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Comment by JohnBooty | Hacker News Reader

What is going on in this conversation thread?

There are two camps that want something mutually exclusive (work from home vs work in office). Additionally, in order to get what they want, they need the other group to comply.* The struggle is spilling over into the comment threads.

* If everyone works in the office, and the work from home people are still remote, they get passed over for promotions and basically have a good chance of tanking their career. If everyone works from home, the work in office people lose a lot of human interaction that they need on a human level.

I still find the replies to my personal experience very baffling. I didn't say what anybody else should be doing; I didn't present it as a universal truth.

It seems very clear to me that there is room for a variety of workplace types. Strictly in-office, hybrid, and strictly remote.

I said I enjoyed getting together with my coworkers; I also said my ideal situation would involve spending a majority of time remote.

Requiring any amount of office time completely eliminates the most meaningful advantages of working remotely.

Is that really true? Even a quarterly offsite can be accommodated from almost anywhere on the world.

It’s loss aversion. Many people perceive office environment to be unpleasant for various reasons (long commute, psychopathic coworkers, noisy, lack of privacy) and so now they have tasted freedom they have a strong negative reaction to losing it.

I just said I enjoyed one week in the office. After four years.

I'm not advocating for folks to stop working remotely. I'm not advocating anything.

I'll certainly never share another personal experience on HN, that's for sure.

At this point, the mere existence of the other group is a danger to what the first group sees as their interests. The human instinct is to minimize the other group, making their group appear larger, and strengthening the argument that their interests should prevail.

Someone who wants to be completely untethered from the office is threatened by someone who wants to work in the office a couple days a week. It means they will have to choose between moving and having job prospects within a much smaller area.

I think there’s a lot of WFH folk who are worried less about promotions than they are the availability of WFH jobs in general.

People who favor that style of working viewed COVID as a transformational event, and are going to push back hard on anything/anyone suggesting a return to the previous status quo, where WFH was something you had to be a relatively special snowflake to be afforded by many/most companies.

> I think there’s a lot of WFH folk who are worried less about promotions than they are the availability of WFH jobs in general.

I feel like this was covered in the "tanking their career" part of my statement, but fair. It's rather important, I guess it deserves an explicit call out.

Resentment from people who have been held mentally hostage by their socialite coworkers who wander around interrupting others for a significant portion of their day.

I enjoyed one single week of office work after four years of being fully remote, and plainly expressed my preference to continue being remote a majority of the time.

I also don't interrupt others in the office, thanks very much. I've worked with those sorts of people (who hasn't?) and I resent them as well.

You enjoy being remote 100% of the time? Cool. I think there is clearly room for a variety of employment arrangements: fully remote, hybrid, fully in-office (yuck). I think you should do what's best for you.

That’s not how this works. There’s an extreme bias toward butts-in-seats. “Everyone should do what’s best for them” is a nice sentiment, but not how the world works at all.

There are a lot of people currently enjoying remote work who are rightfully worried about being forced back to the office for what they perceive as zero benefit. I’m not one of them, but I get where they’re coming from.

    but not how the world works at all.

Counterpoint: competition (and coexistence) between various approaches is most definitely how much of the world works, much of the time.

Companies succeed by hiring the best people and setting them up to do great work.

I think the future in many large firms will be to pair full-time remote folks with others who enjoy full time remote. There are sure to be many hybrid and full in office teams as well.

A similar transition occurred a decade ago when companies moved* offices to cities and away from suburban campuses.

* for some definition of “move”

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