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Comment by marcosdumay | Hacker News Reader

Non-imposing mixed work as in "and we supply an office if that's your thing" is basically the same as WFH, so it can't be the worst of both worlds.

Task-based mixed as in "those activities require coming to the office" doesn't create a lot of problems, but you will discover that workers will demand some incentive to engage on those activities.

The one that is the worst of both worlds is just the "we require your presence 3 times a week", but that is just the failure mode the article talks about presenting itself on a different way.

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As soon as it’s mixed in anyway, it’s the worst of both worlds. The company has the overhead of maintaining an office building, people cannot move to low cost of living locations, companies are restricted to hiring candidates that live within a 30 mile radius, meetings will automatically cater more to those present in the office instead of diving completely into remote first, there will be an unspoken pressure to come in more often etc. It truly is the worst.

It doesn't have to fail that way. The company I work for has an office, but there's no pressure to use it, and we hire people from anywhere within a reasonable time zone overlap. We are all on Slack all the time, and all of our meetings are video based. I was 100% remote for a while, and that worked fine; these days I'm in the office more days than not, and that's working fine too. I think mixed office/remote the way we're doing it is actually the best.

Have you ever attended a meeting where some people are remote while others are gathered in an office? That's often worst of both worlds. The alternative of just having everybody use zoom even if they're in the office disturbs everybody else in the office.

I do this literally every work day and we don’t have many problems with it. What sort of issues are you encountering? Your post doesn’t really say.

Not OP, but same experience. Before COVID we had a few teams with some remote members (usually in a different timezone), and we consistently got feedback that: - they felt excluded from the discussion - it was hard for them to hear everyone (e.g. people sitting in the back of the room) - it was hard for them to speak (e.g. the delay made it)

All above issues could be alleviated with some meeting etiquette, but that was challenging on its own. In our case the vast majority of teams didn't have remote members, so there wasn't much willingness to introduce company wide rules.

The simple solution was to introduce a single rule. If one person is remote, everyone must be remote (join from their own laptop).

> What sort of issues are you encountering?

Not OP but we are forced to dial into the meetings separately even if many of us are in the office and could use a whiteboard in a conference room. Remote colleagues can join the conference room remotely and at least those in office can get to have a conversation of a higher fidelity. But our company bans it for "fairness" - as in everyone must suffer Zoom equally.

We have this happen very often because our main offices are on both coasts. Just get the company to spend like $100 on good microphones and some kind of an easy dock for those meeting rooms. The main problem usually is that people are oblivious and surprised that a MacBooks tiny built in microphone can’t capture a whole room

We had good Polycom conference mics. The problem isn't tech. In person meetings have latency and bandwidth advantages that tech can't overcome. Conversation flows between participants more naturally. Speakers overlap. Body language indicates flow.

We had Polycom too, same issues.

Even before WFH, meetings with people in different offices occurred. There's a much better range of software options now too.

It is the worse of both worlds, because the company ends up paying for an expensive but unused office.

Meanwhile, employees who strive in in-person collaboration suffer in their development.

Why would a company furnish an office space for employees who have elected to WFH? The flip side of that argument is that WFH employees should be getting a bonus for all the extra money a company has to spend to babysit the in-office employees.

In terms of the collaboration, you are implying that I need to be in the office in order for you to be able to progress as a human. I’d once again wonder why you see this as a problem created by the WFH employee and not the in-office employee who needs personal emotional support from others in order to get the job done.

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