I am sure there is a place for a hybrid option but celebrating remote as the future discourages me to enter the field.
Buy a larger desk? Check. Buy a better chair? Check. Spend more time working since there is no psychological difference between relax and work time? Check.
Yes. This is unfortunately happening to me now
Since April this year in the UK we can get up to £6 per week written off business expenses incurred as a result of WFH.
Of course, they may go the opposite direction to encourage people back into offices so coffee/sandwich shops etc. get more footfall.
I disagree with this sentiment, depending on where you live not commuting for a few weeks has already paid for all these things. And for many who haven't had to pay rent in the Bay Area for the last 6 months the gains are even more pronounced.
>Spend more time working since there is no psychological difference between relax and work time?
I agree that's an issue but can certainly be mitigated by building good habits around "work" and "not work" time.
Without remote work, there is significant pressure on people like me to move into the city. I live where the mortgage on my 2500 sqft home with a dedicated workspace ($850/mo) probably costs me less than your 400 sqft apartment's rent. I understand that many people who live in downtown apartments don't want to move; pre-COVID, some vacations to New York and to Chicago made me seriously consider moving somewhere downtown to enjoy the energy and opportunity provided by living downtown. But while quarantine with grocery deliveries was probably hellish for you, it was among my favorite seasons of the past few years of my life.
Without remote work, there was significant offloaded cost onto me the employee, to commute to the central workplace, not only financial but also in time. The cost of a very nice office chair is nothing compared to the cost of a driver's seat in a car, and has no comparison to the hours wasted each week on the road.
I have a physical and psychological difference because I have a home office, which I understand is a luxury that a 400 sqft studio doesn't afford. A home office is psychologically better for me than a central office, because my desk at the office was a combination space for my focus work, video/audio conference calls, eating lunch, and relaxing with coworkers.
While working remote, I spend a little more time working, and that more efficiently, but that's because I don't have to waste time on a commute and because I can maintain focus on a task without too many external interruptions when needed.
Like it or not, I think cost of living is about to experience a significant swing over the next few decades. House prices out here are (were) strongly correlated to distance to the highway and from there to the city. Apartment rents in downtown areas are (were) correlated not only to people's desire to live in the big city but also to the cost savings of not needing to own a car and proximity to high-paying jobs. Eventually, things will even out.
Ironically, commuting to work pushes a lot more of the costs you complain about onto the employee.
The industry is changing for new entrants, and it is considerably different today.
I hope you don't actually believe that's what's happening in American cities.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/dozens-of-arrests-in-san-f...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Free-for-all-as-...
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/30/george-floyd-protests...
Plenty of valid reasons to not want to move here. The idea that riots and people setting things on fire is like a serious problem for your day-to-day life? Absurd.
We both got anecdotes going either way.
If you're hiring a twenty-something Java developer, you're sort of hiring a commodity. Sure, you may care about schools, grades, interview, etc. but a lot of your decision is going to be based on their paper. They may not have worked anywhere, so they may not have much of a work record.
However, over time most people acquire a more unique toolbox of skills. In my case, since my first job out of grad school, I've basically been directly hired either by a referral or directly by the owner or a senior exec. My current job didn't even have a job posting for it.
Large tech companies often just don't take chances on people like this anymore.
But if you work remote, can't you get a bigger apartment (or even a house) out in the suburbs (or other CoL area)?
The only semi-constructive thing I can say is "This too shall pass."
In 1998, at 18 years old, I was literally the boy in the bubble, living in forced isolation for over a year. Atypically, I was also very extroverted.
I was extremely fortunate to have access to dial up modems. So between CompuServe, and starting my own BBS network, I cobbled together a social life and some income publishing my own shareware.
It sucked. But it was also awesome.
Those online relationships were just about the best I've ever had. More like penpals than drinking buddies.
Alas, nothing is permanent, and I was eager to return to the real world.
As for the environmental noise, I'm sure you've investigated noise canceling headphones, white noise machines, and maybe even noise dampening acoustic foam on the walls.
Noise pollution is terrible. Especially if you're sensitive, like my sweetie. I hope you can find a corner in the basement, or open area on the roof, or something. The noise in our prior condo was terrible, driving my sweetie insane. Our neighborhood had gotten popular. So much new construction, new roof top open bar across the street, 3:00am deliveries in alley below our bedroom window, etc. There was literally was no peace.
If you're working remote any way, maybe you can peace out somewhere else. Anywhere with broadband and strong coffee.
IRC/Slack/Discord communities are far better than even the best in-person networking event.
There are even job channels on some chat communities. Though the age of the forum is dead.
I run an IRC network, I’ve hired people from my IRC network, you choose your own level of involvement.
(And your own level of notification. I know the default in slack and discord is aggressive and designed to push more engagement but it is configurable)
As it stands there are many people who are absolutely not “distracted” by it, most do not get notifications at all, but usually if you did get a notification it would be because someone said your name explicitly.
Most people tend to read up when they feel like it and respond when they feel like it.
I also don’t like absolutism but the OP sounds absolutely defeated and for no reason other than they seem unaware that these communities exist and in my experience have given me better experiences than in person “networking” meetings.
Unless I’m already friends, meeting people at conferences is often not as valuable as meeting them on IRC.
A more positive phrasing: Find your own tribe.
I started a design patterns book study group +25 yo that's still going.
When I was doing activism, I had a hard time fitting in. Politics (and people) suck. So I started a new group.
I've participated in many other groups that were technical, volunteering, political. There's often at least one person that I connect with, making the effort worthwhile.
In that broader sense, we have macro forums on the scale of Reddit, and even Twitter, thought its content format/ui drifts much further way from traditional forums than something like Reddit.
Then on the micro scale we have forums like individual users' Facebook and Facebook communities.
So as with most things internet over the last 15 years, its evolved from having many many small scale offerings, to a very few massive corporations that ate everything else.
I don't even have the option for "gigabyte speeds" - consider yourself lucky.
I am on a 30 mbit connection and both my wife and I remote work. She is on Zoom calls all day long and I stream music and youtube without an issue, while maintaining a latency free remote connection to my desktop in the office.
Well, not all of them. Do your job well while being someone fun to work with. People will remember that, especially the ones in your age group. The people I worked with when I was younger are now in positions where they can let me know about jobs and recommend me for them, and I am in that position too for them.
This situation is not great, but keep moving forward as best as you can.
“It is not enough that you do your job well, you also need to spend energy to put out an entertaining persona.” is such an Americanism that creates a game theoretic layer of duplicitous characters on top.
This is important because whenever the boundaries are poorly defined, there is room for narcissistic abuse, even if self-inflicted. “Be a joy to work with” could have so many failure modes; the guy who brings up inconvenient truths could be penalized, the useless people pleasers can get ahead. The idea could work to Marie Kondo one’s clothes, but I feel like standards should be different for humans.
Niceness is a tricky metric to go by in a work environment, adults disagree, and work is not always fun.
On the flip side, if the critic can't express their criticisms without being an asshole, well then of course people aren't going to like working with them.
I think the asshole persona is a useful device to think through this problem, but I think you are overemphasizing it and ignoring other personas. You can express criticisms with perfect tact and you still will encounter people that has a problem with being challenged (it is rather common with newly promoted technical leads or managers), or like I said a healthy code review will require saying "no" at times, with no fault of the reviewer, will still generate adversarial dynamics.
And let's be realistic, performance reviews are highly biased towards positive feedback because criticisms look harsher on that format than they are so people hold back therefore I don't see "asshole" dynamics as frequent as you are focusing, if anything "niceness" dynamics is incentivizing dishonesty in peer feedback.
Now, think about the people you would hire to work for you, and the people you wouldn't even give an interview to.
The people you don't enjoy working with - what side of the equation do they fall on? Some of them will be because they are incompetent, and some of them will be because they are terrible people.
Now what about about the people you did enjoy working with? What side of the equation are they on? Some of them will be because they were great at their jobs and some of them will be cause they are great people. I'm willing to bet that the vast majority are both competent and people that you enjoy being around. I'm also willing to bet that the people you would be happy to work with again, are genuine in the way they treat other people. The "Fake Niceness" is easy to sniff out.
As always, YMMV.
But, what's also almost certainly true, is that different companies and different teams within companies will have vastly different emphasis on in person vs. remote. If you're someone who can't wait to go back into an office pretty much full-time and want to work with others who feel similarly, a lot of companies may not be right for you going forward--given that a mix of remote and in-person pretty much needs to work as if everyone were remote.