Hacker News Reader

Comment by CPLX | Hacker News Reader

This article makes no sense.

I mean I'm all for a little elite run the world consipiracy theory but really, I'm supposed to think that a diffuse group of corporate leaders are upending companies so they can spend more on real estate going forward, for class solidarity reasons?

The reason people running companies want to end or curtail remote work is because it's very fucking challenging to run a group of people remotely. It just is. Everyone knows it, it's fucking hard.

There are also a lot of reasons TO do it. It's possible remote is the "better" option on the whole as a comprehensive decision.

But it takes a lot of skilled work to communicate effectively as a manager, it's hard, and if you get it wrong things start to spiral.

It's not confusing AT ALL why people might consider it. Pretty sure everyone who leads a group of people has had at least ONE moment of "god dammit it would be a lot easier if we were just all in the same room" in the recent past.

View on HN

I run a hybrid team while working remotely. The only thing that is considerably more difficult remotely is getting a feeling for how the team members feel. Are they doing okay? Are they bored/annoyed? But that‘s more of a problem for insecure managers. I trust my teams, talk to each regularly and all is fine so far.

> it's very fucking challenging to run a group of people remotely.

It's very fucking hard to take a relatively random group of people who are used to working together in person, throw them behind screens with little more support than Slack and Zoom, and try to manage them remotely.

It's much easier to take a group of people used to pro-active written communication, "if it's not monitored then it doesn't exist", async-first, https://nohello.net/en/ , actual remote work culture, and manage them remotely.

See, management is about alignment, and alignment is about 80% culture and politics, very little about what actually needs to be done. If you hire people who culturally fit into remote work, you'll have an easier time managing them. If you hire the opposite, it'll be hell. And you can do about as much to change someone's (work) cultural predisposition as you could change someone's (personal identity) culture.

Well yeah. That's another way of saying it's hard.

Also everyone has to start somewhere and get their first job, so the idea that you just make sure everyone is really used to remote work seems to be missing some subtlety as a long term plan.

I didn't say I agree with ending remote work, I said it's really easy to understand that there might be quite a few people who sincerely think it's the best way forward.

Yes, this reads exactly like it was written by someone who's never had a leadership role, and probably doesn't want to hold such a role, but deigns to know exactly the motivations of people in those roles.

It's bizarre to me how religious this conversation has become.

I'm not sure why people are behaving like it's either 100% remote or 100% in the office, and they are locked in a cage.

There are PLENTY of companies who have decided to become fully remote and remain that way indefinitely. If remote opportunities are important to you and your lifestyle, there are plenty of options for you.

Otherwise, I haven't heard of any company requiring 100% RTO all 5 days of a week. Everyone, even Apple, a company notorious for requiring in-office work, has relented and moved towards hybrid.

>I'm not sure why people are behaving like it's either 100% remote or 100% in the office, and they are locked in a cage.

A lot of people have very strong personal preferences (though probably mostly not 100% in person) and they're worried that you'll have a boiling the frog slide towards some outcome they really don't want even if they'd be OK with a more nuanced version.

The whole commercial real estate conspiracy schtick really gets old. There may well be cases where a company has made some commitments to some locale in exchange for tax breaks and remote work an upended that. But dumb as some people think corporate execs are, they almost certainly have heard of the sunk cost fallacy and, to my direct knowledge, a lot of companies are looking for ways to decrease their real estate footprint.

I also agree that 100% remote work is not this panacea that's always better than going into the office at least some of the time. If my team were local we'd be getting together semi-regularly--especially with travel/in-person meeting budgets tight. While it's not universal, a lot of younger people just out of school seem to struggle with the lack of in-person connections.

The challenging part is over. Everyone has had literally years of experience doing exactly that. We adapted. If you couldn’t adapt as a manager, you’re obsolete. Find a different job, because you now suck at the one you have. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way world works.

Is corporate real estate price the primary driving force? Perhaps not, but it’s certainly a driving force. There’s no shortage of articles and opinion pieces expressly lamenting the state of corporate real estate and businesses that catered to 9-5 office worker.

I’d say the main thing that’s driving RTO is ego. THE FAANGs built multibillion dollar vanity offices right before the pandemic. It’s a personal insult to these CEOs that the monuments to their greatness are empty. This plays out at a smaller scale down the ladder. Many people want to see their “human resources” as an ego trip.

I heard of one tech exec say about RTO, it’s just easier to collaborate when you can grab someone after a meeting for a quick chat. “What am I supposed to do on a video call? Get on another video call?”

Yeah dude. That’s literally what everyone did if you couldn’t just wait for everyone to hang up on the current one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com