Five days a week in the office? Forget it | Hacker News Reader

Five days a week in the office? Forget it

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60 pointsCrankyBear99 comments

I have a slightly different take: office is a good thing for some people. I am not wildly sociable. If anything I'm borderline unapproachable if you just randomly walk up to me on the street and start talking to me. When COVID hit and we were all sent home, I had been working at that job for 8 years and I had automated pretty much everything in my day to day work - even the most busy days, I could get everything I had to do in less than 2 hours so all of a sudden, I was all day in my apartment, which is spacious and with views that are second to none in my city. The following 8 months up until I had to quit were the best time of my life. I had the time to read hundreds of books, work on personal projects, get in the best shape I've ever been by a long shot, got a dog. It was absolutely awesome. But time moved on and the few people I was close to prior to that and I just drifted apart and while we were together basically on daily basis before covid, now we call each other on birthdays at best. We see each other twice a year tops: They all moved on with their lives, got married, had children, etc. I did none of that for a million and one reasons and because I worked from home 100%, ultimately completely lost my social life. And now that I can(and actively am) going back to an office, I truly feel happy: despite still not being the most social creature, at least I see people and get to talk to someone. Although I do have to admit - working at a company where literally everyone is cool and down to earth certainly makes it easy. If that were at my old job, there's a good chance I would have become very aggressive and extremely likely violent towards several individuals.

My social life took a hit as well when I switched to remote work. I'm too comfortable being alone.

When I worked at office I had to get out of my comfort zone and socialize a bit with colleagues, chit chat, going for launch together, and in the retrospect it was nice to get small daily doze of social interactions.

I sometimes miss going to the office, hybrid thing (2-3 days in the office) would be probably ideal.

Thanks for sharing it. This is something that I noticed. Office Working and University are very good opportunities to become more social and have a dosis of interaction. Choosing their own hobbies while sounds easy, is something that we keeping postponing.

Too many peoples social and professional lives are entwined. They aren't meant to be the same thing.

Have you heard of the phrase "never mix business with pleasure"? It isn't about sexual harassment policies. It's general life advice, meant to save you from becoming a recluse who loses all of his friends if he loses his job or whose work suffers because he's paying attention to something other than the bottom line.

For your own mental health, I'd work on making some friends outside of the office. No matter HOW cool they are at the office.

Not necessarily. My hobbies and interests are very specific so finding like minded individuals, even in a large city, is practically impossible otherwise. I.e. not my last job but the one before - even though I quit it nearly 2 years ago, I stayed close friends with two of the guys there and we are in touch on daily basis - we just live in different countries. If anything, at this point they are closer to me than most people I've ever known and it's safe to say I'm speaking on behalf of all of us.

Again, that just happens sometimes. For comparison, I wouldn't bat an eyelash about anyone from my old job, with the exception of the hr and qa lead. Everyone else - I hope I never see them again in my life.

> Everyone else - I hope I never see them again in my life.

Wow, quite a strong statement. Personally I'm not much friends with ppl from work, my feelings are neutral. If I see some ex-colleague from work, I'll say hello and maybe some small talk. But that practically never happens, because I've been moving a lot.

If your hobbies and interests are so specific that they prevent you from living a normal healthy life they are maladaptive. You should add new ones that allow you to have healthy social engagements with other human beings.

It's not even that social and professional lives are intertwined as much as going to the office everyday makes it easy to do other stuff too. When working remote most days I wouldnt leave my house other than maybe a quick walk. When I go to the office Im much more likely to make plans with my friends after.

Could not agree more. Let's keep it professional by maintaining some distance.

I don't make friends on the workplace, never will, had once but it was a mistake. Therefore I enjoy the sterility of remote work more than in person work.

So many people here seem creepily entitled to friendships at work. I am there to work, not be your friend.

> entitled

> not be your friend

Ironic.

The framing around productivity misses a huge area - productivity of life. The less time that is wasted in office, the more time is available to do things that make life worth living. Any argument for return to office should justify why people are expected to waste away their lives.

The whole point of work is that someone pays you money, so you donate your time. How exactly and what amount of time, that is the contract you negotiate with your employer. Office time is just one negotiation point.

Personally I would never work as an employee to begin with, unless I were in serious financial distress. I would rather be a poor entrepreneur/freelancer than wealthy salaried employee. And office isn't really the factor, but other things, like freedom. But people have different preferences.

> I would rather be a poor entrepreneur/freelancer than wealthy salaried employee. And office isn't really the factor, but other things, like freedom.

To add a data point that will sound snarkier than it is:

I used to say very similar things. It is a really wonderful sound bite, and you can get together with all the other starving founders to say things like this to each other.

Looking back on it, I think this philosophy is actually a really important part of the startup-industrial complex. If you can just make it "not cool" to go get a job, and starting a startup is all about "freedom and adventure," then it becomes really easy for VCs to normalize things like "founders paying themselves subsistence salaries." That means the pipeline of new startups will increase in quantity and decrease in unit-cost -- which is exactly what the VCs want.

What they won't tell you about, if you want to chase the founder dream, is the opportunity cost. It turns out that maxing out your 401(k) is pretty great, as is having an infinite supply of sparkling water and spending your days building software with a whole bunch of other brilliant people.

I'm still not going to RTO, though. That part is just dumb, and I think every serious company that truly values engineering productivity will agree.

The best things about WFH are hard to quantify, like the best things in life. You are more relaxed, with lower stress, more control of your time, less probability of auto accidents commuting, ... These are rarely mentioned because they're hard to quantify, but as someone who's been working from home for multiple decades, they are far more important for my happiness and productivity.

Different people value different things, believe me or not, there are people who don't care about WFH.

When applying for jobs, you should negotiate for the things that you value. It doesn't make sense to require all employers to offer WFH when it is only your personal employer in the end who matters. There was WFH jobs before COVID, like there are onsite jobs now, and there will be always jobs for both purposes.

You're completely right. If a job expects 8 hours a day, plus an hour of prep time every morning and two hours worth of commute then they actually want 11 hours a day. They also need to pay for the fuel, clothing, food and other incidental costs that commute entails.

In office jobs should pay at least 30% more than WFH jobs to even be competitive.

FWIW, in a lot of cases Amazon (and Google and Meta and all of those top tier companies requiring RTO) do in fact pay at least 30% more. And in the case of Google and Meta, they provide food and other things too.

People are really upset at Amazon because the office doesn't provide anything more than what they can get at home (and in a lot of cases provides less). At least at the others you can get some extra stuff you can't get at home.

Office jobs paying 30% more on average sounds believable.

Commutes usually aren't paid.

They are priced in.

Co A offers $X Co B offers $Y

You take whatever makes sense to you.

> The whole point of work is that someone pays you money, so you donate your time. How exactly and what amount of time, that is the contract you negotiate with your employer.

That's the point. The pandemic give employers worldwide an enormous advantage in these negotiations. Personally I would never work for any company that requires RTO.

> The whole point of work is that someone pays you money, so you donate your time. How exactly and what amount of time, that is the contract you negotiate with your employer. Office time is just one negotiation point.

All these statements are missing the point, which is that commute time is unpaid 99% of the time, and is a complete waste from the employee's standpoint.

So whenever I negotiate with the employer, I have to take that into account, regardless of it being specified in the contract. It's an unstated consideration - an externality.

Past 2024, we should be considering commute time (or at least a portion of it) as a cost to the employee. This should be a firm stance, or worker rights will continue to be eroded.

Work is more than that for many people.

Shareholders do not care about workers' lives. Make stock price go up.

People seem to always circle back to arguments about whether wfh is better/worse for productivity and so on. But that potential cost/benefit is surely drowned by the extra cost of paying people to work in an office.

If productivity is +/-10 or 20% (which would be huge) between office and wfh but the additional comp is 50% to get someone to work 100% in office then the calculus is still simple.

Obviously in practice, this isn't always true, but in general, each employee should output more than their pay, or they wouldn't be there. As an example, Exxon Mobile supposedly has profits of $899,000/employee [1]. Their average pay is probably significantly lower than that, but let's say it's $300k, so a 20% boost in productivity increases profit per employee by $180k. An increase of 50% in salary (and I don't think it takes that much to get people to work in an office) costs them $150k.

[1] https://www.lifehealth.com/top-25-us-companies-ranked-by-pro...

As a small employer in European country, I'm mostly worried about the problem cases. What if someone gets seriously difficult? Like stops working at all. Firing in US is much cheaper and legally easier than in Europe, there I would have less to worry about.

Also one time we had remote employee, that was committing fraud towards the customers.

If someone doesn’t work at all and you are worried about not noticing I think there is some organizational issue.

What in this scenario makes it easier to know if this person is working when they are in the office?

It's much harder to get away with avoidant behavior in-person than remotely. I think you are twisting yourself into a knot to avoid admitting this point.

I was only considering pure solo desk work like software development now. But anything with visible individual output should follow the same pattern for observability. Obviously in other lines of work it can be different. But if I wanted to not work (say, work 50% on my personal project during office hours) then I’d probably prefer trying that stunt in the office. Because in an office no one questions whether you work (people confuse ass-in-seat with work) while if I’m working from home I know I’m only measured on my output.

One guy I finally got fired because he built a lego shelf at his desks for weeks rather than work. I'm not saying that is normal but people can drag out slacking off for a long time remote.

I didn't say about not noticing.

While european law is a lot more employee friendly, what I noticed is that companies are hardly willing to invest even some effort into stringently building their case, which they often could have done, from my laymen perspective.

Given that employment law is even more employer friendly for small companies, I would expect that a small company should not have much problem to argue about terminating an employee not working at all?

This will depend on the country as well, but most have pretty long probation periods.

For Germany for example, it's quite common for office jobs to have 6 months during which point you can "fire" employees with 2 week notice.

Do you have anything against B2B contracts and hiring freelancers? Employing on contractual basis allows you easily cancel the contract or prevent its extension.

How would firing them differ wether they are wfh or in the office?

I think the point is that the remote employee is able to get away with it better and longer, and likely feels more empowered to due to the lack of built-in surveillence from colleagues.

That speaks more to the fact that they don't properly track work being done then.

If I'm behind on my work for a week my manager will know because I have nothing to show as results.

It’s not productivity, it’s instilling norms in juniors.

Employers care so little about “the pipeline” they regularly have layoffs and deny training, but we’re supposed to “instill norms” through osmosis for free to a population of people, most of whom have been through college?

I have difficulty believing employers are that forward thinking.

I'm sort of amazed at this point that these RTO position articles are still so popular. How much more can we say about this?

Because it' still a highly contentious issue. It's as if you asked a hundred years ago, "Why are these free Saturday/40hour-work week so popular"? It is an enormous power struggle, and it can only be won through determination.

And it also seems to be a very US focussed thing. Which is to say that here in Holland WFH is popular too, but it seems to be less of an issue (and less of a hill to die on for some, as it seems in the US). Of course there are differences. It depends on what kind of work you do, how far your office is from your home, how much value you put on "coffee corner banter". This nuance is lacking from most articles I read on this subject.

I work for a professional service firm (disclaimer: none of the big 4 or resellers etc. )and every time this subject comes up with candidates I say:

1. It depends on the customer, but you follow their rules. 2. In practice it's always possible to WFH a few days a week, but never assume this. 3. The more senior you become, the more human interaction and interpersonal skills are key. I am not convinced any Teams/Zoom/Webex (pick your poison) screen can replace this. 4. We try to get our employees a job less than a 1 hour commute from home. Again, this is Holland: a tiny piece of mostly reclaimed land

Summary: it depends on role, customer and assignment.

We never have someone leave because they're unhappy with the WFH policy, we do have some candidates that didn't sign with us due to this policy, but that's perfectly fine. It's a free marketplace and IT staff is in high demand, so if you're qualified, there's a ways work.

The WFH crowd has plenty of time to write think pieces.

All that commute time we're saving.

We’re willing to fight for what we believe in, greener work policies, more power to the people.

I still want to know if companies that can get out of their office leases still want employees to be in the office. Amazon tends to own real estate outright, but many companies don't.

Even long term commercial leases do expire. A lot of companies aren’t renewing underutilized and maybe getting smaller/cheaper space to replace it—or not.

> Once more, companies want butts in seats — even though there's no legitimate business reason for many employees to return to the office.

If there were no legitimate business reason they wouldn't do it since it costs them a great deal to do so. And if businesses are acting irrationally? There are plenty of companies who are not returning to office, so we'll certainly see them out compete and displace the office-based businesses.

> And if businesses are acting irrationally?

That seems to be the most plausible answer. Businesses are led by people and acting irrationally even when not financially beneficial isn't out of the realm of reality.

Businesses in the same industry already suffer from a herd mentality, doing the opposite thing that others are doing is risky, most leaders will choose less risk. It becomes dominoes, one leader from a benchmark company makes a hard to quantify wrong decision, another will follow, the side-effects will take a few years to crop up and by then almost the whole industry will have followed suit.

You mean like open plan offices?

Also overtime.

We have over a century of evidence that requiring employees work > 40h/week for long periods of time is a net loss in productivity compared to working fewer hours. That's why we have a standard 40 hours per workweek and a concept of overtime in the first place.

However, there's always going to be a large cohort of management that thinks their employees are different so they can squeeze out more hours, so we get BS like trying to convince employees they're part of a family they need to sacrifice for and (unfortunately successful) lobbying for legal overtime exemptions across certain jobs.

I think you're not accounting for momentum. Amazon can act irrationally for decades before they get out-competed.

The solution is to own a part of your company. Suddenly you'll love to be 5+ days in the office even if you're in a financially worse situation.

Are you talking about a 5 people company where those people are your friends?

I own 33% of my company.

I can't say I "love" the idea of having an office, let alone spending more than five days a week in one.

I bought one and only one Amazon share. Hence as per your "solution", I own part of the company.

Explain how that makes me love 5+ days in the office. Btw, it's so cool how you put that +. Not just 5 weekdays, but also weekends.

>Btw, it's so cool how you put that +. Not just 5 weekdays, but also weekends.

If you aren't sleeping at the office, are you really living at all?

The old saying about eating lunch on your own time, but taking a dump on company time just doesn't hit the same with WFH.

I hate working at home. I have 20 years of going into an office. I need the separation or I just work ineffectively for a lot longer. I'm Dyslexic and choose teams that didn't work remote because I don't like Async communication. For lots of people the structure of going into work makes them more effective. All these think pieces should just stop and let people vote with their feet.

That’s great! You won’t find a single person who likes to WFH who wants to stop you from going to the office. The rest of us like to keep the movement alive and keep people thinking about how productive some people are when they don’t have to spend 2 hours a day risking their lives in a commute and contributing even more to global warming for no real increase in productivity from them, and for some an actual decline in productivity and severe reduction in quality of life.

> I hear that people in Amazon offices now Zoom from their cubicles instead of their homes. What a culture!

This is true of a lot of companies, particularly those with offices distributed across America and the world(e.g. you work in Houston, but your boss is in NYC). Financial institutions typically fit this bill.

Most office workers probably only need 5 days a year.

I miss the office A LOT. Remote pays more, otherwise I would volunteer my butt easily.

I dunno, the article seems a bit biased towards out of office working, although it raises a few good points.

Something I wonder about, if anyone has already calculated the value of the informal "water cooler chat" which is missing at working from home scenarios.

I mean, that's company time during which one isn't working, but the inevitable coworker bonding that happens can be extremely valuable, as stronger connections with colleagues can make one more engaged, collaborative, and productive in the long run.

He admits that he's biased -and angry.

That said, HR policies (both ones we like, and ones we hate) tend to be "one size fits all" policies. They don't adjust for individuals. There's reasons for that; usually, legal reasons.

Individual jobs require individual approaches. If I'm a bench tech, running a rack of $40,000 analyzers that I share with other techs, I probably need to be in the office. If I'm running tests on an Internet connectivity layer, maybe not so much.

Also, different people work better, in different contexts. Some folks can't muster the personal discipline to work out of their living room (or their home environment is not friendly to their work). That doesn't mean that they need to RTO, but they should find some solution. I know someone that actually rents a desk in a local accelerator, and goes there, five days a week, for a remote job.

I have a good friend that just accepted a position at Amazon. They are paying him a lot more than his previous employer. He's really good at what he does. Their offer was not charity. He came on board as a remote employee. He lives out East on Long Island, and the Amazon office is in Midtown Manhattan. That's at least a two-hour commute, each way. He has a new kid, and is currently weighing his options. That paycheck is making the choice difficult, but he's coming face-to-face with the things he will need to give up, for that paycheck.

Depends on the company and atmosphere it fosters. In our, watercooler/kitchenette is just empty chat, very rarely long term beneficial to company unless you meet just the person you need right now, but then they don't sit far in any case.

One thing that office is irreplaceable in (again, depending on company and atmosphere) is getting some stuff done from people not directly on projects but with crucial responsibilities/access.

If I am physically there, I just go to their desk, and either sit behind them till they have time or we agree to do it within 1 or 2 hours. Now I am few months fully at home due to breaking both legs while paragliding, and some of those folks take 2 weeks of chasing, meetings etc. to get their 5-minute max shit done. While 50-folks project is blocked by them. Maddening.

That's not because of remote work. That's because either your managers aren't capable of doing their jobs or your co-workers refuse to speak up when someone isn't doing their part. I hold my co-workers to a high standard. If they're fucking up and it prevents me from doing my job, I'm not going to pretend like it isn't happening. They will know, and if it continues, so will their manager. The biggest problem with weak managers is that they don't know how to hold people accountable.

That thing you just described where you walk over to someone's desk? Doing it to other people seems like a feature, but when it happens to YOU it destroys your flow and interrupts your work. It quickly becomes impossible to get any deep work done, and you become far less productive. It's part of the reason ticketing systems were invented.

It's a flaw, not a feature.

Whether a flaw or feature is a meaningless academic discussion at the end, when entire IT of the company works like that. To get stuff done on time you need to do what is necessary, rest are details. I agree stuff is not set optimally, but when IT is a cost center to the business and looked down upon, this is what you get. Btw not everything is covered by some form of ticketing system, there are many grey areas.

And trust me, guy managing sFTP server (latest case in long line of cases) doesn't do any sophisticated deep stuff that requires 15 mins to get into the zone.

More often than not its the case of folks in various roles promising to do certain work by the end of the day or given date on the meeting, then happily ignoring all chats/emails/calls asking for it for another week or two past the deadline. Of course the excuse is in 100% of the cases how busy they are, when you know they happily spend 15 mins on coffee/smoke breaks multiple times a day. Absolutely 0 sympathies there, and this is one of general senior skills to get work done on time from such people too.

The solution to lazy or incompetent workers is not to watch them like children, or to make sure you're near enough to nag them like their mother. It's to replace them with people who do the work they're paid for. If nobody is being paid for it and it's worth doing, hire someone.

We have a "hybrid" office schedule, which I vaguely dislike and do not think is valuable, especially since my entire team is in a different time zone and I'm in a satellite office.

I was in the office the other week, and someone from the operations side of the project I work on started chatting me up about a recent company initiative to come up with projects to improve things, and asked my opinion about his suggestion. It was great info I didn't otherwise have and I got excited about solving his specific complaint in a productive way in the new system.

Except.... This was a companywide initiative. Why didn't the company have people present to all engineers instead of just submitting a powerpoint deck to leadership if they wanted collaboration on such an initiative? What if I was sick that day, would he have never talked to me about it and I never would have learned about this sticking point?

I'm available through email and Teams. Why didn't he message me? I message random coworkers all the time about feedback and ideas and brainstorming and questions, why didn't he?

Some people have no willingness or ability to communicate usefully digitally it seems, and they want to make my life worse to counteract that fact, but that's stupid! Just have a teams channel for water cooler talk! We used to have an extremely productive teams channel meant for devs to just bring up brainstorming and ask for feedback and wonder aloud and it resulted in all the supposed benefits that water cooler talk has, and it didn't waste my lunch hour!

Just talk to me! You don't need the excuse of physical presence! If the serendipity is utterly necessary (it really really really shouldn't be FFS), build a quick teams bot that just puts a few people in a chat room together occasionally!

> informal "water cooler chat" which is missing at working from home scenarios.

I have a lot of that. Actually, in each company I worked for, I made sure we have a channel for informal communication, it is a work life changer.

Most people, even so called introverts, sometimes like to communicate, and they need to have a way to do so, and this must be done in a way that doesn't disturb others etc. This can be a slack channel, a weekly "coffee online" with your teammates, or even pre-daily informal discussion on any topic. Otherwise, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy which Bezos apparently doesn't care about.

Pretty sure multiple studies have shown that "water cooler innovation" is more or less a myth.

I'm certainly more innovative when it's the opposite. When you're all on the same page from the beginning and you're deliberating in that way, you will often end up following a very narrow path. Divergence and ideation happens when you're given an initial problem and you attempt to solve said problem independently. THEN you come together and you can start to fashion together a solution, synthesizing the best parts of each solution. Even if someone is completely off the mark with the rest of the group, their lack of initial perspective can bring greater rewards in the long run as they've got a fresher mind to attack the problem from a different angle.

Ah! The myth of "It got invented at a water cool chat" thing. I tend to agree to this one, as I was talking more about informal chatting (like about the last vacation, maybe sharing restaurant suggestions, talking about the boss doing bossy things and so on), which in turn would enable some kind of bonding between people.

I'd appreciate some links

I would appreciate some of them as well.

I'm pretty sure that when someone says "pretty sure" indicates they don't actually have the receipts. I'm also pretty sure that when someone requests "some links" they are a) trying to passively aggressively say they do not believe the comment, or b) they do not know how to use a search engine.

I am pretty sure, you're right! ;)

In fact, with things like slack and Discord, there's far more conversations happening when employees stay at their desks.

Yeah what is the utility of those chance encounters and how often do people get actual water.

The most common thing I've seen as a successful water cooler encounter is getting a coworker from another department's digits for drinks after work

This feels a bit like rose tinted glasses.

It also removes petty sleights, sexual harassment, and political maneuvering.

The problem is when you are wfh and there are still people in the office who get more visibility from management simply by being in eye sight.

> It also removes petty sleights, sexual harassment, and political maneuvering.

All of these things can and do happen virtually.

I'm doing my part!

Would you like to know more?

Well, I don’t think anybody in Starship Troopers looked like they were being sexually harassed…

I have to admit, since the pandemic started the entire conversation around WFH has centered on economics and efficiency, and I've found that very disheartening.

When my company went remote I was suddenly cut off from a handful of friends who I haven't spoken with in four years now. I'm bored and socially disengaged, lacking friendship and largely isolated to my wife and children.

Nobody ever talks about things like this, only what's the most 'productive', which I think is a glaring mark on how people operate and think. There is now an entire class of people who are being excluded from social camaraderie because the majority is happy working in pajamas.

All of that being said, now that my kids are in school I've realized that WFH is far more convenient. But can we please stop pretending that the lifestyle is the dream it's made out to be? If companies aren't offering opportunity for social engagement it can be a real problem.

I’m not sure what social engagement companies can/should offer to remote workers aside from the occasional offsite. At least to my way of thinking, Zoom happy hours weren’t worth a lot.

Adults are supposed to have friends outside of their homes who they do not work with and are not related to. The problem isn't with WFH, it's with society.

The problem with this logic is that our working conditions are a part of society, and in the modern age are a major source of our well being or lack thereof. So if everyone's suddenly trapped in their basement that's just yet another problem with modern society that we now have to deal with.

What I find more disturbing is that in my company's case the result of the pandemic seemed to be random and based on nothing but financial logic. My department supported a hybrid situation almost entirely but the powers that be didn't care, they did the easiest thing. Before the pandemic we couldn't get one day a week remote because it was a 'security risk'.

They aren't trapped though. They can and should leave the basement. They just won't.

That is if you consider things like joining a running club a normal and natural way to find long term companionship. That's not really how our brains work.

It also makes switching jobs lower cost. If I just change where I log in and I don't know anyone I work with who cares.

Look. I like working in an office. WFH has been killing me. But I completely understand how WFH makes my colleagues lives so much easier, especially with kids.

Can we just do the hybrid thing and call it a day? Or give people optionality on whether they want to go into the office or not?

I do half the work I did when I was in-office. Of course I don't want to go back!

By work do you mean the 4 hours a day of utterly valueless uncompensated time commuting to and from, and preparing for my long day sharing a toilet with people who don't believe in deodorant or vaccines? If so you're right. I do less work.

I do have to sacrifice the super valuable experience of joining zoom calls from a loud non-private cubicle to appease a middle managers ego and artificially inflate the local real estate market though.

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