Why Working from Home Will Stick [pdf]
nbloom.people.stanford.edu
nbloom.people.stanford.edu
1. Socializing is the primary activity that happens at work for the vast majority of workers. The gal or guy coming by your desk to "check in" or "see how your weekend was" etc... is literally where they find their social outlets and personal connections.
2. Managers like to be able to watch their direct reports because it makes them feel more in control than they are
3. The commuting routine, even if it's a nightmare, offers a sense of normalcy that most people have gotten used to and in a weird way rely on for grounding.
4. For a huge swath of Americans at least, work is an escape from the drudgery of the home.
To truly work from home 100% of the time you have to be a master at controlling yourself and your ability to be distracted. Most people don't have this control and need a framework to insert themselves into. Add to that the contextual dimension of an "other" place that is a world apart from your home life and you have something that allows for a depressurization for most people.
You have obviously never been on the Tube at rush-hour in London. All it offers is a sense of stress and anger.
The 25 minutes of commute in NYC subway, even packed (but not London-packed, though) are my 25 minutes of uninterrupted reading, or thinking, or otherwise being alone and on my own, paradoxically. I miss it.
I do miss the view in the morning and evening crossing the Manhattan bridge, though. That was nice.
Any time I go to the office I hate it because I’m extra stressed out about sick people being on the train, but I cannot deny it gives a sense of normalcy to life that is otherwise entirely missing.
In the smaller city, I took buses or walked, but I noticed taking a bus still makes a difference, even though one might have to stand up a little. Just the idea of being surrounded by people, each with their own untold stories and problems, made me feel part of something bigger. I agree with the OP; commuting actually helped me feel like I belong to a community, even though I'm introverted and would never talk to any of the people that I would see.
Now with the pandemic on top of it, depression has kicked in. I sometimes play youtube videos with city/car/library... ambient sounds, just to get that feeling again. It does help a bit, but I can't wait for things to get back to "normal", whatever that means from now on.
People used to go to church and do religious events and things sometimes during the week - this is all gone now, and I wish we had an alternative that didn’t rely on religion, just based on the local community somehow.
Community centers 2.0 or whatever, but a place where people have a reason to go. I can only think of classes which doesn’t quite work I think (hard to really get everyone there at the same time) but maybe it’s the key I have no idea!
Community, in some ways, require some lock in (don't think in absolutes here but switching costs etc.). If you're locked in to the community you have to sort out differences and make it work. For religion and work the lock in is obvious. But outside of these we can easily chop and change our community leading to us not bothering about compromise as much and us missing out on the deeper relationships.
In the article he blocks out a longer excerpt from O Pioneers! by Willa Cather, with this bolded bit:
> Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere.
https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-convivial-soc...
This next bit is extrapolation on my part, but I suspect the hackerspace demographic has particularly minimal church attendance, and that may contribute to our appreciation of "third place" dynamics elsewhere.
I'll have a look around my area and try one post-lockdown, although I feel like it'd be so much easier to join if I already knew someone who went...
As for the commute, I previously had a 15-minute walk to and from work before. I try to design my life so I can either walk or bike to work. I miss that too. I was more physically active before, and there's something meditative about walking, helps clear your mind.
I don't know what it is about remote work, but even though I know the physical activity would be good for me, I have a hell of a time motivating myself to taking a walk around the neighborhood before/during work that I work only from home. And we started 100% remote before the pandemic, so it's not pandemic-related.
I think there's a couple of reasons for that, for me. #1, I don't really feel the need to escape home, where I had to get out of the office, especially with all the open office noise. I can just 'escape' upstairs and do some dishes to put some distance from work. And #2, my role is now a lot more on-call than it used to be, and a few times I've taken the walk during work I've had to double back and hurry halfway through, because I always seem to pick the exact time something breaks.
Sucks. I don't have a good reason to be in worse shape because of the pandemic but I am.
My theory is that as more of us have less and less social interaction outside of the workplace (especially in the northeast I think), people really value the social aspects of the workplace. The socialites among us will likely lead the way back into the office and drive peer pressure for the rest of us to return.
Don't underestimate how many of those start from overhearing interesting conversations between other people.
Does that ever happen in WFH companies?
Why should employees even exist? Shouldn't firms just sack everyone, then hire contractors?
I often hear advocates of remote work talk about "presenteeism" and how managers need to just focus more on outputs. This is fine, but if they can do that why not sack everyone and just hire contractors and pay for the outputs?
The reality is, unless employees are micro-managed to the point of being basically robots, they're given a certain amount of discretion. If they are at work, and can't slack off, then they will use this discretion to create value for the company in ways that the managers don't always have time to exactly specify.
The slack and discretion in a "presentism" run office means that employees can make changes without having to always go up the chain. For a concrete example, let's say you think there's a major show-stopper of a bug. Your manager disagrees, and says not to worry about it, and will not budge. You have a few hours free in the week because you finished your work a bit faster than expected. You might look into the suspected bug (and end up proving it's an issue, or proving to yourself that your boss was right) if you're otherwise stuck in an office reading email to look busy, but not if you're at home and you can turn on the TV or walk the dog.
I mean, a lot of them are trying to do exactly that.
So, a future where that happens will require either very tight managerial oversight (pipe dream), or will lead to a bunch of stuff that is brittle as hell.
Doesn't mean it won't happen. But God helps us if it does.
I suspect that would lead to just subcontracting whole business functions to more stable vendors.
To share contractor perspective: a problem I've identified is ambiguous overlap of ownership/maintainer role of project code between contractor and contractee staff (or lack thereof). So a slightly alternate conclusion is that it's up to the contractor to exert authority over the code they provide to the contractee even if that means charging more to ensure said code shall be maintained well into beyond original production date; or doing the hard but necessary things like engaging directly with contractee and its staff at ground-zero and not-to-mention the customers said project serves so as to stay dialed into the picture for as long or as intimately as necessary to ensure optimal results.
It is not always a rewarding experience, and can be demoralizing at times because internal staff can often view contractors as outside threats to their own jobs (which is understandable; but actually is part of the value in hiring outside contractors from time to time as it keeps staff on their toes) and so you may often be feeling like you are on the outside knocking on the window just to get basic access to assets, servers, or people/gatekeepers responsible for granting you what you need to get said work done, yet...
if contractor doesn't exert this extent of dilligence, or lazily assumes the company will maintain said code by means of its own devices - it will become lose lose for both sides as the contractor will be blamed when things start to break or when internal staff eventually & inevitably are requested to introduce new features on top of the now outdated 'foreign codebase' they begrudgingly must now maintain - which can conversely result in long drawn-out 'new platform' projects that set back said company by months or a year or more resulting in yet more need for contractors to fill in gaps again and as such this never-ending cycle continues.
At the end of the day if you are contractor you are indeed expendable & temporary and so its best not to get emotionally invested; be results focused & get paid for your time, do your best and at the end of the day that is all you and your client need - at least until the next cycle begins.
The opposite
During the day, interruptions would be so high that I wouldn’t bother trying to work between them - as bad as if I try to homeschool the kids.
Why not do that anyway? The same reasons apply.
>If they are at work, and can't slack off, then they will use this discretion to create value for the company in ways that the managers don't always have time to exactly specify.
I've never been in a work environment where everyone is working at 100% all the time. Never. Have you?
Pure anecdote - while working remotely I've found that my team is bout the same productivity level, maybe slightly more productive; we've had people build internal tools in their spare time, people are focused on the task rather than wasting time and we've hired carefully and built a culture where people know they are trusted and needed to get the job done.
Yes, it doesn't work the same way in-person works all the time. You have to allow for more asynchronicity, but you can counter that in part by having the opportunity for scheduled check-ins.
In your example, by the way, the staffer has gained no favor from the manager by directly going against what they said to do. They might solve this bug and be a hero but they'll be likely to gain a reputation for not being able to listen to directions.
Yes, (except mandated breaks) although they were all unskilled labor. Working in shipping/receiving, a warehouse, fast food (less so, there usually are lulls at certain times), a restaurant. Very little time not spent working.
In an office environment, though? Yeah, I've never seen it, except on the rare day when something major breaks and it needs to be resolved asap.
Even if you spend some time chasing it and come up empty, the story that you went above what was assigned because you were convinced I was wrong and hurting the company is still a good one.
Now, if you always act like an arrow without any feathers, we may have a problem, but I’d way rather have a bunch of engineers trying to improve the company even if that means proving me wrong than have a bunch of them waiting to faithfully execute my divinely-inspired direction.
The main difference between employees and contractors are incentives. The contractor's goal is to get paid the most over the longest period of time. They don't care about your company's bottom line, they care about theirs, and the 2 aren't automatically aligned. The employees are more or less paid a fixed amount a month, their incentive is to stay around and get raises.
I've been working with contractors for years, and you absolutely need employees to ensure the contractor's output is aligned with the interest of the company, at all times and in detail.
I can confirm this because I've reached a point in my job where I am performing at most about 3 hours worth of actual work in any given week. This isn't because I'm so good at my job (I once was...) and things are running so smoothly (though they kinda are), it's because my current mental state prevents me from being motivated enough to do much of anything. Remarkably few people seem to have noticed and none have said anything about it.
When I was allowed to work from home because I had COVID (the entire IT department got it due to asinine butts-in-seats policy during a fucking pandemic), all that changed is that my stress level went down from not having to pretend to work most of the work day.
Even if the majority of companies see things this way, they will return to the office. But those that succeed, survive, thrive or dominate a market will do whatever that makes them successful along the way. It doesn't matter if people like routine if the other guy beats you on revenue, time to market and profitability. The people that win in their market segment are not "most" people.
Until it is confirmed that 100% remote, with workers distributed all around the world that can be the best at what they do, or are cheaper or are capable of being trusted to get the job done without someone breathing over their shoulder are worse at competing than the status quo, the jury is still out.
Broader society? When has that mattered in the face of disruption? Until the day remote working gets outright banned, this game has yet to fully play out.
I recognize I'm not the norm, but working from home the past year has been amazing for my introverted personality. To imply that the office is a necessity for removing distress is an overly broad brush to paint with that does not apply to everyone.
WFH forces the kind of auditable accountability upon everyone I've taken for granted as necessary to thrive as a consultant. This popularizes communication modalities into the open long overdue. Use of more granular project tracking has gone up considerably as a coordination point to communicate early and often between teams, purely to reduce meetings only to where exploratory work has to be performed between multiple people/teams.
I'm seeing in my clients a lot of the big-talkers-little-execution ("all hat, no cattle") staff members get identified and tracked into more tightly-focused work efforts, leading to less stress upon the staff who usually bear the brunt of picking up the slack. The staff who typically thrive in this environment are highly systematic with their work, take notes instead of relying upon just memory, and effectively coordinate and work with team members in decision-oriented meetings.
Management is much more open to spending the necessary time to ramp up automation, simply because the effort leaves behind far more obvious artifacts, as opposed to pre-pandemic, where shockingly many clients still had armies of staff performing everything by hand "because we can't afford DevOps".
I still predict however a lot companies and people going back to offices post-pandemic. The socialization aspect is poorly addressed with virtual happy hours, or other tactics put on by really good leadership. We don't have the tech cost down enough yet to pull off the kind of virtual office that can replace that yet. I imagine "yet" as way better than Cisco Telepresence-grade AV (8K tiled video, full phased-array directional two-way video, latency management), floor-to-ceiling scale, in everyone's home office, that can reproduce say, a small open office with a central virtual conference table surrounded by virtual doors to virtual private offices that look into people's home office when their virtual door is open. Our species aren't built for the kind of intensely-close face-to-face contact all day long that is involved when web conferencing with each other over laptop cameras, so current web conferencing solutions cannot substitute for high-touch interactions that many managers and staff crave.
Personally, I'm less effective when physically at an office as I can't be as systematic handling the flow of work coming across as a stream of text. A large proportion of workers still vastly prefer speaking than typing, and I end up transcribing a lot of that walk-up verbal interaction myself and then following up in text format anyways, which is a big factor in the efficiency differential.
The lessons going into it now come from my experience at an all-remote unicorn, and your consulting based viewpoint would be valuable to hear.
Voice-centric. This is very difficult to internalize for those of us here who cut our working lives upon text. We literally live in a context cocooned in text: email, chat, complex application UI's, web pages, editors, calendars, and terminals. But we're vastly outnumbered by most people in the world who get activities done by interacting largely by voice or near-proxies. Whether with peers, direct reports, managers, stakeholders, assistants, or any other relationship, the majority of interactions are transacted over voice, snippets of text so brief they might as well be voice, sometimes highly-structured apps (like truck dispatch apps) that might as well be snippets of text, pictures (still or moving), and rarest of all the kind of text we deal with in our industry.
This is text that sits in unstructured form until it is internalized and cognitively, actively modeled. Even highly-structured code with strict AST's counts, because unless I've read the code before, it comes at me as a blob until I've applied cognitive effort comprehending it. If it wasn't this way, the majority of advertisements would be in long-form text. There is a highly specialized area of marketing that does do exactly that, but the overwhelming majority of advertising functions on this predominantly-voice ingestion pattern.
If your product market fit is outside of the group of people who are used to transacting in text (and even then, even inside tech companies, there are tons of people who still vastly prefer voice, even modulo the social dominance hues using voice to convey requests brings to the picture), then I don't know how to solve that problem without Uber-scale buckets of money.
From recording to synthesized structure. This is the passive inscribing act going through the converting process to active internalization gap to produce decisions and results all tools in this genre aim for. You cannot make people cognitively apply themselves to taking raw information, internalize it, and then offer synthesis. Watch a lot of meetings for the following: how many people are regurgitating the recorded/known data or only first-order consequences in their own words (thereby typically cementing their understanding), and how many summarize into choices, tradeoffs, and synthesize a proposed solution that take into account second- or even third-order effects? A great number of tools in this space fall into the recording trap. "Here, I enabled you to record this phone conversation, that web meeting, whatsit email. Now go make something of it."
We're still missing a data auto-editorial function not just in this toolspace but in general within the civilization. The Big Hairy problem space isn't recording, as much as accurate, precise, fast synthesis. We have too much recording as it is. We lack correctly finding the valuable parts of the recordings. As much as people like to dump on Palantir here, they're tackling that synthesis problem head-on; they're basically indiscriminately spraying a firehose of money at the problem, and they're chipping away at it through a lot of brute-force (which I suspect is the only way initially). This is why you see people asking each other over email for the same information they just emailed each other about last month instead of searching the email archives. Associative importance-based memory beats search beats raw data.
What is interesting to me about all this is we aren't even widely supporting interrupt-driven annotation and organizing, even though our biological hardware is optimized for that modality. Vision keying on motion, audio keying on differentials breaching background noise (and said background is cognitively processed, not just a decibel threshold), pattern recognition, and so on: our hardware platform is primed for an interrupt-driven existence, yet our SOTA computer interactions in the workplace are primarily batch-based. It is no wonder Instagram is a smash success, and Outlook having been on the market for a magnitude longer is "just" a square office app, despite one user of the latter conveying far more information in a day than in a week on the former.
To bring this into the concrete, for example we can attach video to a topic, so an even better interrupt-friendly interaction is being able to comment directly into the video, either by typing or talking into TTS/video-over-cam, and have that emerge into the topic alongside the video. That's half way there to summarizing with low effort by the users. As much as I like Markdown myself, unless I'm working with a developer-centric organizational culture, I point teams towards rich text editors (which are free to encode into Markdown). Organizing topics will become an issue, especially in cross-functional teams who are nearly guaranteed to have differing taxonomies and even ontologies. Coercing them all into a One Tag Cloud to Rule Them All seems to discourage adoption rates in my limited experience, which I suspect is due to some kind of conceptualization/modeling impedance mismatch between teams. With cheap storage and processing these days, I'd like to see the results of interrupt-driven, search-history-directed, team-oriented-categorization organizing. Build the associative net based upon what people say to remember about a topic, what they search for and linger upon the longest after apparently pausing their search, and what ML-identified commonalities they share with other team mates (relationships pulled from a directory service).
That's my off-the-cuff reaction.
Knowing the people you work with can make these relationships less abstract and more emphatic.
In the worst case interpersonal communication in the workplace is all about who tends to offload work on whom (e.g. the manager who records a 15 min voice message where precisely one minute matter to each of the receipients offloaded the effort of sorting and parsing to the recipients. This manager wasted then 14 minutes times the number of receipients time, just out of pure lazyness).
Remote communications makes this worse, because every email that leaves open a questions takes time/energy as it goes back and forth.
I think a lot of that can be addressed by having in-person social events once it's feasible to do so.
I spent many years as a consultant for several different large consulting firms. If we were productive, we were generally at client sites most of the time.
That meant we were rarely together as a group while working.
In order to promote teamwork, camaraderie and make sure we knew our peers, superiors and subordinates well, at least at the well-run organizations, we'd have regular (semi-monthly) team get togethers and at least quarterly office get togethers, either in the office or at a public venue.
That sort of thing is much less costly and since it's outside of the regular work routine, socializing and building relationships doesn't negatively impact productivity.
Whether or not WFH+regular get togethers is a good solution depends on the organization and its dynamics. But it absolutely can make a big difference.
I'm normally almost 100% remote but the past 9 months have still been rather isolating because normally I'm traveling about 1/3 of the time including to industry events and internal meetings where I meet among other teams members and other people from the company. Honestly, I go into our local office these days and I might not run into anyone I know because we've grown a lot and my direct team is very distributed.
Agreed. I'm hoping this does become the new normal, but it is a difficult balance to strike for leadership. There are different types of personalities, lifestyles, and life stages within any employee base, and there absolutely is a human need for connection even at work, which for some people can only be found in their specific circumstances in physically going butt-in-seat.
What? What kind of workplace do you work at that you need to resort to recording your coworkers to get to the bottom of conflicts?
In the morning, I don't need to commute an hour to the office, giving me an extra hour of sleep. My workspace is also superior to what I'd ever get in the office.
But the biggest boost in my productivity has come from the lack of distractions when working from home. If I'm trying to focus on something, I can set my status as busy and mute notifications, leaving me to work in peace without interruption.
An interesting factor is how this is dependent on how confident we can be to continue WFH.
Like many people, I'm nowhere near prepared to have a good home office, the house is way too tiny. Which was fine when I didn't WFH more than a few days a month.
But I could easily solve that by moving to a cheaper area where I could get a house with enough space for a dedicated home office. But to do that I need to be confident WFH will continue. Hard to predict what to do.
(So what I've done in the interim is lease a small office walking distance from my house, lots of vacancies right now.)
I had this problem and spent a few months working on the couch before buying a desk and office chair - I dropped a few thousand on these things alone. What gave me the confidence was the introduction of a WFH allowance and news a few people around the company had moved to the countryside.
This is not much different than working in a colocated situation, except my coworkers don't have to smell my B.O.
The tooling available these days makes remote work better than in person IMO.
For example, walking to a whiteboard and sketching something is easier than doing the same in zoom, unless everyone in the team owns a wacom tablet, and even then, physical "big visible charts" generally work better than online ones.
I think the trade off is in favour of remote, for me, but it is highly dependent on job, person, team.
I think one "secret" is that we have small-ish teams (3-5 engineers), each with a very engaged and technically savvy leader. I've known other managers to have up to 20 IC reports. I can see that kind of structure falling apart when remote in such a way that your underperformers start completely slacking off and you're too busy to even notice. It's way harder for that to happen in smaller teams where your team lead/manager is very engaged in the team's work and your relative output is quite visible.
How much of this is the result of working with an established team that existed before you moved to work-from-home? Do you think the same will be true for teams that are created in a work-from-home setting from the start?
I ask, because I am worried about training and retaining new people. A lot of work is not satisfying in itself. Part of my motivation comes from working together with a group of people I've come to known well. Often I care more about the people I work with than the problems I am working on. I consider this people aspect part of my intrinsic motivation to work.
I fear that once we're all working from home, our motivations become more and more extrinsically. After that, why bother working for THIS company or problem? Can I trust myself and my colleagues to be involved enough to finish anything in the long run? Or should I start to expect anyone to jump ship anytime?
If you are a slacker at home I am sure you slacked in the office as well.
To me it all depends if we are talking from a middle management perspective or not. The company is better off but the redundancy of middle management is on full display right now.
There will be huge opportunity though for companies that get leaner middle management wise and poach high performing remote talent across the country. This to me seems very obvious.
Not to mention, it is not like you are going to have the luxury as a company of cutting remote cost post COVID. Remote cost is sunk cost for the remainder of my working life.
I assume the biggest factor right now with how the company spins the narrative with remote work has to do with what things look like with the timing and length of the office lease.
At some point in the future though, the cost of the office will become a competitive disadvantage.
Yes. Key positives for a company are reduced cost of office space and ability to draw upon a wider, cheaper pool of potential workers and increased employee satisfaction (for some, not everyone prefers working from home). Key negatives are reduced productivity due to lack of supervision, difficulty of face-to-face meetings with clients, difficulty of training younger staff.
Its a tradeoff and I think different businesses will fall into different buckets and there will also always be some inertia to change. I do think that the 'new normal' is neither 5 days 9-5 in the office OR complete remote work but something more like a couple of days in the office and a couple at home every week for most staff. But this wil probably be a plurality of the workforce only, with substantial numbers completely remote or close to, and substantial numbers also still in 5 days a week.
>Key negatives are reduced productivity due to lack of supervision, difficulty of face-to-face meetings with clients, difficulty of training younger staff.[hard to measure]
Just throwing this experience of mine out there, when faced with actual dollar figures and hard to measure, vague outcomes, companies that I've worked for have nearly always acted on the dollar figures.
When it comes to their core business companies have a decent belief in what it looks like.
That would make the ones doing the firing redundant too. You want as many employees as possible as cheap as possible.
Playing a little bit the devil's advocate here:
Risk aversion and general tendency to apply gradual changes.
Would you bet your company to run an experiment almost no one else is trying? Perhaps letting your workers work from home works perhaps you'll miss all deadlines and generate all kinds of drama.
An external factors kicked in and everyone was in the same experiment. Things were messy but not completely unmanageable. Some were even surprised things kept working as well as they did.
Now, the big question is: will this take a toll on people? Will companies that choose to continue with this work style be put in disadvantage as other companies switch back to on-prem?
Because it seemed impossible, until now.
Depending on how your company works, the short term positives could be nothing compared to the problems that will arise when everybody becomes an anonymous cog in an invisible machine.
I've worked remote most of my career, and in my experience, the politics and work theaterisms are still there, just different.
For example, someone's perceived level of "effort" often becomes a function of how responsive they are. Do they respond to Slack messages at random hours, when team members in different time zones/aggressive managers ping them? Do they frequently communicate with the team via video calls and Slack discussions? Just like in normal office politics, their actual productivity or work quality is assessed less than their appearance of engagement.
That's just an example, but my experience in general has been that remote doesn't change anything about the cultural of management at a company. Whatever metrics mattered in person, there will be remote equivalents to replace them.
The positive here is that good leadership is still good leadership, remote or not. The negative, obviously, is that remote isn't the balm for poor leadership that many hope it will be.
The high performers work better, but half of the rest workers are doing nothing. I’m aware of people getting canned for stuff like outsourcing themselves, accidentally having sex on an open mic, illegally exporting computers to countries with export controls, etc since COVID.
Work at home is great for people with tangible outputs. I don’t want my salesmen fucking around in the office. But many workers with less well defined outputs are going to be harder to manage, and being in the office kept distractions away.
I am way more productive remote and it isn't even close. While I do like the social aspect of the office, it is such overkill.
To me post-COVID, the whole country is open for business. I want to join a company that values high productive remote workers and sees the massive opportunity this is going to create.
I agree with this viewpoint, and (post covid) there are options for replicating at least some of the social aspects of the office.
1)People hate small-talk $hit. They will not go back to work so they can small-talk
2)Like to - doesn't mean it's going to go back. Plus they can save by firing Manager who used to come and "check in"
3)People will find other ways to have normalcy - no one is going to miss commuting.
4)This is a toss up. I can see it going both ways. Going to work is a drudgery for a huge swath of Americans, too.
Just because these things dont make sense to you it does not mean they are not true for many people.
As a counterpoint I would say MANY MANY people love and thrive in small talk and as is referenced elsewhere in this discussion, particularly engaging in that at work.
2 - I get managers are persona non grata on here but get real. You still need people to make decisions.
3 - I miss commuting. I listened to music and I like driving, and it gave me structure to wake up at a certain time in the morning.
2. Time to get a better manager who trusts you.
3. Commuting is a waste of time. I roll out of bed and immediately start working. The company loses on time I could be working by having me commute.
4. Yeah, I definitely can’t relate to this one.
It's important to be _friendly_ at work but that doesn't mean someone is your friend.
People find a place to work and then stick with it, out of complacency or other properties. It’s why employers famously provide minimal raises, and you earn far more if you change employers.
Employers are betting people will rather accept lower pay in exchange for less volatility and perceived risk, and they are correct.
As a fairly specialized electrical engineer, I could still find employment at several other companies which do what I do, but I'm not itching to move (been at the same company for a decade). Is everyone on HN constantly shifting jobs?
1.) Small startups die often
2.) People vest their RSUs and realize their employer doesn't value them enough for a refresh so they take a giant pay cut hence start the job search
Yeah well, as they say, life's a bitch and then you die. On the scale of things that are horrible prospects "not making friends at work" strikes me as something very privileged to be concerned about.
And I'm not meaning some buddy-buddy friends, but at least making good acquaintances. You can't really go much farther than that unless you have developed a good personal rapport and share some set of similarities.
I too find the need to be friends with everyone quite privileged, and worse, trying to force one's world view onto others. Some people just don't have the luxury of surrounding themselves with people of a largely similar mindset they can bond to in a work environment. Friendship is not something I wish to lower my standards for. Maybe the definition of what constitutes a friend is just different, too. I have high standards for a friend. An acquaintance, not so much. You could be an acquaintance just by saying 'hi' every week.
It is extremely privileged to expect your job to provide that. Most people do not have that many different jobs with different considerations to choose from, and when they do choose they do it based on more important and immediate needs like working conditions and compensation.
I've made lifelong friends at work but it was in a setting where it was a small startup and the entire company literally fit in one room. It was almost impossible not to form relationships just because we spent so much time together.
Getting older, having a family, and working for big corp vesting RSUs? No, I'm not likely going to be making any friends at work.
Of course all that is on hold with lockdown now, which I think is giving people the impression that remote working means no friends.
Indeed
I never even had a single conversation in school
>since school is for learning and not socialization?
I did not even learn there anything. I learned basically everything at home from books.
But I already do have friends, and I see no reason to replace them with my current coworkers.
For me, a horrible prospect is that a corporation could hold my social network hostage, so that if they fire me, I not only lose my income, but also my support group, on the same day.
(I am not opposed in principle to finding a friend among my colleagues, if we happen to click on the personal level. But I am not going to force it; my standards are quite strict. It happened twice in my life, and we meet regularly despite no longer working together. They have been upgraded from the "colleague" level to the "friend" level.)
I get on with my coworkers, we talk about non-work things, we occasionally do (well, did) social activities in the evenings or weekends... but if someone leaves I fully expect to never see or talk to them again, and the thought doesn't pain me.
The longest was a guy I used to meet up with at dog parks so our dogs could play together, or meet for a pint sometimes, and even that is looking like it's probably not going to stick.
The longest lasting friendships for me have been friends with a shared hobby. Like I have a lot of friends that are really into board games. Except for the pandemic it's been real easy to maintain those friendships, just organize a game night.
Whoa, wait — why is it the company’s time to lose/gain back instead of yours?
If job A requires 10 hours of my day because of the commute while job B requires only 8 hours to accomplish the same thing, then employer A is paying me for all 10 of those hours even though they think they’re only paying me (25% more) for 8 of them.
The reasons are multiple:
-Some people are unproductive when working from home (for a variety of reasons)
-Some managers want to see their charges (open office panopticons)
-Some people are more productive working from home.
Companies and managers will have to weigh the positives and negatives. I'm sure they have enough data to determine what makes sense for certain roles and individuals within those roles.
Companies will save on real estate by offloading that to your home. But on average they will lose productivity from most people.
Stanford is special in that as far as I know are short on space for parking and for offices, so they will likely nudge some to work from home where it makes sense. So of course they go on their own propaganda to get their people ready for the shift.
Management and non-management have different subcultures. Managers need power meetings, lunch meetings, shoulder-taps, etc. They are tasked with watching you and making sure everyone is on task. Non-managers don't care about in-person other than for the socializing aspect (or maybe they want to get away from the house).
I think that non-management can work effectively remote most of the time (unless u need to be doing physical labor of some sort). I'm betting that studies are going to prove this out. However, it's not clear if _management_ can effectively function remotely. Management is heavily dependent on being both seen and heard and remote platforms make this harder not easier.
Many companies have 2 subcultures, the workers want remote and the management wants in-person. I think the conversation needs to be around how to get the managers to work remotely in order to succeed. This is a mind shift in how traditional management is done and will be much slower to adopt.
My biggest concern is #1. While everyone has always socialized at work, it seems like modern Americans depend more on work for socialization than ever before. That is probably not a good thing, especially since modern professionals job hop more than ever. A world where more workers are encouraged to have friends and social circles outside of work is not a bad thing, in my opinion.
Depending on work for social interactions is bad. That is what I’m seeing more of, and that is something I think should change.
Depending on work for socialization is bad. That’s what I’m arguing against.
I think WFH coupled with reduced hour days or 4 day weeks would be a much better combo for high productivity in the office.
There are many places and jobs in the US where people start work at 8 or even 7. That seems to be functions of both industry and region.
The hour you start at makes no difference to how much you work.
> 1. Socializing is the primary activity that happens at work for the vast majority of workers. The gal or guy coming by your desk to "check in" or "see how your weekend was" etc... is literally where they find their social outlets and personal connections.
Not for me, or most of my cowoerks at Google. We absolutely would be doing more work by WFH. When we indeed going to hang out in the office with coworker, that's because we are bored by the work at hands, and need some outlet or simply resting. Not that we desire hanging out with coworkers.
> 2. Managers like to be able to watch their direct reports because it makes them feel more in control than they are
I never was in a team that managers need to see their reports. Most of the time, I often want to see my manager(s) in the office, but they were enjoying their meetings all day every day through the week.
> 3. The commuting routine, even if it's a nightmare, offers a sense of normalcy that most people have gotten used to and in a weird way rely on for grounding.
This sounds weird. I absolutely hate the commute. I am pretty sure that without the commute, my work output would double. Just by having those commute time being actual working hours.
I dont feel commuting is normal. Commuting isn't ideal for anyone. That's an unreasonable idea to me.
> 4. For a huge swath of Americans at least, work is an escape from the drudgery of the home.
That's somewhat true.
I indeed felt relaxed in office without being bothered by my children.
But now after all of us get used to the mode where my closed door means I am not to be disturbed, I absolutely love working from home. For example, if I need a rest, I can grab my younger son, and play with my older daughter. Fantastic experience! I think WFH have reshaped my relationship with my daughter because of more time together.
Manager here. Initially, I had trouble with my inability to do this. Now that I've come to grips that I have NO idea if my team is actually at their computer, I now judge them based on if they actually get work done (vs are they "busy"). It has been a good shift, but not easy.
In particular, scroll 3/4ths of the way down to the "Remote Work Prospects and Employees' Expectations" section. 61% of now-remote workers say they want to stay remote. 29% say they'll quit their jobs it they're forced to go back. And few want to go back 5 days per week.
A year ago, I would have agreed with your analysis. Few would have chosen to go remote. But now inertia works the other way. After a year or more of not commuting, what's normal is staying home. Managers have gotten used to managing remotely. To switch back, managers will have to get 100% of a team to return to the office, which is going to be very challenging. People will quit. People will have specific needs where a manager will have a hard time saying no. And if one person on a team is remote, it'll be very hard to hold the line at one.
I think people will solve the rest of it on their own. Some will renovate or move, setting up better for working from home. There will be a rise in third places like cafes and coworking spaces, so people can leave the house but not have to do a full commute.
So my guess is that we'll see a permanent spread. Remote working will continue to be much more popular than before the pandemic. Many companies, including major ones, will drop the expected days/week in the office below 5. Those who go down to 1-2 will downsize office space, shift to desk hoteling, and treat offices more as places for meetings than work. Some companies will try to return to the old paradigm, but many workers will complain bitterly, and they'll have ongoing trouble with recruiting and retention.
And speaking very anecdotally, where I work we've done plenty of surveys on WFH and the results were very clear: not allowing any kind of hybrid model would've become a retention disaster over time. The desire for at least some kind of flexibility post-pandemic was overwhelming.
I promise you it is much harder to find remote work than otherwise; even during a pandemic. I ended up relocating back to a high COL area because of this difficulty(among a few other things).
Once you realize you have to take a 50% pay cut to work anywhere else(or find another high paying remote job- good luck, everyone else wants one too!) remote work becomes a very tight, and scary leash.
Imagine the average intern being able to put out good quality work with minimal supervision. I feel these two things require that companies or teams will have to reorganise in some fundamental way to account for these two classes of people joining them.
You get added to the email lists, the slack channels, the documentation wiki, and the issue tracker. Daily meetings at 10am. You pair up with one person for a couple weeks and then somebody else and so on for the first few months. You regularly have voice and/or video chats. You get, or create, a list of who to contact with different questions or problems.
If somehow all of those communication methods fail, I doubt that just being able to add a physical touch component would help much. Other than touch, the only senses that require physical proximity are smell and taste. If you're relying on touch, smell, and taste to communicate while on-boarding people, then maybe then it might be difficult, but that also seems a bit unusual.
Mostly I think companies that have trouble with on-boarding remotely have bigger problems with their communications in general.
In smaller startups and growing companies, where these things are changing at a high rate, it becomes even more valuable.
It's not that these things are not doable virtually, but it's something that will require deliberate rearranging of how people work. In larger companies, this type of stuff already happens, but not so much in smaller ones.
Engineering organizations can learn a lot from Sales departments in this area. Sales in companies that sell in various geographies (which includes even small companies that have gained traction and are beginning to grow) already functions perfectly fine with very distributed teams, and highly technical sales motions (think enterprise products).
Small, growing companies have big problems with communications and coordination in general. That's what makes the scaling stage challenging and full of pitfalls: many companies fail at this stage!
The fact of the matter is that the tech is now fully in place to support remote work, and the pandemic has been both an infrastructure and procedure stress test, as well as a turning point for businesses.
Remote work isn’t going away.
Are there strategies that fully remote companies take to limit that type of time wasting?
Basically you want to move as much focused work as you can to async collaboration and save realtime for more freeform, relaxed communication. It's more efficient and also less draining to work that way.
Sure, they tolerate the occasional chitchat, but only on a superficial level.
If you actually want to socialize with your coworkers, then you must do that outside in the smoke area, or during your lunch outings. But never actually in the office.
That is the taboo. And the moment you break it, then that’s when you’ll get a demerit from your management.
While working from home, I’ve found it much harder to switch between work/free modes. It seems the daily commute has been an effective way to for me to either prepare for the coming day or settle my mind for non-work related activities.
This worked well pre-covid. Since covid hit ...overall I'm struggling with bleeding boundaries. The pandemic anxiety makes it hard for me to settle in my basement office, so I use other spaces around the house.
2. My manager has better things to do. Being in the office doesn't mean you are being productive. Sometimes you get distracted by noise, or some local office jerk, or some random event... e.g.: in a large company, every day is someone's birthday. Or someone wants to go for a walk and grab coffee...
3. I can live closer to the office and pay as much as twice in rent, or live farther from the office but have a larger place that my family can enjoy more, at the cost of spending more time away from home. If I work remotely, I have up to 2 extra hours every day. I can use that time sleeping, exercising, interacting with my family, cleaning, or do whatever needs to be done that is more useful than spending 2 hours stressing out in a car every day, polluting the atmosphere and congesting road infrastructure, or worrying about being mugged in a train.
4. Trying to escape from your problems won't make the situation better. You still have to go home at the end of the day and deal with your problems.
All that money wasted in a desk/cubicle/office, meeting rooms, cleaning crew, security crew, facilities crew... who do you think is paying all that money? your employer is. It's a lot of money that could rather go to something else, like your compensation, or hiring more people so you have less work to do.
If you are an engineer, offices = a lot of resources and effort put into making your life worse.
And maybe the executives are actually just hanging out, from their perspective. galavanting around the city and schmoozing. having fun solving a problem they’re passionate about and having no negative consequence of having too much fun. hey as long as you’re only inappropriate with employees of another company in the co-working space the liability surface is limited!
so its not just about managerial control
but both of these kinds of people share the similarity of not being able to relate to the lower level employees
You have obviously gathered a lot of remote experience. As someone who has always worked in some form of research lab and is now working from home, I am still achieving my objectives and deliverables but definitely feel a lot less productive without the 'positive' pressure of being with my peers. I am also fortunate that I work with very hands-off and mature managers even in this remote scenario.
What strategies can we create for better self-accountability and discipline when working on long running projects on our own? What worked for you?
I hope my experience is the minority, as the increasing loneliness that seems to be present as the younger generations grow older to me indicates the over reliance on work for friendship is the exact opposite of what we need. And on a much darker and more cynical level, it provides an opportunity of social manipulation for companies to keep one tied to their job at a lower wage, or risk crippling loneliness.
I don't require that my friends have any interest in me outside of the contexts they wish to be friends with me in, though, and so I do consider work friends actual friends.
Same thing with cycling friends, childrearing friends, and hanging out and drinking friends.
Why should a friend share extra time with me for some reason? In any case, the more time you spend with contextual friends the greater the likelihood you will meet a lifelong friend.
Well for a huge swath the office and commuting is a nightmare. If this question is gonna run on majority vote I'm not sure at all the office will make a comeback.
This is big. If I had a fancy apartment in a good quality building, I wouldn't mind.
But the place I currently reside in, is really frustrating to spend your whole day. I can easily hear my neighbours talking, their pets, screeching children or construction work many floors above. The ceilings are also quite low, which amplifies the cabin fever.
If I could escape, from time to time, to an office where my friends work, it'd be increase my life quality a lot.
And I'm saying this as a person who's not a fan of offices and forced asses-in-seats.
My in-ear stage Shures with passive isolation work much better but spending whole day in headphones is neither pleasant nor healthy.
Being together in person doesn't give you the sense of companionship - we found instead that it's the act of building something together does that.
Rather than wishing for the commute, most of my team loves that they are spending more time with their family.
2. Managers may need to adapt and give up being helicopter parents.
3. Same as 1
4. Again same as 1
Minus commutes, extra hours become available for other places like parks, actual friends rather than superficial friendliness of coworkers because life revolves around offices and we learn to fake interest.
You have got to be kidding me.. You are at work because you have a contract to fulfil. You are not there to find your soulmate , stop saying things like "we are a family" , the second you get fired your coworkers will ignore you. Out of 99% of my interactions at work, maybe at best 1% of them even keep in touch with me, never mind actually building a deep connection.
Further if you are praising being in stuck for hours in traffic for a sense of "normalcy" , you clearly have no idea how frustrating and time consuming it is. I've been driving to office for years and the exhausting dread of wasting 3+ hours of commute time in traffic gives my anxiety.
Finally, your home is your sanctuary, if you are escaping from home, you have deeper problems, going to the office is not the solution.
Stop normalizing inefficient office-busy-work over actually being productive, getting decent sleep, having more free time to spend with your family and friends which are huge advantages of remote work.
Personally, I don't think that remote is here to stay. I think working will be augmented by remote tools, but it cannot be replaced by remote. Humans just aren't robots and they need community, and work is the biggest source of community after college. To me, online college is a complete joke and is not what students after high school need. It's just not healthy. Humans need interaction in person, and they do their best work when they are working with people who they see on a weekly basis, especially young 20-somethings.
This whole thing is becoming evident as people are starting to really just not care for the lockdowns at this point. Parks in SF are a complete shitshow because people want to be out and about. You will never be able to force them to be purely remote, and after covid, if your company is purely remote, you will not attract the best young talent, period. You might attract older folks, but you know you want young talent.
This whole thing makes no sense.
In any case, you could still have offices as a place for people meeting face2face and do the most "thinking" or "creative" work at home, it's not mutually exclusive.
It should go without saying that a single professor does not speak for Stanford, or vice versa. For all we know everyone else at Stanford thinks Bloom is an idiot.
Mixing remote and non-remote cultures is hard but if done right it will outperform any of the two extremes you pick.
A lot of the things you say make sense, but this sounds ridiculous to me. Why would you only want young talent? How about older talent?
Skill isn’t age specific.
Just guessing: older talent is less willing to work overtime and weekends, because they have a family waiting for them at home?
sure, a ton of people hate working from home. some personalities and roles require in-person interaction. most people never considered wfh when choosing their apartment or house and don't have good setups. meanwhile, there are also a ton of people, like me, who have always _hated_ going into the office. being constantly distracted by coworkers, dealing with long commutes, and putting up with uncomfortable and loud offices.
yes, people need social interaction, but that doesn't have to come from coworkers. it is a very SF mindset to build your entire life around your work.. being in the office all day and most of your "friends" are coworkers.
Yeah, I think people keep conflating remote work with pandemic remote work. Pandemic remote work sucks. I miss going to coffee shops, 10am Jiu-Jitsu, and going to matinees with friends. I'm ready to get back to pre-pandemic remote work.
Pure remote companies are likely to be rare. But we may see a proliferation of hybrid companies that maintain office spaces but allow certain roles to work remotely most of the time.
I think your analysis here is one-sided and is ignoring all the major problems with 100%-work-in-office cultures. Housing costs are absolutely out of control in major urban centers, and newcomers are sacrificed at the altar of NIMBYism in order to make existing homeowners/landowners wealthier. People are wasting away commuting hours a day. Folks have been getting crammed into denser and denser open floorplans and bullpens for years.
People are willing to put up with these things when they don't have any other options. But when other companies are investing in supporting hybrid environments and you're stuck still requiring people to relocate to San Francisco permanently, you're going to start losing talent. Not supporting some kind of hybrid remote policy is going to become a serious competitive disadvantage in the talent market. You can still maintain your trendy urban office space to attract the college graduates who want that lifestyle.
They are, I work for one - it imposes challenges but in aggregate it is a vastly preferable way to work for me.
Interestingly the people who do well 100% remote are quite different to the people who well 100% in office.
Fundamentally the people who communicate the most effectively in written text and can concisely convey their thoughts/opinions do well.
I love it but I can completely understand why some people wouldn't.
Frankly, I can't think of a single reason you would want to live in the South Bay. Even if you liked the lifestyle, you could find it in a sunnier suburb near Santa Barbara for a quarter of the price.
Wouldn't it be the other way around? Sacrificing your career for social contact?
And to be honest, this might be a personal thing, but if a job isn't worth being in person for, then it's not worth pursuing at all. I know I'd much rather be with a few friends hacking projects together for pennies on the dollar than making 200k remote.
Agreed, except the biggest movers for my career have been social contacts made outside of work.
People incorrectly keep thinking about remote work only in a pandemic sense. Remote work doesn't mean zero social contact, it means more control over the social contact you have.
I'm a young programmer in my 20s and I get plenty of training working remotely.
You need to speak with your manager about this. There’s a lot of social contact and training that can be created without being in the office. If you haven’t spoken up and are just stewing about it at home, your team may be oblivious you feel this way.
There’s also no reason to assume you’d have gotten more training in the office. Many teams simply do not invest enough in training and onboarding new engineers. It sounds like you’re new to the industry and possibly haven’t realized this is common yet. The good news is communication can often resolve this to some degree if not fully.
I for one was glad that I didn't have to sit in lectures that I can learn in less than half the time on my own. That I could structure my learning the way it best fits me. This however requires that materials are available in sufficient quality remotely.
Not attending class doesn't mean you have no human interaction, there are tons of other options for human interaction like sport clubs.
Your comment reads like attending in person is the only right way, while I think accepting individualism and providing choice is much better. So if after covid there is the option to work/study in person or from home, whatever fits the individual that day, that would be awesome.
Well currently that's the case either way
> there are tons of other options for human interaction like sport clubs.
Yea but you won't meet people there who are into the same field of study as you are.
At Uni you get to meet people who have chosen the same path as you have, often people very much alike you. You are working together on tasks, explain the materials to each other and have lunch together.
You just don't have all that remotely.
Also students usually live in a single room apparent, so it gets really hard to separate study and private live.
I find it much harder to stay focused on a video lecture than on a live one inside a lecture hall. You could also go to the library to learn or work on a project if you want to avoid distractions, this is also not currently possible.
For a large majority of courses I simply did not attend to lectures, it's a lot faster to learn on your own. Yet, I could have gone to the social nights that the CS chapter held every week and mingled if I wanted to.
But yes, the lack of separation of studying and private living in a one room apartment sucked during Covid. Of course, in a regular school year I could just take the subway to my uni or uni library to work there.
The bad parts of the remote experience will go away.
Its much harder to establish the social connection, that part is true.
> Also students usually live in a single room apparent, so it gets really hard to separate study and private live.
I lived in a single room apartment and found it quite easy to separate study and private life. It was just about self-control and not invite your girlfriend up to your apartment when you're trying to study for exams.
> I find it much harder to stay focused on a video lecture than on a live one inside a lecture hall.
Not for me. It was much easier to focus at home without the guy next to you constantly shifting in his seat. Plus able to pause the video and rewatch the parts that you didn't understand the first time.
It seems a bit like you are describing university as something only about learning and ignoring the social aspects of it. I strongly disagree.
Firstly let me say that what you have written implies that university merely puts you through some lectures (and maybe some exams and gives you a bit of paper at the end), and you complain that you could learn things better yourself. It would be cynical to think that university is just a book but worse yet necessary for the credential and I will assume that this is not what you think.
As universities are different, let me say what teaching mine provided to frame what I will write below. We began with everyone taking the same courses and over later years there was more choice. Teaching was done with lectures, occasional small group workshops, homework, and 1-on-2 sessions going over that homework. Attendance to lectures (or other teaching) was not required although it was encouraged and assessment was done in exams which included questions from all courses so one didn’t need to commit to certain courses in particular.
While self study was important I think the two key things provided by the university were the small group teachings which gave expert feedback, and discussion with one’s peers which provided non-expert feedback, good sources of inspiration and ideas for things to try, and discussions to build a better understanding. I think this aspect would be hardest to replicate remotely.
The other social aspect was also important: unlike school, you’re no longer surrounded by people who don’t really want to be there and it is an environment where people are particularly similar without all having the same goal. If you go to a sports club, social interactions will be mostly dominated by the interest in the sport. I don’t think it’s a good substitute for socialising with students of other subjects at university.
The least important social aspect was going to lectures although I think it provides a more informal setting than a book to see how the sausage is made (or rather to watch it being made on the blackboard in front of you.)
No, I'm disagreeing witht the one-sidedness of the GPs comment. I don't disagree that the socialising aspect of university is good for *some* (or to some degree even for everyone). I do disagree that it's something that fits *everyone at all times*.
That is why I finished my comment with the outlook that every student has the option to choose what is best for him/her. Reality is, especially before covid, that remote learning and self-studying had avoidable disadvantages, because it wasn't a first class citizen and I really hope it remains a first class citizen, while in-person studying is still available for everyone who likes to use it.
> It would be cynical to think that university is just a book
I don't think you learn how to learn or how to live from reading a book. I do however think you do that throughout university. You have a certain curriculum, you have certain goals that you chose willingly and you have to figure yourself out how to learn them, but also how to motivate yourself and often also how to go through life without your parents. It's this unstructuredness and self-governance that I really appreciate about university. Once you start working, your life is much more structured and externally motivated than during university.
> unlike school, you’re no longer surrounded by people who don’t really want to be there and it is an environment where people are particularly similar without all having the same goal.
In computer science undergrad I experienced that a lot of my peers were not actually intereted in the engineering, in the building part of things, but that they chose the field because of the career outlook and the money. It wasn't particular interesting to work with them and like another commenter said I also did feel they slowed me down. After the first years I tried my best to choose peers that were interested in the engineering for all group work.
Things aren't black and white. That's also why I said having the opportunity to choose on any given day is great. I'm not arguing against in-person class and socialising. I'm arguing for choice! For opportunities! If someone thinks 2 in-person days at university are enough, in an ideal world he should have the option to self-study remotely the remaining three days and not be forced to be at campus just because some think it's best for him. Figuring out how you work best youself as an individual is an integral part of the experience and if you aren't given enough choice, independence, freedom, you can't really figure that out.
Finally, because of the flexibility my university provided, I was able to work up to 2 full days (legally up to 20 hours, in reality I did like 14-16) per week. Not in some unrelated job, but as a junior/student software engineer building and shipping production products together with senior engineers. So, I could also socialize and learn from more senior peers, while earning some additional money. This was, at least at my university, rather common among the software engineering focused students and in addition to a possible summer internship. This might also not be right for everyone, but it just shows there are a lot of different paths that all can be successful and it highly depends on the individual. Arguing in-person university is best for everyone and that the socialising is indispensable for everyone is missing the point.
Sure, but the key is like-minded individuals, and it's fun (at least for many people) to be thrown together with hundreds or thousands of other people who are at the same life stage as you.
Sports clubs, and many similar clubs and societies, amongst university students only really work when those students are substantially located in roughly the same geographical location.
You're conflating being in a lecture hall with attending university. Being in lectures is a small part of the whole experience. Much of the rest of that experience relies heavily on being mostly colocated for the academic year.
A really small example: Cambridge University will not be able to continue fielding a top quality rowing squad unless the squad members are all able to train together as a team. It will not be able to recruit new members to its rowing teams to build that top quality squad unless it can bring all those people together.
On the teaching front it's pretty difficult to do a substantial proportion of, e.g., practical physics, chemistry, and biology labs from home or your hall of residence. It's also going to be impossible to meaningfully participate in practical engineering labs, or many of the activities that medical students need to do in order to qualify as doctors.
Even the more practical aspects of the arts and music present serious challenges, and nobody can make me believe that a remote experience in these disciplines will be anything more than second rate.
For some people I'm sure it's fine (Open University and its associated remote learning have after all been available in the UK for decades) but for most people remote university is going to be an extremely impoverished experience. If I were university age now I'd seriously consider deferring until the pandemic is in the past.
I dont if you have ever been in uni but in my time it was all about putting 200 students in huge amphitheaters with one lecturer not caring at all about their audience. It has to be the worst way to learn anything.
When I was young and starting college, I was poor and lived in a semi-rural area. So getting back and forth to all the classes was very difficult. Not to mention I had to work two jobs to support myself at the time.
I would have fucking loved to be able to do my classwork remotely and just hung out with other students as my schedule allowed. Of course it was not an option back then.
I have recently went back to university to advance my degree and it has nearly all been online. Much better! Frankly I met many more people than I did back in the day through the online tools and the fact that the classwork can be flexible around my life, versus the other way around was very convenient!
I can see how this might not work for labs, but for most other classes it seems to be a very viable alternative.
Also, I think you might be surprised about how much value people of any age put on being near other people at the time of learning. It obviously is very valuable to you, but I would expect you will find just as many that couldn't care less about that aspect of it.
I enjoy not having to commute, but I absolutely miss the banter across the desks and lunch conversations.
I would absolutely like to keep 2-3 weekly WFH days in the future, which would also give me more flexibility in where I choose to live, I really want to move farther from the city and closer to nature. A longer commute would be acceptable if I didn't have to do it every day.
Upholding a nomad lifestyle means it's very hard to establish and maintain friendships and we've both had to completely abandon several circles of friends over the years, due to moving. That's not something I enjoy.
That said a 1.5 to 2 hour commute once a week is doable but that still only gets you to a closer to nature location. It doesn't really give you the option to live in a different cheaper city if that's what you want--which is what many people (not myself) are looking for rather than a rural house.
As a downside to distances being generally shorter, we also don't have the same vast impressive swathes of nature that the US and Canada do, plus historically we cut down most of our forests to maintain an impressive navy. However we do have some forests left and plenty of coastline, no part of the country is more than 50km from the coast, there is still plentiful natural beauty to admire.
So it is possible to live closer to nature here, while still being not too far away from the city. In the long run, I may also want to get out of IT and do something less stressful and more "real", but that's something I'm still weighing the pros and cons of. There is also the consideration that by living in the city, I have very easy access to events and dining experiences, which is something I do still value, even if the pandemic has made all of that seem like the distant past.
One thing I do know is that I'm not interested in suburbia. It's either apartment living or close to nature, I'm not interested in the small identical plots of land, cookie cutter communities, HOAs, any of that stuff. I want my neighbors either on the other side of a wall or more than a stone's throw away :-)
I actually agree with you. I grew up in what, at least at the time, would probably properly be called ex-urban and live somewhere similar today (on 5 acres next neighbors with a lot more land as well as conservation land but within a few miles of plenty of stores, etc.).
I've never had much interest in classical suburbia but I do like cities--at least to visit.
2 hours gets you way out of even most Northeastern US cities. I'm about 90 minutes to get into Boston at rush hour if I time it right and less in the evening. I've actually commuted into the city--I also have a pretty convenient commuter rail--for some days for about a year and a half. It wouldn't have been sustainable long-term though.
If my first employer had told young 20-something Me "I'm afraid we're not going to let you come in and sit in this felt cube every day after all. Instead we're going to ask that you fly to Thailand and work from a laptop on the beach from here on out.", I would not have reacted by explaining how work is a social thing that needs to happen in person.
I spent the first 10 years of my working life focused on get myself into a position where I could do exactly that. As soon as it was even a little bit feasible to do so, I made the jump and haven't looked back.
It's interesting watching the entire software world get handed young Me's dream on a plate, and seeing so many people wanting their cubicles back.
I'd kill for a felt cube.
But of course, remote work allows you to choose your own room / cubicle / beach / whatever you like most.
Work is not just work, it's probably also 15-20% of one's life, or more (8+ hours each day for 40+ years).
My belief is not that people should be free to choose what they want as long as they choose exactly what I want.
I know I will socialize so much more online than in person and the 10-second commute is exquisitely delightful.
It's fair for the majority of people who can only get a crap office.
Our survey evidence says that about 25 percent of all full work days will be supplied from home after the pandemic ends, compared with just 5 percent before.
Isn't it about time we found a replacement? Why should the thing that gives us a social life, the thing that gives us money, and the thing that gives us a sense of fulfillment all have to be provided by an employer?
Just to pick on one aspect; tools. Remote work tools are geared towards many-to-many collaborative activities. Whereas remote learning is primarily a one-to-many activity. Of course you have supporting TAs but still, it's about a very small set of people dispensing information/learning to a very large group students.
At the campus, the physical presence naturally fosters a whole range of interactions besides classroom learning, as you rightly pointed out. Replicating that is just impossible online.
Professional activities, however, is comparatively easier to replicate online, going by the evidence of how companies were able to go full remote just with a few day's notice. Uber, for instance, went full with just one day's notice. I was expecting a massive productivity drop. To my surprise, my team (I was a manager there) actually began shipping more features during full remote. Sure, it took ~2 weeks for us to find a rhythm but that's to be expected.
All this to say, I completely agree with you w.r.t. online education. It's been a shitshow. Education is so much more than just learning. But please don't extend that argument to the professional life. From what I've seen, remote work is here to stay, at least I hope it does. People in India have been working from their home towns instead of being stuck in expensive and shitty urban jungles. It'll spur the much needed growth of tier-2/3 cities in India.
I this is highly subjective and depends on how social you are, how much of an outlier you are in cognitive ability or interest and on what kind of social environments you have physical access to. If you are “middle of the pack” in all these aspects then sure, remote first doesn’t make sense.
On the other take me as an example: I enjoy working with other people face to face, but I’m extremely picky in terms of sparring partners. Most people just slow me down. Some are even offended, probably because they feel a bit intellectually inferior when I get going, leading to unnecessary conflict. I’ve been looking for people with similar cognitive style and interests in my physical surroundings for 20 years, and I’ve only found a handful. They are eccentrics, often in high demand and not easy to collaborate with.
There are of course physical environments where I would not be an outlier, or where I would even struggle to keep up. I’m not Terrence Tao. But I don’t have access to those environments.
From this perspective remote first makes a lot of sense. And while I am a bit older now I don’t think it would have been much different in my 20-ties.
I am incredibly anti-social. I can't stand working from home.
I think it is in some shape or form and it will only increase, because it's a more sustainable way of life to not have to travel every day. Remote work means less strain on cities, less traffic on roads, less inflated housing prices in metropolitan areas and so on.
> but it cannot be replaced by remote
In many areas in can be replaced and therefore it will.
> Humans just aren't robots and they need community
Before open plan office jobs in skyscrapers became fashionable people had for thousands of years their community at home, their street or village. You don't have to be a suit wearing slave to make some friends.
> To me, online college is a complete joke and is not what students after high school need
Agreed. Remote studying is literally just reading a book on your own. Every successful self taught person has gone through that, but because they are intelligent they didn't have to take a student loan for it. They only paid a few quid to Amazon to buy a bunch of books.
University is massively overrated anyways. It's not needed for the vast majority of bullshit jobs nowadays. It just serves as a mean of class segregation to identify rich people from poor when giving them a job.
> Humans need interaction in person, and they do their best work when they are working with people who they see on a weekly basis, especially young 20-somethings.
You can do this anywhere. I have worked remotely for a while now and I visit a lot of co-working spaces which are closer located to where I live. I don't have to slave myself through the rush hour commute into a densely overpopulated crammed city centre to please a master. I can get to a nice co-working space close to home at a leisurely pace without stress and still meet people, have interesting chats over lunch and make friends, be productive and get motivated in an environment. But I choose when to go there based on my personal needs. Some days I want to WFH because I need more headspace, or because I'm tired from a long day before and needed that extra half an hour sleep, or because I want to sort out an errand during the day without having to stress myself. Remote is the future for all jobs which can.
This seems silly. Why would any company prefer workers with less experience.
If anything, I think you’ve got the causation backwards. Hot startups are full of young engineers, because they need to be located in dense metro hubs of talent. These areas heavily skew young, because people with families flee HCoL areas. The competitive advantage of a 25 year old is their willingness to live in a studio apartment.
Now that the we’ve built the technology and culture for fully remote companies, this calculus no longer applies. You can assemble a team of people on a globally unconstrained talent pool. Frankly, there’s no reason to expect a startup filled with 25 year olds to outcompete one with ten times the cumulative experience.
Is so wrong as "Remote working isn't a thing and never will be"
There are a lot of people that are interested in Remote studing. Sure it's not for everyone, sure not always 100% of the time, but I guess it would work pretty well and I personally would love to see "Remote college" becoming a thing.
Then we have the added stress from places with open space/cubicle with poor sound isolation, people walking behind you, and constant interruption for which you have zero control over. Young 20-something Me could only really manage that with a corner chair and with headphones that blasted music so loud that people on the other side of the room complained.
I could however imagine a situation where I would enjoy the situation if given enough changes. If I were the group leader and decided who I worked with then the first problem goes mostly away. If the work I did was mostly social then the problem of noises and interruptions goes mostly away, and I might even want it to be a open space plan so I can walk around and stand behind my employees and check what they are doing. Doing that remotely would be much harder.
Also, I am sure that Stanford online is disappointing compared to in person. But there are ways to improve the social aspects with software. The particular configuration of the software and how it's used will make a huge difference in the types or amount of online social interactions.
For example, if you want you can create a virtual dorm room in Gary's Mod or Rec Room VR and get your friends to log into it at lunch and dinner. But the fact that they aren't forced to interact with you because they are physically in the same space does not seem like it should be the only factor.
In terms of work, however, I think it depends on the organization and people's stage of life. If you already have a family, then WFH is much better to me and worth the tradeoff. Imagine being able to spend 2-3 hours with your young kid everyday at the cost of less face time with your coworkers.
The whole point of a 15,000-person survey like this is so that we're not all stuck guessing based on our own experiences. Obviously one can argue that what employers were telling employees they would do post-COVID as of October 2020 is not what employers will actually do (and give reasons why!), but it's still likely to be more accurate than any individual's speculation (including mine!).
In particular, the survey addressed 2 topics that a lot of comments seem to not incorporate:
1. At population, employer, and individual level, it's not either/or. The paper title doesn't do a good job of conveying this. All 3 entities seem open to everything on the continuum, based on their employees, work type, and so on.
Statements like "I promise that it won't stick for the broader society" imply a more binary outcome than the survey results predict (and maybe than anything predicts). The survey concludes that, of the roughly 50% of employees who can work from home, they'll average 2 days per week (or 23% of total hours worked). IOW, WFH doesn't need to move everyone all the time in order to have massive effects. Some people changing some of the time is enough.
2. Employer plans vs. employee desires. Lots of commenters state their preferences and then try to generalize from that, but.. the survey captured that too. To just skim those results, scroll to page 60 for employee-desired vs. employer-planned % of working days. Gist: if WFH is roughly the same productivity, employers plan ~22% of days and employees desire ~45% of days to be WFH. In all productivity cases, employees preferred a higher % of days to be WFH than employers.
Page 43 shows answers to the pay raise or cut employees would take in order to work from home 2-3 days per week.
It also breaks down the change in perception about WFH by demographic cohort on page 55. For example, those with no children and those with children at home both had significant improvements in their perception of WFH. Those with children had more improvement in perception than those without children. As the study wrote: "This 23 percent figure [post-COVID WFH as a % of full time days] is almost five times larger than in the pre-pandemic time use data, but still half as large as what workers want in a post-pandemic world."
Of course, there's a place for speculation and anecdotes. This paper - and hopefully soon, more studies like it - should let us evolve from speculating based on only our personal experience to thinking about its methodology and results.
Thanks for the quality analysis.
Welcome to the internet.
On the other end, IIUC gossiping has got us to incredible places as a specie.
What I found surprising about this survey is that most people wanted to split their week between the home and the office (according to Figure 3).
Only 24% wanted to work never or rarely at home; 27% wanted to work always at home; and 49% wanted to work a split week.
That's very different from what most people appear to comment.
Seems that a WHF arrangement with dedicated meeting days offers the best from both worlds.
#2 also goes the other way - you don't want endless home interruptions when you have work to do (kids, deliveries, significant others)
Just a few examples of how they differ:
* higher stress from living through a pandemic (and everything around it) gives us reason to set ourselves up to reduce stress in ways that normally might be unnecessary.
* having no alternative to working from home makes it easier to ignore the downsides, because it's not a downside when there's no alternative without it
* childcare / care responsibilities means many of our home lives are totally different right now from normal, so not even comparable to normal
* consistent working from home by everyone (on a given team) tends to be more inclusive because ignoring remote people means ignoring everyone so we work hard not to do it. It's much easier to accidentally get lazy about ensuring inclusivity when at least some people are in the office (and I've seen this first-hand pre-COVID, never maliciously).
* no alternative for many employers means they accept any (if any) productivity losses of work from home because it is that or else lose all productivity (which is obviously worse for business)
To be clear, I'm not arguing remote work will/won't stick in the future. I'm just arguing that nearly all of this debate is moot right now, because most people are basing it on an "experiment" with far too many variables different from the reality of remote work during a normal world.
The decisions to become fully remote, or to go back to working from office with hybrid options will be made at a high level within companies - and which is better for the company is really the question. I speculate most go hybrid and it will just be time until there is a quorum of work from office people.
Before the pandemic, many people who could have and perhaps even wanted to work from home didn't because that would mean they are missing something at work. Imagine scenarios where people who are working in office are having a virtual conference with a remote employee, then when the call is hung up they don't stop talking or working on the problem. Decisions or tweaks are made in office after the official meeting and remote workers have less say unless they have a hell of a backbone.
One of our better developers committed suicide over the summer. He told me days earlier that work from home was not for him and that he missed going out after work. We planned an outdoor outing for the next week but he was gone by then. One time when I went into office over the summer another co-worker was there, in tears, and said "I'm not a homebody". Personally, I'm handling it a little better and didn't realize how bad it is for some, but even I'd surely quit if I'm not allowed to go into office if this ends. I'll solve my problem with working from home by getting a different job. How many employees will companies lose if they go fully remote over having a hybrid option?
My guess is that remote only companies and work from office only companies will lose more headcount than hybrid; therefore, hybrid is likely the goto. A bunch of workers working in office have a competitive advantage over remote workers; therefor, you go to work to compete. End result is a hybrid model that leans heavily towards work from office.
I'm a 99% of success is showing up kind of person and I really liked it when I worked 9-6pm in office, nobody bugged me when I was working, nobody bugged me after hours. Now people who are Away all day bug me at 7pm and passive aggressively ask "Are you working today?" I want to respond "Yeah, I worked 10 hours today, bozo! What about you?" Don't get me started on the pings, ping ping ping ping. People used to see you are working and give you time but now they just ping to their hearts content and even being in DND does not stop them from @'ing you several times in a room full of 50 people.
The truth as always is somewhere in the middle. I do most of my banking online, but still visit financial institutions for important events (mortgages, large checks, etc.)
It does seem to me slightly odd that some people working in “tech”, aka an industry built on disruption, are adamant that WFH can never work. If anything, remote employees are a goldmine of valuable data that can be tracked. Wondering if a meeting is valuable? In person you have to gauge people’s thoughts or rely on surveys. For online meetings just see (anonymously) in real time who’s firing up their slack or multitasking.
Obviously there’s a extensive employee privacy issues, but the bottom line is that we have all the fundamental technologies needed to provide as much data on remote employees as we do in the office.
I haven’t been in a bank in over 5 years. I have refinanced my home twice, and will probably do so again without stepping inside an office. The only reason I see to have an in person bank is if I wanted a safety deposit box, or frequently needed to get money changed.
That said, I had a large transaction I needed to do fairly early in the pandemic. I'd gone into an office to do an earlier iteration on this but I really didn't want to do so in April. I was able to do it over the phone. I remarked to a friend of mine who is regularly involved in such things that "A lot of orgs are discovering they don't actually need to do their traditional processes" and she fully agreed that a lot of people are discovering they don't actually need to do everything they thought they did.
Any job that can be WFH will be easy to outsource. You aren't need in office so why do we even need you in this time zone? Outsource it cheap. If it really is manageable from a 30 min standup and Jira then why even bother with expensive devs?
Before you had a small competitive market in a central location. Now you're opening it up.
On top of that, remote work I find is starting to bleed over. I have meetings well past 5 now, quite often. I get messaged late and early. Whereas with the office it was different. People respected boundaries much more. Fully remote workforces lead to a lot more timezone issues as well.
I like flex time. I want to be able to work from home when I want to, but also want to go into the office for many things that are easier to do as a group.
Because you get what you pay for. I am yet to hear of any cases where in the long run outsourcing development to a low-wage country actually saved money. Competent engineers generally follow the money and emigrate. Why earn $10k a year in India when you could earn $100k in the USA?
Just the clean air, water, nutritious food and cleanliness are good enough reasons to get a US passport. The other things come extra.
The idea that devs in india can never be good as devs in the USA is so absurdly arrogant I don't know what to say. I'm sure mechanics thought the same, engineers thought "no way the japs can make better cars" yea we saw how that went.
Approx 15,000 Indian-born IT professionals migrate to Australia each year [1], and there are around 300,000 Indian H1B visa holders (of any profession) in the USA [2]. I don't see this changing any time soon.
[1] https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/research-and-statistics/stati...
[2] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/nri/visa-and-immigratio...
The supply is rapidly increasing. it doesn't matter that they move. Eventually there will be competition for jobs and prices will go down - because virtual work means the entire world is a job market.
While this is entirely anecdotal I have observed a LOT of time theft by employees. And been asked more than ever to investigate employee behavior (even when I normally try and advise against the approach)
Some more egregious than others. While most probably aren’t going to awol for a day at a time I know a LOT of people that now spend working hours doing leisure things. Maybe that’s a substitute for them browsing internet all day and just weren’t busy.
But even some of my direct reports will slack significantly more if they think I’m not online. Responses that are normally in minutes take hours etc.I have to now probe for updates etc. Much less time is spent on projects of interest (that also benefit the business) during periods of less “fires”. Instead it’s more bare minimum. I know many try to be understanding (myself included) because many have more than just work to deal with but it would need to be addressed if it’s becomes a norm.
Maintaining network and IP security is harder in many sectors. Just look at the SW breaches where m365 tenants seem to be vector. Look at the vectors cropping up. Huge rashes of phishing, people loading up corporate email on personal equipment. Rdp dos and the multiple flaws etc. and even if you have the hardware on lock, home networks are a cesspool.
Support teams are getting pinged at all sorts of hours because people are shifting work hours to ones more of convenience (again anecdotal)
I see more cultures being more amenable to wfh or flex schedules. But I still see the need for brick and mortar work for certain....job types
> Responses that are normally in minutes take hours etc.I have to now probe for updates etc.
I think that's rather objective and affects teamwork/project cohesion.
And this is also what will ruin your health in a few decades.
...which will then reduce your productivity.
...which will then get you fired.
...which will then make you lose your health insurance.
...which will then make you lose your savings to pay for all the healthcare bills.
Luckily, none of this will be your employer's problem, because there is another person with healthy enough spine that can replace you at your desk.
I've known people who became masters at imitating work 8 hours a day.
Look at it this way:
worker A makes 10 widgets an hour. In 8 hours, he makes 80 widets.
worker B makes 20 widgets an hour. In 4 hours, he makes 80 widgets.
Why should the employer care about which one works more hours?
Also, how many widgets will worker A make in 4 hours?
Worker A will make 40 widgets in 4 hours.
Now you're saying people should be judged on their outputs. Interesting change of pace.
In reality he's unlikely to draw 2x the salary for 2x the output, though, because he's operating from a deficit of information and again, the manager/hr person's main goal isn't actually efficiency.
If they're smart, though, they'll give him a performance bonus based on productivity over a minimum marker, maybe staged as productivity goes up without a quality drop to squeeze out as much as possible. At a certain point, though, money becomes less of a driver for most people so that's not the only thing they'll do. They will also tie his performance to the team as a whole, create opportunities for building 'team unity' and maybe put together artificial competition so he actually cares about team performance. Then his colleagues will push him to perform better.
Point is you expected to do an honest day of work for your pay with a good effort. That's the social contract which may well be changed in the future, but so far it isn't.
By the way, I've never seen someone be rewarded 2x the pay for being 2x as productive without a commission model.
And if they are on commission, nobody cares how much time is spent in the office.
>Point is you expected to do an honest day of work for your pay with a good effort. That's the social contract which may well be changed in the future, but so far it isn't.
I don't think that's true. I've worked construction jobs and you're expected to do what you're expected to get done in a day of work, not work hard necessarily. Sometimes you work hard, sometimes you don't. A lot of time is spent uselessly. I found the same thing in corporate environments.
An honest day's work for an honest day's pay would actually be pretty unusual, especially given that for it to be honest the workers would have to understand the labor market implicitly, what they could get at competing companies and what their labor was actually worth to the company employing them. Most of the time none of that happens.
If worker worker A is not at risk of termination, bar any incentive program rewarding excess production, worker B will likely produce 80 widgets in 8 hours.
Having Worker B come in late and leave early sets a bad example for all the Worker As (and breeds resentment among them). Worker B staying all day and screwing around half the time and distracting Worker A so they get 8 widgets done an hour instead of 10 is bad, too.
Give me 10 average people over 5 great ones any day. Average people can get better when they work together. Great people get bored and move on. Average people are just fine for most jobs.
And I assure you that I’m decidedly average and unspectacular in every way.
* that is a hideously obnoxious and entitled phrase to use - instead of "distracted" or even simply just "not working".
This is like a textbook example of manager red flags that you should check for and avoid when joining a company.
Heck Just last week I had an admin that it took 45 minutes to get a hold of during an outage mid day because he was trying to renovate a bathroom and had setup a workstation in his garage.
Time theft is just a common term and I used it for that reason.
And I’ve seen it elsewhere in my workplace and across my communities. We have seen an increase in AV/app whitelisitng reporting attempts to install mouse shakers, auto responses, running video all day to avoid idle timeouts on teams Statius etc.
People calling into meeting while out fishing, hunting, shopping doing home improvement etc and usbeing asked to locate them at xyz time.
On a personal level idgaf about personal time. I heavily encourage my employees to take it. I heavily encourage mental health awareness and having hobbies and interests outside of work. Heck I regularly take off for such things myself. And I work to give my employees projects that fit their interests and strengths.
But what would your prefer I call it when people are trying to do these things and not claiming vacation time?
FWIW I understand where you're coming from generally, I don't want to make these concerns about you or your team specifically.
And in fact I have interjected into late sessions i wasnt a party to to ask parties to suspend their tshooting when i found out it was happening and it wasnt really....critical. My developers specifically can work some odd hours, which is perfectly fine, but they cant abuse my on call ops shifts for it at their leisure.
Or in cases where its needed, they are given comp time starting at 1.5x time to make up for it. Often times it more than that.
Not all work places act like the employee is cattle. Many do see the people as an asset.
Now if he’s on an hourly contract, I’d expect the hours to be accurate.
For some jobs the expectation is literally “be reachable and physically at this workstation when a fire ignites”. Can’t do that while fishing. But lots of jobs are “do this batch of things, and come to these meetings at these times.” If someone can do this effectively from the middle of a lake, who cares?
Time theft is an interesting concept to me because it implies you're being paid for the time rather than for the utility of your labor. Why do you think time theft is important in your job?
>But even some of my direct reports will slack significantly more if they think I’m not online. Responses that are normally in minutes take hours etc.I have to now probe for updates etc. Much less time is spent on projects of interest (that also benefit the business) during periods of less “fires”. Instead it’s more bare minimum. I know many try to be understanding (myself included) because many have more than just work to deal with but it would need to be addressed if it’s becomes a norm.
Are you saying people are less productive generally? If I noticed the same I'd look into a few things: Are you sure that your KPI's focus on productivity properly? If people are performing at the minimum, are you setting the correct goals?
It kind of goes both ways though, if you had a less productive day would you be expected to stay late to make up for it? Most of the time you would just leave at the normal time and it wouldn't matter too much as long as you look like you are trying your best.
Not necessarily, no. If your KPI's and bonus are properly lined up, that could be something for your manager to keep an eye on but you can't expect every day to be peak productivity.
Second, you still wouldn't be expected to stay late or leave early - you'd simply be paid less.
There's a simple way to set that up. If you performed above the minimum set for you, you wouldn't be fired or warned. If you consistently performed at peak productivity, you'll get a bonus based on how much you produce.
We already do this.
>I'd say its fair to say your results are more important than time but it goes both ways.
Why? What does the company gain by having you in your seat for more hours?
Are these employees paid hourly? If not, it’s not really time theft if the work gets done on time.
And that’s my point. It’s not getting done on time.
Projects that are well planned and have long histories of identical executions are taking longer and simply being dropped if I’m not probing.
Maybe you wanted to say "certain people"? Working from home is definitely more difficult for some people's work style than others, plus a ton of other factors like how well one's home is suited to working in, how much skill a person has working in that environment, etc.
Time theft is a bummer, especially on the team-level where you just want to get things done. I wonder what causes it? Off the top of my head I can think of:
- People are naturally lazy (I really disagree with this, but it feels like the default "robber baron" answer)
- People are having trouble adjusting to different and various work environments (probably a good amount of this)
- The nature of how we work in America is fundamentally unnatural for many people, and the lack of supervision allows people to assume a better work/life balance
#3 is maybe just my experience in the workplace, but it feels pretty true — I wonder how widespread that experience is.
In any case, I'm glad the pandemic forced many people to reevaluate what "going to work" looks like, and hopefully we settle on something closer to how we'd each like to work.
I've dealt with this in execs and team leaders before - why do you care about time theft? If it's about the productivity loss, that should be measurable in its own right.
Most of the time, I find that people just want to be able to see the team working for them and don't like the idea of paying people 'not to work' despite the fact that what they're really paying for are outputs.
For jobs where time spent correlates with output, time is a good way to think about it (and should be paid hourly), but obviously this isn't 99% of white collar jobs.
A huge chunk of my time (40% approx) is consumed by pointless cargo cult corporate activities which have no direct correlation on revenue, reputation or longevity but merely serve to sustain positions or activities in the company which someone felt needed to exist otherwise it wouldn’t be a real company. This is a universal truth for all companies with more than about 50 employees I’ve worked for.
Who’s the time thief? There’s only one and it’s efficiency or lack thereof.
At best I’m good for 4 hours a day, probably in separate 1 hour long bursts with downtime between them. No mandated attendance, hours, management technique, motivational theory is going to improve that. Pay me for what I can do not when I can do it.
I've found it isn't so much the cargo cult stuff that causes inefficiency as it is administrative hiring and artificially increased complexity.
Oh, the horror!
> people are shifting work hours to ones more of convenience (again anecdotal)
They have no shame!
> But even some of my direct reports will slack significantly more if they think I’m not online. Responses that are normally in minutes take hours etc.I have to now probe for updates etc.
This all sounds very familiar. Let me give you another perspective on this.
It’s very stressful and disruptive to be pinged 20+ times a day. While some of those are people asking for my help, which I gladly do, a good chunk are managers and seniors asking for “updates” or checking in just to see “how it’s going”. Like we didn’t have a standup 4 hours ago. Sometimes it’s colleagues asked by the manager to check on others, so that it doesn’t look like they’re too annoying. I know because it’s obvious and I got asked to do the same many times.
The answer is that it’s going great, thank you very much. At least it was until you interrupted me for the nth time today and now I will have to waste time trying to remember what the hell I was doing in that debugging session. Actually no, a timer expired, so now I will have to restart the whole thing from scratch.
So yes, I sometimes stop answering the chat, or close it altogether. Because I want us to hit the deadline and ship on time, since I care about the team’s results instead of seeing how busy my subordinates are and feeling important for nagging people all day long.
A micromanager hurts the company by reducing productivity and team morale. Your subordinates are not “doing leisurely things” during working hours. They are probably brushing up their CV and doing leetcode to find another job.
Older ways of messaging, like IRC, were not focused so much on notifications and having a full message history that you had to go through when signing in. This forced people to use specialized forms of communication (video meetings, emails, wikis) for important information. Chat was used for casual stuff, for which it works well.
If I'm struggling with a problem, sitting on my ass for 5 hours is not going to make the solution come quicker. Going for a walk, playing video games, or calling somebody are a great way to recharge, and as long as I'm not blocking anybody or producing worse output, it's a net plus over time for productivity.
In return, I'm happy to throw in a few extra hours in the evening or over the weekend if I suddenly have a breakthrough, but I'm doing that on my terms.
The team cohesion part can be a real issue, but defaulting to asynchronous communication can really help here.
Being productive while remote is hard work and requires a high level of self-awareness and self-control. We cannot "will it into existence" by denying the negative experiences of employers.
Time theft is a real concept businesses care about. Business think they are buying time, with an eye to capture the results. If any one reads this gets confused or angry about this: go contractor. If you want to be selling results not your time then you best move into a working relationship where you sell results. Salary is a time-selling relationship.
As a remote contractor, with my own remote employee, I can say I expect the time logged to be productive time. I don't care if my employee stops work mid day to paint his house: but he better log that time. Flexibility is a responsibility, if people continue to abuse work from home you can bet companies across the world are going to return to office at the fastest opportunity.
not to mention I can now walk on a treadmill while at my desk, save time commuting, save money on dry-cleaning and gas, and I can be productive with my life during all those meetings you are forced to attend but don't involve you in any way. wireless headsets with the camera off is great. I can talk when needed, mute myself for 50 of the 60 minutes, and do a mindless task like vacuum, dust, dishes, fold laundry, etc, while listening to people debate pointless shit.
A solution for this could be managing to outcomes, and setting more clear expectations around their role.
It’s often difficult to gauge employee productivity. I do think that as managers we kid ourselves that we can actually improve individual productivity in any significant, sustainable way, other than helping people remove roadblocks like, you know, the kids screaming in the background while you are trying to code.
That seems entirely reasonable to me. If I've been asked something by a coworker and for whatever reason I believe that they're AFK/offline, then responding to their message/email is going to be a lower priority for me.
I'm not going to stop whatever I'm in the middle of doing to give an immediate response if whoever asked me isn't going to read it immediately. I'll finish what I'm working on, or reply when I'm taking a break.
Make expectations on response times clear. I'm guessing you want it to depend on the medium used and not depend on your (appeared?) online status. Talk with your team about it. Bonus points for summary e-mail after talk.
You usually got a reponse in minutes (I assume IM or mail), lucky.
That is changing: you think it's because they slack. Maybe they much more often enter flow-state* while WFH which is so easely interrupted (or rarely gained) at the office. I know I do.
Maybe those that haven’t been remote never saw this side of businesses, but as someone that will only work remotely, the options pre-Covid were exceedingly thin.
Almost no public companies allowed 100% remote work. Almost none. Honestly I can’t even name a single company that did, but I’m sure there is at least one right?
Also, it should be noted that when I say remote I mean they allow anyone, literally anyone that works at the company to work from Home. Not some one off anomaly for high performers (which I know companies like Google or Microsoft have allowed under certain circumstances).
Why companies have, and I think will continue to be , anti-remote and anti-worker is because of nepotism, elitism, and an over reliance on physical queues for communication.
It’s similar to how Silicon Valley is becoming Wall Street, with pay (often in clout) to play apps (ex: Clubhouse, which feels more like Harvard than an early social network - it’s also painfully uncool) and how they mirror closed minded and closed off business operations — these businesses and their yuppy middle managers rely on a physical presence to coerce employees into drinking the kool aid.
My hope is that employees start to reject these practices and instead force employers to accept remote work, but I’m doubtful since the leverage is mostly in the hands of business - think of the power FAANG companies have. Once they go back to forced commute work, everyone else will see it as an opportunity to do the same.
Automattic?
All the $$$ that businesses get to save by eliminating or reducing office real estate, including $$$ saved by pushing some of those costs onto employees.
If they give the employee a budget, it is a wage, and they have to pay social security fees on it (?). If they buy stuff for the company office, it is an expense and tax deducible.
Even people who work from an office still usually have a home study or office for doing their bills or whatever. Do you mean electricity costs to run your laptop? What does that add up to?
Many, many people will come out of this with their backs ruined from being hunched over a laptop with no external screen for 8 hours a day.
Having written this, I see this could be an impetus to get better at taking notes with software. But some remote jobs and people really benefit from keeping physical things close by.
* Heating and cooling
* Buying furniture and furnishings that are missing, or to replace worn out or unsuitable for full time work e.g. lights, computer chairs, headphones, monitors
* General office consumables, e.g. coffee, milk, pens, paper
The Australian Tax Office reckons (for tax purposes) this costs around 80 cents (AUD) per hour, or AU$1,500 per year.
Also, most people don't have a separate study or spare room they can use as a home office [1].
[1] https://news.stanford.edu/2020/06/29/snapshot-new-working-ho...
This. And not just on office space - all the perks: snacks, on-site gym/child care/etc. Not to mention janitorial/security staff, utilities. I think now companies have tried WFH/Remote, they'll remain open to it in the future.
The cost of those things is a drop in the ocean compared to salaries anyway.
I'm not seeing your point here? it IS still a sellers market, and companies do pay for those things. So its still a savings for them. As for a 'drop in the bucket', I've seen companies try to save money by buying cheaper pens. So I'm sure cheaper rents, utilities, perks, etc. will be considered...
edit: grammar
Just as employers can now access remote employees anywhere in the world, employees can access any company hiring remote.
I especially like the "employees can access any company.." part, as it gives me a lot more options. Up till this now, it was basically only SV companies and small startups that were open to it.. So I'm looking forward to being able to cast a wider net next time I need to look for work.
They still save on janitorial, security, utilities, rent, etc.
So I fail to see how companies don't save money. And from what I've seen, companies will consider anything that saves them money...
The OpEx on office space is significant - 10-15% of salary costs. So getting rid of the office or reducing its size and cost is like cutting pay by perhaps 5-7%. That’s a big deal.
"This is the old converted office of Microsoft. In these very rooms people used to write the operating system that used to run the world."
I'm sure that there will be a much greater prevalence and acceptable of working from home after the pandemic, but I'm equally sure that there will be a gradual but significant shift back to large numbers of people working in offices. The only way this won't happen is if there genuinely is a major uplift in productivity from remote work, and I'm incredibly sceptical about that. Self-reported improvements in productivity are worthless, IMO.
Not saying you won't enjoy being back in the office, but it's something to consider that maybe you could fill that commute time and your social needs with something more local once your community reopens.
Another commenter mentioned they saw more meetings during lockdown as a way for their managers to feel more in control, though for “real” remote companies I don’t see this being the case.
Now everyone wants to have a video call for things that used to be emails or slack conservations.
We should have flexibility however.
Hopefully there will be flexibility both ways
The effect is you spend most of your time at home but still get to go into the office. Think everyone is in office T W TH or T W F or something. I miss that setup and have since returned to that job and I hope I can go back in this year.
Can't you choose to go out and socialise if you want to outside work? (After COVID.)
If we get rid of working from an office, then people who don't want to go out don't have to, and people who want to can still do anyway socially. Doesn't that sound like the best solution? Lets everyone choose what they want nothing forced.
Conference room meetings felt less organized than web conferencing.
Saving 80min in daily commute on top of that gives me over 7 free hours per week, over 250h per year, enough to get an extra education.
30% or more of my colleagues commute over 2.5h per day, 12.5h per week, 48+h/month.
To send emails and make phone calls from an office.
Let that sink in.
No way.
Maybe also because I don’t come from a culture where work expands to take 100% of someone’s life. Work is work. Socializing is outside of that.
I look forward to the office because I’ll always live 15 minutes away. I’ll either take my bicycle or a motorcycle. (Both of which can be fun - wheelies on either are great!)
The in person meetings were more frequent for me because I could just stop by a persons desk to see how they were doing. I can’t do that online and the culture is much more closed down. Forget about going offsite to get lunch and really hear how things are. No weekly basketball games with various people from other departments to see what’s brewing.
There are plenty of benefits to the office and I would like them to still exist. And they won’t as soon as you go remote because they rely on everyone being in one area. If you go remote, chances of seeing anyone in person will fall off a cliff compared to office life.
I’ve made some of my best friends through work and I plan to continue doing that.
But let’s not force people to spend hundreds of hours in their cars, risking their lives and the lives of strangers just so we can have the convenience to interrupt their deep work in person.
I highly recommend seeking relationships outside of work. Jobs don’t love you (back).
Not everyone lives near the office. That’s the point I’m making. I chose to live near the office (some of my coworkers chose to live further away - it is a choice, they all can afford living near the office like I have). If we start going down remote, my coworkers will move away to other states because the cost of living in the Bay Area is too high for them. Also, many of them prefer to be near old families or friends. So, their likelihood of staying near work is relatively low.
Even during covid, about half the company has moved away from the bay. Many going back to another country or moving to another coast, etc. They’ll only come back if they absolutely have to.
I live only 40 min away from the office but will rent forever and never own property. Yes that’s a “choice” — a forced one given my preference to avoid an insanely long commute in one of the largest cities in the U.S.
If I could I’d work remotely and buy a house, possibly in a different city and maybe even country.
Permanent wfh would be the real amazing choice that opens so many possibilities.
Even then, you have a choice. You can live with roommates or downsize your apartment to live closer to work. That’s just how it works. It’s still a choice. It’s not like there’s 0 available options for software engineers in most any major city in the US when it comes to living near work.
Permanent WFH means you’ll never see your coworkers in person. You will not live anywhere near each other. Again, if you have no interest in seeing the people you work with then fine. But for those of us who like to create bonds with our peers, who want to know everything going on in a company, and want to climb the ladder fast... it’s gonna suck. You won’t get that in a remote company unless it has a truly radical culture.
Why not? Making millions you could literally move to each of your coworkers’ city for a week, every week, and become besties. Or, fly all of them and their families to a retreat in Bali every quarter.
When I started working from home a few years pre-covid, I also had the loneley-blues after a year or so. It's wasn't nice and, in fact, lead me to try working from an office again.
And what can I say. While yes, when I moved back in the office I loved socializing more, I soon became miserable again.
See, suddenly I couldn't lie down on my couch anymore for a quick rest. I couldn't "let my self go". Meditate. I had much more fast food and started to feel stressed and sick.
So I went back to home office. And indeed it's true what another commentor said here: WFH during covid is much different from WFH in normal times as me and other WFH friends made it a habbit of working together. You can visit cafe, work from park benches or convert your parent's place into your mega office while they're on vacation.
Ultimately, I ended up renting a room for myself. Now, you say it's an office. I say it's a cosy room that's 10min bike ride away from my home... I wouldn't call it office, but also not home.
PS:
Maybe it's what some people call an Attelier.
While I'm sure some work and some appointments can (and remain) be done remotely, and I am glad its good for the environment, the current way of life (although it is necessary) is not my cup of tea.
Everyone gets into "heads down" mode, "get tickets" done mode, and the big picture gets missed when everyone is scattered with 100% WFH.
Also, hiring new engineers with 100% WFH has been an total nightmare.
I think that 3 days in-office is "just right"
WFH ends the day your competitions beats you a few years/month in 'Time to market'.
It's just way harder to organise going out for a drink after work if you're already at home. If you're in the office and it's a 10 min walk to the bar you just go. There's absolutely no spontaneity in working from home. At work you can have a conversation over dinner, or over a coffee or a smoke, it just doesn't work over Zoom.
Covid has been hell for my social life and probably at least 80% of people in my social circle feel the same. I honestly don't think any of this will persist.
If I was king of the world I'd tell businesses (where feasible - warehouses still need people to be onsite, small businesses may not have the money for the tools for example) that they need to be able to offer home working for those that want/need it and office working for those that want/need it.
With that comes the correct tools and equipment, e.g. video conferencing, desktop sharing, telepresence, laptops, whatever.
I have been working remotely for several years with only occasional visits to an office and it works for me. I would hate to have to travel every day to an office but I like the occasional visit.
I get enough interaction with my family and friends (current COVID restrictions not withstanding ofc) but I have a separate room upstairs where I work so I don't have to sit in the kitchen.
It's horses for courses imo... the future needs to be flexibility-based.
It kind of boggles my mind to think about driving somewhere to do the same thing but in a different place.
I have a long commute and don't miss it... i do miss the books/podcasts and I miss the office. I hope we go to a 3 day home, 2 day office but we'll see.
Managers like having butts in seats. we'll see how it goes long term
I'm still enjoying the job so we'll see how things go over the next, say, year.
Companies that have a component to their office space that requires onsite work - for example manufacturing companies with an IT office somewhere on site or big media companies will probably return to onsite.
companies in which management is predominantly older might return to working onsite - supposing that more of the older management will see this last year as a deviance and working onsite a return to the normalcy they want. (obviously some older management will be able to see the possibilities but, as an old guy myself, I find that most older people are not as quick to change as I am)
companies in which a dominant force of the management would prefer to work onsite will do so. Some people like to work onsite and if they are in management you will do as management wants.
finally I know of one company that has recently had a bunch of high profile moves and are thinking it is caused by working from home and the lessening of social ties this implies.
There are systems of great social and political power in administrative staffing and they don't want to be cut out, so they'll push to go back to the office. It's happened in a lot of places already.
NO ONE is claiming or predicting that everyone or even a majority of people will work from home.
The authors, from three different universities, surveyed 15,000 Americans and documented a permanent shift towards more remote work going forward, going from 5% of work days used for remote work pre-pandemic to 25% of work days used for remote work post-pandemic.
If you think for even a moment how much solo work must be done by individuals at most companies (think: one-on-one sales calls, proposal writing, spreadsheet modeling, coding, design work, writing employee reviews, updating accounting/ERP data, etc.), the authors' findings make complete sense.
Here's the abstract:
> We survey 15,000 Americans over several waves to investigate whether, how, and why working from home will stick after COVID-19. The pandemic drove a mass social experiment in which half of all paid hours were provided from home between May and October 2020. Our survey evidence says that about 25 percent of all full work days will be supplied from home after the pandemic ends, compared with just 5 percent before. We provide evidence on five mechanisms behind this persistent shift to working from home: diminished stigma, better-than-expected experiences working from home, investments in physical and human capital enabling working from home, reluctance to return to pre-pandemic activities, and innovation supporting working from home. We also examine some implications of a persistent shift in working arrangements: First, high-income workers, especially, will enjoy the perks of working from home. Second, we forecast that the post-pandemic shift to working from home will lower worker spending in major city centers by 5 to 10 percent. Third, many workers report being more productive at home than on business premises, so post-pandemic work from home plans offer the potential to raise productivity as much as 2.4 percent.
Im not going back to an office 5 days a week. If they make that demand, I'm out. My guess is many others are in the same boat and managers will be careful in how they reintroduce office time to avoid large scale turnover.
However, I would never want to return to working from office 100% of the time. When I really need to concentrate alone, I find home to be much better for that. Having to go to office every working day is also way too limiting in terms of where I can live - the hybrid model allows people much more freedom to choose where they live, long commute is perfectly fine if you only do it once or twice a week.
Organizations can try to set policies to avoid this, e.g. require everyone to be in the office Tuesday through Thursday. But then you start to wonder why you're paying for office space that you only use 3 days a week. You can try to save the money with hot-desking etc but that has its own effects.
But much to my surprise, we recently learned that we'll be allowed to continue working from home for up to 3 days a week. In a recent survey, most people preferred to work from home, but also missed the human interaction from time to time. And it looks like there was no negative impact when people started working from home.
Before the pandemic, we took a mon-weds approach which was the right balance.
Now, performance-wise, it's obvious when people aren't doing the work by looking at their commits. Fully in-office or 100% remote won't mask that.
And it takes less time overall too.
Total win!
I do go to the office when physical things have to happen. Our business is a mix of software, hardware, service.
And I time shift physical stuff to o'dark 30 in the morning, so there is some overlap, but not much. And sometimes a whole day is needed, or a long one.
Frankly, I no longer care because most days are home days and I have a nice place to work setup just the way I like it.
The biggest benefit, outside the commute savings and other easy items mentioned here is no longer worrying about an emergency or crunch of some kind.
Shit happens. Ok fine. We all just step right up and deal. Whatever it takes. And we are ready for it, nicely charged up, ready to nail it.
On the social front, a bunch of us in my industry ended up on Zoom. We miss all the shows and some of us miss the travel (I don't and was high travel), but we connect now more than ever!
SMS, Skype, Zoom, email just work!
Frankly, I know my industry peers way better than I did before and things like mentoring or being mentored, help finding everyone a gig, all are improved.
Like I said, net win for my niche. I rather doubt there will be much of a discussion about a return to before, other than travel.
And on that front, I poured a lot of time into eliminating the need for it. It will prove to be a killer investment and the time freed up made doing it possible without also cutting into home life.
And the little things matter. We have a young one in our home again. One of my kids fell into drugs. Sucks. I am raising my grandchild.
Normally, I would find that depressing, but I can interact a lot more, be present, and those things do not take much time, but also may need to happen at the right time.
Which 10 minutes can have a huge impact! At best, it all is a modest time shift and or longer work day when needed and balance is good otherwise.
Count me as a fan. Who knew! I went into this pandemic very critical and a bit depressed and worried. Many shut down.
We have thrived. It is good.
And if you want more water-cooler interactions online or whatever there are ways to facilitate that with software.
Also there is nothing about remote-first that precludes people from meeting in person on a regular basis.
If everyone is remote, then a person in India is the same as a person in US/UK/EU and the two differentiating factors are 1.Cost 2.Talent
This puts a very big burden on employees in the US/UK/EU in that they have to increase their talent to match their offshore counterparts while at the same time fighting to make sure their salaries don’t go down
I do agree with what this articles' final outcomes although largely much of it will depend on demographic culture, beliefs of management etc. as well.
[ONE reason why ] I'm convinced that this whole pandemic thang is a conspiracy against ME, personally.
I do not make friends online --never mind participate in social media-- due to the simple Fact that I just don't seem to translate over the wire. Only my closest friends seen to avoid being offended by my text messages..
Although I spend maybe half of the time working at home, at workplace I can enjoy my lunch with colleagues without cooking (possibly free if it was a company), work in an environment that is less distracted and avoid being with my family 24/7.
I'm seeing full remote jobs at 200k or so. I reckon I could move to a small city, live off 60k. Then retire at 40.
25% seems reasonable to expect given not all jobs are suitable for remote.
Personally I think this is a tiny change compared to the changes coming with AI and automation.
Physical standup meetings that have exceeded 25 minutes: 00%.
Virtual "standup" meetings that have exceeded 25 minutes: 60-70%.
Trust me, after the pandemic, when the daily grind kicks in and your office life and daily commute drains every ounce of energy, you'll be happy to WFH.
I know. I guess it’s just choice paralysis.
Anecdotally I found meetup helped me out a lot. After a few weeks of awkward gatherings I finally found people I clicked pretty well with. Forcing yourself to go is hard though.
You'll make friends AND stay in shape.
You have a choice, you don't have to choose the suburban lifestyle.
I would say that it also helps a lot if you know at least 1-2 people who moved to that city just before you. You can plug into their social network and work together to expand it.
The other advice I have is find people who share your interests through sites like meetup.com. Lots of people who show up to those events will also have space on their dance cards. Get comfortable going out to shows, art exhibits, or whatever you’re into by yourself, and then if you hit it off with someone at a meetup event you’ll have something to talk about and something to invite a new freind to join you at.
The biggest factor in your decision should be ease of meeting new people, imo. Cities were already bad for this in the first place, but I view them as the "least worst" option. Try leverage your existing network if you know anybody where you're moving to, because they're going to be in the same position. Hacker meetups, game jams, industry conferences or other hobbies work really well too -- though you might want to avoid being in the tech bubble because I'm totally stuck inside it.
Once you've got a few friends, you can leverage their social network to meet new people and explore new hobbies and stuff.
WFH does mean you can more easily keep in touch with college friends. Me and a few buddies have a Discord server where we co-work and we also have something similar within my company (where it's easier to not worry about leaking secret stuff). This has been one of the few things that's kept me sane over the last year.
Edit: Happy to share more if you've got something specific in mind.
I emigrated from my home country around 4 years ago, and none of my friends are people I've worked with. I'm not against it, but at my old job my coworkers were mostly 10+ years older, married and had children, so they had their own thing going on.
There's lots of ways to make new friends outside of work, depending on what floats your boat. You can go to industry meetups, join a sports club, take up a hobby, go to live music gigs etc. But to be honest, making friends is just one of those things that happens organically, from random encounters multiplied by time. After university, it takes a bit longer to make friends, since people generally have a well established social circle and spend less time socialising due to work and other responsibilities. It took me a year or two to find my feet and "build a network" of friends.
I haven't gotten the flu once last year, yet in open offices I got it like clockwork at the end of fall and at the start of spring.
If covid is dangerous enough to lock down society yet is only x5 as deadly as bad flu seasons open offices are literal murder.
I was unable to function for 2-3 days (as in, I would fall asleep if I attempted to read a book) and was pretty rough for a week after.
Flu != cold.
Flu is only deadly for a very small segment of society, though.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-has-nearly-wiped-out-t...
Sinus congestion and feeling out of it for a week is not the flu.
Yes, Quarantine measures propulsed WFH. But only for those which jobs allow it. Also: The rate of „investments in physical and human capital enabling WFH“ will be highly aligned with HEIs and will be much lower per worker the lower you get in the income scale (worse connection, worse hardware, worse software, more requirements to keep minuscule track of working hours).
So
a) these „investements“ are either done or will compound for HIEs
b) income disparities are being increased massively
c) the low-income end of WFH will suck significantly more than the high-income end. And maybe even worse in terms of pay and conditions than the offline version of same job (more ability for bosses to micro-manage, commoditize and near-shore you).
„Third, many workers report being more productive at home“
d) again, this will highly concentrate around HIEs, because HIEs will be more likely to bring the most important „investment in WFH“ with them: Office Space at home.
For some people, which are usually called "introverts" and similar names, remote is a bliss, and for people like Torvalds, it worked well for decades.
The only real problem is for mostly useless management positions, who will have difficulty to justify their necessity without in-person social signalling bullshit.
For really capable people a simple and straightforward text-based workflow is all what is required.
Again, the development of Linux kernel would be the use case.
My bet is that the actual developers of the Pfizer vaccine do not need any bullshit meetings either.
One more time - for some of us not facing idiots in person is a bliss, and we are capable of writing communication at the level way beyond what is required for most jobs or business relations.
And it is not Slack and other synchronous bullshit. Async email and tickets will do.