My guess is that CEOs and VCs have some obscure reason to force people back into the office. Perhaps related to real estate, especially considering how hard to sell it is and how much higher the interest rates are. Middle management will typically eat up whatever narrative C-level feeds them.

This may sound like a joke but having gleaming, globally distributed offices is absolutely is a matter of great pride and ego for the C-Suite. They absolutely fantasize about how they are jet setting from one office to another and how all the employees roll a red carpet for them.

We already know the C-suite is oligarchical in nature with wage suppression in Silicon Valley, so we know they meet and communication. And things like corporate real estate is garden variety MBA stuff that these guys can freely talk about at the get-togethers.

Not having employees in buildings means those buildings aren't really worth anything. A collapse in the value of office space is something none of these companies want. It would impact share price, options, and executive pay, because these things are 30-50 year investments at a minimum.

Do you know what looks REALLY bad? A giant fancy office with five people in it.

Better force people to fill it up. We are stuck, we spent the money, can’t have it look bad.

Workers certainly don’t.

Everybody wins: extras get to not be homeless and pay their bills, companies look busier than ever, extras can act whatever fantasy management wants to show off, offices have some kind of purpose again, we get to work wherever we like and do actual work… What’s not to like?

Plus, while the overall employment situation is strong, the tech downsizing wave may not be over and if you can get people to self-select out, you can maybe avoid having to officially have layoffs.

Are you sure announcing layoffs hurts share prices? I mean, companies only recently were doing it while still being highly profitable.

I'm relatively sure losing people without severance and without WARN Act and similar notice issues, is easier on the financials for the same number of positions cut than the alternative.

I didn’t say they did.

I said that if you can get people to leave voluntarily, that’s better for the financials.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t conditions where the best available option (from a serving the shareholders perspective) is layoffs. Just that, ceteris paribus, its better to shed the headcount without the added costs imposed by layoffs; the benefit (when there is a benefit) of layoffs is reducing the headcount, not bearing the severance, WARN Act compliance, and other costs particular to layoffs.

Whatever management’s current whim is represents not only a reasonable but the only effective way to serve shareholder interests, amd to do anything differently would be a irresponsible and anyone disagreeing is objectively working against the interest of the firm, and any prior contrary statements about what is best for the firm are nonoperational and any reference to them is a bad faith distraction.

Oceania, Inc., has always been at war with EastAsia, LLC.

The decades of evidence that open office plans are utter shit for productivity already proved that the emperor wears no clothes and they have no idea what makes for better productivity.

When I was required in the office, I would just wear headphones to avoid distractions, but I would have to deal with 2-3hrs of driving/day on top of it. This meant that my employer generally only got those 8hrs out of me, period; because I had none of my personal time to spare. Working from home, on the other hand, gives me more flexibility for meetings, to work at different hours, to be on later in the evening, to put in more time (when needed), etc; and I'm happier.

Most full of bullshit company I’ve ever worked for.

At least they bought you NC headphones; that's a LOT more than I can say about most companies. And the fact that you had a "health and wellness" budget at all.

That doesn't work for everyone. Some offices are louder than headphones and some people come around tapping your shoulders regardless.

Depending on your budget, you can block out anything short of jackhammers with either IEMs or earbuds+noise reduction earmuffs.

> and some people come around tapping your shoulders regardless

Do they expect to continue living? What monsters.

Perhaps more a personal thing but it induces a dizziness/ drowsiness with extended use. It’s fine when watching say a movie but I could never work for long periods with my ears blocked. Wonder if I’m the only 1 but I have heard of similar cases.

We have multiple big rooms now but the current CEO still has his desk out in the open. Last time I was in the office we talked about anime lol.

It didn't make cubicle farms any better though.

To be fair, cubes weren't any better. I remember having a guy slerping tea sitting across from me. I couldn't see him but I could sure hear him and there was no way for me to get up and move.

As I've said before, people here pine for private offices a lot but, in my experience, typical workplace private offices have tended to be door open by default absent private meetings/phone calls/some urgent deadline thing.

See SC Johnson HQ for one of the most famous versions of this. (https://youtu.be/yb-kYt1lpnI)

They learned their lesson from the Frank Lloyd Wright building. It's a wonderful piece of architectural history, but it's not wonderful for productivity.

He doesn't mention one of the most interesting things about that building -- the building has no square corners, everything is round (even the elevator).

Cubes, with hot-desking, is pretty great actually. IBM has it in their drop-in “business centers” for WFH employees.

But "good" is the key there. I worked at an office in 2001 which had a cubicle system that was probably only a year or two old. The desks were wood (probably veneer) with nice big keyboard shelves, as was the style at the time. The panels were either grey metal or red fabric, and they stepped up and down so that beside your close coworker there might be only a 4' wall, and then a 6' wall to the "hallway".

Immediately after that, through an acquisition, we were in an office whose cubicles were probably from the 80s, and they were all 6' well-worn beige fabric panels, which despite being private and relatively quiet were just so ugly and energy-draining.

But to work in them is a noisy hell. I had a lawyer friend talk about how great these open offices must be to work in. So productive and dynamic he would say. But of course this is coming from a profession where having a private office is an absolute requirement.

Sometimes I just want silence. Not music, not $color noise. I also get itchy ears after wearing headphones for hours on end, and noise canceling headphones give me a headache… or, you know, I could work wherever I prefer, with little to no commute, and an office arranged how I like it.

Bumping this up a notch, I have co-workers who work together 4hrs/day on the same meeting but cannot sit together because our Zoom calls all collide when any one person is speaking. Core issue is the lack of conf rooms in a zoom-centric organization.

You've got a computer in there that you're also using for private stuff? Not tax-deductible anymore.

Private books on the bookshelf? Not tax-deductible anymore.

You've got a wardrobe with some clothes you're only accessing once per season (to store off-season clothes)? Not tax-deductible anymore.

But you just have to love how HN endorses tax fraud.

I could make a room a dedicated day-job office but it would cost me way more to do so than I would ever get as a deduction and it would almost certainly be inferior to the mixed-use setup I use.

Most decent companies will give you some money though for WFH or let you borrow stuff from the office like chairs and monitors.

While I'd love to have the financial burden of commuting/WFH be imposed on the employer instead on the workforce, that would require another labor revolution, so far I'd just be happy to have 100% WFH possibly. Internet I use anyway, and I can pay for the extra water, energy and heating by myself, the extra difference is insignificant compared to the time I save commuting to the office.

I found it funny that my lockdown productivity suddenly counted for nothing.

I have friends at other companies who have been 3 days per week WFH for 2 years and really appreciate the flexibility.

My main gripe was that my manager seemed to be having mental health issues (manic over-talking and occasional hints of psychosis). WFH was what helped me last through the covid years as I could avoid her being sat near me.

I was good friends with many people there, some of us still occasionally meetup. And I hear of a steady stream of other developers leavings because they can't work from home any more. Usually it's the younger guys who just had a kid or people with long commutes.

And I gotta say stuff like that gets me even more motivated to do work cuz I know they’re catching heat from the higher ups but we’re just producing too much work for them to really complain too much.

However if you get the purpose of the meeting straight and somehow manage for everyone to properly collaborate, you'll get a 3-5min daily meeting that easily enables efficient collaboration and awareness.

Give me a meeting every day to get people to talk about blockers, but it should be 15-30 seconds per person at most, and it should be scheduled outside of productive hours (easier said than done).

Actually the only thing I dislike about stand-up is struggling to remember everything I did the previous day, then realising I've forgotten to mention one or two key things after the meeting's ended, and wondering what everyone thought about the fact I apparently did so little... (which is silly, I know, but we're all human).

What actually happens in a standup meeting tends to be a mix of:

(1) What theoretically belongs in a standup meeting, which is a meeting that should have been a kanban board plus identification of blockers that have been deferred for the standup rather than properly addressed when encountered and,

(2) tangents into discussions which should be 1:1 (this especially happens when blockers are discussed, because people want to help get them unstuck.)

The problem is therefore not with the concept of a standup, but rather with how they are usually run.

Running efficient standups, or any sort of meeting at that, is a skill.

Equally common in operations roles for the same reasons. Lots of servers and networking gear. You might be changing failed hard drives in a RAID array while someone else is patching servers while somebody else is upgrading some 20 year old Cisco firewall. None of these three people rely on the work the other is doing. Especially if they’re working in different server cabinets.

And exactly, ask that to our managers.

Manager in charge of multiple different projects because "success in organisation" == "number of people managed" regardless of whether they are being managed well or not.

Manager needs daily updates of all things going on his "team", because otherwise not have fucking clue about what manager is "managing" and clearly far too difficult for manager to read JIRA board, look at commit histories etc. Much more efficient for everyone to sit around for an hour during which they maybe have ten minutes of productive discussion.

That's actually not been the case in many teams I've worked on - but we have all been working on the same set of related products (or subset of a product). Actually the managers often weren't even in the teams. I foolishly assumed that's how most people used the term "team"...

"Meta ditches open plan office structure to bring back cubicles"

https://www.chargedretail.co.uk/2023/02/21/meta-office-space...

>Mark Zuckerberg’s firm says it is attempting to avoid returning to the cubicle culture of the 70s and 80s by introducing its own design.

>The Cube helps to asorb sound instead of reflecting and echoing it around colleague’s workspaces.

>Meta claims that its new design reduces sound levels by approximately 20 decibels.

This is BS. Either Meta is actively lying, or they really are SO clueless they've never seen cubicles in the 90s and 00s (when they were really phased out, not the 80s), and really believe somehow that cubicles were made of sound-reflecting materials. They weren't. They were made of cloth, with what I think was cardboard behind it. The cloth worked very well to absorb sound and keep the ambient noise level down. (The cardboard was to give some structure, and also so you could use push-pins/thumbtacks on them to hold things in place.)

The only thing "new" here is maybe using some kind of recycled plastic material to make the cloth. BFD.

90s/00s cubicles were a dream to work in, compared to the open offices of today. Everyone complained about them at the time because they sucked compared to walled offices with doors, but in reality, most workers never had those in the decades before. You can see photos online of engineers working in the 1950s: it was all open offices with a bunch of big desks in a grid.

It feels like I'm thinking the Earth is the center of the universe, then watching Mars go retrograde. Something's profoundly wrong with my understanding of the world. I see two options:

1. Graeber's Bullshit Jobs. Which says that a lot of jobs are in large part about making the boss feel important, not about the assigned work.

2. Communication between leaders and workers is so bad that leaders have no idea what workers really experience in their working conditions.

In our case, we do have good, long-standing metrics: we measure how happy our customers say they are with our service. Since the whole point is to have happy, repeat customers and they have no reason to lie about being happy, we can trust this. That went up significantly and sustained itself during the pandemic.

While my employer did initially want to bring people back to the office, they relented after the push back and have been relatively soft and flexible about this, actually opening up a dialog to talk to everyone about what they need and want.

It doesn't hurt that they're looking at some significant cost savings by significantly downsizing our office footprint.

And, even from a somewhat less cynical perspective, it's reasonable to see a more complicated picture where many things, but not all things, are indeed more or less OK. Overlaid on this is that a lot of companies have cut back on travel etc. budgets so one of the alternatives to people getting together in local offices is at least somewhat off the table.

My money would be on that being half right. They have no way to really measure productivity, but they were very afraid that productivity would drop to zero—and that is something they would be able to see.

Before COVID I don’t know how many times discussions around WFH basically stopped at “we can’t know that people aren’t just watching TV all day”. I think in a lot of places that was a genuine fear—nobody will be working.

So seeing productivity not go near enough to zero to be noticeable was… really good productivity compared to some people’s initial expectations.

Some of them never seem to get much accomplished, though, so I've often wondered if there is something else at play.

They all have families and are PTA presidents and things so def not absentee parents or spouses. Some people just have a seemingly unending source of energy and ambition.

that's the neat part; you get laid off anyway. Layoffs are rarely actually about keeping the most productive people on board. If they want your wing of work to be marked as a redundancy, there's not much you can do from a purely productive standpoint.

Where is that? Even in the EU where employee protections are very strong you can absolutely let go of someone because of poor performance, you just have to do the whole dance of giving them enough warnings, then a PIP, then you can terminate their employment as they are failing their contractual duties. It's not super simple but it is legal and it does happen.

Before COVID I’ve seen plenty of people shop online, chat to friends or play games all day in the office.

What difference does it make? Those that do will anyway. It’s pretty delusional to think sitting in-office = working. If that’s the case all the kids at school should pass, right?

Governments are not ready for the majority of people having the freedom to work anywhere.

The whole foundation of our local and state governments control is based on manageable demographics, we are red or blue, we embrace the old or the new ways, etc., they are not ready for a sudden change in the mix, every local government had worked really hard to keep the status quo.

I’m a bit of an exception because I’m in a city that only has a couple hundred employees, but when I do return to the office, it won’t be to collaborate with teammates: I will be joining zoom calls with people in other cities (which was my day-to-day pre-pandemic). Pre pandemic I would travel every 2-weeks to company HQ to be in-person for demo with stakeholders and sprint planning, but even then many people would join via zoom anyway.

I don’t think return for office has anything to do with productivity and more about anxiety around investments in commercial real estate.

All of which makes things worse for the people at home on the zoom meetings.

As soon as a significant fraction of your employees aren’t in office, it starts to become a productivity problem to force people to stay! Well, unless you gave everyone their individual offices with doors. But you can’t do that can you. Because then what would make the senior people special? So you have to use cubes so everyone can hear each other on zoom calls.

The alpha is that pedantic and over-analytical guys dismiss crystal energy at the expense of their reproductive opportunities, and the way around it is literally just not doing that.

One thing I quickly noticed is that the purpose of all crystals are expected to be the same.

“It absorbs energy and gives out good energy”

So I same the same thing everytime.

Employers must be encountering something similar from some form of stakeholder, such as the board, so the answer is always “increase productivity” every time.

Changing to work-at-office increases productivity.

.

Maybe the Hawthorne Effect actually is real?

Then what happened was a lot of the pending and backlog of projects and busyness got moved over to a completed status. But the lack of productivity at the executive levels meant that the project funnel wasn’t keeping up. So the company was at risk of having a ton of people with not enough to do.

This is purely my personal anthropological perspective of the situation having been an active participant working closely with executives making these decisions the past few years as well as talking with colleagues that do the same. I’m aware it’s probably completely BS.

Which employer would ever say: "ah man it's all fucked up. Our productivity is completely gone. We're not getting anything done"

Imagine what that would do the stock prices

- real estate agencies push for return to office(as they own a lot of office space that's now empty)

- Turns out.. you don't need so many middle managers - without their direct oversight everything just kept working fine. So now you have internal vested interest in return to office for people in power.

This isn't how most engineers write software at the ground level though. Engineers need quiet concentration, free from distraction. Yes, there are hard problems that need collaboration to solve, but that type of interaction can be scheduled when needed. Far from needing to "bounce ideas" off other engineers, most senior engineers are pretty self-sufficient.

There is a different issue at play with junior engineers. They need supervision and that's hard to do unless your on a zoom call with them all day long. This isn't a new problem - it's simply a problem exposed by being remote. When we were in the office, all these junior engineers, were pulling productivity away from your senior engineers. Moving everything back to the office didn't increase productivity, it's actually decreasing it. Commute + sidebar conversations + mentoring junior engineers = less productivity out of your senior engineering staff.

There's definitely a "managers are from mars and engineers are from venus" sort of vibe happening here. Managers need that interaction and collaboration in order to provide oversight and provide direction. Senior engineers need a place to concentrate - and typically that isn't in the office where we have noisy open floor plans.

Also, you shouldn't have to watch newer employees like a hawk if you've given them clear tasks / projects and expectations. No need to micromanage people.

My preferences are likely going to change once I get more experience under my belt but I absolutely feel there are some facets of remote work that benefit senior engineers at the expense of junior engineers.

Our remote-first company has a daily standup everyday which shifts everyone’s brain into talking/collaboration mode for that bit. If someone - especially newer or junior engineers - have a question, that is a great opportunity to either have an impromptu discussion, or to have scheduled a discussion about it the previous afternoon jf it wasn’t particularly urgent.

It's about the desire to control thier investments. They want their investments to work out, so they try to force people back into the office.

Conflict of interest.

Consult complete, that will be $10000

They want to only pay others per keyboard keystroke but can’t accept that often the most efficient/productive workers don’t need to be busy. They spend a lot of their time thinking so that they can generate more impact with fewer keystrokes.

Treat people like adults and, surprisingly, get adult results. Set strategic goals, not daily quotas for minutia work.

1. They care more about control than doing the right thing.

2. They don't get satisfaction from improvements that don't come directly from their doing

Very stringent quotas, asinine team building activities, and of course, mandatory in-office policies construct a narrative for the company that no good thing that happens is from anywhere but the top-down. They can look at improvements in the bottom line and concoct a much more salient narrative that they were responsible for it; that their employees were nannied and hand-held to success. It's much more satisfying for an egomaniac to reckon with this conclusion than the still gratifying albeit less viscerally satisfying one that granting workers respect and independence will merit the best outcomes.

But I've also heard of old co-workers at later jobs where hybrid was just flowery words and really meant "mandatory remote time and mandatory office".

Pretty much. The only time I've considered going back to in-person work since the pandemic was for a FAANG. If you think your employees want to go back to the office, you are either a big tech company or you are deluded

What makes it even worse is the one-size-fits-all mandate, with strict enforcement, like you didn't come in to the office Monday, so you have to come on Tuesday.

I'd also like to add that even if you are in a field and doing work you are "passionate" about you'll spend between 25-75% of your time doing boring administrative bull hockey that no one is passionate about. Whether it's feeling out a time sheet, or watching HR videos on harassing coworkers.

I work because I have to. There's nothing to be passionate about. Employers are just mad because it takes a little more talent to do as little as possible when remote. If you're smart, optimizing your work to exactly the requisite sprint points (maybe a little more occasionally to show "initiative"), making the appearance of availability, etc will net you the same effect as zoning out at 2pm and staring at your monitor for the next 3 hours when in office. Even better if you learn to exploit PM's miraculous ability to expand into any time available for work. Now you can reduce your sprint obligation commensurate to the amount of time the PM needed you to "plan". Employers never realized often the smartest most talented employees were mentally checking out way before clocking out. The physical appearance of "work" was enough to trick these morons.

I made this realization when I realized how Cxx's, sales, etc view engineers. Just "pie in the sky" dreamers who want "perfect" everything. After making a VP particularly mad at one company (for formally criticizing his dogshit work during an audit as the source of a sev0) I got a reaming that included these exact words. It didn't take long after that to make the connection between engineering and labor, the solid titanium ceiling to progress, and the subsequent solution.

I still have 1:1s with my manager, am still accountable for my targets and organizational goals, and generally do the same thing whether I'm WFH or in office.

Office work has several advantages: 1) I like discussing in person with coworkers - sometimes coming up with fun/interesting ideas 2) office itself is more conducive to a particular type of work 3) I get some isolation from the family

But that commute...

Used to be, you could live close but maybe not the best neighborhood.

Now everything that's not some new exurb 1hr+ away from medium-large metros is insanely priced.

You could have smaller offices in different neighborhoods, but there's usually not enough people in any given suburban area to justify an office. Co-working spaces are one compromise but larger companies dislike them for security/secrecy reasons.

I would also add that many people have reasons for not moving closer to work even if they could. Also people are no longer working for decades at the same job, and moving is a hassle if you're changing jobs every few years.

we used to have them. Pension is long dead, however. Hell, promotions and raises are arguably dead as well in certain industries. It's practically common knowledge that it's easier for tech jobs to change jobs for a 20% raise than to ask the current company for a 5% raise. And then that company you left after 2 years proceeds to pay someone a 20% raise in order to ramp up someone doing your same job.

Companies need to reward tenure and actually budget for employee bonuses if they don't want to keep doing this. But from what I've read, they don't care and HR may even be incentivize to do this song and dance: https://old.reddit.com/r/datascience/comments/uo589a/why_are...

or if you want a TL;DR for the TL;DR:

>HR / recruiting "wins" when hiring, and does not "lose" when employees leave. Their incentives are in most cases at the fastest possible rotation of people.

The kind of person who isn’t going to work when not stared at all day by a manager is also probably the kind of person who is going to try to LOOK busy at the office without actually having to do a lot of REAL work. Surfing the web, playing games, chatting with their friends, whatever they can get away with when someone’s not watching. Or maybe doing their real tasks really slow.

They’re just not a hard worker.

Where is an employee who tends to do a good job is going to try to do it whether they’re in the office or not (assuming that’s possible for their position). They don’t really need to be monitored at home or at work. They would do basically the same either way.

So all you’re left with is you need to check real productivity instead of the appearance of productivity. THAT’S what matters, not where the employee is physically located during the day.

Some people are exceptions and will work significantly better in one environment or the other. But if you have an employee who took remote work to mean “watch TV and occasionally jiggle my mouse“ i’m willing to bet they weren’t a good employee in the first place.

I disagree. The vast majority of people benefit from basic supervision and accountability.

Even if you’re thinking through a heart problem or just finished something mentally draining from complexity.

I work way harder unsupervised.

It's probably also naïve to believe all humans respond to supervision the same way...

What I notices small companies in my area (here in Europe) with only one office, put a lot of value in having all employees coming to the office so they can react faster and cooperate easier than distributed teams, rather than saving on rent and letting everyone WFH 100% of the time from wherever they are, seeing it as one of their strengths over big distributed companies where things move slower.

While there's some truth to their arguments about the response time and cooperation in the office, I find they're selecting for people who drink their cool-aid and buy into "the mission" of the company instead of seeing the work as a simple transaction of "I give you my time and mental labor, you give me money, period".

People have always found ways to be unproductive even in the in-office era: going to the bathroom while on the clock, constantly hanging out in the break room under the guise of getting coffee, office small talk, or just old fashioned web browsing on their computers/phones. Pretending like every white collar job was at 100% efficiency in the pre-pandemic era was just pure delusion on management's part.

Which is also a hilarious self-own on the part of the company because they:

1.) hired the person

2.) have such a shitty remote work structure that the same employee is somehow more productive in the office

All of these companies that aren’t remote first, or were forced into remote because of the pandemic have put in roughly 0% effort to make remote actually work.

It’s not like you can just pick up the office culture and move it to slack. You have to actually make an effort to build the process, tools, and workflows that allow employees to be effective remote workers.

Being in the office only works with others in the office, so it's a balancing act between this (likely minority) group of both people managers and employees that want RTO, and the group that excels when working in their own curated, controlled environment.

Companies can probably get more out of average and below average people easily by forcing them into an office. That’s good enough for some companies to get by. And I say this as an average person who would get more done if I didn’t work remotely.

I was triggered by the word Excel in conjunction with average and below average, but that's just me.

Also saddened by the phrase get by. Move, if you can, and are also saddened by that phrase.

I've been in tech for ten years and I never saw a legitimate occurrence of serendipitous spontaneity illuminating someone's thought process into some massive feat of superhuman programming ability. I wonder how much of that wishful thinking is from people who pre-pandemic would spend their days in useless meetings and a lot of cooler talk because they can't code their way out of a paper bag.

We casually observed there seemed to be a split in employee WFH performance, with most performing as expected or better when WFH, but a minority performing MUCH worse. That is, significantly less than 50% of the productivity they have while in the office.

We've had casual one-to-one meetings with those individuals, and while a few will sort themselves out, most just flat out deny a difference. So we resorted to adding some very basic anonymised monitoring tools to a random subset of staff laptops (hence throwaway account).

What we found was that the majority are indistinguishable which days they are working from home and which days they are in the office, but a minority basically do no work when WFH. By this I mean, behaviour such as their laptop is idle for 20 minutes then active for a few seconds. As it's anonymised we can't be sure, but I'm guessing those are the staff we've identified as having a problem. I wouldn't be surprised if they had a second job.

The problem is: what to do about it? We're in the UK so just firing people without cause isn't an option. HR are saying it would be unfair, humiliating and potentially constructive dismissal if we forced the problem staff into the office but not everyone else. There's also a lot of valid discomfort and GDPR-related fear around the idea of installing heavy surveillance tools on laptops to collect evidence, and a concern that it will make for a hostile work environment. Even if we just used it very selectively on staff suspected to be breaking their contract, they would undoubtedly tell their colleagues which would lead to discontent. But without that evidence, it's very difficult to legally justify sacking someone.

The HR people are trying to force us back to the office because these issues are too challenging to deal with, but we (the tech team management) are trying to find a way to deal with staff who are taking the piss without upsetting everyone else in the process.

What's the play here? Genuinely looking for a good solution as, like many others, I personally enjoy WFH and don't want to have to give it up.

With a little of handholding and outcome motivation management, you should be able to hack into their dopamine cycle, keep their interest and those deliverables coming.

Once they've been notified that they're underperforming, try to help them out. If they can't be helped, fire them with well-documented cause (their history of poor performance).

Eg, if bob was working well at WFH he'd do X, Y, Z, but he only did 0.3 of X. You could even compare that to other employees to show that it's just this one person.

Make sure you have good ways to measure work product. For example, you can see if people are pushing to git repos.

Set aside a couple of times where people are required to log into chat or voice room every day. Have them type in a report on what they are working on and be available during that narrow window to answer follow up questions.

I worked at a company which had a similar approach to the one being considered , i.e. force everyone in. Every decision there was based on the lowest common denominators. This meant that the really good high performing people all quit. It's a ghost town over there these days.

Set expectations, support people with meeting them, fire them if they continue taking the piss. Don't ruin it for all of you high performers because you can't be bothered going through the process to fire someone. You'll have better overall performance, satisfaction, and retention if you work to get the slackers either performing or out.

I also have slow days where my energy is low, and intense days where I work longer than normal. People are not machines. Regardless, I get all the things that need to be done done, and usually a bit more on top.

You should measure productivity, not laptop utilisation.

It seems to me that if they are working few seconds every 20 minutes, there should be drop in their actual productivity. If these people have half functioning managers, they should be able to figure that out.

Dismissing people for having almost no output is dismissing for a cause.

What percentage of long-distance relationships work out long-term? Do you become more or less close with friends after they move out of town? Do you still "know" them the same as you did when you regularly met in person for lunch or drinks? Is it awkward when you do see each other in person that one visit a year?

Human beings are social creatures - yes, even we introverts need interaction. A pure voice-only relationship can feel close, but it's not the same thing. Current technology like Zoom and similar is just not a good replacement for in-person interactions.

How many times have you spoken right over someone on a Zoom call or Discord server? The social queues are erased, and things become awkward and less productive. Creativity (which applies even in engineering) is diminished when you have to use online whiteboards and planning tools vs. a real physical whiteboard with everyone holding their own pen and bouncing ideas around in real-time. To use Zoom et al effectively, the pace of thought and contribution are greatly diminished into a sort of per-turn dance.

WFH is fantastic when you have a head-down, concentration-demanding task that is very clearly defined. For most other things, it's actually harder to get work done.

WFH is simply not a replacement for team cohesivity. There is a great deal lost when you do not meet in person with the people you work with on a regular basis - we can't just sweep that under the rug because we'd prefer to sit in our home office. We have to acknowledge the real tradeoffs - the loss of the "team".

That's not the say WFH doesn't work. Some people make an entire career working from home after all. It is simply an acknowledgement that WFH isn't as beneficial in all situations as you might believe.

It's all situational. I agree with you that in-person collaboration is beneficial, but bringing people to the office doesn't necessarily do that without restructuring teams that were built on a distributed basis, which can be super disruptive and lose a lot of organizational context.

At work we've bought small PCs for the meeting rooms so that all those present can be in the same room, and have the rare distant ones participate to the call remotely without preventing other ones to discuss in the room. It's obvious the quality of the participation is much reduced for the remote one in this case, which proves how poor such exchanges are when they're all remote. At least here we can preserve a good communication between those who make the effort to meet in person.

How does this hateful comment reconcile with geographically distributed teams?

And to jump onto one of your points, Linux is the big elephant in the room. Almost every company uses it yet there’s no office building for Linux HQ where the devs all go and sit to build it.

of course I got hired in that place in 1/2020, so we know how that turned out.

All of your complaints are (usually) easily solved by experienced travelers. It's okay to not like travel, but it doesn't condemn the concept of a weeklong company offsite a couple times a year.

I'm the only person "remote" (work from another office/country) in my team and I am the one that always has to travel to meet the rest of the team.

It's nice meeting people and all, but I generally find these offsites pointless and not work the hassle of traveling for it.

Forcing conversation on random people you happen to be sharing a space with has always been psychopath behavior.

....because "being proud of what you are" doesn't work when no one cares about what you do or who you are. Then, your options are two-fold: you either become an isolated loner who doesn't care about socialising, or you participate in those superficial activities in hope of human connection.

Why should we feel interesting? Well, I personally would not want to socialize with someone who found me boring. The juice should be worth the squeeze.

I am curious about your view on pride. The idea of pride is somewhat alien to me. What is there for an average Joe to be proud of? Most of us are trapped in an oppressive economic situation and are forever distracted from any meaningful goals in our lives by responsibilities and society's selfish expectations.

The loss of third places exacerbates the problem. People don't belong in their own communities, and they feel it.

Same with bars, people can go to a bar not for the purpose of socializing at all. They may simply want to get away from home and be left alone while drinking some beers at the bar. Maybe the in-laws are in town. I do this myself.

Some people don’t need socialization and yet aren’t “loners”, their focus is just elsewhere. Trying to state all humans are social creatures is what a few posts up is about. Not everybody is the same, haven’t we learned that already?

If only you believe you have this "relationship" at work that's even remotely close to things being equal. For some, perhaps, but on average?

- Do you get to decide what to do or your boss? Even if you know better ways of doing things or see issues you might not have the politics to pull it off. Does this happen in a relationship? If so, it's pretty poor.

- Can you "unfriend" a co-worker and choose not to work with them? Do you choose your team? You can certainly quit your relationship or even friendship. In a company you get assigned a team. You can't pick and choose.

> Human beings are social creatures - yes, even we introverts need interaction.

And you will get it? You assume your co-workers are your friends. Friendship and relationships common together on common things they like. Co-workers come together to work and may not actually have anything in common. So you prefer being forced together and fake friends than not have any? It can be worse. Being professional is all it is.

> We have to acknowledge the real tradeoffs - the loss of the "team"

That's not a WFH issue. Your whole argument sits on that the only way to build relationships is in-person, even by quoting how long-distance relationships fail. Well do you hug and kiss your "team"? If not, then maybe it's fine. And it fails because there aren't ways to enforce the long-distance relationship to spend time together. Are you forced to spend time together with your co-workers? Yes.

In that context, wfh makes it a lot easier to just get along.

Some folks focus on deep work, and benefit from working remote - others focus on collaboration. There are cons of remote work, there are also cons of in-office work. Remote workers who work best with deep stretches of focus are unlikely to be as productive in office. Collaborative workers who focus on long brainstorming meetings etc. are unlikely to be productive remote where people can just go on mute.

For example, brainstorming we pretty much know to be ~ineffective at this point, but people who love socializing continue to do it. Inversely there’s definitely work that’s ridiculously hard to accomplish solo/async, but people with a strong preference for solo work want to muscle their way through it solo anyway.

Solo workers are willing to give up some collaboration and social workers are willing to give up some focus.

that's the crux of a lot of people here. You are comparing coworkers to friend and some people don't care about friendhips at work. They just want to do their work, stay in good graces, and get back to their leisure ASAP. It's not their job to care about overall company productivity, so as long as they feel more productive it's a win. Any inefficies is irrelevant because it means the ball is in their court and they still get more time for said leisure.

As of now, the WFH initiative is the cloesest we got to a wide scale 32 hour work week that many desire.

I guess the spreadsheet isn't so bad if you work in long, 2-4+ hour chunks. I often work in 30-minute bursts so just being able to click the start and stop buttons in my browser is less tedious than entering the time manually

Do you continue doing what it takes to be close with those friends? Do you talk every other day, for instance, like you do with your teammates? Do you share your experiences, think together, have plans and commitments?

Geographical proximity is not the most important contributor to closeness. I feel closer to random strangers on the Internet than how much I feel close to my neighbors.

There have to be meaningful downsides that CEOs and the like believe is outweighing all that.

I cant stand it when people put out these blanket statements in the form of objective facts. If I'm in a group team huddle with our cameras on - I'm able to pick up on body language, I can see their faces and we can all exchange ideas at the same time. As far as somebody talking over somebody else you can split into multiple groups if it's too big, you would have the same issue in proximity.

You seem to be under the impression that social interactions can only happen if we're all breathing the same air. The only thing that being on site would add is potential tactility. Do you find yourself hugging and touching your coworkers a lot?

Why, for instance, didn’t any of this apply pre-COVID when distributed teams were already common? Are humans beings not social creatures when the same conglomerate owns the office real estate containing all meeting participants?

I was wondering if there is an online whiteboard where every participant can work concurrently. I think excalidraw has a shared feature but I haven't tried it with > 2 people.

Ironically it's easier to get into deep work at home because you don't have to worry about coworkers bouncing ideas on you.

They're not completely to blame; the hordes of people who claim their 'passion' is analyzing widget sales or what have you share some of it. Going along with what are essentially lies about motivations to fit in with the perceived trends of the crowd is understandable (people want to get and keep jobs), but still immoral. And, n=1, but in my experience, it isn't actually necessary.

That point has nothing to do with WFH. If you get paid you can afford food, regardless of where you work. In fact WFH is better because you can save up to 2 hours a day not commuting and instead can spend it on cooking, grocery shopping, food prep, gardening, or any other food on the table related task.

I'm absolutely guilty of this. I'm a software engineer, and I feel proud of having worked on products that millions of people use. Steve Jobs's challenge to "put a dent in the universe" is axiomatic for many of us.

Yet I know that in other countries (e.g., Japan) there is a belief that any job, no matter how humble, is worth doing well and that passion for excellence is a virtue inside us and is not conditional on the perceived pecking order of the job.

If we had such an attitude, maybe it would be easier to feel fulfilled--if you're holding out for changing the world before you can be happy, you're (statistically) going to die miserable. On the other hand, maybe a culture in which we give 110% to meaningless jobs is just another chain for the rich and powerful to keep us productive.

I honestly don't know.

This contrasts with say, a subsistance farmer who produces food for their family and lives in a small community where every product of their labor has a known and appreciable impact. In that case, the equivalent goal of "changing the world" is "helping the community", which is much more attainable.

I get joy from figuring out how to solve a tricky UX issue, or from finally discovering the root cause of a difficult bug.

The work itself can be fulfilling, regardless of any potential deeper meaning.

My experience is that the same job also has a large range for meaningfulness depending on how well leadership manages to facilitate it.

That's a reason why the quality of most Japanese products is superlative. Another nation that is passionate about their stuff are Italians, but they value good looks above all. The US values profits and growth and China values high output volumes.

At least where I am from, Italians have a reputation for shoddy products, laziness, and not caring. As you say: They are happy as long as the facade looks good. Behind the scenes is a mess.

You bring up Japan yet they're known for being excessively and pointlessly overworked to the point of depression and suicide. It is a culture that rewards obedience and prostration to your job above everything else. So many were peer pressured into finding meaning in their work to such an excessive extent, and of course didn't become happy because its a system that optimizes for cohesion and stability, not happiness and meaning.

If only it's all the "employers" fault. I've seen plenty of employees post on social media about how their office is "alive" again and feeling the "vibes" of their team with photos sharing them and their co-workers in-office.

It's the pro-office crowd in general that wants to crush everyone. Some employers are guilt-tripped or forced to support these loud people. They would complain that it's lonely and no 1 is coming to the office with them.

What is a bigger hindrance to this to me is an open office plan. Being distracted by watching everyone walk around, no one respecting my headphones being on, walking over to me for a "quick question" that disrupts my flow and ends up being 60 minutes of work which I get no credit for but they do. At least over slack I can not respond to messages, though the ping is still disruptive.

What helps create deep work is a fucking door which I can communicate to people that I am in the zone and do not bother me unless you really need me.

The truth is that people are just justifying their previous decisions. They made open offices because it is "cheaper" (short term, but arguable long term) and have to come up with a reason that it is "better" other than cost. The same shit happens with WFH because they are still paying for office space. This is crazy since silicon valley was known for crazy perks like laundry and free food and all that but still wouldn't give you an office with a door. But now all that is going away as all their stocks are still going up. The reason those companies got big in the first place is that they realized that there were diminishing returns on financial compensation and that giving other perks actually boosted performance, created loyalty, and keeps people happy. So why stop doing something that is working? (gotta get those stock prices up somehow, right? And a quarterly level, not long term)

I ask which project this is for and log my hour on that. At least my boss sees I'm not slacking, and if it happens a lot can take action. Perhaps the other person needs more guidance or maybe was a poor fit for that project.

I thought performance management was all about managing results. So, I don't quite understand how "lazy WFH employee" could be a management headache.

to be fair, the center of talk on this site are usually in fact the cutting-edge enterprise that is making a real impact on the world (whether that impact is positive or negative is arguable).

>employers smart enough to have founded/run those kinds of companies usually are smart enough to see the merits of a hybrid policy.

so far, I believe Google and Microsoft and Facebook haven't. Twitter sure hasn't but that's honestly the least of their problems.

For example, open source is often all online, and it creates innovation all the time. People bounce off ideas on forums, on issues, often with a high level of thought going into it all. Great exchanges can happen in written form.

But I think a lot of companies that went remote just had no clue how to organize processes, discussions, and decision making for a remote environment.

Also the acceptance of that by employees who have no personal life or live for office drama, and are anti-WFH.

God forbid people miss the wondeful brainstorming opportunities of BS meeting -that-could-have-been-an-email, or the wonderful backstabbing and gossip watercooler camaraderie.

And if the idea of working on a Saturday morning at 6 AM sounds toxic, I also logged off at 2 PM yesterday to spend the afternoon with my wife, who'd come home early from her office, and went to sleep by 8 PM, so it's not like I'm hustle culturing it working 80 hour weeks. I just happen to like early mornings.

So suck it, dumbass CEOs.

It's not a straw-man, I've seen behavior in the past year that I've never seen in my entire career things as absurd as someone working 7 other jobs while pretending to work for us.

Frankly it isn't worth the risk or waste of time or money anymore. Thankfully just by saying you need to be in the office a few days a week will weed out 90% of timewasters.

>employers who have a delusion that their workplace is important enough that people need to sacrifice a large portion of their lives just for the opportunity to be there in person.

Employers don't owe you a living, you're welcome to go work somewhere that's fine with you not showing up.

I'm sure I don't understand. You were paying someone for 40 hours a week and getting ~5. Why was this not apparent to their management? Or, if it was, why was nothing done about it?

The problem that your organization pays someone for 8x the output they're getting is definitely a problem, but if your management's only solution to this problem is to force the entire workforce to commute to an office, I think the bigger problem that should be addressed is that your management sucks.

Either they're not producing enough output to warrant their salary - in which case you have good grounds to fire them regardless - or they're perfectly productive - in which case why does it matter?

The biggest issue many managers have is that they have no idea how to measure employee output, separately from time spent at the desk imor in meetings.

In other news: office workers should unionize, or at least work together to demand WfH.