Chat

Just started a hybrid job and can give one reason: being trained remotely sucks.

Every question has to be a chat/email/call and you don’t get the passive learning of hearing a solution that randomly comes in handy later.

I can give one perspective. I average one day a week in office, and it’s necessary for certain tasks and helpful for others. Then, we all complete our tasks independently on our own time the other days. Office days are driven by need but we’re free to work from home otherwise. Hybrid makes sense for us.

But, it’s nonsensical the companies that set an arbitrary amount of days you need to be in person just because.

I do a monitoring job and outside of training newbies being in the office (thankfully only a few times per month we have to go to the office) feels just so pointless. Sure, the extra hardware does help but we don’t have things happening that much too often and our tools actually work better on the VPN.

Add to that the fact our shifts are 12h (day and night shift) in exchange for working less days in a week - when someone lives further from the office it’s a full day, exhausting ordeal. Getting up at 5.30 am, returning home 10pm kind of thing.

Interpersonal relationships is a big reason. Our CTO has been pushing for us to continue to go into the office as much as possible for cultural reasons. At first I was very hesitant, but it appears he was at least partially right. There has been a noticeable shift of communication style and a decline in trust amongst people who used to work together in the same office and are now working remote. We used to play board games and solve jigsaw puzzles during lunch breaks/downtime and had very friend-like relationships. Now, we're turning scheduled meetings into bitching sessions because we have nowhere else to do it. We now have recurring meetings where we play games together virtually for an hour, but it's nowhere near as effective as building relationships and, most importantly, trust amongst our teams.