The social and economic costs borne by young people without offices

-- For the budding young developer who can't wait to show ideas to teammates and demonstrate being a go-getter by asking random questions and finding unaddressed issues to innovate on, WFH might be terrible. You're going to schedule time to fortuitously run into the senior person who takes an interest in your idea?

-- For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50% due to parenting obligations, WFH might be terrible.

-- For the middle manager who can coast along and not need to move greatly in his/her career, WFH might be great.

-- For the developer who works by tickets on very concrete things and this is nothing new, WFH might be great.

-- For the small company CEO who relies on force of personality and everyone in the same room urgently working to get something done, WFH might be terrible.

There's a huge variability in what WFH means, depending on what you want from the situation.

For some people, remote working is really not good.

And that's aside from the point that, when everyone is remote, you're also competing with the world who is also remote. Jobs and job qualifications (and competition) may change...

To be honest, I've never really had a cubicle. Usually just a desk in a bullpin type arrangement. No privacy. Distractions galore. The sound of co-workers flushing the toilets in the restrooms nearby. Nothing to reflect fondly upon in my opinion.

If I had wanted or needed a new job, completely changing careers would probably have been easier than getting another gig in my field with the experience I’d accrued at home.

No doubt my experience is different doing technical work, but I have never relied on my co-workers to line up my next position. I flip the switch on linkedin to let recruiters know I'm looking and call or email the recruiters I have worked with in the past. Sometimes an employer might ask for a reference. I suppose I do have a short list of those.

“Outside of immediate family, people’s co-workers become their most consistent opportunity for social interaction,” Peditto told me. “What happens when you lose that is one of my greater concerns.”

My social interactions really do revolve around my family and long time friends. It's not a large group, but I'm not a social butterfly either. I have a hard enough time keeping up with those social interactions. Who knows, maybe I was born for remote work.

Overall this feels like yet another hit piece against remote work with a lot of anecdotes and not much else. Here I am arguing against it with my own anecdotes. I really don't understand why these keep cropping up. Are commercial real-estate conglomerates paying for these?

Personally, I am happier than I have ever been working remotely. I don't struggle to keep a routine or maintain separation between my work life and my home life. I don't feel starved for social interaction either. I would hate to see the sentiments these articles convey ruin something that has been very positive for myself and my partner (and my dog).

My student apartment is not equipped for this lifestyle. I do not have a home office in a sprawling estate in the suburbs on several acres of property where I can enjoy the sounds of nature. I live in a small apartment on a busy street surrounded by highways and golf courses who don't let plebs like me wander around inside.

When I'm at home, I just feel this anxiety about working that just never subsides. I feel much more relaxed when I'm able to be outside, but the nearest public green space is campus, which I avoid as much as possible now that school is in session. The nearest park is a thirty minute drive, but I have to check the air traffic before leaving due to a nearby airport.

At home, work seems to never end, especially with the 13-hour time difference that necessitates 10:30pm meetings twice a week. On one hand, I really enjoy this rare occasion to talk to my co-workers, but on the other hand, I can't shut off my work brain until after the meeting is over. On these days I end up going to sleep at 3 or 4am, adding to the cycle of stress and sleep deprivation.

I figured this would last one, maybe two months at the most. But now it's been four months since I started remote work and six months since I accepted the initial offer. There's no word about Japan issuing new work visas any time soon.

I want my life to begin.

Just finished a parent transcript today. What came through loud and clear is that school from home is wicked hard for all kinds of people and that combining WFH and school from home is even more wicked hard. Parents are struggling with their kids' academic content (pre-calc? algebra?!). Kids are struggling with less structure. Everyone is struggling with limited bandwidth (literally and figuratively) and learning/working styles and the need for socialization are colliding in an unfortunate, constant way. For many, not all.

Looking forward to reviewing all the transcripts and compiling the findings. But if parents are any indication, it's gonna be a rough fall.

*Edit: Yes, I'm from New England. (wicked)

Some of the downsides of WFH that the article points out, like how our office coworkers incidentally become our social life (and now we don't have them), are also symptoms of larger issues that I don't think work should be tasked to solve. The social isolation of the youth (before Covid) and the dependency on an office for many people to make friends were already pretty depressing parts of our society.

But so was having to go to work to do a job that could be done anywhere. Like everyone always talks about wanting to retire so they can finally hang out on the beach year round, but WFH is what lets you do that. It doesn't need to be a distant dream anymore for when you're old. I get that people were suddenly tossed into the deep end of WFH due to Covid instead of given a choice, and that many people aren't cut out for it.

But this kind of coverage also goes too far, I think, in a world where we were always forced to go to an office. I was looking for a job last year, and I had to search high and low for a remote job. For example, almost all the job posts on HN want you to come into an office. I was unsuccessful finding remote work in my more traditional search and fortunately found a good remote job through my social circle.

Office jobs have a certain stability and, even more important, familiarity. But I think that familiarity can be confused with an assumption that it's the way things should be.

For example, I agree that a future where most jobs are WFH will have to consider a solution for helping us find a productive way to work (like giving us a private office in a coworking space or letting us choose a stipend to set up a home office). But also consider how depressing it is to clutch on to office work because it gives you an escape from your children—it's really not a quality of the office work itself that you're after, but somewhat of an incidental upside that can (and should) be replicated in a culture of WFH.

What I mean to say is that I see a lot of office-work praise for what's actually incidental advantages of office-work (that should definitely be replicated outside of office-work), and it would be a damn shame if we as a society use those incidental benefits to damn WFH and regress back to the more or less office-work-only society from which we came.

I hope we find a good 50/50 middle ground where people have a choice.

To say working from home results in a lost generation is excessive, almost to absurd. It is beneficial to some people and harmful to others regardless of financial or familial situations.

Furthermore that opinion only makes sense in a vacuum, such as for people who do nothing else and are limited to a single job solely focused upon writing software. Once your professional experience has broadened a bit absolutes like this subject become more clear for the limitations that they are.

For me it meant getting a house and setting aside a specific bedroom to be an office. I do use it for hobby activities but those uses are easily put away at the start of the work day. It's not used as a spare bedroom for visitors.

There are also certain security issues that employees and employers are going to need to come to an understanding on now that remote work is getting more common. Some discussions should not be able to be overheard by spouses, roommates, friends, or if your walls are thin enough, neighbors. So far there seems to be very little discussion around the security side of things, likely because everyone knows for most of those suddenly thrust into remote work, there's only a limited amount they can do about it right now.

Even at a wider, multi-group level, we are able to address issues of innovation and serendipity by creating time and space for them. One of the best tricks is encouraging lots of small presentations on non-work or semi-work topics followed by lots of open ended conversation. People show up by mutual interest outside of their project based work and talk. I run a book club roughly themed to application development and every session I meet new people from across the org and exchange ideas. Some of these contacts have resulted in valuable insights for later projects. Volunteer projects and hackathons can serve a similar purpose.

These are just examples and we are hardly perfect, but I if the projections of an massive increase in WFH bear out at all, you'll see culture adapt to it as well- people will get better at socializing on screen, feel more free to ping with questions, and will find these alternate avenues to collaborate. I'm less confident that society outside of work will adapt as well, but I wouldn't be surprised at all to see a long term increase in young people continue to live with extended family or social clubs.

There's certainly some people near either extreme -- from those whose mood, productivity, health plummets when away from a social/work environment, to those who could happily go weeks or months with minimal human interaction, and whose productivity soars when they set their own schedules and can control & minimise interactions and interruptions.

Apart from a tacit acknowledgement that people are not required to be in an office 5 days a week, I am hopeful that this pandemic will lead more workplaces to embrace and accommodate that spectrum, facilitating environments and conditions that will better suit - well, ideally everyone, but I'll take 'more people than before'.

So others do that too?

I understand that most people are working for a company so others tell her what to do after school when they also train you what to do and you are micromanaged all the time.

The article portrays that you need your boss to create your social circle for you.

People do not see that as the enormous opportunity that it is.

For example, before I worked remote I used to spend two hours every day commuting. I risked my life on the road with truck drivers and other carriers that were always late, stressed and dangerous. That also required my own money in gas and car repairs, expensive clothing...

Most people at the office were not my friends, they were coworkers, and because I spent so much time there I had no time for seeing my real friends and family. I was also exhausted all the time, because I did not sleep enough.

Working remote is amazing for me now(it was tough at first) and it could be for a lot of people is only they learn to grasp the opportunity.

Take control of your own life, you will have to go against the training of the school days that is pervasive, school took years of your live. It will take you years to undo this training. Make your own group of friends, lovers. Sleep and eat well. Exercise. Invest on your skills.

The article portrays young people as victims, and it is quite the opposite, they are the ones that can adapt and learn and grow.

I went to Russia and most old people had a hard time working in a capitalist society because they grew up in a State that did everything for them, so as young people they did not developed the skills to make things on their own. If you actually tried , you were strongly punished.

But young people are adaptable. When I was young and started working remotely very few people did, so I had to learn on the go. Today it is much better and easier.

Be proactive, refuse being a victim, if you have problems with working remote create a club, a mail list or whatever for other people in your same situation. Learn from people that have made it.

But don't be a victim. We will be having covid for at least 5 to 6 months more in the north Hemisphere. You can spend that time doing something about it, learning and improving your skills or just complain all the time.

After everything goes back to normal, most people will not do remote work 100%, but odds are they will do 30%, 40, or 50%, and their live will improve as a result if you have gotten the skills.