Companies causing 'massive disruption' by mandating office return, says expert | Hacker News Reader

Companies causing 'massive disruption' by mandating office return, says expert

businessinsider.com

10 pointsrobtherobber6 comments

I'm currently in the process of resigning from my current company after only a year because they're forcing us to come in twice a week, coming from only once a week.

The reason given is: "it's important to have social contacts with the other colleagues that are not in your team". If people thought that was important then they'd go to the office more often than required. It seems like they don't, so they won't.

It's frustrating and a bit mad to see management push these decisions when there's no valid reason being given.

I do wonder about this, to be honest.

I vaguely remember a study, long ago, about which professors and assistants did the best work.

They found a correlation between where in the hallway your office was and the quality of your output: when more people were walking by, the quality went up.

The assumption was that output of work was comparable or even slightly higher for the loners, but the relevance and creativity was higher for the more walked by people. Other people pull you back to reality and let unrelated things pop up in your mind

I can't find the study and don't condone management pushing their workforce against trying to get work done. Even so, I do find the result of that study plausible.

That does seem like it would make sense if you're working on the same product, in the same team, or in the same location. My team consists of 6 developers, 4 of which in one city, 1 in another city, and the last one in another country. Every time we 4 go to the office we're still in remote calls and meetings, but this time in an open office with no noise cancellation.

The other people in the office are either sales people constantly in calls, or other teams with their own issues.

It's the tax breaks.

>Of the billions in tax incentives granted to US companies every year by cities and states, many agreements require workers to come into the office some of the time, or at least live in the region. For companies receiving these incentives, relaxing in-office attendance could be costly.

>The contracts were crafted in a pre-pandemic era, at a time when commutes to the office were a given. Now governments are deciding whether to crack down or rewrite the rules entirely. In some states and cities, policy changes have already been proposed to account for the new reality of hybrid work.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-t...

If a manager/ceo is insecure enough that they feel they need to lord over people in person it says a lot.

It's obvious people don't want to go back to the office. It better on net for the country to distribute income across it than stuffing it into dense cities. Having commuted into the valley well before covid its miserable.

> How many TikToks do you see of people being pumped about work?

I don’t know about anyone else, but if someone’s citing the number of TikToks of people being pumped about work as evidence of anything work related I’m pretty sure I have no interest in anything they have to say on this topic.

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