This is a really good point.

To add to it, WFH has one clear massive weakness: the lack of face to face interaction leads to quite a bit of atrophy when it comes to team cohesion. I've been managing WFH teams for the better part of a decade and I've yet to find a satisfactory solution other than getting people together every couple of months to work on hard problems together and build some trust.

I'm really bullish on the hybrid model right now. I think having an office designed more like a co-working space that can serve as a central meeting place for teams is what the future of software development looks like. No expectation that everyone is in the office every day, but rather reimagine the office more as a place where people come together when they really need (or want) too.

We're experimenting with that now in my organization and the results so far are pretty good. Some people come in every day. Some people come in every now and then. Others come in when their teams needs them. We're continuing to use all of the best practices for remote work and I think people are finding a really good balance right now.

I don't understand how the "work from the office one day a week" thing would work. If you mandate it's the same day for everyone then the office is empty 80% of the time. That's a huge waste of money. If you don't mandate everyone come in on the same day then all the benefits of being face to face disappear because the person you need/want to be face to face with chose a different day.

It is for sure a challenge, especially where people work across multiple teams and each team has a different 'standard' office day. That unfortunate individual is now compelled to come into the office multiple days.

And folks that work across teams like that are often gluing the organisation together in subtle but vital ways, so anything dis-incentivising it is a dark pattern.

I think the important distinction for us is that it isn't "work from the office one day a week". It's work from home unless your team needs you. Our ask is that team leaders work very hard to limit the days that people need to be in the office and that when they ask folks to come in there is a clearly articulated reason and objective. Basically the idea is that we want coming into the office to feel valuable and therefore worthwhile.

In reality most teams don't need people to come in that often... I'm concerned about some long term drift where some teams never come in and others find themselves schlepping into the office a lot, but I think it's something we can manage with good coaching for our team leads.

WFH and working onsite are two polar opposites, and I personally think that hybrid models are bound to lead to either model being used 100% fairly quickly. Either work and communication is structured in a way that it can be done fully remotely, or it’s not. If it is, then what‘s the point of onsite? If it’s not, well then everybody needs to be onsite.

„Your team needs you“ is a far too unspecific constraint to implement btw. That’s an invitation for extrovert team leads to pull in the whole team for minor issues.

As far as I know, no one is mandating that every comes in the same day. So you can reduce the office space by some percentage, assuming people come in on different days and not all at once.

If you have 10 teams of 5 people each in an office, in a 3/2 hybrid setting you can expect you'll have 30 people in the office. You can pad that to go to 40 people in the office on any given day -- this gives you a 20% reduction in required office space.

The way my team (informally, management isn't in it) was to create a Discord with several rooms. If a couple of you are working together, you can jump to a different room and screen-share. If you want a chat, move to a busy room. If you want to do some head-down work, mute and deafen. It's been really valuable, especially for someone like me who joined during lockdown.

>>> atrophy

Have you consider team atrophy as a pre-existing/chronic condition which maynot have cure?

Probably not, because as with many of these studies, people that can impose their preference will do it and rationalize their preference.

There was a study about US companies moving headquarters in the 60's. There would be planning committees, analyses, the whole shebang.

This later study found that almost invariably the new HQ would be closer to the CEOs home/hometown/home state. Some of these companies even failed because obviously people working at the NY HQ would not necessarily want to move to the Texas HQ.

In Romanian we say: "cine împarte, parte-și face": he who shares (does the sharing/gives things out), gets his share (cut).

If most people had an enjoyable 30 minute commute like you do, there would be a lot more people who agree with you. It's not that working in person doesn't have tons of meaningful benefits (to most people), it's that 10 hours of miserable commuting every week is such a soul-sucking curse that a lot of people would trade almost anything to get rid of it.

At one point in my career I had a 30 minute commute on a two-land road through beautiful hilly vineyards, and I'd end up at the beach where I could watch the sunset. Even if my workday was hellish, by the time I got home i felt great.

At another point in my career I had a 30 minute commute in stop-and-go traffic on an ugly highway. It was soul crushing - I could feel the minutes being stolen from my life.

Too many people quantify commutes in minutes, but should probably be looking at the drive itself when choosing a job or a home.

I agree. In my case, living in a medium size city of Spain, I get a 30 minute commute from to the office, driving on a very good condition highway, on low-medium density traffic.

For me, a relaxing listening audiobooks while safely driving is like a warm-up for my workday. An activity I wouldn't have time otherwise.

And the same, in my way back home.

I have worked in IT for two decades and usually I spend some time working on something in the evenings as well. If you make a clear separation, it's hard to spend time on expanding your knowledge, whether the goal is to use it for the next day at work or for own personal programming / tech projects.

WFH lets me mix those two a lot more and become more efficient. There's less interruptions since I am not going to the office, and also I have supreme "quiet time" after work, usually between 9pm and midnight.

As someone who has been working from home for 20 years, I've come to realise you need to be set up for it. I've gone from working in a spare bedroom to building a garden office, so there really is a hard separation between home and work.

Well said. Indeed, the whole "battle" over WFH should be about giving people the ability to choose what works best for them, not forcing either option. And that may even change for a particular person from year to year or job to job.

I agree. But the "battle" is at least partly around:

- People who are technically allowed to WFH but who are concerned that co-workers/managers will pressure them to come in anyway and

- People who want to come back into an office most days but don't want to come into a ghost town with most meetings over video anyway.

> People who want to come back into an office most days but don't want to come into a ghost town with most meetings over video anyway.

I think this battle is lost. Even if people go back to offices, a lot of meetings will happen over video anyway. This has been the norm in some large companies already.

It's been considered best practice (at least according to the people I follow on twitter) that if 1 person is dialed in, the whole meeting is dialed in. The 5 people at a table and some other people on Webex or whatever just doesn't work.

Yeah, I work with teams that have that as a rule. Pretty clearly it's a best practice in most contexts. (There are some exceptions like a scheduled on-site that someone can't travel to but for most things.) My guess is that a lot of people have noticed that video calls have been working better during the pandemic because of this.

>>I enjoy my 30 minute commute. I listen to podcasts or design board games. I understand I could do those at home, but I'm more likely to just watch a show or something instead of dedicating time to just listening to a podcast.

You don't have to do them at home. Take a 20-30 minute walk before work and it'll be the same thing, plus you'll also get some exercise!