Comment by treis

Comment by treis 10 months ago

Because it's really hard for a company to do both. Even if it's a remote first and the office is just a place to do zoom calls. Human nature will divide it into two camps with social bonds being stronger within the remote/on office groups than across.

Speaking as someone who would have to be dragged back to an office, it's obvious that the in office group would win out. Bonds are weaker in the remote group and your type A ladder climbers will be overrepresented in the in office group.

So hybrid office is probably going to lead to all in office. Especially in these difficult economic times as workforces stagnate or shrink in these companies.

cryptonector 10 months ago

Some coordinated office presence + some WFH is a good mix that reduces commute times, increases WFH productivity (because in-office interactions lead to pressure to deliver), and maintains face-to-face access.

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ghaff 10 months ago

Teams that are relatively co-located geographically can coordinate to come into a location regularly on the same days. That really didn't happen where I worked and, as far as I know, the company continues to shed real estate. I'm not sure the execs especially liked the shift but, starting from the base of a fairly remote-friendly company, COVID just largely shredded whatever in-office culture there was for better or worse.

So, yeah, I think there was some pre-COVID middle ground but you probably have a fairly large percent of people mostly coming into an office and a fairly small percent doing so--which of course tends to reinforce both behaviors. (And it grew a lot in a distributed manner as well which probably made getting everyone together physically all the time less relevant.)

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treis 10 months ago

Think this is like a lot of things that work in theory but don't work in practice. You think you'll get the best of both worlds but really you get the worst of both.

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- ghaff 10 months ago
  
  Simultaneously, when I was there, the other thing that was going on was that the company was basically not paying for off-sites any longer. So, latterly, I had immediate team Zooms but was pretty much disconnected more broadly.
  There was this intersection of COVID and don't spend money that isn't NECESSARY. And the result was basically everything on Zoom. I actually spent a lot of my own money to attend some conferences to maintain some contact with people.
  
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