Hacker News Reader

Comment by iagooar | Hacker News Reader

Working remotely has a very high cost, but it only gets visible in the long term.

Working from home isolates you. There is no way around this. You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office.

For the company, people that work remote start drifting away from the company vision and spirit - you get an army of people working individually most of the time, not socializing, not establishing strong bonds. If personal contact wasn't important, we could raise our kids remotely.

I have some friend who have been working at a company who went remote-first and after 5 years they do not feel identified with the company anymore. It's just a job. You could work for someone else and you wouldn't even notice.

Also, working from home is only as convenient as your life situation allows it. Have kids? Bad luck. Live in the city because you enjoy city life? Sorry you have to convert you bedroom into your office during the day because you can't afford to have an additional room. You are a people's person and feel more energetic and productive when working with others face to face? Well, sorry, your team is mostly remote.

Please, let us just top playing down the importance of the office. It is important and it has tons of benefits for the team, as opposed to the benefits for the individuals.

View on HN

You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office.

Eh, I met my wife at a running club. My longest-term friends were made prior to work. My current friends are mostly from cycling and camping. I'm not social with any of my co-workers.

they do not feel identified with the company anymore. It's just a job.

I felt this way when I was at the office, and I feel this way now that I'm WFH. My job funds the rest of my life. That's it. Why should I get attached to a job? It's a fickle thing - the owners can fire me on a whim. It's a not a social relationship, it's a purely monetary one - in trade for cold hard cash, I do some work. There's no long-term contract there. There's no expectation that this will last indefinitely. I get paid, I do work, and hopefully the owner gets her new Tesla (or boat or whatever)

> My job funds the rest of my life. That's it. Why should I get attached to a job?

Unrelated to the WFH vs. Office topic (WFH works for me, but I am an open source lifer and used to distributed community - and got amazing friendships out of it), but: This is a mindset I never understood or could relate to.

Doesn't it make you depressed that you need to spend 8+ hours of your life on something you don't really care about? It's time you don't get back, ever. For me the #1 req for a job is that I care and think it's worth doing, because it's part of my life.

I'm not attacking your values there, I'm just wondering how you can be OK with the time loss. I think it also reads on having a healthy relationship with the employer as an employee - do your best not to waste my time.

I'm a consultant/contractor and sometimes do remote. Even when I was an employee, I've never been able to identify with the company's mission and goals or whatever it is that thing is that everyone else experiences. In fact, I found it extremely cringey whenever I had to take part in any company sponsored socialisation events though I'm willing to concede that it's simply the introvert in me feeling that way. Despite that I'm still able to enjoy my job because my focus is on doing good work to the best of my abilities. I get along with my colleagues and have made real friends with some of them even.

I believe it's best for people to learn to separate their employer from their identity.

The fact that you can't work at a place unless you get some shot of dopamine associated with the perception of "this is worth it" doesn't mean everyone has that particular hang-up.

Ultimately, what do you get out of "this is worth it"? You don't get anything. Or, rather, the important thing you get is a paycheck, just like everyone else.

You'll answer, "I get the satisfaction that..." That dopamine addiction isn't any more meaningful than a cigarette hit.

When our ancestors were out hunting mammoths I imagine there was one who said to the others, "I hate this shit. Don't you think we should be spending time doing something we like?" And his friend said "Meh. It's not bad, and I like to eat."

I don't dislike my job. I get to solve interesting problems, work with great people, and our particular niche within the broader software industry has more redeeming qualities than most.

I just don't feel particularly attached to it. If I was RIFed tomorrow, I'd be anxious about finding a new job, but wouldn't feel any great sense of loss.

FWIW, my career started in 1999, so I barely got my feet wet before the dot-bomb implosion (followed my 9/11, acquisition by a PE group, then 2008, then ownership change to another PE group, etc). It's blatantly obvious that C-level, BOD, etc only have the interests of their employees in mind while that happens to align with their own self-interest. I'm just a cog in the machine. I'm ok with that - I'm a well paid cog and it lets me do things like travel the world, buy expensive toys, and live on a golf course.

Yeah, I hate the loss of time, but haven't found a good alternative. I don't want my hobbies to become work - I think I'd just end up hating them.

> You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office.

Eh, there’s enough anecdata to swing this in either direction.

I have not grown up in the US, so I’ve truly started my social network from scratch when I began my professional career almost two decades ago. The people I’ve become friendly at work make poor friends.

Perhaps my definition of “friend” is different than yours, but I expect to have a trust based relationship with a friend. If I’m having trouble at home or trouble with money, I expect my friend to hear me out, offer a shoulder and maybe give me some advice.

I wouldn’t tell such things to anyone I’m “friendly” with at work. Don’t get me wrong: I like these people, but would I want another team’s manager to know that I’m deeply in debt or fighting bitterly with my spouse? I’d think not. This is America: land of dog eat dog. People will use such information against me without hesitation. Corporate politics are real here.

Remember: when a “friendship” begins in a context of making money, it’s most likely no friendship at all. Surely there’s the opportunity for an occasional exception to slip past this rule, but don’t you go around thinking that it happens as a base case.

Lastly, work isn’t the only place where adults interact. I’ve met lots of people through my kid. School and sports teams and other places where my child is involved: there are human adults there too. Those other parents are better than colleagues in many ways. For one thing, you’re not bound to them in a commercial context, so there’s no incentive to play politics. People are more relaxed because it’s more purely a social environment rather than a business one.

And what happened to meetups? Yes, the pandemic has put a damper on those, but they’ll be back eventually.

Edit: PS: Had I not been working remotely, I’d never have found the time to show up to my kid’s sports practice or school committee meetings. Commute and office shenanigans always eat up that time. That’s just life. One door closes and another opens.

It's not the social isolation as much as it is being disconnected from your work environment. There's a very real benefit (that varies a lot on individual circumstances) to being close to the flagpole.

This discussion reminds me of Richard Hamming's anecdote about open and closed doors: http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html.

What happens when everyone’s work environment is the same across a given company? Doesn’t this level the playing field? Evergreen communication seems to specifically serve the goal of reducing or even eliminating the need to be “close to the flagpole”, as you called it.

There were a lot of companies that were remote work first before COVID. The issue is that this is only possible for companies in certain fields (tech being one of them) that have the right tools and management structures in place, and where explicit knowledge is more important than tacit knowledge.

I'm not familiar with Evergreen communication (the closest I could find was a consulting-ish company online), but I'm sure that small companies in a larger number of fields could, theoretically, go remote work first.

> I'm not familiar with Evergreen communication

I saw the words "evergreen communication" in a job posting this week, and they stuck with me. I've no idea if this is a common expression, but it seems to make sense to me. My interpretation of it is: words said during an in-person conversation tend to fade away into participants' imperfect memories as soon as they're said. Words that make up written communication (Slack, wiki, ...) tend to stick around, thus allowing others to who weren't directly around for the conversation to benefit from the knowledge later on.

"Asynchronous communication" likely refers to the same thing.

This is my experience too, I have a single long term friend that started as a colleague, but the rest have drifted into acquaintances after leaving companies. I liked the majority of them, and we socialised outside of work but when that main anchor of seeing each other during the week was removed the friendships faded too.

I suppose it is a problem to form proper relationships with people outside of work if you're not left with any time outside of work though, so for some people being sociable in the office is a good way to mask that work life balance issue in the short term.

It could also just be an age thing, when I was younger I would have probably preferred to be in the office, but now I want to be with my family as much as I can be and removing things like the commute makes a huge difference in available time.

>> I wouldn’t tell such things to anyone I’m “friendly” with at work. Don’t get me wrong: I like these people, but would I want another team’s manager to know that I’m deeply in debt or fighting bitterly with my spouse? I’d think not. This is America: land of dog eat dog. People will use such information against me without hesitation. Corporate politics are real here. >> That's a shame - you should be able to get some closer friends from a work environment and not have to consider or contend with this. Definitely a difference between 'colleagues' and 'friends'. It still makes sense to keep most private things at a private level. Being cautious always applies, with some work environments, far more caution clearly is needed

> you’re not bound to them in a commercial context, so there’s no incentive to play politics. People are more relaxed because it’s more purely a social environment rather than a business one.

Coworking spaces offer this plus - depending on the space - potential friendships with people in your field. I was at a space for awhile and there was a great group of fellow software people who all sat together.

> I have some friend who have been working at a company who went remote-first and after 5 years they do not feel identified with the company anymore. It's just a job. You could work for someone else and you wouldn't even notice.

I think feeling “identified with your company” is kind of pathological. If remote work gets more people to realise it’s just a job, it’s not their company, and they shouldn’t work themselves to death over it, good.

There no reason that you cant have a heathy view of the working relationship and identify with they company or in fact your team.

In fact its more the problem in forming a team than the company

This is a feature of remote work, not a bug. I cringe to put on the company themed shirt I am required to wear at the office on special occasions. The esprit de corps at my company is used to justify unpaid overtime and working on weekends. I would rather first identify with something else, like my family or local community.

It just sounds like you have a bad job, and yes, in that case it is a feature, not a bug. Because any system that lets you stay far away from a bad job is good.

But there plenty of people who actually love the place they work and the people they work with and do it with healthy work/life balance without the stupid company shirts. Hard to imagine for you, just like it's hard to me to imagine caring about my local community.

I may be wrong, but I think what was meant is a feeling of belonging to a community and a feeling of togetherness.

A company isn’t a community. You don’t belong to it and the togetherness only lasts as long as your boss says it will. Ultimately it’s in the company‘s best interest to try and get more value out of you than they pay you for, if they think they can do that by fostering a feeling of togetherness then they will, but it’s not, you know... real.

e: and the parent of this chain is a CEO. Three guesses as to why he finds it a negative that an employee doesn’t really care who they work for.

"Identified with the company" may be a poor choice of words, but I'd rather spend my time working for a company whose culture and goals align with my own, rather than feel like I'm doing tasks mechanical-turk style.

A full time job is something you spend 40 hours a week at and your coworkers are human beings you spend a lot of time working together and very often you share similar goals.

You don't have to drink the Koolaid and all that, but if you can feel a sense of team and belonging from your job there is only positive effects, provided that you don't confuse that with blind loyalty.

At one point I've had 5 jobs in 7 years. But I still thoroughly enjoyed my time at those 5 companies and I made friends from all of them, many of whom I talk to until today. You would call me "pathological" but honestly I would absolutely hate to work anywhere with a bunch of people like you.

Just like a job isn't your whole life, but people also shouldn't be so vehemently against actually liking their job and their coworkers.

As a guy that married with a girl that I did know first on MMOs (11 years of marriage, after 3 years playing Ragnarok Online), and played some others (WoW, WoT) for a while, connected entire day using Teamspeak, I do not feel this a negative point.

We can workaround and I made many acquaintances online.

Now I have a 5 year child and I turned my bedroom into a office. I just educated her during the last year (before covid) that this is a possibility.

I promised her that after 6pm my schedule is hers and we have fun after that.

Not commuting equals 5 extra hours / week of fun with my dear little girl, playing some games, doing activities like painting, board games and so on.

For me it was very positive.

The main problem I had on physical office was disruptions to answer questions and many meetings.

I was advocate for async comms (PROPERLY using Slack, Teams, etc), but not everyone was on the same page.

Stopping my concentration on code architecture, code writing, managing AWS infrastructure to give random consultancy, or meetings with little purpose was a real point of pain for my productivity

> Working remotely has a very high cost, but it only gets visible in the long term.

True, but it's not clear that cost is higher than working in an office over the long term.

In true internet-discussion fashion, there's lots of absolutes people talk about when discussing remote-first, remote-only, and dynamic working. As ever, the answer is "it depends".

Some people will benefit massively, some people will have to sacrifice massively, and most people will live with less extreme and different pros and cons.

> It is important and it has tons of benefits for the team

Depends entirely on the team. I know "it depends" is always a cop-out, but truthfully, any working system is going to depend massively on the work and the team dynamic. Having any of these grandiose statements on how work should be done fall down almost immediately when trying to extrapolate them to more than an individual company (or even beyond a single team in a company).

"It depends" isn't a cop-out when it's true. Some situations benefit a lot from remote work. There's a reason why a lot of startups were going remote work first before COVID was even a thing.

The issue is that IT is one of the few fields where a large portion of the work can be remotely created and evaluated, and a large percentage of the people on HN/Twitter/Tech Blogs happen to work in or around this industry. Programming, at least, is like writing with much better pay.

You can't remote work restaurants. Or any job where you have be somewhere to do something, or where interpersonal relationships are a key success factor. Remote work is even a challenge in IT, where it's theoretically easier to evaluate and promote talent and where there are proven ways to properly implement telecommuting.

As opposed to at best a smaller desk in a spare room.

More likely your having to work by converting a kitchen table (wrong height) or your bed room if say you live in a 1 bed flat.

Its even worse if your in a couple or a flat share where several people are competing for space and wifi

> More likely your having to work by converting a kitchen table (wrong height) or your bed room if say you live in a 1 bed flat.

> Its even worse if your in a couple or a flat share where several people are competing for space and wifi

Again, we refer back to "it depends". My partner and I live in a 2 bedroom apartment, we now have dedicated proper-sized desks in the living room and in the spare room.

Appreciate not everyone has the space to do that, but that's kinda the point. I'm not really an advocate for full time remote myself, I think agile working is the best of both worlds.

The company has an office with maybe 50% desk capacity for employees, then employees cycle in and out throughout the week on a cadence that suits them. Everything's still set up to be remote-first (virtual meetings, no massive in-person all-hands etc...) but you can choose to use an office or your home. Or a coffee shop, or an airport lounge, or a park, or...

(and in before "what if everyone comes in on the same day" - I used to work in a place that had 60% the number of desks for employees, I never once struggled to find a place to sit. To the extent they're subletting a whole floor due to lack of usage).

There's also nothing stopping companies paying a coworking stipend to those that want it in lieu of an office. And booking out a large conference hall once a year for everyone to come together.

Essentially, most things are at least semi-solvable and no decision on the future of work should be taken based solely on how we've currently set ourselves up.

I agree that offices can be beneficial. But most of us are comparing our work-from-home setup to a very sub-optimal office experience. It is usually a big open plan office with crappy air conditioning and windows that don't open. It is a complete lack of privacy unless you manage to book a glass walled meeting room. It is a boss who thinks that shorts on a hot day are "unprofessional". I would love to go back to the office, but not like that.

> You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office.

Yes, but there are other ways to build relationships. Get involved in your community, donate your time, etc.

That's a feature not a bug. It is just a job. Look, I enjoy my job. I love the product I'm building. I like the people I work with. Being remote for over a half decade now doesn't change that. But, it's just a job. My life is so much more than just what I do for money.

> Also, working from home is only as convenient as your life situation allows it. Have kids? Bad luck. Live in the city because you enjoy city life? Sorry you have to convert you bedroom into your office during the day because you can't afford to have an additional room. You are a people's person and feel more energetic and productive when working with others face to face? Well, sorry, your team is mostly remote.

Huh? We don't have kids but we do foster and we have room for the kids and an office for my wife and I (we do have to share that). We see plenty of people outside of work that seeing co-workers in person doesn't matter.

> Please, let us just top playing down the importance of the office.

How about we stop with one size fits all?

> It is important and it has tons of benefits for the team, as opposed to the benefits for the individuals.

I'm a very productive member of my team. I'm a SME on our most important product. People know they can contact me when they need and I'll have solutions. I'm hugely beneficial to my team (not really trying to toot a horn, just making a point), and nobody has ever once in all the years I've been here complained about me being remote.

> Working remotely has a very high cost, but it only gets visible in the long term.

How long are we talking? Modulo a short stint, I've been remote for over a decade now and don't see any of these problems.

The mistake a lot of "anti-remote" folks are making right now is to mistake good, well-planned remote work with whatever their employer managed to put in place over a couple of days back in March. They are not the same.

As often happens with this topic, this comment tries to portray an individual's opinion as a universal truth

> You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office.

Whose adult life? Because in mine, I have a very active social life outside of work, so the office comprises a tiny minority of the people I meet as an adult. On top of that, if you work at at a small company like I have, then there are no opportunities to make new relationships. Who are you thinking of meeting in an office where it's you and 3-4 other people, day in and day out, for years?

The office is not the only way to meet people, and for people who can't or don't need to rely on the office for their social lives, nothing is lost on that point by going remote

> For the company, people that work remote start drifting away from the company vision and spirit - you get an army of people working individually most of the time, not socializing, not establishing strong bonds.

That sounds like a company problem, not a remote problem. I love my employer and my team, and get along fine with video calls etc. I'm not at work to hang out and have fun, I'm here to do my job and get paid, then go live my personal life.

> It's just a job. You could work for someone else and you wouldn't even notice.

That's specifically what some people, like myself, want to feel

> You are a people's person and feel more energetic and productive when working with others face to face? Well, sorry, your team is mostly remote.

Here you conveniently disregard everybody who doesn't support your argument. Let's describe the office for people like me, who have absolutely 0 (zero) interest or need for an office: "You don't like to be around people, and you feel more energetic and productive when you can choose your working environment, don't have to commute, and can sleep until 8:59AM if you want to? Well, sorry, your team isn't remote"

> Please, let us just top playing down the importance of the office. It is important and it has tons of benefits for the team, as opposed to the benefits for the individuals.

I think a fairer thing to ask is: please, stop treating all people and companies as having the same qualities and preferences. If you want to work in an office and it makes your life better, that's great. But what you may consider great conditions might literally be the worst part of life for others. There is no single solution.

> You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office.

I don't really understand this. While I like my colleagues, they're just that - co-workers. I'm never really been interested in socialising with them outside of the workplace.

I've moved to a new country and the way I've found friends (without even putting much effort into it) was through activities and shared interests outside of work.

Yeah, this blows my mind as well. Believe it or not, people are actually able to make meaningful friendships outside of work. For example, I got into whitewater kayaking after about two years into my career (software) at age 27. It's an activity that requires groups of people to work together. You need multiple people to run vehicle shuttles up/down the river, and you also need multiple people for safety on the river. I've been doing this activity for a few years now, and through it I have formed some of the deepest relationships I've ever had. I hang out with these people every week often on weeknights after work. One of the good friends I met through this activity even got ordained and married my wife and I!

My point is that kayaking is just one means of meeting people and forming relationships. The idea that an office is one of our only opportunities to make relationships is just absurd. My experience with relationships in office is that most of the time they are very hollow and superficial. Also, if most of your relationships come from the office and your career, you are limiting yourself to a narrower field of ideas. If the main people you hang around are managers and software developers, then you are going to miss out on a lot of other viewpoints. Through kayaking, I've made close friends with people from all walks of life. We were out to eat one night at a restaurant, and at our table sat a plumber, a realtor, an orthopedic surgeon, an electrical engineer, and an FBI agent!

> Working from home isolates you. There is no way around this. You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office.

Since social distancing guidelines in my country have been relaxed and I've still been working from home, I find I have had more time and incentive to cultivate relationships with people that I actually want to spend time with and who have similar hobbies and interests as me rather than those who I am forced to spend time with in the office.

> after 5 years they do not feel identified with the company anymore. It's just a job.

I understand this is a startup board but I’m all for having founders to work harder in persuading employees that a job is not just a job. (Please record these zoom sessions too - I’m gathering material for the office 2.0)

A job is just a job. That doesn't mean you have to stop being professional at it. Socializing at work in a corporate environment is majorly an US phenomenon because hours tend to be longer, paid vacation close to non-existing, leaving no other chance to socialize.

I spend a large portion of my week on video calls with colleagues, whether it's discussing requirements, pairing, bouncing ideas off someone or just shooting the shit before standup. I don't feel that my contact time has changed significantly at all. I actually think working from home facilitates face to face communication over an open plan office because everyone has total control over the sound in their office. If you're on a call you can be as loud as you like without disturbing and other calls you just don't hear at all. For me it's a huge win.

Then there's all the extra time and energy you have from no commute. I socialise far more frequently since working from home then when I was commuting into London for instance.

I've been curious about the demographics of people who oppose remote work vs those who are for it. At least from my industry (Software), my guess is that those who are for it are developers and those that are against it are going to be more of the managerial type. My manager is late in her career and has opposed the concept of allowing full-remote work after post-covid in a very strong way. I think now that all of the workers are not physically in the office, she feels like she has less purpose.

I was curious what the OP's job role was to see if this thought lines up at all. I click on his profile and he is a CEO.

It's definitely isolating but it's also a solvable problem.

Now that all my friends are working from home, we have more of a desire to meet on a weekly basis. We've been going on short after work hikes together regularly.

We also hold weekly zoom calls to play online board games or chat about what's going on in our lives.

Lastly, for people who have hobbies that still allow social distancing, you can still go to some meetups and have fun. My friend is still playing tennis / badminton and having her normal after match meal.

> For the company, people that work remote start drifting away from the company vision and spirit

The company I work for produces some really cool products that I really enjoy making. Is that good enough?

I worked on satellites, and then rockets, and now I'm back to satellites. From an embedded software point of view, they can be made remarkably similar. I'm guessing most kinds of embedded software development feel similar lol. Of course, company culture matters - and by that, I mean how the team behaves, how the management behaves, and how the CEO runs the company. I worked for an idiot CEO once and the managers would yell at each other in meetings. I left quickly because it was a very toxic company.

> Also, working from home is only as convenient as your life situation allows it.

Almost every single company talking about going mostly remote is still having offices as an option for those who need it.

> You are a people's person and feel more energetic and productive when working with others face to face? Well, sorry, your team is mostly remote.

You lost me here. That sounds like an extrovert demanding that everyone bend to their will.

some of this is true (being lonely and things) but working from home is simply the bee's knees if you have children. It's literally the best arrangement you can have aside from on-prem childcare in your office, which is probably about equal, but only good for the youngest children.

Once you hit kindergarten -- I am the one who picks up my kid from the bus, walks her home from school when she has after school activities, make it to every little performance/play/whatever, eats lunch with her at school every so often, etc. I'm not taking hours out of my work day to do these things -- Mostly just coffee breaks that I would take in the office.

My own childhood was being in full time (7am - 5:30pm) school/care.

Your post speaks with an all-encompassing reach that remote doesn't work. This probably annoys the people who really swear by remote. Just like how all the people waxing lyrical about remote life annoys you.

I disagree with your assertion:

> You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office.

My own personal experience has been that every 2-3 years I establish a new network of friends. This has all been outside of work and tends to correlate with my personal passion of the time period. By comparison, I have formed considerably fewer work friends.

Of this "churn" (terrible word), 10-20% tend to end up closer friends/friends for life.

On the other hand, I find I have far less in common with most my colleagues. I have found maybe a 1/50 to 1/20 chance of having a meaningful connection with most my colleagues, especially if you set aside professional passions (ie software / startups).

I have worked at everything between megacorp and startup in a garage. I have also worked remotely.

While I like the social aspect of working in an office and building trust and relationships with members outside of my immediate team's interface (eg HR, Finance, Marketing) I also hate working in an office with noise and distractions when I want to focus. I also think commuting is the greatest waste of life there can be.

I personally embrace the optionality remote life brings - I can go abroad for a month or three without needing to take a sabbatical for instance. I can live near a good school without travelling for 2 hours to get to an office.

Tldr YMMV

You mean they think of their job how it should be thought of?

Most offices are filled with people who will do nothing for your career.

Sure, when you work with good people, youre right. But these aren't the majority.

I'd guess, that the best what can happen to the average employee is more time for their loved ones and less time with at best boring and worst toxic people.

When we went remote first we were pretty aggressive about organizing our work so that people could work more independently, i.e. we got rid of a lot of meetings. By aggressive, I mean as the CEO, I often have zero working meetings in a given week. That's more aggressive than most people will do.
But what we did instead was start a nearly daily standup video call that is primarily social. Often people will bring challenging questions and we'll all riff on them. We call it a standup meeting but maybe we should call it a water cooler meeting. It's just about knowing and relating to each other.

Team is about 25 people with another 200-300 contractors in a given month and I count six major concurrent projects right now.

Coffee shops were created as places to socialize. As they turned to places of work in the past decade ... the office i guess was turned to the last place where random socialization was socially acceptable.

Neither of these conditions is unavoidable, it's all about the social convention. I guess if WFH goes on for long enough, people will change their social expectations.

> after 5 years they do not feel identified with the company anymore

Yeah, freedom has a price, but it's tangible, a remote workforce will be closer to gig workers, which does allow them to jump ship easier for better pay, but also ends the idea of a business as "being a family" (which is mostly a false illusion anyway).

How about:

What works for you, might not work for us.

And what works for us, might not work for you.

Easy.

You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office.

I think the usual expression here is don't shit where you eat.

In other words it might serve you well to forge social relationships separately from working relationships.

It's tended to work for me, I'm married, work from home and I haven't had any unfortunate episodes at a work Christmas party. But whatever works for you, I don't think we have to, or even should, all go the same way on this.

I just spent 15 minutes with old women at my job. It was all about how much interpersonal issues they had during their career, the backstabbing etc etc

Having suffered from this beyond reasonable levels I assure you, isolation would yield way more benefits than issues.

Now I'm not an extremist and being able to deal with some level of office politics to get a few more bonds is neat. But in my case, work sociology is synonym for hell.

It's totally reasonable to like a physical office and all it brings, but the above is a bit slanted.

I've worked remote in various forms since the late 90s. I've formed very important friendships with people halfway around the world I'd have never met in a local office. There's more than one way to socialize, and online socializing has some advantages too, not just drawbacks.

I met the majority of my friends at clubs and bars and house parties. I would be much happier with WFH if we still had bars and restaurants.

In February, I started my first ever gig as a contractor just before the virus hit. I was in the office for about two weeks and was just starting to learn the office, the people. What ticks bells and what doesn't. The team is very tightly nitted and without any presence in the office, I simply don't exist. I can sit all week on slack and not get a single conversation. If you highlight my name it's assigned as "Contractor" with my role left as blank.

Apart from the morning yesterday shift report given on Microsoft Teams. I just send my invoice in for the amount of hours completed. While I'm aware a contractor is suppose to be detached from the company because your hired for a specific reason / project but mentally it's a lot harder not knowing people, what emotions and how to react and webcam is just pointless; the delay and the lag from home connection is just so poor.

> You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office.

This is a perspective of very work-centric lifestyle. That's not for everybody.

Ditto for city life. I live in a city for my career. Now that remote work is more normal, I can live the life I actually want.

I work for a remote company (2 years now) and I just make friends elsewhere (typically neighbors and people I interact with outside of work day to day, as you'd expect). I actually find these friendships to be more fulfilling than work friendships.

I don't doubt lots of companies are providing terrible work from home experiences right now but if you're lucky to work for an all remote company from before COVID a lot of your criticism doesn't ring true for me at least. I'm sure there are people it just doesn't work for though, and I respect that might be the case for you. I just don't think a blanket statement "remote work doesn't work in the long term" is very likely to be true.

I've worked in a lot of offices, and I've spent almost 10 years working remotely. I would give the advantage to remote work in terms of social interaction because I can hold several conversations at once over chat.

Then again, my remote work was designed that way, not some half-assed thrown-together-at-a-moment's-notice poor-man's copy of a centralized office system. If you don't plan to succeed you're probably not going to succeed. That does not make the goal unworthy, but it does makes your effort unworthy.

> You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office.

If your only opportunity to make friends is at work, that's a really bad situation and it should be a very high priority in your life to fix it. Get a hobby! Find a shared interest to bond over. Go on dates.

Work should not be your primary source of community.

> Working from home isolates you. There is no way around this. You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office.

What about church, neighbors, walking in the park, family, etc?

I'm not going to to work to get more buddies, I'm there to make money (and make a difference, if possible).

Some of this can be mitigated by coworking spaces and a little less so by coffee shops or libraries.

> benefits for the team, as opposed to the benefits for the individuals.

As if it was a zero-sum game.

> It's just a job.

It is in fact just a job. Can be enjoyable, but that's what it is. Losing sight of this can lead to being exploited.

Respectfully, I disagree:

> Working from home isolates you. There is no way around this. You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office.

It may be that way for some people, but it doesn't have to be that way. I've been working remotely full time for a bit over 10 years and I have not felt this at all. For people who don't have a healthy community around them, what you say would be true. But the solution is not to force people to go to on-site work, it's to have healthy communities. Work should be a way for people to make a living, and sure, can provide social opportunities, but it should never be your main source of relationships. Most people already depend on their employer for income, making them depend on it for friends too seems terrible to me.

Not true at all in my experience, and I'm on my third full time remote work. I've always had great team bonding, even with people I have never met in person. I maintain a very good relationship (i.e., I speak very often) with former colleagues. I don't think the comparison with raising kids is valid. You can't compare successfully collaborating with other adults to achieve a common goal with raising your children.

I'm not sure why this is a problem though? It is just a job. If you identify yourself with the company and think it's more than just a job, you'll be in for a nasty surprise. I get money in exchange for my dedication, to the best of my abilities, to do some tasks. I'm not the company, and the company isn't me. As I said before, I do have great relationships with my colleagues. This is independent. In fact, both having a great relationship with colleagues and knowing that "it's just a job" is what has helped me extend my support network in a way that I always have a few doors to knock on should I need a hand, and I have my door always available and have given a hand to others when needed.

Your first sentence is exactly as it is. The rest of the paragraph directly contradicts it though. Have kids? It's great! I have 2, and I would not trade being around them as they grow up for any amount of money in the world. My oldest is 14 and as I said, I've been working remotely full time for a bit over 10, so I know what I'm talking about. In my specific case, working from home has been a blessing that has let me be there for them every single time except the very few moments in which I had face to face meetings in some other country.

I also live in the city, and I've never had to convert my bedroom into an office. After moving from a house (where I had a dedicated office) to an apartment, my office is now in the living room, but that doesn't bother me at all.

The last sentence is strictly true too actually, if you're a people's person, you surely won't enjoy working remotely. Let me tell you something though: if you're an introvert who plays very nice in teams but would rather not be around people (except for family or close friends) all day, working in an office has a very high host that gets visible in the medium term.

So please, let us just stop assuming we're all the same. Some people love working in an office surrounded by other people, others don't. If anything, I hope COVID perhaps is showing the extroverts and super social how bad it can feel to be forced to work in an environment that doesn't suite you, so that, once people can go back to "normal", they try to make arrangements that take every individual into consideration.

Not for me, I was very lucky to make the jump a long time ago, but for anybody else who may be like me (and I know I'm not alone) and must surely be enjoying this period of not having to go to an office.

None of this is written in stone. YMMV. You make what you want of it.

> Working from home isolates you. There is no way around this. You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office.

Completely false. I now have people in New York, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that I've built good friendships with in my all-remote company. It's actually opened up routes to friendships I didn't think were possible. I would also argue that it's actually better when I'm not just locked into making friends at work, there's more incentive to make friends outside of work too now which is great for pushing me out of my comfort zone.

Same as above. We have "happy hour" sessions at my current job where we all socialize and bring a beer to chat over Zoom. Outside of that, we bs and socialize daily in various meetings or across Slack. Again this all depends on you and your team members. If you want it to happen, make it happen.

I don't know about you, but for me an office job also ends up being "just a job". Personally I couldn't care less about "feeling identified with the company". I have zero loyalty to my employers and my friendships are not restricted to arbitrary boundaries defined by where I work.

Haha this is rich. I've had to deal with the opposite problem for years where the vast majority of employers are office-only and my family needs require a remote setup. I had to make arrangements with my boss to work remotely and constantly live in anxiety fearing anytime the company had a re-org and I got a new boss, the arrangement would end and fuck up my life (and it did). Over the years I've had to limit my search to remote only employers to avoid that scenario. You can do the same and seek out office-only employers.

> It is important and it has tons of benefits for the team, as opposed to the benefits for the individuals.

Yeah that's great except the benefits for the team have slanted in favor of the team for many years, neglecting benefits for the individuals. There's nothing wrong with balancing out the best of both worlds. Going back to all the points I touched on, you and your team make what you want of it.

This.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com