Discussion
theandrewbailey: Those pushing return to office have drank so much of the Kool-Aid that compliance with policy is worth any cost. You must keep collaborating and allegedly being productive in person.
duskdozer: It's managers who want to feel in control of their peons reinforced by massive investment in corporate real estate and businesses surrounding them.
varispeed: It is usually the creeps that rush for it. They want the taste of power (forcing you to be in certain place and causing inconvenience) to sniff your perfumes when talk to you up close and clock your bum.
joe_mamba: Management: "But think of all the in person collaboration that gets missed from the in office presence!"The actual collaboration in the office: 50-100 person open space office with everyone wearing noise canceling headphones all the time to drown out everyone else in zoom/teams calls, not talking to anyone in person, reading reddit and watching youtube on the second monitor while waiting to clock out for the day.
rhines: At my workplace, HR addressed RTO and said that even when people aren't working together, just seeing people around invigorates them. Kind of demeaning to think that part of my pay comes from HR enjoying seeing the back of my head while I'm hunched over my laptop.
_fat_santa: I've been working fully remote for like 5 years at this point and I have to say I do get an itch to go into the office.My pipe dream for the future of work is it's remote by default with in-office being a decision that's made at a team level. Ideally there would be no hard requirement to come to the office X days per week, it would be a team coming together and saying "hey, how about we all go into the office on Tuesday to collaborate on this thing" (this assumes buy in from the entire team).
icedchai: Same. It's been 6 years of "work from home", starting mid-March 2020. It has become very, very old. I would love to find a local startup that embraces hybrid work.
dominotw: i am guessing you dont have kids. i get extra 2 hrs with my son that wouldnt trade for anything.
harryquach: Agreed, over the last 6 years I have been able to spend lots of time with my two kids. Would not trade that for anything.
netrap: Do companies give a crap about employees spending money on gas? I mean maybe for those that are traveling salesmen or something... but otherwise I don't see how it would bring it back...
biophysboy: I think the perfect set-up is hybrid, with 1-2 days office / 3-4 days home. Virtual meetings are significantly worse than in-person. But obviously the commute determines whether this is "on net" worthwhile.
BirAdam: I have a long commute to get to an office where everyone is wearing noise cancelling headphones for meetings...
biophysboy: Ha! That seems like a waste. As I said, commute time determines whether its worth it.
clintmcmahon: Been working remotely for a long time now and was beginning to feel that loneliness. So, I started going to a co-working space to be around people again. Two/three days a week I'm in the "office" with my new "coworkers". It's been great to get to socialize and talk to other tech folks who are working on interesting and different things.But I also love that freedom of staying home whenever I want to. IMO, more offices should operate more like this.
alephnerd: > Two/three days a week...This is the norm now for the past few years, and is one of the few ways to protect your job from being fully offshored.People keep complaining on HN, but the reality is WFH during COVID proved async works, and if async works then there's no reason not to reduce hiring in MTV and NYC and shift to (eg.) Prague, Warsaw, Tel Aviv, Bangalore, etc.The post above as well is predicated on a 1973 style consumer transport shock. At least in most developed countries, the average MPG has dramatically increased [0].In 1973, the average MPG was around 12 MPG. In 2015 (before EVs were normalized) it was almost 25 MPG. In 2026, numbers would be significantly higher.A more realistic prior is what happened in 2006-07: your boss will expect you to go to work.[0] - https://public.websites.umich.edu/~umtriswt/PDF/SWT-2017-5.p...
cramsession: Yes except for the Tel Aviv part. Hiring in Israel is a huge liability. Brand and war damage.
erikerikson: Actually, there are reasons not to offshore. See near shoring as a trend for evidence. Places in South America are preferred over Europe and Asia for U.S. companies. Beyond that though, local workers are easier to communicate with, culturally compatible, higher skilled, and tend to behave better.[Edit: source: I led a consulting team of about eighty Brazilians and Ecuadorians]
game_the0ry: I don't know about you guys, but RTTO was the biggest signal to me that corp america is lost and beyond recovery.The benefits are so obvious, yet here we are.
gtowey: I have heard a large impetus for the RTO push was to prop up commercial real estate. Permanent WFH would change the value of trillions of dollars of properties and reshape the commercial centers of cities.A lot of people with a lot of money at risk got really scared and decided the easiest thing to do was to go back to the status quo.
gruez: >I have heard a large impetus for the RTO push was to prop up commercial real estate. Permanent WFH would change the value of trillions of dollars of properties and reshape the commercial centers of cities.That makes as much sense as "people buy iPhones because they own Apple shares in their 401k (it's #2 in the S&P 500) and want to pump the stock". At an individual CEO level it doesn't make sense, for similar reasons. The CEO and the company can reap massive savings from not leasing an office, which is presumably also good for their careers and make the board happy. On the other hand the individual benefit that the CEO can get by ever so slightly increasing demand for CRE is negligible.
jaffee: I was a big WFH proponent, but I found the thing that I hated the most was the commute. Actually being in the office is pretty nice (assuming you work w/ nice people, have good culture, good coffee, nice desk setups, etc).I've made the switch to biking to work about half the time and it's freaking amazing. I turn 20-30 mins of absolute dead time where I'm spending money, polluting, and using up infrastructure into 50 minutes of getting healthier and having a blast. It's a great trade, especially if you were going to work out anyway... which you should, of course.I'm effectively spending 25 extra minutes of my day to get a 50 minute workout and save some money, and not pollute, and not contribute to traffic problems, parking congestion, etc. etc.It's not necessarily easy to make this happen, cycling safely is a whole other can of worms, you kind of need a shower at the office (or take it easier on an ebike), but the benefits are massive if you can do it.
chii: The incongruent part of that theory is that the RTO push came from middle to upper-middle management (and some top-level ones on occasion).The owners of commercial real estate are not these people. And it doesn't seem likely that these commercial real estate owners would have sufficient push by themselves to make such a large scale RTO mandate.
atentaten: It came from the very top. The owners own both real estate companies and software companies and much in between. Many also copied the RTO directive to fit in.
gobeavs: I have kids and would prefer to work in-office or hybrid. There's lots of reasons people might want that.
kot_manul: And there's the people that more or less require the use of headphones if you want to get anything done: the two or three people that continually narrate every aspect of what they're doing loud enough for everyone to hear, the handful of people who desperately need attention and validation at every possible juncture, the project managers having a ball pretending every day is an episode of The Office, and if you're really unlucky, the fire alarm that goes off at random intervals throughout the day that everyone's learned how to ignore.
seethishat: Some older people don't hear well so they talk louder due to that. It's not that they intend to be loud, it's just they don't hear as well as younger people do. Many vets also having hearing loss due to service related injuries. So next time you hear someone talking loud... remember that.
blakblakarak: My kids are 12 and 13 - wfh was is getting very old for me, especially during the school holidays when I’m constantly in ‘dad mode’. Don’t get me wrong - I love them with all my soul but sometimes I really want a break.
OptionOfT: In Texas where BCBS is based, the city asked them to re-instate in-office policies, as all those people drive a large amount of tax income in the city.
SirFatty: yeah, when you work in the office, there's no way to get your Costco shopping done.
pstuart: There were a lot of downstream effects as well -- local businesses that depended upon those office workers being in the area. Those ripples hurt a lot of people.That said, it shouldn't be the driver of RTO, it should be the need to actually have in-person collaboration.
swed420: True. Many large cities also depended on that tax revenue.It's almost as if we should find an economic system that doesn't rely on forced consumption, waste, etc in order to be "prosperous."
