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Comment by tivert | Hacker News Reader

> WFH only is low quality experience for me. No close bonding. Just zoom calls. Hybrid/Flex is the way to go I think. No need to be in the office 100%, but show up if you can.

I think Hybrid/Flex is the way to go, rather than pure WFH, because of the social connections, BUT it's also utterly pointless with distributed teams.

I'm on a distributed team. I have to fucking go into the office to fucking zoom from there. Plus it's a hoteling setup, so it's even hard to know who's around and my workspace is always a little off.

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We have the same. I'm not sure if it's something built into humans but it turns out very much like the lunchroom at school, where the same people gravitate to the same areas/desks. I've probably sat in one of the same four desks for the past year and know all the people around me.

Also share in your experience that I'm going into Zoom with my team on a different coast, or other teams across the world. I'm the only one at my hq. I was thinking about this the other day and it's actually kinda nice - the people around me are on different teams so I get to talk to them about their work and I don't have deal with my team complaining endlessly about our problems! :)

Before COVID I worked for a big multinational that got rid of all meeting rooms because they realised people could just have meetings at their desks. It was all open plan "hot desking". You'd literally have people transporting their sack of meat upwards of 50 miles each day just to sit at a desk on Skype all day talking to people on the other side the room. I found it particularly amusing when two people on the same call would be sitting right next to each other but talking through the screen.

There might be real reasons to be physically present at some places, but I think it's important to remember many places are like the above and the reasons for coming in are complete bullshit. For most people in an office coming in is mainly because they don't have an office at home. That's not a problem for most geeks who generally have a far better setup at home.

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