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Ask HN: Do you think 'normal' working will ever return?

by scotthtaylor on 10/6/20, 11:46 AM with 64 comments

• by muzani on 10/6/20, 1:59 PM

  Let's address the elephant in the room: Working from home is a lot less efficient than an ideal office. It's harder to debug things or pair program when needed, it's harder to grab someone's attention, it's easier to miscommunicate, and communication is a lot slower. You also don't get the same camaraderie as you would face to face, but the upside is that you also don't get distracted by attractive coworkers.

  However, few offices are ideal. Traffic and commuting is one of the worst little things of daily life. It's dangerous. It ruins the environment. Parking sucks.

  Good offices are wide open spaces, with good air, good climate, and cheerful environments. Many offices are bad environments and overcrowded.

  There's a balance that COVID has tilted. Some will learn that they don't need offices anymore, especially when people have decked out their home offices. It's likely we'll see employers double down on home offices where they can. Some, like Airbnb or Apple might find that morale is better in their offices. Some smaller companies might set up theirs out of major cities, where lifestyle is cheaper and less crowded.

• by emit_time on 10/6/20, 3:07 PM

  I think this is teaching a lot of people how much of work is BS.

  Now that a lot of the distractions and meetings are gone lots of people are realizing they really only work a couple hours a day and spend the rest dicking around or stuck in pointless meetings.

• by SashaRuvin on 10/6/20, 3:33 PM

  The one thing I can appreciate about working from home for so long is I haven't been sick this entire time. Open floor plans spread colds, flus, and stomach bugs around like wildfire, and it's nice to be out of the petri dish.

• by Natales on 10/6/20, 4:56 PM

  My CTO has been researching this (large 30K emp. software company) and the current consensus seems to indicate that ~60% of the workforce is expected to continue to work remote. Offices will be redesigned as collaboration spaces, where (when it becomes safe) people will converge from time to time for specific activities, but the follow-up and rest of the work will be remote.

  I fully support this, and I to a degree, I've been doing it for 6 years already, and I find it extremely effective.

  And no, I would not take a pay cut. Companies pay for what I bring to the table. As long as they get what they want from me, it should be irrelevant where am I.

• by AnIdiotOnTheNet on 10/6/20, 2:54 PM

  I'm still working in the office, so yes. Even though remote work has been a possibility for IT for a long time, various factors have prevented it from being taken up as the norm. I don't believe those factors have changed in any permanent way.

  I would happily take a pay cut to work from home, and I'd even happily take a 50% pay cut to cut my hours by 50%, and I'd like a pony...

• by Minor49er on 10/6/20, 12:24 PM

  I would not work for a company that would have me work from home for 10% less than what I make now. Why would I do that? I am paying more by working from home since I need to supply my own utilities and resources just to do my job.

• by pc86 on 10/6/20, 2:29 PM

  The location from which I am working is irrelevant with respect to the value I'm providing to the company. If anything I should earn more working from home, because I'm paying more for utilities and my employer isn't paying utilities for me at the office.

• by chansiky on 10/6/20, 3:26 PM

  Just adding another opinion to the poll. I think this is an extreme scenario, but it also is a shift towards a new "normal". The inefficiency of commute, and the ease of not traveling to work everyday is a thing many people would love to reduce. Pushing buttons on a television screen has been largely eliminated by remotes because it simply requires less mental energy and I think the workforce will fight for it simply because people are lazy.

  Also, I would WFH for the paycut, and that's because technically I'm not home at the moment - and that is potentially more valuable than what the extra money would have bought.

• by fiftyacorn on 10/6/20, 1:09 PM

  The trend to home work has already started before Corona.

  I think we'll see a return to normal as there is too much vested interest in commercial property esp in the UK.

• by _ah on 10/7/20, 9:51 PM

  1. Individual Contributors are more effective at home without distractions.

  2. Managers are more effective at the office where they can talk to people and discover information: "manage by walking around".

  3. Why are managers / executives necessary and often paid more? Because their contribution affects the work of many other people. Managers' work operates with leverage (for good or ill).

  4. If offices make managers more effective, and managers leverage their effectiveness over a large number of people, then the greatest good for the company is likely to be a return to in-person working environments.

  It may take a while, but most of us will be going back.

• by candu on 10/6/20, 3:02 PM

  1. Yes, we will largely return to offices. Digital tools remain sub-par as replacements for direct human contact / communication, and that isn't likely to change soon. (Mayyyyyybe mixed reality will finally make a dent here, but meaningful computer-supported collaboration is still a very active area of academic research. Haven't found any tool that comes close to the fluency and reliability of a quick huddle around a whiteboard.) As others have noted, there's also a lot of investment in commercial space - so there will be economic / political pressure to return to office work.

  Will this happen in 2021? No idea. Some workplaces have announced full-remote until mid-2021 at the very least, and any cure / vaccine will take time to fully study, productionize, and distribute. It might take a few years to fully return, and there may be a slightly higher proportion of WFH even after that.

  For a historical perspective: consider that humanity has weathered catastrophic pandemics before, and look to what happened there in the longer term. This time around, we have the further advantage of much better medicine / logistics than, say, during the 1918 flu. (We also, of course, have both the advantages and disadvantages that come with much faster communications channels.)

  2. Absolutely not! By working from home, I'm taking on additional office-related expenses that would normally be paid for, plus expenses related specifically to remote work (e.g. webcams). If anything, I'd expect the company to help cover those expenses, and/or bump my salary up to compensate for added setup and logistics on my end (or even just to reflect the reduced overhead on their end - if they save money having me work at home, why shouldn't I see some of that?)

• by president on 10/8/20, 12:24 AM

  Some annoyances I have found from working from home:

  1. Lots of people have horrible internet connections making communication a frustrating experience. 2. Hard to get attention of colleagues when they don't respond on Slack. It was already hard enough in the office but at least you could physically walk into somebody's cube before. 3. Not everyone has the amenities of air conditioning or heating.

• by goatcode on 10/8/20, 5:19 PM

  It depends on the will of the companies employing people. I've been back in the office for 4 months, and everything feels extremely normal up until I try to go to most businesses outside.

• by commonturtle on 10/6/20, 9:46 PM

  I would prefer working from an office just because of the benefits of collaboration. For generic cookie cutter projects WFH works well, but IMO complex large projects can be executed much faster by a co-located team of people.