Why do so many people want us back in the office?
paulitaylor.com
paulitaylor.com
Some people have long commutes and wfh is great
Others have small, expensive apartments they paid for shorter commutes and it's suffocating 40-50 hours a week
Some people live in palaces and offices are a step down in comfort
Some people are happy with the online interactions
Some people are dissatisfied with the online interactions and prefer to talk to humans and not text strings from humans they can't see or hear
Some people want to work from home some of the time, and go to the office some of the time, and they've wanted that before the apocalypse occurred (puts hand up)
Cities are nervous that business districts are devastated since no one buys coffee, lunches or walks home and steps into a shoe store or tailor, or to a bar for drinks with colleagues.
But like much else in our present world, things are presented in black and white, emotive ways.
I'm a college student graduating next year, and I just finished my first substantial internship ever in a remote arrangement. The past twelve weeks were my first real experience in my professional environment of interest, but I'm not even sure if I can call it that. I did the best I could and completed three of four of my projects, one of which was a competition where my team placed. But this was despite reassignment from my preferred original projects (in a physical lab), productivity, and general morale suffering immensely from pretty much every restriction COVID and the California wildfires have wrought on us.
I'm a young guy in the process of building myself in nearly every way. I have more "potential" than I do domain knowledge and wisdom. I'm less disciplined. I feel a huge need to get out into the world and see people in places to develop my career and every type of relationship. These have all been harder to work on in the current climate.
So when I see people extolling anecdotal virtues of no commute or not having to bother with seeing their coworker's faces in response to comments explaining why people may like the office, I get annoyed. I've literally never seen a single colleague of mine in real life or had a chance to get bored of my commute, and it was not a choice for me. Yes, adapting as things come is important. That doesn't change the assertion my demographic will have likely been more impacted by this when the smoke clears. I haven't had nearly as much opportunity as these people may have taken for granted in situating themselves so they can presently bank on their know-how and established relationships until we are out of this crisis. I hope my experiences in this regard will not be as bad as I go for full-time after I finish school in June.
As someone who's been through internships and many years of in office work this is worrying me too.
Our junior colleagues coming in without the little things they would get from sitting in a room with everyone else.
Without team lunches and social events. Because it's not direct impact this is hard to reason about and create artificially.
I chose to work remotely full time 4 years ago and I have to rely on my past years of experience quite a lot.
What I do see is that excellent mentors and senior colleagues still find a way to mentor less experienced colleagues. It just takes conscious effort from both sides and we need to support both sides more in this.
I'm very keen to study this in my teams and use the learnt experience to raise the base level.
As someone who's later in his career, I'm totally fine and happy working from home (and was doing that most of the time pre-pandemic anyway), but if I look back to my early-/mid-20s and think about all the in-person mentorship I'd gotten, and how much I learned just by physically being in the presence of other people with more experience than I... I'm really worried about how we're going to effectively mentor a new generation of colleagues if we have to keep up this reduced amount of interaction.
Now, we do need to be careful to not equate the current situation with what "minimum office" might look like outside a pandemic situation. If we were all working from home but didn't have to isolate and socially distance ourselves, we'd still greet our interns and new employees with lunches and other outings, and we'd have plenty of random get-togethers in parks and bars. And I'd expect we'd come up with ways to get more-senior folks in the same room with the newcomers on a regular basis during the work day, whether in a co-working space or just a sparsely-populated office.
So really, it just sucks right now, but won't always. I know that's little consolation for you and those like you, who are entering into this mess before we've figured out how to do it right. I do expect things to be a bit better next summer after you graduate, but I'm sure there will be plenty of rough edges.
Sure, communications tools and practices were a lot different then. But, even so, it's difficult for me to see starting out working from my apartment.
Just as everyone experiences some level of shock at the start of university for what it is truly like, I expect the same for my transition into the workforce, and that it may take a long time. It took me until last November of last year to truly fall into a groove in college, and that was in normal times. The harder recent period has been a strange juxtaposition for me of adult responsibilities with the stuck-at-homeness of my teens. In essence, it felt as if my life regressed in every way with the exception of a regular paycheck.
It's all the more jarring when you consider that my time at college was derailed in March just as I was the most at peace, capable, and ready to build others up around me. Now, I'll likely never see that environment again. I have lots of unfinished work in the labs and CS/CE student community which can only be realized in a diminished extent now. There are countless people I never had a chance to say goodbye to. I sadly expect my own graduation to be virtual like the class of 2020's.
In summary, I understand reality will rarely align with expectations. Sacrifice and adversity can be expected, and thus far I have been fortunate to have not lost anything truly irreplacible. However, there is room to lament lost plans and opportunity. That wave of momentum and self-esteem I managed to climb to the crest of towards the end of my in-person college experience will have to be rebuilt. I am and shall overcome the times we live in now, but it is also not unclear to me what I could have done and became if the pandemic didn't happen.
People that have the luxury of a dedicated office at home, an actual room that is just used as an office, not a corner of the kitchen or living room that has the "family desk" that everyone shares, is more apt for WFH
I know many people that do not have this space, and do not have the ability to create this space in their home. For them WFH is a challenge.
On the other hand, people like myself that do have a dedicated office space that is in many ways better than the office space at the commercial office find WFH to be great and prefer it, even when factoring in your list.
In my office I would say it was about 60-70% of people that preferred working in the office and did not want to work from home primarily because they did not have a dedicated working space nor could easily create one.
that said I think you can build in remotely, even the people I am in the same office with 70-80% of our communications is over Chat, Phone, or Email anyway. Why walk 10 feet to the persons office when I can just message them on slack or teams?
I don’t doubt that one day our descendants will prefer something else than laughing. I doubt it will happen in my lifetime though.
It's such an illusion, too - the sender doesn't even see the same emoji character as I do because of different fonts and devices. Some emojis look sad or angry on some devices, and smiling on others. There's plenty of room for misinterpretation.
But it adds feeling anyway!
Privacy. Human interaction element. If all your interaction is online at your work - good for you. It isn't for my work environment.
Some of my coworkers have taken to giving me their phone number so that we can talk outside Slack because they worry that Slack is being watched now. Some of my coworkers and I used to go on 1:1 walks around the office area to get a breath of fresh air but also to have private discussions. We can't do that the same way anymore. I talked to one on the phone recently but it's not the same - you can't see every bit of their emotion as it is conveyed. Video doesn't do this justice either - how often are people going to show you a nervous fidget they're doing off screen that indicates they're under a lot of stress?
It depends on the type of place you're at. If you're at a great place where everything is just a rocket ship, everyone is in love with their work, and everyone's boss is just a stellar human being who really has high regard for their subordinates - then whatever. But - that's not been the case at any company I've ever worked at. So, :shrug:
This is one factor I should consider more, I (among others) control our companies communications platforms so I know the security, who has access, what they can see (and cant see) etc.
If I was not on that team this may also be a factor for me.
as to emotions... Again this is why I work on computers.. I take a Vulcan outlook to emotions.
More importantly, the comment has nothing but an anecdote that's attempting to make a statement on what the stats will probably be. There's no fact-based discussion possible, only whether you think the anecdote is "representative" or not. Which you have to decide based on your prior beliefs, because the post doesn't contain new information ("X population has nonzero people who disagree on belief Y" is not new information).
I guess I should ask: what discussion could be had around this anecdote, other than "guess the % who agree"?
Though I can imagine a scenario where it's equally bad for everyone. For example, if the client needs an in-person demo to understand how the widget works or to be convinced that it's useful, but no seller is offering an in-person demo, then the client may decide to not buy it from anybody.
Maybe it does, but that doesn't make people's job that were heavily relationship-focussed more enjoyable
Here are some candidates -
1. Improvement in city air quality due to reduced commute - road and flight.
2. Erosion of "social credits" over time due to lower bandwidth interactions when remote.
3. Cumulative impact of serendipitous but significant learning arising from in-person interactions.
4. Impact on the body - prolonged unmoderated sitting in bad postures, eye strain due to constant staring into the screen, bad eating habits, etc.
5. Reduction in sense of belonging / identity / cohesiveness as the "molecules" that make up a cell can move more freely through the "cell boundary".
6. Impact on cognitive development during early childhood - due to school-from-home and lack of social interactions. Joint family homes are great to counter this!
7. Eroding knowledge and awareness of local geography due to reduced travel. Reduced attachment here can lead to apathy when local environs get trashed.
Hey, this is me! I developed tendonitis in the shoulders from sitting in a lounge chair all day, and now I work with a physiotherapist who gave me funny looking exercises I do twice a day to retrain my body to get my hands behind my back (and other forms of shoulder mobility).
Ergo is not a joke, friends.
I have much better food at home than whatever shit I can buy at or near the office.
And it's probably also cheaper. For 5 € I can either buy a small lunch for myself, or cook for the entire family. With less salt, and more vegetables.
What kind of awareness of local geography do people even cultivate on a 40 minute commute? You're going for speed and consistency, not novelty and aesthetics.
You see only a tiny amount of environs on your commute (most of it non local), and I'm not sure people develop that kind of relationship with the neighborhood at mile 38/49 that they'd care if it's trashed, whatever that means and however they'd notice.
I've had both long and short commutes, and I don't understand what you're talking about.
I actually lost weight and improved my posture when WFH, and i do have better eating habbits now(being able to cook a warm not pre-ready meal for breakfast is a godsend)
More important for what? And for whom? Someone who just shaved 100% off of their 70-minute commute probably doesn't give a fuck that their awareness of the "local geography" (see: trash-draped blackberry bushes on the highway shoulder) is "eroding."
Some of your points are legit (particularly 6), but your dismissal of what you call "first order effects" is essentially just proving OP's meta-point about the terms in which the discussion is being held.
I found your response to hone in on one detail and contribute nothing useful to the conversation.
I'm not dismissing first order effects. They are important. However higher order effects are where feedback cycles usually reside (ex: whats happening with climate change). So ignoring them is not a good idea even if during the initial phases it might seem like obsessing over details. In poorer countries, we can't ignore the risk of people dying due to hunger triggered by lockdown for covid19, for ex.
Public policy is hard and chock full of higher order effects. Common mental habits of super focused problem solvers don't help and can be downright bad to address such problems (ref: Dietrich Dorner's revealing book "The logic of failure").
Around my locality (Chennai, India) it is a very compelling argument that lack of awareness of local geography can be behind the dire water supply situation. For example, all localities with the name "pakkam" were originally in the vicinity of large water bodies .. nearly none of which are around today. Many localities were named after the dominant vegetation in the area, which you won't see any signs of today.
Yeah the commute is probably not going to help much because the commuters will likely be on their phones or cursing the increased traffic due to the need to be in offices. Feedback loops start that way.
I'm not aware of any particular evidence that "second order effects" are driving climate change or causing feedback cycles. But I suppose it depends how you define it. What do you have in mind here?
An immediate first-order effect is a lack of air travel.
A resulting second-order effect will be the eventual shift in aircraft buying trends, pricing, scheduling, etc. to adjust to diminished air travel, something that cements more concretely the travel patterns we're adopting during the pandemic. Examples may include smaller but more fuel efficient planes, but also potentially ordering far less of them (we're seeing this now - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-american-airline-outlook/...) as well as possibly shifting seat availability in favor of business and premium classes to extract more value from people who do fly...
...which loops (to the OP's point) back into keeping more people from flying as a third-order effect.
---
Et voila, significantly reduced air travel and a significant aid in our fight against climate change.
If fewer flights is a "second order" effect here, I'd struggle to name anything that is a first order effect. I don't really think this is what the person I was responding to was talking about when they mentioned second order effects. But if it was then I question the usefulness of the terminology.
> If fewer flights is a "second order" effect here, I'd struggle to name anything that is a first order effect. I don't really think this is what the person I was responding to was talking about when they mentioned second order effects. But if it was then I question the usefulness of the terminology.
I'm confused; I don't see how your interpretation arises from what I laid out.
I'll see if I can rephrase and clarify.
The first order effect is that less people are flying specifically because of the pandemic. This doesn't immediately result in fewer flights because air schedules are meticulously planned in order to maintain specific routes, which is why oftentimes at the beginning of the pandemic many planes were flying almost entirely devoid of passengers. In essence, the airlines were hemorrhaging money because their flight schedules were planned months/years in advance by anticipating certain flight loads, and all of that was turned sideways in less than 6 weeks.
The second order effect is that airlines start factoring in the risk of a protracted outbreak with no foreseeable end and therefore start making longer-term strategic decisions adjusting to the sustained (years-long) impact of less flights being booked. New routes, canceled routes, different purchasing decisions for planes, different decisions around how to equip those planes and for which classes of clients, folding some operations in some cities altogether, consolidating operations, etc., and these changes will likely result in airlines having to extract more value from the fewer passengers who do have to fly....
> ...which loops (to the OP's point) back into keeping more people from flying as a third-order effect.
...and therefore potentially contributes towards sustained reduced impact on the environment due to less flights being flown globally, greater fuel efficiency of new jets, and less fuel being burned as a result of both.
Hope this helps.
That's all well and good, but in fact the pandemic did essentially immediately result in fewer flights. Flights started getting cancelled within days of lockdowns starting in NYC. If this is a second order effect, then everything is a second order effect. Reduction in travel demand is a second order effect of the pandemic. The pandemic is a second order effect of globalization. Globalization is a second order effect of trade efficiency. Trade efficiency is a second order effect of air travel. Etc. It's not a useful terminology.
That's first-order. You can reference my prior post for the distinction between this and long-term re-working of tactical and strategic decisions (second-order)
Not sure how else I can explain this to you mate. The original commenter and I seem to get it.
Plenty of times, multiple people have had agreement on a belief that is ultimately incorrect. Before you crow, see how the air travel landscape looks in five years. I predict, assuming the pandemic is resolved, it will have fully recovered and passed the 2019 peak.
Yep, offices have a terrible impact on people. Working from home gives you the opportunity to eat better, have far fewer snacks thrust in your face, and to get.out and exercise at lunch.
I spend much more time in my local environs now I don't have to travel away from them each day.
> Impact on the body - prolonged unmoderated sitting in bad postures, eye strain due to constant staring into the screen, bad eating habits, etc.
How does WFH change how you sit and the eye strain? You’re doing the same work, what changed? IMO having a good office setup (chair, device, screen, room lighting) is a must for any WFH position, but especially if it’s full-time.
Also for me, the food is better because in the office I used to eat snacks and go out in restaurants or fast foods. Now I mostly make food at home, and with the benefit of s garden have home-grown vegetables. So I eat better and spend less, plus I cut down the crap food from couple times a week to a few times in a month.
As I see it, the argument 4) applies only with refusing to invest into a proper working environment setup and with the lack of discipline. But I hardly believe someone with the lack of discipline would eat any better in the office. And I’m taking this from my past experience.
Two, WFH can mean less interruptions requiring you to move, resulting in far more sedentary behaviour than normal office work, even if you assume no difference in movement from commute.
The other point I agree with :)
For my situation, my home is better than office where could not code in standing (we don't have such culture) and has no place to walk around for thinking. And, at home, I could make lunch healthier with balanced nutrition when there are no good restaurants near my company.
Working on the crappy laptop and a kitchen chair is less than ideal - and the fact I was furloughed 4 months and ran out of savings means I can´t buy new stuff for WFH, not to mention it could end up being wasted money if I'm back in the office the next month.
And I'm not in the US so "used" stuff or other cheaper workarounds don't work for me (no "buy it from Amazon", there's no Amazon here)
1. I replaced my commute with more screen time. This was a net increase in my daily time spent at a computer. 2. My screen time was more contiguous. I didn't have to walk to my coworkers' desks for a quick chat (whether casual or work related). Meetings kept me at my desk instead of moving. My work day transitioned directly into my personal hobby time (video games).
some bosses themselves work best in the office with people around.
What is more complicated is why they want to take everyone else with them. My own employer is letting some people come back in the office but not insisting on it.
And all of this in the context of the trilemma: try for zero virus, accept total spread with associated medical costs, time off, deaths, and potential long term complications, or delay until the vaccines are ready and being deployed.
Probably because what other people do affects them.
If everyone else on their team comes back to the office and they choose not to, that's probably not an ideal situation.
Conversely, if they come back to the office and most of the people they work with don't, they're now effectively in a co-working situation where the office is just a physical space and they'll still be on video meetings all the time.
In my current job I'm progressing quickly and have built good relationships with my colleagues. We can take a break and just turn around and chat for 10 minutes about random stuff. When everyone is working from home it's not like I could just call someone and chat to them because I don't know if they're busy or not. I can't build the same sort of relationships as I can in person.
I'm quite introverted in a way that I find it hard to go out of my way and make friends. But the longer I spend with people in person, the easier it is and I find that I'm able to get along with almost everyone I meet.
And as with most things, it's not really what you know, it's who you know. And knowing someone IRL is much better than knowing someone remote.
I don't really see what the issue is. In my company if we want to chat we simply ask on Slack "can we have a call?", and the other person either says 'ok' or 'call me later'. Most conversations happen over async chat, which is great if you are waiting for something to compile (Scala...).
How do you do it in an office setting? Would you go over to a person wearing headphones and starting telling them about your weekend?
This is exactly my situation, it takes me two hours of commute per day to get in the office, and the housing is prohibitively expensive the closer you get to it.
My quality of life is significantly improved by WFH, which leaves me with more quality time with my kids and to cook.
Offices don't require that. All the soft benefits - water cooler chats, and so on - are balanced by disbenefits of expensive commutes and even more expensive real estate.
So the experience becomes a lot more individual. Some people are happy, others aren't.
Since most corps care more about productivity and costs than happiness, the final decision will be made by the cost savings.
If productivity drops by (maybe) 20% while costs drop by (maybe) 50%, it's likely wfh will become much more of a thing.
Some corps are already giving up on centralised office space - either permanently, or in the hope they can run remote for a year or two and renegotiate much lower rents and/or ownerships costs then.
Of course this assumes the (maybe) 20% productivity costs won't be cumulative. But given the insane costs of office space, I suspect we'll see a lot of corps trying the experiment and attempting to make the best of it.
So IMO anyone who is expecting things to go back to "normal" soon is going to be waiting at least a couple of years, and possibly forever - and should make plans accordingly. This applies equally to everyone, from CEOs to interns to freelancers.
I think this is more true than a lot of people think/or care to make known.
I know the business district in my city, Nashville, is hurting right now.
There’s the problem.
Turns out, when city is of a type of mixed use and walkability such that you live above (or a trolly ride away from) where you work, working at work or working at home don’t meaningfully change city viability.
Greyness comes with crafting a collage of black and white?
Why must my personal position take into account a composite greyness if it means being put into an office setting I am not productive in?
Why bend myself to an arbitrary greyness?
Our social laws should acknowledge the greyness and avoid empowering a uni-culture that leans towards one choice? Efficiency != resiliency.
Rather than commit to the one size fits all dragged in the direction of currency holders. Complete lack of acceptance a nations currency is propped up by the greyness in opinions
I don’t care who has memorized what facts. The fact remains they’re not a god
I think this is easily resolved by audio / video calls. All of my coworkers are significantly older than me and have no issue communicating this way.
I dont mind commuting but I dont want to commute as often. I think my sweet spot would be to commute around noon once traffics no longer crazy and go back home after traffic dies down but the more I think about that the more I feel like driving altogether is a waste. I prefer to only commute when we all decide to be onsite to discuss something and work through it.
On another note we've had lunch calls on Wednesdays as a more informal setting so everyone can talk about general things and keep the social aspect going. Course some people don't feel the need to partake (I sometimes am too busy) so it's quite different from call to call.
I believe remote work is a temporary phase, with businesses going back to the "old normal" as soon as COVID no longer presents much of a threat.
My first reason for thinking this is I've found inertia is the most powerful force in the office environment. When given the option to adopt a different way of working, the aggregate whole will resist the attempt unless there is no alternative. This conservative nature is the reason why Agile fails to take hold, why compliance rituals will remain long after they're relevant and so on.
The second is extravert culture dominates the office. Most people are extraverted (about 60% IIRC), with even higher concentrations in general and C-level management. This can be observed in the performative nature of the hiring process, the belief in open plan offices, in companies thinking of meetings as productive rather than waste to be minimised and believing in things like brainstorming sessions leading to better results despite research indicating the opposite. An extraverted manager needs to interact with someone on a personal level because they need the stimulation and social contact, and because it's more efficient for them. An introvert has no such leanings.
Third, I believe we're in a leadership crisis, where companies believe "command and control" is more important than improving employee efficiency. In order to control, you need pants in seats. When adopting that stance, you're less likely to want to delegate in the true sense: offer employees autonomy over their tasks, trusting they'll get the job done. Working from home is counter to the control scheme.
As I see it, the voices arguing for a return to the office are the representatives of the conservative, extraverted, control-oriented voices in the business community.
My colleague has a massive house with a pool tennis court and so much space he has literally 3 never-used bedrooms. His wife looks after kids who are at school most of the day again. His commute is 2 hours each way.
People are talking home vs office people are coming from very different comparisons.
You missed a key word in the parent post.
_Ideally_ people wouldn't be forced into multiple hour long commutes either, but that has been the reality for many before this year.
Im happy for all the people that can live happily hours outside of urban areas but the insistence that remote work is uniformly better for all people is just so exhausting. I for one, will be glad when it ends and will continue to prioritize companies that keep most of their work force in office; bringing work into my living space has been terrible for my mental health (anecdotally this sentiment has been shared among other single young people i know in the city).
The insistence that we need to force everyone back into the office makes me quite upset.
Some teams fight this with some strict rules - eg insisting conversations between people sitting next to each other happen over slack. But I think it will usually work better in the long run if either everyone is in the office or basically everyone is remote.
Yeah, that’d definitely work itself out; but it’s not what I would describe as a remote friendly workplace.
On the other hand, I don't particularly miss the office. Sure, it's nice to have breakfast with my workmates from time to time, but I can live without it.
I should also mention I don't mind commutes that are: walk to bart, read, get off bart, walk to work, work, reverse. I DO mind commutes that are: drive for an hour, sit in traffic, avoid that asshole trying to cut into my lane, and listen to podcasts. (I like podcasts, it is the driving part that is frustrating) It is substantially more stressful.
The important thing is that it's time that is literally impossible to re-allocate to either housework or work-work.
Any makeshift substitute won't have that property, and you'll be pressured to skip it in order to do more housework or more work-work.
So it is all about habits and freedom. Turns out freedom is not that easy to manage. Artists and self employed people have to be able to manage such things themselves (think writing an album at home), and it’s interesting to see that many people are struggling with that.
And it’s not like there’s really any places to get deep focus anymore. The parks and plazas are filled with air pollution, cafes are takeout only and libraries are closed.
I thought that overall air pollution was way down, and covid dispersion outdoors was a minor concern. Where I'm at, I avoid indoor space maximally, but outdoors I am comfortable with 6 ft and a mask.
I even make sure to my favorite fast food breakfast once a week and coffee twice a week. Fortunately for me that is but a ten minute drive one way to the closest place to fill that requirement but it fulfills the ritual.
One item to remember to add in to that time and money savings of your commute, you safety and security has gone up as well
Anyway I'd rather not use public transport right now. I don't think it's safe.
Or you could just walk (or bus, when it's safer to do so) to a park, sit on a bench, and read for a half hour? Or maybe even the full hour and a half, so you get some uninterrupted reading in, and you can pick whether you do that in the morning, or in the evening? Or, hell, do half in the morning and half in the evening as you do now, just without the pressure to get somewhere.
I keep hearing how some people (mostly those who don't have to drive themselves) like their commute, and are sad they don't have one anymore, and may not even after COVID restrictions are lifted, but... you've been given that time back to do whatever you want with it. How is that not in every way better than a commute, even one you currently enjoy?
People who have a 2 hour (one way) commute from hell from their massive house are super happy about this situation (shocking, I know).
People who live in a small studio apartment 10 minutes from the office see it differently.
What I expect this to result in is employers increasingly forcing people to WFH (either outright, or by making the offices horribly unattractive through hot-desking, increased density, etc.), pushing the cost of an office onto employees.
Even if a company "generously" gives you a $1000 allowance, that barely covers what high quality office furniture would cost, and in exchange, you pay a lot of tiny things that don't seem to be worth mentioning individually but add up to a massive cost when you take them all together over years:
- the real estate
- HVAC
- utilities (increased water usage, electricity for the office equipment & HVAC)
- maintenance for all of that (money and time)
- cleaning (if your employer asked you to come in unpaid after hours to vacuum the office and scrub the office toilets, everyone would consider them crazy, and yet this is effectively what will happen with WFH)
Not to speak of all the amenities and perks employers often provide, like cafeterias (often subsidized or even free). And not only will you end up paying the businesses' business expenses, you'll often do so (at least in part) with your post-tax money, i.e. depending on your tax rate, each dollar spent may be equivalent to e.g. $1.6 in lost income.
On the one side you have the commute--both in time and money.
On the other side is whether the place you'd be living in otherwise is suitable for long-term WFH or if you have to spend more money for another bedroom or whatever.
So, if you already have a dedicated office in an exurban house (as I do), not commuting--which I rarely did anyway--is a cost savings. As someone who has mostly worked remotely for years, all the other stuff is pretty trivial even given the occasional significant purchase (I had to replace my very old office chair).
I already have to clean my house and/or have it done. And the delta in utilities, etc. is trivial.
ADDED: Companies sometimes have covered co-working spaces. Though I suspect this will become less common.
On the other hand it’s also much cheaper to cook at home.
PS: My preference is to live close enough to walk to the office, but that doesn’t really scale well.
I took on an extra $150-$200 in power expenses per month, and it was absolutely treacherous trying to get reimbursed for this. The company never considered the costs they were funneling into the employees - apparently - until people started to complain.
I fear most people were put into similar situations - perhaps not fiscally, but in a procedural sense - during this most recent mass WFH migration.
Well, fuck that... if it's company hardware and there's no reimbursement, power gets cut to that rack at 5PM local time.
"I don't know what to do. I guess if you wanted to send an electrician out to install a new circuit with its own meter, things might be more reliable."
I think OP needed an electrician onsite anyway, as $200/month would be somewhat over 2500 watts continuous 24x7 which would require in the US at minimum two dedicated 15 amp circuits. That's a serious enough amount of heat to require the attentions of a HVAC guy also.
I ran some small clusters at home for learning purposes and maybe $400 per year was pretty minimal compared to the cost of tuition, cost of the hardware, etc.
The rack consisted of a dual-processor Xeon 1U with a Tesla GPU, two 4U hard drive racks, and a UPS unit.
Since they said NYC we can bump that to 21 cents and then $150-$200 becomes 980-1300 watts, or 8-11 amps. That's something most people could plug in to their bedroom or living room circuit without a sweat.
I am fascinated by how people know these figures seemingly off the top of their heads. :)
That's a big difference from my laptop being plugged in at home for 8 hours a day rather than in an office.
(I expect another one of the "surprising industry suffering from covid" articles at some point about lack of footwear sales)
That said, I'd be happy to concede that working at home costs me $1K/yr. in costs I wouldn't have were I to go into an office every day. But that has costs like commuting (for most people) too.
Add in some of the other costs of the “downtown lifestyle” (lunch and coffee; skipped and brewed at home for pennies now) and I’m saving like $15k/yr post tax.
Just on insurance, parking, gas, lunches and coffee I’m saving enough to buy a brand new Aeron chair every month, give or take.
And if this turns permanent, there are a lot of other changes I can make to save even more money and increase my quality of life.
I’d say $1k/yr sounds about right for the extra expenses I’ll incur. That’s not even on my radar with all the other money this saves me and the opportunity it creates.
Especially if the house isn’t completely empty when you’re at work.
The more regular commuters we can take off the road, the better.
I live a 20 min walk from my office. I have £0 commuting costs.
On the other hand I live in an old city with little new built housing. My flat is over 100 years old with massive ceilings, electric heating and no way to way to improve the insulation. Heating it just in the evenings for 5 hours costs about £50 a month, heating it while I work will likely cost £70-100 extra in top.
Walking/biking gives you agency that public transit/cars don’t. It feels much freer.
I used to like reading on the train as time for myself but it didn't balance out the other stress & cost of commuting.
If Transport for London said that trains would be free at the point of use & actually put on enough service that most people got a seat I'd definitely consider the office more favourably again
The delta in house price for ‘extra bedroom’ in the place I live is around $250,000.
There is just no way my company is going to even consider reimbursing me for that.
- Have reasonable fast internet.
- (Affordable) Hospitals/Police/Firewatch in reasonable distance
- Are not to far away from the companies office as you likely still have to go to the office from time to time.
EDIT: Most people don't live in Tokyo or cities with similar expensive housings. The cost of moving away from cities is often much bigger then "just" longer transit times from home to work.
The length of a "tolerable commute" increases disproportionately as the frequency of said commute declines. If I have to commute every day, anything over 30 minutes is pretty tiring. If I have to commute twice a week, driving 2+ hours is fine. If I have to commute once a month, I'd be willing to live on the other side of the country and fly in.
While living in a house with too many bedrooms. And if you want to talk about environmental impact, the air is cleaner the water is blue again and maybe we start paying baristas 100k a year for the inconvenience of having to live in the city instead of software engineers that can fckoff and do this from the moon.
The obvious is slapping everyone in the face. And if you are in commercial real estate, best wishes in 2021.
But then this is the trade: he goes from a cheap, tiny place in Tokyo, spends most of his time at the office or out and about, gets to enjoy a world-class city
to: living somewhere that isn't Tokyo, where he can afford a space large enough to have an office, and is home all the time, and doesn't get to enjoy a world-class city.
Not a win, I'm guessing. And this is coming from someone in his third year of remote work who lives a mile out of a village of about 3,000 people. It's not everyone's cup of tea.
For example for some one where anxiety acts in a way which hinders him to proper handle thinks like making food or cleaning having a clean office with a Mensa giving out reasonable good food for a reasonable price is a massive difference. It can make the difference between overcoming it and complexity succumbing to it to a degree where you at some point end up homeless on the streets....
Sure just one example. But you can make many such examples. Often less extreme.
But however I look at it it always boils down to people being good of (housing, mental health, social net and high sallery (==more affordable office equipment)) profiting from it but people which are not (small dark apartment, mental health problems, abusive partners, social isolation, not much money) paying the price for it. And sure in the praxis you will find anything in-between.
> allready have a dedicated office in an exurban house
In my experience (Germany/Berlin) this normally only applies for people which earn above average and even then it not so common for people only earning slightly above average. The best/most common thing you find with people earning slightly above average is a room which is intended for children but they either don't yet have any or they already moved out so it was turned into a office room.
Also most office at home room I have seen where just suitable for one person, so if both partner need to do home offices it gets space-wise tight.
Living hours from your workplace because you can't afford to be closer is not privileged. Wanting to cook at home because it's cheaper than restaurants it's not privileged. Wanting to Save the costs of gas or public transportation isn't either.
There are good arguments for and against but it's kinda bad to assume.
And this is still when it’s unknown whether I’ll need to go back to an office full time at some point. If this turns into even 60-80% remote long term, I can start looking at things like selling the second car, moving a little further out instead of paying a premium for a “short” 1 hour commute, etc.
And that’s all without even discussing the time. The extra several hours a day I have to spend with my wife/child/dogs and doing things I love instead of sitting in gridlock are invaluable.
So I'd happily pay the commute cost if I have to for my mental well being. If you don't need that that's fine. You can stay home.
I have a gut feeling (so no data) that for many projects a core group of physically together people will out perform a group of remote workers of the same size "All other things being equal" (which they never are).
I come from games, having designers/artists/programmers able to look over each others shoulders and "riff" off each other's ideas is invaluable. But I know there are other kinds of work that don't need as much interaction so YMMV
Of course, I live alone in a decent-sized apartment outside of downtown. I also work at an XP shop (I actually much prefer remote pairing) and I'd probably feel differently if I had to work alone all day every day.
But in a way, this is not a balanced relationship. Sure, you'd want to interact with people like you who are excited about being together, so that's the preferred state anyway, but if most of your colleagues are of the 2nd sort, then you put the effort of going in the office to no reward. You could connect with people outside your immediate sphere, but team cohesion isn't helped by that and you might start disliking working there. So in a way you get some bubbles forming - those who prefer virtual interaction and those who prefer face-to-face.
This will probably be a big factor for career progression - is your manager leaning towards WFH or office-work? If you're on the other side, you might get left behind. Not that there aren't plenty of such possible discrepancies already out there
The people I want to talk to are usually busy doing actual work so we usually catch up at lunch or after work. I also have the personal numbers of those people. All the people that have time to talk during the work day I'd rather not talk to. I know this is basically an insult for that I'm sorry but I suspect you are one of those people. The awkward guy with no friends that comes to the office for his social interaction fix.
Riffing ideas is not helpful sorry but its just your awkward way of socializing. Has anyone really ever said oh ok I'll just trash this work and start over after "riffing"? No they just go "haha" and continue doing whatever they were doing.
For some reason, passionate work from home workers assume everyone likes what they like and everyone has the same situation as them.
I prefer going to the office. It’s not a moral failing, it’s just what I like. I think people should be free to do what they like.
EDIT: Not to say that studio 10 minutes from work might enjoy other aspects of his living situation but if his main constraint of "must be 10 minutes from work" is lifted, that gives him much more flexibility.
Even if I did I got a great deal on my flat and I'd have to move right out the the edge of town or to a very rough neighborhood to afford an additional room for the same price.
Lastly you're ignoring that some of us genuinely like being in an office. I like the physical separation between work and home, I like seeing folk day to day and I like discussing things and working together in person.
Almost any commute is going to outweigh those factors.
Then in my experience you're an outlier! I've never worked in an office with anything other than the worst bilge available for free....
If you're making £12,000 a year though? That £100 might be your entire budget for Christmas presents.
Not everybody’s situation is the same. I really liked my situation before COVID. I had a 10 minute walk to work, a large public park across the street where the city maintained the “yard”, and I saw my daughter for hours most evenings. Many co-workers who lived further out barely saw their kids during the week.
Obviously, COVID has caused a lot of people who love urban living to take a hard look at it. Living in a city loses its appeal when all the amenities are closed/gone, but the real estate “is not a cost” is not true for everybody. An extra bedroom where I live would have been hundreds of thousands more. We elected not to spend the money because, well, I had a desk at the office and we were only going to have one kid.
I still don't really understand this attitude. Sure, if you're only living in a particular city to be close to your office, it makes sense to re-evaluate when your office is now your home. But if you like living in a city because of those urban amenities... they're not gone forever. They're already starting to reopen, cautiously, to some extent, and I expect things will be back mostly to normal early/mid next year (minus, unfortunately, businesses that did/will not survive the shutdown). It seems pretty short-sighted to leave a place you otherwise love because of conditions that are temporary.
I’m not sure how things may change long term. (God I hope) in 5 years a new wave of people who didn’t live here during the pandemic will replace them. I suspect that even if people work from home full time on a more permanent basis, the cul-de-sac bedroom community suburbs will become even more isolating as people spend all their time there, not just for the quiet evenings and weekends.
We’ll see, I guess.
“Free” food isn’t free. “Amenities” aren’t free either.
Saving on the commute however, that’s a substantial savings in your time. Even if you have your commute subsidized, you aren’t likely being paid for your commute time. Getting back an hour or more per day is more valuable to me than a ping pong table or free coffee.
For those that live five minutes from the office — now you can move and save a pile of money in the process.
No thanks, I like my kids to be able to walk from school to home.
Is this privilege? Of course. A lot of people don’t have the luxury to go get a better job if their pay gets cut. But how does me foregoing that privilege help them?
I have no idea what the point of your comment is. Are you just wanting people to feel bad because they don’t like that WFH made their life a little worse?
Edit: The parent comment was edited after I started writing my comment. Said something about GP’s comment being a privileged one, amongst other things. Just for some context about where I’m coming from with my comment.
The key points I'm talking about are "some form of office" and I believe most people who can WFH had that. Even people who don't work in offices usually have a workplace, i.e. the utilities issue applies to them as well.
Less privileged workers will be hit harder by this, because a couple hundred bucks for all the bullet points I listed each month is not a huge deal to a tech worker, but potentially a massive deal for someone who makes less.
The additional perks are a tiny part of it, and subsidized (not free) cafeterias aren't uncommon even outside of tech in Germany. This will affect all office workers, not just tech.
I believe this is the very definition of penny wise, pound foolish. If the cost of providing an office is seriously noticeable against the (comfortable) labor of your people your company has much bigger problems than "business expenses".
When I found this place I never intended for it to for it to be full time wfh space for 2 people.
If I knew I'd only go to the office once a month I could live in Minden, NV or something.
Might need to reconsider Minden though https://twitter.com/markpmeredith/status/1304932801649623040
This is the real story.
Suppose you're a company that pays someone a really handsome salary. It's a man. Do you want him in the office, where he is guaranteed to spend 0 hours taking care of kids, or at home, where it's not guaranteed?
Don't pin this on the wife. Do you think she'd rather he drive 2 hours a day and not take care of the kids, and get paid $400k/yr, or nothing, because whatever he's doing is actually very competitive and there will always someone else gunning for that job, so this obsequious rehash of the "well just work part time" idea that exclusively programmers engage in does not apply? So there is no actual option, part time take care of the kids?
I want him wherever he feels he’s more productive. If that means he plays around with his kids 2 hours a day then more power to him.
Almost all of the casual conversations with my kids are more interesting than the casual conversations with my coworkers.
The puzzle of the rare effective and profitable office conversation is kinda like the rare and effective advertisement; we simply accept that 99% of it is useless and force enormous amounts of engagement to promote those casual successful interactions.
People are unhappy about extra money spent on Air Conditioning or an extra office chair but the most are happy to carry the opportunity cost of commute. :(
I make it 30 min by walking through a park to have a coffee in the morning and unwind before going home in the afternoon.
As someone with a comfortable WFH situation, and a 1h commute, I’ll definitely be staying at home most of the time once offices re-open - and maybe even consider moving a bit further out for a bit more space.
My company officially allowed on-site work again several weeks ago in NYC. I have one close colleague that tried it, and he was the only on in the office. I know several colleagues in small apartments that were not fans of not being in the office that have not returned yet.
Sure, more space at home makes it easier to drag this to the long term, but even people inconvenienced at home have found solutions for 180 days now, and aren't (at least with my company) jumping to come back.
I am absolutely, 100% against full-time WFH in an expensive, low-quality(no sound/thermal insulation) Bay Area apartment without a dedicated workspace.
> if your job can be done from home, it can be done from anywhere in the world
I will call anyone's bluff who says this. Do it. Good luck. If you haven't successfully done this already, there is a reason and you know it.
One final point is that anyone looking to judge my WFH productivity better take into account the endless procession of major disasters taking place outside my window. WFH in a pandemic with looting and massive wildfires is not the same as WFH in a 'normal' year.
It's fine. They can force the expensive employee to teach the new cheap person everything they need to know in the few weeks before departure!
/s
> I will call anyone's bluff who says this. Do it. Good luck. If you haven't successfully done this already, there is a reason and you know it.
Welp, I'm the CEO of a smart wearable device company (https://pavlok.com). We were based in Boston because everyone told me, and I believed you HAD to be in one place to build a startup, and DEFINITELY for a hardware startup.
Then when I finally closed the Boston office and moved to Medellin, Colombia. Then budapest. Then Berlin. Then Bali. Then Mexico.
All while doing the same for the team -- remote first, work anywhere.
Only then did we begin to explode in productivity and success.
I don't think it's true for EVERY job (tough to do janitorial cleanup from another country). But it is possible for a lot lot lot lot more than you think.
Not everyone has the resources to make a working place anywhere viable. You seem to have the resources to make a hotel in Budapest or whatever work. Talking so causally about international travel already puts you beyond most Americans’ income.
So yeah it is very, very easy for folks with a job like yours, and with the resources you’re afforded, to work anywhere. The issue isn’t proximity to resources, but the ability to complete work.
Usually true. Although some countries (like China) do have a business visa that you're supposed to get if you're e.g. attending a business event.
With a US passport traveling to countries for example, there's nothing keeping you from visiting for a month or two and working from a short-term rental. I don't know all the theoretical rules that may exist but I know traveling partly/fully on business, people obviously do work for their US company all the time without filing any special paperwork.
https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/a-shocking-way-rea...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/arti...
I have no doubt that I could personally move to another country and do my job. I seriously considered it as a way to escape unfair alimony payments, and still might.
What if, pre-covid, the reason was "we believe having everyone in one office, regularly meeting face-to-face, is more productive than anything involving videoconferencing" ?
And, of course, there are often other similar failures, like failures related to contractors, or failed attempts to switch from internally built software tools to third party vendors.
If a company has been around for 30 years and isn't using an option that seems much cheaper, there is going to be a history behind that.
One of the reasons why offshoring failed is that you needed to be in the office to have a 30 second chat about something that saved you a few minutes of digging to find it yourself, which added up quickly.
This is no longer the case.
There are still reasons to not offshore, but we do not know if they are enough to keep it from happening. These conversations tell you more about the mentality of the people having them than about the viability of offshoring.
Yes, but your compensation will be reduced. You can't take you SF salary into Eastern Europe.
First it’s wrong to assume there cannot exist multiple sets of laws in the same physical place, which reduces to effectively the economics of offshoring. Amazon delivery contractors deploy undocumented workers or people with unlicensed driving skills, paying them $7/hr and charging Amazon $15/hr. It’s economically positive for sure. The drivers live here. Is it really the same country or the same laws?
It’s also wrong to assume people have tried or will document the consequences of their try. Apple already earns more than $1m per retail employee. The gulf between Apple and BestBuy’s revenue per employee is much bigger than the savings due to offshoring anywhere in the world. I personally don’t think it’s obvious why Apple Retail stores are so successful, it is multifactorial and very difficult to reproduce, so even basic service jobs may never be worth trying to offshore (whatever that means) if there’s absolutely no way it could really matter. Another way of looking at it is that retail store bankruptcies occurring today were inevitable, the economics of what they were doing never made sense, so even if offshoring could save them money they were still doomed. This is a much harder conversation to have about IBM or Accenture, who have made offshoring a consistent economic positive for someone, we just can’t be sure it is for their clients or for them. However, it seems pretty obvious that a robot (or an abstraction thereof, like an automated warehouse) can do a lot of what retail workers do.
So I still think it’s all about the mechanics of the job, and it’s definitely a signal if you can WFH.
I can say one thing about it after being 100% WFH for 2+ years now, I can set my alarm clock, to wake me up exactly 1 hour before my morning video conference "standup" meeting, and still have time to wash-up, make coffee, watch the markets open, be properly awake and caffinated to participate in the meeting, etc...
Previously, depending on the total commute time, I would need to set that same alarm perhaps 2 hours or more in advance... the stress of the commute aside, I was getting less sleep on average, and in my line of work ( programming ) sleep is valuable to me, it helps me think better than when tired.
I feel more rested, healthier, happier, less stressed, and I know my productivity has INCREASED over the alternative in-office scenarios...
I will make my commuters into remote workers by default unless they either want to come in or have to. One of my guys is Polish in Poland and can do whatever the hell he wants! Most of my staff are a bit stressed over SARS-COV-2, as am I but we will crack on.
I'm glad to hear you are thriving. You are one of the folks keeping your economy going (wherever that is) - take some pride in that.
No they really aren't. It will be several years until we really understand the effect of remote work on areas like talent management, retention, idea generation, trust building, etc.
Sort of? Unfortunately this experiment also has included forced isolation and social distancing, and for parents where schools and day care have closed, a further experiment in what happens when parents have to simultaneously do child care and get work done.
I expect it's hard to look at what's going on now and really see what prevalent home-working looks like in normal times, when there isn't a global pandemic going on, people can still meet co-workers when necessary, and friends for normal social activities, and parents can still send their kids to school and get in a productive day of work without constant interruptions from their kids.
> I will call anyone's bluff who says this. Do it. Good luck. If you haven't successfully done this already, there is a reason and you know it.
I can give an example here: Back in March/April, we were told that if we wanted to "WFH" in another state, we had to get approval first due to laws around payments and taxes. Some states were pre-approved because of remote workers we already employed, but most had to be looked into and it wasn't a guarantee they'd be approved.
He gets paid UK rates for a UK job and lives in Poland as a sub-contractor. He may do other stuff there as well but I don't care - I get my pound of flesh 8) Poland is an hour ahead of the UK so he generally gets to run the 0800 start which works nicely.
Now this is not the new normal bollocks. It works for us and him. I can't ask him to go to Cardiff and roll out a few dozen new laptops but in general it doesn't matter that he is in a town in Poland that I can't possibly pronounce the name of, instead of Yeovil, when fixing a snag in Sherborne or Hull.
I and my company are very lucky that we can still function effectively, regardless of location. I as MD am now much more disposed towards home working. We were already pretty flexible but now I am far keener on even more flexibility. There are loads of silly and not so silly things to work out eg "I did x but n doesn't seem to be pulling their weight" etc. We need to invent mechanisms to deal with this. We already do a weekly get together on Teams but that is not good enough.
I tend to agree. At least as it relates to offshoring. My company has been doing a 50/50 split between the US and Hyderabad/Pune for years, and there is no real danger of us moving everything to India. Good developers there aren't really that much cheaper than good developers in the US. The 10-12 hour offset is a huge impediment to success. Some folks there will work really late to make up for it, but there's still a pretty big gap. Not a lot we can do to make it better other than move entire groups over there and minimize communication requirements.
What I can see happening is more competition within the US. Having developers offset a couple hours is no big deal. Same culture, same language, and three hours ahead is just fine. We do that every day. So it may be that remote developers who used to work in expensive locations like SF will find that they can't command that salary when they are indistinguishable from any other remote developer in the continental US.
Anyone who says this has never tried to work closely with someone in a timezone ~12 hours away.
Companies will lower our salaries as we move to more affordable places to live. It already is dependent on location, people in the same team living in US and EU have different compensations.
> I will call anyone's bluff who says this. Do it. Good luck. If you haven't successfully done this already, there is a reason and you know it.
I'm a dev and I say confidently that I can code from anywhere and produce the exact same output as in an office. In fact, not having to deal with the stress of office conditions will almost surely get you better code out of me. Maybe you do something non-technical, but for most any tech job, I can't understand why you say this.
2. You can't mix WFH with work in office. It's either one or the other. If you have a single employee working remotely - you should transform all the processes to WFH-style.
3. WFH shifts most of the burden onto management. Managers should put 120-150% of effort in planning, communication, documentation and checking. I never saw a single manager who likes WFH. And the management are the ones who decides.
While I agree, I think there is room for organizations to at least be remote friendly. I'd love to work for an organization that allowed for WFH in the middle of build cycles/sprints and keeping a more strict at-office policy during planing phases of projects.
You don't provide the line of thinking behind this statement. Why do you think this is the case?
Also, even taking your statement at face value, you can still have a setup where there are fewer days in the office and more days working from home for every employee. Basically, have flexible in-office hours, whether that means only certain days, or certain parts of certain days.
This sort of flexibility could be of great benefit to the employee who has kids, or is just tired of sitting in traffic or crowded trains 5 days a week. As a bonus, it could reduce crowding on transit lines during peak hours.
From my experience, if most employees are in an office and only a minority are remote, the remote employees are at a big disadvantage, unless the company (or remote employees) actively work to make sure they’re included in as much as possible.
If it’s in the company’s culture to have lots of ad-hoc in-person conversations where remote employees are unlikely to be included, they’re going to have a bad time. If those conversations mostly happen in chat or scheduled meetings with video chat, then it might work.
I think it’s probably better to just have whole teams be entirely (or at least majority) remote, or entirely onsite.
How about the sensible reality where we have an office, that we can get to, but we aren’t expected to turn up there every day just because? Where I work from home a few days a week to get that tricky stuff done – heaps harder in a distracting office – but then I go in a few days to connect with colleagues, catch up on the conversations, overhear things across the partition?
This saves my sanity, money, and time, and saves my employer ~50% of their office space. Win-win, surely?
(Not that I disagree with the sentiment that all processes should be made WFH-friendly. I think that’s very sensible. But it doesn’t mean that I necessarily must WFH the whole time.)
Only if you hotel, which a lot of people don't want.
In general, I agree with you. But if that's the norm it means people still need to live at least somewhat accessible to the office. For even one day per week, a 3 hour each way commute isn't really sustainable.
And what if a team consists almost entirely of people who want to come in 3 or 4 days per week? They'll likely end up just ghosting the one person who will reluctantly drag themselves in 1 day per week.
First of all, I am talking about teams of 20+ employees, e.g. 3 pizz-teams or more. This is a number when you definitely need two levels of management, event if one of them consists of makers-managers, e.g. teamleads.
That is the scale where you can't keep all the data in one head. So the information is distributed among employees, managers and no one has a full pucture. Some people know their segments with specifics, some has a helicopter view with coarse details.
Now, in office-based team you have a privilege to keep most of the data in the heads, because everyone can just walk to anyone and talk to them at the end of the day (pun intended).
You have those daily stand-ups, weekly all-hands, but most of the data are still don't have a hard copies. Of course you are writing specs, maybe you are writing docs, chances are you are writing company-wide weekly updates (and wondering if anyone actually reading it).
I know a lot of companies where people just changed in-person meetings to Zoom and are thinking they are fully remote now, In fact, they are just burning through data savings in their employees heads. It becomes visible rignt about now, after about 6 months of this quasi-remote. Teams are slowly turning into mess where right hand has no idea about left one. What took couple of weeks now takes month or even longer.
So, managers are trying to fight it with more conference-calling, more reporting, itemized plans and Gant diagrams, putting some pressure to engineers. At the same time engineers are trying to restore horisontal communications via chats, which leads to distraction and further loss of productivity.
This is because remote teams should work in a completely different manner. Great example is Gitlab, check out their handbook [0]. Mind you - that this is just a tip of the iceberg, they are incredibly transparent, but they are showing less than 5% of what they have.
So, in fully remote company you should organize all processes and workflows in a manner when no one should be synchronized with anyone in real time. You should ditch conference-calling almost entirely and record remaining video meetings to be available later. You should switch from chats back to emails, yes! You have to write down everything: specs, docs, meeting protocols, decisions - both accepted and rejected. And this is just a beginning: you also should keep all those in an actual state. Do you know a lot of companies where documentation and code are 100% coherent 100% of the time? I don't.
And of course most of this work is falling onto managers' shoulders: not only writing stuff by themselves, but checking that everyone else is writing stuff too.
Some people (even in this thread) may say that their company is doing just fine without all this and they are just happy saving commuting time. But I am sure they are just being ineffective, which means sooner or later they will be predated by more effective competitors.
I can’t disagree with any of your points, but for the past decade, I’ve mostly worked for huge corporations with multiple offices in multiple cities, and have only rarely worked with anybody I’m in the same building (or even the same city) as, including my boss. Until this year, they’ve demanded I physically drive to the office anyway, but there’s never been any reason; I’ve been on zoom calls all day anyway.
I do. But you've never seen me, so there is truth to your words.
The employees are quite productive, I hate commuting, and Zoom works remarkably well to stay connected. Not as well as it could be, but it's finally "over the hill".
Two things worry me:
- The long-term isolation is detrimental to mental health, so we might be on borrowed time right now.
- Onboarding new employees might become more difficult absent ongoing visual contact.
With WFH I feel like my social life is better than ever, even with the "quarantine". Due to the flexibility of work days I can meet friends outside at parks and enjoy socializing at a safe distance. This may change in the winter.
I don't understand the connection between the first and second statements. Can you clarify? How does WFH put more burden on management?
^ This is not true.
Where I work we have a mix of people who work exclusively from home, some who work some days at home and some in-office, and some who work exclusively from the office. This is including managers (some of whom like working from home, btw). Some people's jobs work better with one arrangement, some with another.
It was like that before March, and now way more people work exclusively from home.
Now I'm sure there are some jobs where having a mix complicates things too much, but it is definitely not universally true that having a mix never works.
My workplace is no special case either, I know of others that work the same way.
[ edited to remove unintentional indentation ]
My broader team was already pretty distributed around North America and Europe already. And other groups I work with were pretty distributed as well. But some were in offices and would do calls from conference rooms. It is better, to at least some degree, with everyone now on their own camera/microphone. (And in fact a couple sub-teams already had a rule that everyone did calls from their own computer/phone.)
I haven't done a company-wide survey :-D However, I have not seen complaints from anyone just dying to get back to the office.
You never saw them because they were WFH :D
But seriously, I've had managers who were happy to WFH a few times a week, though that team was pretty much self-managing on a day-to-day basis with the manager mostly there to make organisational decisions and to provide cover from above.
Now I work on firmware, and I have about $6000 of test equipment that is required to do my job, as well as multiple fragile circuit boards, some that I'm afraid to touch because some of the rework wires might break. I am working at home, but I guarantee that I'm not as productive as I would be in an office with access to the EEs and MEs and the people who built the firmware for the previous version of the product. Yes, I can schedule a call or ask questions on Slack, but so much is passed to new team members by osmosis or exposure or context, whatever you want to call that side effect of colocation.
> The best thing you can do in any period of change is to bet on neither black or white.
I agree, in some cases. There are still some cases where the best bet IS almost entirely black, or almost entirely white.
But, one can monitor the channel so it behaves like a water cooler too. And up-scales to video and screen share super fast. (Faster than other tools) It's really quite flexible.
We've been using this pattern for about 60 months. We all (6 humans) seem to like it OK.
To be in the room muted and with no volume, disconnect the audio connection.
To ask for someone's attention, send them a direct chat message (not to Everyone).
And of course you could always leave the Zoom meeting and rejoin later.
I have been pushing for Stadia as a primary testing platform, but the backend is quite painful to use (please don't hurt me google, I know I signed an anti-disparagement agreement, but your backend is really inflexible).
But I think this is the 'old way of working', we're so fearful of losing devkits (and the software on them) that we keep them in the office, but that's not realistically much safer really.
As a sidenote though: it's quite fun to see the game working on a tiny little MacBook.
But we have also found a vast increase in productivity that we probably won't see in the numbers until we can separate it out from all the other crazy shit that's been happening. The efficiencies gained in every white collar business being forced to make remote work to some degree are significant, and I think as of yet underrated.
So no we're not all going to be sipping cocktails on the beach (though more of us might) but we will be better off. Big exogenous shocks tend to find hidden productivities, even if the shock part really sucks.
I agree there was a good head of steam where people were able to quietly and independently work through their "list" of stuff they wanted to do for ages but never had the chance to etc, or whatever had previously been planned out.
Now months later I feel like things are starting to grind a bit and productivity is starting to wane because the "pipe" is starting to dry up. Those ad hoc conversations that lead to a new feature, bumping into someone in the corridor who mentions some big issue they're having, meeting and talking to end users, the offsites to work out the strategy for next quarter, day-long workshops with UX and management and users and post-it notes galore where we thrash out ideas and concepts are a distant memory. Instead we have stilted video calls where people sit on mute 95% of the time and there simply is not as much collaboration as there was before.
Sure stuff still happens, but it feels like to me that the "spark" from people who usually generate ideas and set the agenda/work items is reduced significantly - if not entirely gone - and people are just going through the motions somewhat mechanically and "doing the best they can given the circumstances" etc.
Similarly distance education sucks. It's sucked forever buuuuut, with whole countries attempting to manage distance education at the same time across all educational institutions, I am very optimistic that we will find some new techniques that will have huge returns but it will take a while for those techniques to gain dominance.
I could be totally wrong about this, but we'll find out for sure in the next few years.
But what are those gains you get from working from home? The only "real" one I can think of is no commute ... but that removes productivity from the businesses now failing and going bankrupt because they have no/reduced customers.
Plus the commute is not just dead time, at least for me I usually triage my inbox before I arrive at the office. Now I just waste time and have an extra bowl of cereal it read the internet for half an hour instead of doing anything useful.
Those businesses may fail, but the money will go somewhere else, somewhere else that doesn't involve me wasting four hours a day.
I occasionaly worked on my commute, but most of the time was wasted, and now I'm free to use the time how I want.
> Plus the commute is not just dead time, at least for me I usually triage my inbox before I arrive at the office. Now I just waste time and have an extra bowl of cereal it read the internet for half an hour instead of doing anything useful.
this one is kinda on you. you get to decide what to do with the extra time. I wake up a little later now to stay up talking and playing video games with my friends that live further west. not very productive, but I value having a slightly more relaxed work week.
I watched a McKinsey presentation last week which, among other things, went into what ways of doing things forced by the pandemic did they want to carry forwards and what they didn't want to carry forward.
A couple of things that people most plan to carry forward were increased home cooking and online grocery delivery.
There may be GDP effects that counterbalance this. Less money spent on gas or at small businesses near the employer. However, as suburbs have more at-home workers, more lunch spots will pop up nearby so I doubt the GDP effects are big. Sure, some might spend their productivity gains enjoying an extra bowl of cereal, but there's nothing wrong with that.
I see it in abundance in every single discussion here and elsewhere - people who hate commute but for whatever bad/stupid reason ended up far far away and were wasting hours every day on it suddenly have extra time and its great. These people keep praising current state as the best invention since fire. Most companies aren't organized around that last time I checked.
Maybe its a very US thing and true there on really massive scale. But here in Europe its not like that, not that much at least. Most folks commute 20-50 minutes. That is for 2nd biggest city in the country, smaller are more effective.
There are massive issues right now. Physical fitness is rapidly declining. People are going less out, less sun exposure. Amount of mental issues is understandably shooting through the roof (saw some firures about 5x increase in some cases). Economy is going down the toilet, some parts of it will crash very hard, possibly unrecoverably in current generation. These are effects that will be around for very long time even if we have 100% cure for covid tomorrow for 1 cent per dose.
Plus what parent wrote is absolutely, 100% true - I see people tired from constant conf calls and full remote. Mailboxes are exploding, it becomes hard to track emails even few weeks old. Brainstormings are mostly gone, people became more robot-like. Whatever you gain from not commuting from that middle of nowhere you live in means nothing compared to all this. For companies and for economies.
If you'll read the thread all the way through, you'll notice that I'm a big fan of offices. I think the issues you and mattlondon raise are real—fitness, mental health, etc.—but those are temporary issues since people will eventually start going back to the office.
We will gain because through this experience, many firms will discover efficiencies from remote work and be able to apply them in a judicious way when things are back to normal.
It'll be really hard to discuss remote work productively if you keep conflating it with COVID-induced issues.
At the very least, for the most part, businesses won't forget that possibility, even if they don't rely on it heavily post-pandemic. We've removed a significant blocker, that doesn't necessarily mean that we've reinvented the office dynamic or anything like that, but we've at least opened up a new channel for some businesses that didn't have it before, which IMO is objective improvement.
My employer mandated a return to the office about 2 weeks ago. Productivity has declined compared to when we were all WFH for 6 months and I have the stats - pull requests, builds pushed to prod, tickets opened, all are down.
I'm trying to understand how much negotiating power software developers have with their employers these days; in general and on this topic in particular.
IMHO now is probably a good time to invest in meeting-place providers like Regus.
You said this, and then wrote the rest of your post about the opposite? Why do you think we'll need offices?
We don’t need corporate offices full of cubes and butts and chairs.
We need co-working spaces sometimes.
Personally, my employer of 92 is doing fine remote. So, you know, anecdata and all that
There’s that personality though that needs a group to help them decide on the color of a button, and how thick a drop shadow should be.
Let’s hope those folks are able to power through making such difficult decisions alone, without free lattes followed by yoga class to ease the chemically induced anxiety, and over thought fear of making the wrong palette choice.
My goodness, tech millennials might have to move on from college life! For shame.
And truth is. Everyone is different. I can respect the person that prefers office environment. What we will see is greater flexibility and just less office space in the future.
The real winner outs of all this will be local communities and businesses.
I personally believe that we're all running on the trajectory and direction we scoped before the shut-down, and as we move into H1 planning next year, things are going to get much slower and more complicated.
Instead of a bunch of programmers spouting group think, I get to interact with writers, artists, indie game devs, etc. Way more innovative than any programmer group I've been in.
We need something to simulate this kind of shared reality somehow. Video conferences don’t do that. I’m sure there will be some innovation that might, I’m betting on cheap, high quality AR headsets. Right now it feels like in 2007... internet on cellphones was a thing but an iPhone with touchscreens had to be invented for something revolutionary to happen...
Working from home has been amazing for my concentration levels.
The latter can be done remotely but definitely isn't anywhere near as smooth or natural I find.
I also miss the social interactions, discussion with colleagues is much easier in person. Lastly, I hope it will reduce the amount of video conferences that crept up considerably.
edit: Not OP obviously.
edit2: Note: Just to make sure, I know this is personal preference and I am perfectly happy with other people being super happy and productive at home!
I've had time to get my head around the separation you talk about, I guess. Also helps that I'm on a small team and we all slack something like "Signing off now, catch you tomorrow" at around 5.30. Puts an end on the day.
What used to be going to work in the morning became exercise. Then, when it was end of day, we went outside. I have kids which made it making more sense. But you can go outside for walk or read book outside etc. The point is that you leave room and do something that causes mental switch.
But I'm not convinced a corporate office is the only, let alone, best option. Have you considered alternatives?
I know this is a personal preference, but for me, physical distance makes my work more productive and my private time more relaxing.
Can you recommend your camera, mic and screen setup? And what brand/model they are? TY!
I use a Blue Snowball mic but any decent USB mic will work. I have a dedicated office and I haven't found using a headset makes it better though YMMV. I'd just as soon not wear a headset unless necessary.
Computer is just a 27" iMac with a 2nd monitor. (Though I actually usually work with video on my main screen and do any work with shared docs etc. on a MacBook.)
Also have an Elgato keylight to get the lighting a bit more even.
ADDED: Probably at least as important is that you're not backlit by a window and you have the camera at maybe a bit above eye level. I've also done a bit of "set decorating" of my background.
If I had the extra space and time to set it all up I would probably use a regular SLR camera on a tripod, and lavalier mic. But the Logitech is a lot more convenient - connects over a single USB through the docking station and just works with zero set up.
The screen is just a regular LG 4K 55" TV mounted on the wall which connects to the laptop docking station, allowing video conferences, slides, etc. to be "thrown" over there when it's convenient.
Additionally, I am definitely a person who prefers in person meetings and conversations. It’s not that I can’t do remote conversations - I’ve even managed remote employees for years - but I value water cooler conversations as a place for spontaneous idea generation or just relationship building, which is just harder remotely. You have to go out of your way to send ideas into the ether, without the physical signs that someone might be receptive to random, possibly stupid musings, or non-sequiter stuff about personal life.
Count me among the people who are fine with others choosing to stay remote, but once it’s feasible and safe to go into the office I would want to do it.
My company (~10k, global, mix of hourly and salaried) has multiple times sent out pandemic guidance asking people to take more time off and stop working so much, they see the extra hours in their time tracking tooling upstream (and it's not a financial play, they're targeting the salaried).
- I get far too distracted by my apartment. The things I hung up on my wall to give myself a sense of personality are the things that I will be distracted by if I have my work laptop open.
- I want a clear separation between being at work and being at home. Otherwise I will make excuses that because I happen to be at home I can do X or Y without consequence. At home I have my personal computer and television within walking distance at all times. By being in the office I deliberately prevent myself from having those options.
- My job requires me to use a specific model of laptop for remote work. The laptop itself is not an ideal environment for getting things done. It is a Lenovo-era ThinkPad with the chiclet keys and they are awful to type on. I have other hardware in my room to plug in, but on top of that I have to RDP to my machine in order to access corpnet things, and the latency is plainly awful. It takes several minutes to just launch it and render the entire desktop completely, control key combinations will frequently not register because of the latency, I'm unable to use my laptop's microphone half the time over RDP, and there are frequent disconnections. And if I'm working at home, all of these annoyances will just pile on top of each other and make me lose motivation to do work entirely.
- On top of that my access credentials expired while I was taking shelter early on, so to use my work laptop from home at that point I had no choice but to go to the office to get them unblocked. I went in and immediately wondered why I hadn't been working from there in months. It was night and day.
I got certified to go into the office as "essential staff," because for me being in the office is what determines if I am productive at all or not. In fact the amount of work that ended up piling up because I was unable to work effectively anymore caused an anxiety episode that I had to take off a few months for. It truly felt like I had been pushed into a corner. Thankfully my team was understanding, it being a devastating pandemic and all.
1. Work/life separation. Even with a separate computer, getting it shut away and Slack gone is easier said than done. Now everyone knows you're probably around somewhere and will read their e-mail or see their Slack message, even early in the morning or later in the afternoon.
1b. I work better in a dedicated environment. My home office has all kinda of other distractions. Homework from my OMSCS classes beckons to be done, personal projects, not to mention kids. The psychological difference of being in a dedicated workspace is significant.
2. Social connections. There are many people I was friendly with but only at the office. Now I only interact with people on my own team or in closely related teams when we are working on some project that overlaps. My 'work world' has shrunk dramatically.
3. Zoom. Just make it stop. My company has dedicated Thursday to be 'no meeting day' but it hasn't really stuck yet. I'm brought onto way more calls now than I ever was when we were in the office. It feels like Zoom has become the substitute for the random communications we used to have, except instead of taking 5-10 minutes everyone schedules 30-60 minutes at a time. And they always find a way to use up every minute plus 2 or 3 after the end time.
I don't actually want to go back full time. I am thinking seriously of selling my Model 3 because having a 60K depreciating asset in the garage that only gets driven a couple hundred miles a month is not the best use of my money. But when the office opens back up eventually, I do think I'll try to spend at least one day a week there. Maybe two.
I echo this sentiment. As a junior engineer in a large office, being able to keep track of other projects, who is working on what, what's coming up in a different business area, etc., has been very important for career development. Working from home, I've been "siloed" into my own team to a much larger extent.
Send a meeting invite for 30 minutes to someone in the org with: "Hi. I'm new and I try to meet one new person every week in areas I'm not familiar."
Pro tip: Either pick someone who seems to have a cult following, looks to be untouchable in the org and or very active on internal company GitHub/Gitlab.
I've been told "You have no instinct of self preservation at this job" but being stuck in meetings and not being able to get things done is not what I was hired to do. Tuesdays and Mondays I concede to meeting hell because those are regular team meetings but your little attempt at showing the marketing department is still doing work by scheduling meetings is not that fun :(
But... why? Just don't look at work messages outside of work hours. Is that so hard?
I wonder why that is 🧐
Edit: weirdly it seems to just be that specific emoji, others don't work
I submitted my comment using Hack (iOS) but the emoji is coming though for me as the black box as well.
Different people have different preferences.
(Please stick to text here too.)
I don't have a dedicated workspace at home, and I'm definitely feeling it. The line between working from home, and living at work, is getting very blurry. Our living room has become an office, our kitchen has become the other office. The bedroom is now the only space sacrosanct.
It's not so much that I miss the office, but I certainly miss "going to work" and "leaving work". That's very difficult to replicate in the space I have - here I am on a lazy saturday afternoon, and "work" is the sleeping thinkpad just to the left of me.
Obviously if this persists, I'm going to need to look into a larger living space. Either going from a 1 bedroom to 3, or somewhere large enough to have a separate dining room we can repurpose (and "young-couple flat with an actual dining room instead of a table floating in the middle of an open-plan room" seems to be quite rare.)
So whenever I hear talk of how much our employers could save by not needing anywhere near as much property - in the back of my head I'm starting to realise it's just shifting that property cost from them to me.
Keep in mind it wasn’t “I want to be there 8 hours a day, Monday through Friday”. But they definitely wanted the option to work from an office for part of the work week, at a minimum.
This doesn’t surprise me in the least.
Is that a useful answer? Of course people would like that opportunity, even if they never used it - it's pure bonus.
More useful question would be "how many times a week (or how many hours) do you plan to work from the office given the opportunity to work from both home and the office?"
I like working from home right now, but I’d sure love the world to be working such that we could reasonably go back to the office.
Only if you're doing a commoditized, conveyor-belt kind of work.
Some of us want you in the office so that we can mentor and train you. Teaching doesn't work too well remotely.
“ Kirsty Allsopp led the anti-remote work charge on Twitter, suggesting that if your job can be done from home, it can be done from anywhere in the world. Who would have thought that a couple of months of working in shorts and a T-Shirt has made us more susceptible to being replaced by less expensive folk in India, Myanmar and China?”
It doesn’t matter if they are American or live halfway across the world. If you want amazing talent, you are going to have to pay them well. Talented people are usually well aware of the salary differences between American vs local companies of their region.
The people that tend to take the low offer are usually not in the best position to do the best work compared to their counterpart.
I have met and worked with amazing talent from all across the world. At the same time I have also worked with people that should have never been in the business and were the root cause of project delays caused by buggy features and constant rework. Whether they are American or not, the people in the latter group tended to be in a group that was not happy largely due to their pay. In the cases I probed for more information, I discovered amongst the contracting companies that placed bids, the company took the lowest bid that was offered. No fucking surprise that 8-12 months later that the project is behind by at least half a year.
Moral of the story companies need to pay well - regardless of the location of the person - in order to get a quality product that is pushed to the masses in time and remain competitive.
2. The very largest US companies learned long ago about the importance of a significant geographic economic presence all over this great country aka USA. Alternatively 90+ Members of Congress explained the virtue via anti-trust actions and other targeted legislation. With telework, FANG and the like get the political benefit of constituencies across Congressional districts and States without the overhead of managing a lot of real estate for offices.
3. There are a lot of edge cases being thrown around in this thread. It’s good to hear those voices, but it can make it hard to gain a sense of how many people actually now experience telework as a good thing or a bad thing, especially if/when some fraction of infrastructure cost savings are directly shared with the employees.
4. To the question of the original post, businesses dependent on commuters (including those who own real estate in the commercial area) call up the Mayor, and the Mayor calls CEOs and begs/threatens/pleads/flatters/seduces/cajoles and it is easier to send the droids back to the grind than to hear the Mayor’s minions whine and complain, unless the droids push back hard. [Purely personal guess]
Presumably this works both ways. Google does not pay 500K/year to developers in the Portland office. Why should SF developers get paid more? Nobody cared until engineers out of SF wanted to take advantage of remote work but keep the big paycheck.
I can technically go to these other places and work again, just like I used to, because the area I live in believes this is all a hoax, but I'm just not comfortable, and I don't want to wear a mask all day, and people just aren't the same right now - so I'm a little nervous about being around strangers all day and want to avoid uncomfortable or awkward situations.
My commute was a pleasant 25m bike ride I could use to listen to podcasts (which is exercise I've now lost, so losing the commute didn't exactly give me a bunch of extra free time). Seeing coworkers in person was a really nice way to not only get some social contact every day but also build a rapport with my teammates. The office was also going to be a great place for my dog to get some socialization with other dogs.
Yes, I was annoyed at the moves to more open spaces and with regular frustrating interruptions, but with those mitigated, an office with my actual coworkers (with at most 1 day a week at home) is vastly superior to what I'm doing now, regardless of how much processes change. Not to mention, employers sort of implicitly assume that any time you gained back from not having to commute or whatever are just going to doing extra work.
You can still do that, though. Get up, do a 12.5m bike ride out, and 12.5m bike ride back home. Then start work.
Or do anything else. Maybe you'd prefer to go for a run some days? Great, you can do that. Maybe you want to lift weights? Great, you can do that. Maybe you stayed up late the night before doing something fun and want to sleep in a little? Great, you can do that. None of this other stuff would have been possible when you were fixed into the required, inflexible commute routine, but now you can do any of these things, or just keep doing your same commute routine, just with a different route that returns you home.
> Not to mention, employers sort of implicitly assume that any time you gained back from not having to commute or whatever are just going to doing extra work.
They only assume that if you allow them to by working longer hours. Set your boundaries, and assert them.
Or, you have the choice to use that time in a way that you prefer.
Your company. Offices are pretty expensive, if the company goes remote they have extra capital to distribute during yearly review or whatever policy your company has.
People used to have an actual connection to the community they lived in but it seems like there’s now a massive collective laziness to seek it out.
Not only is it a waste of time, it in an unnecessary danger. Tens of thousands of people are killed in their commutes, and many more are injured in accidents to, from or during work.
I have stopped talking to people outside of the development team but I don't really care. I never really knew these other people I was talking to. We just shared random stories about the weekend.
Maybe that because remote working is affecting their politicking ways more than it affects people who do the grunt work on the ground.
That being said, I look forward to going back to the office. It’ll be nice to see people again —- few people bother to turn on their video on zoom anymore for anything other than one-on-ones, myself included, and that is starting to feel alienating to me. I don’t think it’s wise having a policy that you must have video enabled, though, it’s nice being able to sprawl out on the couch and get comfortable for a particularly long, boring meeting.
Edit: to address the actual contents of the article, I think below is a better read that doesn’t reduce people’s concerns about remote working to wanting to save sandwhich shops:
https://marker.medium.com/remote-work-is-killing-the-hidden-...
I made tons of other, more useful things (meals, real work, babysitting etc.) during those dull calls that are not really about me (or they cover me for 1 minute in 30-60 minutes). It would be really tiring to keep looking engaged while I couldn't care less about the topic (self pressure is a bitch), 3-6x per day.
agree, but not as an explicit company policy. what I mean is, if the company officially says something like "the office is open, but you don't have to come back until you feel safe", this can put pressure on employees to agree that they feel safe. if you're one of the last people to return, maybe you start feeling pressure to give some sort of concrete reason why. I think it would result in a lot of people returning when they don't actually feel safe.
imo there are three reasonable positions: a) office is closed, only essential staff allowed on premises; b) office is open, but physical attendance is strictly optional (without any caveats about "feeling safe"); or c) office is open and you have to come back.
edit to address the article you linked: I do feel for those people who do office support work and suddenly have no customers. but doesn't it suggest that a lot of that work wasn't really necessary in the first place? I just can't see how it can be a net harm for remote workers to cook themselves hot lunches every day (or just spend less for a similar cold cut sandwich).
How is it not net harm to have to do a chore that you didn't have to do before?
I'm pretty sure that free onsite lunch is rather exceptional. People that don't like to cook can still buy lunch or whatever.
In my anecdotal experience it is good to strongly encourage video use. Well before the pandemic, I noticed that our colleagues in Hyderabad were far more involved and engaged when we made it nearly a requirement that everyone on the call turned on video. Especially once you've visited in person at least once so you have a little bit of a personal connection, video can help preserve some of that. Disembodied voices on zoom calls are the worst thing ever.
I was never previously a big fan of working from home, I enjoy the social interaction at the office. Having coffee breaks with people, going out for lunch etc. But now I'm used to WFH I love the fact that I can wake up at 9AM and I'm 'at work'. I finish at 5:30PM and I'm already home. Yes I do miss the interaction with people, but I have met some people outside work, and regularly have Slack convos (or social ones while gaming for example) with those people.
I feel lucky that I've been at my company for a relatively long time, so have 'work friends' who I continue talking to. I now don't talk to the 'acquaintances' or new starters for example, which I guess is sad - but being selfish, makes it feel like I have even more time to do my own things. But on the other hand, probably isn't so good for the newer members of staff and doesn't help company morale.
I am still fairly young and have seen some people mention work/life balance. That doesn't bother me too much either as my company is flexible and I know if I do a few extra hours one evening I can do a few less hours another day etc. and wouldn't have to tell or ask anyone to do that.
Until reading this post I hadn't really thought about it too much, but guess I am just lucky that it works for me. If I was older and had kids/family, or didn't have an office to work from at home I can see how it would be more of a struggle. I do want to go back to work at some point, but I don't know how often I'd want to be there. I don't know if I can handle the long commutes week in week out now.
But jobs / companies are mechanisms for getting people to do things they wouldn't feel like normally doing, because they get paid to do it. That's the definition of work!
Of course no one wants to go back to work when they've been allowed not to for a while.
The author lists all the things he hates about being in the office. Namely the things that are work. He wants some fairy tale home environment where no one bothers him, there are no deadlines, and he gets to work on only the things he wants. For high pay and 0 stress.
If anyone has been able to find that in life, god bless you and treasure what you have. If the author was not getting paid right now, you best believe he'd have a different attitude.
Eventually people will have to go back to work. This "work from home lala land" imaginary utopia is not going to be possible forever.
- The office is much quieter, and it's easier to concentrate.++
- People working from home are harder to reach. I can wait 6 hours before I get an answer to a question I would otherwise get answered within 5 minutes.
- Those who stay behind become the Go-For guys for all other departments. Marketing needs something sent to a client by mail ASAP? Just ask the only guy left to gogetit! It's tiresome, especially if the other department is a mess.
-People are really bad at describing things. In casual chatting, the amount of non-language communication, like pointing things, is staggering.
- The more time people spend time away from work, the more they seem to get out of touch with the physical nature of what they do. For example, if you want something transported somewhere, you need to tell me from where, to where, when, how big it is and ideally a reference number or a contact. No, we can't modify the order if the truck left four hours ago...
But my concern is that I likely won't get this choice. I suspect that the layers of management above me will want employees in the office ASAP because that's how they wield the most influence and control. Plus, management makes more money, so they aren't as subject to the quality of life tradeoffs that come from being in the office. I feel like if only one of the people in my management chain want me back in the office, then I'll have to go back. It seems unlikely that all of them will be OK with remote work.
CEOs do most of their time: meetings & talking to people. This is their job, they don't do Powerpoint, coding or anything else beside talking and meetings. Both is more draining if you do this 10h a day remotely. To my coachees there is a big push amongst CEOs to get people back in the office, they haven't defined their remote role yet.
Right now you can see this in the real estate markets - people are moving out of their smaller city apartments into bigger places, partially I’m sure, because maintaining an office at home requires extra space. But that cost is on the employee not the employer.
It's just another trade off. That isn't hard for many people who prefer working from home.
“Does your company allow you to expense a portion or all of your internet?” Type inquiries. I’m often uploading and downloading large assets to our and our client systems, would be happy to fill out an allowable expense report if the company would pick up even a third of my Internet bill (course I have a feeling such a thing will never happen)
Anyone know? Curious to read the results if such a thing exists.
However, I would have internet whether I worked from home or not. I realize some people may need to upgrade their internet plans, but this probably doesn't apply to most.
Also, if you go outside the company bus shuttle bubble, companies never paid people all the commuting expenses that people incurred. Some _might_ give you a few bucks, but that rarely covers parking, gas, full public transport passes, wear and tear on your car, etc.
Separately, the tax office does not allow employees or contractors to treat commutes as a tax-deductible expense. The cost of going to a non-habitual workplace is expensable, but not a regular commute.
In my case I have no commuting costs, I run or walk to work. Hell it's actually slightly cheaper as I showered at work 5 days a week.
The costs of wfh during winter however are massive as I live in an old northerly city where well insulated flats simply don't exist. Plus my flat is mostly one room, with massive windows and has electric heating. There's no affordable way to insulate it and heating it an extra 8 hours a day will cost £80-100 a month.
Working from home is crippling for forming new social connections. Promotions are done based, primarily, on social connections. Hiring too. There is very strong pressure for ambitious people who know how the world works to get back into the office.
And the social aspect of a supervisor understanding what their reports are doing is also easy to underestimate. Offices will be back as soon as it is practicable.
Supervisors can understand what their reports are.doing without physical presence.
I don't think "the office" will become a thing of the past, but I will welcome it being downgraded as the be-all and end-all for work that is not location sensitive.
This is really strange to me as someone who has worked remotely for the past several years, because I've made more social connections outside of work than I ever did while working.
> And the social aspect of a supervisor understanding what their reports are doing is also easy to underestimate. Offices will be back as soon as it is practicable.
Sounds like offices will be back as soon as possible for workplaces where supervisors feel compelled to micromanage.
>There is very strong pressure for ambitious people who know how the world works to get back into the office.
It is possible to do all that remotely. But people in physical proximity have a massive advantage. If two roughly equal people are trying for a promotion, the one with more face time in the office is quite likely to get it. That is how human social activity works.
Now if literally everyone is at home then it doesn't matter. But as soon as anyone is in the office, everyone who wants a promotion will end up in the office.
This doesn't even touch on all the economic spillovers of having people in the same area, such as restaurants and other services catering to the concentration of office workers (as mentioned by the author), but also things like specialized lawyers, financiers, and other professional services that concentrate around Silicon Valley and other agglomerative clusters.
Ultimately, I hope we can come to a compromise, something like 50/50 remote/office, with smaller offices that cater more towards the explicitly social functions of the organization.
This has made me insanely productive and I don’t know if I have ever had such a great streak before. Going back to the office ruins all of that.
So I say, boo-hoo to the real estate investors.
Since the lockdown and the "working-from-home" revolution I've had the time to start working out, sleep more and better, cook my own food, not being a complete zombie in the evenings, spend more time with my girlfriend...
Of course I'm in a position to say this because I'm also lucky, I have a beautiful home in a nice place.
I always took the reality of the commute and working in the office for a fact, but my productivity also sky rocketed in this period.
I know that sometime soon I'll be back in the office, but it will be incredibly hard to go back to my previous life and give up all of this.
What particularly saddens me is the idea of how wonderful fatherhood could be working from home, and all the time with my kids I'll have to give up again when I'll go back to spend 11h outdoors daily.
Hopefully, offices open up as an option for people who want separation for various reasons.
This is my preferred outcome, but the main benefit of remote work, for me, has been the opportunity to leave the Bay Area. I can't really stand the idea that I'd be forced back into the Bay Area housing/rental market, just so that I can attend a few days of meetings per month. It would be the worst of all worlds.
So I'm hoping that the reported techie exodus from SF leads to a diaspora, with attractive tech job opportunities cropping up in more U.S. cities.
My situation may be a bit unique, in that I work in an office alone (we are a remote work team, but I still keep an office), and my commute is very short. Still, I've always found it hard working at home and being as productive as at an office.
Some things have improved. For example, my office-based colleagues' videoconferencing etiquette has improved dramatically. Nowhere near as many people doing things like leaving their camera off and blatantly working on other things instead of paying attention to the meeting.
But my own sense of wellbeing has suffered, all the same. I find it much easier to maintain work-life boundaries when work happens somewhere else.
...
In any case, if anyone else here has worked in a nice office setup (4 walls + door, no uptight manager, no long commute, and no army boot camp style communal bathrooms) then you'll know that the main problem with working from an office is those particulars. WFH is nice simply because everybody's house is nicer than a trash office build-out.
Great article. I recommend taking out the word "cynically". That is what this is about.
1. People simply aren’t used to it yet. The self discipline part, knowing when to work... and when to stop too.
2. You do need some sort of dedicated space. I’ve been working from home just fine for 20 years but I have a separate room for that.
3. Especially in tech, management may not have the knowledge to judge productivity. Measuring time the chair is filled in the office is much easier than evaluating a developer’s work based on just what they do.
At home I have a fast 8C/16T desktop with two 4K screens and a comfortable chair, awesome sound setup.
Vs a 1.5hr commute and the inevitable MacBook it’s a good trade imo.
When we buy a house I’m converting the garage into a proper office/motorcycle workshop though just because I’ll have the space.
I think that this may be the key thing that the pandemic has accelerated: A re-evaluation of what kind of management is appropriate for modern work, and whether that management can be performed by the self, another person, another company, or perhaps even by a tool.
Managing work, in an idealized sense, is wasteful because it’s not actually production. Of course, in the real world we need all sorts of management of our work, from well informed decisions by individuals all the way up to strategic alignment of whole organizations. But how we actually get that management done, and done effectively, feels like it’s taking center stage now that our old routines have been up-ended.
Edit: Note that an individual’s preference work at home, for or against, is in a sense a vote for a certain kind of management. As the article points out, work at home can be interrupted with Zoom And Slack just like it was in the office with in-person meetings and office chatter, so the at home/at office debate kind of masks the real issue: We all want better management. Now we just need to invent it.
Thank you! Likewise, I don't actually want to WFH except for the fact that there's a pandemic and it's the responsible thing to do given that I'm able to. It's getting tiring explaining this to management- the argument somehow becomes about WFH during non-pandemic times.
-- 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 also count your other hidden factors -- when everyone is remote, you're also competing with the world who is also remote. Jobs and job qualifications (and competition) may change. You might still have a job if people have to go back in person...
This is not just "those evil exploitative bosses want to get us back in offices". It's not that simple, as with anything.
I've always been competing with developers all around the world - it's not like outsourcing is new.
But it’s worth bearing in mind that this in particular is an almost completely orthogonal issue.
The hidden factors you mention are based upon conjecture. You are right remote work proves that you can hire anybody in the world. However, that doesn’t mean companies should pay a person that lives in another country a lower wage than the American counterpart.
The platitude of “you get what you pay for” really shines in this discussion. I have witnessed amazing talent from all across the globe that produced excellent results for the team and company. At the same time, I have also seen dog shit work produced by Americans and abroad. In the latter group, I noticed the individual was paid much lower than expected or in a bid for contracting companies the company took the lowest bid offered.
I have seen numerous projects fall significantly behind schedule due to buggy features or just constant re-work of terribly implemented features because someone at the project management level thought they could convince poorly paid people to push out quality work.
I spent £180 per week on transport before this, and another £50+ on coffee and meals.
At the end of the year I will have saved enough to get my bathroom refitted, benefitting local tradespeople. I also go out and buy coffee and food locally more often.
The spending won't be lost, it'll change. And if we're lucky it'll change in a way that spreads the money out beyond London.
The real sector that's f*cked is commercial property.
Clearly there will be some significant change, but I'm sure it will be a balance between what we had and how things are now.
Once that happens, we don't really want to have lots of businesses to have gone bankrupt. At least not the ones we will still want when things have reached that balance.
Some caveats: this was before video conferencing, slack or FB Workplace so maybe things are better now. And, it might be different when everyone is remote so YMMV.
I do think things must be a lot better now. I started a new job after COVID began, so I still have never met my team in person. I’m on video calls with them multiple times a day though, and slack with them all day. Sure, it probably isn’t quite as good as in person contact, but I’ve been shocked how well it has worked and how well I feel like I know most of them.
The article points to some statistics about the benefits of remote work. But I think those benefits are more derived from enabling individuals to decide what is best for them and their company. Alot of what is described in "Bullshit Jobs" was reversed overnight, and we're seeing the benefits of that. Location has nothing to do with it.
Now when I have a family, remote work is a real money-saving solution, but gosh, how I miss the office and how I'm tired of my home turned into an office. My wife also works here, we have two workspaces, 3 printers, but no space anymore for "switching context" from work to home, and no private time, work may find you at 11 pm, and you can't stop thinking of doing more today to do less tomorrow. I read everything about WFH planning and self-discipline, but this is how it works for us at the moment.
Work from home won't work for many companies. Period.
Based on that, it would be wrong to jump to the conclusion the "most" employees need constant management in an office and will do the minimum possible at home.
This is why there's such a big debate about WFH now. Having tried it at scale in a forced situation, turns out it actually works ok for many jobs in the short term.
It is too much to be in the office all of the time because sometimes "life" happens or you need the ability to have some silence and concentrate.
It is too much to be remote all of the time because software is a team sport and to function optimally, we need to have great human relationships and communication, and those are better done face to face.
We need to find the "happy midpoint" between these two extremes as a working culture.
If however you and your partner are squeezed round a small table in a studio flat with no air con fighting over crappy WiFi the office makes a lot of sense.
The author finally comes to this point at the end of the article. It’s not all back to the office or the death of the office, it’s somewhere in between. Unfortunately that’s not a good headline.
Would you not be happier able to be completely unchained from an office location, and able to choose to live anywhere? Then you could likely have a bigger place too.
And now, way more companies open to hiring remote workers!
There’s a balance to be had, which remains to be seen. I personally will choose a flexible company that allows remote work 100% of the time. I prefer to work in increments spread throughout the day, not a strictly regimented 9-5 which office environments encourage.
Once you start thinking about it:
- it's hot there. There's no AC on a beach.
- wifi in the beach is mostly likely poor
- sand is a nasty substance which gets everywhere, including your laptop
- the nearest coffee machine may be a couple of miles away
and so on.
I'd rather work in an office.
IMHO Trying to emulate office work procedures with video conferences isn't helpful.
A move to out-of-office work should go hand in hand with a move to more async leadership and (technical) communication.
> what we gain in work-life balance
Might be nothing or even massive negative depending on the combination of your (home) environment and personality.
Remote work has the uncanny side effect to make it harder for people which have certain kind of problems, like abusive parterns or a otherwise "broken" home, addiction, depression or some other mental problems.
Sure at the same time it can enable some people with mental problems to work, through often under the condition that their problems are already handled well.
If you want/need to go to the office, great, go for it.
Requiring people that have a desk job to be in a specific building to do their work is absurd.
Edit: I’ve been working remote for almost 12 years.
But the effect the article has noted is really prevalent and weird. Seeing the actual UK government banging on about how essential it is for everybody to get “back to the office”, being very explicitly anti-remote-working, and using their usual propaganda channels to spread that message is a strange choice at the moment. It’s hard to find a convincing explanation for.
Cynically, the leadership of top companies wants workers back in the office (for whatever reason) and the current government is in their pocket.
But yes, I agree. Since my company will be saving tons of money once their lease comes up for renewal, and already hasn't had to expand despite hiring more than 60 people this year, it does seem like a stipend is in order.
In my case, I worked remotely for a lot of my career pre-COVID, and of course have been remote since. I don’t like the Bay Area housing situation, and the freedom to look elsewhere is appealing... but I really do miss the office.
That was a rare experience for me back in the old W-2 office days.
My boss was in another state, another timezone, another shift, sometimes another country. Ditto coworkers, internal and external customers.
I had a few office jobs supporting field circus techs where by definition we never worked physically together and they had no idea if they called me at work or home.
There are a lot of 3 to 5 person companies out there where people labor away shoulder to shoulder for hours; but not that many.
Depending on where these people fall in the power/management structure is what determines how the return plays out.
I read somewhere that we didn't have people barricading themselves in the office refusing to leave. Where I'm at we literally did and those people successfully managed to stay at work when 95% of the staff was not.
https://zwischenzugs.com/2020/07/25/the-halving-of-the-centr...
Because I live reasonably far out into the suburbs, my home office is a completely separate room, so it's fairly easy to just totally forget it exists when I stop work.
While I didn't normally walk to work (pre-pandemia) I knew I could and I did (I live in a major capital with lots of transit disruptions).
I definitely wouldn't want to work at the office every day, but I also wouldn't want to stay at home everyday either (hunting for a seat on a cafe counts as wfh for me).
An increasing number of people that spend their full office hours doing meetings, while devs need silence and solitude, complain that remote work sucks for meetings. Wow. What a bunch of egotistic children.
If only! Richard Tice (major political funder) had spent a lot of time on Twitter claiming remote work is directly responsible for Pret closing stores!
If WFH produces superior result, it should mean that companies endorsing WFH should be better investments and make more profit.
It is also possible that other factors matter way more, and therefore it is not the thing to focus on.
Every remote contract I done I found that when client hires another junior(fresh out of college) person productivity plummets for everyone. When you have one in the office I find that mentoring them and getting them to be useful is much easier.
That would require removing emotion from our biology. Maybe shoot for something smaller.
Why isn't this a hybrid solution?
We are being forced to change and take the 'physical' out of the social.
What's not to like?!?!
For example, take something like presence. The boss wants to know if you are working. With software, there are ways to track that if it's really necessary. For a manager that doesn't trust the employees, activity tracking software gives about the even more information than being there, because you can actually see screenshots.
That is what UpWork does. It's quite invasive, and most people would not tolerate it if they felt they had the choice, but I bring it up as an example of how the software configuration makes as much difference as the physical location. And in fact tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people on UpWork have tolerated it. So it's a real thing, even though it's abhorrent.
The more sane way is having some way to see your reports' work output on a regular basis. And there is no reason that needs to be minute-to-minute or even day-to-day if there is a level of trust.
But presence is not just useful in a physical setting for monitoring employees. It also allows for things like spontaneous communication or types of communication not possible or difficult on a computer screen. Here I think again, the actual software available and the configuration can make a huge difference.
For example, if you truly feel that water-cooler meetings are critical, you can build that into your at-home software setup and just make it mandatory. There are a lot of ways you could do that. It could literally be chat rooms named "water-cooler1" and "water-cooler2" and then you put some piece of required information like an expense code in there so people have to enter.
Or there are various types of software with virtual spaces, such as top-down maps where you see the location of your co-workers and can even hear their conversations if your avatar is close by. There are also 3d world's, both with a screen interface and a virtual reality interface.
I think especially as VR and AR headsets get more comfortable and usable over the next few years, that is really going to be able to compete with physical presence. For example, they are starting to track eye movements. That's going to make it possible to actually communicate using your eyes in VR.
Point being that there is a big spectrum in types or level of presence that is about the type of software and hardware configuration (and culture/rules) as much as it is about actual physical location.
(Is the quiet part some are not saying out loud)
I also miss my dedicated workspace, and I miss being able to separate work and home life easily by going no contact after 5PM without management thinking that means I am a bad employee.
But most of all, I miss being able to let my bosses "micromanage" me in a way that didn't disrupt me. “Office Politics” has changed at my company in a way that is taking up a lot more of my productive time than it used to, and I hate it.
Before the Great WFH of 2020, my boss would walk by my cubicle or speak to me in person regularly. Short conversations, didn't ever bother me, and allowed me to focus on work. Made him feel busy and made him feel I was busy. Ultimately I was able to spend less time "appearing busy" and more on actually getting work done.
Since management at my company doesn't know how to actually track real work output, they have always used proxies like "how long does this person stay at the office?", "Are they still in their cubicle when I am leaving?", "When I walk by their cubicle do they have their IDE open doing 'coding stuff'" etc. etc.
I’ve always been decently performant at code production. So all I had to do was stay on my coding tasks for a few hours each day, have an IDE always open on at least one of my monitors and wait til exactly 5:01 PM every day before I left as that was when my boss went home. I ended up getting stuff done quick, got to avoid most meetings, and could screw around the rest of the day if I wanted. Personal projects, internet surfing, etc.
Great reviews from management. I would prefer an actual meritocratic standard based on actual work done, but that really has never been the case at any of the companies I have ever worked at so far in my career as a software engineer, so I’m used to it at this point.
But now that we are all WFH, they really don't seem to know what to do. They don't know how much work anyone is, or isn't doing, instead daily standups have changed from 10 minute short succinct updates to “how aggressively and for how long can you technobabble bullshit about your coding tasks you did yesterday” turning these stand ups into at least an hour or more, and now I have to also technobabble bullshit or management will think I’m slacking.
Even more so than before, they now seem to think pointless emails and multi-hour zoom meetings are the true marker of productivity. I hate this. I don't want to have to spend hours per day making up bullshit technobabble emails and sitting in on multi-hour long zoom meetings talking about unrelated boring bullshit. I just want to be able to focus on getting my coding tasks done for the day. Some of the lowest performers on my team love it though, because they are great at meetings, scheduling meetings, and making themselves feel important with pointless technical presentations during these meetings. Not to mention we are expected to have our webcams on at all times during these meetings, so I can’t even “pretend” to be present while I go make myself tea or something.
The barrier to entry for meetings has lowered. Before, scheduling a meeting in the office room down the hall and giving a presentation on why we all should add “bureaucratic coding standard addition xyz” was both too scary and too much work. Now, its “why not, management will think I am showing leadership skills!”.
Thanks guys, I love more poorly managed bureaucracy. Test driven development might be good if someone actually managed it and maintained standard during code reviews, but now everyone just creates shitty unit tests to meet the 70% code coverage requirement we are told to meet because the literal lowest performer on my team scheduled multi hour meetings with management on why we should all follow tde and convinced them it was a good idea.
2. In the US at least in my experience and from observing my clients' organizations, after two decades of relentless offshoring, for high-wage roles we're nearly scraping the bottom third percentile of the talent barrel globally for available replacements for on-shore talent, without accreting significant technical, organizational, support, maintenance, goodwill, and other types of intangible debt that CxO's increasingly recognize as burdensome friction to rapid innovation. Gains to be had offshoring are measured in inches and not yards now, with lots of attention-to-detail work to achieve it; the gains exist, but are just as hard to accomplish anywhere in the world, domestic or offshore. Just recently here on HN we were discussing management/promotion engineering/demotion, with a significant sidebar conversation on hybrid tech lead roles; there aren't that many people wired for that kind of balanced hybrid, and throw that on top of the complexities we normally deal with, and it is no wonder it is hard to recruit no matter where you look in the world.
3. Lots of "I need that separation" reports are very familiar to those who have been doing remote work for a decade or more. It takes anywhere from a year to multiple years to work out accommodations and find your groove when remote working. Finding that separation is part of it. Some people never adjust to it, and that's okay.
4. We have plausibly reached beyond the observer effect-type improvements in productivity [1] from the remote work change in habits, so this mass social experiment shows there is something substantive to remote work compared to traditional office work.
5. We have not yet reached critical mass on the time everyone has been working from home to internalize the effects of their new normal. Remote workers who have successfully made the switch have reported this takes between 6-18 months typically. This takes different forms in people. For some an intense loneliness sets in, others depression, others are happier, others find more energy. This is the Remote Work Great Filter.
6. We flipped the switch and paused a system that has taken literally centuries of refinement upon office work, and started a remote equivalent under emergency conditions from scratch in many instances with (from initial indications) no productivity hit, and some even claiming a small productivity increase. What kinds of productivity increases lie behind further remote work refinement?
7. A "grey system" of hybridized remote and on-prem office presence can unlock interesting benefits. As expensive as offices are, the pandemic response shows that they aren't so unbearably expensive that companies would wholesale leap at the slightest opportunity to unload them. This might change with the depression barreling down upon us, but for now, there is the opportunity (and perhaps even requirement) to use long-term commercial lease agreements (or even more long-term capex real estate purchases) to double or triple the amount of space in company offices. A soft turn away from the open office plan.
8. As flawed as the response was in the US, a lesson I drew from it is the qualitative change in information infrastructure since only a couple decades ago enabled private entities everywhere (not just the US) to rapidly route around many kinds of damage in many, adaptive, different ways. Very rapid, Net-based, decentralized, decoupled decision-making like depicted in some futurist visions is already here in a proto-form.
A lot of the response depends upon organizational culture and individual psychosocial makeup. I agree with the author, a hybrid grey response seems the most realistic. Remote work has the potential out of this experience to go from a marginal recruiting tool to an integral part of capex and opex plans.
You'll find articles largely in the business and financial press, e.g.,
"Coronavirus set to usher in big changes at U.S. offices" https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-of...
"Pandemic exposes ‘severe stress’ in commercial property financing" https://www.ft.com/content/e4b2302b-76c5-494a-8560-e6d24de93...
"Suburban Philly offices feel the brunt of COVID-19’s economic toll" https://www.inquirer.com/business/suburban-office-distressed...
"COVID-19 and real estate: How the coronavirus is impacting the AEC industry" https://www.bdcnetwork.com/covid-19-and-real-estate-how-coro...
"United States Office Outlook – Q2 2020" https://www.us.jll.com/en/trends-and-insights/research/offic...
Contrast the outlook as of October 2019: "base fundamentals indicate that the US CRE market remains on a strong footing."
Deloitte: "2020 commercial real estate outlook" https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/financial-...
That's not to say that sandwich shops and individual workers and managers don't have concerrns, but their voices are far more relatable and telegenic than faceless megabanks. Even genuine and spontaneous statements can be repeated and amplified by other interests.
Most of the advantages that individual knowledge-workers attain from an office — work-life separation, and meeting rooms in which to come together with others for a scheduled semi-private conversation — already have a relevant institution that will provide those to almost anyone on Earth, free of charge: the public library. Everyone[1] sitting at the tables in a public library is being productive. And almost all modern libraries have bookable meeting rooms as a free service!
[1] If your library is full of noisy people, find a different one. This mostly only happens to the one library per city nearest to the projects. I suggest a public library near a college; or, for that matter, a University library, if it’s public-access.
Yes, there’s also coffee shops, but those only solve work-life separation. Most coffee shops don’t offer bookable spaces for private meetings. I guess you could combine coffee shops with booths at restaurants, but that gets expensive quickly. Libraries are free! And, unlike the coffee shop where sitting there all day with your laptop will annoy the employees, being productive all day in a library is the point, and you have every right to ask the library employees to shush anyone interfering with your productivity, because productivity is what they want the library environment to foster.
——————
Who doesn't think libraries are a valid substitute for offices?
• Sales people and call-center workers, obviously. Anyone who needs to make phone calls all day. But these people were never really suited to ordinary office space, either. They need sound-proofed rooms/booths, really. You can build those anywhere — podcasters and journalists are currently building these at home. You really do need a separate space for this, though, and that might not be tenable in a small bachelor apartment. I have a feeling we might see the rise of specialty coworking spaces consisting of floors of small, rentable recording-booth rooms. (Some fancier public libraries have these too — again, for free.)
• Managers. Specifically, middle-managers. In-person, off-the-record conversations are how you "build your team", i.e. how you build loyalty to yourself and ensure that your team-members are working for you, rather than for the company, such that you can later take credit for their achievements and they won't call you out for it. This role is dying, and most of the visible backlash is likely coming from here. It's like the death throes of aristocracy when centralized government rises to replace it. Good riddance, I say. (Team-allocated executive assistants can perform the project-management tasks of a manager just as well, without also becoming feudal lords. These don't mind remote work at all, because they're fine with everything they say happening on-the-record on Slack/email/etc.)
Anyone who enjoys having a personalized ergonomic workspace that fits their needs. Working on a laptop 8 hours a day is going to be terrible for your body long term.
>without also becoming feudal lords.
You really underestimate what people given power, implicit or explicit, can do with it. Once you're able to tell people what work they should do, you have a lot of power to wield as you wish.
Libraries have computer workstations with proper ergonomics. Bring your laptop and a long HDMI cable. Push the workstation’s keyboard and mouse back. Plug your laptop into the monitor with the HDMI cable, then set the laptop down where the workstation’s keyboard was. Switch the input on the monitor to your laptop. (Ignore the laptop’s screen; don’t try to use it as a secondary display. It’s too low; you’ll hurt your neck.)
Since you’re not unplugging anything from the workstation, you won’t even have to ask permission from the library IT staff first to do this. It’s just like using a USB stick.
Alternately, bring one of those HDMI “compute sticks” and your own Bluetooth keyboard and mouse paired to it. You won’t get the same level of compute power that you’d get from your laptop, but you will get slightly better input ergonomics. Fine if your work is cloud-based.
Alternately, sign up for (or get your company to sign up for) a cloud Desktop-as-a-Service service, e.g. Amazon WorkSpaces. Then VNC/RDP into your workstation from any old library computer. Even the 10-year-old Dells with Celerons are powerful enough to support VNC streaming; and, given that you’re at a public library, relying on the wired Internet means you avoid the bottleneck of the single overloaded wi-fi AP everyone else is contending over.
Certainly, these workstations aren’t personalized; but they won’t kill your back/neck.
> Once you're able to tell people what work they should do, you have a lot of power to wield as you wish.
The simple difference between a manager and an executive assistant is that the manager hires the team, but the team hires the executive assistant.
It’s the same as the difference between monarchy and democracy: subjects live at the sufferance of their monarch, but a president commands at the sufferance of their people. If you can fire your boss, they’re not really your boss.
Some manager up the hierarchy hires the executive assistant, the team simply has input into the process. I suspect the input into the firing will quickly go down to 0 if the person who actually has firing power likes the EA. If the team has direct firing power then you're going to get some lovely politics going on between everyone like giving choice work to half the team all the time to keep them on your side.
>but a president commands at the sufferance of their people.
Technically, they only need 50% of the people at best.
edit: And since the EA isn't actually accountable for productivity (how can they be, they can't fire the "unproductive" team members after all) they can play even more political games since they're less in the line of fire for backlash.
My post assumed team autonomy, where each team has an entirely separate hiring pipeline. Think “startup that’s recently been acquired by a big company, but hasn’t yet been absorbed into it.” I think Amazon’s AWS service teams are also like this. Tiny little independent business units.
But really, you don’t need that; you could still have a mostly-hierarchical organizational structure, but just take hiring/firing away from the managers at every level. with no managers making hiring decisions at any level. You’d give all hiring/firing power, instead, to teams; or rather, to each team’s hiring subcommittee (which would be a temporary thing, elected anew from the team members each time hiring/firing must be done.)
You can still have traditional managers in such an org, but their main purpose at that point (if the EA duties are being played by an actual EA) would be to serve as the contact point for a team — the “API” that the rest of the org uses to access the team members and their labor. So, essentially, a talent agent.
> edit: And since the EA isn't actually accountable for productivity
Sure they are. Just because something may fail for reasons entirely out of your control, doesn’t mean you’re not usually, partially in control. A wilderness guide can still be held accountable for the safety of those in their charge, even if sometimes there’s just suddenly an angry lion.
The point of the EA—like the point of an effective manager—would be to (attempt to) be a multiplier for the team’s aggregate productivity, usually by subtly enabling knowledge-sharing and communication, while deflecting outward pressure.
As such, a measure of the EA’s effectiveness, is the same as a measure the team’s aggregate productivity, against a pre-existing baseline measurement of the team’s aggregate productivity with no EA/manager.
I would guess that it’s very likely that the average EA/manager has neutral or negative impact on aggregate team productivity. Which makes sense; an EA/manager needs to have (much) higher coordination skills than the average human being, in order for their inserting-themselves into coordination problems to be worth the overhead it introduces.
> Technically, they only need 50% of the people at best.
If you like — and this works especially well when done remotely — you can set up your EA/manager as a (team-specific, unlimited-scope) helpdesk, where team members “file tickets” with the EA to do things for them; and where the EA/manager can also file tickets themselves “on behalf of” someone, when they notice something going subtly wrong and are trying to help without being explicitly asked to do so.
Probably you could do this in a streamlined, ChatOps way, where any new team-workspace message thread with the EA/manager is automatically a new ticket.
Then, you can throw industry-standard IT-helpdesk ticket-resolution performance metrics at the tickets the EA/manager is creating+resolving.
This won’t tell you anything about aggregate productivity, but it will tell you — in a very legible, statistical way — whether the EA/manager is preferentially solving problems for only a subset of team members. (Don’t hook anything automated up to that fact; you need manual review, because it might be the team member that’s giving the EA stupid asks that they’re rightfully ignoring.)
All the data we have now shows that even unmitigated COVID-19 spread is not dramatically worse than a strong flu season, with the difference that COVID-19 kills far less younger and otherwise healthy people.
Even the argument that "we have a Influenza vaccine!" doesn't really cut it, because those vaccines are only 50% effective on average.
Of course, there are plenty of irrational reasons not to go "back to normal". I wouldn't be surprised if these were to prevail.
Governments around the world have just been handed powers they never knew they had, and I'm not talking about the power to do lockdowns.
I'm talking about the peoples of the free world demonstrating that they can easily be scared into compliance, that they will follow the dominant narrative, that they're ready to denounce their neighbors for infractions of rules "for the common good" - anything you would expect in a totalitarian regime works just as well in liberal democracies.