I don't think FAANGs will have any trouble hiring a boatload of eager, hardworking college grads in September even if they lose multi-digit percentage of their current workers.

I miss the office for..

- Free and convenient food.

- Social chatter & engagement.

- Making friends with employees who I don't know and connecting with new employees.

- Work life separation (balance).

- Proper workstation, climate controlled environment.

- Sense of belonging - team outing, after hours beers..

- Intra and inter company sports and games.

- Meeting potential dates.

[Not me. Just empathizing]

Why? Work is where you spend one third (or more) of your time during your adult life. Why the hell would I not want such a significant portion of my life to not also provide great benefits like opportunities to make friends, meet people, eat great food, and have fun?

If you scoff at people who want to make their workplaces more welcoming and happier, no shit the workplace is going to turn into anti-social, work-only hellholes that nobody wants to go back to. This attitude is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and a root of the problem.

Speak for yourself. I am very experienced. I have worked at many companies, some of which I left abruptly, and others where my close friends were fired/laid off.

But guess what? None of that matters. Just because a friendship starts at a workplace doesn't mean it ends when the employment ends. Some of my best, life-long friends are people I met at work. My current SO, who I will marry, is someone I met at at a past employer. My wedding party is going to be half-filled with people who I met at work, even though I no longer work with them. I currently mentor (and am mentored by) people from past jobs, one of which was actually fired.

This is also a self-fulfilling prophecy that I see in these conversations. People begrudgingly make nice with people at work, and restrict those relationships to only happen at work... and then are surprised when those relationships end when employment ends. If you only interact with your "friends" at your employer, then no shit those interactions will stop when your employment ends. But they don't have to, and for many people, they don't.

It's not any different than any other part of life. I'm no longer in college, but I'm still close friends with people I met in college, and I don't regret at all the fun activities I did during college. I no longer go to my old gym (I switched to a new gym), but I still keep in touch with someone I met at the old gym and I still benefit from the exercises I did there. I no longer live in my old apartment, but I still keep in touch with my friend who lived across the hall from me. Why should my workplace be any different?

You sound SO different from me. I really struggle to form relationships so easily, yet it sounds like you making lasting relationships wherever you go.

I find that kind of fascinating. As someone who just went back into the office with the whole intent on being more social, I still find that my interactions with coworkers are at "arms length" and are very sterile. Hard to imagine a relationship with them outside of work. That line is still very strong.

Kudos to you. But I would ask, is this an intrinsic skill or did you learn this over time?

It works even better if you can manage to remember those things people get excited about. Even if you don't remember anything else about the person, it gives you something to revisit in future conversations.

I've heard from people who are good at this that it comes from a genuine interest in other people. They're able to work through the small talk phase because they're driven by an intrinsic desire to learn more about the person. I definitely do not have that trait.

One thing I would say though: if you believe that this is an intrinsic trait that others have, rather than something that can be learned, then this belief may hold you back more than you may think.

WFH has changed work from a social experience into something boring. I get it, work is work, and maybe treating it as a more significant part of life isn't a shrewd move, but I am definitely missing out something in this current state.

(That being said, I do understand that I may change my mind in 10 years, assuming I have a family. But I can only talk about how this seems today.)

Your point about not over-investing into a company that doesn't care about you is valid, but not relevant.

I think how much you invest into this faceless entity is independent from whether you WFH or the office, no?

> Why? Work is where you spend one third (or more) of your time during your adult life. Why the hell would I not want such a significant portion of my life to not also provide great benefits like opportunities to make friends, meet people, eat great food, and have fun?

I say: aren't you supposed to, you know, work while you are at work? The office is not a social club!

Jokes aside, I always wondered how much time people actually do proper, productive work while in office, in software engineering. My view is rather restricted to my own experience (personal + people around me). I'm asking because if it's, say, 4h a day, I'd rather just spend 4h a day in office, and spend the other 4h however I choose to (alone, with family, or with colleagues, friends etc.), instead of watching YouTube or listen to conversations I don't want to (thanks open plan office!), or whatever people do when they are not productive.

Maybe one day we'll collectively figure out the right amount of time we are actually productive, and get back the rest of the time.

Because if you live in a great place, all those things are available to you without discontinuity regardless of WHO you work for. The reason that there's such a disconnect between 20-somethings and everyone else on this issue is because everyone else has been through it already. Sure, there's a possibility that you will remain friends with people at your former place of work after you leave. There's also a VERY strong possibility that the people who are at that workplace are socializing with the people AT that workplace. The longer you stay away, the more people you DON'T know, and the less you fit into their social crowd.

And how is this an argument for not also getting those things through work?

I have many hobbies outside work. I live in a great place where I am able to spend my free time meeting people and doing things outside work. I still want those things from my workplace, too.

I like having fun, and I like making friends. Being limited on time, I want to maximize the percentage of time in my life that I spend having fun and I want to maximize the amount of opportunity I get to make friends. It's great that I have personal free time where I can do that, but why would I not also want 8 more hours per day at work where I can also have fun and make friends? It would be silly not to, that almost doubles the amount of opportunity I have to have fun/make friends!

>and those relationships don't always follow you to your next job.

See my other comment in this thread. I haven't found this to be the case. Sure, not every relationship follows you, but that doesn't mean I'm going to forgo the opportunity to cultivate relationships that will follow me to my next job, or even for the rest of my life.

I'm sorry that apparently you haven't been able to (or just haven't bothered to) build the relationships I have been able to, but work is unequivocally an indispensable part of how I (and many others) enjoy life and meet people. I absolutely wouldn't give up the friendships that I made at my workplaces for anything.

Some employers will be very happy with blurring work/personal life boundaries: employees make friends (but the real quality of friendships will only surface after you've changed jobs, unless you plan to stick to a single job forever), eat great food (because maybe it's cheaper than simply paying the employees more) and have fun (enough to make impression of a laid-back place but not too much, because it would hurt company's performance).

It's because all these 'perks' are built on completely different goal. I used to think they're mandatory for me to feel satisfied with the job - looking back they now seem artificial.

That's why I personally love WFH - it let's me focus on the essence of working which to me is providing value for my client. For everything else, there's time outside of job.

For many types of thought work, 3-4 hours is pushing it anyway; the default assumption of 8 hours doesn't make sense with the heterogeneity of what different types of work actually entail.

They may provide some of those either explicitly as an incentive, or as a side-effect of putting a bunch of people in close proximity, and that's great. But when profits are looking iffy, I don't think you can rely on it. It makes more sense to be less dependent on your job, which might go away, and to build those social experiences outside of work so you still have them to fall back on if you change jobs.

I expect to treat my co-workers with respect, but that is no different than what Open Source projects have done for decades.

But there's plenty of room to be critical of companies without sacrificing the positive things you've listed above.

I surely hope this is rare. Even a 40h work week is less than a quarter of work per week and that doesn't account for holidays, vacation etc.

Workmates might become friends but more likely they are work colleagues that vanish after a contract ends, especially if they didn't mesh with your network.

In my circles we as a group often get work at a company. At least do referrals etc. We also leave together to find new opportunities when the place goes feral. This is partly why we think office work is less than good a lot of times.

I'd argue most offices devolve into hellholes as management forget about people and treat them as things.

40 hours a week is a huge chunk of my life. I don't want to just be a robot during that time, I want to be part of a community of some sort. (Even as I do try to maintain connections outside of work too!)

As these offices are sitting empty and are no longer required, instead of letting them sit empty, let them be free to all. Community involvement is the only way to get this done.

The lack of of "community" is not due to lack of concrete boxes, in my opinion. How busy is your local library? From the odd occasion I've been, mine is not very. And seemed to be almost entirely frequented by people who had come to use the free computers/internet and were pretty solidly absorbed in facebook / paying bills / online shopping / whatever.

I don't think people like to invest a lot in public shared spaces because antisocial behavior from a few can easily ruin it and is difficult to police without being extremely restrictive.

Private clubs, groups, organizations are much more successful, and those are everywhere and (in my small experience) have good community spirit. You just don't necessarily see them easily because you can't necessarily walk in the door and start doing what you want.

I agree with the person you respond to: we kinda haven't figured out the social spaces thing, nor had to figure it out, for a very, very long time. All of our current shared social spaces are conventions from a time past that we continue because they're still relevant (bars/pubs, clubs, private clubs, restaurants, etc). Not complaining about any of these -- they're fantastic. Just noting the absence of modern social spaces.

Its the reason I really love Summer where I live. Always a festival or event to go got and get lost in a crowd, meet new people and celebrate whatever's on display that day. Aside from those, there's very little of what I'd call modern "social spaces" around me. Seems like a void needs to be filled there in the community.

People don't prefer to socialize anywhere. Libraries definitely used to be a much more social community hub though. But I'm not just talking about socializing but "shared spaces", as OP said. People working, meeting, relaxing just weren't there. And it is not for lack of room. The people there as I said using the facilities I didn't mean they were wasting it or using it other than its intended purpose, the opposite they were. They were there for a free service they didn't have, but almost certainly if they had a little bit more money they would have prefered their own internet/computer/phone and used it somewhere not in a shared space. Like everybody else who didn't have to be there to use the internet.

> I agree with the person you respond to: we kinda haven't figured out the social spaces thing, nor had to figure it out, for a very, very long time. All of our current shared social spaces are conventions from a time past that we continue because they're still relevant (bars/pubs, clubs, private clubs, restaurants, etc). Not complaining about any of these -- they're fantastic. Just noting the absence of modern social spaces.

There is no absence, they just aren't used as I said. And what do you mean we haven't figured it out? Everything is figured as we go continually. We have arrived here because there is actually less relative demand for these shared spaces than there used to be.

> Its the reason I really love Summer where I live. Always a festival or event to go got and get lost in a crowd, meet new people and celebrate whatever's on display that day.

Is the problem this meaningless new phrase "shared space"? We've always had festivals and markets and shows and concerts and things like that.

> Aside from those, there's very little of what I'd call modern "social spaces" around me.

I don't know why "aside" -- as I said those are not modern things. Would help to define what you mean, the first post didn't seem to be advocating for more crowded festivals but rather taking over empty office spaces and turning them loose to the public with some unexplained goal in mind.

> Seems like a void needs to be filled there in the community.

Sounds to me like the void is lack of community trust and cohesiveness and therefore willingness to share spaces. As I said, that will not be improved with more concrete boxes.

> Is the problem this meaningless new phrase "shared space"? We've always had festivals and markets and shows and concerts and things like that.

The point was that this is all where I live in terms of shared spaces and I seize those opportunities. The idea being, there is a need for shared spaces. For example, whenever a block party is organized here there's not really any public space to host it. Not enough greenery per district where daily activities of the locals can vary but special events, for said locals, are easy to put together. That's a void.

As for the term, I understood the spirit of it to mean public spaces to socialize, where any variety of activities can be done alone or with others. Examples include parks with chess tables, public pools and nature reserves. You can easily go to these kinds of places, socialize with perfect strangers or go alone and still be surrounded by people in your community. Again YMMV and that's OK. I'm open to any ideas so long as those spaces exist.

I agree and think it'll always be hard to trust strangers. But the more opportunities communities have to socialize, the easier it is to build that trust -- but they have to exist. When there's a lack of spaces, that just compounds the trust issue.

Suffer what same issue? You said there is a void of "modern social spaces" around you. Is that the issue you're talking about? I'm saying opening up empty office space to the public carte blanche won't turn them into vibrant engaging places that the community will gravitate to.

> The point was that this is all where I live in terms of shared spaces and I seize those opportunities. The idea being, there is a need for shared spaces. For example, whenever a block party is organized here there's not really any public space to host it. Not enough greenery per district where daily activities of the locals can vary but special events, for said locals, are easy to put together. That's a void.

Isn't a block party specifically organized on the block for local people to turn up to without having to go far? Isn't the block exactly the desired public space for this? I don't see what the void is there, sidewalks and verges are public spaces.

If you think buildings anybody is free to go in and out of to have parties in would be a good idea, I'm not sure what to say.

People are perfectly free to open their houses and invite neighbors to have a party too (which occasionally happens on my street). Or you can book venues or organize to go to a partk (where do you live that has no parks in walking distance?). The point is this rarely happens because people don't really want to invest in this. A block party takes very little investment in time or money or location.

> As for the term, I understood the spirit of it to mean public spaces to socialize, where any variety of activities can be done alone or with others. Examples include parks with chess tables, public pools and nature reserves. You can easily go to these kinds of places, socialize with perfect strangers or go alone and still be surrounded by people in your community. Again YMMV and that's OK. I'm open to any ideas so long as those spaces exist.

I'm just saying they exist everywhere (including side walks and verges if you want a block party) and are under utilized. The demand is not there.

> I agree and think it'll always be hard to trust strangers. But the more opportunities communities have to socialize, the easier it is to build that trust -- but they have to exist. When there's a lack of spaces, that just compounds the trust issue.

Turning the public loose on vacant buildings I guarantee will not do anything to increase trust. The results will make people rightly very angry.

> entirely frequented by people who had come to use the free computers/internet

This is a problem with a lack of investment into the space. If half of NYC was shared space, they would find their space and you would be in another. I find Central Park to be mostly pleasant, and that's a shared space. When it's 0.01% of the space, there isn't enough room for the required segmentation of the different tribes and it ends up toxic.

I might be missing something. You're making it sound like there is some short term or new phenomenon happening here. COVID certainly has not been the cause of the decline of community cohesiveness, and certainly not behind any rise in demand for people "sharing spaces" with strangers.

> This is a problem with a lack of investment into the space. If half of NYC was shared space, they would find their space and you would be in another.

Well I disagree with that characterization that it's a problem or that a solution would be to spend vast amounts of money on it. As I said, people don't want to share spaces. The "problem" is not lack of shared space. If you don't like the lack of community or people willing to share and invest in their shared spaces, the root cause is completely different. A top-down decree of more will not fix it.

> I find Central Park to be mostly pleasant, and that's a shared space.

Parks are one thing that can work if they are quite remote or highly policed or in "good areas", but that's because people tend to go there for few reasons, there isn't much in the way of infrastructure or services to be ruined or hogged or stolen.

I don't see many people working, cooking, or gardening in shared spaces though. Sure there are some college kids, occasional professional who takes their laptop there for a few hours to work, sometimes people will have a BBQ and there is the odd community garden project. But even with the meager parks there are, I don't see a lot of them overflowing for places to sit and work.

> When it's 0.01% of the space, there isn't enough room for the required segmentation of the different tribes and it ends up toxic.

Dangerously bordering on anti diversity wrongthink... but true. However increasing space doesn't really help all that much when there is a lot of crime and not enough resources to police it.

This is a brilliant sentiment and can be tide to multitudes of other items. The more that can be voluntarily decoupled from the employer-employee relationship, the more should be.

This is a lesson I learned in the last year. Even though I've made real friends with colleagues and I wouldn't change that, I would still advise caution. It can be tempting to make friends at work because spontaneous regular encounters and shared experiences are the natural basis for cultivating friendship. However, making friends at work has hidden hazards.

Most (but not all) colleagues are like fair-weather friends. It is easy to confuse someone being friendly with someone being a friend. If you couldn't imagine spending time with this person outside of work, they are probably friendly but not your friend. If it would be weird for them to call you outside of work to ask how you're doing, they are probably friendly but not your friend.

Why wouldn't you want to cultivate true friendship in the workplace? Don't expect workmates to continue to be friendly when you switch workplaces. If you're not engaging with them outside of the workplace, their friendliness will simply fizzle out. Secondly, confusing friendliness for friendship makes it easier to be exploited. I've stayed at a dysfunctional workplace far too long because I liked my "friends" there. However, when I finally did switch and these "friendships" fizzled out, it became much more clear that these were simply friendly people. This doesn't make them bad people, it's just a social lesson I learned. Finally, the last hazard of workplace friendships has to do with the insulating effect of selection bias. Especially in the tech sector, workplace friends will tend to be a much smaller slice of class, race, and gender and it's easy to have a narrow worldview as a result. Maybe the importance of that differs from person to person, but it makes it easier to wake up one day and realize, "Huh, I have only middle class white guy friends. What's up with that?"

As far as chatter goes, nobody wants that. It's distracting to those around you. When we were at the office we were chatting over IM to cut down on the noise. Guess what? We're still chatting over IM while WFH.

Besides, many companies are adopting a hybrid plan anyway. My team, which includes many young professionals, wants to go to the office once per month. Make good use of that time to build your network.

I interpreted "social chatter and engagement" not necessarily to mean people are yapping at their desk, but that people say hi in the break room, have lunch together, etc.

> Young professionals need to learn the difference between friends and colleagues.

I hear that a lot on HN, and I'm sorry if I have to roll my eyes a little. TONS of humanity make friends at the place where they spend nearly half their waking hours, and there is nothing wrong with that. It's fine that not everyone does, but this "rule" people like to spout about "your co-workers are not your friends" - well, maybe your coworkers are not your friends, but I've made plenty of deep, lasting friendships through work.

I just like talking to people. I like being able to go down the hall and solving a problem in 5 minutes that would take 3 days and 3 meetings WFH. I am "friendly" with many people in the office. I socialize with them.

They aren't dear dear friends but they are acquaintances that have helped me out of tight spots and I helped them. I can't tell you how many times I've been helped through these sort of relationships.

If you're introverted just say it. There's nothing wrong with it. But there's nothing wrong with socializing either.

Once allowed we'll be going out to lunch again. I always made it a point to go out to lunch with people - people I work with now, people I've worked with in the past, and people I've met through meetups. I like going out at a minimum every other week and prefer once a week.

Maybe it's company culture? We're in multiple states and have multiple locations within the same state - and I need to work with people from all these different locations and so we've solved this "working together remotely" problems ages ago. It's an important part of our corporate culture. WFH just solved the problem of working in a big, noisy area.

Some of my best times were working in a university department. We did all this, though the talking to people outside your team was at proscribed coffee times in the staff lounge and sometimes over lunch.

But they remained colleagues not friends. Outside the few parties a year we didn't go round people's houses. We collaborated and fought over work, as that was what brought us together.

I make the distinction between colleagues and other employees as not all employees are colleagues. Colleagues help each other out of tight spots and talk beyond "Nice weather". Friends could be either, but in my experience once everyone is married and has kids, the closest will be "friendly" rather than "friends".

'Colleague' just refers to someone you work with who is of the same rank as you, and probably on the same team. It's closer to 'teammate' or 'peer' than it is to "workmate you have a friendly relationship with". You can dislike a colleague, and you can also barely talk to or really know a colleague.

I think the point being made is that this is totally okay.

There's an undertone in this greater thread that "people you work with aren't really your friend" and it implies that these "not-really-friends" aren't pleasant to be around. But that's not necessarily the case. For many people, being around "colleagues" and making small chit-chat is enjoyable, desirable, and helpful, even if they aren't (and never become) your "friend".

My point is, there isn't a right or wrong here. It's frustrating see the WFH warrior brigade come out and diminish other's experiences just because they had a bad experience. It's simply not universal.

Things could be perfect, but (with high probability) a relationship will abruptly end and managing every social aspect can be difficult.

Most of my immediate team are in another continent, others 100 miles away.

I'm used to working 'remotely' to my team, but still from the office. The office is my social space, where the company culture is, where I go out for lunch with work friends etc.

I've worked at my company for a while, so luckily already know a good number of stakeholders around the business. I hate to think how bad it would be for new starters joining the company and only really being exposed to their direct team.

Meeting people at the coffee machine or at a lunch area may not seem important but it's what made me love my workplace.

The C level has completely changed three times in my time here, but our culture lives on in the people. If it wasn't for those connections and sense of belonging, I may no longer still be working here.

I don't want to be forced into going back to my 3hr daily commute, but I wouldn't mind easing back into the occasional office visit.

I've spent most of my career doing remote work. Since I planned on it, rather than being forced into it, I was able to do things like rent an apartment with space for an office and set it up how I like. That actually adds to my balance as I can "go to the office" and then "leave the office" when I'm done. A lot of people in the pandemic era aren't as lucky there since it was so unplanned.

More importantly to your point though is that remote work normally doesn't mean "only work from home". Outside of the pandemic I would regular take my laptop to parks, libraries, or other spaces for a change of scenery. With the pandemic that wasn't an option as places were closed. I'm hoping to continue this now that things are reopening.

Unvaccinated folks pose a potential risk to themselves and other unvaccinated people. So, if you're already vaccinated, why are you still hesitant to go out? Is it because you live with kids or with someone immunocompromised who can't get vaccinated?

The person you're replying to is pretty similar to me, where I use the fact that I have a physical office as my work/life boundary. But I also don't shy away from having a social life when I'm within the work side of the boundary, and another social life when I'm on the outside. If you spend 1/3 of your life on the inside, you can have fun there without contradicting your personal work/life balance.

the only good thing about working at an office is the free food, but food isn't terribly expensive anyway. i could probably use transport savings to buy myself a nice food every week or two.

She worked in the same building for another company and we often saw each other at a nearby restaurant at lunch time. Often as in every single day. After some time (months) I was able to find someone in the other company that told me her name, searched her on facebook add her and we started talking first online, then of course we went to lunch together since we were in the same building. The rest is history as they say.

I do like free food though :-)

Do you not live in a place with climate control? At home I make the temperature decisions not the facility folk.

I sort of feel like these discussions are just (oversimplifying here) extroverts and introverts arguing back and forth about the best way to find satisfaction socially when they just have profoundly different social needs.

Also FWIW I've never lived in an apartment with climate control past radiators and window AC units. I don't think that's too unusual if you live in older buildings.

Does the office run the AC a bit cold? Yes, but to be honest when you reach almost too hot to sweat that's a nice problem to have.

I used a portable AC in the past but they barely work and are very loud.

I know plenty of AMZN and MS employees without AC.

There's also the matter of the fact that because Seattle doesn't get very hot or cold, there aren't that many people or companies that do AC installation. Anecdotally I've now heard that they're booked out for months, possibly a year, and with tight local housing and job market that is unlikely to change. You certainly haven't really been able to buy fans or portable units anywhere in the area since May.

Work is a decent place to meet people, but I don’t think it’s particularly healthy as your only or even primary opportunity for social connection. That might not be the case here but it sure sounds like it could be.

My own life improved immeasurably when I finally started having interests outside of pushing buttons into a glowing rectangle of light.

>The latest results from the 2009 Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) show that 87 percent of U.S. households are now equipped with AC.

That was 12 years ago.

I don't have AC and neither do many of my coworkers.

Seattle has the lowest percentage of home AC in the nation. It's not installed standard in new construction.

- Work life separation (balance)

Does not compute.

You can integrate certain aspects of work and personal life (social circle) while keeping other aspects siloed

And dating a co-worker in today's climate? No way, to much a risk -at least in the US.

The rest of them (comfortable space to work, food) are easy to solve with minimal effort. Especially on a dev salary.

It makes no sense that employees exist, right? Why not just pay everyone as consultants, gig workers, piece-work, etc?

But employees do exist, possibly because the best way to manage most people is to pay them to be in a room where all they can do is work.

Do you have a great idea to save time? Well you tell your boss, and you're pretty confident that this won't result in you losing billable hours, because you're an employee.

Are the requirements kind of bullshit? Not a problem, figure it out, you're paid to be here.

Do you need a break? Have a break. Maybe chat to some colleagues, that might even add some value.

All the anti-office folk seem very set on believing that they should be paid for the value they add, not the hours they are in the office. This is fine if you're delivering pizza, but for a lot of jobs this just isn't easy to measure.

Yes, there's some consultants and B2B, not everything needs to be employees, but for a lot of work and a lot of workers and managers it's paid salary that ends up being fairer and easier.

A lot of employees became more productive in lockdown, but I suspect this is partly due to novelty (change often has short-term benefits), partly due to there being nothing else to do, and partly due to all the uncertainty that the business might have mass layoffs.

Also the HN audience is far more remote-oriented than I’ve encountered among my coworkers over the course of my career, including > 4 years working full-remote.

It would seem prudent to be aware of these other "HNs".

There is a really funny one where the guy goes back to work and hits his head on a door.

If you’re suggesting HN is old and cranky…

You’d be correct.

At this point in my life, I'm one of those people who is screaming to get out of the house. It's a place of comfort to me for sure, but also distraction and stagnation. Couple this great start to my career with having a critical third of college plus youth in general being ripped from me, I think its pretty clear why I am against pure WFH. People in different situations and stages with different needs will want different arrangements, but I am not going to apply for remote positions as a new grad.

I have recently started a new job and was interviewed and onboarded entirely remote. The process was fine and in the future I am not required to be in the office a lot either.

However I am eager to get into the office to meet the new people, have them at hand to ask questions (not just on teams) and generally assimilate into the team.

The problem with teams and other such tools is that I can’t see if someone is available or not. Their dot might be green, but they might be in the zone or otherwise not easily interruptible. In an office I can see whether or not this is the case.

I’m not keen to work in the office 100% but I am also aware of some of the benefits of being in the office at times. Especially planning meetings etc.

I also don’t think each case suits everyone and IMO flexible location is a good compromise allowing people to work where they would like. Let people come in when they need or for meetings but also let them work from home as they need.

In an office I think it is pretty hard to tell when someone is actually available. If you make a mistake and interrupt someone while they are actually thinking deeply about a problem, you can cause a pretty big dent in their productivity.

Maybe if the "office" actually gave everyone enough space to have their own office the push-back against going back wouldn't be so bad, but it seems like no company wants to spend the money to have comfortable and productive working environments.

I'm a soloist, and I've found WFH to be a mixed bag in the past 16 months. I love that I can set up my home workspace exactly as I'd like it. But I very much miss routine social interactions and don't care much for the daily isolation.

If I could return to an office/cube, I think I'd prefer that. But alas, my clueless F100 employer insists we IT-types occupy an open space without personal- or group- reserved seating, so I'll rarely be able to find or sit with anyone I know. NOT something I'd prefer.

Perhaps the exodus of those seeking greener pastures will include me too.

Do you truly want work life separation, is your work place your social venue, or do you want a mix of both? No wrong answers. Just pros and cons with personal preferences. I just feel that it would be nice to have that choice.

Now I have a family at home and life is much easier working out of the house.

I believe that I have a perception of being irreplaceable, but it's because of my future value rather than past value.

I've never felt like I was being treated like cattle at work, though, so maybe I've just been lucky enough to work at good companies.

But maybe they have excellent documentation, knowledge sharing and mentorship, unlike all multinational corps I've ever worked for (where was generally a cost center and frowned upon).

Netflix engineer here. The portion of the company I work in has been hiring remote during the pandemic and we have a company wide permanent WFH policy (well guidance from HR) in place. The policy includes pay tiers depending on where you live, but the pay adjustment doesn’t take place until COVID WFH is lifted.

I work on a team that, post covid, has engineers in two countries. I personally live in PHX and won’t be returning to the Bay Area. My salary is currently 100% what my Bay Area was, and will be adjusted down to 80% once the offices fully open.

Yes. I’ve run the numbers several times. I have a 2 child family. Treating our house, child care, groceries, etc. as fungible I could take a 50% pay cut over SJC and “maintain” our quality of life on paper.

But details matter. I live in a community with 22 miles of maintained trail, some of the best school districts in the country (with no lottery system, we just pick a school), our grocery stores are better (better meat, better produce, better selection), etc.

After living both, I strongly suspect my current quality of life in PHX literally does not exist in the Bay Area no matter the price point.

To put in perspective of how little I pay, I pay about 1900/month for mortgage, taxes, insurance and HOA (which is like $150/month because we live in a gated area). I am about 30-45 minutes door to door from PHX airport.

On the low end, it would require ~75-80k before taxes just to make up the mortgage difference, and likely be more than that.

TL;DR: Yea, it can easily be 100k cheaper in PHX vs SF depending on your situation.

But this can be solved with just renting a separate flat and using it as an office; something I actually considered, except small flats are the new fad for real estate investors (at least where I live), so prices are ridiculous.

Going back to the office, the company building, removes a lot of the flexibility and freedom that are important to me, and bring in heaps of crap that I don't want to deal with.

I don't want to go back to a small room crammed full of programmers shoulder to shoulder, stuck on depressingly out of date equipment, with shitty air conditioning and public restrooms.

I'm sooo much more productive and happy working from home

What I can't stand, and what I believe many people don't realize how much they can't stand it instead of something else, is having to share a space with people I have nothing to do with. Open floor plans prevent me from talking with my close colleagues, they force me to overhear conversations I have no interest in, strangers walking by all the time, the lack of privacy generates anxiety and so on.

While I'm in school, remote work is actually super useful because I can work wherever, whenever, and working around my coursework is incredibly easy. When I'm not in the middle of a term though, it becomes more of a chore. Working 40hrs out of my bedroom isn't ideal by any means (I go out and work at a coffee shop for a few hours each day to combat this), but the work-life separation has been really hard for me to form.

I just got swapped from 1099 to W2 so now I'll at least have a work machine that I can keep separate from all my personal stuff, but I feel like it'll still have more of a blurred line than it should have.

I might feel differently about this when I eventually have a house with a dedicated office, etc. but living out of an apartment with no formal workspace is really difficult, at least for me. Definition of spaces is incredibly important to how I work.

I've been working remotely since 2015. Do I want to go back now? Hell no.

That's the perception we have in our groups. We meet up weekly face to face to share air when possible.

Seriously, does half of HN work in the real-life equivalent of "The Office"? Yes, office politics exist, but this idea that it's some sort of scheming, back-stabbing environment is a caricature I have never experienced in my nearly 30 year career.

It doesn't magically go away, it just keeps happening, almost certainly to your detriment.

Bullying? I've had it done to me and another time had to sit in with HR on someone else's behalf.

People being performance managed just because? I saw a bunch of 40 somethings get targeted and zeroed out. It got ugly.

30x1 is not the same as 1x30 or 6x5 or 15x2 or 10x3. They all look like the same equation but the experiences can be vastly different.

I get that some people want to put their head down and grind for 8 hours a day then move on with their lives, but I tend to prefer at least knowing who I work with. I work at a small company, well under 100 people, and haven't met half of them.

But 30% of the time? Or 20%? For plenty of people this won't seem weird. Spending two days per week working from home won't be strange.

I work remote now. While I still see a need for in-person catch-ups this doesn't include any need for the classic daily commute. That, for me and many others, at least, is now dead.

I understand that a lot of people will respond to a question of whether they intend to quit their job with a 'you bet!' even at the best of times, but I'm seeing a lot of people quitting and switching right now, as different company plans are crystallized for the 'new normal'.

In my current company (for another 2 months) I was interviewed to join a team of 12 tech developers, and a couple of months ago the first of the switchers quit to leave for another company specifically because they were guaranteeing remote-first work.

Then another five of us quit over the following few weeks. We met up last week for a goodbye lunch in the park: half the team that I joined a year ago leaving the company over the Spring and Summer.

Is a 50% quit-rate normal? Maybe each of us had slightly different priorities and plans for the future? But I do know for sure that people are reflecting more than I've ever experienced before, about their work environment, the balance in their lives, and prioritizing other things than 40-50 hours each week sitting in front of a screen, inside an office.

I've talked with executives in charge of large teams at both companies about this issue and so far it looks like the actual resignation rate due to the policy is less than 10%. Hiring, on the other hand, has gotten significantly harder and candidates are citing need for wfh as a reason they're not interested in open roles.

So, personally I think tech workers are overrepresented in the "wfh or quit" discussions, but there's a longer-term shift of some kind that's going to play out, especially in hiring.

This is where I suspect a lot of places are going to end up in the medium term. I'm not back to the office in the first place, and I'm aware that I have a nice office and moderate commute, but I still want some wfh time, as well as some time seeing my colleagues. A balance.

The problem is that in a hyper-optimizing environment balance is something to be eliminated.

I think most people want a better work/life balance, which is what all this ultimately represents. I imagine the eventual long term settle is somewhere more in the “wfh, but with team gatherings for a few days once a month” in a lot of industries.

This is only a tiny subset of people though, and is more the exception that proves the rule.

There are cities other than than the west coast as well. 5 acres 1.5 hours from Minneapolis will be 300k with a house.

We’ve already seen it before the pandemic: where engineers had one day or half a day a week of remote as an exception, it generally resulted in a push to have it applied to the other roles that could work from home (marketing etc.)

This is much more reasonable than what I've seen most places offer. I don't mind the sound of that at all!

This sounds a bit too much like jobs that claim 10% or 25% travel that pull a bait and switch, or don't hire the 2nd opening for your position, so your responsibly to "cover" for the dept really means double work, or same amount of work but more like 60-75% travel.

Same with jobs the promise of a 40 hr week, but ends up being 60 hrs to handle everything that's your responsibility.

So my question is: what guarantees or addl compensation are people getting (in writing) to keep the one day a month from turning into more?

Excuses like: "oh that one day is for our staff meeting- if your team leader wants weekly update meetings in the office you need to be there"

Or "you're responsible for coordinating and meeting with your team as needed to fulfill the responsibilities of your position"

Etc

Extra day off or extra days salary or just compensation for extra commute? Or just put up with it til it crosses a line?

I know if I get two job offers and one is any form of WFH Hybrid (or a "you can probably work it out with your manager") and the other is 100% Remote, I'm taking the 100% remote position, unless the hybrid is like 2x the pay.

Right now there's a lot of recruiters trying to sell me on various nebulous hybrid positions (sounds like the companies don't really know or have committed to anything just yet, or are afraid to let potential hires know what they're really planning), but there's equally as many recruiters contacting me for 100% remote (and plans to stay that way) as well.

I don't mind meeting up with other employees on the occasional fun team-building outing, but I really don't want to work in an office again.

I likely have permanent Tinnitus in one ear thanks to my time in open offices and I had to turn music up to block out multiple conversations to concentrate, for one reason why I'm not in a hurry to go back, let alone there still being uncertainty about this or future pandemics (I'm vaccinated, but delta or delta plus or the next crazy variant might still fuck me up, and I don't want to be stuck having to go to an office when I start feeling uncomfortable about the spread of those).

Also I don't want to deal with paying and transporting my dogs to doggy daycare everyday, or spend 2+ hours a day driving to and from work. I've done plenty of that in the past, and it always sucked.

> I don't mind meeting up with other employees on the occasional fun team-building outing, but I really don't want to work in an office again.

I think this is probably where a lot of companies will settle out; wfh, but with monthly or quarterly workshops/meetups for teams.

A recruiter (household name tech but not FAANG) pitched me on a position that was "1 day a week" in an office 300 miles from my home.

I knew my conditions* wouldn't be met, so I turned him down.

*The company covers my airfare and meals. I fly out and back same day. The morning outbound never departs before 8AM. The return never arrives after 6PM.

That is a good point. My company doesn't know or has not set a return policy. So I imagine it is hard for recruiters and hiring managers to give an honest answer. And I wonder if it is better to wait until more companies have set a firm policy.

That means better organized meetings with a purpose rather than a bunch of weekly meetings that are there just cuz.

I think it is some personalities just need human interaction more than others and when they are in management/executive roles they want people in the office.

Corollary I guess is that some of us might be able to lock in a remote-only position if we act now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal

This article told me nothing concrete of value.

"Hey this number is big" - Yes, but was it also big before? How much bigger is it now? 2%? 10%?

Is the cumulative number larger than just the sum of months under quarantine? Ie this is just pent up demand and if we averaged it across months it'd look normal? Historically what percentage of people thinking about changing jobs at some point in time actually do within 12mo? 10%? 70%?

Without any context to me this article is just as likely to be the precursor to a follow up articke about "the major job resignation that never materialized" as is it to be about an actual change in positions.

A week later we got an email saying people wanted 2-3 days in office.

If you want to stick it to them you should put out an informal poll with all employees and publish those results separate, show everyone how the company is lying to you.

Public discussions are good for, you know, the public. Keeping things private just means the manager is the only one who knows the whole picture.

Multiyear leases and/or real estate investments.

Sure it could all work out fine for them. Maybe employees will grumble for a bit, then settle back into office life. But maybe it wont’t. There’s a very real possibility that you lose a non-negligible percent of your staff (disproportionately the most talented who have other options), handicap your ability to recruit replacements, and destroy morale for the remaining. For companies who’s entire value is the intangible human capital of their workforce, this seems like a pretty big fucking risk to take.

I get it. Maybe you think WFH is long term unsustainable and it will erode corporate culture and what not. But the point is it’s pretty clear that it’s not short-term unsustainable. Obviously companies have survived for a year without the train swerving off the tracks. Why would any rational company want to be the first back? Why not just wait six months after the other FANGs go back to see what happens? At worse you lose a half year in the office, which clearly isn’t that bad. At best, you potentially save the entire company from collapsing.

Making such a big push to go back in September instead of waiting until January just seems reckless to the point of irrationality.

The FANG workers got a taste of not having a daily long commute and don't want to give this small life improvement back. Getting back several hours of your life is pretty big.

FANG companies however have gotten a taste of nearly unlimited power and have not heard "no" in years. They too don't want to give this up. This is why they demand the butts back in the cramped open seating office. Does anyone buy their "we will allow you to apply for remote work" BS? That is just something to get you back in the office. They will quietly deny your request later.

People can call these FANGers spoiled, but I really hope they win. It would benefit everybody, but the CEOs of the world.

Times I used a climbing wall or nap pod: 0

In the end even the free lunch was annoying. (Yes I am going to complain about "free" food.) It just lead to short lunches where people go back to their desk as soon as they could.

I love the social aspect of lunch and it's the highlight of my day to eat with friends. When you are trapped on campus that rarely happens. I was immediately happier when I left and got the social aspect of the middle of my day back. Went from taking like 20-30 minute lunches to like 70. Leaving the office and eating lunch with good friends a few times a week is a huge moral boost over waiting in some silly named tech cafeteria.

Don't get me wrong pre-FANG I dreamed of how nice it would be to eat at on campus free cafes. Later on I realized it was mostly there to keep you from taking a long lunch stuck in traffic.

It seems like it's almost completely self-inflicted if someone doesn't have time as a full timer (at the 2 Big-N tech companies I've been at). I didn't have time as an intern because I wasn't confident and felt I needed to prove something. Now, many years into it, I know I can work my 40 hour weeks, enjoy the perks for what they are, and relax most of the time.

I've never understood why people consider perks like food as traps to keep you on campus. Nothing stops you from leaving campus for lunch, as long as there's not some meeting you scheduled. Nothing stops you from working 40 hours a week, unless you choose to work more to get ahead faster.

Also totally agree with you not having to work so many hours, but this is exactly why they love the college grad pipeline. So many fresh workers with something to prove.

The problem with nothing stopping you from leaving campus for lunch is that it's hard to convince your work-buddies to join you. Free is very compelling to some. And all your co-workers plan their meetings around this truncated lunch break.

Also you should have more trust for your fellows in dialogue here, that they do have some immune function against misinformation viruses.

A number of folks are asking the question, "why does the HN consensus appear to be so far away from my experience?" I think the answer is really that noise is being amplified and echoed above the signal.

If you know you're just guessing based on what "seems reasonable" and "matches what other people are saying" you need to stop and re-evaluate the validity of your beliefs. That's an important part of critical thinking which is sorely lacking in this forum right now.

- don't read minds; dialectic can only happen if we allow the flow of conversation back and forth. Cutting that flow prematurely happens for example when we assert that we know what the other person is thinking.

- don't use should statements; don't enter the scene with imperatives and normativities. At best it is insulting to fellow adults you're talking to, at worst it again kills the dialectic. Conversation requires trust in the other person being able to unpack and reality test what is being said. It requires an assumption of good enough character. Talking down to people is a self fulfilling prophecy; when you show you have very little expectation in having a good faith conversation you have already created it.

- let go of black and white thinking; simple categories are useful but have serious precision errors. I invite you to consider "truth", "knowledge", "validity" as shades of gray instead of discrete categories while talking to people, because it allows parties of a dialogue to puzzle together the subsets of truths they have.

- don't overgeneralize; don't take a comment and overgeneralize that to a person's essence e.g "they are a person who always does this". Don't take a few comments and overgeneralize that to the entire forum. Don't use labels.

- don't discount the positives and filter in only the negatives; instead of focusing where people might have missed your expectations in critical thinking, see if you're downplaying or outright ignoring when they are in fact demonstrating it.

Hope it helps.

I mean, you say "It is the exact same process which reinforces beliefs in flat-earth, anti-vax, chiropractic, homeopathy, the stolen-election narrative, and other such nonsense.". But is that true? How do you know? Do you have all the facts? I'm sure it seems reasonable and matches what others think...

This is an interesting claim. Do you have evidence for it?

The consensus was that the downside risk is the two people coming to various conclusions even though they knew nothing about it simply due to our cognitive biases and how we interact with each other. Therefore, two people talking about something they do not know anything about might very well be worse off than had they not talked about it at all.

Humans are deductive creatures and we're not terrible at constructing and testing hypotheses. A lot of value can be derived from discussing inconclusive topics, and an understanding of new subject matter can be established for those unfamiliar. It's a valuable exercise to walk through supporting facts.

I wish we didn't cry every time we conjecture.

When I was working in the bay area I would've happily taken a 10-20% pay cut in order to work remote from anywhere. I would've been happy with a mandate of 'come into the office for a week (on the company dime of course) once a quarter, bi-annually or whatever'

Who's going to let housing be built if it devalues the houses they own?

Prop 13 in California is a key thing cited as why NIMBYism is stronger than usual, because current entrenched residents don't feel the pain of their behavior.

Gov'ts also do not willingly pass something like prop 13 themselves, because they don't like to limit their ability to tax.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/05/25/us-dollar-ho...

To think this time is different is to be ignorant.

I don't want to have to move.

It is also the astronomical real estate money they had sunken into new office spaces.

This depends on how you define morale. Morale can be thought of as the willingness of people to make difficult sacrifices to maintain community ties, in the sense offered by the essay "Why Strict Churches Are Strong":

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/230409?jou....

In that essay, they make the point that there are no freeloaders in a strict church, and that is what draws people to strict churches. Strict churches will be smaller than non-strict churches, because non-strict churches allow a lot of members who do not participate very much in the life of the church. In a strict church, people obey a large number of rules, and make substantial sacrifices, to belong to a group in which everyone else is also making sacrifices, and therefore, in a sense, everyone earns their place. And by most definitions of "morale" strict churches have better morale than non-strict churches.

It's the same with any organization, including the military, and including corporations. Asking people to show up to an office means you're asking people to make a sacrifice to continue being a member in good standing. Such a request can weed some people out, but that is the point of the request. For those who are left behind, morale is higher because everyone is known to be making that sacrifice.

There are several qualifiers that are normally added at this point, raising questions over the fairness of the rules, the fairness of the enforcement, and the group perception of the fairness of the enforcement. I'm not going to write all of that out in a comment on Hacker News, I think the essay I linked to above covers most of the details.

We're all slowly dying, and personally, I value having more control over what little time I have left alive while getting done what needs to get done to make a living, and do it right without being tied down, more or less against my will, to any office.

This right here is the entire argument. It's about control, and nothing more.

The pandemic displaced a large group of socially successful people from the social hierarchy. Those people want to return to the old normal because they want their status back. They want control back. "You'll do what you're told because I said so, that's why." lies at the heart of it.

Some of those displaced people have been revealed as frauds: they don't actually contribute value that is commensurate with their position in the hierarchy. And some of those who report to them have had just about enough of their shit.

We're collectively asked to give up our lives to these companies. To willingly give over our ability to determine how we order our days. To look the other way as our various employers build a literal dystopia.

Yeah, no thanks. I'll stay in control of myself from now on.

At a base level, everyone wants a meaningful, fulfilled life. A key component of that is having enough autonomy and control to feel that your decisions matter because they are your decisions. But another important component is to feel that your decisions matter because they matter to others. We are a social primate species and for most of us, our emotional systems are wired to feel the greatest peace when we feel we are helping our tribe and being supported by it in return.

Being part of a group (job or not) where you feel your efforts help not just you but the entire group is deeply important for most people. There's a reason that male suicide rates skyrocket not long after retirement. We are not happy alone and disconnected, even though being in that state in theory maximizes our personal autonomy.

Obviously, this is not to imply that a job is the only or best way to find that kind of tribe or group identity. But there are meaningful jobs out there and working together can be an important part of a fulfilling life.

That seems to be a completely artificial problem of the modern corporate first-world that discards or isolates anyone it doesn't find useful (the elderly and children) when, for a most of history; the elderly never stopped working in a meaningful capacity ever until they dropped or were incapacitated; children were working with their guardians much much more of the time without dipping into exploitative child labor of industrialism.

> But there are meaningful jobs out there and working together can be an important part of a fulfilling life.

It's like we're making the best of having our village raided for resources and saying some of the raiders don't take all the stuff (and they don't take nothing). What we need are appropriate walls so that our relationship with these outsiders can be one of trade/negotiation.

> Some of those displaced people have been revealed as frauds: they don't actually contribute value that is commensurate with their position in the hierarchy. And some of those who report to them have had just about enough of their shit.

Oh boy, I could share quite a few relevant stories (as I think many of here could too) that'd make your head spin. It's crazy to think of the number of these fraudsters out there and how awful it is for those who are forced to be stuck dealing with them/their actions day in day out. Been in that situation with a few managers in the past, and it's an understatement to say my time was stolen by them.

As to this:

"We're all slowly dying"

That is a double-edged sword. Many people find meaning through the commitments they make: marriage, the military, the nation, their religion, children, parents, friends. Why make a commitment? Because we are all dying and so we wonder "What is the meaning of life?" And for those who find meaning through their commitments, then the fact that we are all slowly dying would be a reason to make more, deeper commitments, not less.

"I value having more control over what little time I have left"

Unless someone puts a gun to your head, no one is taking away your control over your time. Whether you decide to make any kinds of commitments to marriage, the military, the nation, your religion, children, parents, or friends, those are your choices, both if you reject all such commitments or embrace them.