Six months in, the main thing that this experience has taught me is that I never want to work a remote job. It's miserable.
And I know, just for me. On scale of 1 to 10 if for me WFH is a 3 then work from cafe is a 5 and work from office is a 10 (note: this is with cool people on cool stuff, those numbers and even order might changes of those 2 things were not true). I don't generally talk to anyone at a cafe so I don't get any social interaction quota. I can't bounce ideas off people at the cafe, they aren't generally fellow SWE. So while it feels less isolated than WFH it's not a substitute for me.
Some small project teams got it right and reduced meetings and replaced them with asynchronous communication. This was a great experience. But sadly I got pushed into projects were this just wasn't the case.
So probably your experience is more of a Covid-19 experience than remote work.
It's definitely been better since I've been able to get out and see friends, but I'm still itching to get back to the office.
There are obviously many factors that can affect a person's happiness and it's always good to hear people's perspectives. Why do you find it miserable?
I live in an apartment complex that normally features amenities and is located in a neighborhood with lots of shops, cafes, bars, gyms, etc. All of the third places are currently closed or under very heavy restrictions (e.g. in Seattle you can only dine indoors with members of your household), so now I'm stuck in a two-bedroom apartment. I can still go for walks but it's not quite the same.
There's also the issue of everybody else. On paper, I have gig internet. In practice, I don't think the fiber here was designed for everyone to be simultaneously working from home. And especially with kids staying at home instead of using up their energy at school or at the playground, apartment noise has become more significant.
Work from home would probably be nicer under less strenuous circumstances. Working from home or a coffee shop of your own volition is one thing, working from home because you have to is another. I'm onboarding to a new team and personally I've found it difficult to get the quick 30-second validation I need to see if I'm setting things up right or have the right assumptions, because it very easily snowballs into setting up formal meetings.
I was setting a bad precedent for my sons when they would try to talk to me and I'd say "I'm working. not right now." Then it becomes ambiguous whether they can talk to me or not. Not good for kids IMO.
Now when I come home i get the biggest hugs you've ever seen and we start playing.
Ugh, I do this all the time and didn't think about how bad it is. A gut punch, but glad I'm now conscious of it.
Just because I go to an office doesn’t mean I baby them or don’t teach self-reliance.
> instead of actually being there all day
Most parents aren’t present, even if they are in the same room.
> Most parents aren’t present, even if they are in the same room
Seems like you're probably not aware of the irony.
Here's the main page: https://www.studio-shed.com/products/signature-series/shed-t...
I’ve considered an office shed too, but I’m a bit worried that’s still a little too close haha.
I pay $400/mo (all inclusive /w internet) for my little office. That would take me 5 years to recoup at my current rate.
I got my company to pay for it though so its technically free.
No doors? Seems like there are many ways you could make the signal less ambiguous.
So many people are working at a kitchen table right now or similar. I.e. in a communal area, due to lack of spare rooms to make into an office.
Imagine two adults trying to work at a kitchen/dining room table all day with children around.
My home office is great: nice desk, chair, good lighting, extra monitor, more than enough space. The literal work facilities are certainly better here for me than at the office. I just miss seeing coworkers, and I even miss my train ride a bit (that used to be my reading time).
And, yes, I live by myself (with my dog, fortunately).
Dream job in my opinion. I personally hate interacting with coworkers and meetings.
That sounds like a symptom of a deeper problem—insufficient autonomy? no "seat at the table"?—that is, at most, being exacerbated by remote work. What specifically about your culture makes you feel this way? What makes you feel this way more now than previously?
Like many of us, I have wide latitude in exactly how I go about meeting the requirements of the project I'm on, and I have some amount of freedom in choosing those projects. My manager is not looking over my shoulder at how many LOC I commit.
What's causing me to feel this way is a combination of isolation, every fucking thing that's happened in 2020, and my deteriorating mental health as a result. I may not last another year in a remote work + COVID environment.
What made it feel any different in the past?
My married friends complain more about WFH than otherwise. I think it depends on how many kids you have, and how big your house is.
I have a coworker that I haven't seen for weeks now because of their new part-time job as a homeschool teacher.
Childless couples and single people seem pretty happy with their new free time, even if they’d eventually like to return to the office.
- my spouse is stay at home, and therefore is supervising the kids while I work - I have a study/office at home that allows me to close the door if necessary - more of my daily time is spent programming than in meetings or interacting with people
If any one of those things wasn't true, I too would probably be struggling more with the WFH situation. As it stands, its a massive improvement as I can still work effectively, the lack of commute means I have more time for seeing my family, and the flexibility of my daily schedule now allows me to do things like take a break to hang out or have lunch with my kids.
I would have thought to be the other way around - parents miss office as they have to supervise and educate their kids while also doing their regular job.
Personally I live with 4 other family members but have a dedicated room with a dual monitor setup so I find this to be ideal.
TBQH I think a lot of young people no longer know how to make friends outside of the rigid structures of school and work. All of the old structures of church and community fell without something to take its place, and for whatever reason it's progressive to discount prioritizing traditional values like family over career. If I hadn't grown up in Boston I probably would have stuck around where ever my family was located. I think the pandemic is forcing people to analyze their own lives and many are discovering things they don't like about themselves and their choices. Hanging out on social media all day is unhealthy and is not a replacement for true friends and family.
The economy grows faster when people sacrifice their personal lives for work.
Not saying I like it, but it seems obvious why incentives are aligned that way.
It's not obvious in the longer term. Economic growth, which is affected by technological and scientific advancement (among many other things), depends on insight and creativity, not just hard work.
Maybe the economy grows more in the longer term if the people working in it were raised as healthy, happy children in more of a "family values" sort of situation.
(Personally I hold much more of a progressive, pro-LGBT+-visibility, love-and-let-love type of position than what are sometimes called traditional family values.)
Rather, I want to suggest that long term economic growth almost certainly depends in some way not just on people sacrificing their personal lives for work now; but also qualities that future generations grow up with, i.e. how children are raised, schooled, looked after, the attitudes they are surrounded by and so on.
I'm not informed enough to know how personal life in the present affects multi-generational economic growth. But I'm sure it has an effect, and that everyone maximising work in the present at the cost of personal life is almost certainly not the path to maximum collective prosperity as measured by economic growth in the long term.
For many friends and colleagues with children, however, its been a disaster, and it seems the largest culprit is that they both work, and therefore they struggle to do their jobs while also watch their children all day. I don't blame them for their situation. Society has made it so that having a stay at home parent is a luxury that many families simply can't afford, and it has also devalued the idea so much that even the families that can afford it are almost embarrassed to do so (my wife personally likes being a stay at home mom, but feels judgement from friends and former colleagues for quitting her job as a chemist to do so). Its good that we moved beyond expecting women to exclusively be the homemakers, as that is needlessly sexist, but it would have been far more healthy to replace that with normalizing one parent, gender-agnostic, devoted to child-care, rather than normalizing both parents working and relying on daycare/schooling to watch kids for most of the day.
I'm a very enthusiastic engineer and love bouncing ideas off others, whether they are in sales, marketing, or other engineers.
Remote has made "connecting" much less natural and makes it difficult to progress in my career.
If you're the type of engineer who likes to be given requirements and sit in your home office and code all day in silence then power to you. Not for me.
What's your strategy to counteract this if the people who you enjoy bouncing ideas off of prefer to and/or end up all staying remote?
I also find that simple conversations take way longer, especially when there's disagreement.
Thirdly video calls are super draining.
It's also really difficult to get separation between work and life. I find myself doing home chores doing the day intertwined with work.
Unlike some commenter, the social aspect isn't that important to me, but there's definitely some camaraderie missing. In the office, I feel like part of a team that's working together to achieve something. At home I feel like one of a swarm of drones that occasionally communicate for information exchange. It's not very fulfilling.
This has been a HUGE PLUS for me! Just the ability to run a load of laundry while on a 90 minute call or water the plants when I have a gap between meetings has been a major quality of life increase. Now I can manage the house during the week and weekends are true relaxing and enjoyable weekends, no longer chorefests.
I’m married with one 18 year old son at home. I put 11 gallons of gas in my car early July and still had half a tank mid September. I realized that I only leave the house every two weeks to get a haircut. My older son who doesn’t live with us needed a car and I just gave it to him. I didn’t need it.
I had former coworkers/friends who I would meet up for lunch. But none of them are comfortable even eating outside. The married friends that we had, we don’t get together with anymore.
Working out? I had started going to spin class at the gym pre-Covid and was planning to maybe start back teaching fitness classes once or twice a week like a did almost a decade ago, but that’s cut. We have a gym at home that I use and my wife turned another room into a studio where she teaches online fitness classes.
I’ve really become a hermit. We are going to venture outside to eat out for the first time since March next week. Of course we are going to eat outdoors. We use to have date night at least every other week - dinner, movies, live music, etc.
We are still trying to figure out a nice, safe, drivable getaway.
They have good reason to be. A recent study from the CDC found that eating out, even if outdoors, was one of the largest risk factors for infection of the disease. They found that people with Covid were over twice as likely to have gone to a restaurant than the average for those without Covid.
There is not much friction in all this since you know you are going to leave this behind at the end of the day. My interactions with close friends, although longer and much more meaningful, are also very bursty. The "mid-range socializing" (regular and frequent but not very serious) that office provides, that WFH is mostly unable to replicate in my experience, is something I am missing and I think it makes all the difference.
Co-workers often make good friends since they have a lot in common. Some of them will be acquaintances, some will be good friends. It’s normal
I think you have it backwards. People who are "good at making friends" can also make friends outside of work, and so aren't left without social ties when everyone is working from home. If the only people you are making friends with are people who you both are compelled/paid to be around each other for 8+ hours a day, you might not be that good at making friends.
However it would be quite different if I was just on my own the whole time.
These "free social interactions" are often just distractions - taking you out of your context, making it difficult for you to be productive.
That's why I love remote + Slack. Slack is async. I can finish what I'm doing before addressing messages there. On-site, people rarely if ever warn of their intention to come talk to you - they just walk up and start talking.