I understand and even expect the lack of empathy from RTO executives, but the lack of empathy on the part of the 'remote work for everyone, always' camp saddens me.
I've worked primarily remote since 2016; but I have the option of going to an office a few miles away when I want to. My wife, forced to work from home, finds the entire experience to be socially isolating and misery inducing.
> work from our own comfy homes instead of rolling into a crowded, stuffy office everyday?
This one-sidedness is a strawman. Not everyone's home is comfy or has space for working; some people made housing decisions based on one person leaving the home for most of every day (e.g. choosing a smaller apartment closer to city). Not every office is crowded and stuffy; some are quite pleasant. Not every worker gets their social needs met outside of work, and forcing them home ends up isolating them from the primary source of social interaction in their world, with all of the mental health and well-being issues that entails.
Personally, think that "more remote work" is the way to go, but the issue is more nuanced than "why are people resisting this obviously beneficial change?"
Work is not voluntary, there are no alternatives. Unlike other social opportunities in ones free time. So folks who can't get their needs met from remote work can still remote work and find fulfillment elsewhere.
Folks forced into an office cannot choose to opt out of all work. Changing jobs is a bigger lift than picking up some social hobby or activities after work.
I agree hybrid can be nice, yet executives are too often demanding RTO compliance. That's why there is so much breathless enthusiasm for remote work, and angst against attempts to both-sides the issues.
Why do people constantly equate picking up a social hobby after work to an in person workplace? They are not equivalent, and the social needs fulfilled are very different.
I might pick up a hobby and make some friends there - these friends are going to linked to my personal life, not my professional one.
I cannot ask this hobby friend for a referral for a job in the future. I cannot ask this hobby friend for some help if I’m dealing with a difficult boss or a challenging technical problem.
I might ask this friend to come skiing with me or come to the bar with me though. That’s nice, but it’s not a work relationship and I can’t fulfill work relationship needs through it.
Remote coworkers can be a referral network and help with difficult problems.
Perhaps you can strike up friends at a co-working space or a company where RTO is optional. (I go snowboarding with a former co-worker occasionally. Since we live far away it's usually a big trip, yet still no less an adventure.)
Hopefully losing your job won't also put your social life at risk.
Remote coworkers generally don’t care about you to the same extent. It can be generally difficult building social bonds remotely, and there’s mountains of evidence that shows the veneer of internet communication doesn’t actually fulfill them.
That’s not to say it’s impossible, of course, but just much harder. Your professional social network is much smaller remotely. You have to work with someone remotely for months to form the same relationship you could have in an afternoon in-person.
Hybrid work is a good compromise.
Losing my job wouldn’t put my social life at risk - as work relationships don’t and shouldn’t fill that role for me. Again, you seem to be conflating personal and professional relationships.
> But some people need to be around other people more or less all the time to be happy.
That's fine, but no one is obligated to spend time with them. They need to be more convincing or charismatic then to get people to spend more time with them. "If you don't endure a commute to spend time with me, I won't be happy" won't cut it.
This view is too zoomed in. The human organism generally expects other humans to be around. Solitude in nature is a death sentence for humans, so our organism provides inbuilt incentives to avoid solitude. We can’t turn this instinct off, except to partially anesthetize it via fake social interaction like television, podcasts, etc. The anesthesia works better or worse for different people.
Some people have convinced themselves that they don’t like social interaction, but this is probably due to a trained negative association caused by repeated past negative experiences. It seems very unlikely that some humans simply lack the social instinct congenitally.
Society is currently set up in a way that social urges are largely satisfied by work. Is that a good setup? No, it definitely isn’t. Is deleting it without a proven replacement a good idea? Also no.
My point is that there are many other, more fulfilling ways to get human company than forcing your co-workers to commute to the office everyday. Besides, for the many people who live with a family/kids/partner, WFH lets them spend even more time with them. The solution for people whose only source of social interaction is the office is to develop a social life outside of the office, not to force everyone else into RTO.
This is simply a non-starter. I have not witnessed a single work environment where long-term remote workers don’t effectively become second-class citizens against in-person workers on the same team, in a way that materially harms productivity.
How cold the world is to make the primary form of communal spaces be working in the rigid hierarchy, abuse, and discomfort of the modern American workplace.
I recommend the 1999 American film “Office Space” or the 2003 British television series “The Office” if you somehow think this is a novel sentiment. Or “Bartelby the Scrivener” by Herman Melville from 1856.
Not everyone is a single tech employee who lives alone. Some (in fact, many) people have a social life outside the office where not going to an office doesn't result in eternal solitude.
It's not grandstanding, I only brought up social life because someone mentioned social isolation from remote work. That is a real problem and I can empathize with it, but the solution isn't forcing RTO on co-workers to force them to hang out with you.
> So folks who can't get their needs met from remote work can still remote work and find fulfillment elsewhere.
How? If my remote work makes my employer schedule 2 hrs of extra zoom meetings and the workday is now 8-6 instead of 9-5, how can I find fulfillment elsewhere? In that scenario, office seems better because I get to hang out with other people between 9-5. Remote is much worse if one likes to socialize.
If your employer is increasing the workday to 8-6 due to Zoom calls then you are in the minority and that is an issue with your employer, not remote work.
> but the lack of empathy on the part of the 'remote work for everyone, always' camp saddens me.
You are making the straw man here. People are mostly asking for a right to work remotely if they want to, that's all. And the status quo until very recently was (and still is) the opposite: not allowing remote work for people who want it, without any empathy for their needs. Try not to read it as an attack on the office, but more as millions of people asking for not being forced to commute and go to the office for a miserable experience.
If you read the replies to that post you might think otherwise, it's full of people suggesting the only reason you would go to the office is you don't have a social life, and every time this subject comes up on HN it's the same narrative.
I don't hear the same sentiment in the real world but there you go.
I generally think that we, as a society, should prioritize happiness and human flourishing. Work-from-home has been great for me, but I understand why others wouldn't enjoy it.
Workers should have a strong say in how they spend their 40+ hours a week, but we have a society where petty tyrants get to control their workers' lives. It should be easier to form worker-owner cooperatives and to organize strong unions, and generally promote more democracy in the workplace. And we should, as a society, de-emphasize work a bit. With all the automation we have, most people should be able to work a 32-hour work week and society would clip along just fine. Meanwhile, people would have more time to devote to the rest of living a life (pursuing art, socializing with friends/family, volunteering in social projects, studying an interesting subject, etc).
That's all to say, we are all individuals with different wants and needs, and we spend a lot of time at our jobs. We should restructure society to make us all happier and more fulfilled.
> Workers should have a strong say in how they spend their 40+ hours a week, but we have a society where petty tyrants get to control their workers' lives.
To be fair, this is especially egregious in the United States, where urban design is incredibly hostile and workers have long commutes because of distortionary policies to boost car sales and maximize returns on real estate speculation. Likewise, workers have so few protections and paid leave relative to other developed countries.
I probably wouldn’t care about going into the office in a nice, walkable European city, where I didn’t live in constant fear of being fired, be unable to take sick days, or be constantly forced to work over 40 hours, rarely take vacations, etc. But if you’re going to design society around maximizing my misery to make as much money as possible for someone else, I’m sure as hell not going to want to go into work if I can do my job from my couch with my dog beside me.
Your wife is not "forced" to work from home. She is forced to find her own work accommodations. At the extremes of requiring a dedicated IP address and fiber connection, it's still an option to rent an office space individually. At the less extreme: an individual membership at a coworking space, likely a public library, or a coffee shop. Similarly, whether at home, at a office, or at a coworking space she is not forced to be socially isolated or miserable.
There are also, frankly, a lot more jobs out there where 100% remote isn't even an option. Maybe they should consider changing jobs? 100% WFH is a dream for a lot of people, so let someone else have that spot
It's always more nuanced, but headlines don't have room for that.
If you advocate for "mostly remote work, with hybrid scheduling and hot desking as needed", some unempathetic execs and clueless middle micromanagers are inevitably going to try to turn that into a privilege to be allowed to work from home once a month. You have to open the negotiation by demanding full remote, so there's room for concessions allowing a few satellite campuses and occasional all-hands meetings.
The employee only have to care about their work and paycheck. Is they were paid to accommodate company needs, CEO wouldn't be paid 500 times the media pay and C-suite wouldn't be paid 100 times what I earn.
There is more to life than work and it should never be your entire or even most of your social life. Being socially isolated as a result of not having to go to work is a pretty good sign that your entire existence revolves around your work. Go outside, make friends, have a social life outside of work. It doesn't and shouldn't have to rule your world.
On the flipside, it's pretty sick that we've normalized getting all of one's social fulfillment from wage slaving rather than genuine social experiences that don't involve exploitation of our labor.
I've worked primarily remote since 2016; but I have the option of going to an office a few miles away when I want to. My wife, forced to work from home, finds the entire experience to be socially isolating and misery inducing.
> work from our own comfy homes instead of rolling into a crowded, stuffy office everyday?
This one-sidedness is a strawman. Not everyone's home is comfy or has space for working; some people made housing decisions based on one person leaving the home for most of every day (e.g. choosing a smaller apartment closer to city). Not every office is crowded and stuffy; some are quite pleasant. Not every worker gets their social needs met outside of work, and forcing them home ends up isolating them from the primary source of social interaction in their world, with all of the mental health and well-being issues that entails.
Personally, think that "more remote work" is the way to go, but the issue is more nuanced than "why are people resisting this obviously beneficial change?"