forever etc. While they assign you much longer lengths of time just working around something that was poorly designed.

Those companies have to justify their office leases somehow.

Wouldn’t that just be sunk cost? How does it matter whether or not the spaces are occupied? Are we dealing with some emotional thing here?

If the justification is meant for the shareholders: why not admit they may be right, and lease a smaller office?

A few of them built multibillion dollar campuses, as well.

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