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Comment by hyko | Hacker News Reader

When will introverts realise that their working conditions are being dictated to them by extroverts? The pandemic-driven remote working is hell for some people, and unfortunately they call the shots.

I don’t mind coming into your office now and again (there’s a special dimension to IRL connections), but the reason I don’t want to work there full time is that it’s crap for knowledge work. I outspend you by 10x per head in my home office, and everything there is to my exact specification. The whole field of modern office design should be a discredited pseudoscience; management is addicted to it because of the real estate crisis though.

This is also kind of terrible, because a lot of people use FAANG as their North star for every policy decision.

“Well Google use primary colours in their logo, Brian”

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I'm totally not an introvert: I love being around nice people, I love playing table tennis and having lunch with my colleagues. But wasting 1h-2h daily on commuting to/from work is in absolutely no way worthy of this.

It's our duty as human beings to resist going back to the office as much as possible. To gain back some of the life we otherwise would spend on commute. Work is for work, not for socializing, or having fun, or playing Xbox and table tennis. I mean, sure, these are nice perks, but we are being paid for the work we do, not for the fun we have. And working without being distracted by some colleagues loud music in the headphones, or the chit chat of others, or the "sorry, quick question" of some manager, improves my quality of work tremendously.

Yes, two non-introvert reasons for remote work: Commuting is hell and deep focus is near impossible in modern offices.

For the latter, there are times when you need to think about working, and when you're doing that, being in the office with a group of people and a whiteboard is invaluable. But at some point, you know what you need to do, you just need to get into a flow and do it. And that is near impossible in modern offices. That is especially important for engineers, but it also applies to accountants and designers and carpenters and any productive labor that isn't management.

Introvert/extrovert doesn't come into play, all productive labor needs to get into states of deep focus.

Maybe if engineers all had doors that closed, but for some damn reason we haven't had those since the 1960s.

I worked in an office many years ago where I noticed that the accountant always stayed late in the office. I once asked her and she said: "I stay late because when they leave I can finally start to work".

For me it was exactly the other way 'round.

I came to the office very early (say 7ish), which gave me a couple hours to really focus on things, before my colleagues started meandering in.

I never understand why long commutes aren't "Pants On Fire" emergencies for people. If you're driving two hours every day, and not spending all your free time wondering how you can either change jobs or change housing, well, it's a finite life that you're pissing away.

I'm certain that there will be an outpouring of hundreds of reasons why people cannot move, and I'm sure all of those reasons have merit. But it doesn't change the fact that long commutes are a huge detriment to work/life balance.

I have a 1-hour each way commute when I have to go to the office. I would love to live closer to the city centre, but the cost is extremely high for houses, so I would need to move to an apartment... I used to do that but decided that the feeling of having your own house and being able to walk outside on the grass and enjoy the weather (when it's a nice day), not to mention the silence at night and even during the day, are much more important to me. Living in an apartment felt like living in a jail to me.

With the pandemic I've been enjoying being at home so much. If they force me to go back to commute I will look for another job.

It depends on the nature of the commute. I've had a commute that was an hour each way, and that worked extremely well for me because the first half was by train, which is fairly low-stress and can be part of a relaxing morning routine (breakfast / coffee / reading the news), and the second half was by bicycle over quiet bike paths, which was important daily exercise that I would have to do anyway one way or another and also woke me up. The only part of the arrangement I disliked was the expense of the train fare.

Commute time doesn't have to be wasted time.

Unless there are an equal number of housing units to office seats in a particular region of a city, by the pigeonhole principle, it's not possible for everyone to just live where they work. Also working spouses and other cohabitants can't always just work in exactly the same place.

Your suggestion works for exactly one type of person, who has enough resources to outbid others for housing and either lives alone or has a non-working spouse.

I have regularly had 2-3h (each way) commutes. It's not because I couldn't change, but because I actively enjoyed the travel each day. Dedicated, no interruption thinking space, and a clear buffer between the stress of work and my home life.

Wouldn't that 3 hours per day be better spent on meditating/yoga/woodcarving (or any other relaxing activity) instead? I mean driving doesn't appear to me like most relaxing activity, but maybe it is just my perspective.

I'd suspect the results would be different, the fact a commute is forced puts your brain into the mode where you solve creative problems in the background without thinking about them. There are good reasons ideas come out of nowhere to you in the shower or on a bus.

That said I'd never ever have a 1+ hour commutes, 30 minutes is plenty but I have noticed a difference in inspiration this year and I put it down to this.

Once you throw mass transit into the mix, a long commute also becomes dedicated reading/napping/web-surfing/project-management/side-project time.

I was doing 90 minutes each way, four days a week, before; I'm currently not worried about going back to three days a week, although I'm a little curious if I'll feel differently once it happens.

"a commute is forced puts your brain into the mode where you solve creative problems in the background without thinking about them"

I don't think about work outside of work, which includes commuting. I may have an epiphany while showering or talking a walk, but in the car I listen to music or podcasts. That is Me Time, not Employer Time.

My point is creativity works by connections happening while your doing autonomous tasks like showering, spacing out on a train or bus.

You might not be thinking about work, but your brain is.

Maybe I care about this more because I'm a designer so, creativity is what I'm judged on.

"You might not be thinking about work, but your brain is."

This is definitely true after work sometimes, but a commute is not necessary for this. Walking helps similarly and is healthier, too. For me personally, I tune everything out and listen to music most of the time while commuting, or simply meditate (specifically not dwelling on any thoughts).

"Maybe I care about this more because I'm a designer so, creativity is what I'm judged on."

I'm not sure if you intended this, but this could be read that you're implying that programming is not a creative profession. Which is wholly false.

Part of tackling hard problems is coming up with creative solutions. One absolutely needs creativity and vision to architect larger applications and coordinated services.

I've met accountants that are more creative than some jazz musicians, but the creative work they do is much more abstract and not as intrinsically understandable as a musician that's improvising on a tune.

This is why I like my bus ride. I lose valuable time when I work from home.

Seems like an odd thing to do for that. I take a short drive each morning to get my coffee and then come back home. It's my meditation/alone time/change of scenery and i get to continue my day working uninterrupted at home.

People think that the things they do at the office (beyond work) are impossible to replace in "real life". They are, office is the actual virtual life

I study on the bus because it's the perfect environment for it to me. I'm on the bus, so I can't do anything else. I'm on the bus so there isn't any expectation that I'm working nor can I change when I get to get to work. My mind is just at ease that there is this naturally occurring block of time with the perfect conditions to help me accomplish an important goal of the day without impinging on any other part of my day and that is solidly baked into the routine in a very stable way that doesn't require me to exercise any executive function to ensure it happens.

My bus ride is very valuable to me for this reason.

Try as I might, on the WFH days I virtually always wind up doing this same block of study after 10pm which is my free time.

I also get interrupted just as much regardless of whether I'm at home or in the office, so that's kind of a moot point in my particular case.

Have you tried taking the bus while WFH?

> I'm totally not an introvert: I love being around nice people, I love playing table tennis and having lunch with my colleagues. But wasting 1h-2h daily on commuting to/from work is in absolutely no way worthy of this.

I commute 2x 40-50 minutes plus if I work at the office I have a forced 1h break, so around a little bit less than three hours of life have been given back to me during remote work. I understand your sentiment and I share it completely. I am now able to run errands, exercise, nap, clean the house, play video games, or work in my garage during this found again time. I often feel shy to admit that the pandemic-induced shift to remote work has given me back a lot. My boss lives a 5 minutes walk away and will never ever understand what it means to have to commute every day.

> I love playing table tennis and having lunch with my colleagues.

I don't know how others feel, but I am not outgoing enough to use the foosball and pingpong tables that are common in development studios, I feel so judged; so those are (for me) not perks at all.

I cannot agree more. If I have to choose between spending time with my kid or actual friends vs sitting in my car commuting it is an absolute no brainer. Thankfully I have been a contractor for a while and I don't need to put up with this nonsense anymore.

I've created https://sievejobs.com to allow software developers to simply "block" contacts regarding jobs that don't match your preferred working arrangements.

I try not to build too much of an us-vs-them philosophy into either the site design or the marketing message, but I hope to soon have an XHR-type feature where the hiring manager instantly sees the effect that each piece of job metadata (remote work-ability, interview format, etc.) has on their prospective candidate pool as they enter the job info.

I think this could send a useful signal upstream to the industry at large.

You can see all of the filterable attributes by directly visiting https://sievejobs.com/job-seeker

And I'd love to hear any feedback that anyone might have.

lol, nice domain name :)

Thanks. I'm honestly not crazy about it, but am holding off until profitability justifies purchasing something more succinct. :-)

The commute sucks, luckily mines only 30 minutes but honestly after a year of this I'm now convinced video calls are half as productive as in person meetings and some people just never really engage at all in video calls when they used to working in person, not sure if they're consciously aware that they no longer provide useful input, they used to.

I've started going back into the office now for brainstorming because just being able to talk without latency and without only one person being able to talk at once the difference is just night and day, not to mention the casual non-meeting non-slack chats where ideas are born.

I think remote work is now something people will demand but I can't be the only person who's noticed the difference especially in creativity focused work and believe the end game within 2 years will be the people in the office will work on the interesting stuff and remote will work on fixing bugs. Which of course will trickle on to impact salary unfortunately.

> It's our duty as human beings to resist going back to the office as much as possible.

Please don't talk for all of us. If you're miserable in the office that's fine, but it's noones duty to support your preferences. This is why we have this amazing free market - everyone can work at a company that respects their preferences.

> amazing free market

> everyone can

No. Most people don't have good options. It's a little ironic to say the OP needs more empathy and then go on to make an argument that's almost breathtakingly disconnected from reality.

I've seen many breathtaking articles on this very page which claim that majority of companies are shifting towards permanent WFH. They were followed by predictions that this will increase.

How am I disconnected from reality?

Just in terms of reduced CO2 emissions due to fewer people commuting because they can work from home, and the impact this has on climate change, he is correctly speaking for all of us, if by all of us you mean life on Earth.

If that's the main driver, then instead of forced WFH, let's do a blanket ban of cars. Not just commute to work, but force people to stay at home at all times. After all, we're ignoring all the other effects here right?

Tackling climate change is a step at a time. First, we support WFH. Then, we can move on to other things.

And yes- I would like to see a total ban on gas guzzling cars in my lifetime. I would like to see cities built around walkability, and ban all types of cars entirely in the city center. Etc. But it's a step by step process.

Hmm, and does this free market give us the option of quiet, small offices, with doors? Or do we overwhelmingly get the "option" of open offices?

It's our duty as human beings to resist any normalization of remote working. Loneliness is a far worse problem in our society than commuting. We need to make sure everyone has a baseline level of social contact.

You can have social contact outside of work though. WFH gives people back time to explore hobbies, join clubs, meet people etc.

The social contact you have at work often feels forced and artificial - you can choose your friends, your colleagues not so much.

> you can choose your friends, your colleagues not so much

I did choose them, luckily I got to audition them from around 300 people I've been forced to interact with through over my career during the past 10 years. Not only do I get to know their characters well because I can decide if I like them or not and find out if they're trustworthy through working together I also get the extra benefit of being recommended for jobs through them.

How on earth am I supposed to do that though clubs? Presumably you mean sports clubs because no sure much else than that exists for adults, what if I want to make friends with people who are not interested in sports?

I didn't mean sports clubs. I don't like sports much either other than the gym, where I go alone.

But in my city Meetup.com has a huge amount of clubs and groups for basically anything, and I'm in Barcelona so the city isn't even that big and it's not all English-speaking (which I guess may be more likely to use Meetup).

There are sometimes local Facebook groups for stuff as well, I went on day-trips to various places like that.

I know my colleagues who are into tabletop games and D&D go to those groups, I personally just went to language exchanges and hiking/tourism groups. There are even groups for local video gamers etc. as I guess it's nice being able to meet in person too.

There are a plethora of groups for adults. There are groups for tabletop/board games, music, movies, sports, hiking, etc. There's likely groups near you on meetup.com or facebook groups.

For music specifically there are local scenes. If you go to local places consistently, you'll see some of the same faces. Etc.

I like programming, but I would find it very boring to only be friends with people in the same industry as me.

Meetups or facebook groups select people who are into meetups.

For meetup.com specifically, maybe, but there are plenty of facebook groups around hobbies that aren't specifically "meetup" oriented. You could look for organizations specifically in your area, and chances are they'll have a facebook group, facebook page for events, or a meetup account.

I also don't see this as an issue. If you want to meet people, that's a great way to do so. I've done it across America and in Korea, and I have made many friends from it.

Does wfh really give back time to people? From what I've seen with colleagues and friends, it mostly has led to longer working hours. The commute time and the time before dinner has been replaced by more work.

If you have been able to draw the line and log off at 5pm, good for you, but that's not the experience for a lot of people.

Yeah, disconnecting can be hard. I was one of the guys who always left my laptop in the office.

But I'm not working extra hours every day, and given the time I save on commuting and lunch hour and being able to do various chores during the day - I think it's still a significant win.

> If you have been able to draw the line and log off at 5pm, good for you, but that's not the experience for a lot of people.

That's a personal issue though. It seems backwards to insist on an in-person work environment because someone doesn't have the personal discipline to log off at 5pm on their own.

If it's one person, sure. But not if it's a widespread problem.

For many people, that doesn't work for whatever reasons. Which is why we have a loneliness problem.

WFH may be good for introverts with good social skills. It's awful for shy extraverts (which is a less-than-ideal combination to begin with).

> for whatever reasons

If you can't speak to people unless they're forced to, that doesn't mean that you need to make it so that everyone else is forced to because otherwise you're uncomfortable.

You must have misread my post.I wrote "many people", not "me".

Maybe you should get friends outside your work?

And depressed people should stop being so unhappy?

For me, either I can go to the office 90% of the time or I can burn out from being alone at home and only talking to people via chat/video. My personal live is qualitatively better when I go to work most of the time. There are tradeoffs but on the whole the benefits of WFH (less interruptions) don't make up for the isolation.

In the same way working 60-80hrs a week will start being more productive at the start but eventually burn most people out, at least for me and people like me, not hanging out with others will do the same thing.

It's a balance for me. Too little direct interaction, short breaks, sharing lunches, having non-work related conversations, will end up decreasing my over all productivity.

You're welcome to WFH but I personally hope you're in the minority because if no one but me goes to the office then it's just as bad as WFH for me.

I'm in exactly the same position. My worry is, even if there's this move to both WFH and office, at some point 'office' is going to become an expense and be cut and then there's no choice. I am too cynical to believe that companies want to push WFH for good and nice warm fuzzy reasons.

Also I feel for the people who's work was supporting workers in, y'know, work. I no longer live there, but even a crappy day in London for me was brightened by the countless interactions with people, the guy in the magazine shop, a new hipster pop up cafe, the street vendors selling exciting new food. Will they work from home?

I’m not suggesting WFH is right for everyone; I think you should have the right to work the way you need to, as you know yourself and your work best. I personally feel you have nothing to fear in terms of numbers, because there’s an enormous bias towards IRL work for both strong and weak reasons.

I think one of the major challenges for an organisation is how to get peak performance from a diverse team (in terms of life circumstances and personality) and still maintain one culture and a ‘team mind’ where everyone is safe and content with their work.

I’m not a WFH evangelist really: remote is just another modality, with its own costs and benefits. It just doesn’t seem to get a fair hearing in a lot of places.

>>>When will introverts realise that their working conditions are being dictated to them by extroverts?

This is my exact complaint, even in the Marine Corps. All of our senior leadership are charismatic extroverts. They are trying to adapt "distributed command & control" because they recognize that large management nodes are easy to spot and kill. But they still insist on all forms of concentrated workspaces, in-person meetings, video teleconferences, etc... We have the technology, but it will never be fully embraced because it is fundamentally anathema to the character of our decision-makers.

For most people home office makes sense for practical reasons - long commute, spending more time with the family, living in a nicer / cheaper location but having a well paying job. On the other hand, extreme introverts that don't tolerate working in an office are a tiny minority and should dictate the working conditions even less than the extroverts.

Personally I tend toward introvert (it's not black and white) and have experience with working from home before the pandemic. For someone who's starting working from home it's easy to fall into a pattern of self-isolation which will have a negative psychological effect on them. I'm convinced that most people need at least a couple of days per week of social office time for their own sanity.

All these issues around “I like it my way and everyone should do it that way” issues have a very simple solution: let the adult people you hired decide for themselves! Make presence in the office entirely optional and see what happens. Those who can’t live without being in the office can come in every single day, those that hate it can never come, and those who want 1/2/3/4 days a week can also do it.

I agree it's true for "some" people. Not for "most"

"spending time with family" - no, I'm single and alone and so are most of my co-workers

"living in a nicer / cheaper location" - no, my office is nicer than my home and same for most of my co-workers.

Your situation and needs are different than mine apparently.

Is long commute something that's normal for "most people"? Most people around here have commutes shorter than 30 minutes one way.

Commute length and comfort is often inversely proportional to income.

Sometimes you end up in a job with no good transit routes from where you can afford to live, so you have to drive hours a day. Search the web for stories about "supercommuters".

Compared to any of that, a 30 min bike ride is downright lovely.

This is the thing, right. The problem isn't remote or office per se, it's the commute to and from the office that's the issue. I can definitely focus more at home, but I really miss my 30 minute bike commute.

>I really miss my 30 minute bike commute.

I've seen this argument before, and I don't understand how working from home changes this honestly.

Why not just start your day with a bike ride for leisure? Unbound by the location of your office you can now cycle to any arbitrary location. If you struggle to do it without a reason, perhaps cycle to a bakery or store and pickup some fresh food for the day.

> Why not just start your day with a bike ride for leisure? Unbound by the location of your office you can now cycle to any arbitrary location. If you struggle to do it without a reason, perhaps cycle to a bakery or store and pickup some fresh food for the day.

For me, it's a motivation issue. I had to go to work and had to cycle/walk there. Now, going out in the morning is optional. If I stayed up too late or if the weather is bad (it's almost always bad in Scotland) I'll make an excuse and not go out. After doing it a few times, I broke my morning habit and it's extremely difficult to force myself to go out.

I know it doesn't really make sense but that just adds to frustration. I hate that I cannot force myself to do daily exercise and it makes me feel like shit, creating a sort of feedback loop. I don't go out and do exercise because I feel like shit and I feel more shit because I don't exercise.

Once the pandemic is over and if still WFH, get a spot at a coworking space. This is what I been doing for years.

Alternatively find a coffee shop, ride there for your morning fix of caffeine.

It's much easier to do something when you have no choice but to do it. If you have to commute to office, you have to do it, period. If you want to do "virtual commute time" when working from home, you have to somehow justify it to yourself (and your spouse), against the ongoing pressure of thoughts and words like, "I can skip my 'commute' this time to do just this one errand / complete this one task / read this HN article...".

If it's not a necessity, it's hard for people to maintain habits, particularly physical ones. The reality is many people are just not very disciplined if there's not an outside factor forcing them into it.

There are many comments here about missing their commutes as they could meditate/reflect on things, etc. One can quite easily do this with meditation or walking/running/biking for ~30 mins. However it takes discipline to carve out that 30 mins and leave it specifically for meditation or whatever.

> I'm convinced that most people need at least a couple of days per week of social office time for their own sanity.

"A couple" can mean anything from two to full week. I can assure you that at least for some people one day is enough.

Very well said. I am actually more productive working from home. I think asking everyone to work at the office again is just a decision by extrovert people managers.

In my remote office (which used to be at home, but is now a private, non-shared rented space), I have an ergonomic split keyboard that costs probably 6x a 'standard' one , I have 78" of screen real estate, split across 3 monitors, I have an Aeron chair (used, but worth every penny), my internet connection is completely dedicated to me and is business-class cable with LTE failover.

Typically, as a contract consultant, working onsite would have me provided a 13" cheap crap-top (my personal laptop has 32gb of RAM and 2tb of SSD in a RAID config), and then stick me in the worst "half-cubicle/half-storage/supply closet" that none of their employees would ever sit in.

Even then, there would be a non-stop stream of people dropping by, and/or "shoulder-taps".

And I am a weird introvert/extrovert - so I love in-person meetings, whiteboarding and training/speaking sessions. But I also love the quiet, uninterrupted time in a decent work environment to actually... "get stuff done".

I had hoped Covid would normalize at least partial WFH. I'm somewhere in the middle on this scale, but the reason to WFH is that it gives me some flexibility around chores and appointments outside of work, and saves me a commute. I hope we'll get to keep that freedom at least. 2/3 days at the office and 2/3 days at home would be great for me.

Our political conditions are also driven by extroverts. Our promotions are also driven by extroverts. Our insurance for the house, and the value we add as programmers, extroverts organize the world and take their share. I consider being extrovert as a quality for many things, and one has to learn to be versatile, even if I don’t like it personally.

I'm an introvert as well but even I recognize the effectiveness of face-to-face interactions and the necessity of creating team cohesion and esprit-de-corps. That is simply not happening in total WFH despite the best efforts of both managers and individuals. There was a recent posting on HN (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/30/microsoft-message-to-manager...) where Microsoft reports significant drops in team connectedness as the pandemic continued.

As for "The pandemic-driven remote working is hell for some people, and unfortunately they call the shots.", one might want to ponder _why_ the extroverts got into a position where they're calling the shots. Mastering the art of human interaction is important, even for introverts.

I agree but I think this is more than an introverts vs extroverts issue. Managers need an office to manage. They also want a large private office for themselves. They don’t want to be a “manager” in a Zoom window. They want all the people they manage around them. This is the career they’re trained to do and worked hard for. Not the Zoom thing.

This is way more nuanced than introverts-extroverts. I'm not a massively social person and I prefer working in an office over working from home by a very large margin.

My wife is exactly the same, while I'm fine with either (prefer meetings in-office but have been working 100% from home over a year now; though I personally haven't "made friends" from my work/office since I hit management, so an office setting doesn't provide that incentive to me).

> When will introverts realise that their working conditions are being dictated to them by extroverts?

While extroverts are overrepresented in management, I think a bigger issue is that people who overvalue physical proximity as a tool for establishing/maintaining control (both of formal subordinates and otherwise) are overrepresented in management. You don’t have to be an extrovert to be cargo culting Management By Walking Around (if you aren’t cargo-culting, you can probably adapt it to a remote environment) or to have developed and lean heavily on communication techniques (non-verbal, especially) that work better for dominating meetings in=person.

Honestly, I think introverts who have spent time crafting a particular set of tools for surviving as managers are at least as dangerous here here as extroverts.

It's broader than that. Their whole life is being dictated by extroverts (teaming up with other extraverts, something introverts cannot do). And that's why one should strive to shift as much into extroverted state as possible and defend their opinion and find allies.

The problem is the working environment in general, doesn't matter if it's at home or in an office, if the surrounding environment is full of distractions then productivity will be as bad everywhere.

For a knowledge worker where they need to concentrate there needs to be a quiet distraction free environment without interruptions. If this is at home in a separate low-traffic room or in an office with few people and a door that can be closed , both will work well. However I don't think many people's environments are like that in either place.

So to me there's no difference between working at home or the office, if you're going to have people interrupting you, high levels of background noise, and other visual/scheduling distractions.

“Well Google use primary colours in their logo, Brian”

LOL, thanks for the laugh! :-)

> When will introverts realise that their working conditions are being dictated to them by extroverts.

Majority rule :-)

Hardly. Extroverts just have an easier time getting heard.

In these circles, yeah, maaaaaybe introverts are the majority.

For the general population? No way. Most studies put the number of introverts somewhere between 20-40%.

Extroverts are loud and they are the majority, too.

As someone on this forum put it, the only evolutionary advantage to being an introvert is that you're insurance in case all the bunched up introverts die in a natural disaster, while you're away sitting alone in your far away corner.

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