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Comment by mmvora | Hacker News Reader

I've had days where I come to the office, go on a bunch of zoom meetings, and leave. At that point why force in-person attendance??

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I have had those. Worse is that everyone has different work from home days and on Thursdays I'm the only person on my team in the office - so I get up early, make the commute into the office, talk to no one face to face, attend meetings remotely (but have to book a meeting room for privacy), then commute back home. It's a giant waste of time.

Don’t complain about that or you will end up with forced telework days. Our office now requires everyone in office TWTh, where so preferred working MWF because of how my work products and some meetings are scheduled. Telework and flexibility are at risk here.

Our team has specific days we are all in the office (and we all get lunch together that day) which helps. The commute to an empty office does really suck. All the energy and value of being in-person around your peers is lost...

I get that...and honestly thats why I do still look forward to going into the office once a week, but thats only when I know I can have real interactions with great people :)

Pointing this out and complaining about it isn't going to make the office disappear its just going to make forced in office days appear.

I don't point it out at work. I sit quietly doing work with noise cancelling earbuds in and think about finding a job that doesn't make me come into the office 3 days a week.

RTO is never going to work with my team. More than half of my teammates are remote, and unlikely to move if asked. We’ve already lost one person that way. I used to have a private office, but when I came back they moved me to an open floorplan seating arrangement. I now don’t sit next to anyone I work with who are local, nor do I know what the people next to me even do. No conference rooms are ever available for meetings, and most of the people I collaborate with at this point aren’t in my office anyways and I know exclusively from webex and slack. I usually just take meetings from my car in the parking lot. And damnit, they “renovated” the office but it’s now just a collection of misshapen rooms and white walls.

I can’t believe I get paid as much as I do at such a reputable company and this is the current state of things. I feel like a dog being dragged on a leash by whatever god-emperor exec made this decision. Sorry for the ramble, but I’m sitting in bed procrastinating going to work when I could alternatively just pull out my laptop right now and get things done.

I feel you. I did a somewhat controversial thing when I was in a similar situation (I had to attend an online meeting and actually present something but all meeting rooms were usually occupied by people who wanted to work in peace). So I made the effort to be anti-social and spoke quite loud in the open space to make sure everyone left, including the CEO heard me well. Nobody dared to approach me and discuss my behavior because, well, they understood the idiocy of the situation. I left the company a few months later anyway as nothing changed and they insisted on hybrid work with no private offices.

I'm sure you know the answer to your question is "because they can".

All the current layoffs and rollback of WFH are directly related to power gained by employees during the COVID emergency. These useless stuffed shirts want to return to the good ol' days, when they barked and we jumped. No more.

The jig is up fellas. The banks are broke, the workers are pissed, and this attempt at rolling back worker power will fail.

I had a job where I was the only person on my team in the office location, but I was expected to work in the office. All of my teammates were in other states.

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