Would you prefer working from home after the pandemic?
letsworkfromhome.herokuapp.com
letsworkfromhome.herokuapp.com
Even with my short commute: I have a huge desk, I can take power naps, my girlfriend cooks for me and brings me food during meetings, I can take a shower after scrum, and my productivity may actually be higher.
Also I can work from an armchair instead of an office chair.
I do move around the house, but for at least some of us, our backs thank us if we do a lot of our sitting in a good office chair.
Take a dance class. Become a volunteer firefighter. Deliver meals to the elderly. Join a choir. Play darts down the pub. Join an ultimate frisbee team.
Lots of people like offices for the social connection. That’s cool, but if you can’t get that social connection outside an office it’s a problem you should do some work on.
If your entire social world would be brought undone by losing a job, that’s a problem.
employer rents a desk/office in a larger facility (or multiple) and allows office working staff to travel less.
like a gym membership. sign up to one, use any of the same companies gyms. but with a desk or office, you can book ahead.
no central office with people commuting 40+ mins each way, less need for public transport, could also lower cost of renting an entire building/parking/insurance etc
I can work from home for the most part but would be nice to be able to take 10-15 minutes to walk or ride to an office and use the resources of an office. and play table tennis
I totally okay with traveling even longer distances for occasional meetings if I can otherwise be flexible and choose on my own. I hate the "being forced to come to the office" aspect.
For me there is a high chance that I might switch companies after the pandemic to retain the gained freedom I now have. Albeit "gained freedom" might be a bit much. Since I currently have to assume that it's "back to the office" again after the pandemic, I'm not yet as free as I could be with a true remote job.
Needs a 3rd option on that poll.
Some employers are desperate to prevent their employees from seeing this by making sure they go back into the office as quickly as possible, but the secret is out in my opinion.
My family is scattered around the country. And I'm at a a time when I want to spend more time with my parents.
My perspective is many of my older (and more financially established) peers have spare bedrooms converted to offices, which I imagine makes long term WFH more digestible.
I wonder if WFH/office skews around age, or other criterion. If so, what are the long term social implications of a dual WFH/Office option.
I'm barely 30 and a homeowner, and loved working from home. I didn't have to waste hours on a stressful commute. I have a comfy gaming chair, expansive multi-monitor setup, wraparound desk, and silent but fast desktop instead of an aging laptop and 3x5' desk, the kitchen is tons nicer than the break roome, I enjoyed quiet walks in the woods or throwing the frisbee for my dog during breaks...it did suck hearing my 3yo through the door beg me to come out and take one of those breaks with him, but at least I got to do so and have lunch with him, and he figured it out pretty quickly. And no inane interruptions from coworkers when I was deep in a technical problem!
I think the main long-term social implications are a move back out of the city towards more rural or maybe suburban living. Quarantine would have been hell in a crowded downtown apartment with roommates you barely like well enough to share a bathroom with, on my acreage and in my old house with a mortgage that's cheaper than downtown rent it was not just digestible but magnificent, I would quarantine again in a heartbeat.
For example, if we're thinking about age, what does a team look like after a year when only the junior level staff have been coming in to the office? It seems like that could have significant effects on team-building, and leadership relationships.
(I'm admittedly biased towards in office work. I personally feel both more productive, and happier when I have segmented spaces for work and home life.)
But even though I'm just 30 minutes from an office, I didn't even have a desk there any longer even pre-pandemic. The teams I work on are highly distributed anyway. No reason for me to drive 30 minutes into an office.
Fly to a location for a long weekend with activities some team building, get a big hotel block.
That would cost less than a seat in many of these nyc offices.
I do agree with the basic point. The team I work with is scattered across about 10 timezones. On a given day I'm probably talking with some combination of remote people and people normally in about 5 different offices. As someone who has been remote, the main pain point over the past year has been the lack of my usual travel to many events as well as team off-sites (which usually aren't primarily fun and games but do involve socializing). I normally travel about 1/3 of the year.
I do understand there are folks who live in a shoe box apartment, have no family or responsibilities, lonely, have little else going on in their lives and basically "The Office" is the only thing they got. These people should be allowed to return but lets not drag the rest of us in with you.
1) The list of companies is pretty odd. It has Apple but no Facebook, Google, Netflix, etc. Is there actually a large population of HN that works at e.g. all these financial institutions, oil companies, and places like Walmart/IKEA?
2) I think the votes would be a lot more valuable if they were broken up by job role. IME devs I talk to seem split somewhere 40/60-60/40 on whether they want to return to an office (to some extent) soon, but other roles (specifically managers and admin) overwhelmingly want to go back (again, IME). Grouping everyone across all roles might be too broad of a scope to have a meaningful poll result.
Most people like being social, hate Zoom meetings, don’t have a private office at home. Many use the workplace as a place to go to get away from an undesirable living situation (small apartment) or in the case of schooling: a lot of students rely on schools for basic social services. Not everything can be replicated via a computer screen, nor should it.
Working from home is great for employees. It seems likely that a solid majority of employees prefer WFH. But this is in the same vein as most employees would prefer to be paid without working anywhere full stop.
Employees are paid, in a large part, to do what their employers think is profitable. If there is a disagreement, the employee's opinion isn't really the guiding star. The question on WFH/Work from Work isn't what the employees prefer, it is almost strictly going to be about what employers think is more valuable.
>most employees would prefer to be paid without working anywhere full stop.
This is true but we should ask why?
> If there is a disagreement, the employees opinion isn't really the guiding star.
This second point is deeply related to the first. If employees actually owned part of the business like the owners, or to put it another way, there is no employee/employer separation, then it's clear they would want to work since they A) own part of the business and B) have say over the business.
There is the concept of Democracy at Work by Richard Wolf as a solution to the two problems you mentioned.
As an aside, as someone who owns part of a business, I can say that I also prefer work-from-home.
Just label the employee "contractor" and the employer "client", and you end up with the exact same picture: the contractor would like to be paid by the client without doing any work. The client would like to pay nothing while having all the work done. They meet in the middle somewhere.
For subsistence farmers, that might look differently, but mostly it's just an internalized split between wanting the fruits and not wanting the labor.
Sounds like we’d need even splits?
Depends on the size of the company.
> This is true but we should ask why?
Huh? The entire concept of working is that you do something you don't want to do in order to get something you do want to have.
It makes no sense to ask "why would you prefer to get the good things without having to do the bad things?"
To me it seems like this will result in these places becoming worse and worse until they collapse under their own weight.
Corporations may be legal 'person', but they don't have individual thoughts
I do miss in-the-office work, but given the trade-offs involved I'm okay being remote. No commute is great.
The hard part with COVID isn't the remoteness, but the lack of other stuff. I'm used to doing my 9-5... and then GTFO of the house and hit a bar / gym / event / quilting circle / whatever.
Those "3rd spaces" will return after COVID, and remote will be okay then as well.
There are plenty of companies looking for remote employees, more than before nowadays. Worst case scenario I'd sacrifice part of my salary if necessary, but in no way I'd go back to commuting every day and deal with all the bullshit of open plan offices.
I remember times back at the office where I was so sleepy I was just waiting for the day to end so I could go home and take a nap. Then I'd finish my work sometime in the evening.
It's easy for CEOs to want to go back to the office because they don't have to be there and usually aren't.
I created this website because I wanted an option poll showing that majority of people are actually interested in continuing to work from home. Maybe I am wrong. I don't know.
A remote-only job can become very isolating. On the other hand, mandatory office presence is forced socialization. Most of the times humans accept it as a cost of living but there are many cases where it creates unneeded stress and reduces productivity.
If one is unsociable and surrounded by sociable people this can be perceived as pressure, under threat of becoming an outcast, tensions build on either side, resulting in burnout.
If one is sociable and surrounded by unsociable people (my case at my last job) it becomes very draining to have to spend 8h a day with people who do not reciprocate the energy, frustrations build on either side also resulting in burnout.
If ones sociability is incompatible with others in terms of language/views/manners/etc., then the group splits into subgroups, each subgroup gossiping about the others.
If the group is all around compatible (my second to last job), there are some options:
It either becomes a very fun place to work at where each members frustrations are being dampened by the enthusiasm of colleagues, and tensions between members are being dampened by the other members. The social agreement that rules the place is like "we are all in this together".
Or it becomes a very peaceful, efficient but cold place where work is leanly getting done ruled by an implicit agreement like an armistice, "I won't bother or disturb you and you won't bother or disturb me".
Allowing unrestricted work from home means an acknowledgement that work and socialization are separate and each employee has freedom of association. If a group clicks together, great, they can be like the legendary dream team of VmWare. If they don't, then it's just a professional relationship, and it's best to keep it that way and for digitalized professions, there is no need for this to include physical proximity.
This is not a rant against offices. Separating work and leisure space is very important. It is a rant against centralised offices. People who are sociable and get along are better served by a shared working space like a company office, a nearby coworking space, rotating work parties or some other form of shared space. People who treat the job as just a means to an end for a salary and as soon as the shift ends there is nothing they would rather do than go home are better served by rented work pods/cubicles at neighbourhood office buildings.
What makes a team efficient is compatibility, not a certain style of office. The default should be being professional and remote work is perfect for that. It's easier to be professional online. If there is room for socializing, great, but forcing this is counterproductive as a business. Some people only want a quiet cubicle. Great, for those people you save money on teambuildings and events and other stuff. Some people want an open-space office and plants and nerf-guns and group playlists and negociating complomises and team events. Great, with these people you save on floorspace and soundproofing. Just don't force them to mix.