People with friends and family can't gauge how bad of a toll this has taken on lonely single guys like me. For most of them WFH been a Godsend. I really wish this ends or at least there remains enough places which require working from the office.
Fact of life is, many relationships have trouble finding balance between "me time" and "us time". Going to work is, for many, a way to catch a break from their home - with perfect plausible deniability, since it's socially approved and demanded externally.
Some people don't need it. I had a co-worker who would come super-early in the morning, so he could leave early and spend time with his kids. At work, we could see his kids were his whole world, and he was always happy. But at that same job, I also had a different co-worker who went out his way to find reasons to stay overtime - he dreaded coming back home. I don't keep in touch with them much, but I imagine the former one was super-happy about forced WFH, but the latter very much not.
Add to that, quite a lot of people in cities bought their apartments on the assumption that both partners are working 9/5 at the office and the kids are at school/daycare - this let them buy smaller places for less (or closer to work). Such apartments become living hell when all dwellers are present simultaneously for the entire day, and each is trying to do their work/school.
This is not to trade who has it worse - just pointing out that it's not smooth sailing for those of us with families either. There's a tight line between being happy to have people around, and hating their guts for it - this pandemic pushed a lot of us close to that border.
The elephant in the room: if you can't tolerate your partner in the same flat/house for longer periods of time then IMO you shouldn't marry them so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I get it that alone time is extremely important. I practice it as well -- my wife too. But what you describe just seems... more like a good roommates' arrangement / contract, and not an actual relationship?
Please understand that none of this is meant to offend or generalize. But what you describe is just legitimately baffling for me.
Because it costs a lot of money to buy a house with enough room for 2 separate offices. Paying for that if you have no reason to believe you'll ever need it would be well into the stupid range for most people.
Ignoring those might be the venturing into the irrational range that you mentioned.
For most 20-30yo, the 9-5 lifestyle is absolutely expected to be there for the next 30 years. Vacations are often handled by traveling, visiting extended family, etc. There normally are many options available. And by the time retirement comes, children will have moved out, or perhaps the parents will have sold the flat, or left it to the children, and moved out elsewhere. I don't think there is something as a "lifelong estate purchase" these days in the cities. Not when you're in your thirties.
> The elephant in the room: if you can't tolerate your partner in the same flat/house for longer periods of time then IMO you shouldn't marry them so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Easy to say :). But some people only discover that quite late - once some unpredictable circumstances (like job loss, or a global pandemic) force them to actually stay in the same flat for long periods of time. Most working-age adults don't experience that ordinarily (and I think every couple expects they'll work such issues out by the time they get to retire).
> But what you describe just seems... more like a good roommates' arrangement / contract, and not an actual relationship?
Relationships are complex, and every one is different. They get even more complex if extended family gets involved, or when children appear. And sudden events like a global pandemic have a way of revealing previously unseen cracks in the foundations. If people were aware of all this up front, humanity would have died out centuries ago :).
I would be very careful making any claim going as far as the next 30 years, given what has happened in the last 2 years, let alone in the last century. If that wasn't enough to convince my fellow 20-30yos, nothing's going to shake them awake to how volatile life can be.
A) less work hours per day
B) fewer years of work per lifetime
I think most people around my age in Europe (in their thirties) started working around 25, at the latest, and will work until they're at least 65. Probably later, since in many countries the retirement age is starting to be indexed with life expectancy. It's quite realistic that by the time I retire I will have worked 50+ years.
Simple answer: You aren't locked into a home for life, so you buy a home for the life you want now. My parents are on the verge of retiring, so they bought a beach condo and plan to sell off their suburban home.
My wife and I are looking at smaller city homes, but definitely do not plan to retire in it, we're looking at maybe a 5-10 year timespan of ownership.
> Because you get to buy a cheaper estate -- is that the main reason? But you will not always work 9-5.
The extra time spent commuting from a distant house are real costs paid every day. The potential of owning a home that you can retire in is a hypothetical payoff many many years in the future.
In a post Covid world, WFH could involve coworking spaces and cafes. I expect that industry will grow massively over the coming years as we migrate into a more distributed working style. It’s a new way of doing things things and it’s going to take time to adapt and replace the social side of the office.
Generally remote working means flexibility and freedom (to varying degrees). We don’t have that now.
Zoom (fatigue) meetings all day, staring at the screen instead of real people and any form of "managing by walking around" and watercooler chats are gone.
This might not make a difference if my job was a corporate mess and sucked before already, but for people like me who actually enjoy their peers, it‘s a net negative.
I feel completely out of touch with what happens in the company and everything feels super transactional.
I mean, nobody opens a Zoom call to just chit-chat about mundane stuff. Well, some do but I‘m sick of taking any additional video call beyond the 4h I’m enduring every day.
Sure, we could adjust to an even more asynchronous workflow like the poster child remote companies, but to me it would make this issue even worse.
I can see how this benefits introverts and people with social anxiety, but as for extroverts me, I‘m getting more depressed every day.
Looks to me like that is the root problem you're having...
Always reminds me of meth lab enforcers walking around and intimidating illegal immigrant meth cooks on a meth assembly line.
Looking forward to going to the pub with colleagues when it reopens in a couple of weeks, but nobody wants to go to an office to sit around.
Can not wait to get back to being able to meet people in person, even if remote and WFH is allowed and accepted in the future, which I think it will be for all but the most dinosaur of companies.
Because for me the concept of managers 'just walking around' gives me that itchy feeling on the back of my neck.
And at the end of the day if the employees who write code/produce output are doing that efficiently that is the goal right.
You might have a bad case of a micromanager there, but here‘s my definition:
> Management by walking around emphasizes the importance of interpersonal contact, open appreciation, and recognition. It is one of the most important ways to build civility and performance in the workplace.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318016170_Managing_...
Your definition of success might be technically right, but doesn‘t resonate with me.
What good does it do if some code works but the employees behind that aren‘t happy, don‘t feel valued and we can‘t celebrate success together?
I thankfully no longer have to deal with micromanaging, but have in the past (hence the itchy neck feeling).
I should have specified happiness in there somewhere because I agree that the efficiency should come with happy team members.
In my case if theres something I need to make me happier as a team member I'll just ask, but I guess that isn't the case for everyone.
That is the short term goal. But it isn't the only goal. I want my reports to trust me so that if things change or they are having problems that they'll be honest with me and provide feedback so I can make things better. I want my reports to feel valued and emotionally satisfied with their work. This means understanding their career goals and what makes them feel happy so I can make sure that they get the kinds of rewards that matter to them. These sorts of things are important for the long term sustainability of a team even if a team is delivering efficiently at a given moment.
With remote teams what I've done as a workaround with some teams have been to enforce a short 1-on-1 weekly, and tell people if we don't have anything to talk about, then we make it brief. It prevents team members who are reticent about taking your time from having issues build up because they feel it's too small or too personal to schedule a meeting about when they have a time slot they know you'll schedule regardless. For some it was almost always a 5 minute annoyance of me asking if there were any issues, them saying they had nothing to talk about, and for us to leave it at that. But it acted as a safety valve, and every now and again something absolutely critical would get brought up in those calls.
And many times when they had "nothing" to talk about, I'd ask them followup questions about small stuff like e.g. how they got on with specific people, or how a certain project was going, and suddenly it turned out they had plenty of things to talk about.
In teams where you know everyone will speak up, you can dial back both the actual and "virtual" walking of the room, knowing they'll come and tell you, but "walking the room" effectively acts as a way of lowering the barrier to bring up an issue, because they're not "bothering you".
Some indeed do, but for some reason it requires more effort than meeting physically did. I never did that, but I had co-workers who did it regularly even pre-pandemic.
What more people do, though, is chit-chat about mundane stuff on IMs. Depending on the company, your subordinates may already have their own #random / #offtopic channel. Of course, as a manager, you need to stay away from it and pretend you don't know it exists :).
But I wonder if there's a space for managers to create a second off-topic channel for their team - one that contains the manager as well. Most of the casual talk will of course stay on the original #random (the boss/subordinate separation cannot be bridged, everyone knows it's there even if they pretend it's not), but the #random+boss chat could capture the kind of conversations you'd ordinarily have on the corridor/around the doors to your office. I know I had plenty of semi-casual chats like this IRL with my boss back in my office days, and they were good for morale. I think this concept didn't translate well into pandemic/forced-WFH world.
Of course, if you don't like casual IMing and prefer synchronous communication, then that's not an option for you.
> I can see how this benefits introverts and people with social anxiety, but as for extroverts me, I‘m getting more depressed every day.
I sympathize. I hope this will end soon, and that we all find balance again. Your company may not return to full-office, but when the restrictions end, it'll be easier to see people IRL even if everyone's mostly working from home.
For what's worth, I'm more on the introvert end, and yet I sometimes feel I'm on the verge of losing my mind - we introverts have limits, too, and this pandemic situation is stressing them.
Why is that? At all the companies I have worked at the managers would join in with these kind of things same as everyone else (not all of them, but then not of all the ICs were interested either).
But the reason is, these chats are for conversations you won't feel comfortable having with your boss around. Cat pictures, stupid jokes, random topics. Even if people felt comfortable with such topics around their manager, they might still be worried that the volume of communications will be seen by the manager as evidence that people are slacking off.
I guess my feeling is that if your manager is doing that then they aren't a good manager (of course there are plenty of not-good managers, but it's not part and parcel of being a manager)
In other countries it got even more strict - 1 hour exercise and you had to pre register on a form.
Yet the subsequent lockdowns have been enough even for me to nudge me into what feels like (very) mild depression. Low-level enough that it's a nuisance rather than a problem, and I'm confident it will just go by itself once I am able to spend more time doing other things, but nevertheless it's a noticeable deterioration in mood and happiness level.
I can't imagine what it must be like for people with stronger social needs... It's also the main thing that keeps me from getting judgemental about people skirting lockdown restrictions.
she used to loathe working from home during the lockdown, but when the restrictions were eased she started enjoying it a lot.
if anything, she says, she's getting at least one hour and a half more sleep in the morning and she's skipping the commute on the way back, so that's another hour saved.
she still has to go in the office on friday, but according to her that's more of a management wish that anything really useful.
A fitness club I was part of a decade ago had this amazing 'cafe' space that was often used by folks with laptops and the odd bit of chat. It felt social. If work anywhere becomes the thing, is there is scope for work 'clubs'? Or without the fitness reason to be there at all, is it a nonstarter?
And banks aren't the only companies where that applies, anyone dealing with customer data cannot just use a shared office with people of other companies. If you deal with code that can also apply to some degree.
I've often enough seen confidential data on trains/planes because people were working on the go and not using proper screen protectors (in the past those were mostly consultants). Luckily that never included sensitive customer data. The more people work in public places, the higher the risk for data breaches.
I love working from home but I think it has to be either home or office for many, cafes or co-working spaces aren't a viable solution and a nightmare for anyone in IT security.
With family and house, sure. But I literally don't have the real estate to make a nice home office.
Mixed mode works very well tough, I can go to the office if I want and stay home if I want, so I mostly spend 4 days in the office, 1 at home.
If we as a whole continue down the path of more WFH, open shared office spaces may eventually begin to find their feet and fill that 'mixed-mode' equivalent if the company itself does not have office space. I predict there might also be more public spaces such as libraries opening up with work areas for people to get out of home when working.
The other challenge is the social component of work, but I think that will change post-Covid too. Being in Australia has afforded me the extremely lucky capability of being able to get out and socialise almost completely freely during the last year, and it undoubtly helps immensely. I think that for people who live alone, working from home will become less isolating when they can socalise outside of work hours more freely again. For example, social sport is a lot easier to fit in to your day when you're not then also losing an hour or more in your day to travel. You can do it and still easily have time to prep dinner or do your daily chores.
In short, I think that the shift to WFH due to covid will be a lot easier for a lot more people once the restrictions of Covid subside.
I've heard a lot of people saying that companies are going to realise this means they can cut down on their property costs, but far, far fewer mentioning that they're moving the costs for us. We're looking for somewhere with 2-3br so we can dedicate WFH space, and it's going to mean 2-3x our current rent.
Whereas an office could write off coffee, TP, cleaning staff, electricity, the whole rent etc, we are stuck with only being able to write off equipment we bought specifically for working and wondering if the tax authorities will come after us for that.
I had to cancel my co-work subscription when no client would accept my proposal to work remote. When the world reopens I'll never go back.
In your case, imagine yourself pleasantly walking to your local co-working space or to any of the urban entertainment facilities that will inevitably proliferate in the effort to capture all the time freed from lousy daily commutes.
Teams were assigned areas so they knew where in the building to meet, but if you arrived late and all the desks were taken you simply went and found another area (or if you needed to hide to minimize disruptions).
In a hybrid-model this becomes even easier, because the hardest thing with the above model is keeping free capacity in a growing company.
We experienced 2 months of 'school at home' with kids 5 and 8, and there is no comparing with the current situation (schools open)
To respond to the point you made: I am a young single guy loving on his own. Still, I do not mind the lockdown so much. Granted, I may not be very representative, but just another data point.
covid is still very much among us so don't expect much socializing until people feel safe to leave their basements.