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Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

I'm with you in regards to how my mind responds to working from home (not well).

Humans evolved as social animals. Everything we've always done has been in groups. When you are growing up, you spend most of your waking time in the company of other people (school). The ones who don't, who are homeschooled alone, turn out "weird". Until the modern advent of telecommunications, working has meant being physically collocated with other people. Spending most of your waking hours alone at home is an unusual thing to do; we're not adapted for it, and it's tough.

100% telecommuting doesn't work for a lot of people, maybe even the majority of people. It definitely doesn't work for me. Coworking spaces are one solution, but I only have a short commute anyway, so I'm just going to go into the real office.

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You talk about how your mind works, but then make generalizations based on that, even saying "it doesn't work for a lot of people". You're generalizing and stereotyping based on your own feelings and thoughts about how humans work. I especially take issue with your assertion that people turn out "weird" in relation to homeschooling.

I'm an introvert. I wasn't home schooled. But extroverts think I'm weird because like the OP, I don't enjoy social events with people who aren;'t my friends, I don't enjoy large groups, and after a long day of work I just want to be home with my family or alone in silence to recharge. There are lots of people like me. The "weird" you see? Probably just different than what you're used to.

The approach should be that if you want to work remotely, you should. And if it doesn't work for you, then you should go to an office. We shouldn't force whole groups of humans to do things they are uncomfortable doing. You shouldn't be forced to isolate yourself if that doesn't work, but you shouldn't force me into sitting in an office when I could do the exact same job remotely and be more secure and comfortable.

And neither one of us should call the other "weird" for feeling that way.

Humans being social animals isn't just some generalization based on "how my mind works", it's a basic fact of our species. Yes, there are some outliers (i.e. hermits and recluses), but the vast majority of people benefit from daily social contact. This is how we evolved as a species and it's how we are to this day. There are plenty of scientific studies showing what happens to socially isolated people: They get more stressed out, anxious, and have lower life expectancies.

> the vast majority of people benefit from daily social contact.

This I can buy. However, you can have daily social contact. Significant others, friends, family, church, meetups, social outings, etc.

Homeschooled kids have social contact daily. So do people who work remote. Don't conflate hermits with remote workers.

The reason I personally can't stand to be in an office? The people who think that the office is where you get your social fix for the day.

Upvoted because I agree with your overall point:

> 100% telecommuting doesn't work for a lot of people, maybe even the majority of people.

You're probably getting downvoted (I had the urge myself) by the minority of people who find it to be an excellent fit. Maybe in previous generations we would have been sheepherders, cowboys, or explorers. Or maybe monks. I work remotely and I like social interaction, just much less than most people. If working in an office gives you 10/10 in social interaction, my preferred number is probably a 2. I'd be unhappy with a 1 but much more unhappy with a 10.

Maybe others feel like me. Or maybe given the presence of always on google hangouts and facebook messenger and slack and irc, they feel plenty social.

I consider lack of being face-to-face to be a legitimate drawback of my job, but it's waaay less of a drawback than being forced to live in a "tech hub" or have a commute. The power of being able to hire people who live more than 30 minutes away from your office is incredible.

>The ones who don't, who are homeschooled alone, turn out "weird".

And those in the public school system are juuuuusssst fine...

I think CydeWays quoted the word "weird" so as to make it clear that they did not think that those people were weird (but that society at large does).

> Everything we've always done has been in groups

erm no, there are numerous accounts of people living ar ermits or away from the groups in History. why do you assume everyone has to live with the herd ?

And they have always been considered weird, even when respected by their local culture, and to number very few. We have a word for such people. We do not actually have a word for people who are not hermits, because that's how normal it is. We have words for being excessively group focused, like "gregarious", but not for "not a hermit".

Slightly less extreme, many cultures have had some sort of monk experience, where the monks do not live alone but often have some sort of highly restrictive vow of silence or something. It is certainly a thing in humanity that is popular enough to at times create social institutions for those who wish the rather different lifestyle, but it has also been a radical minority of people who choose it.

What's my point? Is there anything wrong with those choices? No. The point is that trying to arrange a social order that tries to push the majority of people in that direction isn't going to succeed.

I consider "everything is going to become telecommuting in the future" to be up there with "mobile games are going to completely destroy PC and console gaming". If it was going to happen, we should not still be speculating about it... it should be happening right now, visibly obviously, not something we have to go parse through trends and sort of squint at to see.

Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's not there.

Do you have any sense of how many people who are forced to head to an office each day would rather not? Probably not. I know I don't. But that's because the majority controls how these people work.

Working remotely doesn't mean you're a hermit. If you are, your organization has a communication problem. I work remote and am able to get social interaction instantly with anyone in the organization.

"Working remotely doesn't mean you're a hermit."

Yes, I'd call it much closer to monk-like existence.

It still isn't what the vast majority of humanity is going to prefer.

The proof is that if there was some sort of massive preference for working from home, we should be seeing it now. The tech is here. The Internet is here. The computing power is here. All the preconditions would seem to be here. If what is missing isn't that humans don't generally prefer to be physically together in a group structure, what exactly is it? If the revolution is so inevitable, what's stopping it?

If the answer is "Well we need more VR that makes it feel like they are there", that's a goal post move. May be true, but still a goal post move. If the answer is "because $MANAGEMENT", what's going to change about that in the future, and why aren't the managers also eager to work from home if it's so inevitable? If the answer is "Well Americans (who are uniquely terrible in all the world) have this irrational desire to spend time in their car in gridlock because they love it so much" then I guess that's more inevitable than the move to telecommuting then, huh? I haven't got an alternate explanation for why this isn't already happening that makes any sense, other than, we are not generally psychologically suited to work that way.

> The tech is here.

While I WFH quite a bit, I have to disagree with this statement. For a lot of interaction modes, being remote still lacks a lot of the bandwidth (for lack of a better term) than in person. If you're working out a problem/presentation/etc. with a group, it's still hard to beat a conference room with a whiteboard.

Things are better than they used to be. Something like Google Docs can certainly help. But working with a group F2F, serendipitous encounters, informal interactions, etc. can be hard to replicate. And, again, I say this as someone who works remotely much of the time and doesn't go out of my way to commute, even though it's not a bad commute.

Thanks to Google Docs and video Hangouts it's gotten a lot better than it used to be when I first joined the industry a decade ago. You're right though, it's still not as good as being physically co-present in a conference room, or sitting side-by-side at a computer. I suspect it will get better with VR. For now, though, I definitely enjoy working in an office with my coworkers the most, with perhaps a very occasional work-from-home day (only 5% of all work days) thrown in as a sort of quasi-vacation.

I love my vive and all, but having to deal with it for every meeting just sounds like a hassle.

That's actually a good point. I hated remote meetings back in the day when you had to call up a number and then enter a meeting ID, and having to put on a VR headset seems like a similar amount of hassle. I also have eye issues readjusting for some time after using one -- that doesn't seem like fun to deal with repeatedly throughout the day.

Maybe we'll have to wait until mind-integration VR becomes a thing.

I'm perplexed that to this day there still aren't physical whiteboards with a screen underneath where you can write on them and see others writing. This, along with seeing the face of whoever is talking would be basically as good as being in person.

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