Hybrid work will fail and will be blamed on remote working

Software engineering moved to a 100% remote setup almost instantaneously in march 2020. There were a few weeks of initial confusion but everyone came out successful. Companies booked record profits over the last two years. Remote working works.

Companies are opening up and the idea of “hybrid work” is unequivocally embraced by many. In a nutshell, people are expected to be in the office 2/3 days. They can choose the days and be flexible. It looks ideal at first glance, but this is going to be a disaster.

Open office does not work with Hybrid

All modern offices are literally open floors with hundreds of employees sitting at desks. Hybrid would mean that most of them will have to be on a zoom to accommodate some part of the team that is remote for that day. Two colleagues next to each other in the office will zoom in from their desk into the same meeting. How ridiculous would it be?

Water-cooler chats become self-selecting

Office goers whose time windows or days align will start forming circles of trust based on the days of office presence. Engineers who cannot afford a similar window will be left out. In the fully remote world, throwing a quick happy hour zoom link at the end of the day made it extremely accessible for everyone.

1 Conference room + 10 individual zooms

Brainstorming is getting harder. Now someone cannot just share screen or write into a doc to jam on a topic like the fully remote days. Partially participating on the whiteboard with some remote participants is hard. When two colleagues in a room discuss, the remote participants may get left behind due to bad audio and pace of discussion.

Office or Remote - both work. Hybrid does not work. Wife likes brown shoes and the husband likes black shoes, so our kid ended up wearing one black shoe and one brown shoe. That is how hybrid is turning out to be.

AirBnB, pintrest are some of the companies that are doing return to work right. I suggest that other companies take note of this competitive advantage.