> transparently a middle management “I’m still relevant!”
Which makes one wonder who the people who kept posting on here how much they missed the office and wished we'd go back to the office during the pandemic actually were.
I had a hand-full of friends and coworkers who felt this way. Talking to them about it broke them into three broad categories:
Enthusiastic extroverts who needed face to face interaction to stay happy. The pandemic limited their social options and they longed for the amount of in person interactions they had when working from the office.
Easily distractable people unable to set up a distraction free environment at home who got stressed because their productivity suffered. I thought I was going to be one of these people because I had a pre-school aged child who was also stuck at home but it didn't end up being that much of a problem for me thanks to my wife being very proactive and able to juggle her school schedule to when I was available to parent. Some of my co-workers privately admitted that they couldn't focus on work when their hobbies and house-chores were so close at hand.
Those who had issues in their home environment that caused them grief and they relied on the office as an escape rather than fixing their problem. These were the people who got divorced or broke leases at the beginning of the pandemic as they were unable to live 24/7 with the people they had been able to deal with as long as they had 40+ hours of break from them every week previously.
I forgot to add, I was suspicious at first that people were larping their jobs or it was managers who were trying to psyche everyone up to come back but at least in my experience it didn't go that way. They did make us come back when numbers were dropping (but before the vaccine was available to the general public) although the actual date they picked ended up being a major spike in my state related to a holiday weekend and they didn't back down from it. In the next month 80% of the office got Covid and they sent us back, I've been working from home since then. Like this article suggests, I would look for another job if they mandated return at this point. My math says it would be affectively a 10% pay cut to start commuting again, I'll never consider the commute as outside of work time again, it is either unpaid work or I'm considering it part of the time covered by my salary.
Its easy to believe RTO would be a bandaid to a degraded social life or non-optimal at home situation. And for some it might even be true. But by large your social life can and should thrive outside your job. You just have to work for it.
Honestly, I don’t even really have much of a social life outside of work, aside from talking to the other parents at my kids rec activities.
For me, WFH has made giving my kids a great childhood just substantially easier. We’re not constantly in a rush to get the mandatory stuff for the day out of the way, so we can spend more time with rec activities or just having fun.
We’re also not beholden to terrible schedules. As an example, the range of swimming lessons times we can handle basically opened up drastically. The range of afterschool activities we can manage as equally opened up. Where previously it was soccer, now we’ve been able to try a bunch of things and let them land on what they like.
I think this is a large part of it. For me certainly I realized during the pandemic that I was starting to feel really isolated and needed to make a conscious effort on my social life, but I also think this was a net win. True friendships are formed and strengthened by putting in effort. Ephemeral office connections are fleeting. I think if your social life dies when working remote it's a sign of a problem the office was papering over.
I also believe there are those for whom this is not enough and they really do need more time around people than can be obtained outside of work, but there are solutions for these people as well (ex co-working spaces)
There's a non-zero number of HNers who arguably make their job a core part of their personality that experienced significant distress when they discovered that people were fine working from home. It's the only way I can rationale people who cannot fathom that others have hobbies / friendships outside of work.
The world of employees is more than just HN userbase. Don't take the narative here as being universal. In my groups of people, most prefer working in the office the majority of the time than at home. They are not on HN.
I will say that, personally, I miss the office sometimes. If I had a 45 minute (per direction) or shorter commute I'd say my perfect world would be getting together in an office with my immediate team 1-2 times a week. It's just so much easier to have thoughtful discussion in person than via teleconferencing; I also, selfishly, enjoy the social aspect.
The other side of the coin is that solo work - e.g. slinging code - is a lot easier to get done at home with fewer distractions.
All that said, if my choice is between the extremes of mandatory RTA and full-time WFH, I pick full-time WFH ten times out of ten.
I've worked remote now for 8 years, I do sometimes miss being in the office with the people I'm collaborating with, but it's not something I would want to do 5 days a week. I'd be totally fine with 1-2 days mandated in the office per week if I was within a reasonable commute distance to my team, but my current team is geographically dispersed anyway (think co-workers who've never met face to face in 15 years) so it makes no sense to require any of us into an office. I'll choose WFH every time because I know I'm far more productive that way - if I was forced to go back to commuting work, I would effectively restrict my office time to no more than 8 hours per day and refuse to ever work outside of the office, where as today I'm effectively available to do work about 11 hours per day even though I seldom do.
Of my current direct reports, I have 2 folks who couldn't wait to get back to the office full time, a number of folks (including me) who go to the office maybe 1-2 days of the week, and the rest never come to an office. My office folks go in because they like a firm separation between work and home and like seeing their friends in person. Same with us casual office types; I go in because there's conversations that move faster to better outcomes when had face to face. Exactly how are we wrong? Why do you care?
And while I know you won't believe this, but the middle managers job hasn't changed: all the bullshit they had to deal with so you don't is still there.
My guess is that there are a lot of founders (or aspiring founders) on here who have dreamed of having a team to lord over and look at everyday and now they feel that dream slipping away.
It's very common for neophyte founders to get and office (and business cards) as their first order of business, because in their mind the artifice of being "in-charge" is the actual motivation behind moving into leadership.
It's so weird. I don't know anyone in real life who pines for the office.
When I meet someone new around my neighborhood, I usually don't offer information about my employment, but if they ask, I tell them I work in computers from home. 100% of the responses I get are approximately "Wow, that's amazing," "you are so blessed/lucky," "our boss dragged us all back in," and "are you guys hiring?" and exactly 0% say "Aww, sorry to hear that... you must really miss the office/your commute."
Speaking only for myself, I don't know that I actually like working from home, its just that all the stupid stuff I have to do to get into the office makes it so much better to just not go in.
I actually enjoy interacting with my coworkers, but the time I would enjoy spending with them outside of work, I instead have to spend on the road.
HR works for the corp, strictly in the corporations interests. Even if the narrative you’re describing is true (I don’t know either), it’s only a coincidental[0] point, not The Reason for BtO policies.
HR, in general, is not a reliable source on anything other than what the company for whom they work wants you, as a potentially unreliable production input, to believe in order to keep you maximally aligned with the interests of the corporate owners as relayed through management.
I heard the same.
I also asked someone who is in management. They said that they were getting a lot of feedback from exit interviews from employees with > one year of tenure who left. Many complain of feeling disconnected from their team or not know what to do.
I don't like working from home, but I hate mandated RTO because of all the antisocial behavior people bring into the office from their WFH days (loud meetings at their desks, brushing their teeth at their desks, Das keyboards, etc.).
Those definitely existed in the past, but there's been a dramatic uptick of terrible office etiquette in my current situation relative to pre-pandemic times, even though I'm in the same building working for the same company. I now expect any rando who sits next to me to enter a meeting.
Which makes one wonder who the people who kept posting on here how much they missed the office and wished we'd go back to the office during the pandemic actually were.