this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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Hybrid jobs don't make sense to me. If it's a job that can be done from home, why are you forcing workers to come back to the office 3 days a week?
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.
This only gets worse as you move up the org chart and the duties & skills become more nebulous. If your job has "mentoring" rather than "training," then it's really hard to build skills remotely.
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.
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.
The cliche of “Great Communication Skills” on resumes comes into play with WFH. For me, unless you are an absolute all star at your job and can complete everything without anyone’s help ever, you need to have better communication skills than tech skills.
My job is “hybrid” in the sense that if I would like to go to an office, one is available for me. I’m not mandated to spend any amount of time there.
I do one day a week which isn’t bad, I wouldn’t have accepted it if I didn’t live nearby but I’m lucky to live near a place with a good job market. I’m pretty happy with it to be honest but Oxford is a very pretty place, I suspect I’d be fully remote if I lived somewhere that wasn’t a draw in its own right.
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.