> All this is to say, I'm skeptical that workers won't be called back into the office as soon as leadership gets the chance.
That forget the leadership on top of that leadership though!
Where I work, before covid they were working on expanding quite a bit the amount of office space but as far as I understands, all theses plans got cancelled and instead we won't have permanent desk and instead we will works remotely 2-3 days a week. That's coming from a company that had literally no remote works before Covid (except while travelling).
It represents so much money to have less office space, as long as the manager doesn't play too much with their staff efficiency during Covid, it will just make sense to save money there.
>Office life will never return to the way it was pre-pandemic.
I think this is absolutely right.
It will vary by company of course. But more people will be fully remote and, based on a bunch of different studies I've seen, in-office will probably be 3 days a week or so for most people. Now I would expect co-located teams to coordinate some but I doubt that the 9-5 everyone in the office world will be the norm at most companies for the foreseeable future.
>>Office workers are not going back to the office.
I am not seeing this. Major companies are forcing the issue, and employee can pound their refusal all they want but at the end of the day I think we not going to see a normal fully remote work force.
At best you are going to see a hybrid where you get 2 or 3 days a week of WFH, and the balance in the office.
Further from personal experience I somewhat agree with the management because I have seen LOTS of abuse of WFH from employees.
> Give me a dedicated office with a door that can shut, allow me to commute during off-peak rush hours, and raise my pay or shorten my work hours for the same rate... then we will talk about coming back in.
If you can talk like that post-pandemic, why couldn't you walk like that pre-pandemic? You could've had a remote job then, too.
I do like remote work, but it's not all upsides. If there's a big shift to remote work, it will suppress wages because now you can hire from across the country, where living expenses are low.
> At the end of the day, it boils down to your personal choices.
I like working remote fine I guess but all else being equal I'd consider an office for the right job.
All else isn't equal though and the reason we went remote is still in play. A company I left a few years ago went back into the office in january. My old manager who was still working there just died of covid a few weeks ago. Vaccinated, boosted etc.
The risk might be lower now but it's not gone. I never fully recovered from my first round with covid almost two years ago. I'm not looking for another go.
The balance of risk/benefit might favor companies choosing to have workers back. We really might be more productive in there, and hey probably only a handful will die. There's a little more going on than my personal choices though.
> No, I don't want to go back to the office (I don't have to; my team is now fully remote forever)
It sounds like it's impossible for anybody to ruin it for you, then!
That's great. Same here: I was fully remote before the pandemic, and will continue to only work at fully remote or remote-optional companies.
So, if other people want to return to offices, it doesn't affect me at all. I wish them well (and secretly think they're nuts, but: different strokes for different folks).
Maybe some companies will insist on people returning to the office, but it's really hard for me to imagine a future where it's harder to find a remote job than it was a few years ago. So I don't feel threatened by this. This feels like there's more variety than there used to be, that's all.
> Considering all the middle managers I know of are desperately trying to get the workforce back into offices because they seemingly have bugger-all to do now, I'd say you can cut out a fair few of them if you need to balance out a new cost.
Are you sure you've diagnosed this correctly? The managers I know are ready to get back to the office for the exact opposite reason - managing remotely is much harder and more time-consuming.
> I’m gonna go against the HN grain here and, despite having been fully for remote work for the first year or so of the pandemic, come out and say that life has really gotten a lot more repetitive and frankly disappointing since covid and the death of the office. I kind of miss meeting people in the office.
I'm sorry you're having a tough time with it. That sounds really unpleasant.
> My company is hybrid at the moment and I’m actually writing this from the very empty office. Things just aren’t the same.
Ignoring the pandemic, it sounds like the people at your company just don't agree that in-person work is necessary for them to get what they need out of their employment. The issue is either side attempting to force its preferred working conditions on the other. aka the solution isn't to make all of those people that don't want to be in an office come in again, but instead for you to find companies/circles that have people with similar interests as you. Being around people that don't want to be around you is unpleasant for both sides.
I'm not trying to be facetious - you seriously can't provide your own meals and snacks working from home?
>> Many people who work at these companies live in big cities where they don't have huge amounts of space and it's not conducive to being productivity, particularly if you live with other people, if you can't get some form of separation.
Do you live in that space because it's close to your office? Ok, so now you're remote you can live anywhere. If there was no pandemic you could work from a library, or café or dozens of other places. You could move around each day. Or you could move to a cheaper location and have a nice home office.
> The fact that I had to ride a train twice a day just to take those zoom calls from a local office was always an annoyance.
This exactly. I was already working more or less remotely before the pandemic, but from an office 1 hour from my apartment. I often worked from home anyway and nobody noticed other than my manager, who usually was also working in a different office from me (1 hour drive away) but who insisted that I come into the office whenever possible. Covid gave me the chance to stop wasting my time and energy on the train just to keep up appearances for the person who did my annual performance reviews.
My current job is a bit different. Our team is "global", but several of my coworkers actually work in the office near where I live, so going into the office is actually a nice experience. Also my commute is 1/3 what it used to be, which helps.
> Why do you think remote work is only feasible during a pandemic?
Remote work was feasible in part during a pandemic because it had to be. When everyone is 100% remote, things aren’t bad. If companies don’t do anything to preserve that culture from during pandemic times, when folks start returning to the office again, remote work will very likely go back to sucking. Being remote you’ll very likely be the odd person out on meetings desperately trying to hear what was said and/or struggle to get a word in with everyone else jammed in a conference room.
>But we are paying all this money for office space, I don't want to waste that.
let's rearrange office into gym, pub, strip club or something else and let's increase profits!
Anyway, my co-workers want hybrid approach, 1-2day office, rest home, with exceptions for ppl that have long commute (tiny minority) - they can 100% remote.
> BTW - my current employer (big tech company) also wants to bring everyone back into the office, even though it increased the headcount during the pandemic and there was no campus expansion for 1 and half year due to COVID lockdowns and there is no space for everyone.
My current company hasn't made such a demand, but I've also heard that in others in this country about 20% of people actually prefer to work in person daily, everyone else seems to work remotely a lot of the time.
Now, I'm probably under a certain sampling bias here, but the few times I recently went into the office, it seemed comparatively empty, unless a team had decided to meet up in person for whatever reason.
I guess not everyone enjoys the commute, especially in pretty cold weather (or just thrives while working remotely for a plethora of reasons).
> I’m gonna go against the HN grain here and, despite having been fully for remote work for the first year or so of the pandemic, come out and say that life has really gotten a lot more repetitive and frankly disappointing since covid and the death of the office. I kind of miss meeting people in the office.
There's a big difference between 'remote work' and 'forced to work from home due to a global pandemic'.
>To level the playing field it has to be all colocated or all remote.
Completely agreed. The way I see my situation playing out is that all of the employees who went remote during COVID will be tolerated, but that the company culture will revert to in-office first. That will eventually lead to the remote cohort slowly being relegated to irrelevance and passed for promotion until they disappear (including myself) through attrition. When that happens I will start looking for 100% remote companies. But for now I really don't care though, as long as they are paying me a Bay Area salary to live in the midwest.
> A coworker of mine recently pointed out that not only are businesses saving money by closing offices, they're
I hadn't considered this. I've always thought that many companies are tied to long leases they wouldn't be able to get out of that quickly. I can imagine some savings on the other associated office costs.
> I for one am even more in the no-remote-only-gigs camp given recent events.
> Today, as some companies are changing their remote work policies to be return-to-office, there seems to be a lot of resentment about this, and I don't really understand why.
I mean, this is a ridiculous argument supporting remote work because it works so much stronger the other way.
You literally had companies change centuries worth of corporate work for overnight to switch everyone to remote work.
If anything the people who want full time return to office have a much stronger argument that companies have suddenly changed everything on them, as opposed to the people who are complaining that now that things are normal companies are reverting the changes they made for a once in a lifetime pandemic.
Emotion may be beating logic for many of the people in this thread.
Our company has been super transparent with us from the outset that we're about 30% less productive as a remote-first company compared to everyone being in the office. This was deemed acceptable. We're biotech, we employee an army of medical doctors, and as long as COVID remains a real threat, we'll remain remote-first.
We got rid of maybe a quarter of our office space, but our company has made it clear that it intends to eventually move us back into the office at least once or twice a week for most employees to regain some of that lost productivity and especially to help new hires get up to speed more quickly.
Some high performing, individual contributor, highly self-motivated knowledge workers may be more productive in a fully remote environment, but I think it's very much the exception. For better or for worse, most people just want to do the bare minimum amount of work that they can get away with while still keeping their job, and they can get away with doing far less remotely than they can in real life.
> How much more productive will employees be if they don’t have a dedicated office and if their commute time was like 15 minutes instead of the 2 hours someone from Silicon Valley may spend?
Yea, i'm very pro-WFH, but i've built my life around it. I own a house with an office. I can't imagine trying to WFH on a couch or some desk in my living room while my wife cooks/watches TV/etc.
With that said i still hope people see more chances to WFH, and can start buying/renting homes with this in mind. I have a three bedroom house, turned into 2 offices 1 bedroom, and it worked wonderfully for my wife and I during these WFH times. My wife fwiw was not a WFH person before Covid, but she is currently, and she has adapted quite easily with a dedicated office. One of her coworkers however lived in a tiny apartment with two children and no office. Her QOL was miserable.
That forget the leadership on top of that leadership though!
Where I work, before covid they were working on expanding quite a bit the amount of office space but as far as I understands, all theses plans got cancelled and instead we won't have permanent desk and instead we will works remotely 2-3 days a week. That's coming from a company that had literally no remote works before Covid (except while travelling).
It represents so much money to have less office space, as long as the manager doesn't play too much with their staff efficiency during Covid, it will just make sense to save money there.
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