I feel like this discussion is missing the hybrid part of the policy. 2 days at home for flow state work and 3 at the office to collaborate doesn't seem crazy. Maybe it should be 2-3 instead of 3-2 for some people, but in my experience the biggest productivity disruptor is meetings. And you’re only getting two “no meetings” days a week anyway. And the biggest downside from working at home is the hit to socializing and collaboration. You’ll hear anecdotes for days from both sides. A hybrid policy addresses both perspectives.

Now if you just want to work for a fully remote company or in a remote role, why not take a job at a place where that’s the philosophy? And on the flip side, if companies want productive employees over the age of 28, and deliberately don’t want to be remote, maybe they should start providing offices instead of desk clusters…

If there is value in interacting in the office, hybrid work that has people coming in on random days seems almost like the worst of both worlds. If the value is to get face time with your teammates, then the in office days need to be aligned.

The "solution" is for everyone on a team to come in on the same days.

Yes, but that doesn't seem to be what is happening in most places.

But it sounds like a management problem, if they cannot organize their team to get together on one day. Shouldn't that be easier than just forcing everyone to be in every day?

Which can only work if you have a team entirely located in the same place, working on the same project.

I don't like hybrid because what I say about ruining flow is still true on the days that you have to come in and even worse, you're forced into the real-estate market by the office vs living where you want and where you can afford.

That should be a discussion with your manager and HR department. Most places assist with relocation expenses. And nobody paid you to move away from the office in the first place.

Hey dcow, maybe they were hired for remote work and are now being forced into hybrid. And absolutely no company is going to help their employees pay for the cost of living in places like Vancouver, San Fran, London. So let's bring the argument back to reality, ok?

> And absolutely no company is going to help their employees pay for the cost of living in places like Vancouver, San Fran, London

Well this is definitely not true.

I WFH and would never work in the office again. If the place I was working demanded that I go into the office, I wouldn't talk to the HR department, I'd find a new remote job.

Good, that’s exactly what you should do!

I did the force hybrid thing for a while (team showed up on the same days).

It was awful for productivity. One in-person day per week would have been OK, but the other time in the office was a waste. The only work that got done that day could have been done via a few scheduled 30 minute 1:1’s.

If management must force people into the same spot, I’d suggest considering a “Thursday we grab beers or go hiking, etc at noon” schedule.

It would be better for morale and productivity, and also cheaper than maintaining an office. They could even give everyone a free coworking account.

This is a great idea and an example of thinking outside the box to actually achieve a goal, rather than cargo-culting the corporate conventional wisdom that collaboration has to be in the office or can't be constrained to a small amount of actual work time, mixed with activities.

Yeah, for sure. I can't get anything done in the office anymore. At this point, we just go in once every couple of weeks, when we can all arrange a lunch, and it generally just turns into a: Do a bit of office maintenance, and socialize with coworkers day. I actually quite like it.

> Now if you just want to work for a fully remote company or in a remote role, why not take a job at a place where that’s the philosophy?

Because during COVID a lot of companies started saying that's their new philosophy and are reneging on it now that they feel they can, and a lot of us shuffled around during that time. People hired onto remote teams and are getting rug pulled now.

To my knowledge nobody said they were 100% remote, you are in a remote role, and are now reneging. If they said they’re remote then they’re still remote.

They did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23155647

> you are in a remote role, and are now reneging

It's completely unreasonable for a company to force you to move, if a company asks that of you start looking for a new job immediately. There are companies out there that respect your personal life and don't want to consume it.

Twitter reneged? We’re talking about Google here.

The post we're replying to said:

> Because during COVID a lot of companies started saying that's their new philosophy and are reneging on it now that they feel they can, and a lot of us shuffled around during that time. People hired onto remote teams and are getting rug pulled now.

Twitter is one of those companies. Any company that didn't say "you can work remote temporarily", but now wants to force RTO is also going back on their social (and potentially legal) contract with their employees.

I'm trying to clarify my understanding. Is it the case that Twitter has reneged on telling employees they can work fully remote? I have no disagreement with you that there are social and potentially legal problems with companies that have said that. I am just trying to understand if Twitter and more relevantly Google have done that.

Yes, Twitter promised "work from home forever" and Musk unceremoniously reversed that. Same with Slack: https://mashable.com/article/slack-remote-work-permanent-cor...

I'm sure there are other but those are the two I know off the top of my head that promised work from home "forever" then went back on their word.

Then if I were a Twitter employee I'd be pretty upset. In terms of Google and Amazon and Apple telling people to come back to the office, though, not sure there's the same grounds for outrage.

They should have never used “permanent” or “forever”. New leaders come in, old leaders go out. Realities change. Should every subsequent CEO be bound by some promise of a prior CEO? Seems unsustainable.

> And you’re only getting two “no meetings” days a week anyway.

My experience working from home was that it didn't change the amount of meetings at all.

Right that was my (slightly ambiguously worded, my bad) point. WFH hasn't materially changed the amount of time I spend in meetings, which ultimately is the thing that pulls me out of flow states aside from typically distracting stuff that can happen in any environment.

For what it's worth I find it the exact opposite. If I need 8+ hours of uninterrupted 'flow', nothing beats the office. My 'commute' (a 30 minute walk) clears my head, and really helps me switch into 'work mode'. Then I grab a desk in the designated quiet section of the office and I have a clean desk, no distractions and, since I'm in the quiet section, I can be reasonably sure I won't be disturbed all day. At work there is nothing to do but work. If I need something to eat or drink the office cafe will sort me out quickly and efficiently. I can stay in the office until I'm done, then walk away leaving work behind me both physically and metaphorically.

Don't get me wrong, I love working from home as well and never want to go back to the office full time, but home is full of distractions. Everything from cooking lunch, to deciding to quickly throw on a load of laundry to talking with daughter about her day when she comes home from school are all distractions I don't have att the office.

If I had to guess, other than most offices just absolutely sucking ass, this is the nation-wide crux of the entire debate:

> My 'commute' (a 30 minute walk)

Most Americans have a 30 minute drive at best, and state departments of transportation and the federal government are doing everything they possibly can to make sure more cars are sold, more highways are built, and lanes are widened because they'll be damned if someone is going to wake up with no car related debt and walk to work.

No state DOT is turning down a lane widening project, or a new highway build, or a "smart lane" because their jobs depend on it, even if it comes at the expense of us all. They really are not departments of transportation but just departments of highways and cars.

Recently I joined a community input/comment session regarding a $44 million "Smart Lane" here in Columbus. I learned two things:

1) These comment periods are a formality. A state's DOT will never turn down a big project.

2) The state DOTs are focused on metrics like maintaining existing commute times.

> No state DOT is turning down a lane widening project, or a new highway build, or a "smart lane" because their jobs depend on it, even if it comes at the expense of us all. They really are not departments of transportation but just departments of highways and cars.

I think states DOTs differ pretty widely. In Texas and I imagine Ohio, yeah they're very car oriented. But where I live, a lane widening project was just rejected because of how expensive it would be and instead they are using funding towards improving other transportation solutions that don't involve cars.

In the past CDOT has been heavily car and highway oriented, but that seems to be changing slowly. Maybe other states are also considering different options to cars.

https://coloradosun.com/2022/05/16/i-25-no-expansion-central...

Certainly there are differences, to your point. I don't think there's a huge difference though given that the US is so car-dominated. Good to hear CDOT rejected a highway expansion. We need more wins like that nationally.

> No state DOT is turning down a lane widening project, or a new highway build, or a "smart lane" because their jobs depend on it, even if it comes at the expense of us all. They really are not departments of transportation but just departments of highways and cars.

My city in Kentucky at least has been making all sorts of headway on multiple major "road diet" projects. Many of those projects are probably more expensive in the short term and maybe even in the long term, so it seems good for business too.

These "Road Diets" are amazing: fewer lanes, dedicated turn lanes, dedicated curb space for parking (and plants!). Traffic is safer, oddly slower but ultimately faster (median speeds are down but throughput is higher and accidents generally fewer; all commute times are better than the multi-lane equivalent times despite cars moving individually slower on average; fewer stops and grid blocks).

To maintain fewer lanes at faster throughput, they seem to need a lot more concrete and lot more road painting and that keeps jobs employed.

I don't know how you sell Columbus on the idea, I barely know how we sold ourselves on the idea, and I do know how much controversy it has been for some of the earliest streets to get put on such a "road diet". (Businesses looking at the plans complained that they'd lose a lot of car traffic and thus a lot of business. Results were mostly the opposite: slower median speeds meant more awareness of local businesses people were passing by. More dedicated street parking meant more people actually stopping at businesses. Slower median speeds, with sidewalks more protected by street parking and other furniture, also meant more pedestrian foot traffic, because they felt safer, something once long thought vanished never to return for some of these streets.)

> Then I grab a desk in the designated quiet section of the office and I have a clean desk, no distractions and, since I'm in the quiet section,

Most work places don't have a "quiet section".

And some don't have noisy sections.

The two worst work environments I've been in were an open office situation, where the noise and motion was far too intrusive for me to get anything done, and another place that had a strongly enforced "silence" rule. That was perhaps even worse. The office had no noise at all except for the incessant noise of typing.

I need something in between those two extremes, I think.

Different people have different homes, and different offices have different norms. My home is less distracting than the office, and the environment itself is much less stressful than the office. It seems weird for Google to force the decision instead of trusting employees to make the right choice for them.

The fact that talking to your daughter about her day when she comes home is a nuisance to you, which the office saves you from, is a very interesting detail

Where did I say it was a nuisance? I said it was a distraction. I love talking to my daughter after school, but that doesn't change the fact that my daughter coming home from school also effectively marks the end of that days 'flow'.

The parent poster said "distraction", not "nuisance", in the context of being able to be in the "flow" of programming.

I rented a quiet co-working space, instead of working from home or working at the office. That gave me the advantages of choosing my own work area, while still working remotely.

I struggle to work well from home, so renting my own nearby office worked really well for my productivity.

Later I also travelled (pre-COVID) and rented co-working spaces which had great benefits, and certainly bet working from a café or hotel.

Most people dont have any of the things you described.

This demonstrates the most important difference between In-Office fans and remoters: They ALWAYS have the best possible situations thinkable, far and away better than any average or median.

A 30 minute walking commute is INSANELY rare, as is a quiet section, as even is a office cafe. I'd be far less pissed about forced in-office work if I had any of those things.

It's not insanely rare, but it probably depends on the country. I've moved multiple times and worked in different countries; a 30 minute walk to the office has been quite common for me (or up to 20 minute bike).

A 25-minute commute is common, at least in the EU: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d... (I expect many of them commute by public transport, which can be a bit less enjoyable)

Nonsense. Good software is about good looking people looking at the screen, one of them is sitting down and typing while the other are pointing and confidently smiling. No grilled cheese.

You are assuming that all the homes are well equipped to handle good flows. Maybe true in American suburbia with big homes and spare rooms. How about small city apartments shared other people (partner, roommates)? Multi-generational setups? Toddlers at home? I bet most of the workers do not have a proper working set up at home.

"Commuting alone absolutely destroys that for most people."

Commuting is not equal. Short vs Long commutes, commuting where you have to drive, commuting where you physically exert yourself, commuting where you meander through a park or market on the way to the office and leisurely have breakfast on the way... these are all commutes but they might not all be experienced by everyone the same. Some people hate driving to work, other people have a sports car and love it, and some people might not mind sitting in rush hour traffic with some good music and a bong in their lap.

Personally I love a 15-25 minute bike ride to work. Nothing like it to wake up, clear your mind and get energized for the work day, and the ride home can be a furious workout to destress, or slow and blissful. But that is me.

A) Not all commutes are bad B) Cities should probably be designed to make commuting better (but that may require less cars and more public transportation and better urban planning) C) Some commutes can be good. D) Long term consequences of decreased activity and social interaction may not be apparent yet.