Ask HN: Is Hybrid Working a Ruse?
We've been asked to return to the office for two days a week "mandatory".
I'm convinced that this is just the first part of a plan to eventually have people working 5 days in office again.
The reason I am convinced is because there is no clear value proposition to even being in office two days "mandatory", which tells me that it is not really a gesture of flexibility but rather of temporary appeasement.
What do you think?
253 comments
[ 102 ms ] story [ 542 ms ] threadBut then again maintenance, utilities, toilet paper, sickness, taxes, etc are all burning a hole in their pocket. So better to force people back to the office?
Worse yet, any big corp that announces back to work has an army of recruiters cold calling all their employees offering them exactly what they want. More money and work from home.
It's an impossible situation for businesses.
Flipside, what's more important to look at is only what you can control. You wont change your employer's mind on whatever bad decision they make.There are only bad decisions to make.
You can control yourself. Do you even want to go in for 2 days a week? Personally I'm not interested in paying for parking, 1 ply toilet paper and pointless chitchat about moon knight or some other tv show i havent had the chance to watch.
You can instead make the decision for what you can control. There's an awful lot of employers who will accept completely remote workers.
In other words. From most expensive to least
* all employees at office
* empty office, employees remote
* no office, employees remote
Business would do whatever is cheapest unless they believe they won't hit their targets. So it's got nothing to do with the buildings existing.
Must be some other reason.
Like in OP's pov, the intention is 2 days a week but as he expects, it's just to slowly ease back into 5 days a week. No doubt seeing that the lower cost being to take some HR losses is less than the huge discount in selling the building.
Rent + Monthly Expenses > Rent
So an company who only cared about money wouldn't pull employees back into the office as that's more expensive for them than letting them say at home, even if they company is still paying rent. They'd need some other reason, like they believe employees are more productive at work. Short of that, they'd just let them stay home, even if they have to keep paying rent on an empty office it's still less money than rent + office expenses.
That only makes sense if they derive value from people being in the office. Otherwise there is nothing lost by simply leaving the office empty.
Having the building is a cost.
The better thing that OP or OPlikes is that they should be considering unusual options to discover a not-bad decision.
What if instead of forcing people back to the office that they instead buy a ton of hydroponic systems. Start growing food with their unused office space.
If enough businesss do this, we might not have a food shortage. We might avoid a disaster that seems inevitable.
edit:conjunctions
This is why good fully remote organisations decided to not have an office, and appreciate transparency, working in the open, supporting one another etc. Of course these values are not exclusively fully remote.
In case you're wondering where I'm coming from, my company switched to purely remote. Yet we're still renting a huge office, and we're told to go there every once in awhile. But we're purely remote. It seems pretty obvious that we're just remote until someone can crack the whip and make us go back so they feel like they're getting their money's worth on rent.
I think the other thing worth mentioning, we're not alone. This is going to be done to all of us. Remote work is great, but it turns out companies aren't run for the benefit of the worker.
Although I think that it is probably better for companies to pick a side as neither will be happy with the arrangement as it (at least when i was at a hybrid company) just meant going on Zoom from our office desks.
Hybrid is the worst of both worlds, you're almost guaranteed to have someone calling in and you need to live close enough to the office that you can't really take advantage of cheaper house prices/more space.
It will be interesting to see how the competitive advantages work themselves out. We'll see if in-person communication is as important as legend has it.
The push to get butts back in seats is 100% about job security for middle management and maintaining the value of commercial real estate. I've seen evidence of CRE leaning on the media and politicians to push a "return to work" narrative.
Now is really a good opportunity to redefine the relationship between employer and employee, and 'work' in general, and I hope we collectively push forward with it, not just sink back into the semi-abusive situation of before.
Managers really do need to communicate with the team and the team really does need to communicate with each other. That really does happen better in person. Even if it feels like a distraction when someone needs to communicate with you but you don't with them.
Says who? Some management study? My anecdotal experience tells me I’ve formed stronger relationships over zoom and slack than I have working in person with people I truly cannot stand. At least with zoom and slack, if I don’t like you, I can hide your window behind my IDE.
And there’s no rule that says I have to like everyone and everyone has to like me. There’s no rule that says I should want to spend my free time with so and so. How about, I choose who I spend my time with and you choose what I work on and pay me for that?
I mean if you can't stand the people then you're going to have poor relationships with them regardless.
I once worked with a dude that would come into my cubicle every morning eating chunks of watermelon out of a sandwich baggie. He would just stand there smacking his lips and slurping up watermelon juice, purposefully trying to be a dick.
I shouldn’t have to deal with that or be expected to get a new job. And management shouldn’t have to sift through that passive aggressive behavior and make arbitrary judgement calls of who the dick is. Just let me spend the least amount of time as possible with him, and I’ll be happy. Respect my freedom to choose who I want to associate with.
Confronting bullies is a game of chicken and most bullies can't really take it. You just have to hold the line or make them think you will.
Did you try asking him to stop, or to eat somewhere else?
if the elements of a person we find objectionable are things that only exist in person then different modes of communication may mitigate those.
For instance, if someone doesn't like me because I interrupt conversations with irrelevant anecdotes in a way that derails the topic and being on a zoom call makes it much more effort to take over the conversation, then that might actually improve our working relationship.
Prior to 2020 this was certainly the conventional conjecture, but the world has had two years of full remote. That’s a natural experiment, and the results are in. Companies didn’t collapse. Therefore, that’s not true.
Even in The Before Times, I lead a team that was effectively 100% distributed across North America, with only about half us capable of physically meeting once or twice a week. There as no difference. Slack the person, or hop on a call.
Personally, I think the real reason that’s driving return to work is big companies wasting literally billions of dollars on real estate. Better stick folks in those boxes, or the execs made a huge mistake, and of course execs didn’t make a mistake, because the execs are geniuses to revival the demigods.
Your argument doesn’t follow. GP claimed that in-person is better, not that it prevents companies from collapsing.
Frankly I don’t think there is an amount you could pay me to do back-to-back Zoom meetings all day every day. My price would be high enough that I’d retire on it pretty quick. Management doesn’t have to flee the industry in protest of intolerable working conditions; it controls the working conditions. We should it expect it, all else being equal, to secure the working conditions best adapted to doing management work. And that means presence.
I think the original comment is around owning the employee's time, which is most effected when you have some ownership of their physical presence.
For example, we often have mandatory company wide meetings where the subject is only of interest to 5% of people but yet everyone is forced to be present and attentive for the entire period, adding another level of forced fakery to our daily lives.
If it seems like I'm projecting some anger at a specific scenario, I am. Let me pivot.
Hybrid seems like a good option for teams, though it takes away the geographic-flexibility perk of WFH. I think WFH can be successful, but I absolutely 100% think a lot of people are bullshitting how effective they are at home, because none of the workers want to lose the time- and location-flexibility of WFH. So we all just say "yeah it's great, it's just as productive" where I can plainly see a number of people are not. Flat out. Does that mean we should all go back to the office? Maybe not, but it takes more and better management, not less.
Personally, the banter and whiteboarding and trips to get coffee and lunch with coworkers made working together better and more effective, it made work more enjoyable, and we worked together on problems a lot more effectively. Who enjoys Zoom meetings in themselves?
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I respect some people work better remotely. We need to respect that some people genuinely work better in person, and stop accusing them of "just wanting to wield power over others" or something. There are legitimate benefits to the person and to the mission when people are in person.
don't make me talk to you. you've already said you hate introverts. i don't want to talk to someone like that
But that doesn't make it a healthy lifestyle when taken to the extreme.
As it applies to work, I feel there is a war going on between those who recognize and remember the social and professional benefits of working in person and building professional relationships, and those who don't.
I think extreme introversion is as unhealthy as eating poorly and refusing to exercise. Running isn't always fun, but we do it. Interacting with humans isn't always fun, but we do it.
You think being an introvert is so negative to your health that it will literally reduce your life expectancy?
What exactly do you think introvert means?
"A tendency to turn inward, first examined by Jung, which often results in avoidance of social contact, isolation and loneliness."
I see introversion/social anxiety/disdain of others in the modern world to be like depression, or getting winded after going up one flight of stairs. It doesn't make you a worse person, but it shouldn't be embraced - it should be seen as something to periodically work against to keep the condition in check.
When we get winded after walking up some stairs, we see we should go on more walks or jogs. When we have depression, it is beneficial to get therapy, change habits, and/or take medication. When one finds themselves disliking the idea of interacting with people (even the occasional stranger), that is a signal to periodically flex one's "emotional muscles" to counter the condition.
I don't like making appointments on the phone anymore. It causes me anxiety. I find that to be a fault in myself. It is a flaw. I sometimes don't get back to friends quickly when they ask how I'm doing or if I want to hang out. That is a flaw, and one that I need to work on. I don't embrace it. When I have a negative feeling about "people" - like "ugh, people are so annoying" - I remember that is poisonous thinking to mental health and put the thought away. Or at least, I don't embrace it.
Nowadays it is generally accepted that introverts find socializing to be exhausting while extroverts find it energizing. That's the key difference. This is thought to be due to a physiological difference in how the autonomic nervous system function. It's not a muscle to be exercised.
Also, how you draw parallels between introversion and mental illness is really telling about how you view it.
Being an introvert isn't a "condition" or a "flaw", and not wanting to be involved in social gatherings that you aren't interested in is not unhealthy. Being anti social or a misanthrope is a completely different issue.
It's estimated that between 25-40 percent of people are introverts. That's a massive population you are writing off as defective and "needing to work on it"
But maybe it should be. Just as you can lack physical strength and exercise to become stronger if you view that as desirable, you can be too introverted and work to become less so if you view your level of introversion as undesirable.
OP isn't being unreasonable. It's certainly possible to find yourself in a position where you are extremely isolated. For some introverts that would be an ideal place to be, but for others it would be depressing and they would then have to learn how to become somewhat more extroverted.
I think you're reading too much into what he's saying.
This is just baffling to me. What are you even saying.
Are you under the impression that being more social makes you less introverted? The way lifting weights makes your body stronger?
It doesn't. It just makes you appear that way to ignorant people who still think being an introvert means you aren't very social.
Being social is a skill you can practice.
Being an introvert has nothing to do with that skill.
What I meant is that it is possible to reduce your level of introversion and actually enjoy being around people more and having it become less draining. In a way it's the reverse of what you said: becoming less introverted makes it easier to be more social.
Yes, I've done it. No, I can't really explain to someone else what it was that I did.
The only reasonable path is to strike a balance of both.
Take a hike with this sanctimonious judgement.
I see extroverts as people who are so needy they need constant socialization to counteract their feelings of inadequacy and hide this by performing social dominance rituals (see BMW owners).
See how stupid that sounds? Maybe look in the mirror and think about how judgmental you're being.
My broader point is that there is normal, balanced; and there is abnormal, unbalanced, in all things. It's up to each of us to feel how we feel about what is normal, and it's culture that shapes it.
I have ADHD. I am certainly depressed, but I am not diagnosed. I don't know if "bipolar" fits, but I can be extremely outgoing and center of attention one day, and extremely emotionally drained another. I'm also skinny-fat from stopping working out while continuing to drink. I have many friends, some incredibly close and genuine, but still feel lonely.
All of these things are abnormal. They are flaws. They don't make me evil or wrong, but they are things I don't claim are normal or fundamentally healthy.
I'm reacting to the sentiment I see online, mainly reddit and sometimes here, that thinks disliking people and/or wishing not to interact with others and/or being unable to cope with minor interpersonal annoyances at work is normal. It isn't.
I like interacting with family and friends. I do not like going to game nights or parties to meet new people. I don't like going to bars. I don't like being forced to interact with coworkers.
So yeah, I recognize we're social animals and we have to interact to be healthy, but technology has made it such that it's now easier to be selective about who you interact with.
That's a huge benefit. Why should I have to be forced to get along with some passive aggressive or outright aggressive asshole in the workplace more than necessary. I believe hanging out with such people who make you miserable causes premature death. I shouldn't have to change my attitude about such things if I'm happy with the friends and family I got and technology enables me.
You can only get so much done by working on a Jira ticket in complete isolation. While it might work well enough for a mature group, it fails completely when bringing new people up to speed.
I've worked with more than a few people like this. Perhaps they get all the social interaction they can handle at home and just want to be left alone at work. Or perhaps they just dislike their co-workers. Others find working in groups of more than two people to be difficult. I don't think it's strictly a personality trait. It's more of a cultural thing in some companies.
How far of an extreme do you take this to? Do I have to enjoy spending time with other inmates if I’m in jail with them? What if I’m surrounded by pedophiles? Do I need to force myself to cooperate with and respect them too? I mean, where do you draw the line? Just because you work with somebody doesn’t preclude them from being a despicable shithead. To me, that’s just obvious.
If we are going back to the many-independent-clans structure our ancestors had, we probably also going back to their material standard of living and their exposure to violence. For a while, until we get slaughtered by or assimilated into a culture that can get people who aren’t necessarily friends or family to have lunch together in between raiding our huts.
If there are performance losses, why are they not being addressed? Why is there a blind assumption A or B is better? How are people able to BS their way through in a way they wouldn't in the office?
This is an incredibly negative take when the opposite may just as well be true. If people don't want to lose this flexibility, that's an incentive to not drop their performance in a way that is measurable, making them at risk of losing that privilege.
>Maybe not, but it takes more and better management, not less.
Better, yes. More? Why would the assumption immediately be that we need more management, given that WFH resonates primarily with people who tend to be far more autonomous and communication-independent than those who want to work in office?
If anything, this shows just how much management has been pushing a one-size-fits-all solution for decades to make it easier on them, at the cost of ICs. WFH is the tip of the iceberg in this regard.
For some people just seeing the faces of co-workers while working can help quiet a lot to not feel alone. Plus they can see you working so you feel social control. It is also super easy to have a quick chat whenever you want to as you can see who is in deep concentration and who is available.
People that don't feel like being social can stay out of it. In practice, nobody is fully extroverted or introverted, so people can do whatever mixes their current needs. DO NOT MAKE IT REQUIRED. That will ruin it.
I am always shocked that people still haven't figured out how to do remote properly.
Hybrid is the worst of both worlds. Why don't the offices down size and give people the option, while admitting there are time when people need to come into the office. Training is much more difficult (usually) when done remotely, so - when possible - why not take a month and come in to get the ropes tight and the boards nailed in, then everyone can figure out what's best for them. This saves the company money and makes people (ostensibly) happier.
The team I'm working on is both remote and in the office, right now. A few people get on a conference call at the offices - sometimes in separate rooms, which is odd - and everything gets hammered out. I have a disability, which makes it MUCH easier to work at home, but if I have to, I can work in the office, and I did for years. It just required extra preparation and planning, etc. etc.
At the end of the day, if it's just as productive (if not more) WFH, then your personal likes and desires about lunch and a date with coworkers is just more BS that needs to die. Go work for a full office company, but don't make other people have to fill in the holes in your social life.
It's "maker's schedule, manager's schedule" - you don't need power-hungriness or real estate cost calculation to explain why management types prefer the office, it's just inherent to their worldview and the kind of work they do. Don't like it? Try to build a company whose managers do not come from the management community, and try to prevent them from developing this kind of mindset even as circumstances make it optimal for them. Good luck.
Your comment does not have anything to do with realpolitik. You're just expressing your personal preference, and spinning it as if it was norm. Except that it's not. Far from it.
Is your personal preference an adequate tradeoff for forcing all the inconveniences and downright degradation to the quality of life of everyone around you?
I mean, why would I waste 1 or 2 hours of my life each day and be kept far away from my loved ones, and in the process be forced to endure a more expensive cost of living, just because some dude at the office doesn't feel like having an occasional 10min Zoom call?
Extreme commute times are very bad, but they aren’t facts about working in offices; they’re facts about housing choices, and probably also our deranged housing & transportation policies. I will happily join you in getting angry about those!
I don't find being in the other side of a webcam much different than being on the other side of a table. Maybe that's a sign my own brain is weird but really, it's the same to me.
> We should it expect it, all else being equal, to secure the working conditions best adapted to doing management work
No, we should expect it to provide the working conditions best adapted to their team's needs.
Fuck this whole idea that managers are more important than ICs.
> We individual contributors may not think about this much, but the absolute thrill of being above others in the hierarchy only reaches its fullness when the employees get out of the damn pajamas and into the open offices. Please pick me up a coffee while you are at it.
This is a wildly cynical take. If you're dealing with managers like this, you're not in a normal tech office environment. Every decent tech company I've ever worked with has put a lot of pressure on managers to treat employees well. Retention is a huge issue, especially in this market, and managers actually spend a lot of time trying to cater to their IC's wishes rather than jerking them around.
Any tech manager who acts like you describe will steadily fail out of tech companies due to employee attrition.
* Whether people should go into work
* Where the pressure to go into work comes from in an org
I work remote. I manage remote teams. I love it and I think it's great.
But it's definitely not for everyone. A lot of people can't handle remote work. A lot of people don't have the self discipline to get work done without being in a social context (some of my remote team members work in coworking spaces as a workaround). A lot of people see remote as an opportunity to isolate from the team and dodge important communications.
I think we need to get past this idea that one type of work is best for everyone and every team. When people try to say that remote is superior, they don't know what they're talking about. It's one the most "it depends" topics out there right now.
> * Where the pressure to go into work comes from in an org
Let me answer this indirectly:
If companies saw a net increase in productivity and employee well-being from going remote, they'd be falling all over themselves to go all-in on remote work. Getting rid of office space and being able to hire anywhere is a huge advantage and every executive team I know was enthralled with the idea.
So why would they want to retain expensive office space and limit themselves to hiring only nearby candidates? It's because for every 1 person who's great at remote work, there may be 1-3 others who aren't doing well at all. Juniors and new hires suffer the most because ramp-up times become extremely slow when the rest of the team is isolated away working on their tasks and uninterested in talking to anyone they don't have to. Interpersonal conflicts are way up because people misinterpret things as insulting or offensive because they can't see the other person's face. Fights and arguments break out everywhere because there's little difference between the company Slack and the other Discords where the person alt+tabs to argue with people.
In short: Remote is hard, creates more work for management, is detrimental to juniors and new hires, and doesn't work for everyone. If a company is willing to invest a lot of money and time into hiring more managers to deal with it and churning through hires who can't handle remote, it can work. But it's often easier and happier for everyone to just go into the office a day or two per week to resolve these issues in person.
Even as a remote team, flying everyone into the same location is hands down the easiest way to get people communicating efficiently and treating each other as human team members instead of Slack screen name enemies. Remote is hard.
The increasing value of property and the need to collectively keep office space prices high is a big reason. Do you know how much Apple or Google's campus is worth?
I agree. I really enjoy working hybrid myself - going to the office every now and then to have some human contact, otherwise working from home or wherever I am.
It also depends a lot in the living situation: A 20-something single who lives in the center anyways might enjoy going to the office, a married 40-something in the suburb would rather work from home all the time.
5 years ago, I exercised my privilege (as an IC with a lenient boss), to work from another state for a few months.
During that time, I dialed into meetings that were otherwise held in person.
My experience:
- Nobody remembered to ask me for my opinion, so I was constantly interrupting
- Often, people just forgot to open the telcon, so I was ignored on hold
- Often, people forgot to present the slides / visuals over telcon as well as the projector, so I had to interrupt them and cause 5 minute delays
- Whiteboard designs? Flat out of scope
- Try pitching ideas over the phone to a room full of stakeholders. They treat you like a spam caller
A project I was leading for a new design was "killed" and "revived" with exactly the same team, but another (onsite) person swapped out for my role. That person is now in charge of the project, and it's a big, big deal, with attention all the way up to Washington. His career is skyrocketing because of this.
Working hybrid may not be a scam in and of itself, but I suspect someone with 10+ years experience managing recognizes that all remote, or all in person, are both tenable solutions, but hybrid will cause a separate-and-not-equal workforce schism.
> Nobody remembered to ask me for my opinion, so I was constantly interrupting
that's not much because of you or others but the actual management organization is crap. The basic idea is have a workforce, at any level, made of stereotypical Ford-model workers, those who ancient Greek's call "useful idiots", people just able to work but mentally unable to be citizens, to be adult, autonomous. So there is the idea of creating a hierarchy of shepherds to keep the flock "as it should" and that does not work because such social model does not work.
A proof? We have not invented anything really new in the last decades. We have improved anything, popularized anything, but nothing really new have seen the light. Now for the first time in human history after industrial revolution began we see a decline in quality of anything not because of scarcity or war but because of a system that can't anymore sustain itself having consumed itself from the inside.
That's the classic failure of merchants societies: they are skilled in making money, but they only exists if there are some others society to commerce with, different society who develop and produce. Now that everything is commerce...
> I suspect someone with 10+ years experience managing recognizes that all remote, or all in person, are both tenable solutions, but hybrid will cause a separate-and-not-equal workforce schism.
I think it's already there: most talented escape, lest talented start the so called big resignation with vague autarkic attempts doomed to fail and resulting in a mass of future new poor ready to be inserted in the WEF 2030's agenda new society.
Being in person offer benefits form human interaction we can't have on remote BUT have the downside of the physical location need. In a changing world people want freedom and actual cities does not offer that and have no visible chance of improvement. Remote allow living in good place with enough services at interesting costs (at least in theory, in practice for some a bad cold shower of reality for others) trading the less benefit from human interaction to a far more comfortable life. In a society designed around the panem et circense concept at the start of a scarcity era most prefer the circense in absence seen the scarcity of panem...
Beside that, at another level, economy of scale have reached the tipping point of density where we are now too dense and so the scale benefit drop crushed by the density costs. A reset is needed and nobody want to be in the places to be resetted and no one know how will be the new world. So no one want brace the new trying to save resources in classic reactionary moves.
Here the real schism.
It was eye opening to me. If in an environment when people are trying to accommodate the remote person they still got left behind, what does that imply in other circumstances
I’ve been in 100% remote team since but I would be really careful with being one of the few remote resources. It’s a recipe to grind your gears alone while the team is moving on.
My only personal experience with that was being remote for a few week at a time. I always felt a disconnect settling in.
Let's all recall that IC-Turned-Manager is a rarity in the general management space. Engineers choosing from amongst their own is an anomaly, not the norm, across many industries.
> across many industries.
ime, bad managers are more common than decent managers. Also, most managers are not IC-turned-manager at least at any significantly high level.
In my whole career (17 years at this point) I've encountered only one manager who was in it for the power and control... and he got fired.
I spent a significant proportion of my career as an IC but I'm a senior manager now, and I can tell you that "power over people" is precisely not what I'm after. The fact that I have power (and not forgetting that that power comes with responsibility), is not relevant to me and not a positive part of the job.
Telling people what to do is orders of magnitude less effective than convincing, inspiring, and motivating them to do it.
The company seemed to select for extreme psychopathy the higher you looked.
Well... two of the best bosses from whose perspective? Your perspective of a great boss might be way different than the perspective of a metrics-obsessed "data driven" CFO.
Can you name one business leader, just one, who has demonstrated no desire for power (in all its forms) and who didn't even want the position. Just one of "The best leaders" you're talking about.
Many teams find it easier to work sitting close to each other. Is this superior? Is WFH superior? Is hybrid superior? I don’t think there’s a fixed answer because such things work both individually and collectively.
WFH can be better for you but not for 2 of your coworkers. Now who’s supposed to adapt to what?
For example: for me meetings and discussions are too many times better in person.
And hybrid is worse imho. You are stuck to living close to office so you can’t live wherever you wish. And then you’re working from office but also working from home so for many teams and folks that expectation of some sort of “always availability” (work/life blurred line) will continue.
Tech people often don't make the transition to management well.
Though at the same time, my company opted didn't renew their lease on two office floors (out of a total of 8 floors) due to hybrid work and employees not having a designated desk. So who knows.
For certain purposes, being in-person can be useful
If the office space is already paid-for, it's silly (from a business perspective) to not use it
If you have needs for scheduled all-hands or other types of meetings, doing them all over Zoom can be much slower / less efficient than doing it face to face
This is known as the sunk-cost fallacy. Just because you have the space is not sufficient reason to use it.
I agree though, being in-person can be incredibly useful, but it very much depends on the team, the type of work, etc. It's also just nice to see people in a less structured manner - e.g., water cooler chats vs setting up a Teams call.
It may not
Fact remains: if it has been paid-for, there's a strong justification for using it if you have it
Pre-Pandemic, fully remote folks were at a distinct disadvantage since they would be cut off completely from the politics, relationship building etc. that would happen via people being in the office. This strategy is clearly aimed at discouraging people from being fully remote by making them aware of the “benefits” of working in an office.
I feel sorta lucky because my team is distributed between two cities on the West Coast, so even if people are in the office you still have to video conference … making it somewhat pointless.
I was talking to a friend at Apple who had been forced to work from their office. They are really unhappy; primarily they were so used to the peace and quiet of wfh that they’re having a hard time getting anything done in a loud (relatively) office.
(Disclaimer: I have to telecommute, I've been doing it since 2014. Because of where I live, I can only go in about 2-3 times a month.)
For example: I worked for Intel in 2005-2007. It was hybrid by necessity: They had offices all over the world, and were so large that it was impractical for everyone to be on one campus; and even if everyone was on one campus, travel among buildings was somewhat time consuming. Thus, many meetings were conducted via teleconference, and no one cared if you were in the office. (I would always take early morning calls at home and leave after the call.)
While I was there, it became obvious that people were abusing the liberal telecommuting policy. My boss went on vacation for one week, and then "telecommuted" the second week. I quickly realized he had an agreement with his higher up to get a 2nd week of vacation as long as he checked email and kept up appearances.
A few months later Intel cut out most telecommuting. The rumors that came back to me was that a lot of people were just goofing off; and even running 2nd businesses, like liquor stores, while on company time.
There's also the story of Yahoo. This is well documented, so I'll leave it up to someone else to dig up links, but the general belief is that many Yahoo telecommuters were just keeping up appearances and not really working. The company cracked down because it was going broke paying people to do nothing.
So, I don't think it's a "ruse." I think it's a case of a company doing what it thinks is in its best interests. If it's in your best interests to be 100% remote, or 90% remote, ect, have a frank discussion with your boss, and if they can't accommodate you, find a new job.
"Thinks" being the key word. Although I would posit that anybody who think this way hasn't thought about it very hard. I mean, it's trivially obvious that a worker can be in the office, and still contribute absolutely nothing. You can sit at the office, or at home, or in Tahiti, and surf Hacker News all day just the same. At the end of it all, companies that don't know how to measure the productivity of their people, and make any necessary adjustments based on those measurements, are going to get screwed.
That was why Intel and Yahoo made work for home only on a case-by-case basis.
Obviously, well let's take Intel - I mean you're building semiconductors so you probably need to be near machines/equipment/etc. so I'm not suggesting everybody in the world should or even wants to work remote.
Of course everyone here pretends to be the 10x, hyper motivated individual contributor, because the world's a stage and HN is part of it.
Ha. I know what you're saying. Not me though. I'm just a 1x. Motivated and interested for sure, at least for my part.
I think this might be an agree to disagree thing. I think most people genuinely want to just do something interesting and enjoyable, and make money so they can live fulfilling lives. There are a lot of disconnects though, ranging from flat out opportunity, to lack of available training - i.e. something like a bootcamp - full-time pipeline, bad corporate incentives and structure, and lack of investment in best practices and communication tools. I mean take Microsoft Teams. Absolute dog shit product (sorry guys) - stop using it and use something better. It'll make your employees lives easier and better, and you won't need people to be in the office in the same way because you're using better tools.
Ultimately if a company has to "settle" for an employee who they have to monitor and watch from behind their chair, in my view it's still the hiring company's failure. It says nothing about remote/hybrid/on-prem. If they have to "settle" then that's still their fault, and bringing people to the office doesn't change that fundamental fact.
My entire point about "flawed individuals" was that this is not binary. It's not wonder employee vs do absolutely nothing unsupervised employee.
Office environments for sure push up productivity for some folks from, say, 40% to 60%. Mediocre folks being boosted a bit by having structure in their lives. And mediocre folks are most folks, by definition. So that boost adds up over large numbers.
I couldn't have said it better myself.
(The fact that some managers get off on having a room full of people at their beck and call is also a factor too.)
Even in software, it's notoriously hard to estimate how long a project is going to take. You just assigned some bug to someone and told them to fix it by Tuesday. Is the employee slacking off if the bug isn't fixed by Tuesday, or is the issue actually more difficult than it seemed to be? Is it a bit of both?
People will always find creative ways to get paid while doing nothing. The hastily set up WFH system just happens to contain more loopholes that the higher-ups aren't prepared for.
That's the sign of a company that should pay for work instead of time.
“The purpose of the ‘boil the frog method’ [is] to do it subtly and thereby avoid difficult questions and conflict”
https://fortune.com/2022/04/04/former-google-hr-chief-laszlo...
The way they convinced us that it won’t change on a C-Level’s whim is by drastically reducing the office size so it’s not even possible for anyone to come back full time. But you can work at a co-working space if need be.
The company saved a lot of money by not having an office and I’ve never seen such a productive team in my entire career.
Why so?
If the answer is no, then there's your answer. It is appeasement.
Even though I have the worst commute on my team I want to be in the office a couple days a week (it's going to be 3). But our campus is great, we have real cubicles and standing desks, and even free meals.