Comment by consteval

Comment by consteval 3 days ago

It's unpopular because the positions aren't on equal footing. In order to achieve the in-office scenario you HAVE to force people into the office. Because the office itself has no value - it's a building. The value is the people there.

That's not the case with WFH setups. WFH scenarios do not care where people are. They could be in the office, in a stairwell, or on the beach.

So one position is inherently one of control, and the other is one of freedom. Maybe that's controversial to say, but to me it's plainly true.

ssl-3 3 days ago

I parsed that as:

"If anyone has an office in a building, then everyone must have an office in that building and must be forced to work there."

And I just don't follow that. Why must it be this way? So that the office is full?

If so, then: If having the office full every day is an important metric and WfH interferes with that metric, then the problem is not that the people make choices.

Instead, it is that the office is larger than it should be.

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saghm 3 days ago

> Instead, it is that the office is larger than it should be.
Yep, but rather than admit that having too big an office is a mistake, they double down on it and try to force employees back into the offices. For a certain type of personality, pushing the negative ramifications down to subordinates is easier than admitting that they need to solve the actual problem.

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- philwelch 3 days ago
  
  The problem is literal vested interests in commercial real estate. Not just in the sense that the company itself owns their offices, but many of the local businesses around those offices are popular investments for upper management. (Amazon in particular isn’t a free-lunch workplace, so at least when I was there, there were tons of lunch spots scattered amidst the Amazon campus.) If people don’t RTO, a lot of money stands to be lost, especially since Amazon was investing heavily in both their expanded Seattle campus in the Denny Triangle and HQ2 when COVID hit.
  
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consteval 3 days ago

I would agree, but I have to ask: where's the cutoff?
If you let people "choose" and 99% choose to always work from home, do you think that's gonna fly? I don't. I think the in-officers would be very upset about that because that's not enough people to make their in-office experience how they like it.
No matter how you slice it, such a position is one born of control. You have to force some people's hand in where they work.

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- ssl-3 3 days ago
  
  Perhaps extroverts who can only thrive when in the company of others should stick with careers that require the company of others, instead of those careers that can be accomplished hundreds of kilometers from society (in a cabin in the woods).
  
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  MiguelX413 3 days ago
  
  Why should I have to work from home just because I like engineering?
  
  Reply View | 8 replies

nostrademons 3 days ago

You don't necessarily. Optional WFH or coworking arrangements let you come into the office if you prefer to, but let people who would rather WFH do so if they prefer to. They were pretty common even during the pandemic, eg. in my time in the startup scene probably 70-80% of founders worked out of a coworking office instead of their home.

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marcosdumay 3 days ago

Optional WFH is the one thing called "WFH" on the vast majority of cases. The few places that mandate you not to go to the office all make sure to make that position clear.

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- eric-hu 3 days ago
  
  I’m currently job searching and I tend to just see (remote) or (hybrid). It usually requires me digging into the description to see if a company has an office I can go to.
  Some that are hybrid optional list themselves as (remote), but do so fully remote companies.
  
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