Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
Many of us were remote, and now many of us are being asked to come back? Knowing office workers all work with remote people in other offices, and there’s not much in-office dynamic like maybe there was 20 years ago, what are your primary motivations dragging us back into the office? Nearly every meeting I’ve had in an office since 2014 has been a video conference with remote people.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 348 ms ] threadFrom my experience and observations I've gathered from my teams, my conclusion is the opposite of this. I have to regularly tell folks to watch out for burnout and it's ok to wait until Monday.
Of course, employers want both butt-in-chair metrics and 24/7 availability without increasing pay. Don't give them that.
Common counter argument to this is that the manager sucks because he/she can't measure the work otherwise. But from managers perspective it is much easier to force people to be on-site than fix his/her own problems.
They also mentioned avoiding other distractions: That's the main feature of remote for me, after many years of wearing headphones all day in various offices.
Because if they're not, they miss deadlines.
Like maybe I go afk 30-45 mins here or there when I normally wouldn't in office. But for me, I put in more hours overall. A key to this was learning to not have my personal laptop open to the side, and avoiding distractions like social media and idle browsing.
YMMV of course, I think it can really depend on the person and their life situation. But the same could be said of anyone remote or not when it comes to productivity. It's on the managers to measure if things are getting done or not, which is the most important thing.
What do you have to back up your belief? I work from 8-6 on most days +/- 30 minutes. Lunch is a walk downstairs, grab something and eat it at my desk. That's pretty typical of the group of engineers I've been working with remotely on/off for the past 15 years. I don't think we're exceptional in this regard.
Plenty of people with one job don't perform and get cut. I've worked with people in the past who I knew had multiple FT jobs, or a FT job and a very demanding contracting schedule, or whatever, and had no trouble doing their work in a reasonable timeframe.
This whole idea that it's wrong or bad to have two FT jobs just smells like some middle manager feeling like they "own" their employees. I'm glad to see the culture has shifted somewhat and people are starting to see how ridiculous that mindset is.
Of course I also enjoy some of the flexibility of WFH.
The inability to support remote work signals the employer cannot manage based on performance, is power hungry, or is managing from emotion instead of data.
(have worked remote for 10+ years)
Unless, of course, there is some other reasoning than what you state in your comment, like for example, middle management feeling irrelevant or sunk cost fallacy on office space?
Companies can make this more appealing by holding the meetings in nice parts of the world -- note, nice doesn't have to be outrageously expensive -- putting people up in nice hotels with suitable space for spouses and kids, and by making the week before vacation for half the group and the week after for the other half, with the option to stay in the same hotel at the company's expense.
This won't work for everyone, or every company, but it's a much nicer carrot than usual.
But if work wants me to travel for a week, it either means my spouse has to pick up all the stuff I do at home, or I have to find someone I trust to stay at my home for a week on an ad-hoc basis.
It's much harder to find ad-hoc babysitting than regularly scheduled babysitting.
I believe parent is suggesting quarterly gatherings of the existing office team, the ones who share an office now.
For background, at least half, or more of the company is fully remote. It’s so many, that the transition to remote work was met with a collective shrug. So MoCo used to have weeks (maybe twice a year?) where teams would fly in to the office to work. Later, in a cost savings move, it switched to fly every everyone in MoCo to some place for a week twice a year. It was called “All Hands”.
I enjoyed the free trips to Whistler, Berlin, and Austin, and Maui, but it never really felt like work was actually getting done. It was conference room chats ostensibly about planning, but everything always felt a bit phoned in.
I never got it. Inevitably the real planning work would end up after we returned back to our regular locations, so it was more social than anything.
My personal thought is that RTO among the FAANGs is 100% sunk cost fallacy. They wasted billions on bespoke glass donuts, circus tents, and airplane hangers. There’s pride on the minds of these oligarchs.
I think we overrate the need to build in-person social rapports. Just be a professional. I think there’s a concept where often work colleagues become friends and we misidentify that as being a key part of the work dynamic. I’m not sure it’s necessary. Most of my work colleagues are not my friends and I’m quite fine with that.
All the while not forgetting that people contributing to free software have altogether different motivations: they are (almost) all in it because they want to contribute their own time to something they believe in.
Quite different from what majority of people in any company are there for.
> Just be a professional
In my experience, there are many people that find this an incredible challenge. This is where it can easily fall apart.
I agree, for the most part. It's not too hard to build good working relationships within a small team that's remote.
One notable challenge, though, is developing working relationships between different teams and cross-departments. In-office, it's easier because you likely at least know of the people on the marketing/sales/service team by running into people in the hall or at lunch. Remote, it's not unheard of to (literally) never interact with other departments at all.
So in remote, cross-department projects like "let's launch a new marketing site" become more difficult to orchestrate because the engineers simply don't know the people they're working with in (for example) Marketing until the project starts.
Granted, this issue isn't completely unique to remote work. At big 200+ person companies, even when 100% in-person, you won't know everyone and you'll face the same challenges. But for a 10-50 person company, it's pretty easy for everyone to know everyone when in-person. Still possible when remote, but it has to be encouraged at the management level since intermingling between departments for fun isn't something that most people will do on their own unless directed to.
Remote works really well for task-oriented jobs (like engineering, where you're assigned a Jira ticket to complete) especially when you're working with a small group of people every day. Remote starts to become challenging as an engineer if you're in a position where you need to frequently (and quickly) build working relationships with people on other teams to complete cross-departmental projects where collaboration is necessary.
This is also where good product managers can really come in handy. Good product managers will be able to handle the cross-team relationships, manage expectations, gather/communicate requirements (offloading that overhead from engineers).
Only in very small companies or if you happen to work in the head office. I worked at the same company for thirty years and only met the sales people in the period before it was taken over by ABB. After that meeting anyone from sales was something that happened only rarely and always deliberately.
Our team doesn't, are we anomalies? People need to be mature, reasonable, responsible and accountable to work together well.
There are many people who have never developed social connections outside of school or work and unilaterally decided that that is how people must socialize. After all if they can’t socialize outside of such an environment surely no one else can. If they can’t see a person as a person if they’re not face to face surely no one else can.
It’s unfortunate that these folk provide backup to the executives who are forcing RTO simply to provide the appearance of value and/or control over the plebs.
One size very much does not fit all, and that’s the entire point that those who prefer remote work are trying to drive home.
What we are seeing is a large swathe of people who use the office as their social life, and they’re taking the position that their inability to socialize out of work is important enough to inflict the negative consequences of returning to the office on people who don’t treat the office as a fun zone for personal sustenance.
This isn't self-evident to me at all.
Do you know how much time people spend on other tabs while in zoom meetings?
In terms of meetings, I've only rarely seen a meeting that couldn't have accomplished the same goals in 1/10 the time if it done without being a meeting. Whether in-person or zoom. The information density is far too low, too much time is taken up with things that aren't moving toward the goal, etc.
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.
IME, it's usually 30/60 minutes during which the Architect listens to himself, draws some nice boxes and arrows, overlooks all the edge cases and nuances and then everyone goes back to their open space desk. And the next day you realize that the solution doesn't work and you start a Jira comment thread.
Source: worked in various CS labs for a few years
I hear this often, and it makes sense, but I am not sure how frequently do people solve problems with whiteboarding? Is it such a frequent problem that we need to be in the office every day?
The overhead of having such meetings is next to nothing in remote compared to the office. No one has to get up to go to a meeting or book a meeting room.
Did you just have a eureka moment 5 minutes after a meeting ended? No problem! Ping the group chat and get on a call in less than 15 seconds while the idea is still hot in memory.
Oh you want to pick up where you last left off? No problem, upload last meetings Excalidraw file and start editing.
what’s an example?
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.
Honestly I’m beginning to find “we need to be in person to collaborate” to be a red flag for unable to communicate and “will interrupt people working all day”
the culture at the company you co-founded and i worked for would have absolutely 1000% not existed if we were 100% remote.
we did amazing things, and i believe a lot of it was due to us being able to work together in person.
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?
"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."
It’s always disheartening to me though that it’s just so easy for people to justify undercutting labor in just a few swift sentences like this, especially because the nuances of culture are very different, for one, and for two, there are downsides to this form of recruitment that never gets acknowledged from issues with time zones to acceptable quality standards and other things.
Maybe I’m just old, but it feels almost heartless to be compared by the numbers that someone should just “hire in Latin American because they have less leverage”.
Just treat your employees well. No you don’t need to hire in traditionally geographical Silicon Valley areas every time or by default, but you don’t have to go all the way to latam either.
I hope people in other areas of the world wise up to this and ask for 1st rate salaries and benefits
I can't believe HN zeitgeist cannot understand this.
Why would I hire a US employee for twice the cost when I can hire someone 95% as good remotely in a low cost area of the world and actually get an employee that sticks around for a decade vs. a year?
It's honestly not even really a decision at this point if you have the management infrastructure in place.
This is fantasy.
It's not interesting to discuss outliers. Millions are being made playing this talent/wage arbitrage as we speak. The top 1% of engineers is not interesting to discuss, and certainly is not representative of the average FAANG employee (or salary).
Edit: Direct personal experience during my entire working career. Are there bubbles of super-talent completely out of my reach for such a pleb? Absolutely. But those folks are not interesting to the vast majority of companies needing basic but competent IT talent. Many folks here seem to be under the impression they are in that pool. Time will tell.
I'm not saying there aren't some talented developers working for cheap, but most of the time you get what you pay for.
The problem with “off shoring” is that’s how it is treated.
Remote work, where people become part of your team and work with everyone else is quite different and avoids the failure cases you have likely seen.
It’s hardly controversial to say that a huge chunk of Silicon Valley talent is from migrants. So clearly the training overseas is up to scratch.
Thank you. I believe this is the point everyone is missing.
And this is new. Giant companies never did this sort of thing really. It was always the low effort outsourcing approaches I was seeing in these markets.
Today I'm now competing with IBM and the ilk in these markets for direct employees. The tides are shifting extremely rapidly and I don't think many in the US even understand what has happened underneath them in the past few years.
LOL. That's totally out of touch. It is not about them "wising up". There are quite lots of different dynamics here at play. It is a complex and competitive market.
I'm sure all the latin american developers are super hyped about this advice not to hire them.
It’s meant as a counter ti the idea of hiring them just because they’re “cheaper”
Disagree. Quality engineers will ask for their worth regardless of location.
Also I think indexing on "less likely to job hop or negotiate salary" is short-sighted thinking. You're asking people to do a complex job where the key skill is critical thinking and self determination. Those skills go hand in hand with people willing to demand their worth from you. Sure, save a little bit of money now. But you're going to be building a brittle, disposable product with a brittle, disposable team for what ultimately will amount to a brittle, disposable company.
You might laugh, but for some being a builder of a place that treats people well while also being financially successful is important. In any event, it’s a interesting challenge that it seems few care to undertake.
Like I said in a sibling post, the best we can do is: first, don't give our talent or time to these people. Second, start our own companies built on treating human beings with respect.
To give you an idea, Google Warsaw pays just a touch above 100k to local senior engineers.
What data do you have to back this up? Top 1% engineers who have all the options? sure.
80% engineers? You will be paying double local market rates already and you will find you can trivially out-talent for the same budget.
Will this change over time? Sure. But reality on the ground is you can hire someone of equivalent talent for half the cost in Europe/LATAM/etc. vs. the US a the moment. In quantity.
> ...you don’t need a team in NYC/SFBA for most things... There are great engineers in Latam
> ...globally average Bay Area engineer
There are two sides to the kind of broad strokes generalizing you are doing.
It has been my experience, and the experience of everyone else that I know, that the Ivy League US-SF-NY people we work with are far and wide smarter, more productive, nicer, and way fewer problems, fewer emotional problems especially, than others in engineering and management.
Go ahead and run a LATAM team. Nobody really cares. It will not turn out to be the management superpower / huge insight you are making it out to be.
For example in India it used to be only outsourcing, but now they are launching their own startups as well, some quite succesful. Slowly the capital will start accumulating there as well. And that is a good thing, for global inequality.
Plenty C level people know this is the eventual outcome. They just also know that the runway is likely to extend beyond their working career because they control most business decisions for the foreseeable future.
They still operate on a relationship basis with ownership/capital while managing the company on a Netflix performance model for everyone else. Those relationships are likely to stay in place until both sides age out of the industry.
I've worked with a number of C level folks hired into companies from low cost regions and they have all been utterly stellar. This is coming, just not for the current generation of senior execs.
You acknowledge you are a cofounder of your company, therefore you and your cofounder named you as CTO (as opposed to an existing company where somebody was promoted or hired into the position by someone else). I'm just curious who your "peer group" is, the ones you believe "don't know how to manage remote teams" and have "loneliness issues" -- other self-proclaimed CTOs? Or a wider group of people? And what experience do you have that makes you so much of an expert? What are the long-term consequences of an engineering team that you assembled at a discount?
The playbook worked for them, but that doesn't mean it worked for the people they were managing, or the company they worked for.
My experience with managers and "the playbook that worked" for the past 50 years is that 80% of it consists of "if the employee is in their seat, and not visibly goofing off, that means they are working at 100% productivity; anything else is stealing from the company."
It's effectively rooted in an assembly-line mindset (where if you weren't at your post, you clearly weren't working, and it was pretty easy to see whether you were working when you were at your post), in addition to treating subordinates like robots with no mental, emotional, or even physical needs while they are at work.
Also: I'd like to ask you a few questions on Latam remote work. My email is in my About if you have the time!
You can find devs in the US for less too. $160k for a senior dev in the Philly region is generous.
The more we collectively push for remote work, the more likely it becomes that our compensation takes a huge nosedive. Engineers in Brazil or El Salvador will LOVE working at even 30% of total FAANG comp (while enjoying fewer worker's rights and fewer benefits), and they are by and large technically competent.
This whole thread has a very "I got mine" vibe to it.
That's really just a veneer for "transactional and performance based"
Whenever I hear a company say that they are like a family, I run. In a family, you don't lay off family members. As a matter-of-fact, if it is a family run business, and there's a business downturn, they will lay off all workers and leave their actual family members working.
In reality, saying it is "family" is just a machiavellian ploy to pretend a business actually cares about the employees, in order to make them loyal to the company, without the loyalty going the other way. I've read so many stories about how owners were always talking about the company being "family" but when push came to shove, they shoved the employee out the door. But like so many companies, all the ones that are shedding employees, they never seem to fire the C-suite, somehow.
As far as culture goes, all companies want to create a culture that is maximal efficiency for the company. That's all the culture is in a corporate world. It's transactional. No company is going to have a culture of 5 hour picnic lunches every day, followed by an hour foot massage for everyone so that only 2 hours of work get done a day. That would be silly. ALL business cultures exist to maximize shareholder investments. To the extent that cultures are different is just a different way of trying to maximize employee output. Nothing is wrong with it, but it actually is transactional. To the extent people talk about "culture" that is really just trying to polish the turd.
I agree with everythinig else you wrote.
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.
If the results are there, and in accordance with the employment contract, time shouldn't matter.
And "results are there" is just hand waving away the problem. Nobody can measure developer results in any sort of systematic fashion. If you've got a way then by all means share with the world.
Time does matter because the agreement between companies and workers is money for time/effort. I'm not giving back salary if my project flops and they're not giving me (much) more money if it makes the company millions.
If you're signed into Teams but playing a game or watching a movie, it could probably be challenged in court whether you're performing a service for your employer.
Did anyone say it was?
> I think a lot of people are abusing WFH. Some make it obvious like doing meal prep during refinement...
What does "it" refer to in that sentence, if not the immediately preceding "abusing WFH?"
The fact that this has to be explained to people is why there's a push to return to the office.
Your refinements work a little different than mine. In mine, the SME or the person who opened the issue (often the same person) reads the story, gives any extra context, answers questions, etc., we assign a point value, and move on. Refinement can be a discussion -- it doesn't always have to be a research session.
That's a load of context that wasn't clear from your original comment. The jargon "refinement" is not used where I work.
> The fact that this has to be explained to people is why there's a push to return to the office.
That you then need to backfill assumed context is not going to be solved by returning to office. That it's now been clarified in text, in a work situation, could be turned into a resource to be referenced in a future conversation. In the office, the explanation would be ephemeral, and may need frequent repetition until somebody overcomes the hurdle of committing it to text.
This is why return to office is an attractive option. People are definitely not bringing veggies to chop or laundry to fold to a conference room. And most of them are going to pay attention to a person in their presence talking to them because of basic social niceties. It solves the problem with much less hassle than actually having to identify and cull people who can't handle WFH.
The fact that having a standard of "pay attention in meetings & don't be a ghost" gets you labelled an "irrational micromanaging bully" is exactly why management pushes for a return to office. It's just way less of a hassle for them than having these sorts of battles.
> evaluations of people without knowing their story.
Pot meet kettle
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
That seems odd to me. I can give my full attention to something I am reading, or to listening to what a person is saying in the meeting, but not both at the same time. If I start looking up documentation, I'm going to miss what is being said.
Can... can most people split their attention this way? Am I weird?
I can do a completely mindless manual task while listening to someone speaking (though I struggle to do something manual while reading) - but this doesn't seem to be what is expected here.
This person also routinely ignores/mutes as many meetings as possible and frequently multi-tasks in the gym, house chores, etc. Had that person been in the office they'd have had their time wasted on useless all-hands meetings, etc., so now everybody's happy (because that person hasn't had to quit, because life's too short).
Working based on hours doesn't work remote. It should be based on deliverables.
I'm not sure if people are even doing that. And really if you tack on a couple hours of pointless meetings we're pretty close to 40 hours a week. They're within spitting distance of an expected work week and if they're responsive and hitting targets then who cares. I'm talking about people I think work more like 3-4 hours a week.
Over at Google, there’s an internal study that shows raw code checkins have dropped dramatically since WFH. I’m pretty sure Sundar’s 20% more productivity comment came directly from the numbers in those slides.
It does not surprise me that Zuckerberg and Benioff have gone the length of calling out their employees’ productivity directly. I’m really surprised this comment is this far down, when it’s been painfully obvious at the couple companies I’ve worked at through the pandemic that productivity is the elephant in the room. Some CEOs dress it in corpspeak about collaboration, but if Google, Meta, and Salesforce are all complaining of worker productivity, I think that’s the true reason. I think we’re too afraid to take an honest look at how productive we are, which will ultimately be the demise of WFH we want to defend so badly.
In a rare occasion I get a desk anywhere near a coworker when we are in the office, I also find it hard to know how much they are working.
The physical presence in the same city, building, or even sat right next to each other, goes not give me any information.
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 consider the dynamic you described, of local teams in separated locations that have to work as one, actually to be a major antipattern. The communication doesn't flow as well between locations as it does inside each location. It's much better to shape the teams to the geographic organization.
That's it.
And I think it's understandable. Management is hard.
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.
Managers schedule VS makers schedule.
Add to that exec level are usually already rich enough that they don’t have commute or schooling problems to deal with. So they just can’t understand why RTO isn’t popular!
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.
The must have pretty bad managers then. Why should there be a trust issue? My manager assigns me a task, I do it on time and they are happy or I fail to do it on time and they are unhappy. How does where I do that task make a difference?
I think the return to office thing is just a cover for incompetent management.
That probably doesn't really fix the problem, the incompetent manager is probably still incompetent just in a smaller sphere of operations.
Then again I don't think I ever stayed in any company for more then 2 years so that just might be me.
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.
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.
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.
Let me tell you, I hate these. And I will take vacation days to avoid going to them. And I also think they're not very productive no matter how many 'How To Run A Sprint' classes the organizers take.
Be patient, kind, and spend an extra minute writing a more detailed email that is helpful to your colleagues. If you're a manager, give them the right tools and empower them.
But this is completely orthogonal to whether the work is in an office or remote.
If people are bad at writing, they can get better at it, like any other skill. I have a bad memory for voice/video conversations, so my preference is to always have a written email to go back to for reference.
But I'll still attempt to do what my other team members are comfortable with.
I find it very strange that being in a room with someone is somehow different than being on a video call.
You can see the peoples' faces...what are you going to do in person? Touch peoples' naughty bits? Fart so everyone can enjoy? I don't get it. You are there to exchange ideas. Being face-to-face in person allows you to see the person's face and non-verbals. But you get that in a video conference.
I don't understand.
Some key components for me are:
- don't impose too much structure, or God forbid, try to make it fun. It's work, let's complain about work and hopefully some useful ideas might come up - Bring in relevant people, that actually get work done. The less managers the better. - Don't be afraid of being negative. The whole point is to complain about shit and see communalities in problems, and perhaps come up with potential solutions.
Especially questionable in an open-plan office, everyone is trying just to concentrate and are wearing headphones.