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I will always prefer to work from home
- harryquach 3y agoAgree on all points in the article. One of the most underrated features of WFH is my own private bathroom. This is something I would never have at the office.
- marcosdumay 3y agoPersonalized climate control; a useful (clean and fully equipped) kitchen, with private storage... There are all kinds of features, with varying value to everyone and that people insist on ignoring.
- Topgamer7 3y agoAs someone who had bell/chili pepper family triggered IBS for 6 years without knowing the cause. This 100%.
- funkattack 3y agoI'd chip in doing laundry or dishes whilst on a boring call I'm forced to attend. Just don't forget to mute the mike on the headset.
- rootusrootus 3y agoThat's definitely a big upside. Things like dishes and laundry are great background tasks. Doesn't take long to set up, then a machine handles the rest, swap out the laundry and keep going. Barely interrupts my day job, and the impetus to get out of my chair is welcome anyway.
- dsugarman 3y ago[flagged]
- fbdab103 3y agoI can settle for a public bathroom, but surely we have the technology to construct walls without significant gaps. Spend the one-time extra investment so that I can pretend I have some privacy.
- babyshake 3y agoEspecially considering that many people tend to get their BMs around the same time, after coffee or a meal.
- aijoe5pack 3y agoBoss makes a dollar, I make a dime. That's why I poop on company time...Love to have someone else clean up the empty bathrooms at work every day or so; shame that job was almost two hours away for the 2 days a week I had to go.
- cwales95 3y agoI liked this post. A lot of the pros/cons resonated well with me. Going to save this for anytime some corporate person tries to "enlighten" me about the benefits of workers returning to the office.
- the_snooze 3y agoI feel these discussions always go the same way. Working at an office sucks because of some combination of {long commute, open office plan, team not being there}. I quite like going to the office myself because my situation is the opposite: I bike to work, where I have my own office, and my team likes to come in too. Hating the office is totally justifiable given that my setup isn't common; most people are forced to deal with crappy built environments.
- strangesmells06 3y agoYes! This! I think anyone would not mind the office if they werent treated like cattle. I dont think people dread going back to the office. People dread going back to the open office.
- ghaff 3y agoSome people really dislike open offices (or just spending the day around a lot of people generally) but I'm betting commutes are the #1 reason most people have against going into an office. Unless you can walk or, for some, bike any meaningful commute is basically a not very pleasant hour+ out of your day.
- strangesmells06 3y agoAgreeed! Commute is rough also.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y agoI'm used to open office. Not sure it'd matter if I had my own room. I'd still get dragged into useless meetings that interrupt my flow. If I can even get into a decent flow because our DX is so atrocious.
- wrp 3y agoI know a few retired guys who pay their own money to rent office space away from the house. They don't even have kids living at home any more. If you have a nice office, it's...well...nice.
- ttul 3y agoIt always confused me that we would sit in these large offices together, chatting with each other on Slack. It was like the idea of working from an office had greatly outlived its utility following the development of the internet, yet nobody got the memo until the pandemic forced it into our conscious awareness. I will never go back to an office again.
- codegeek 3y agoYes great points. But most WFH advocates forget to talk about juniors or people who are just starting their careers or people who just cannot wfh effectively. The article talks about Management's arguments against WFH but fails to mention any of the points I mentioned. The best solution in my opinion is hybrid especially for juniors and I will die on this hill.
- 5ADBEEF 3y agoJuniors are hyper-online, accustomed to COVID classes etc. Maybe it is methods of training that need to shift.
- askonomm 3y agoNot sure why you can't just teach juniors how to work from home effectively, just how you teach them how to do their job. It's all part of the same thing. I've certainly helped juniors over a video call just as effectively as being next to them physically. In one case I point a finger on their screen, in another I point my mouse cursor on their screen.
- codegeek 3y agoIt's much harder. We are social animals on a whole. Nothing beats in person interactions. I am not against remote work btw.
- askonomm 3y agoAnd we continue to be social animals over video chat. Harder in what sense? I hear this a lot, but I rarely hear concrete examples. Feels to me more that people are just not accustomed to fully online communication at work rather than that it actually being harder. Change is hard, yes. But that doesn't mean that what you change into is actually more difficult. Also, I'm not sure of newer generations where you're from, but here what I see is less and less want from people to have in-person conversations. Newer generations have everything done remotely. Ordering food, socializing (online video games, etc), that in-person conversations often are intimating to them. Which begs the question, have the people who say juniors need in-person help actually asked juniors what they would like? Or is it more that _you_ are more comfortable _teaching_ in-person, in which case again, the problem seems to be you, not the juniors. All-in-all, I'm just not seeing the difficulties people seem to say they have. Just my $0.02.
- UrineSqueegee 3y ago[dead]
- woodruffw 3y agoThe underlying thing here, like in so many cases, is coercion: we should structure workplaces and workforces to treat people well (and optimize for their long-term productivity), rather than squeezing them for short-term outcomes. Whether that means working from home or an office depends on the person, but the corporate policy is the same regardless: let people work where they do their best work.
- donbox 3y agoDoes your team use Slack (or something similar). Don't you get random pings, mentions or calls for help/input. Is there an expectation around for you to respond within a short period. I have been 100% WFH since last 5 years and I am only productive after 5 pm.
- wood_spirit 3y agoYes a big downside from wfh is that you don’t need to book a meeting room :( This means people can book meetings when people are free instead of being limited by the availability and preplanning of big enough rooms!
- codingdave 3y agoYou can ignore those random pings of all kinds until you at a good place to stop what you are doing and help out. If you are responding to all of those the second they come in, you are encouraging the problem by building a culture of over-responsiveness. I've been on teams where we explicitly defined expected response times. 2 hours was the typical answer on teams where I've worked. I've also been on teams that didn't define the expectation, but nobody I work with expects Slack to be real-time. The only time we respond quickly is when we have first asked, "Hey, let me know when you have a couple minutes to chat." And then I either stick around until they have time and quickly have the chat/huddle... or if they don't respond and I need to step away, I delete my message. It sounds counter-intuitive but you can often build a better remote culture by being a little less responsive.
- Jcampuzano2 3y agoMy team does use Slack, but I just have it muted for most channels and check it in predefined intervals. I don't have DM's muted but we also don't have a culture of DM'ing people, calls for help are posted in designated channels. In my opinion and experience there are very few issues that require you to actually respond immediately, I just find many teams don't understand this. Everyone thinks their specific issue is the highest priority thing going on, and I'd say product teams are especially bad about this. Asking for status updates all too often and interrupting developers days just for small things that could've been done at a scheduled time or just been an email. Obviously this can somewhat depend on your role since your role may be something that tends to require immediate intervention. But I check Slack once every 30 min to an 1 hour or so and have no issues with my response times.
- grubbs 3y agoI understand why these get posted. But not everyone is in the same situation as the author. I can bike to work, I'm extroverted, and I like free coffee. So I go into the office 2-3 days a week by choice. I have no on-site requirement. I also get quite depressed in winter working in my cold basement office with a space heater :( But that's just me. And I don't feel like I should force my WFH opinion on anyone else.
- lapcat 3y ago> But that's just me. And I don't feel like I should force my WFH opinion on anyone else. The problem is that company management often does force their WFH opinion on everyone else.
- joshmanders 3y agoOn the flip side, if I was required to be in an office for any job, I would not be working in this industry because the only jobs in my area are paying literally $10/hr for this work and it's mostly just building brochure sites on Wordpress. Being able to even go to an office is a luxury for a LOT of people. "But Josh, move to a place that has jobs, duh!" Yeah, I highly doubt any place in this world is willing to not only pay to relocate me, but also my ex-wife and her family because I can promise you no job in this world is worth giving up my child for.
- mr_mitm 3y agoI even went to the library when studying for exams in college even though I didn't have to. I consider myself introvert, but I just like the physical separation of work and leisure. And I have a beautiful commute by bike.
- rootusrootus 3y agoI feel you on the winter thing. I added an electric heater to my office so I can keep the temperatures a bit higher than the rest of the house (mostly I do this for my fingers, honestly). And through the magic of LEDs I have a fairly ridiculous amount of light I can turn on. Makes winter more bearable when I can make it as bright as high noon in July. I totally get wanting to go into the office. I would go in a few days a week if they hadn't put our new office 20 miles away. Not close to where anybody lives, but it's in the trendy part of downtown.
- wood_spirit 3y agoCan we have a quick roundup on where each of the faangs and household names are on going back to the office? Can report that Spotify is firmly work-from-anywhere and wouldn’t have place for everyone if they went back on that. People sometimes work from exotic locations and it’s normal to not having met teammates in person etc. Productivity is generally high and not adversely affected.
- metabagel 3y agoI like to go into the office for the social interaction, but I also like working from home one day a week. From the article, the con about being interrupted while working in the office applies equally to WFH. Your train of thought can be just as much derailed by a Slack/Teams message as by a colleague wandering by your cubicle.
- tymscar 3y agoNot even close. I can mute slack. I can’t mute the office.
- flurdy 3y agoI can't mute the family.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rootusrootus 3y agoIt's interesting how my daily interactions have evolved since we all went remote. A lot of people at my company seem to have given up on email, and the go-to solution for communication now is a direct message with a request to join a "quick" zoom call. I've had to get a bit militant about it. Some people still get a bit snippity when I tell them I don't have a moment right now but I'll touch base with them when I reach a stopping point. As if my mere presence on Teams means I ought to be available at any moment to entertain them.
- r053bud 3y agoThis is silly; I can just silence slack whenever I need to or simply ignore it. I can’t ignore a colleague standing next to me tapping my shoulder.
- joshmanders 3y agoI did contracting for Deere & Co, because of how close they are to my home, they requested I be on site. Wanting to be a team player I agreed, it was only a 3 hour round trip, they even agreed to pay me for the commute. My time started the second I left my house and didn't stop until I got home. But here's the thing. The days I was on site, I sat in my own cubicle and didn't converse with any of my colleagues except over Teams, and then when we had a meeting we all filed into a meeting room, where we got on a video call with the teams in India. None of my reason for being on site mattered outside of them being able to claim I was there in the office.
- ctenb 3y ago*on site :)
- joshmanders 3y agoAt this point I've stopped trying to correct autocorrect when it decides a word I spelled correctly isn't the word I wanted and changes it with a different word.
- rootusrootus 3y agoI hate how autocorrect has evolved into something that tries to actually rewrite words that I've written, even after I've moved onto the next word. And sometimes the old trick of just backspacing and typing it again doesn't convince autocorrect that I in fact know what I'm typing and want to keep it. I'd prefer to just have it highlight the word it thinks as wrong, and leave it alone. Kinda like when I'm on my computer.
- joshmanders 3y agoThen you actually do typo a word and are one letter off and is clearly wrong and it’s like “nah that’s good we’re not changing anything”
- doubloon 3y ago
- truegoric 3y agoDon’t forget about the often critical, but almost never mentioned directly, argument for returning to the cubicle: office spaces are essentially an investment, which may very well go down in value when the general way of thinking becomes “WFH is better, offices are obsolete”.
- game_the0ry 3y agoIf someone were to ask me why I prefer WFH, my answer would be: bc I fucking feel like it. I am not obligated to justify my preferences to anyone. Ever.
- codingdave 3y agoTotally true. And yet, if you do explain your preferences, your leadership can know their people and try to build an environment that works for them. Hard to blame them for not giving you a good environment if you've never been willing to tell them what "good" means for you.
- Jcampuzano2 3y agoThey ask because then they bring some of that stuff into an office and then claim the office is better than WFH. For example: One of the biggest things people pointed out at my current job was the long commute/gas money. So company offered to recompensate gas for anyone up to 50 miles or something and claimed now there was no reason to complain anymore... which is obviously untrue. I've seen this at 2 of the companies I've recently worked for where they do silly polls as to why people prefer WFH, make some small tweaks to the office that still come nowhere close to the convenience of being remote, and then claim there's no longer a reason to WFH anymore since they have made the office more preferable. Most people who are remote will never want to go back to an office, regardless of what happens.
- dukeyukey 3y agoThey might've done a bad job of it, but if they looked at how to make the office more comfortable and then implemented the suggestions, that sounds like a good thing? I like working from home, but I definitely want to see my co-workers in person sometimes. So if they can bring some WFH benefits to the office, that's great!
- agumonkey 3y agoI'm mostly in favor of WFH, but there are a few missing spots: - toxic people ? if you're in a small team, or it's your direct lead, you will endure his toxicity even when remote - dedicated space for calm/silence: unfortunately not everybody has an isolated spare room. And personally I don't mind house noises, but the person there can get pissed if not very angry very often during zoom calls and it may/will eat your energy. Other than that the luxury of not having to commute or avoiding very bad workplaces is still something that should be the norm and part of worker union rights. If there's a coworking space and positive teammates I will come to see them very often, after all what's better than having a good team to work with closely ? but this is not the average experience.
- lnsru 3y agoWFH is much nicer, the toxic person will need to call you and this is extra effort. But in the office you’re few steps away, so the whole day can be poisoned easily. My stupid manager (and former brilliant technical contributor) once sat for tho hours between my and colleague’s tables and watched what we do. Because he had nothing to do between meetings. I understand, that this is not everyday’s normal situation, but still not pleasant.
- agumonkey 3y agoyeah that's for sure, in remote you're one button away from peace :) but when you have mandatory regular calls with the somehow just slightly too toxic but not enough to grant company action.. you know it's gonna be a long term issue
- atleastoptimal 3y agoI enjoy working from the office when the atmosphere of the office is aligned and there aren't a hundred abstractions of self justification and internal status signaling, though that's very rare in most companies.
- totallywrong 3y agoNot to mention the ability to do work holidays, where I go to the beach or whatever and work from there for a week or two. And the sick days is a big one that benefits the company. I've never once oficially taken one since WFH. I might have been mostly just standing by if I felt like shit, but still available for anything urgent.
- throw__away7391 3y agoUnder-appreciated: not wearing shoes all day. Anytime I need to spend a day in an office now, when I finally get home and pull off my shoes and sweat soaked shoes I'm so glad I don't have to do this on a regular basis anymore.
- lukevp 3y agoPerhaps your problem is that you’re wearing 2 layers of shoes. Try socks instead. ;)
- hombre_fatal 3y agoTry wearing socks with those $45 foam Birkenstocks as your daily driver. Black on black doesn't look bad. When I lived on a beach I didn't wear shoes for years. The combo above was the only way I could reenter society.
- flurdy 3y agoYeah, I used to have black office sandals that I wore with my black socks. No one noticed that they were not black shoes. I stuffed them in my office locker overnight. Worked a treat, no longer sweatty office feet... Though it was a toss if I changed them when going out for lunch, usually I did not even in winter time (London). Though as my last non-WFH gig the team had a habit of having "lunch" standing outside a pub it was sometimes a little chilly in January.. (I still have my last pair in black, which I am not sure they sell anymore https://www.crocs.co.uk/p/mens-swiftwater-mesh-deck-sandal/205289.html?cgid=men-footwear-sandals&cid=206 https://www.crocs.co.uk/p/mens-swiftwater-mesh-deck-sandal/2... )
- aulin 3y agoIt's not even sweat, you need to take off shoes after hours sitting at a desk because feet swell from the blood not being pushed back up as you're not moving your legs. There are few things I hate about office work as much as not being free to work on my slippers in the winter or flip flops in the summer.
- hh3k0 3y ago> Under-appreciated: not wearing shoes all day. For me it's regularly putting my feet up, standing up to stretch, and looking out of the window into the distance for a few minutes. You know, just some things you should absolutely do if you value your health. And yet, having coworkers around tends to guilt you into not doing them.
- lapcat 3y agoThe article rehashes some well-known arguments, but the most interesting part of it for me was this: > “People need to be in the office to be a part of the TEAM” > This gets at a much deeper issue, however. Should we be loyal to companies who would lay us off at the drop of a hat to pad their quarterly earnings? Companies who decide the projects we work on have no merit but can’t be bothered to reassign us to more critical work after spending the time and money to get us in the door? Many of us feel the need to be loyal but what are we getting in return? The author acknowledges that team-building may be easier in the office, but the question is whether team-building is of any benefit other than to keep employees stuck to their employer.
- tqi 3y agoWho is this meant to convince? Has anyone ever changed their mind as a result of reading a listicle of complaints? This seems more like something for people who already agree with the author to read and self righteously think "yeah, this is THE way" There isn't some objective right answer here. Different people value different things, and that's ok. Companies can set their RTO policies as they see fit, and that's ok. People should try to find companies that match their preferences. Let's not turn this into yet another tribal schism...
- throwawaysleep 3y agoThis particular one needs to be a tribal schism as the preferences cannot coexist. WFH people will always be miserable with in office people and vice versa.
- tqi 3y agoDifferent companies can set different policies. A large enough company can set different policies for different orgs.
- lolinder 3y agoIn the long run this is how it will work out, and people will choose companies that match their preferences. In the meantime there's a culture split within many orgs, with each faction wanting their org to end up on their preferred end of the spectrum.
- ghaff 3y agoIt's not as black and white as all that. People also just have different home situations and different commuting situations. I'd routinely come into our downtown office if I could walk or hop on the subway for a few stops. But it's a two hour drive or train trip. I'm not coming in just to keep you company.
- lostlogin 3y ago> Has anyone ever changed their mind as a result of reading a listicle of complaints? I thought ‘no’, but then remembered how John Siracusa works. If he ever reviews something you like, turn away. The previously hidden defects and problems will suddenly be very obvious.
- MrDresden 3y agoI agree with almost everything there except the point about powering through and working when sick. If you are sick (proper sick not just slightly under the weather) then take those sick days. That is what generations of workers before you fought for, so that you wouldn't need to. On the subject of wfh I do 1 day a week at the office when feeling like it and my productivity usually goes right down to zero on those days. But I like that little bit of social exposure.
- deergomoo 3y agoI suspect the author was talking more about being just under the weather with this point. There have been plenty of days where I would have called in sick to an office job, but was fine working from home where I could sit in bed with hot drinks, tissues, and access to my own bathroom.
- charcircuit 3y agoSome of these issues would go away if the author used headphones and the office used an open floor plan instead of cubicles.
- lukevp 3y agoOpen floor plans are super loud and distracting… what issues would this solve exactly? I think it only creates more issues.
- charcircuit 3y ago>what issues would this solve exactly? Other people not knowing that he is in deep focus.
- giantrobot 3y agoThey still interrupt you even with headphones on.
- dmitrygr 3y agoLet me be crystal clear: NO ISSUES ARE RESOLVED by an open office plan, unless your issue is "productivity"
- juunpp 3y agoIt resolves the issue of killing productivity and making most people feel miserable.
- charcircuit 3y ago>NO ISSUES ARE RESOLVED by an open office plan It is easier to communicate with teammates when they are near you. Both communication via words and communication via body language.
- dmitrygr 3y agoPlease acquaint yourself with the term "interrupt overhead". Then with the term "email". I can suggest a number of books on effective communication as well. Few of them recommend randomly interrupting people busy actually doing things.
- softwaredoug 3y agoI think what’s missing in these conversations is the cost of living near an office. Housing costs are very high. If I could live 10 minutes from an office I’d go all the time. But most live much farther, which puts an untenable strain on them (and the environment, infrastructure, etc!) Of course the C-suite class probably DOES live 10 minutes from an office. They can afford to, unlike most employees. If you want RTO build more dense housing near where offices are located. And build solid transit and other means of getting to an office quickly.
- Longwelwind 3y ago> Just when I am deep in some twisted train of thought involving a failing JS callback or missing network packets in Kubernetes someone ambles over to my cubicle to ask me some random question about helm that they could have answered in 2 seconds using the search function of their web browser. Train derailed. > Don’t talk to me about collaboration when I sometimes have to turn off slack to be able to hear myself think. Why not communicate to the people that interrupt that they should not come to your cubicle to ask their questions, and should send you a Slack message with their question instead? And then, if you are deep into something and you don't want to be disturbed, you can mute your slack notifications. It feels to me, from the tone of the post, that the writer prefers WFH because it allows them to side-step issues that they could have resolved with communication. Of course this doesn't apply to the practical issues (time lost commuting, ...)
- Tomte 3y ago> Why not communicate to the people that interrupt that they should not come to your cubicle to ask their questions, and should send you a Slack message with their question instead? Because then you're the weird introvert, and "not a team-player". People will get surprisingly hostile.
- throw555chip 3y ago> should send you a Slack message with their question instead? > you can mute your slack notifications. These things can be done from home or a remote location, what was the point of forcing them to come into the office in the first place, none.
- Longwelwind 3y agoThe second quote was the author's response to the argument that working at the office increases collaboration. My point is that some perceived benefits of WFH can be achieved when working at the office with some communication. That way you can keep the benefits of working from office.
- jlund-molfese 3y agoI wonder why companies feel the need to set physical presence policies at the company level. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to do it team-by-team? Is the unspoken admission that nobody would choose to pick a collocated team if they could join a remote one? A team composed of 4 people, where one’s in SF, another in NYC, etc is having a very different experience from one where all 4 people are all collocated.
- MattPalmer1086 3y agoThis question was recently asked at a company meeting when they said they were increasing the number of days in the office. The response was it "wouldn't be fair". Which I thought was an interesting response, as it at least demonstrates they have some awareness that the move back to office isn't popular.
- TrackerFF 3y agoI have a very short commute, 5 min walk from door to work. So that's 10 minutes a day. With 260 workdays a year, for me that's 2600 minutes - or 43.3 hours, just over 5 workdays, spent to and from work. One of my colleagues has a 1 hour commute, so for him that's whooping 520 hours / 65 workdays spent on commuting! But anyway, the commute isn't the only factor for me: During my 30 min lunch, I spend maybe 10 minutes eating, and the rest 20 mins is spent on shooting the shit with colleagues, scrolling the phone, or similar stuff. When I work from home, I can spend that time doing chores. I can put on clothes, do the dishes, cleaning, or whatever. It's amazing how much you can do, by just spending 10-15 mins here and there throughout the week. My weekends do feel a bit longer, since there's less housework to be done. I spend less money on fuel, and shop less. Of course, I do enjoy hanging out and talking with my colleagues - but I don't feel like I'm "missing out" if I'm at the office 1-3 days a week, compared to 5 days a week. So, mostly just benefits for my part. Can't really imagine going back to a typical "butts in seats" with lots of facetime type of job.
- lostlogin 3y agoCommutes can be amazing. Biking home after a shitty day and getting a few segment records on Strava is so great. I also like a commute via train or maybe even bus where I can zone out with some music or reading, then when home have the energy to get something done. A long commute via car is pure evil.
- SoftTalker 3y ago> A long commute via car is pure evil. Not everyone hates driving. I think it's better than sitting on a full bus.
- bilalmaleq 3y agoDon't you guys think that WHF makes learning for Junior Devs relatively much more difficult?
- oscillonoscope 3y agoI have noticed it is harder for getting people straight out of college used to a professional working environment. However, I haven't noticed any difference in getting them up to speed technically.
- devnullbrain 3y agoWhen I was a junior my manager was in a different country. What's the difference? It's like how companies didn't used to support WFH right up until the moment they wanted you to take some work home for unpaid overtime.
- poszlem 3y agoTangentially to the topic of the blogpost, has anyone else noticed that many recent articles on Hacker News feature AI-generated illustrations? They seem to have a unique, AI-specific style and that weird "uncanny valley" like quality where you can easily tell it was, in fact, a machine generated thing?
- abaymado 3y agoI like working from home because of its flexibility. To separate my workspace from my living space, I rented a co-working station similar to WeWork, which is a 10-15 minute walk from my home. I usually spend 4-5 hours a day there, focusing on tasks like hard problems, and work from anywhere for less demanding tasks, like squashing bugs. On a weekly basis, I find myself spending more productive hours this way than I would if I were going to an office. Additionally, this approach allows me to learn more; I can freely explore new frameworks or technologies unrelated to my current work, without the pressure of product deadlines breathing down my neck.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pojzon 3y agoWith current gas prices in many countries you would have to pay me 500$ more for me to even consider driving to work and spending 1h in traffic jam every day. The times when ppl considered commute time as opportunity cost are long over. If my work does not require me to be “there” to do my work, no way Im going to waste my time.
- acuozzo 3y ago> and spending 1h in traffic jam every day I see mention of traffic a lot, but I work on the east coast in the defense industry where flexible schedules are the norm. Traffic completely dies down out here by 10AM and 6PM, so I work 10-6, sometimes 10-7. Is traffic just not as bad in Maryland or are flexible schedules not the norm outside of my industry?
- BizarreByte 3y agoI thought I would, but I'm no longer sold on full remote work having done it since 2018. I didn't realize just how much of my social interaction came from work and it's something I've not been able to recreate outside of work in my free time. I am hopelessly lonely and the mental health affects have at least in my case been dire. At the same time I'm afraid to RTO because if for some reason I need the flexibility of WFH again there's a good chance I won't easily find another job that allows it. We talk about the loss of third places, but some of us have lost our second places too.
- lnsru 3y agoYour colleagues are not your friends. You’re more like passenger in the same bus where somebody will depart in the next stop. It’s dangerous to build relationships with people who are about to leave.
- oHqgTQUT 3y agoI have made many life long friends at work, who I am still friends with to this day, many years after we left the companies we both worked at. I'm sure many other people have too. You need some kind of social bond with the people you work with. What are you going to do instead? Treat the people you work with like robots where every interaction is a barter or request of some kind like "Hi, can you review this please. Thanks." every single day for the entirety of your employment at this company?
- lnsru 3y agoNice that it worked out well for you. The last friendly colleague relocated to the other town. Guess if we will meet again with 1,5 hours driving distance. It was nice relationship with 35 minutes driving, but now obviously it’s over. I will have new colleagues and he will be envy, that I left toxic place and he stayed. The colleagues are not much more than robots. Wait for another promotion or layoff round. Nice for you if you’re not competing with others for more money or job security.
- jnwatson 3y agoYet another reason why WFH is useful is meetings. Now that I'm more senior, I'm in a lot more meetings. I average 7 meetings a day. At the FAANG I work for, you have to be a vice president before you get your own office room. That means an hour of my day would be taken up by finding and going to different conference rooms. Now that RTO has happened, folks find themselves having to go to different buildings to find a place to talk. It is like nobody thought this through.
- adamredwoods 3y agoMicrosoft campus (a few years ago) had little "phone rooms" where people could go to get private or quiet zoom calls done. This was great. They also had larger rooms with a desk to get some focus time. Unfortunately, people would camp out in these rooms all day, and they became filled. It became a territorial thing as my manager did not have a private office so he would "claim" one of the smaller rooms and would grumble loudly if someone else took it.
- dadie 3y agoI'm in the partial "work from home" group and I agree to most points and would stress it is in my experience by far easier (and less stressful) to have a very good equipped home office than an at least half-decent equipped office. For my home office I simply buy the equipment I need. But for the companies office I have to ask multiple level of management for simple equipment like a mouse with more than 3 buttons just to be told that a 3 button mouse was good enough.
- billti 3y agoI think by now it should be pretty apparent that people are different, and some prefer working from home, some prefer coming to the office, some prefer open spaces and some prefer personal spaces. Most people are somewhere on a spectrum and like a different ratio of each. Posts like these are about as useful as an article on “Why I like gray socks more than blue socks”. What I would love to see is some data on why so many companies that previously said during Covid “Oh wow, this remote work is great! We’re going to stay like this” are now saying “Sorry, changed our minds, now we want you back in the office”. Office space isn’t cheap. Requiring employees be local limits your pool of talent. A lot of people like being remote. Companies must have a strong reason, hopefully with some data to back it up, but I’ve not seen any hard evidence for the about face yet. Anyone got any pointers?
- michaelmrose 3y ago> Companies must have a strong reason, hopefully with some data to back it up This isn't how companies or indeed people work. Most decisions are made emotionally while trying to find data to back up what one already believes. This is especially true when we have bought into the idea of an army of professional managers who are neither any good at the actual work nor management not because this is a useful social organization but because it provides a useful justification to reinforce the existing stratification of society. We bless folks who prove they have enough money to earn a potentially useless degree with a position in the social hierarchy that befits them.
- tkiolp4 3y agoIt’s not only about personal preferences. Being able to work from city X for a company that has its HQ in city Y within the same country is a game changer. I don’t know who would refuse to such. Note that I’m talking about remote working within the same country.
- karaterobot 3y agoHere's a reason I never see brought up in discussions like this. For me, it's as important as the others: Being an introvert, I always used to be exhausted at the end of the work week. I liked my coworkers a lot, and I liked spending time around them, but it didn't matter, I'd still feel wrung out at the end of the day. And by the end of the week, each day's exhaustion would have accumulated to the point where I needed two days spent doing absolutely nothing just to feel right again. Going for a weekend trip? Impossible, I barely want to shop for groceries. Hanging out with friends? Not going to happen, I talk to people all day at work. The weekend didn't feel like a vacation, it felt like a time to catch my breath, and nothing more than that. Since WFH, I don't run my batteries down during the week, and suddenly I have all this energy on Saturday and Sunday. I've taken up new hobbies, I visit places, I catch up with friends, I exercise, I go to restaurants. I've done more interesting stuff in the last 4 years than in the previous 10, because suddenly I have usable time and available energy. I thought I was a homebody, turns out I'm not. Imagine not finding that out for the first 20 years of your career! I'm not going back to the office, that's for sure.
- jes5199 3y agoI find Zoom so much more exhausting that being in the office, I am way more wiped out by my 2023 job than by my 2019 job
- exponentialgenx 3y agoYeah - last job I had was a nightmare of 5-6 hours per day meetings. Not a good fit at all. Current one is much better, better team, maybe 1 meeting 4 days a week at most (who does standup on Friday anyway? Nobody)
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y agoWe do standup once a week and I think even that is too much. Our team is too big. There's like 30 of us, we barely fit in even the large meeting rooms. No one listens to what anyone else has to say. I don't know who the meeting is for. It's not like any of us are even working on the same project. One person per project or you'll never get promoted; even the managers admit that.
- m1117 3y agoThis headline doesn't make sense. Whatever dude. Someone wants to work from home. Someone wants to be vegan. It doesn't tell me anything.
- oHqgTQUT 3y agoSomething I have been struggling with as a remote software engineer is 1. getting reviews from coworkers and 2. being able to communicate asynchronously with coworkers, even those working on the same projects. I find some of my coworkers are quite good, but others much less so. Sometimes I've waited 48 hours to hear back on a DM, and in other cases 3-4 weeks before getting reviews on PRs. It feels like in a remote environment it's so much easier to ignore other people that you work with.
- cebert 3y ago> I've waited 48 hours to hear back on a DM, and in other cases 3-4 weeks before getting reviews on PRs. This sounds like a performance management or team expectations management issue, not an issue with remote work.
- oHqgTQUT 3y agoPerhaps. I ended up going to a coworking space with this person for a day as the latency doing it remotely was just too high.
- dukeyukey 3y agoAnd both those things are much less an issue if you can physically bother the person whose supposed to be doing them. Like sure, we should be able to fix them. But if WFH creates extra friction that doesn't exist in-office, that's an extra resource drain that ought to be accounted for.
- isthispermanent 3y agoI’ll admit that I do miss when everyone else wasn’t remote. Once Covid handed everyone remote on a silver platter it diminished some of the perks. Everything used to be completely empty during normal work hours. This is was one of my big life lessons that it’s better to not advertise things that are truly great in order to help prevent the utility of it from being crowded away. Case in point are “day in the life” TikTok’s about an awesome lifestyle. These egotistically blatant brags end up bringing attention that threatens it.
- asynchronous 3y agoAt the same time I see “day in the life” TikTok’s about working onsite at a FAANG and they are the biggest jokes of software devs I’ve ever seen.
- rednafi 3y agoSame here. I value the time I save by not having to commute at all.
- isanengineer 3y agoAs a mechanical engineer, I want to offer some perspective on how specific this is for people working exclusively in software. I would never ever even consider working fully remotely, mainly because my job involves designing physical things. The prototypes and models for them are not and cannot be in my home. A big part of my job involves making sure the technician can actually assemble the things I design, which requires going to the place where they assemble it. My company employs many software engineers, and they work from home more frequently than the mechanical or electrical engineers, but they are much more hesitant to allowing full remote just because the work is so centered on the physical product. Every time I see an article posted here arguing one way or the other this rarely comes up. Regardless of the pros, cons, or preferences this just is not an option for a lot of technical people.
- lolinder 3y agoThis is fair, but I think software engineering is more typical of most knowledge work in this respect than mechanical engineering is. Most knowledge workers aren't handling physical objects for their work beyond a keyboard, mouse, and possibly a high-quality headset. Software is probably rare among engineering disciplines in never requiring physical access to specialized equipment, but it's pretty normal in the scope of white-collar work in general.
- OJFord 3y agoI'm not so sure about that, scientists need labs, academics have labs and lecture theatres, lawyers (some of the time) need courts and to meet clients or counterparties, very few doctors can work from home a non-trivial amount, etc. I agree it's unusual for something we call engineering, but I don't think needing more than a computer is that unusual for 'knowledge work'. A lot of finance has been more changed by computers than professions like accounting say which you could roughly say just swapped paper for computers and always could've been done from home to a similar extent. I suppose it's the internet being the significant piece, or just needed as well as computers themselves.
- MrOxiMoron 3y agoI 100% agree, the commute (90+ minutes twice), the open office space where people walk in and out and interrupt even without checking if you are in a meeting or concentrating on some complex problem and the team not being there (I start early and leave early, other do both late). and yes, the team thing is hard, but we do have office days when we all show up and have an agenda of things to discuss. That's when the team building happens!
- SleepyMyroslav 3y agoMy thoughts are that people that maybe will return to office or mixed setups will be completely different group than one left office in a hurry. Like in my case we have some pressure from management and some excuses to avoid open conflict and not do RTO. I agree that younger generation that wants to grow is really disappointed in ways current wfh works. I think opportunities to improve wfh setups to better teach youngsters are not exhausted yet.
- adamredwoods 3y agoI've worked in many different jobs throughout my life: in the office, freelancing from home, renting office space, or working on company and university campuses. I feel cubicles are better than open plans. Allow people to WFH. Personally, I don't mind in office work, but I prefer mostly from home (I am raising the future work force). Commutes are horrid. Here in Seattle, road rage shootings are common. In San Francisco, on the BART, one could get into an accidental fight with strange people. Make sure the bathrooms are clean, and don't assume men's bathrooms should be smaller. I find it absurd to stand in line. Free coffee and candy are not perks. Homogeneous workplace application is a thing of the past. Flexibility is the future.
- axpy906 3y agoInteresting point about not being loyal to a company. If this year is any indication it’s not taken into account when layoffs are done and the only winner is the overemployed.
- artyom 3y agoOffices today are merely a justification for managers (the useless kind, which is about 90% of them) to not become redundant, and for the C-suite to keep getting those sweet sweet tax breaks. Which answers the question by itself. "Should we be loyal to companies...?" No
- dahart 3y agoSpeaking personally, I felt way too shut-in during my fully remote pandemic time. But I’m also quite glad that the work-week has relaxed such that I can work from home when I want to. Just a couple of thoughts on this part: > being a ‘tech person’ who needs to focus on things in a deep way, and having to share some open plan office space with a hundred other people every day… The two things just don’t mix well. I’ve totally argued this myself in the past. Long before the pandemic I even tried having office hours, and hanging ‘don’t talk to me right now’ signs on my char (with limited success at best). But for most software engineering I now disagree with the ‘I need deep focus’ arguments. I have watched way too many people go off and write the wrong software when left to their own devices, me included, claiming they needed space for deep thinking. Over-engineering is a widespread problem and a massive waste of time and energy, and a lot of people are better off with frequent check-ins and budgets on their alone time. Everyone hates having budgets and micromanagement too, of course, and it’s possible and common to go overboard on that in the wrong direction. It just needs to be balanced, but on the whole this is one of the reasons that being in the office sometimes is useful. Another good reason is that co-workers need help, information needs to flow, and allowing knowledgeable people to avoid all interruptions is bad for the productivity of team. I have also seen many of the best engineers write large systems and get them deployed widely, with not enough documentation, and then make themselves unavailable and act like questions are too burdensome on their time, saying they require deep-focus time for whatever they’re working on.
- mattlondon 3y ago+1 to this. I feel like a lot of the time the "focus time" blocks in their calendar are just because they can't be bothered to deal with meetings or talking to others - basically they just want to do the parts of the job they like (code or whatever) and to fuck with the bits they don't like. "Sorry - can't do that planning/bug triage/training/mentoring/interview session - I am in my focus time" When you get to the more accomplished/senior levels of impact, it is all about scaling your skills - i.e. using your skills and knowledge to accomplish more than just one person can do on their own by sharing knowledge, helping others etc, leading a team/teams in the right direction and so on. Locking yourself away so noone can talk to you for hours/days at a time are the hallmarks of a selfish engineer (or at the least a very junior one who doesn't yet realise their place)
- higeorge13 3y agoEU perspective: i work remotely in a german company, and my salary is way higher than the top engineer/engineering manager/director of engineer salaries in my country. There is no office/commute/etc debate for me, more like if i had to work to a local company i would need to take a massive salary cut. Hence I will try to work remotely as much as possible.
- tkiolp4 3y agoI don’t mind the office, but I do mind that without remote work I cannot work for a company located in Berlin while living on the other side of the country (e.g., Düsseldorf).
- brianjking 3y agoWell said.
- FFP999 3y agoI am also a dedicated worker-from-home, and I know plenty of other people who are smarter than me who work by choice from the office every day. Even confining the discussion to those of us who logistically can do all of our jobs over the network, I've come to think that there is no single policy that can be applied over an organization that won't alienate a significant fraction of your staff. Organizations that don't find ways to accommodate the whole spectrum of, uh, "work-remoteness" are going to be at a serious disadvantage in the years to come.
- SpacePortKnight 3y agoMy work is 20 minutes away which consists of a 10 minute walk and a 7 minute tram. I also get free lunch at work and since I'm single, it's also the only place where I can talk to people in real life in the weekdays. Furthermore, my gym is also next to my office. So, in my case I will always prefer to work from office until I get married and start a family.
- fatih-erikli 3y agoI always felt like work from home is an extension of slacking in an open office plan. Work means a lot more than sending keystrokes to the computer. There are labor laws, information safety guidelines, tons of things you can't do at home alone by yourself. How can you be sure that your neighbor is not creating something competitive to the product you work on?
- thegrim33 3y agoOne of the (many) parts of the article that annoys me is that they basically push a grand conspiracy theory where apparently nobody running any company anywhere is/was able to actually measure employee productivity in any way, but him, a random person, somehow knows better about worker productivity and what's better for these companies, than all these companies with years of experience managing their workers do.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y agoWorked FH for a year. Hated it. Between TV and refrigerator, not much work could be accomplished.
- OfficeChad 3y agoBack. To. The. Office.
- jdlyga 3y agoI'm an introvert, but it feels very isolating working from home by yourself day after day. I also live in a 2 bedroom apartment, and my office is a gigantic 52 story building with free coffee, events occasionally, and plenty of space to focus and think. So if you're in a beautiful house in the woods and your office is a soul draining place in the middle of an office park, I totally feel you.
- LRVNHQ 3y agoI much prefer working at the office. There's less distraction and better divide between work and private time. When I leave the office, I'm done for the day. I find somewhat ironic that people use an alleged higher productivity at home as justification for remote work, but but doing chores around the house throughout the day always comes up as a perk of WFH. Doing chores and being productive are antithetic. Anecdotically I live in Europe and don't know anybody of any age who wants to work 100% remote, although obviously everybody likes the flexibility of working ~50% remote. Hating the office to the point of wanting to be 100% remote seems to be a very american thing, I wonder why. Average commute time the the US is among the shortest in the OECD btw, so the reason must lie elsewhere.
- tikhonj 3y ago> Doing chores and being productive are antithetic. Creative, high-leverage work like programming isn't a linear function of hours-in-chair. If working from home lets you focus better and be more creative, you can absolutely be both more productive and have time to do chores/etc.
- glow8 3y agoI personally really enjoy my commute. It does take 25 minutes, but I cycle, enjoying the views of parks and multiple gorgeous monuments. It makes me move a bit, as opposed to my usual very very sedentary days when I wfh. I imagine this isn't as frequent in the US, as I live in Germany. I have actually moved to a team that doesn't do wfh so much anymore because my days were long and boring. Life is much better seeing humans on a day to day basis (and I still have some flexibility for wfh and working from abroad).
- acherion 3y ago> There's less distraction and better divide between work and private time. When I leave the office, I'm done for the day. I am glad I have the luxury of having a separate room as my home office. When I’m done for the day, I leave that room and close the door, and don’t go back in unless it’s the next day or an emergency.
- 3y ago
- tibbon 3y agoI’d be happy to work in an office, had I little commute. I moved from Boston to Providence in 2019. The thought of doing 4-5 hours of daily commute to get into Boston, pay for parking, deal with taking food there or daily expense of eating out, wear and tear on a vehicle… fuck no. Tech barely exists in providence though, so most in office jobs would be in Boston I did this to myself yes, but having a house that wasn’t tiny and expensive was important to me
- Mountain_Skies 3y agoOffices, along with mass transit, are superspreader sites, but we're asked to pretend that they're not, even after going through a pandemic during which we were told to be in constant fear of killing grandma and potentially everyone else we come into contact with. It's amazing how quickly things like caring for the environment disappear the instant they become inconvenient for businesses or governments, and the same is true for just about every single thing that was rammed down our throats during the pandemic that should be forgotten so managers can look out over their underlings and extroverts can get their unspoken fringe benefit of using the office as a place to socialize. COUGH COUGH! Oh well, none of that pandemic stuff really matters anymore, right? Which is weird considering how much messaging there is around everyone needing to get more boosters. Can't even go grocery shopping with it being announced. So, what is it? Over or not? If it's still on, why are superspreader activities allowed, especially when there's a viable option of not maximizing office attendance?
- karim79 3y agoI used to work at a fortune 500, my commute (each way) was 45 minutes in the best of conditions. 100% of my job could have been done from any location. Back-of-the-envelope calculation for how much time in a year was spent commuting (conservatively, and not factoring in public holidays and vacation days) would be 15 days/year commuting. So as a proposal, give employees who can fulfil their duties from anywhere, the choice - Want to work from the office? Your commute time will be compensated in days off, or extra pay, or a mixture of both if you want. I think that has a lot less stink to it than, for instance, Amazon's recent move to block promotions from WFH insisters.
- angarg12 3y agoHere is an argument in favor of WFH that I hardly ever see: Growing up in a second rate city in a country with little tech scene, my and my colleague options to advance our career was to leave our city or our country behind. Having to choose between family/friends and career is a pretty tough choice to face. My sister in law moved to the capital for 2 years and had a distance relationship until she was able to transfer back to our city. WFH makes this much less of an issue. Now someone can have a successful career more easily even if they live in a small town. Having more choice of career while not sacrificing friends and family is something I wish I had 15 years ago. At the same time people starting their career tend to be the ones who benefit the most from an office setup, so there is probably still a tradeoff to make.
- rr808 3y agoUltimately its supply demand. Lots of people prefer to work from home, lots of employers prefer people in the office. It makes sense that eventually people in the office will get paid more than those at home.
- just_boost_it 3y agoI have a 100% remote job, but I had them set me up with a desk in a coworking space. I just felt that being alone all day was just a lonely way to live my life. It was great at the start to have so few interruptions, but y'know we're not building the pyramids. Everything we make in tech becomes legacy pretty quickly and eventually forgotten about and lost. I think a lot of life is what happens in the interruptions. That's where you find out about the guy that goes ice fishing and get invited along, or about someone who plays in a band and introduces you to a weird new music scene or something like that. I think everyone should get to work however they feel they need to within reason (I like the coworking space vibe myself), but I just hope people aren't giving up more than they realised.
- rreyes1979 3y agoIntrovert and HSP software engineer here. Not only working from home comes naturally for me but I have to say that since I started WFH 15 years ago, I've been a top performer in most of the teams I worked for (and that includes some teams where I was the only remote worker). I don't see any reason why I should work from an office at this point in my career and it actually makes little sense to me why some companies are losing top performers just to enforce some silly back to the office rules. I guess they just promoted the wrong people :)
- eatbitseveryday 3y agoHow are people having so many meetings per day, they need to complain about it? I have literally four meetings each week: company, group, boss, focus group. It sucks. I basically talk with myself to solve problems and see zero appreciation from fellow employees about how it impacts them, or what they’re struggling with or working on. Not arguing for office life, but interaction is needed to some degree to feel value in the work. Maybe it’s just my employer that isn’t doing enough?
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- aijoe5pack 3y agoI manage multiple teams all across the world. Other than being able to lock ourselves in a room to fight a fire, why do I need to have my onshore people in the same building as me? Its nice to have them close for when things get sporty, but at the end of the day, its all about theory X managers wanting to get their Taylor on.
- samhuk 3y agoAgree with writer, apart from a challenge on the "I get pestered at the office/on slack too much!": I see this complaint quite frequently about flows being disrupted due to office/slack, having to "mute slack to get anything done", etc. In my experience, those who I have observed IRL complaining about this are, more often than not, those that tend to struggle writing clear and maintainable code, those that struggle writing concise and readable documentation, those that struggle writing up tasks properly, and so on. Equally more often than not, I have found that they often fit into the "Super Smart Engineer Individual Contributor" bin, who are clearly incredibly good at solving very challenging problems, sometimes performing great, field-leading feats of engineering, but fall short on the human side of the job. I know this is highly generalizing and not all fit this description, but it truly is what I have seen. About me, I have been WFH for a long time, before the pandemic: <2019 60+% WFH, >2019 100% WFH. * Saved 2,500 hours by no commute - around 100 extra days of life. * Saved ~15,000-20,000 GBP by no train/car commute * I'm quite particular about my food and drink, and invest quite heavily in it (some would say too much when it comes to tea and coffee :P). I fear hot drink vending machines, "nespresso pods" (which I disagree with on perhaps a spiritual, even cosmic level), and/or plastic "bag tea". Eeeek D: * I'm quite particular when it comes to peripherals. My back hates Herman Miller knock-offs, generally any kind of "different" from my at-home setup to be honest. Thunderbolt, in 2023, remains at best a challenge, at worst a mystery for multi-million and a number of multi-billion companies. * Office equipment in the last ~5 or so years has been on a somewhat downwards trajectory since 2019. Companies don't invest in quality software engineering equipment like they used to (understandable as paying for equipment that few use is a waste). This troubles me often; I fear that the pandemic has sparked a rapidly spiraling, high momentum, positive feedback doom-loop, i.e.: 1) Pandemic --> 2) WFH --> 3) Companies invest less in office equipment --> 4) More employees want WFH for better equipment --> 5) Companies invest even less in office equipment --> GOTO 3