Ask HN: What do you think about 3 days a week work from office? As companies are planning to return their employees to office, 3 days a week work from office seems to be the dominant option provided to the employees. Do you feel you will be more productive with this approach ? What are the other options provided by your company other than fully remote ? |
In other words, the "min 40 hrs per week" cultural standard will evolve to "24 hrs a week". I'm speaking broad strokes, of course. If you need to spend X hrs a week to do your job, that's what you'll end up doing.
Better is full time wfh with an occasional visit in person, with an agenda. I'd much prefer to go to an "office" once every two weeks and have basically all meetings, then be able to go home and get stuff done for the rest of the time. Will there be other meetings other times, of course! But you can push bigger things, brainstorming type meetings, to be in person.
I still don't think this is great for the reason given by ketanmaheshwari above, but certainly an improvement.
One company I worked at attempted a hybrid remote experiment. It was awful at every level.
Having half a business in-person and the other half remote creates a massive rift between the "real" employees and the cogs (yes, it's company dependant and some business has probably made this strategy thrive, but it takes a lot of work).
Eventually, in-office was mandated. I quit a few months later.
I watched this partly unfold recently. Luckily, this company decided to scrap the office outright and now the entire company is distributed across the country (and a little international).
I would not accept partial remote as an engineer.
Pull requests generally ping the whole team, so during wfh, some of them would do it well into the night to prove that they were working hard. It's probably a bit of politics to show that remote was more productive too.
You can get a fairly affordable CO2 meter (like $50, don't get the $10 kind that measures VOC as a proxy for CO2) and use that to indicate how much of the air you inhale was previously exhaled by someone else. School classrooms are showing 2000+ ppm of CO2. Ignoring the controversial topic of whether so much CO2 impairs cognition, that really does seem to be enough re-breathed air to spread infection.
I could handle going into an office at times of day when no one else was around, but that probably defeats the purpose.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/opinion/coronavirus-airbo...
I could apply for full remote and would probably be approved.
It works both ways - if you don't like remote and your company is forcing you into it, quit.