Employers, why do you want us back in the office?

I'm in my 20s. I live alone in a city where I don't know anyone. Remote work destroyed my mental health.

All I wanted was to be able to go into an office and talk to a real life person. I would go weeks at a time not talking to a single person in real life.

I don't think people understand the plight of the young office worker until they've experienced the torture of solitary confinement. Day in, day out. All alone. I don't have a girlfriend, friends, or a life in this city.

I tried to join clubs and a maker space, but no time - I was working all day. The maker space closed early. I'm creative, I like working. I just wanted to go to an office. That's all I wanted. I wanted a routine. I wanted to commute and people watch. I wanted to feel like I was living life. But no, I had a remote job.

I got a new job that's supposed to be 3 days a week in office. Guess what? My team can't get enough remote work - they're not going to go into the office. And here I am, again, in the torture of solitary confinement.

I've been thinking about getting a new career, going into the trades. Anything that would allow me to have consistent interaction with other people.

I've become anti-technology, anti-society. I'm an optimistic person, yet I slip into depression because the only thing I want - to be able to go into an office - will not happen for me.

There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.

That’s the sort of thing that isn’t immediately obvious, but becomes more noticeable as time goes on. The first months of the pandemic people were able to coast on their existing connections, but it becomes harder years on, especially if half your team has _never_ met in person or come to company HQ.

In the before times, good remote companies would be intentional about having regular company meetings in a single location. That is a good alternative. But if you already have an office and already expect everyone to be relatively close, why fly everyone to London or SF?

Finally, everyone being remote is really bad for younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship, company culture, etc.

P.S. if you do a good job arranging your life (as most software engineers absolutely have the means to do) you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy separation between your work and your life.

Edit: full disclosure, I’m not an employer but I sympathize and spent a lot of time thinking about these things as a scrum master, trying to mitigate some of these problems in 2020. Now I’m not an SM and largely work independently, but I love being able to walk to the office every day (30 minute commute). I used to do hybrid but now I’m really enjoying the separation and am loathe to work from home, except on weekends.

I’m also an Urbanism nerd and don’t want to see cities revert to the 70s-era trend, which is clearly and noticeably happening, destroying decades of progress on livability. Unfortunately there’s a collective action problem; people will miss having nice cities to visit, but don’t make the connection that there is a “use it or lose it” aspect to great shared spaces.

Employer here. We had a fancy brick and timber office. It was beautiful and centrally located. I let the lease expire in 2021 after everyone went remote for the pandemic. There has been no sign of any decay in productivity.

It is true that hanging out in person develops a sense of human connection that feels good. But is that needed for effective work? I’m not so sure.

Brainstorming and creative collaboration activities seem more effective when done in person, so we have periodic “off-site” retreats for a day or two, or we meet at a conference. But most of work is just grinding. That works perfectly well from a home office.

I’m a CTO at a small startup, not forcing RTO on anyone BUT the vibe I get in my peer group is that managers don’t know how to manage remote teams, don’t want to do real performance management, and they personally have some loneliness issues they solve by working from the office. I work from an office with my cofounder 1 day/week, and it has been great for my mental health to leave my living room. I think broadly speaking that the path of building and managing a remote team successfully is different than in person in that (1) it should be more transactional, less relationship based, and you should be more comfortable and active in routinely cutting the bottom performers. Remote work does genuinely change the labor relation to be a step or two closer to the contractor model (extremely transactional and performance based, not culture/family etc). Remote work gives power to capital/management and it seems like most managers who graduated Stanford/MIT and learned to run teams in a zero interest rate env are not comfortable exercising this power on behalf of the companies they represent. (2) Managers should be hiring in low cost areas, you don’t need a team in NYC/SFBA for most things. There are great engineers in Latam. You can find very committed senior talent in latam for 120-160k, the US equivalent would be 180-250k, and the latam folks are less likely to job hop or negotiate a higher comp in month 12. (3) a lot of senior leaders don’t want to learn a new playbook (remote management). They have a playbook that worked, they used it for 10-15 years, and they want to turn the clock back to that time. Even if 30% of senior leaders at a company feel this way, that’s usually enough to “roll back” to how things were. The remote enthusiasts who haven’t taken on the new management style whole hog don’t have any wins to show, so the revanchist old managers are winning the hearts and minds of CEOs. The companies who mastered remote and learned how to do it right aren’t doing RTO BUT remote done right definitely is not paying a globally average Bay Area engineer locally competitive salaries for globally average work.

(CTO here, 100m€ public company in the EU, 200-person development organization. Anonymous to let me speak more freely)

1) I don’t care about per-dev productivity. Might well be some teams are more productive fully remote, looking at some numbers I suspect they are. But our biggest problem is not “cranking out lines of code faster” - it’s making sure we are doing the right projects, not wasting time on the wrong things; and dealing well with all the cross-team dependencies. I’m quite consciously making the trade off that I think devs will be more frequently interrupted and get less work done … in return for which they will be much better informed about what the company is doing and we can focus our efforts more effectively.

2) because this development organization works and I want to keep it functional. This is a public company, we have analysts looking over our shoulders and constantly querying our strategy. We have potentially hostile acquisitions always around the corner. If I am running a fully remote organization then I can’t justify a physical office space in the EU and there’s a very clear route to cost-reduction which is “push all the work out to low CoL countries” And honestly it won’t matter whether that is actually feasible or not, the logic looks too compelling and there’s a risk it would be forced on me, which would be a massive headache because I know it won’t work well. On the other hand, if as a dev organization we are mostly back in the office, it is much easier for me to make the argument that offshoring wouldn’t work.

I've worked remote for several years as both a senior engineer and team leader, these are the problems with remote work I haven't yet found good solutions for:

1. I don't know how my employees are doing; many times in my career I've had to tell programmers to "go for a walk" or "time to go home" when they get stuck on a frustrating task or fall in to a flow state far past leaving time. Solutions I've found to this put onus on the employee or create more restrictions that hinder in other areas

2. Brainstorming whiteboard sessions are harder; the issue with remote meetings is that you need each person to finish speaking before the next person can start, which IMO slows down collaboration. Also I still haven't found a great tool to replace the whiteboard, Miro / Figma (Figjam) come close but also are slower at spinning up a flow diagram or sequence diagram or describing a stack.

3. Juniors / Grads need handholding; I've written frameworks to train newer developers in a remote setting but the remote divide creates an invisible barrier between the seniors and juniors for base support. I used to purposefully sit them next to eachother to enable the quick "do I use this or that?" questions or, better, have the senior look over and spontaneously create a learning opportunity related to whatever the junior is doing.

I guess the themes here are speed and spontaneity

(I haven't had my coffee yet so I hope above made sense)

Microsoft did a very interesting research about this amongst 60k+ employees. Read it to find out why serendipity is a good thing and hardening already existing relationships is not good for the whole:

“Furthermore, the shift to firm-wide remote work caused employees to spend a greater share of their collaboration time with their stronger ties, which are better suited to information transfer, and a smaller share of their time with weak ties, which are more likely to provide access to new information.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01196-4

It’s usually the executive class of employees making these decisions, and they want to convey business as usual to the board and others that they report to. They also work differently than almost everyone else. They usually have meeting all day and the topics and decisions being made benefit greatly from the in person dynamics. They also get a lot done by just dropping by other peoples desks and quickly having an impromptu conversation.

They’re pretty removed from the way you work as a non-executive and don’t really care that you can accomplish your job just as easily remotely. In their mind, it’s not best for the company.

They’ve also lived the mandatory WFH days and the whole decision making processes slowed down or they just put a lot of things on hold because it couldn’t fully or appropriately be decided without difficult meeting logistics. These are things you’re unlikely to be aware of as a non-executive.

I think a lot of people are abusing WFH. Some make it obvious like doing meal prep during refinement but others are just kind of ghosts during the day. Even as a fellow team member reviewing code it's hard to tell how much my coworkers are working. Assume my EM has less of an idea than I do and anyone above them is totally in the dark.

Some of my teams were fully remote about eight weeks in 2020, while others have been remote the entire time. I don't believe in full RTO, just hybrid.

1. The last few years have demonstrated that projects with teams that are primarily remote require a higher degree of project overhead staffing. I think this is most evident with very small teams. For example, it's fairly easy for a small internal tool team to coordinate their work without a project manager, design, or business analyst if they are in close phyiscal proximity. The struggle is when you distance that team from larger products/project. Even in the minimal case creating visibility for that small team into larger workstreams requires overhead itself. With the macro environment and with leaders being forced to tighten the belt, this is less and less possible. All communication has to be structured fully remotely. That structure requires management.

2. I've found about 20% of people have the ability to maintain a professional work environment at home. I'm constantly seeing in meetings where highly compensated employees are providing childcare during working hours. I'm all for flexibility, but it becomes a distraction.

3.Junior employees have little to no ability to develop skills from seniors. I have hired entire classes of employees in software engineering roles that started in a fully remote environment, realized they weren't learning anything, and then came to work in a hybrid setting.

I'm an employee and I've been working remotely since long before the pandemic. But occasionally I'll roll into the office when they have free lunch, because I know a bunch of people will be there. And when I do that, I always get a chance to meet up with some coworkers and end up getting a lot done.

And sometimes we have a leadership meeting where I fly into the corporate HQ, as do my coworkers, and we have an all day in-person meeting with no one remote. And it's amazing how much we can get done in a day.

Sometimes it's just a lot easier to discuss a contentious subject where we don't all agree in person, and see body language, and not have to deal with the weird gaps that happen with online meetings.

That being said, I won't ever return to the office full time. The boosts in productivity only happen because it's not a regular occurrence, and it's a huge hassle to get there and back.

But I do see the upside to occasional work in the office.

Also, I used to work at a company that had no remote employees, so we were all in the office every day. That was nice, because if you needed to talk to someone you could just wander over and hash out an issue right then and there, and you could have meaningful hallway conversations, and we were just generally closer as humans. But that only works if you have no remote employees, and I'm not sure that's feasible anymore, at least in software. People got too used to remote work. But if I ever found a company like that where everyone came in every day, and it was close to my home, I'd be willing to do it.

People need social connections with their peers to work together successfully. It's much easier to build these connections in the office than virtually. Seeing each other a couple times per quarter for an extended period could also work, but it's easier--if you already have an office space--to bring people together in the office once or twice a week.

I think that in our field people work better together - more collaboration, knowledge transfer, teamwork and ultimately better solutions delivered.

I also believe that people are more motivated and engaged, and work harder and with more focus in a shared workspace outside of the home.

I was on the fence going into the remote work experiment, but everything I’ve seen since supports my feelings above. I’ve seen less of the good stuff and a lot more slacking off.

I think the level of flexibility we had before was about right for knowledge work. I could always get a day or two from home when I wanted some solo focus. I could always shift working hours to fit around life, or take a few hours out of the office for a personal errand. That was enough flexibility for me even though office was the focal point. I don’t think being asked to go back to the office with that kind of dynamic is overbearing or in any way unreasonable.

Far too many of these posts since the pandemic, it's OK if you personally feel more productive at home but if you seriously can't understand the benefits of working together physically then you have a serious mental block. There's some emotional reason why you don't want to hear why people find office work productive. You should at least be able to recite an opposing argument if not empathize with it (let alone agree with it). If you can't do that then you can't make a logical decision and instead you're making a faith based decision. A plug I make to everyone and I'm surprised more engineers don't engage in it; therapy is usually helpful in debugging what's going on in our brains and how our emotions are affecting our ability to navigate with logic.

Not an employer. But I believe most employees simply put in less hours when working from home, and most employers aren't very good at rewarding people for their results, not their hours.

Remote is high risk, high reward. If you’ve built a great organisation filled with talented, motivated and trustworthy people who have autonomy then remote work can be a fantastic boon to productivity because it’s an extension of the autonomy that helps the workers thrive…

…if you’ve built an average organisation filled with people who are demotivated by bad management who have no autonomy and struggle to drag themselves through the day, then remote work will shred what little value you’ve managed to extract from a dysfunctional organisation.

Remote work isn’t the problem, the problem is further upstream: if you work for a company that is restricting remote work, whether you love to work remote or in office, it’s a sign to leave.

I love working in an office and do so every day, and consider in-office collaboration to be very valuable, however, autonomy is far more valuable.

So, from a managers perspective: if your organisation is struggling with maintaining output while permitting remote work, you can either radically rethink your entire organisation and engage in a multi-year project to undo years of mismanagement… or you can just ban remote work. Of course, the latter is just kicking the can down the road, but kicking the can down the road is usually the only real option without buy in from the board.

I heard from one large tech company that was pressured by the city to bring people back in order to prop up the city's downtown service sector.

The company caved because they depended on city approval for some licenses.

The person who told me this was an analyst tasked with cherry picking data to justify the decision that had already been made on political grounds.

(This was after a few drinks and has not been independently verified)

Remote work requires a certain culture and skillset. You must be a good writer, type quickly, be self-expressive online even when not prompted by management. You must self-document and self-promote.

Believe it or not, many, many people are not good at that or don't fit that mold. Yet they can still be productive. They just require more supervision and the ability to express themselves in a manner that suits them.

If remote work suits you, and doesn't suit your management or your management's culture, don't try to change your whole company. It won't work. Instead, search for a company that is a better fit for you.

I wonder if there is a bias towards WFH on HN because the type of person most likely to like WFH is also the kind to post a lot on internet message threads. I think most people feel most productive spending at least some time in the office with other people, face to face. Further, I assume many people are like me and feel like some pressure to actually go to the office is good, or I'd too often make the short term easier decision to WFH.

Some problems are solved faster by multiple people getting together in front of a whiteboard and drawing. For those kinds of problems it’s useful to have people in the same room until we have AR solutions that can fill that need. Also for some people, not leaving their home caused significant issues in their performance. People aren’t solitary creatures, so for some - the office fills that role. For others, home office works perfectly well. There isn’t a yes/no answer here. I should perhaps add, that coming to the office was always voluntary in my company, way before Covid.

At my company we have the worst of both works with "hybrid office". Employees need to come to the office 3 days a week, each team picks one day for the entire team to be in-office, the employees can choose the other days.

The team day is mostly consumed with in-person meetings with others on your team, so no individual work gets done that day. The other in-office days are either spent heads down with headphones trying to focus or trying to book one of the limited conference rooms to have a zoom meeting with coworkers that are working from home or in a remote office. It's hard to book meetings before 10am or after 4pm because someone's usually commuting during that time.

Companies should either pick full remote or full back in the office, Hybrid doesn't seem to work well.

Let's talk about resources and overhead. If you WFH, then you're paying rent, utilities, you have a kitchen, you may well be BYOD, your ISP is a consumer-grade connection, you've got renter's or homeowner's insurance covering your stuff.

That's all miles different from working in an office. They've got cleaning staff and a maintenance team. They've got an enterprise-class high-speed redundant Internet connection (and the on-prem servers are on your multi-GB core network.) There's a break room and free sodas in the fridge. The engineers don't need to clean their own toilets.

I mean, if you think about it, it may be crazy for companies to insist on RTO because of costs of all that overhead they're saving, except for the simple fact that you get what you pay for. There are reasons people work together in offices and not from their homes, there are economies of scale, and there are efficiencies that happen.

I've been waiting for the penny to drop for some time now. Since COVID-19 locked everyone at home with a consumer-grade ISP, I've had plenty of time to read my TOS and service agreements. And you'd be hard-pressed to find such an ISP that actually permits "commercial activity" or WFH to occur on their connections, which are intended for gaming and entertainment. In case you haven't noticed, consumer ISPs don't really care when your connection goes down. The SLA is 0 CBR, best-effort delivery. So, enjoy your WFH infrastructure, but you get what you pay for.

My Site B is the public library, where I've been assured that I can conduct my WFH activities on their network, even in a private study room. That's the best I've got for now. If you're RTO--count your blessings. I have no office to return to!

I work as an engineer at NASA in Cleveland, Ohio. We went from 100% in person work to completely remote work for a year and half due to the pandemic, and now the work environment is mainly in-person but remote work is much more common. I often work in a lab with physical hardware which obviously requires me to be present. Additionally, we don't produce anything per se, we do tech development. I'm not cranking out widgets/code/whatever where my productivity is easy to objectively judge.

Here are some reasons I could imagine in-person work may be advantageous:

-I think there is probably an increase in camaraderie when people can interact with each other in-person.

-Spontaneous unstructured collaboration and innovation absolutely increases in-person. We rarely have informal asides after a Teams meeting, but it happens a lot after in-person meetings.

-Hiring new inexperienced people who are from out-of-town and having them start 100% remote is generally a bad experience and they pick things more slowly.

-People that working from home abuse it and multitask by running errands, watching their kids, etc. This is great for employees and I would guess that it is a large part of the reason that many employees are loathe to go back to work 100% of the time. Productivity can be difficult to track.

-The NASA network is very reliable and under our complete control. Remote work depends on each person's home internet connection/router/wifi and it's MUCH slower and less reliable. I often deal with large quantities of data and and the only way to work with it is locally on the same network it's produced on. Sure I can remote in, but then we're back to depending on public internet infrastructure. Sometimes things break so I guess I can't work on that today.

A related thought: -If large percentage of the workforce depends on the complex public internet infrastructure to perform work, that creates a possible weak point in their operations that could be affected by adversaries or maybe a natural disaster or something. I get that many people here do work that would cease to have any purpose if the internet disappeared so there's less disadvantage to remote work. But most industries use the internet for convenience, it isn't fundamental to their existence and everything they do could be done without it.

Pre March 2020 almost none of my meetings in the preceding 5 years included a single remote person. I liked that better for working. I felt more connected to my colleagues and more in tune with what was happening around the firm.

Of course I also enjoy some of the flexibility of WFH.

They want you in the office because

a) they are thinking that you are slacking off when you are working remotely. This might be true or not.

b) they are unable to quantify your work and decide if you are successful or not, which is an indication of unfit management. By forcing you to go the office, they can justify their own existence, claiming they are managing "their" people.

In my 25+ years working at US companies, I encounter the latter case with managers, who came straight out of the army, doing noting but but barking orders at their subordinates all day long. They were under the impression that corporate America was managed the same way. I personally put a couple of them in their places, in those days.

CEO of the company I worked for, straight out of college, one day, gathered up all 120 or so of us, new hires straight from the school and and gave a speech. One thing he said still sits with me: Good managers want to work with people who are smarter than themselves. Others want to work with mediocre or worse people, because they do not want their decisions to be questioned by their subordinates.

The people who want you back in the office are not good managers. They are "the others"

For those who are replying with "all my projects were remote before anyway" or "I was on video conference before fully remote work too!" - how many of these co-workers on video were at another office site, or had worked at an office site before "going remote?"

Before 2020, I also had video attendees in almost every meeting, but they were either at another office site where they still had a peer group and some co-located team members, or had a long tenure at the company and had been "allowed" to work remotely.

In my opinion these previous remote-attendee situations are totally different dynamics from running a fully remote team. There is a special, major challenge in managing a team where many team members have never met one another, a coworker of any kind, or their management in person. It's a surmountable challenge and I think some of this can be explained by the cynical "employers would rather let remote employees go than learn something new" take, but working in and managing a remote team is still a unique experience IMO.

I’m unsure why an engineer would want to be back in the office. There are a lot of distractions and unnecessary stress.

From my point of view, engineers who depend on others to get their work done like to be in the office. Because it makes it look like they are collaborating and getting work done.

From a manager point of view, this looks like collaboration as well. And would benefit the project. This is why they want people in the office.

I disagree with it. There are engineers who like to manipulate other people and it is far less likely to happen in a remote environment.

Just my observation, not 100% facts in all cases.

Not an employer myself. But still taking a jab.

"We have set unrealistic expectations and those aren't met. So we conclude that employees are slacking. Thus we want you back"

Or

"We pick lower-tier employees who won't work until they are forced to."

Additionally to all the comments, I think it is a challenge for most middle managers and up. Because it becomes obvious who can manage people and who can not. Who is capable of planning tasks and who is not. They have less personal/social leverage => they need to be professionals... and 50% are not ...

In the office there is always an illusion of control and it's easier to come up with ad-hoc tasks.

But in my opinion, managers who don't know what their employees do via remote. They know even less what happens in the office. But sure every one looks busy when the boss is walking the floor... :D maybe that gives them a good feeling.

I personally prefer a mixed week, like 2 days in the office and 3 days remote. But I would say the remote days are more productive in a sense of getting stuff done.

I'm an employer, but my opinion would be the same regardless.

The script is something like this:

Person1: Arg! This thing!

Person2: What ya working on?

Person1: <...> is giving me trouble.

Person1 then figures it out while trying to explain it, or Person2 has a helpful idea. Happens multiple times a week. If you were working at home you wouldn't even know you were missing out on this interaction.

Also, WFH is also just too distracting if you have a family/roommates etc...

I'm sure there are plenty of jobs where regular, informal face to fact interaction didn't help me solve problems faster, but not in my line of work.

I have some interaction with Federal employees too. They have been out of the office for a long time. You now have more a problem getting a hold of someone who is nominally 'at their desk'. I don't know why this is, but its a fact.

I'm not a direct employer, mostly an investor and solo entrepreneur who has low likelihood of ever employing people again. Used to be a big employer until sold my company.

Personally I have seen lots of different work in my previous work, and I just don't believe that remote work provides as much value for the shareholders. Productivity is likely better as remote, but the communication and trust issues cause problems. People often end up working on wrong things.

Personally I won't be investing in remote-only companies, unless it is somehow extremely stellar project.

Not an employer but the answer is obvious: control.

It is true you can get some organic team-building and spontaneous collaboration but the cost of that is so high, it's no justification. Not having to commute, being able to live in a lower cost area, having flexibility to run errands, etc are of such monumental value to people.

But the real lesson here I think a lot of people are learning to their surprise is that tech companies are really no different to any other companies.. Moves like forcing you into the office and all the entails (commuting, face time, regular hours, no real breaks, unpaid overtime) has the same motivation as layoffs for the "recession": to suppress labor costs.

15 years ago we had collusion by Apple, Google and otehrs to suppress wages through collusion not to "poach". Now? Other companies laying off 5-10% of staff gives every other company the freedom to do the same. It's all the same: to suppress labor.

So forcing you into the office is both about control and increasing organic attrition. Some people have made new lives in the last 2 years and can't just come back to the office. A certain paercentage of those will quit. Great. No severance.

Many tech workers with so many good years and high-demand for our services have fallen into the trap of thinking they're somehow above the adversarial (exploitative) pressures other people are subject to. Fancy offices, Herman Miller chairs and "free" food play into this delusion.

I really don't care - whatever works for you. But there are a few things I observed, due to which I believe remote work will not be default work mode in the long run.

* There's significant rise in burnout rate and LOTS of people looking for professional help with psychological issues. Many times more than in previous years. Some returned to the office and got significantly better, because they simply lacked human interaction (both their and surrounding opinion).

* There's group that prefers to work from the office for various reasons (people, work/life separation, small/noisy home).

* Both groups make significant part of our teams. Due to that some additional people decide to join as they feel they are missing out on part of the discussion and team interaction. This tends to snowball.

* Then there's elephant in the room: I know some people (personally, but outside of my org), who will hire at a few places (three or more) and bluntly lie about being full-time dedicated to each of them. They'll actively delay work giving false reasons, to maintain that illusion. Some employers will react by implementing group responsibility, when they find out.

Disclaimer (I had that discussion before): if you have steel-strong psyche, prefer people from outside work, have great communication skills, can sleep 2h a day and work 16h or have negotiated terms of employment that allow to be hired at a few places - good for you. This comment is mere observation, not attack on your life choices.

This topic comes up a lot, and the biggest pro return to office argument is essentially social. People want more human interactions that online do not give them.

This I think is more indicative of society, and I think is something that is a gap in society / business opportunity. WeWork, which was poorly run, I think really has a foot into this, but not to the full extent. In urban design there is this idea of a third place, somewhere that is not work or home that people interact. These places have massively declined in the west, especially in the united states. People used to have many many third places. People had work, and home, but then they would also have church that they attended weekly or more, they would have union halls, taverns, social organizations (masons, elks, knights of columbus, vfw, etc). A lot of bars and restaurants are a lot louder and more consumer focused than they used to be I think as well which has hurt.

Public Libraries are another place that could step up, try and get more people to work from there and socialize, but most libraries have pretty bad hours and are undefunded or have strict silence requirements. But I can see a need for some kind location, that is open a lot, 7am-10pm or something, that you pay a membership fee for. That you can go anytime, and drink cheap coffee or beer and work / socialize in them.

Not an employer, but work at a pretty big company where the CEO made a pretty big tell: he mentioned that remote work seemed to cause a loss in overall productivity. But then almost all engineers chafed, and he had to clarify: we was talking specifically about the sales organization.

My sense is that leadership making these decisions simply isn't really tuned into how engineering operates. And that's mostly it; they're focused on the business, and probably are dialed into the sales pipeline. And that probably leads to tons of questions and one-off-style clarification sessions where video chats and Slack just aren't great, to be frank.

At the same time, I do think there are significant tradeoffs between a remote team and a "shared meatspace" team. With remote teams, cross-team relationship building is really challenging, and I've noticed that there's a natural tendency to focus purely on your team. With all teams in a same physical location, it's easier to actually just pop by and clarify complex details. But, I did work at a place that got hundreds of engineers together about 3x a year, and that seemed to be enough to build significant bridges across the org.

Ultimately though, in my experience, these kinds of decisions are just because upper management is more aligned with sales organizations than engineering.

I can't speak directly for the people you're actually asking. I'm involved in these meetings at my workplace. I don't agree with the call to bring everyone back to the office even though I like working from an office. I've been fully remote since before the pandemic but I like seeing coworkers. I'd like to think I can "see it both ways." I voted against bringing people back but I lack the all important "C" or "V" in front of my title so my opinion carries little weight.

From my company's discussions, my take is that it's hard for the C suite to feel connected to employees without face to face time. Why? Probably the very basic issue of 1 on 500 or 1 on 5000 communication, which is hard in person and even more so online. I don't mean 1 on 500/5000 presenting, I mean the exchange of ideas and gaining understanding of the people that work for you. If you're a front line manager or sufficiently senior on the IC track then you likely had to learn new techniques to communicate in 1 on 10 and 1 on 20 engagements. It's harder to scale that to 1 to 500 or so.

If you hold the power of sword and purse, then it's "easier" to mandate that people work from a location you can easily travel to.

I'm not answering this directly as an "employer" but just a few imperfect observations...

Many people do not need social connections and interactions to be productive and happy. I find that most of the people who want WFH or be entirely remote fall into this group.

Many people so need social connections and interactions to be productive. They find value in dealing with people 1:1. Its how they socialize in-part, how they make friends, and provides variety in their day. They may like to WFH on occasion, but the office interaction is integral.

So... it is (IMHO) mostly the first group that we hear from in these discussions. I would argue that OP is in the group. That second group is often ignored when these questions are framed in such an abolitionists manner ('this works better for me so it must work better for everyone').

Its not just 'employers' making arbitrary decisions. It is not a simple question to answer and a whole host of other factors come into play (company culture, company size, history of remote work, location of teams/people, timezones, and so on).

(Minor note: I find myself in the first group but I appreciate that there are many sides to this)

Employers are locked into all these commercial real estate transactions and since it's a big part of the budget, they have to utilize it. The alternative is a realization that without the performative part of office politics most of the stage is unnecessary since in most companies the core business ultimately is done by a small group of people. Often similar with tech teams... Management and middle management without the meetings and performances to prove their need and value require everyone in the office to be in attendance as an audience. Otherwise it's just even more obvious how much is needed for the core business to be profitable and succeed.

So far Twitter has been a good example. Now for workers, it's important to go back for other reasons. Remote workers reduce your power negotiating as an employee and it's a much larger pool to even get hired. Being able to be in person becomes an emoloyment advantage at that point.

Working closely with a number of pro-office senior leaders it basically comes down to a few thing:

1. It is very hard to steer a giant organization and get everyone on the same page under ideal circumstances. Work from home makes that even harder because people aren’t as tuned into what is happening beyond their job. If the business needs to pivot it takes longer.

2. Most senior leaders spend 6-10 hours a day in meetings. It really sucks when they have one or two people on Zoom and everyone else is around a conference room. Wait, your mic is muted, Ted. Oh, no it is the conference room speaker is off or something, I don’t know…20 minutes later someone fixes it, but it wasted 20 minutes that all those people don’t have in their day.

3. Usually senior leader, C-suite folks, got to where they are at, in part, because of how good they are in the in-person meeting / 1:1 in-person. It is their super power. You take that away and they feel less effective.

Answering the direct question in a simplistic way: because this is the preferred style of collaboration for these employers you are talking about. Let me elaborate.

It is not good or bad, effective or ineffective, nor it is the case for all employers.

Here is my take: the preferred style of work (office, remote, hybrid, flexible) needs to be shared between the team members. Not unlike people's values. If the vast majority of people on the team share it - you are golden. If everyone has their own - you have got yourself a problem. By all means, please, ask it on the interview! (Goes both ways, for the employees and for the employers.)

Now, I understand that right now there are probably more pro-office employers than people willing to accept it. Whether it is true or not (do we have some reliable statistics on this? are we a vocal minority instead?), I think only time will create an equilibrium (new generation of middle managers, etc.)

I'm an academic in the humanities, and we've had working from home (except for teaching) for decades. You have a range of people from those who just come in to teach during term time and otherwise work from home 2.5 hours away by train, to those who are in the office all day every day. We also have big get-togethers in the form of conferences.

My experience since 2020 has pushed me against working from home, in particular research seminars are far worse online. The quality of questions is much worse, and engagement is visibly worse than when we have them in person.

As for research... a lot of research ideas come from corridor chat. If you have an idea for a paper and Dave down the corridor is an expert in the area, it's much easier to test the idea out on him as you walk back together from a seminar than to email him. Maybe it shouldn't make a difference, but it does.

Shitty management/lack of processes.

That's it.

And I think it's understandable. Management is hard.

For many (most?) it’s fairly clearly about demonstrating power over the plebs. For some there’s making it look like their investment in shitty open plan offices wasn’t a waste of money.

Of course they dress it up as collaboration, much like they do open plan offices, and much like open plan offices it’s BS in this case as well.

Obviously there are some people who desperately want to return to the office as they use the office for socializing, except that of course they’re taking the position that their socializing /lack of non-work life is more important than everyone else’s life.

Also chatty coworkers isn’t productive, especially in open plan offices. Oh and of course now you get to have coworkers coming to the office size and giving you plague as they did prepandemix, only with an exciting new plague option as well.

It's a combination of the following: 1. Hr and management Karen's/Joe's looking for control 2. People who hate their families and want a socially acceptable way to get away from them. 3. Corner office types who spent their careers trying to get one just to have COVID and cloud services make them realize it was all a mirage anyway.

At least this is what I've seen. I don't have a problem with hybrid schedules but the last in office place I went to did a Monday, Wednesday, Thursday hybrid week. FFS, it was awful. Id have all of this go juice for Monday, lose it for work from home Tuesday and be miserable for Wednesday and Thursday. Just do Monday through Wednesday in office or Tuesday through Thursday. Just keep all the in office days together.

>Nearly every meeting I’ve had in an office since 2014 has been a video conference with remote people.

C-level leaders at my company set a mandate for our "distributed sites" to be relatively autonomous with their own missions and roadmaps. But middle and line-level managers keep making exceptions, finding it expedient to use India and LatAm teams as extra hands for projects run out of the US, for example. So as an employee you experience most of your collaboration being remote. Your EM and your skip get it. But HR and the CEO don't.

We're in a situation now where almost nobody knows anyone in their management chain who cares about their attendance, but the CEO and HR have made clear that they will be firing people who aren't badging in.

The management class is dominated by extroverts, who cannot imagine not needing in-person interaction to thrive because it is what they need.

Sadly, the biggest employer motivation is some have very long leases and don’t want to look stupid to the board for having signed up for useless office space with a decade still on their lease. Others are motivated by ego, being able to walk down isles watching their minions tools away. However, never meeting people IRL definitely reduces collaboration and performance on highly iterative and collaborative projects compared to everyone going and meeting IRL. Meeting at least quarterly for 3-4 days can make things work, but time in an office is better. Again, if you work on a team. If you are and IC, quarterly if probably fine or entirely remote might be fine too.

Junior and some mid employees seem to do worse - at least in the small amount of data I've seen since the pandemic. This is likely part culture, which emphasizes individual performance rather than team performance. If you're a netflix-style organization that only hires seniors then this is less important.

I think hybrid, with ~2 days a week - one dedicated to any team meetings and the other pure work is a good compromise plus regular in-person summits if you have a geographically distributed team. Don't just get in-person to meet, working together allows you to learn the the many subtle things about people's workflows that may be good or bad.

Maybe does not apply to high-tech companies but I personally witnessed fintech company employees slowdown almost to halt. They stopped working and did not finish many of the tasks unless managed in person. Majority of employees find ways to watch netflix/hulu/youtube even on company laptops (or play games). They miss the first minutes of meetings, you can hear them eating stuff and plate sounds in the background while talking to them. Unless the employees are career driven, they stop working and find ways to do bare minimum to get their paychecks. That's why.

Because there are people who can self-drive and get themselves to work and become productive without having to be reminded/ridden.

Then there are people who need someone over them (and that's ok).

Most people think they are the self starting type. Most people are LYING or WRONG about their ability to self start & self manage. Most people simply are NOT more productive but think they are. The numbers state otherwise. I'm all for remote work for high performers and self starters but everyone places themselves in that category and it's only true for a small percentage.

I'm not in the position to set policy but if I had to give a reason: mentoring of juniors. This could be done over chat and webcam but it appears to me this is not a great fit for everybody.

I remember an interview of Blockbuster long time ago who claimed that their business will never go out of business because people come to their store for the people connection, chatting with employees, walking around the isles searching for videos, and ultimately the experience of even going to the store.

I was actually in agreement with them at the time. But fast forward 10-20 years and with Netflix and YouTube, looks like they were wrong about the whole thing.

I think the same is playing out here with the in office vs remote work.

Banks are offering almost 40% more than they offered me last year for 2 days hybrid. It's amazing.

Remote communication is not as good as in person. One zoom meeting is not the end of the world. But after 1000 zoom meetings, the problems start to compound and matter a lot for any team that requires a lot of communication.

If you're maintaining legacy software, the requirements are relatively clear, everyone is experienced and knows what to do, and you're not in a hurry to ship, bearing the extra communication overhead of remote work is probably not a big deal, and you get the benefit of hiring people where the cost of living and wages are lower.

On the other hand, if you have a fast-moving project where you still don't know how to solve the problem, you need cross-functional collaboration, speed is important, you don't have time to spell out all the requirements in writing, you're trying to get junior people up to speed, etc, remote work makes that very challenging. It doesn't make it impossible for a project to succeed but it makes it less likely.

Ultimately, the measure of productivity should not in the number of lines of code written or tickets completed, but in delivering value to the customer. Many of the projects I've worked on in the past couple years have ended up failing and were a huge waste of time and money, and I think a lot of it comes down to communication problems.

I think we can categorise employees into two: Experienced professionals and everyone else.

The experienced professional has a track record of coming up the ranks in both position and skillset. He doesn't need to talk to people as much to get work done. He has a good understanding of the domain and has strong analytical skills, able to break down complex problems by himself or with another experienced engineer.

Then there is everyone else. Everyone else does not have the above characteristics. They do not have the skills needed to work by themselves or even learn by themselves. Juniors get frustrated because they don't have the necessary number of synchronous experiences, relying on async forms of knowledge without the ability to piece it together (or at least do it quickly). Furthermore, everyone else accounts for a bigger percentage of the organisation. Most people do not have the skills I mentioned above.

To conclude, some people manage equally well or better remotely. But it's not the case for the whole organisation.

Follow on question: I wonder what the long term effects on company juniors are of working fully remote. I estimate it takes each individual 3-5X more time to get upskilled.

As a counterpoint, I (like many other) love working from home.

I still get to see colleagues maybe once every few months for an all-hands/drinks after, and I consider some colleagues to be friendLY, but I wouldn't consider myself friends with them; my friends are the people that I have around every week for movie nights/gaming sessions. Colleagues can become one of those people but they generally do not (& in fact probably like most people I haven't stayed in contact with the majority of people from previous jobs).

In terms of mental health: I feel much better working from home for so many reasons, I don't have to commute so I can get a little bit of extra sleep when needed, nor am I contributing to mass pollution of the environment with my needless travels. I can have packages delivered and be there to collect them, tidy the house or cook myself a proper lunch over my break. I can do other chores like put washing on in the morning and be able to hang it to dry once it's done. When I'm being social in the evening we can start a lot earlier; no need to wait for everyone to get back to their respective homes, shower and get ready and then travel all to one place - because they're already at home. If I'm feeling ill, but still ready to work rather than going to the office and giving everyone a cold, or staying at home on a sick day and being bored out of my mine I can still just work. I can itch, scratch, cough, blow my nose, fart, sit in a relaxed manner without social repercussions. I can control my working environment in totality - if I want to listen to music on a speaker I can, if I want to put my desk next to my window I can, if I hit a brick wall and want to take a quick breather to make myself a coffee and decompress for 10 minutes then I can do that without looking "lazy".

I do still think for more junior developers that it's important to have an "office day" once a week or fortnight especially for mentoring purposes.

What a lot of people forget (including myself at times) is that a very high percentage of polite & friendly coworkers behave that way ONLY because of the contractual settings. IRL they wouldn't give you the time a day.

Funny story: I had a coworker one time who would come talk to me every shift (I never went to them), they wanted to know every detail about my existence, pick my brain, had surprisingly interesting things to say and tell, made funny jokes, laughed at my jokes. We would revisit topics and talk about them some more or exchange new found insights. Then when I quit I asked if we should stay in touch and the response was: why the hell would I want that? I'm like, why do you come talk with me every day? Oh I was just being polite. Apparently it was important for all of those people they didn't like to like them. It was entirely political!

I wasn't hurt or anything. More like amazed by the quality of acting. A format like: "Oh? you like pokemon! I like pokemon too! Let me impress you with my perfectly faked pokemon knowledge while thinking: o god, another one of those pokemon people & if only I could remember where I put my pokemon shirt.

These aren't real people people.

This is the area my startup is in (hybrid working) and i've been exposed to work practices and decisions at several hundred companies. Unsurprisingly, the common theme is that it's a massive culture shift. You're looking at breaking something that's been the norm for a LONG time, and almost breaking it overnight.

I've spent quite a while trying to formulate a response that covers everything but it's a deeply complex subject and touches on physical space constraints, employee development, cost (both to employee and employer), speed of decisions and response, and (all) employee wellbeing.

For every positive, there's a negative and if people aren't sure what to do I think they just default to what they're familiar with and knee-jerk back to what was the norm.

I think we're only getting started with remote working, my feeling is that there will always be office only companies (in the same way there's always been remote only companies). And the most common will be 'remote first' model where you can work where-ever you want but you're expected to attend certain meetings in the calendar in person.

I worked for 5 years for a group that was located on a different continent; I was the only one not in that office. My performance was stellar based on official evaluations, but career was stagnant, I was almost a myth than a real person with a real career. Salary raises were limited by the level in the company, so that had a ceiling too.

Then I was the manager of others for even more years and we were part of a geographically distributed team. I asked the people to come to the office a couple of days per week, mostly to discuss face to face the stuff not so productive on audio (we almost never do videoconferences) and to have lunch and keep the feeling of being part of a team. This was only because of my previous experience.

The result was during the summer most of the team was in the office most of the time (the request was only for 2 days), while during the winter the people with complicated comute were coming only a few days per month. Some of us were walking, cycling or motorcycling to the office, so weather was an important factor and traffic is usually very bad on bad weather, working from home was the right choice.

A full work from office makes no sense, in my opinion, for most IT people except local helpdesk that interacts with people, from replacing a laptop to fixing an app for the business people, as IT people usually self-service their problems. At the same time I believe that a 100% work from home is not good for many people, especially new hires and people that thrive in a community.

There is also the aspect of performance: if a bad performer is just a name, a person you never met and don't care, it is very difficult to empathize and the tolerance for their mistakes or slowness is very, very low.

A lot of the comments here are binary. Why not advocate for hybrid, 3 days in, 2 days out, or vice versa, giving junior people opportunities for exposure and mentorship and giving everyone time to build culture together, but allowing people time away for deeper work? And then why not invest in your office space so people aren’t treated like animals at a trough and be in actually good locations with walkable amenities?

Employee here, I really enjoyed full remote work during the pandemic, but I have to admit after 6 months I started to feel pretty lonely. I think for mental health reasons employees should be encouraged to at least do hybrid, but I do expect my workplace to also provide flexibility to suit everyone's needs. If I had kids I'd probably try to be remote as possible.

The company I'm with since 2015, was founded in 1989 and has been fully remote since that time. As a remote working for 8+ years, I found the initial transition difficult (came from brick and mortar) but now I cannot imagine going back to that. The collaboration and spontaneous connections work just fine remote, at least they have in my experiences.

I’m a middle manager in my 40s. I’ve been going into the office since the fall, but was fully WFH during covid before that and made the decision to go back in purely due to personal convenience. My company continues to offer employees flexibility and has not mandated RTO.

That said, we have a lot of team members in the firm in their early 20s, their first jobs. I’ve noticed a preference for those team members to RTO (at least a few days a week), and that a good deal of learning and camaraderie result. It is certainly far easier for me to mentor such folks in the office (especially since most aren’t on my team) than when we’re siloed at home.

More senior folks prefer remote — it’s generally easier to balance family demands. But ones who’ve joined the team having been fully remote from the start have even expressed difficulty coming up to speed, despite everyone on the team being transparent and working to solve the issue. It takes new habits and they’re hard to learn.

I think that within a few years this question is going to be much more nuanced. There are numerous tools for remote presence, from chatting to real-time code windows, 2d RPG-style shared spaces, and 3d and VR shared spaces.

My assumption is that within say five years the question is more often going to be something like, how often (if at all) are you required per day or per week to "teleport" into the shared AR/VR collaboration space.

We should anticipate putting on a pair of normalish glasses or maybe goggles that can then integrate a very realistic virtual room into your home. There will be eye contact with what appear to be real people. These will make heavy use of AI for compression and realism. This is just extrapolating from existing research or enterprise devices and software that have most of these capabilities already.

Many people will view this in the same way they do going to the office. They will either think it's essential or a total distraction.

I'm not currently an employer.

I think over time remote is going to lose. Once the revolution is over and things mature remote working will become far more invasive and controlling than it is now. Then on-site companies will start out-performing remote, especially very large companies.

I reckon many employers make the same calculation and want to head it off.

Because going remote first is hard.

Because "you", as an established worker in your industry don't need hand holding guidance.

Remote first will never replace the way impromptu mentor sessions happen in person or after hours. I am extremely glad I had the opportunity for this, and I want to replicate it for the juniors just entering work.

Not an employer and I'm not a fan of RTO personally, and I've figured out how to remote work.i do help with interviews and I do have to say our success rate of good hires kind of went off a cliff with WFH, hires that we would have expected to excel absolutely flopped. Now it may be that we as a company or group are not geared with our processes to properly bring up ppl in this environment,becaus we expect a basic amount of integrity and work ethic from people, which is starting to look like a bit much. We actually have a very relaxed culture, no unpaid OT generally and unchecked flex hours...all on an honor system, I see a lot of abuse from the COVID hires and I worry. So I see why management isosing faith. Even I'm starting to pitch office days to get people moshing.

If you live in any medium to large city there are countless young professional organizations available. Join one or two and get involved. Be willing to volunteer for committees and participate in events and you will quickly have a full social calendar. Junior Achievement is one great organization. Jaycees is another organization.

Young Republicans or young Democrats are a couple of great organization. Want to meet young people who are going places in their life? You will meet them in these organizations.

Do you like exercise and fitness. Look into Team in Training. This is a fundraising arm of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Sign up for one of their races Go through the training and fundraising process. You will me lots of other like minded people. After your race consider becoming a Team in Training coach.

The possibilities are endless. If you are lonely it’s by choice.

Short answer: Control.

Traditional employers want their employees back in the office since they are unable to control them otherwise. Employers and managers who have failed to grasp the concepts of remote working, lack in async communication, and have trust issues with their staff, want to keep a physical headcount of the sheep

There aren't that many actual employers responding, but I read several of these comments, and kinda starting to see a pattern: clichês, anecdotes, no nuance, no acknowledgement that the world has changed, or that teams, jobs, and people, can be different then your own experiences

Y'all are not looking good, bosses.

I want people to be around each other enough that they are comfortable interacting. Some of my most painful experiences in management come from having to mediate a low-level dispute between people who work together but never interact on anything other than work. They are quite often on the same page but have different ways of expressing themselves that can cause friction. This often happens as part of having a highly interdisciplinary and international team. It is incredible how much a few shared lunches or coffee breaks can relax people and help them cohere.

I see in-person work as one of the only opportunities for scheduled casual interaction. Mandatory fun time is not a real solution, but the fact that exists often speaks to the perception that casual interaction is an essential part of building a team.

I suspect HN skews senior/established in our careers, but it’s interesting comparing the sentiment of people on here (almost universally pro-remote) with candidates I’ve talked to when we’ve listed roles. A lot of candidates, especially more junior ones, explicitly want an in-person office culture.

20 years ago I was on a lot of conference calls early or late in the workday, offshoring my job to a time zone 11.5 or 10.5 hours off, or with sysadmins 1 hour off.

The only thing that's changed in 20 years is Zoom or WebEx vs a conference bridge. There wasn't an in office dynamic then or now.

I'm a wfh proponent. However, could the mission to the moon have been done from home, today? In the timeframe that it was completed? I'm sure there's good arguments on either side. But there's something special about the face to face connection that you can't replace with emails and video conference. I believe humans are more effective at getting things done, in person.

Another fact is that today's managers are all from a time before cellphones existed... For the most part. If you're 30 something years old, you remember when you still picked up a book or hung out with your friends at the mall. Which makes me believe that it will take a generational shift for us to truly abandon the office... Whether that's a good thing or bad.

None. 100% remote for 8 years with a team of 40 in the cybersecurity space. It’s all about control.

https://www.defiant.com/truly-remote-vs-total-control-wordfe...

1) Managing remote employees is harder. Managing in person is easier.

Both are doable, but managing someone remotely requires either the manager and/or the employee to be really good at remote comms.

2) in person spontaneous collaboration

3) my experience is most people get less done remotely. Some do more, but most do less

It is much easier to perform the display of “valuable manager” when you can hover over people.

Employees that perform just fine without being micromanaged are a threat to the livelihoods of people whose entire jobs are scheduling meetings and arranging office pizza parties.

I see a lot of “good” answers where good translates to reasonable business or social goals. But I can think of quite a few bad reasons.

The top reason is, management wants workers back in the office because managers never learned how to manage people, so they practice management-by-walking-around, aka interrupt-driven behavior. Many companies have a culture of MBWA, and it’s a hard curse to break.

Another bad reason is, distanced work has led to a substantial reduction in workplace unfairness behaviors such as sexual harassment and race-based favoritism. And this, logically, has made female and minority employees more valuable and better performers. But in many workplaces, favoritism is the order of the day, and women and minorities were not the favorites. The favorites are now performing worse than the people they stepped on to be unfairly promoted, and it makes incompetent executives look, well… incompetent.

Another reason is that many people, particularly executives, have more authority, respect, or control in the workplace than they do at home. For quite a few people, their office has become their primary social outlet. And taking that away has proven unlivable for them.

The other reason that immediately came to mind is that executives are, by and large, older than the rank and file, and they (we) come from a time when building, maintaining, and overseeing an office space was both a critical part of the job and a source of pride / ego. For older management, offices are still a real-world manifestation of the success of the company that signals to other people how effective the leadership of the company is. People are less able to derive the same sense of awe from abstractions like sales numbers. If people don’t return to the office, it will not continue to make economic sense to have flashy offices, and this ego outlet will disappear.

Are these good reasons? They are not. But these reasons, honestly, ring truer to me than “hallway collisions.” In the real world, all motivating reasons are self-centered reasons, and executives simply don’t benefit from hallway and breakroom magic or mentoring of the young. They do perversely benefit from showy offices, discrimination, avoiding overt displays of their lack of skill, and forced social conduct, though.

Here at ardour.org "head office" (my home in a small village in new mexico), we just had a 5-6 day hangout of myself and the other main developer. We have spent years collaborating online on this large project, but in those few days we were able to resolve some high level design issues (well, we hope we resolved them) that have proved resistant to online discussion.

This experience isn't enough to justify the idea that we (or anyone else) should work in close physical proximity all the time. But it does point to one of the plusses of doing this at least occasionally.

Not an employer but:

- Older execs are too stuck in their ways

- Busy execs __need__ a work family to rationalise their commitment

- Hard to make a culture when remote

- Hiring is one of the hardest task in most companies and it’s made harder by remote. Not being able to nail onboarding and the face to face getting to know someone can be lethal

- In the 1% of times, when shit really hits the fan, remote is best because you can have zero communication delays, command management etc. As an “exec” these are the moments that you optimise for

- Bad eggs leave such a bad taste in the mouth.

I’m not an employer and not even exec level. So I may be totally off base. Just my observations.

We don't - at least not all of us.

I have a mandatory 1 day in the office for the staff, the office is there for anyone to work from at any time - no one ever takes it up, they are very comfortable working at home.

And I get it - I prefer working at home too - I also love our 1 day in the office where we can have a laugh with each other, get lunch together and generally bond as a team, but as the CTO of a company where pretty much my entire dev team are introverted , its not a big priority for me to have to get people back into the office.

It's not about the productivity, it's about the culture and the shared experiences. It would be tough to argue that those two things don't matter for the success of a company.

My guess:

- the communication aspect (I've noticed projects with people who are physically in the office progress much smoother than when I have to schedule a meeting or reach out via chat; the friction to ask someone is lower when you run across them and can see that they're not busy vs. pinging them and then not getting a response because they actually were in a meeting)

- some people treating WFH as "part time, work a few hours between child-minding, chores and other non-work tasks" or a fear of that happening

I have 4 employees. We're in person because the extra 1-2 hours of programming they do here, they do on issues I urgently raise and directly affect the bottom line.

And while I would trust any of them to work remotely, I would never hire someone to work exclusively remotely.

I have only met one person in my life, ever, who has asked for exclusively a remote arrangement and wasn't trying to take advantage of us, and the guy was practically a wizard of engineering and deserved whatever arrangement he wanted.

Because they have assets sitting there empty and accountants are like wtf you gotta make use of this were stuck in the contract for x years. There ya have it. Simplified but mostly the cause, if ya company rents space to operate and tells you reasons other than above they are probably lying through their teeth at ya. It's got zero to do with what they think is good for you the worker or some water cooler innovation bs and everything to do with profit,loss and expenditure.

I would love a fully remote job (currently looking, in Germany), and I understand that, for some people, the office is the place to meet others and socialize. I like socializing, but I have my wife, cats, and after work hours I have online friends who I do online projects with.

I understand the loneliness, and I've certainly been there, but learning to find people and things to do outside of work is the key to "surviving" a remote job.

> Employers, why do you want us back in the office?

Because we're all paranoid that the other companies will somehow gain some sort of economic/productivity advantage from bringing their guys back into the office and leverage this to push us out of the market.

Even though we keep seeing research that this absolutely isn't the case, the only way to be sure is to preemptively bring our guys back into the office too. Ya know.. just in case.

I’m not an employer. I’ve worked in academic research as a software engineer and research scientist for 20+ years. I don’t think great research can be done without some kind of regular in-person collaboration. Serendipitous, chance interactions are part of this. But for me, there’s no substitute for whiteboarding in the same room. Now of course we also need lots of time to do focused work by ourselves.

I dislike remote work, because I live in a small apartment which means I don't have a special room for work and that leads to the fact that my work and my free time sometimes aren't clearly separated anymore. I also think that there are people who are good at remote work and people who aren't, the people who aren't mostly abuse wfh, while the other group strifes in it.

Dragging us back.. says it all really. The majority of companies weren't supporting remote work as a new flexible way for their employees to work. They were supporting remote work because it was the only way to get ANY work done at all during the pandemic. There is always value in face to face interaction and compartmentalising work from our personal lives.

I have a very hard time believing people are so out of touch with reality that they don’t understand why employers want people in the office.

You’re not in back to back meetings from the moment you start work until you finish. Not all meetings involve teams in other geographies and even ones that do might still be one where most people in the call are from one city.

While in office, every single person talks to coworkers at many random times throughout the day. That builds comradery within and across teams. That, in turn, means each employee cares more about their job and the success of the people around them. That in turn, makes it harder for them to look for other jobs because your not just completing some tasks from day to day like a machine. It’s not just boring chit chat either. You’ll sometimes briefly turn your chair or walk a few steps to get someone’s opinion/ideas about something you’re stuck on with your work and vice versa.

Aside from this, having people in the office reduces the number of people who slack off during the day. This point shouldn’t be glossed over. Not only does it hurt productivity, depending on the type of job, that will put extra burden on others on the team. A slacker could at the very least take on some of the work of others and that reduces overall stress and improves overall morale.

I love remote work and would hate having to go back to the office more than a couple times a week. That said, I can still be objective and understand the viewpoint of someone running a company and wanting in person collaboration.

People are missing the point. Remote work is about judging you by your results. In person is about your manager watching you.

I don’t think work culture has broadly attuned itself to working from home and how companies operate hasn’t shifted enough to leverage its advantages and mitigate the disadvantages.

Companies that do figure this out will thrive of course, as it seems that this is something employees are willing to stand up to management over

Not an employer but if I was, I would absolutely be full remote. Employees mostly want this and costs / headaches are far lower. I don’t buy into the “water cooler” thesis. If you want people to collaborate more, ask them to work together. This is where I find the best connections are formed.

Well, see 4 years ago we invested in this new office building with lots of open office space and small conference rooms with shiny whiteboards. Now it's all empty and we need to make sure we can tell corporate it was a good decision. Therefore, we need as many butts in seats as possible asap.

78 comments as of now and I can't find one from an actual employer, only people speaking for employers.

1. We generate trust faster and stronger when we are physically present.

2. Teams with high trust tend to be happier and deliver better and more.

3. Some people need to be in the office. Hybrid approaches (some people at the office, some not) suck. So full-office, or say goodbye to the people that need the office.

In this thread: lies, fabrications, misinformation, disinformation, deception, skullduggery, wayward words, dirty deeds, and a case and a half of the finest bullshit you’ll ever read.

They want you back in the office to make the management happy, to make the corporate rent make sense, to make the banks happy, to feed the giant machine whose primary purpose is 100% unequivocally NOT getting stuff done (tm)

If your team isn’t getting stuff done remote, investigate a protocol for communicating the business and product needs to the developers, and maybe skim some commits.

If you are being threatened with back to office and you don’t want to go, make them fire you, use your resources, and I’d estimate there’s about a 95% chance most of you can find a higher paying position elsewhere, or at least equal pay & remote-first. The world is changing, don’t let them play tricks on you.

I’ve fought with DC traffic for twenty years, I’ll be damned if I’m ever going to show up in an office for less than a client-vendor situation or L5/6+ all hands. If it’s on fire, you better call my work phone and make sure my deposits are up-to-date.

I know it’s tougher for the younger bucks out here, and that loans and rent and everything might tip the scales a little further away from you. Do your best, do what you can, but I strongly recommend putting up the fight for more comfortable work arrangements.

If we’re all gonna be obsolete in ten years, they might as well be paying us right and speaking to us right for the next nine!

Of course to control better and coordinate effort for the profit better! There is no but in the most of coding business. We all know we have access to the information needed on the internet. This is something aimed for PROFIT. Not for your lives to make better!

My reasons:

- I like easy access to my crew

- I feel like people goof off when WFH. I know I do.

- For most people (not all) office work is better from a mental health perspective than WFH.

- For most jobs (not all), the work is more easily performed at a high level in an office environment with easy access to colleagues and resources.

Big organisations are lead by people that hang out with other people in big corporations. Some of these other corporations are friends with people in big organisations that own office properties or do office cleaning or whatever. These corporate leaders have common interests in office workers being at the office and justifying paying friends of friends and keeping them happy.

If you're a bigwig and cut down on office spending other bigwigs will be less likely to help you out when you need a new position, among other things.

To explain the 'hallway talk is great' myth: it's from the masters of process, owners of product, and other similar people, that work relatively closely to the people actually building and maintaining the systems that make dah mahney. These people learn a lot and get a lot of things explained that they otherwise wouldn't and that makes them feel less nervous about not having any actual control at all over the output and functioning of the 'team'. They could of course ask over asyncronous chats or email but they don't know what to ask and they're scared they'll irritate someone, so they prefer sucking it out of smalltalk by the coffee machine.

And then there's the 'but how will I ever manage to take a walk or bike if my boss doesn't tell me to'. If this is you, get help. You have some executive dysfunction that will eventually be unhealthy somehow, probably when you're unemployed or have a lot of spare time for some other reason. Fix it before you realise you've spent amazing free time that you yourself got to own on doing none of the things you know makes you feel good and strong. How to do it varies, it could be therapy, it could be to move to a less polluted place, could be something else.

Remote is here to stay. Fire your boss if they insist on you spending more than two days a month at some office for no good reason.

Solving the in-person/remote work problem is becoming intractable.

The people who prefer remote seem to strongly prefer remote. Any arguments against it are dismissed as RTO bootlicking. See the top-level comments here from people who will absolutely not give up remote work and are giving people advice on how to live in a remote-only world. (Just get a hobby, bro! How hard could it be? Can't make friends after work? That's a you problem!)

The people who prefer in-person strongly prefer in-person. They think that this is the ONLY way to build a community culture and foster spontaneous collaboration. Moreover, the kind of work the people with "power" in these organizations (executives, salespeople, marketing, etc) have is almost entirely face-to-face, and they are also raising families and dealing with traffic, so there's willful lack of empathy there too.

Hybrid work environments make it easy for the "minority" to miss important context.

Either extreme (RTO, or full-remote) leads to serious backlash.

I think that a mostly-full RTO will win out for the same reason that chain layoffs happened this year.

The biggest companies are all _very_ pro return-to-office. I don't know of any big companies that stayed full remote after vaccines were viable.

The smaller startups that can do full remote are vying for acquisition or to go public. In both cases, the power dynamics will shift towards making people go back into the office because that's what the people in charge want. (Again, their jobs are mostly face-to-face, and they also raise kids and deal with traffic and doctor's appointments, so empathy is lacking there.)

For the industry in general, "hybrid work" at a coworking space may be a compromise worth considering. Whole regional teams can be in the office a few days a week and the company need not commit to a long, expensive lease agreement.

I couldn't work in a modern office without my noise cancelling headphones. In fact, as I look up from my desk, I can see dozens of engineers all wearing them. We commute into the office to sit in silence with our headphones on.

Not an employer but I noticed that after 2 years of working remotely I feel like I have enough. Not just enough of working remotely. Enough of working at all.

Then again I don't think I ever stayed in any company for more then 2 years so that just might be me.

How about just reconfiguring bullpen office back to semi private cubicles or tiny phone room offices? Make the office a place to come to for a better work environment.

Let’s be honest- these bullpen setups suck and very few people want to “return” to that.

> there’s not much in-office dynamic like maybe there was 20 years ago

Yeah, because folks like you insist that office culture has nothing to do with productivity. I wonder if you've ever worked somewhere productive.

> dragging us back into the office

Dragging? Are we slaves now?

Perhaps those of us that would enjoy some in person socialization should meet up in person? If you’re in the Bay Area I’d be happy to get coffee as a group, maybe even make it a thing where it’s available frequently.

The elephant in the room for return to office is commute. If the office was <20 mins for most employees, I doubt there would a huge hue and cry over going in 2-3 days a week.

Am employer, but only after covid- during covid i wanted to get back to the office as soon as i was vaccinated. The reason for that is that i missed my coworkers. I missed the spontaneous connections, the conversations, the hang outs. People are social beings, and being fully remote means a lesser emotional connection. I don’t like that.

> what are your primary motivations dragging us back into the office?

The truth is, for a great many jobs it's impossible to measure work well enough to tell if you worked 1 day or 5 last week.

You're debugging a memory leak? Well, maybe it was very difficult to find. You're reviewing grant proposals? Who's to say how carefully you read them? You say it was very difficult to make this page work on chrome, firefox and safari? Well, if you say so.

Meanwhile, employers have read articles about "quiet quitting".

I suspect employers fear we're on the golf course, working a second full-time job, or reading HN. Sending people back to the office assures them that's not the case.

> not much in-office dynamic like maybe there was 20 years ago

what’s an example?

Security. It's easier to secure a small set of networks than it is 10/100/1K/10K/100K network connections. We're at Quantum. It's that simple.

Not an employer, but my read is this:

When I'm in the office, I have little, off the cuff conversations I can't have online, where I can express and develop a thought that would otherwise be gone as quickly as it came to me.

IRL, I have thousands of opportunities during the day to get 10 seconds of feedback, online I'm not likely to get a response because of the context switching overhead.

I don't want to be 100% in the office, but the one day a week we have at the moment is definitely positive for the whole team.

Tl;dr: the creativity that can be achieved by having people to bounce ideas off is multiplied when they're in the same room.

Scrum Masters (and equivalents) have gotten lonely and don't feel quite as useful without in person interaction.

Whiteboards !

None of the online whiteboards equivalent tools work as well a old fashioned white board and markers.

Real estate.

Probably because we are not as tough in-person as behind a screen.

I feel most people love the office but hate the commute..

Not an employer, just a mid dev. People waste their time so much remote. In 2021 it felt like almost noboby was getting any work done. You need good managers to handle that, and they are rare.

People slack off when they r at home

Communication bandwidth.

Because there are people

I like the office...

its difficult to micromanage remote employees

I'm not from the US (EU) and we're doing hybrid model (wfh if you want to, work from office if you want to, combine both as you see fit, no requirement to notify anyone on your preferred model).

I like to work from my office. What I hate about remote work is often waiting for responses from multiple people. Something that used to take ~60 seconds to deal with now takes up to an hour while waiting for everyone to answer. I dislike video calls and I prefer to use written text as a way of relaying information crucial to engineering / configuration / infra.

I never cared about office and having to work from the office, but it's noticeable that a lot of people don't have sufficient self-control or work ethics to be as productive from home as they are from the office.

TL;DR:

1. people work less efficient from home 2. it takes a lot longer to receive information

Serendipity.