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Comment by d3nj4l | Hacker News Reader

Working from home. I realised being in an office - especially an open-plan office - was setting off my social anxiety all the time. Working in a place where I could choose to engage with people instead of having it forced upon me made it so much easier to work. I became a lot more productive and started enjoying what I did, even picking up more side projects and learning actively. It's a shame it's coming to an end, and I can't seem to find many places that are going to remain remote.

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"Working from home. I realised being in an office - especially an open-plan office - was setting off my social anxiety all the time."

This! It's been such a game changer for me too. My career has been turbo charged over the last year. The change has been so dramatic that I won't switch to a company that doesnt have a remote-first policy. I'll forego money and promotion opportunities for it. The stress and anxiety reduction is more a personal thing but the freedom to choose, the fact that I'm not mandated to be at a particular place at a particular time, is such a revolution. It seems oppressive to not allow flexibility where the job allows. Most people I know seem to feel the same.

I'd like to point out that as a manager, my stress and anxiety level have gone through the roof during this WFH period. As I was an IC for many years, I completely see your point but I'd like to point out the other side. I've talked to several other managers in my org, and I am not alone. Some part of it may be that older people (who are likely to be in management) are more likely to have kids (which led to untenable situations during school lockdowns).

Flexibility in producing the "right" work product is really key. In many large corporate environments, figuring out what is the right work product is possibly more work than the work itself. I have a feeling we may even see different models between different types of companies (nimble startups vs small companies vs large corps). In my personal org, what you are describing can be viewed as an engineer "phoning it in" .. as the engineer is depending on their manager or team lead to assign them the right work. An IC who phones it in may think they are a top producer but will get surprised when it comes to their career progression.

I have been a manager and manager-of-managers for quite a few years (many of which were WFH), and IC now. I'm curious about your statement that some might look at the behaviour describe above as "phoning it it"? I didn't see anything in their description that said anything about getting less done or putting less time in or not being available when needed. Maybe I'm misreading something.

I agree that remote management has very different challenges than remote IC - certainly you're likely to spend a lot more time talking with people so less-than-ideal WFH circumstances would be harder.

"I'd like to point out that as a manager, my stress and anxiety level have gone through the roof during this WFH period"

That's interesting for sure. I guess, as with so many things that happened during covid, the effects on people have been extremely varied. Sorry to hear that you've struggled as so many no doubt have.

The tricky part is going to be how to reconcile these different needs. A hybrid flexible approach is necessary but getting that right will take a lot of iteration.

My company isn't going fully remote, it's going to be a hybrid approach but with no mandate to come in on a given day. We are very strong when it comes to self-organising teams and autonomy so I think it will work. We don't really look to management for more than a high level steer, we all are expected to own our area to a high degree. Phoning it in wouldn't work therefore, it would be obvious to the team that someone was lagging. For other organisational styles this flexible approach could be challenging but it does seem to work for us at least.

Does this suggest that there is a trade-off between working conditions optimal for managers, and working conditions optimal for bottom-level employees? And that perhaps until 2020, the balance kept gradually shifting in favor of managers... offices replaced by cubicles, cubicles replaced by open spaces... until it became completely one-sided?

WFH suddenly gave many people their own office room again. It's 20 years since the last time I had that.

I felt this so much. When I'm in the office I spend so much time thinking about if my cough was too loud and distracting people, of if my hair is neat enough, or if I should walk to get a cup of water or if I should wait 20 minutes because I just got back to my desk from the toilet.

Working from home I don't care about anything and just get things done.

I hadn't thought of those things but I did the same in the office too. I still look in the mirror or camera to see if there is food in my teeth :) but yeah a lot less stress from silly stuff. I am more conscious of appearing 'away' now though.

I realize given how much hardship other people have experienced so this comes across as rather callous, but for this reason 2020 has been one of the best years in my career.

In-person interactions add stress on top of my normal work stress. I think I can objectively prove I've been more productive at home than at work too. I'm really hoping I can find a way to stay at home.

Same here. I feel guilty about the thousands of people who died to allow me this luxury... but I already feel sad about the day when I will probably have to return to the open-space hell.

And I regret I will probably never experience the combination when I work from home, but kids are at school. Instead of colleagues, spending the breaks with the wife I love.

Agreed. For me personally, commuting is a big factor - I love not doing it... Unfortunately, permanent WFH will probably not work for me for other reasons, in particular I think that the face to face interaction with coworkers cannot be replaced...

I'm currently experiencing the same calm as when I lived a 4-minute tram ride from work. (My current job is over an hour away)

The soul killing of commuting is underrated. Just the sheer amount of time lost in your day is huge and that loss builds up over time.

And that's not even counting increased health problems, sleeping less (well), increased stress from anxiety or just basic public transport bullshit.

I used to say I didn't mind my daily ~2.5 hours in trains and trams. Right now I will fight _hard_ to keep it out of my life.

Some of this could be fixed very easily by employers by widening their range of office hours. Commuting times grow exponentially when everyone has to do it at the same time.

When I was commuting in a car, the exact same path would take me 45m to an hour at peak time, and 15m off-peak. Just by pushing forward the starting time by about an hour, I saved loads of time and aggravation. This applies to public-transport commuters too: the experience of squeezing into an overcrowded carriage where you could die standing vs sitting comfortably and reading a book in a mid-morning train, is night and day.

Employers should just agree that the actual hours where absolute overlap is required, are about 5-6 per day. Leave people free to attach the remaining 2-3 at whichever end they prefer, or even do them from home (so you commute calmly and then just end the day from home). It won’t solve everything (schools remain obtuse bottlenecks with their inflexible schedules) but it would go a long way towards removing stress from commuting.

There are some children for whom the rigid nature of school schedules actually provides structure which makes them less stressed out :)

You are right, actually not only for children. But also there is perfect synchronization between the first day of school and the first big traffic jam, at least where I live.

I don’t particularly disagree, but there are still thtings that could be done, e.g. different schools could use meaningfully-different times.

Perhaps, though peak/off-peak makes no difference in time for me. It would reduce the busyness but I was generally able to sit anyway. Even then, I am _forced_ to sit and read (/scroll) for that amount of time a day, at set times while I could be doing things that are far better for my mental and physical health. (or just more fun, fun is underrated these days)

The move to remote work is saving me about 1.5 hours of commute each day, plus a couple hundred in gas money each month. The return to the office later this year will be brutal.

I will be refusing to return to the office for several reasons:

1- the threat of Covid is not going away in the next 2-3 years. I am no risking it!

2- I and everyone in my team have been more effective, less stressed working from home for more than a year now. Why would I go back to a less efficient way of work?

I agree. Management is telling us we are more productive now that we are remote. Yet they want to bring us back to the office. The only thing I've really heard to support this (poorly so at that), is that people are feeling more burnt out. Once you add back the commute time and remove the flexibility that we got used to from working from home, do they really think this will fix the burnout? I think it will only make it worse.

> Management is telling us we are more productive now that we are remote. Yet they want to bring us back to the office.

Apparently, the management optimizes for things other than productivity. (Is anyone surprised?)

This year taught me how much commuting stressed me out. Never again.

Same. Commuting is one of the worst parts of "modern" life, so not doing that is great. In addition, it's quiet at home, I have better equipment and people can't come and distract me all the time. I'm way more productive which makes me happy.

Where are you looking ? There are tons of remote-first positions (https://weworkremotely.com/ is just an example).

It could depend on your field too - in mine (IT) it feels like there’s a shift to remote and many organizations will keep allowing it even when they are able to go back to the office.

Are you not in IT? Remote is literally permanent now

Not everywhere. Most companies here in India aren't looking to stay remote long term if they weren't remote friendly before.

Considering a lot of their work is sourced from abroad, this is very ironic (in the Morrissette sense).

While it's ironic, I think I understand why it's the case: there's a plethora of managers who can't really manage remotely the way they were used to in the office: by applying lots of pressure to those underneath them. It's much harder to show how big boss you are on zoom compared to an open space office,where 50 poor souls are scared to say anything back.

And most of them are redundant , was always wondering what most of the managers in our division actually did as we seemed to function better without them during WFH.

lot of companies in EU (especially D/A/CH) also have absolutely no plans to continue WFH. Despite covid restrictions going to be an issue also long term, they have (1 year later) still no strategy that incorporates or improves efficiency in WFH organization and workflows. Instead they all look forward to going back to a time that no longer exists.

So not the EU obviously but in the UK, or London at the very least, I don't know of a single white collar worker where much-increased WFH won't be the norm. I'm not just talking tech but banking, law and so on.

We do indeed seem to be far ahead of our European neighbours in this regard from what I'm seeing.

I agree, it will be the new norm. it's just that this insight hasn't arrived yet in many places (and Europe is generally lagging behind in doing things differently compared to how it was done the past hundreds of years). suppose it won't matter really since majority of companies won't survive the coming years anyway (for other reasons) so their short sightedness wrt WFH doesn't really matter :D

Yeah totally agree. The UK is much more enlightened and progressive than a lot of Europe on many things (unfashionable opinion, particularly for a "remainer" like me)

never mind fashion trends, they come and go :) I think you're on point. Hopefully Britain will bounce back as a beacon of progressive ideas. It was always the voice of reason and brought balance to the dominating German/French axis of bureaucratic/pedantic authoritarian thought.

I miss you guys!!

I'm from mainland Europe and have been living in the UK for more than a decade: bundling up all European countries under one 'Europe' umbrella isn't helping. There's insane variety between countries, cultures, and attitudes towards work. The UK in some aspects is ahead,while in others decades behind and the comparisons are often very difficult.

"I'm from mainland Europe and have been living in the UK for more than a decade: bundling up all European countries under one 'Europe' umbrella isn't helping"

Sure, Im not implying that Europe is homogenous, just that there are certain areas (eg WFH policies) where UK is an outlier. To this extent you can draw very general distinctions. Similarly you could draw distinctions between France or Italy vs the rest of Europe. Every country has its outlying traits.

I work in the London (City of), and the company I work for (many thousands of employees) will be expected back in the office this year end. WFH has never been part of the company culture and, at most, people previously WFH 1 or 2 days over a 2 week period, and even that was exceptional.

> Are you not in IT? Remote is literally permanent now

Sadly, not for everyone. For the company I'm with, before covid we were allowed to spend up to three days out of the week remote as long as we came in for at least the two required days (Monday and Thursday). Then, right before covid, we were told that even this policy was going away and we had to be in the office four days out of the week and could remote on Wednesdays. That policy never took effect because covid hit right before the transition date, so now we're "remote until July 1st 2021, after which we'll reassess the threat and plan on everyone being in the office five days out of the week."

I've been so spoiled by WFH, I am not looking forward to going back to two hours of commuting per day.

Was going to answer with this as well. I have never met my colleagues and boss, and have never even heard their voice after the job interview, and almost all of my communication with them is asynchronous, without requiring immediate answer, and it has been such a good thing to my mental health.

Unfortunately, most of the western, first-world companies who are offering nice salaries for international remote workers ($60-80k after tax and above) do not trust them and require insane control, with screen recording, constant zoom presence, etc. But just as remote work has finally won over the industry, async communication will too — if for nothing else than what a boost to productivity it is.

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