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Comment by shafyy | Hacker News Reader

There's nothing wrong with that, and I have many friends that like the social upsides of having an office.

But I think it will become increasingly common to divide social life and work in the future. Imagine the following: You have a few good friends in Berlin and each of you work for different companies. But you all work remotely. You could rent a small office space with your friends everyone could work from there, but on different things. You can grab coffee together and talk about metal bands, you can grab lunch together, and you can get a drink after work.

I for one, would prefer this setup, then being force into a location and social life that I don't want to be part of. Sure, you can be lucky and meet great friends at work, but often times this is also temporary - people leave teams, people leave companies etc.

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Every time that this topic comes up it goes the same way. I wish that we could all collectively agree that this is a PREFERENCE. One way is not objectively better than the other. They both have trade-offs. We could actually make some progress if we focusing on having WFO and WFH people better able to collaborate together.

One anecdote: I've been working fully remote for the last year. I prefer WFO but such is the world today. It is been going okay for the most part. Everyone is pretty good on Zoom and Slack.

Recently we all came in to the remote office to meet each other for the first time and do some planning for future features. It was an absolute disaster. Everyone has forgotten how to have a meeting outside of Zoom. 5 conversations at once, constant interruptions, etc. We also had some people calling in to a Zoom that the in-person people were on. This is also usually a complete disaster. The remote people have almost no ability to break into the in-person conversation.

IMO, this is the thing that needs to get solved. What process/tools can we add to a hybrid Zoom call to make it productive? What process/tools can we use to help WFH people adjust to in-person meetings? What process/tools can we change/use writ large, so that the WFO vs WFH choice can truly be an employee preference and not a mandate BUT still be a productive endeavour?

> I wish that we could all collectively agree that this is a PREFERENCE

If you read my comment, that's also what I'm saying in the first sentence. I think the issue is that living that preference within one company is really hard. A remote-first culture is usually very different from an office-first culture. I would never want to work remotely when most of my team is sitting in the same room every day (done that, been there).

So, what will happen is that will be an increasing number of remote-first companies, and people who like to work remotely, will work there. This way, the preferences can be shown.

What will the remote-first companies' share be of total companies? Who knows...

Crazy that it turned into a disaster. Ours went so well that we wanted more of it even after the in-person event. We only had one person on Zoom though. I don't know your situation at all, but it sounds like people felt the need for multiple conversations that may have been pent up like a dam til that meeting.

> But I think it will become increasingly common to divide social life and work in the future.

I am pretty sure that is a already the case in most of the world. The exception really is Asian and US work cultures (and perhaps specific worspaces like Academia or Startups).

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