“ The benefits of sitting together, collaborating in person, and solving problems as a team are clearer than ever in our post-Covid world.”

100%. Speaking only for myself, I was fully remote for a few years and that was a miserable experience. Now everyone is mandated to be in office 3 days a week and that works better for me. Uber is going one step further and structuring teams to be colocated with their manager. That solves the problem of team members distributed across multiple offices, which is still a real pain point in the hybrid model.

I know some people who strictly prefer fully remote setup. Over time, I think companies and employees will self sort themselves into those who prefer office vs those who prefer remote. That should work out for most of us.

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xingped a day ago | parent | next [-]

I love how most any RTO-proponent always presents RTO as "well I'm glad you're back in the office with me because that's better for me". Ask most any WFH-proponent about going to the office and the answer will read like "do whatever works best for yourself, I prefer WFH myself, you can go to the office if you want". It's a very selfish mindset, really. If RTO-proponents cared about not imposing their will on others, they'd also advocate for WFH for anyone that prefers it, but they don't.

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missedthecue a day ago | parent [-]

Well what do you expect? Holing yourself up in your home is something you can do unilaterally. In-person team collaboration requires... well, collaboration. It's not a unilateral action so there isn't unilateral advice.

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pjmlp 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Except most of us don't do team collaboration in the office anyway.

With very few exceptions, all my projects involve distributed teams in a mix of nearshore and offshoring, across multiple locations.

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FoundTheDouche 6 hours ago | parent [-]

[dead]

	▲	pjmlp 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If you say so.
	▲	cindyllm 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[dead]

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locknitpicker 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> In-person team collaboration requires... well, collaboration.

You're confusing things. Collaboration doesn't require you to be continuously in the same room with people 5 days a week, 8 hours a day, and your personal needs to be in a room with someone else does not justify forcing everyone under payroll to commute to the office.

You already need to schedule meetings to be in the same room with someone, don't you? Why would anyone have to waste their time commuting to the office if you didn't booked a meeting?

	▲	missedthecue an hour ago \| parent [-]
		You're misunderstanding my use of the term collaboration. I'm not using it as corporate speak for "teamwork". I'm saying that in order for me to go into the office with everyone, everyone needs to go into the office. That's an axiomatic self-proving statement. As opposed to WFH where one can simply do that without other people also doing it.

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catchnear4321 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

in-person collaboration requiring in-person more than collaboration, as collaboration is quite possible remotely, and even asynchronously.

“holing yourself up…”

but it wasn’t about conversation, it was about opinion.

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broknbottle 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

100%. The Linux kernel would have never grown and become so successful if it weren’t for everybody in the office all those years just collaborate-maxxxing … /s

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mhitza a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

When working a regular 9-5 I very much preferred office presence for the social aspect, especially when work is slower and no pressure.

But when I actually need to concentrate and deliver high quality work, it needs to be in a quiet place. And that is often from home, because open space office buildings are the devil's work and I will never forget how much people complained about them when they started becoming the norm a bit before the 2010s.

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throwforfeds a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Speaking only for myself, I was fully remote for a few years and that was a miserable experience.

Just out of curiosity, what did you find miserable about it? I've been working remote since 2008 and just have no desire to ever be consistently in an office, but I guess I did like it when I could pop over to SF (I live in NYC), stay in an apt my employer at the time had, and spend a week with people. Otherwise, I much prefer the freedom of being remote.

	▲	unethical_ban a day ago \| parent [-]
		Different person. In short: I get distracted at home, and home is no longer home - it's the office. I work best when talking through my mental blocks with people. As a consultant I've never gotten over trying to poke my head in via Slack/Teams/etc. In-person huddles and brainstorming get more done in 30 minutes than phone back-and-forth usually does over days. Being in the office allows some level of personal understanding occur between teams and people. I like the idea of being able to live where I want, but I haven't moved since going WFH, and I find talking to people in person when I visit gets planning and training done a lot more efficiently. Learning from others and collaborating on problems is something mid-high level IT does a lot more than solo coding for hours at a time.

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locknitpicker 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Speaking only for myself, I was fully remote for a few years and that was a miserable experience. Now everyone is mandated to be in office 3 days a week and that works better for me.

If you feel you work better at the office, more power to you.

That does not justify forcing everyone around you to do the same, particularly if the best argument you can piece together is that forcing others to do something against their will makes you feel better.