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Comment by typest | Hacker News Reader

I totally agree with you. The general negativity towards remote work seems, to me, to reflect a lack of imagination about how our lives, and our societies, could be organized in a world with more remote work.

The potential reduction in housing cost alone(one of the largest inhibitors to developing wealth for most Americans) should be a massive cause for celebration. We can stop orienting our lives and our cities around commuting (and therefore cars) and start focusing on people.

People complain about the loss of the workplace as a social environment. What about the opportunities to create new social environments that aren't centered around work?

I wrote more about this here, if you're interested https://manyfoxgiven.com/2020/01/21/remote-work-promise/

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That all implies that people won’t be working more - while it’s true commute times being cut is a huge benefit, I’m concerned about employer demands and culture leaning more into people working more, especially across time zones. When there is more competition for roles those who are willing to work more and longer will advance.

That said, I also hold out great hope for this development. I’m already looking at places I’d like to live because I’d like to live there, not because there are jobs.

That would probably require changes in laws around the 40 hour work week and overtime, don’t you think? If enough engineers are making less, they’ll probably request the ‘exempt’ status be removed and suddenly they get overtime for those extra hours.

Did people that live in company towns tend to work 70* hours a week?

It is hard to imagine things being different for people that have been going to an office for the last 5 or 10 years.

Reality is crumbling now that the pandemic proved that we can be as productive without an office. Some people are lying to themselves to justify why they have lost so many hours of their life in an office.

>Some people are lying to themselves to justify why they have lost so many hours of their life in an office.

Sounds needlessly aggressive, just straight up dismissing any valid points the other side could have.

Do I like working from home? Yes. Does it give me more flexibility when it comes to my personal life? Absolutely. Would I want to work from home every day? Definitely no.

In a perfect world, I would love to work 3 days a week from home, with the remaining 2 days in the office (not necessarily back to back, e.g., I would prefer working from office on mondays and wednesdays.

> Sounds needlessly aggressive, just straight up dismissing any valid points the other side could have.

I'm not saying this is the case for everyone (I'm using some here) but myself and a couple of my friends have definitely been in that category before realizing that we actually don't like going to an office.

I’ve worked in an office essentially every weekday since 2007.

I can’t wait to get back to one. For me, working from home is awful. For you, it’s not. Different people are different.

Mostly it’s the isolation that gets to me. I’m used to working with people.

Out of curiosity which office did you work in between 2007 and 2018 when you started working for stripe? How is your teams WFH experience within stripe?

Most of what people talk about is going on a snowboarding trip while getting paid to "WFH" not the day to day reality of it.

I agree, but I'll note that I did exactly what you're talking about (went on a snowboarding trip while getting paid to "WFH"). I was in Europe, so I was on the mountains until midafternoon, and then worked the rest of the afternoon / evening. Worked great - I got a lot of work done, spent a ton of time on the mountains, and my employer never complained about my output (I spent a good 6-8 hours working each day, and easily got my normal workload done).

Yeah... what you describe isn’t lying about working from home. It’s changing where ‘home’ is. I was considering doing that this summer for some hiking trips, too.

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