Employees are quitting instead of giving up working from home
bloomberg.com
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I can wake up later since I don't have a commute. I don't lose two hours a day due to the commute.
I can wear as comfortable clothing as I desire. I can delay my shower until after my daily workout (Which I can do since my workout equipment is at home).
I can control my environment so there are as many or as few distractions as i like. I can put on videos or audio that might not be considered work appropriate. I can use speakers since no one is around me to hear the sound.
The number and magnitude of inconveniences we subject ourselves to by heading to an office every day has been fully revealed. I will do all I can to work from home for the rest of my life.
I still 'work remote', as a freelancer. I have had engagements where I go to a client's offices, sometimes for somewhat extended periods of time. I will travel if needed.
But the majority of work I do is still done on terms I have some control over, which, ultimately, I think is the key part of the whole discussion. Where I work, what equipment, what hours, when/where I travel, what I wear, etc - things you were mentioning above - having control over those is key, regardless of whether you want to work from home or in an office or somewhere in between.
I recall once interviewing at a startup. Their office was in a co-working space. When I arrived in the morning I knew after 5 minutes that I'm not going to work there. The entire team of 4 people, including the CTO who was supposed to be my manager, were sitting together in a tiny room with zero privacy.
I also wonder how the end of pandemic norms will effect people who claim they want to be in the office. If they can get their socialization outside the office, we could see a resurgence of neighborhood clubs.
It's not 100% the same thing as 100% total privacy, but it's generally not very noisy, and there's enough quiet to concentrate and focus when needed. There are some larger spaces in the area I've been to that are nice looking, and conducive to group work/meetings/collaboration, but don't work well for "I need solo time to think/work".
I felt it myself at first. I had to do something to break up the day into work and not work. At first I'd pretty much just walk to the bus stop and go home from there. Basically pretend I took the bus. After a month or two I think I stopped. The walk was the new commute. The ritual part just became moving all cables back to my own computer from the work laptop dock. A quick minute and it's over. Work has ended and all is well.
The reality is that working from home means I end up spending almost all my time at home. Almost all 24 hours of it. I think about how quickly life goes by, how much I've already spent behind a computer, and realize that's not going to work for me long term. I will be very disappointed if I look back on my life and saw that it almost entirely occurred behind a computer in the one spot.
It was fine the first 6 months of working from home but I feel increasingly professionally isolated, not knowing what is going on, even though I spend half of my day talking to people on a headset.
This is another positive.
> So any gossip or informal catch up, or sharing real “corporate incorrect” opinion is out of the door (if you work for any large organisation).
I'm not sure what "corporate incorrect" means here, but gossip is generally a net negative in the workplace that tends to build cliques and factions that often manifest in a bigger problem.
Assuredly there are other non-company channels to do those things, but the question is ... why?
How do you arrange something like that behind your boss's back if you can only communicate with your colleagues via corporate-approved communication channels?
I use my work communications devices to communicate with colleagues when communicating in a work context.
I suppose some people may have employers that prohibit them from having personal communication devices in their place of residence, but that's going to be a very different high-security type environment anyway.
I don't have a problem with asking a colleague to give me their personal cell number on a work communications channel. I don't think I'd want to work in a place where doing so was prohibited.
It's dangerous for practical purposes, because that law is not well enforced.
Believing second-hand rumours on the internet would be less intellectually honest than believing my anecdotal evidence.
Right?! They suck for everyone else, but as far as looking out for their members' interests, they're pretty much the gold standard.
Wild.
As a non-American non-employer, my current job is unionized, and I believe that union to be a major factor in the rampant dysfunction, though probably not the driving factor.
I think that every time I've had a friend or family member working in a union environment that wasn't more-or-less minimum wage (e.g. unionized Starbucks workers are a counter-example to the pattern I'm describing) they've had similar observations.
I'm still very hesitant to attack unions in general, because as a student of history it's pretty clear that the situation we have now is better than the situation without unions. So I'd rather live in a unionized society than a non-unionized society, but I'd rather work for a non-unionized employer than a unionized employer.
Well, that's what I would expect to see in US too, but it's a survivorship bias at work. Obviously, in country which is (quite commendably, in my opinion) anti-union, only capable unions would be able to survive.
> that's an inversion of the power dynamics a union is meant to promote
Power dynamics that you are talking about are pieces of fiction, which oversimplify reality in order to boost one or another political viewpoint. It's a very popular piece of fiction, too: paint one side as "the ordinary people", the underdog, morally superior, and thus taken advantage of. And the other side is, obviously, the devil.
Anyone sees these stories quite for what they are when it's the story from the other side of political spectrum. For example, if anyone would come here to HN and tell the story of immigrants taking "our jobs", it would be dead in 5 minutes, and all the logical inconsistencies and fallacies in it would be split open. And, just to be clear about my personal political opinions — this takedown would be completely correct.
But it works for both sides. "The people" are often not much of an underdog, as are "the workers". I know quite a lot of real businesses, even in IT, where "the man", the business owner, takes home less money than he pays his senior engineers. The situation with police unions just highlights this disparity between the story in a way that you can't just sweep under the rug — but it's always there, even if less apparent.
? That's not what I mean at all. Think of Uber; the drivers don't have much control over when they work, if they want to afford to live in a building. The people in charge of Uber, however, do have control over when the drivers work.
In a school, the teachers have more power than the children – but oftentimes when that power is exercised, it's in dealing with bullying or classroom disruption.
Acknowledging that some people have more power than others is not the same thing as declaring the powerful evil.
> "The people" are often not much of an underdog, as are "the workers".
But in this particular instance, they are.
I'm a Betriebsrat, a Germany-specific "workers council", member at my employer. By law, the company is mandated to provide us with the resources we need (e.g. access to company wide email distribution lists, a private MS Teams channel, private folders on the file servers, a locked office for personal meetings of the council and with staff members) and is prohibited from interfering with all our duties. Any form of censorship or surveillance would be a big no-no which could even land our execs behind bars.
It isn’t useful at lower levels. It’s pretty much the definition of senior management. I wouldn’t have wanted to discuss replacing a senior person, whom I found to be ineffective, on corporate Zoom, for example. That said, temporary hierarchical rigidity and some people explicitly opting out of the promotion race isn’t a bad thing.
Not having to have "how are the kids?" conversations and instead being able to play a video game or watch a TV show during some down time is worth every bit of company gossip I'm missing.
That's a small price I'm willing to pay.
> So any gossip or informal catch up, or sharing real “corporate incorrect” opinion is out of the door (if you work for any large organisation).
Just speaking personally, any company I've worked at where gossip/whispering/staff looking over their shoulders and feel the need complain/etc. were important factors was not an environment I wanted to be a part of anyway.
Also, a lot of people at my work are on Discord. I wouldn't be surprised if that were the common channel for semi-private employee chats.
not sure how "corporate incorrect" you are intending, but I feel pretty open to discuss things I'm dissatisfied with with my team. I suppose if push came to shove, I would be fine with that being public record.
I doubt all of our Google Meets are recorded. And even if they were, who'd bother listening through all of them for wrongthink?
In a normal job that's 25% of your time that's flatly uncompensated, who would opt for that.
My company wants to go 2 days home and 3 days office. I've said I'd do it the other way around.
I do miss my colleagues as well, but two days a week should be enough to garner most weekly advantages of being in the same place.
And it's not just convenience, either. 2 days in office would open up immense possibilities for me regarding housing, I can live in a cheaper home outside the big city and still commute less than 10 hours a week.
So downsize. We were doing partial WFH before the pandemic because our office had more people than seats (open office seating); everyone picked different days they preferred for home and office, and the office ended up mostly full most days.
Mine is pushing some similar nonsense. I don't think anyone thought about it too hard:
1. I still have to live within a reasonable driving distance of the main office.
2. I still have to maintain a home office, sacrificing valuable square footage without being reimbursed for its use.
3. I still have to furnish this home office, without being reimbursed for anything except computer accessories.
2. This is true, although you get 'reimbursed' for that by not commuting. And since you don't commute you can live somewhere cheaper, or get a bigger house for the same price.
3. My company paid for all that, so no issue here.
If you live two hours from your office and go in for three days per week, that's 2h per leg * 2 legs per day * 3 days per week = 12 hours per week on the road.
You were spending more than 12 hours per week in traffic?
The average commute in the United States is a little less than 30 minutes [1]. That's 5 hours per week for someone who works five days per week.
1. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-...
I was spending 1,5 hours per day in a train, and walking to the station for 10 minutes or so, yes.
I think they'll pay for a monitor if you're full-time WFH but that requires special permission.
That's exactly the same as me. Company is talking about everyone coming back in for 3/2 starting in mid-September. My response is I'll see you for 2/3. I have a 20 minute commute which isn't too onerous, and I like having some in-office time as I find it valuable.
What will really be the test for me is how I feel after a month or two of the kids being back in school. Right now being home is still fairly social for me. Previous times I've tried to work remotely it was the loneliness of having only myself in the house for days on end that killed it for me.
I'm also a bit of a realist, though. Being remote (or at least 'more remote' than the rest of the team) is a serious career limit, so if everyone else starts spending most of their time in the office, I will probably follow along.
With that standard 8h work 8h personal time 8h sleep. Commute eats up 1/4 of your personal time.
Don't forget that could also be more time with your loved ones, like your partner, your children or even your pets.
That's a big deal for lots of people and very understandable.
edit: It's also more time for _everything else_.
Personally, I really enjoy cooking lunch and sitting on my balcony for half an hour, something I can't do when working from the office.
I've worked from home for a few years now, and before that I would have to take vacation time to go visit them.
Unless you live outside big cities, I'm not sure if 2 hours of commute is that common (at least with my South West European perspective, maybe is different in the US/elsewhere?).
And besides that, laundry is going to have to be done regardless, so its not like they would be saving time by commuting to work instead. The laundry will still be waiting when they get home.
You can do the same way with commuting, enter the bus/subway/train and then do other thing while there, you don't have to wait until you arrive to start doing other things.
> And besides that, laundry is going to have to be done regardless, so its not like they would be saving time by commuting to work instead. The laundry will still be waiting when they get home.
You could have someone else do the laundry for you.
Maybe it was a bad example. I wanted to compare activities that we usually do where you can perform multiple things at the same time. Commuting is generally a passive activity while we wait to arrive to our destination, just like laundry is a passive activity until the machine is done.
In my pre-covid life, I often couldn't even hold a book on the subway as it was too crowded for that. There were times (near daily) I couldn't even reach into my pocket to take my phone out to put on a podcast due to the crush of people (and oh my god the stress when your headphone's cord would get hooked on an exiting passenger).
My commute, while long enough to do something useful, was never useful. Crowded platforms, crowded trains, and transfers down long crowded corridors made it impossible to do anything else. And I'll be damned if I'm going to do more work on the way to and from work!
This works but only in very specific types of commutes. I used to take the train which took 30 minutes each way and I always got a seat, perfect for reading, maybe even light work. Now after almost 2 decades I know that that's the exception and almost always my commute was pretty much wasted (I don't consider listening to music or podcasts productive, it's nice but not productive).
Even listening to an audiobook or podcast is such a passive thing it's hard to call it "doing" something.
If you count weekends, you have 5 * 8 + 2 * 16 = 72 hours of "free time". so 5 hrs commute / 32 hrs = 6.94% or 1/14.4 of your time awake.
Also, I'm not following your calculations. If we establish that your 'free time' is 72 hours per week (8h/weekday and 16h/weekends), and the commute time per week is 10h (2h round trip x 5), it would be 10/72 or roughly 13.9%.
Your top speed is less and your average speed is more. Cars never seem to get past 15mph in that kind of traffic.
Motorcycles are nice too. Good top speed, lane filtering to avoid traffic, plus real brakes, rear-view mirrors etc. Feels a lot safer than my electric skateboard used to.
The pandemic has done some of that figuring out for us.
Yep, that sounds as ridiculous as your statement.
These flats would be considered tiny by American standards and you have a lot less privacy/independence from your neighbours.
What do you do?
Constant talk and interruption are not conducive to the work of a software engineer.
During the times you are coding, yes. But a software engineer is more than a coder, so there are times when collaboration is very useful.
But nothing distinguishes a junior and a senior more than the ability to work independently.
More seriously though, it's part of skilled project management to organize work in such a way that seniors don't need to constantly collaborate to stay in sync.
(Although obviously those statements aren't absolutes, hence the use of the word "often".)
We are talking Months and Months" by stopping other teams going of at a tangent or flat out just not doing what they are told.
The seniors used to be called "architects," and the "driving projects/design" used to be called RUP.
Your seniors should definitely be thought leaders, but when they get "too senior" or "too important" to write code, the company is done innovating. That's a major organizational smell.
And if your code isn't expressive enough that the design can be extracted without major effort, then the two will inevitably diverge at some point. Many bugs will appear.
Big incorrect assumption here, my primary focus is not my work but my hobbies, family and friends. I don't like working in the office mainly because it's social but because we all are more productive. I like to be efficient at my job, even though I don't think it's my primary focus in life.
You can't just write something like that and then accuse someone of a "big incorrect assumption". Work is work, I work to do my job, if you want to go to the office to be with people because otherwise you live alone that's okay, but you can't just turn around an say "I have plenty of friends, it's about being more productive".
I am a father of four (though they're here less now that they're leaving the nest), happily married, active in a committed church community and love outdoor things like water skiing, flying planes, snow skiing, biking, etc. I build things like legos, stand up paddle boards, Ford ranger engines, and the 1000 ft addition we added to our home. I enjoy my work--sometimes I love it even, and other days I'm ready to rage quit, because I'm one of those difficult to manage dramatic people--it is hardly my whole life though.
I have spent nearly 10 years (2 different gigs) of my 30 working years working from a home office. In both instances, it was awesome at first, and then I came to hate it. I totally concur with the GP. I'm just not as productive at home. I know that most of us in all 3 teams where we've done some remote work are generally more productive when gathered. No amount of technology solutions has improved that.
My suspicion is that there are other factors at play here. In my case, I've worked in companies where the software development components of the company are relatively small (anywhere from 2 up to at most 18 people). My commutes have all been (relatively) short (15 minutes or less). I've always had flexible schedule available to me--come go when you need, get the work done. And at times, I do actually choose to sequester myself at home to write a mountain of code that just needs a mountain of direct writing.
I'm curious if perhaps it's not so much work at home, as it is some degree of autonomy that needs to be given to people to manage their own work load. That kind of autonomy tends to go down as company size goes up. If corporate overhead burns up a lot of ones time, then it may indeed be that people feel they are getting more creative work down at home.
What I'd like to see is more flexibility, less middle management (because I think this is the real source of most of these issues) and more of the "teach the employees correct principles and allow them to govern themselves" gestalt.
Do you have data to back up your suspicion?
I tend to agree with this, and I've worked remote (hybrid) for over 12 years now. For me, a hybrid is the best. Most tasks and problems can be solved well asynchronously and for those, give me a WFH option. It's great for all the reasons this thread creator mentioned and time cannot be understated. The commute alone typically requires a vehicle and the much of maintenence time I spend in my free time comes from wear and tear of commute driving as do expenses to expedite repairs for necessity of a car for work. This stuff all adds up.
Once every now and then, in person meetings and problem solving synchronously is good where virtual just fails. Usually this involved external clients and so forth or some physical, hardware related aspect of work. Software alone I can typically do fully remote as it's assumed everyone is competent and can easily share needed information and visuals with one another.
>Unless you live outside big cities, I'm not sure if 2 hours of commute is that common (at least with my South West European perspective, maybe is different in the US/elsewhere?).
I lived in rural US and my experience is that commutes tend to be longer, both in distance and time, in rural areas. While traffic related commute times tend to melt away, with less density, people tend to drive further for better employment opportunities. Sometimes this involves living near but not in a large metro area and driving hours daily to pull in high income with low COL at the sacrifice of great commute times. I know a surgeon in Texas who commutes around 4-6 hours each trip (nearly doubles his income), someone near NY/NJ who commutes 6 hours daily to drive in, and people in small areas that would drive 2-hours to a nearby plant that pays more. One of my peers used to work 3 positions and one required driving an hour each way to. One of my older directors actually lived 2 hours away and purchased a condo near his job where he worked and stayed throughout the week then returned home on weekends. I presume his wife who didn't work would sometimes stay at his condo but never felt comfortable breaching that discussion.
For them, the time they lose can't be spent working elsewhere and average out to the same higher rates and they're willing to sacrifice that time to pull more in and provide for their families. This is ultimately because good paying opportunities are often few and far between in low COL areas and highly competitive as well. For me, living in a metro area makes more sense these days. You pay more for property but recover that in terms of commute time and TC. You also have more security depending on the area by there being more opportunities to transfer to should you want/need, without changing commute times too drastically. If you live in a rural area and the diamond in the rough position you found disappears, you have to consider significant lifestyle changes for you and your family or even consider uprooting and moving. There are trade-offs either way you go.
And/or (like me) you like work being somewhere different to home, and don't have room for a dedicated home office. In fact even if I have the room I'd prefer for work to not be in the house. Being able to work from home is useful to me on occasion, for both work and personal reasons, but I did not like it nor feel myself to be productive when I was there all the time. If I had no choice but to work remotely I'd probably rent an office space and have to factor that into my costs and benefits analysis of the job.
Then again I currently work a 15 minute slow-ish walk from home (or less than a 10 minute run back) if I take the most direct route, and can get home to entertain the cat at lunch many days, so the commute isn't a significant factor like it will be for many.
I've found it the complete opposite in software. Zoom screen sharing is so much easier than peering over someone's shoulder at their dark-mode IDE. Copy-and-pasting a command in the chat window - what an improvement! How many times have I said this to someone?
> "s c p space s v 0 1 colon forward-slash t m p"
Ug.
Design meetings are so much easier when I can see the UI on my screen, instead of halfway across the conference room.
We also do a lot of work with a team at another location and again - when we are all on zoom together now we can all see each other, we can all interreact when each other. It used to be 6 of us on one conference room and six of them in another conference room trying to talk to each other over a tinny speaker.
I hope I never have to go through any of that ever again.
It would be harder in the office - too many people talking over each other in separate meetings. I can't imagine. So we all end up fighting for few conference rooms, or we squeeze once again into each others cubicles, losing the advantage of multiple screens and trying not to talk to loud and disturbing everyone around us.
I've spend decades developing in offices with other engineers, collaboration is always difficult when what you are collaborating on is always tiny text on a small screen. Zoom is better.
I find Zoom in particular to be a crude place to get this type of work done. Why do I have to send a huge video stream that roasts my laptop just to share a few kilobytes of text? I can’t scroll around or select text to point something out.
If the streamer’s text is too small, I’m shit out of luck there too.
Visual Studio Code has great collaborative coding tools that I have found work really well in a local network setting sitting near coworkers. Zoom is a total cudgel in comparison for this task.
Like, a couple weeks ago I had to waste half my day to go into the office and sit in a 3 hour meeting. I got some useful information out of that, but there was SO. MUCH. OVERHEAD. I could've watched the webex from home and saved so much time because the relevant parts were 2 10 minute sections spaced out by like 2 hours.
Plus I hate sitting close to people who had onions for lunch. And alcohol. And it's always that dude you've gotta pair program with that smells like a gorilla and has bad breath. xD
I live alone too and I hate for me when people at the office became an erzats social circle. It is not. It is not a social circle but a workgroup you have little control over; you might end up with really difficult people, great teammates you love might leave, project might get cancelled and that group might get disbanded altogether.
Even if you had the best workgroup, most of the time those people will not be in your life for long or deep. They won't help you move, drive you to and from an outpatient procedure, won't play with your kids or even be by your deathbed. And you do need people who would do those things in your life. For this reason, I liked the social lack WFH created because it was closer to the state of reality, and forced me to invest in my real, non-workplace relationships.
To be clear, I am not saying you can't make lifelong friends in a workplace, I am saying you shouldn't satisfice your social needs with a workplace. Just like hunger is a signal to point you towards nutrition, loneliness is a signal to point you towards nourishing allies. And workplaces are not places to procure that.
Any deep social needs are satisfied by my long time close friends who I see every few months or my partner if I'm dating.
I don't think you can make that call what someone should and shouldn't do to satisfy their social needs because everyone has very widely ranging needs in the first place.
I feel perfectly topped off just by being in the room at a coffee shop with people for a few hours for instance.
That is why I said satisfice.
Good on you that you know exactly what you need. I thought I did too, and it took a burnout and extended time off work to realize how I was mostly deceiving myself. Most people are not that transparent to themselves, that is why they have to be careful with the stimuli that seem to fulfill a need in the short term but create serious deficiencies in the long run.
A bag of potato chips will curb your hunger but you'd be severely malnourished if it was the only thing you ate for a year. Cocaine, amphetamines even caffeine will give you an elevated sense of agency but you'll quickly spiral down to addiction with little corresponding real-world, long-term gains. A workplace, a coffee shop or even binging netflix alone might create a sense of a peopled life, but none will be real allies that can have your back in a time of need.
Thanks to the incredibly bad city planning (which is common all across North America) and complete joke of local transit options (also common in NA), you regularly see folks with 45 minute to 2 hour commutes one way.
Folks are losing as much as 4 hours out of their day even though they live in a small city that should be easier to commute but isn’t due to corruption and laziness of the city.
To be clear, we’re not talking Seattle or Portland, we’re talking obscure cities like Ogden, Calgary, Edmonton, etc.
North America is a massive turd compared to practically anything in Europe. Some of your far flung towns have better transit than some of our metropolises.
tldr; it is drastically worse for commutes in any non-major American cities. You have no idea how good you have it in Europe.
Let's look at a 1-hour round trip commute assuming 240 working days per year. This means 240 hours gone in a year to your commute. That's 10 full whole days. A 2-hour round trip commute means 20 full whole days... almost a whole month gone. 3-hour round trip commute = 30 full days.. and so on.
This obviously depends on your city / county / state having good public transport infrastructure but if the option is there and its practical then I'd take the train over driving to work any day of the week.
People on HN often love to get on their high horse about parenting responsibilities but the fact remains that even the best parents need some "me" time occasionally. We do our best parenting when we're not mentally and physically exhausted. Much like a good company shouldn't allow their employees to burn out -- a good family shouldn't let either.
So my point about the commute was about how that time can be optimised for relaxation so you can better serve your family once you are home.
We are not talking about beer with friends once in a while either. We are talking about regular very time consuming activity.
It sounds like you've only worked in organisations that force a really shitty work/life balance on their staff but I assure you that you can have your proverbial cake and eat it. Maybe it's a US vs Europe culture but here companies are generally (not always, there's a fair share of shitty companies here too) accepting of employees working from home when they need it. I've never once had a job that hasn't allowed me to work flexible hours to accommodate school runs and other family commitments, nor take time away when my child is ill.
In fact because my wife is a school teacher (and thus has less flexibility in her job), she is the one who depends on me most of the time. The commute was the one little block of the day (and it wasn't every day) when I wasn't running around for a wife and two small children.
So you can absolutely have a commute and still be dedicated to your family. You just can't work for c*nts who thinks a working relationship should be one way.
This isn't a theoretical argument either: I spend more time with the kids and help out with more duties since taking up a job with a 3 hour round trip of a commute than I did when I had a previous job in the same town.
The distance will obviously have an impact on your day, but what matters far more is the employer. Plenty of employers enforce an unhealthy culture of > 40hr weeks. Whereas my current employer is very family focused and offers a lot of incentives to enable parents to balance work and home life.
I suggest people open their minds a little. IT is a broad industry and there are plenty of good jobs around doing interesting things that pay well and also offer a good work life balance. Again, I know this from first hand experience :)
My solution was to figure out how to afford to live in the city. I am privileged in that sense, however.
And in case you think Canada is wildly different than the US, not only is it not, but it's actually even better: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/190225/dq190...
"3 hours is the norm" is just not true for any area of the US or Canada.
But if you live in a HCOL area, and you want a yard, you're pretty much locked in to hour+ one-way commutes.
One of which was that my 6 mile commute in Austin took between 45 minutes to an hour.
At some point, I'm going to want to buy a house (so money now can be saved), the total cost of which is >$1M in not just the Bay Area (which I've now left, for these very reasons); even where I am now, housing remains that pricy … unless you give up having a sub 2h commute.
> A 2-hour round trip commute is insane.
My employer doesn't believe that. If they did, they would pay me sufficiently that I wouldn't need to choose. The Bay Area doesn't believe that: if they did, they'd address the housing crisis.
There has to be a name for the logical fallacy of treating the market as some kind of oracle, as if it was a global optimizer, instead of a greedy optimizer that will happily ignore the costs it can externalize.
"The Bay Area" doesn't "believe" the housing crisis needs to be addressed because for most interested actors, it's in their personal interest to further the crisis. You paid a lot for your house, and you want it to appreciate in value. You paid a lot for your house, because others who bought before you wanted theirs to appreciate in value. Someone else will pay a lot for their house, because you want yours to appreciate in value.
Pollution is the clear example. Unless forced externally, producers will just ignore negative externalities.
For many people it comes down to whether they can afford to deposit or get the income multiple loan to buy in the city, not monthly expense.
I lived and worked in London (South Kensington/Pimlico at college, Streatham, Walthamstow, Acton Town, Notting Hill - all over, really) for about 16 years. I've been in the Bay Area for ~17 years. There really isn't any comparison. Londoners have it made, even if it doesn't feel it when the train is packed/a few mins late/cancelled.
I see the light-rail here going by on occasion. It's empty. BART is inadequate (there are 270 stations on the tube, there are 50 on BART covering a larger area), and it runs with a 10-20 minute cadence, not the 2-5 minute cadence of the tube. As far as real trains go, Caltrain is pretty good if you're on the track (really, the train itself is nicer than most in the UK) but it's coverage is very limited.
Just like the NHS, you don't know what you have until it's gone.
Basically an hour each way, of which 20m fast walking, if you timed it right. Hit a slow train, try for the 10 bus and miss, get rained on, train late, miss the train, train runs over someone — sometimes it took longer.
I moved up to the city and had about 40 minutes each way by bus, and if you haven’t tried it let me tell you: an hour on Caltrain is much nicer, not to mention safer, than half an hour on a MUNI bus.
On Caltrain I could at least read the news, on the bus it was pretty much watch your back.
I haven’t commuted at all in the last 12 years but I accept that if I ever work onsite in the USA again I probably will need to, and the trick is to try and find a form of commute that isn’t a complete waste of time.
Saving that time does make a huge difference, indeed.
It's exactly my case, actually. My commute was just under an hour each way, walk and train, so I have been saving a lot of time and money since WFH. I go for a walk at lunchtime, though, in order to do some exercise but it's much nicer than walking on busy roads to train stations.
No, I didn't sleep, read, or do anything distracting on my drive because when you're in deer country, dawn and dusk are times to be vigilant and ready to brake or swerve if horribly necessary.
Still had $4100 of damage one January.
Commutes can be anywhere from 0 - ? percent multitaskable.
Most people are experiencing a noisy packed out train car lit by bright fluorescence lamps, full of tired, irritated people, where they could easily be standing for half the trip.
Not exactly the ideal environment to dine or work on your hobbies…
For people who chose to not prioritise living remotely near their workplace.
That's a relatively small slice of workers.
Your most valuable resource, time, which can be neither replenished nor its true quantity known, is being wasted for very little gain.
You'd think working from home would give people more free time, but that's not always the case, for example if you have small children. Don't get me wrong, I love spending time with my family, but the commute was the only "me time" I had in a given day and I miss that dearly.
Now that I've been 100% WFH for 14 months, I've realized how easy it is to just get caught up even deeper in the assumption that "you're home, can you do _?" and wind up devoting more and more time to the house and projects and the pets and realize that the last time I was in a space by myself, at least briefly not 'monitoring' or 'on deck', was how many days/weeks ago?
That time where I'm not on call every second to potentially deal with a pet or household or any other 'now' thing, is way more precious than I realized. I've survived with very little of it this past year.
I say that partially in jest because, of course, no employer is going to increase your salary by $48K simply because you value your commuting time at $100/hr (a reasonable rate if you're in tech). Still, I think it's a useful way to gain a perspective on just how valuable one's time really is to them.
I reckoned that it would be £10k post tax just for the additional cost of commute (65 miles)
Yes, I hate driving. But I'll move closer to the office (which we're relocating to a much further location currently) and I'll get it to <20 minutes each way, which is acceptable.
Just because you can't find arguments for it in your life doesn't mean others can't. I need that environment and if my job went remote-only, I'd quit without any hesitation just as employees are quitting after being asked to return to the office. We shouldn't go from one extreme (everyone has to be in an office) to the other (there is no office at all).
We need to accept hybrid solutions where an office exists and maybe you're expected to be there once every week or two or something. We need to accept that some people work better remote and others work better in an office. We're trying to build the most efficient working environment for the team in general, not just one or two people one way or the other.
Unless you're in an industry that requires actual physical presence I don't think you're going to see the same office experience any more. Companies aren't going to keep an office big enough for 100% attendance when there's only a need for a smallish fraction of that.
I'd start looking for other ways to scratch that socialization itch.
Also, having a social aspect outside of work makes job changes way less scary and stressful.
I do like the social interaction and joking, or venting, with co-workers, even as an introvert.
The best approach is a hybrid model.
I often -often, not "sometimes"- get more done by 8AM, than I used to get done in over half a day (or even the entire day) at the office.
WFH won't work for everyone. It takes real self-discipline, and not everyone considers home to be a suitable place for work.
Even in these cases, I think we'll be seeing alternatives, like small "work hubs," ala WeWork, that are close to people's homes, and allow them to have a lot more autonomy than the main office.
But now everyone else I deal with is WFH too and... It turns out they don't appear to be benefiting in the same way and performance has probably dropped on average.
Give it a couple of years and most people will be back in the office as before, I expect.
My hope is two days in the office for meeting days or interviews, rest engineering time at home.
That said, I miss going out to lunch, accidentally meeting people from other teams, reading on the train, meeting friends in the city right after work, and just being around people in general.
I wish I could get an in office part time job that paid benefits, but I don't think those exist.
Not an uncommonly long commute, perhaps, but only because—particularly in the US—we’ve made some really unfortunate choices with regard to city planning. It shouldn’t be this way.
I live in a fairly large city with decent transit options (for the US), and (notably) a high-speed commuter rail system going into the city. I'm considering moving out of the city in a year or so, and if I do I want to be convenient to a station on that rail system.
Using a friend's address in the suburbs as a proxy (who lives near where I might be moving), Google Maps puts the travel time from there to my office at 32 minutes via commuter rail. That's with an 8 minute walk and 11 minute walk on either side, but if you assume a bike ride rather than a walk I'd imagine you can cut each of those down by at least half. The rail line has headways of a little under 15 minutes at rush hour, so that could possibly extend the trip a little bit if your timing's not perfect, but still well under an hour.
Of course if you need multiple transfers to get to your destination (and your local transit system doesn't have very short headways) that will increase your travel time substantially. The commuter line I'm thinking of takes you right into the heart of the city where many jobs are though (including my own) so that's not always a concern.
I actually did this for a time, fortunately not every day but frequently enough. Wouldn't really have been sustainable long term.
Now, sure, if your partner works XX miles in the opposite direction from you, and/or you have some other unique community attachment, and you can't change jobs, you're always going to have a long commute, and that's a life choice you're going to have to make. But there's no reason that should be the norm.
But when those problems are solved (not likely to happen in my lifetime) I'd be willing to reconsider raising a family in the city near me.
This video is a good overview: https://youtu.be/MWsGBRdK2N0
Of course, if you want to live super far away from the city and drive in, that's fine, I just wish that wasn't basically the only option besides living right in the city. Places like this still exist, and I think there's a lot of demand for them, but because they're not expanding (again, legislated away) the cost of living there will just keep going up because supply will never increase.
Unfortunately that probably means that if you have a city job, for now you'll be stuck with either long commutes, living right in the city, or expensive housing in the remaining walkable suburbs.
Or you can move somewhere that has already figured this out. :) But I understand that's out of reach for many people; it's out of reach for me.
That said, I actually like my commute that is 30 minutes of bike followed by 30 minutes on the train. I get exercise in the morning and evening and make steady progress on my backlog of books.
I would hate it if I was driving. That's just wasted time.
Working from home has been an absolute boon to me. I've done partial WFH for my entire career and it feels totally natural to me. I do miss being in the office, maybe once a week or so.
I used to commute an hour pre-pandemic so I thought, how bad can it be?
Let me tell you - after a year of working at home, any commute feels like a giant waste of time and energy, which of course it is. I cherish the time with by child, but being strapped into a car seat in the back of the car is hardly quality time.
Realizing I was basically using an entire work day or even a little more per week just to commute was what made me put in the effort to move to remote work(pre-pandemic by a couple years). And once I started, I noticed the little niceties as you mentioned and it would take something drastic to get me back into an office again.
That is not universal. That is a subset of work-from-home. Many people working from home can no more step away for a break than they would if at the office. For instance, customer support/contact people cannot just step away from the phone. Others working at home have employer systems that monitor them live. Any unscheduled breaks get noticed and recorded.
Even amongst highly-paid "knowledge workers" there are issues. I do occasional home days but am not able to take breaks. At any time one of my five bosses might call. We don't have any monitoring software but they expect me at my desk ready to respond, not walking the dog or doing laundry.
I suspect most people working from home have some opportunity to take breaks here and there, though. I'm aware of certain professions with invasive monitoring (I've seen nurses that work for pharmaceutical companies report this), but it doesn't seem to be particularly widespread. I'm not familiar with anyone in my personal life who have an expectation of immediate response to superiors (though on the rare case the CEO contacts you, you should make sure to get on that pretty quickly ... but that's why I get email on my phone/watch).
It depends on whether you are working primarily via email/text or live talk/chat/webcam. When my boss calls me on the phone during the day he expects me to answer.
I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic, but how could you possibly be productive after that?
I use it for focusing on purely creative works, but I definitely can’t use it in a professional setting.
Why would I ever go back to the office?
How do Zoom calls work? Do you just throw on an Afghan monk-style or use a Snap filter?
I've never been so psychologically stable and productive in my entire working life.
At this point if a company wants me back in office, I'll go and work for the one which doesn't really there's no value in being packed in a shop with people who don't want to be with you.
It's other thing to orchestrate something by purchasing bit of inputs from everyone on team.
* EU work visas seem very hard to get
* EU software jobs seem to pay ~40% less than comparable American jobs before taxes (and EU taxes are more significant)--this leaves little slack for travel
* My wife's field is communications/marketing and she's pretty specialized to English/American-culture and the demand is quite a lot lower for her industry than mine
Then there's the hassle of long-term remote: figuring out taxes, selling our home, the logistics and costs of moving those possessions we're unwilling to sell to Europe, etc.
Work-from-home enables us to work from Europe for a few months at a time--we'll have to work odd hours (~2pm-9pm iirc) and we'll probably have to pay Europe rent and our American mortgage; however, we'll probably take most of our vacation during our abroad months so the odd hours will only apply for a few weeks and we can afford the additional housing cost (especially if we save for it during the months we're in the US). I think the tax situation should be okay since we'll be in the US for the majority of the year, but I need to find out for sure.
Will your firm catch you? Likely not if you are only working abroad for a few weeks, if you're doing it for longer, you'll probably get an email asking for clarification on your tax status (at best). At worst, they'll pull your VPN logs and demand that you get back to the states before you trigger some payroll issues.
My country has a tax-treaty with the country I do most of my work for, and so I only pay taxes in one not the other. Without such a treaty I'd have to pay taxes in both countries and it would make it unviable.
Anyway, among other things, he said that doing any work inside US borders, if not on a work visa, is technically illegal. Like apparently if I'm on vacation in the US, and I pull out my phone to answer a few work emails, that's technically a visa violation, not that in that case anyone's gonna mind. IANAL TINLA. And of course you're interesting in jurisdictions other than the US.
So, yeah, I think the way to find out is find a lawyer in the jurisdiction you'd be wanting to work from, one who advertises themselves as specializing in visa issues.
Consider also that foreign employee of foreign firms have long traveled for business (well pre-Covid they did) and there is typically no work permit required for short/medium stays. In most places it just requires a typical tourist visa or equivalent when under 3 months.
Maybe this will be much more common and laws would change, but it's hard to see why countries would resist such residents; they bring their own job, they spend foreign money locally and they're no strain on the local social welfare system. Economically, they're just as beneficial as tourists and not as much of a risk as the average immigrant.
Not sure about other countries but it's pretty much automatic in Germany for any job over EUR 55k (or something like that). Which is nearly all software jobs worth taking.
I can just start calling people, no need to find a room with my laptop where I only have the screen of that laptop, just to not disturb the others in the open office.
I have breakfast with the kids, am home for package/groceries deliveries.
I have much better relations with colleagues in other countries because cam on is the default and we are not with a group of locals and 2 people on cam. It's a big equalizer.
I like it like this and would be annoyed as well if this was taken from me.
- time saved
- gas saved
- car wear saved ..
Businesses have to justify offices and cubicles to their workers but from all of the arguments I’ve read, they’re coming up short.
For example living 15 minutes to world class hiking trails or surf spots. Not having to take a flight or drive for hours each way to go do those things on weekends you can now do them every day before or after work. Getting to live in a large house out in nature, far away from the city crowds.
It's a game changer
- Walk kids to school in the mornings, pick them up in afternoons
- Buy groceries when it suits you in the middle of the day.
- Do sports in the middle of the day
- Start slow cooking during the day
- Avoid being called into pointless meetings (no-one can see that you are actually not in another meeting or phone call)
- Take breaks with your wife
They'll still need to be done at some point, but now we have more choice on when we want to do it, and not just between 8PM and 8 AM or only on weekends, as it was the case before.
- Control of food. No more bagels or carb dumping ground. No more limited food options. My own kitchen.
- Control of equipment. Need a 4k monitor? Need a trackball? No approvals needed.
- Control of ergonomics. Get exactly the chair you need. Get an electric height adjustable desk without going through facilities.
- Control temperature. Never be too hot or cold.
- So many great options for breaks. Walk down the street. Meditate in the garden. Play Beatsaber. Take a nap, naps are magic.
- Control your lighting. Good color temperature and comfortable brightness make the space more relaxing and can aid sleep and wakefulness.
- The ultimate corner office. Privacy and separate space that you can personalize to your heart's content.
- Location flexibility. Work from a beach rental. Do a city-stay near a WeWork. Find a mountain cabin with high speed internet. Move to a new state without having to change jobs.
- Finances. Live in a low tax state. Have an older car. Spend less on clothes, lunches, parking, gas, tolls. Live in cheaper square footage without worrying about what it does to your commute.
- Stress. More emotional speration between you and your work. Relationships are through Zoom and require less emotional investment. Work forms less a part of your identity and changing it involves fewer changes to your daily routine.
- Caffeine. With more tools to manage your wakefulness, less need to lean on the crutch of caffeine. For me, less caffeine means less alcohol as well.
Other people are free to have their opinions that they don't like WFH or can't wait to get back into the office. For me, I really struggle to understand how you cannot love it. With total control of my environment, I can easily correct for minor downsides such as needing to maintain work-life balance and good social connections. After years of optimization, I have a better quality of life than our CEO. I'd be insane to give it up.
No approvals, but you have to pay for it.
Prior to COVID, I used vacation time every summer to work at an academic summer camp for three weeks. Most of the other staff members—largely college students—had to go through this dumb supply request system whenever they wanted materials for an activity. I just ordered whatever I wanted off Amazon, which was expensive, but I figured I was technically on a sort of weird vacation, so screw it.
My point being, you can make this trade-off in many workplaces. Working from home just normalizes it—and sometimes removes the choice.
They would buy ergonomic things that could be justified though.
I don’t miss that.
I now have an electric standing desk with memory settings, a cushioned standing mat, a great office chair that fits my back perfectly, a kneeling chair, a yoga ball, a stool, plants, original artwork, fidget toys, cozy lamps, excercise equipment, ergonomic keyboard and mouse, a large external display, the best video conferencing headset I could find, laptop and monitor height adjustable stands and probably a few other things as well. I changed jobs recently and didn't have to do anything but swap out the laptop.
If you could share your findings this would be greatly appreciated. (Is it wired or wireless?)
It's a bit of an investment, and very slightly cumbersome at times versus a wireless headset, but I think it's worthwhile in order to sound good.
(Well, okay, a truly professional microphones would presumably make you sound even better, but you're very much past the point of diminishing returns.)
On the main topic, as a boomer who suffered through office work for decades (the dictation system in my first job was a DictaBelt, and electronic forms were what the secretaries stored on their IBM Selectrics), going 100% remote 12 years ago was the greatest productivity boost I've experienced since my first work PC (which I built from parts sourced at Jameco Electronics... in 1988).
There is _no_ way I'll ever return to an office, with all the distractions (we used to call them "drive-bys") and already mentioned ergonomic barriers. My manager is a genx who is fully behind remote work, but there are lots of late boomer and genx execs who are really uncomfortable with it for a load if reasons -- including that it denies them opportunities to intimidate through physical presence (never a problem I experienced personally, mostly because those same sorts of managers tend to be intimidated by age, experience and credentials).
I find it ironic that so many execs who now lament the loss of "collaboration" weren't voicing those concerns a couple of decades ago during the massive push to outsource and offshore. I know from personal experience that collaborating remotely is not only possible, but often superior to in-office -- as I think dozens of my colleagues across a couple of oceans who I worked some pretty difficult technical issues with would attest.
Besides being half the price, it’s a dynamic mic instead of condenser.
True, a good condenser will sound marginally better, but it will also pick up a lot more background noise more readily. Better off to pick up cleaner audio to start with rather than try and filter it out after.
And to your point about diminishing returns, I think especially over the generally iffy quality conferencing software we’re all using something like a Blue Yeti is already well into the diminishing returns.
As a result they're significantly smaller than over-ear cans, and able to be stuffed in a laptop bag easily.
The style can become fatiguing with extended wear, that is probably their biggest flaw along with limitations on how much sound isolation they can achieve.
There's no depth limit, it's just a subtle cue to consider slowing down, to help prevent flame wars.
Or are you renting them access to your equipment :-)
Some professionals, notably those whose work culture encourages self-determination, can be allowed to bring in their own hardware or request custom hardware. These are usually the outliers, rather than the norm (and in fact, this is often advertised as a "perk" of being employed at that particular place).
The vast majority of corporate environments are rather locked down and standardized, understandably, with one-size-fits-all or a set menu of tech provisions, depending on role (e.g., designers often get larger screens than accountants).
Even as a developer, I had to fight for larger screens for my team, as IT saw no inherent need for larger screens beyond what they initially provisioned.
Contrast that with my WFH setup, with my 3-monitor setup on a 7-foot standing desk...
So yeah, these sorts of workplaces exist and thousands of people have to contend with their on-site limitations.
If managed to bring through securty some stuff that you plug into the office network, isn't certified and something goes wrong, short circuit or whatever, it is on you to deal with whatever might happen including dealing with the insurance company.
So unless the item is listed on that list, you are SOL.
I wouldn’t focus on niche places that do this though as an arguing point. It may as well be, “but some chipotle’s don’t offer guacamole. So, ya know, can’t rely on it.” Might be true but sounds rare.
People got away with breaking some of the rules, but it was definitely a risk - it was theoretically grounds for dismissal to bring in your own hardware, IIRC, let alone to run unapproved software.
The concern in that case was a PHI (personal health information) breach, which could bring the wrath of the US judicial system down on the company.
So, not top-secret or anything like that, but still very conservative and with decent reasons to be so.
It would be easy to figure that out about me, if you cared. Say if you found a list of employees and contractors.
A sufficiently-motivated attacker could backdoor my firmware with a timer-based exploit (e.g., start your keystroke payload after ten minutes without input events) and I might well not notice if it was a deft-enough change.
It might not be worth the cost, given that I might well notice it and it might not pay off even if I didn't.
Still - the point is that keyboards are not innocuous, harmless devices that it's a no-brainer to allow.
It was acceptable to bring your own keyboard and mouse to two out of the five companies, other than that, no other hardware was allowed to be brought in. So you are stuck with the monitors provided, with the rest of the hardware that was provided, and while you could bring in limited ergonomic stuff, you were also limited to whatever office furniture was available.
You are otherwise reinforcing the point that you can't just bring whatever equipment you want to the office, as the parent poster claimed.
I am reinforcing no such point. I bring my own keyboard but it isn't noisy. I also bring my own mouse.
Say you have a 1hr each way...2 hours/day, 5 days/week, 48 weeks/year, $100/hr: $100 * 2 * 5 * 48 = $48,000. WFH literally just saved you $48k of billable time.
Buying a 4k monitor (that you can also use for non-work activities) on your own dime is probably reasonable.
And when I worked in high end rnd if we brought kit on behalf of a client to use on their projects we charged them AND A 25% MANAGMENT FEE.
The company is not your friend as people often say on here but buying equipment for them is OK FFS
Here's an idea: instead of expecting the employer to provide more than a basic level of ergonomics and potentially having to go through all the bureaucratic and mental hoops, both on receiving and on returning, we just.. pay the employees more money so they can decide for themselves.
Why you're putting this in the frame of "employer is not your friend" is beyond me, no one was framing it that way to begin with. If anything, it is because we can't expect employers to deliver beyond a basic level and introducing all these rules to make it harder, that it makes more sense to bite the bullet up front and be in control.
I "invested" my commute savings savings in a Tudor GMT watch my ISA and some bullion
who’s happier?
I have some points on the not good column
- If you have kids, it is hard to focus sometimes, specially small ones.
- Sometimes your SO forgets you are not "Home" and this also can be bad, as it can create stress between you 2.
- I miss software design sessions with my team, we would go thru issues 2x faster being together.
- Onboarding new team members is a lot harder and they feel less part of the "team"
Last one is building culture remotely is a skill a handful of people have, until now at least. So this also becomes a mess...
For me the perfect balance is to be at the office once a week.
Simple solution, put a sign on the door that indicates you are working and only to interrupt if it's important. You can still set boundaries here without it being an issue. Be creative, talk it out with your SO.
This can help when kids get old enough to understand as well, but admittedly won't work with small children.
> miss software design sessions with my team, we would go thru issues 2x faster being together.
I think this is something that can be solved with software but it'll take some time to develop workflows that work for everyone. Talk to your team to try to find ways you can optimize.
> - Onboarding new team members is a lot harder and they feel less part of the "team"
This comes down to the culture, which is your last part.
You can help new members feel included in simple ways. Or simply include them in decisions and discussions is helpful. Really it's the same as when you're working in the same location. You just have to be proactive about including someone that you're not seeing. This is more on you and less on the new person.
Who said anything about a door? We dont have two spare rooms really.
I suspect anyone that enjoys living in a high cost of living city (SF, NYC, etc) and isn’t obscenely wealthy is working from their living or bedroom. If you’re not living alone, WFH becomes a lot harder.
I would prefer to live in SF and go to the office (because my house/apt is too small) than live elsewhere but be able to afford a house with a dedicated room for an office.
Still EXPENSIVE as hell, and no big open spaces to yourself, but also still not a quick stroll to all the world-class amenities of SF.
Maybe it varies for other people, but when i think of "live in to enjoy the city" i think 2 blocks from enough food to never cook again, new bars every friday, a quick transit ride to almost any activity i could want - and no car ownership needed. Its a lifestyle of living out of the city as a communal space, not a destination to visit on weekends.
Combining that with the fact that we don't do bars, we cook and need car ownership so we can do hike-trips...
I still live in the Bay Area, but it's a 45min (no traffic) to ~1:45hr (typical) commute to the South Bay. It'd be hard to do this every day, but I don't have to.
As a result, I get to live on huge chunk of land, with an office to call my own, for the same $$ I'd spend on a 4br/3ba 'normal' house in San Jose.
We are actually moving soon primarily so that I can have an office.
This is what can happen when you WFH with small children:
Very early in the pandemic our CEO was doing all hands sessions with the company and these things happened on and off.
I still don't know if it just happened naturally or if it was staged, but either way it was brilliant. It set the tone for the company that if even big shot billionaire CEO was having kids wander into meetings, it was certainly ok for everyone else.
Out of necessity I've been WFH for the past 2 years. While overall I have enjoyed working from home, the issues you describe are real. Once it is no longer necessary for me to be WFH full time, I think one day a week in the office would be ideal.
Maybe some things would need to change in terms of what office space is leased, and the capacity, in order to manage the cost.
This is why HN is special!
I guess a lot of stuff happened over the phone? If you write a document, how do you send it to others? Did he use a fax machine, maybe?
He had a Palm Pilot he would scribble on a lot to work out of the house when those became a thing, and he had one of the first actually-portable laptop computers. We (he involved me in a lot of his process of learning tech) tested out early tablet computing devices (running Windows 3.0 "for Handwriting" ;P).
-Design jobs like architecture and drafting
-Small device repairs (where the device is high value and can be mailed)
-Creative labor like copy writing, editing, etc
Also, where I grew up in rural Montana, a lot of jobs that are considered to require an office but which can be done over the phone were worked remotely up until recently. Sales in many industries was done over the phone with people stationed throughout the Western U.S. states, each managing about a 100,000-300,000 sq mi area.
I'd typically do a short dialup call in the morning and one in the evening to upload emails I queued up to send, download any emails I received and sync up code repositories.
Honestly I often wish for similar conditions today (except the 2400bps part!). The productivity and mental peace of zero distractions all day long was so much better.
As to how to work? No different from today really. Sync up the code repositories and do all development locally for the day. Or work on architecture/design documents.
I sometimes seek that peaceful working condition by working remote at locations with no signal. Wish I could do it more often.
All that has meant is that ramp up time is a little slower. And I can come into the office for 2 weeks for the two times a year we onboard people. Hell, if we did an office rental then neither of us would have to commute into town. It may be shocking to hear, but new people typically live in the outskirts where housing is cheap. Right next to where I live...
On the other hand, we onboarded someone who lives in Vermont (the rest of the team is in the same town on the west coast) and since we are all working remotely, other than changing his working hours to align with our own, you can’t tell the difference between him and us.
The fact that you are not going to the office is too broad of a category. I mean just look at the name, work from home, and it is misleading right there.
You may need to look into a co-working space or other option to get out of the house with so many distractions.
It's also going to be totally different for people who have no kids or who are employing nannies or day care to occupy the children.
The software design sessions thing, I absolutely do not buy the idea that this cannot be done remotely. Use a Zoom meeting, one of the many collaborative whiteboarding sites/programs and get people Wacom tablets if desired. But just a chat room, phone call, Discord voice channel, etc. should actually be adequate most of the time.
For onboarding and culture, just because people are not coming into the office does not mean that it has to turn into a free for all. You can still have rules about being around at a certain time or using certain software or video calls or whatever you feel you need to keep people integrated or whatever. The only thing that needs to be different is the literal physical presence of the person. Virtual presence can still be facilitated and required if you feel it is necessary.
Please check out https://sharetheboard.com -- we too didn't want to give up markers (on paint or boards or anywhere else). We're working on a number of integrations at the moment. Hadn't considered Whereby yet (Miro is on the short list) but open to suggestions.
I also spent the year stressed out by the endless stream of Slack messages, eating poorly, forgetting to take breaks, and slumped on a couch rather that bothering to use my nice ergonomic chair, so, YMMV
Like, I’m trans and have kept it hidden most of my career. It’s always been hard on me, because I have to carefully curate my image because if I don’t I opened myself to discrimination if people could tell.
I started a new job during the pandemic and went full-on “fuck it” mode and I couldn’t be happier. Joined the LGBT ERG and helped organize some of the younger trans people at my company into pushing for expanded healthcare benefits (I don’t need them personally, but they will). I don’t think I would have found the energy to do any of this if I was also worried about how I was being perceived by others — all that energy would have gone into creating an illusion that’s acceptable to the people who do my reviews and sign my paychecks.
The positive reason for this, is that it allows potentially extreme variants and dialects to co-exist while letting everyone still communicate clearly with others (by code-switching to whatever's considered standard). The down-side is that it often exists alongside negative stereotypes about those who can't, or choose not to, code-switch to SAE (but, of course, refusing to becomes its own counter-signal for very high status—Fussell, for instance, observes that adhering to SAE is a middle-class and up tendency, but not among "old money" or his "top-out-of-sight" rich, since they don't need, at any point in their life, to give a damn whether some employer or other gate-keeper judges them worthy or intelligent or whatever).
For trans people, just existing without conflict or judgement from others is a constant struggle between society's normative expectations and the desire to express who you really are.
In my home office, I've got pushup stands, a pull-up bar, suspension straps, an ab roller, yoga mat, resistance bands, and some dumbells that I use in those moments while something is compiling. No back pain for years and I'm in great shape.
If I did this in an office, I'd get endless remarks and cocked eyes, eventually being told by a superior that my "coworkers find that a little weird". (i.e. stop doing that)
While I was more productive at home, I think that came at a cost to others that I work with. Every interruption that I avoided while WFH is a slowdown for somebody I work with.
I'm back in the office again but I'm hoping that I can one day arrange to work from home most days and only occasionally come into the office.
Also I realized how conscientious I am compared to other people and the message trail means I have peace of mind about stuff that's not my fault.
And I love that some people are forced to hold in their verbal diarrhea and have to think before writing messages.
But for me, comfort isn't everything. I'd rather be a bit less comfortable if it means being able to feel part of something nice. I really like being among people, experiencing things together. For me, that feeling easily outweighs comfort.
Then again, my work is a 10m walk from my house, and I have quite a bit of influence on how our work environment is shaped - so that may be easy for me to say.
That's what the local pub is for.
But it is kind of vindicating seeing people everywhere start to have the same philosophy. It makes me hopeful that other good things may catch on in the future eventually.
The next stage is possibly moving somewhere with a lower cost of living. Been spending most time in Mexico for almost three years.
I've considered moving for a lower cost of living or living the "nomad" life, but I honestly prefer big crazy cities with tons of people and endless possibilities every day.
And so I've lived in big cities the whole time and have loved every minute of it. I pay more, and I charge more, and generally try to make sure my clients aren't local so they don't suddenly get the crazy idea that I should pop into the office. But, even when they are local, I keep office visits to a minimum (once per month or less).
It's been pretty great to see so many start to see the delights of working from home. It get that it's not for everyone. I'm positive it's for a lot of us.
I see this point but it's often not a guarantee, particularly if you work at a small company. In the US if your employer is in State A and you want to move to State B, then your employer must become registered as a business in that state and abide by that state's labor laws. Many small businesses aren't capable of (or interested in) maintaining compliance with every state's laws.
I believe this will change in the future, but right now I wouldn't bet on it.
Maybe you did run in to it but haven't mentioned, or maybe 5 years is not enough to see it -- have you noticed that a big part of the "remote culture" that few know how to build, is proper recognition of remote workers in the mixed- or dominantly-office- teams?
Those CEOs are perfectly aware that your life quality is higher than theirs on a much lower income, they know full well you are not going away anytime soon...
For clarity, I enjoy having a hard separation between home and work. If I'm at home, I'm more likely to be distracted with chores instead of working. I leave my laptop at work so I don't need to work off hours unless there is an emergency. I enjoy my 30 minute commute. I listen to podcasts or design board games. I understand I could do those at home, but I'm more likely to just watch a show or something instead of dedicating time to just listening to a podcast. I enjoy being around friends that I've worked with off and on for over 20 years. We go to lunch together and talk about life. Sometimes we play board games at lunch. I enjoy collaborating over a white board trying to solve a problem. It is sooo much easier to do that in person. I personally feel more part of a team in person than I do if we just communicate via Slack. But these are just the things that work for me. I don't expect anyone else to feel the way I do but there are lots of others out there like me too. I'm glad more companies have options for those with a preference.
- People who are technically allowed to WFH but who are concerned that co-workers/managers will pressure them to come in anyway and
- People who want to come back into an office most days but don't want to come into a ghost town with most meetings over video anyway.
I think this battle is lost. Even if people go back to offices, a lot of meetings will happen over video anyway. This has been the norm in some large companies already.
To add to it, WFH has one clear massive weakness: the lack of face to face interaction leads to quite a bit of atrophy when it comes to team cohesion. I've been managing WFH teams for the better part of a decade and I've yet to find a satisfactory solution other than getting people together every couple of months to work on hard problems together and build some trust.
I'm really bullish on the hybrid model right now. I think having an office designed more like a co-working space that can serve as a central meeting place for teams is what the future of software development looks like. No expectation that everyone is in the office every day, but rather reimagine the office more as a place where people come together when they really need (or want) too.
We're experimenting with that now in my organization and the results so far are pretty good. Some people come in every day. Some people come in every now and then. Others come in when their teams needs them. We're continuing to use all of the best practices for remote work and I think people are finding a really good balance right now.
Have you consider team atrophy as a pre-existing/chronic condition which maynot have cure?
There was a study about US companies moving headquarters in the 60's. There would be planning committees, analyses, the whole shebang.
This later study found that almost invariably the new HQ would be closer to the CEOs home/hometown/home state. Some of these companies even failed because obviously people working at the NY HQ would not necessarily want to move to the Texas HQ.
In Romanian we say: "cine împarte, parte-și face": he who shares (does the sharing/gives things out), gets his share (cut).
And folks that work across teams like that are often gluing the organisation together in subtle but vital ways, so anything dis-incentivising it is a dark pattern.
If you have 10 teams of 5 people each in an office, in a 3/2 hybrid setting you can expect you'll have 30 people in the office. You can pad that to go to 40 people in the office on any given day -- this gives you a 20% reduction in required office space.
In reality most teams don't need people to come in that often... I'm concerned about some long term drift where some teams never come in and others find themselves schlepping into the office a lot, but I think it's something we can manage with good coaching for our team leads.
„Your team needs you“ is a far too unspecific constraint to implement btw. That’s an invitation for extrovert team leads to pull in the whole team for minor issues.
WFH lets me mix those two a lot more and become more efficient. There's less interruptions since I am not going to the office, and also I have supreme "quiet time" after work, usually between 9pm and midnight.
You don't have to do them at home. Take a 20-30 minute walk before work and it'll be the same thing, plus you'll also get some exercise!
For me, a relaxing listening audiobooks while safely driving is like a warm-up for my workday. An activity I wouldn't have time otherwise.
And the same, in my way back home.
At another point in my career I had a 30 minute commute in stop-and-go traffic on an ugly highway. It was soul crushing - I could feel the minutes being stolen from my life.
Too many people quantify commutes in minutes, but should probably be looking at the drive itself when choosing a job or a home.
Depending on company culture, meetings with 10+ people can end up with just a few people talking and others not participating at all but still being forced to attend. Tolerating such events is much easier when you simply turn off your camera and lay on the couch, stretch around etc. instead of sitting awkwardly and pretending to care.
One of my bitches about Silicon Valley is top managers of tech companies locate their companies a short drive away from their homes and estates in Palo Alto, Los Altos, Woodside and force the schmucks that work for them into long commutes.
Commutes are also dangerous if they're by car. Not only are roadway congested, everyone is in a rush, and people are driving after just waking up and then again after a full day of work.
From a purely economic standpoint, commutes are responsible for a 10% drop in hourly wages[1].
Is this hyperbole? Why do you all have 2 hour commutes? That sounds like hell
1. I compete for positions with people all over the world. Who can complete with a fraction of the salary I need.
2. As a remote worker -most often working as a contractor- I'm even easier to be replaced in a heartbeat. No severance or anything alike.
3. Did I mention that I compete with all the planet? That makes competition for good roles really crazy.
4. Work blends into life and it is very hard to keep it from. This gets worse depending on the company/role but in general these things tend to go the employers way not yours.
5. You need to find new ways to socialize (and the motivation to do so is minimal) or you risk mental health issues.
All I'm trying to say is be careful what you wish for because you might get it.
Am I one of the few that sees this as an enormous benefit? Work becomes a series of tasks I need to achieve throughout the day, like all the other tasks like laundry and doctors appointments.
I get to restructure what I need to do in a way that suits me best. I can push code at 11PM and go for a nap at 4PM if I choose (assuming no meetings).
Then my life isn't segmented into exclusive blocks. It is just one seamless integrated life.
Keep in mind I have kids, a social life, etc. I’ve built my time around work/life balance and keeping the two distinct. It’s healthy for me in ways that having the two conflated never was. May not be an issue for everyone.
That happens when I work at the office. At least at the roles I work, I'm expected to be on call all the time to support production environments. I'll get a text or something and usually have to address it.
When I'm in that situation, I don't expect a response immediately. I know I'm a night owl and other people aren't. I'm sure other people do. At the same token, when I work late and the early people schedule an 8am meeting, it's the same.
Having said all that, the only difference for me in this scenario is whether or not I commute to the office every day. Same, same.
If you personally struggle with keeping your work and personal life separate that's a personal problem and shouldn't be used as a bullet point in your list against WFM.
Well, that personal problem affected _all_ of my co-workers when we were sent home during 2020, so even if experienced remote workers get it figured out, I think it still needs to be addressed and listed especially for those of us who are new to this.
Also, the downside is not just because of my struggle, management attempts to hinder that separation: "Its 8pm, but since your there with your laptop, would you mind...". And things that didn't use to be emergencies are now, since the level of effort to address them is considered significantly less (by your manager anyway).
I don't know about you but I'm not smart enough to feel that my job is as easy as doing laundry or going to the doctor. I'd rather finish all my work in one focused block of time and not think about it the rest of the day. Due to the pandemic destroying most childcare options, this is an unattainable dream for many.
Can people call you or message you to clarify what you just now pushed at 11pm? Do you respond immediately? Let's say you do immediately because you restructure your night time as your best work time, does that mean you're automatically exempt from 8am meetings in a few hours?
Come to think of it. Pushing code at 11pm is not that unusual even pre-covid, but the expectation for the associated communication might be totally different.
2. As a contractor, yes, As an employee WFH changes nothing here, particularly in countries with worker favorable employment laws.
3. See 1.
4. True, remote workers need to maintain a 9-5ish routine. meaning that remote means you can be flexible about which 8 hours you work, but you should still stick to the 8 hours you are paid for
5. True, but you now have more time to find a social group to join, closer to home and more into things your interested in outside of work.
I really don't think so. And I'm afraid that this is a classic race to the bottom for the most of us.
Many of these are temporarily waived by the authorities for the duration of the pandemic but that won't last forever.
Employers aren't going to drop salaries in the midst of a pandemic, but if remote work persists, salaries will drop substantially. It's simple supply and demand, and I'm sure there's data out there (for existing remote positions) that corroborates this.
Software wages in the US are high, because it's very hard to replicate the quality of an American workforce. By and large global differences in wages reflect global differences in workforce quality. It's not like this is the first time companies have realized that global labor is cheaper. They've been trying to capitalize on cheap engineers in developing countries since the 1980s. It's always the same issue. Lower price on paper, but delivery and quality issues that scale far beyond the up front cost savings.
Don't get me wrong, there are smart people in India. But if you're outsourcing for cheaper labor, you're not getting these smart people.
The gravity of magnitudes better compensation insures that the very best will migrate.
FAANG level engineers are completely insulated from overseas competition due to this, but of course the lower echelons will have to worry about this if the current demand spike falls off.
The support contract for a huge multinational I was a small part of a while back, was bought out by an Indian-based company, who wanted the prestige and new line of business, but bit off WAY more than they could chew, and threw the entire tier 1/2/3 process into near chaos.
Had they looked even a little deeper, they might have realized that they had no pratical experience in customer facing sw/hw support, and saved everyone two years of flailing, panic-driven, blame-everyone-you-can-point-a-finger-at, the-technicians-are-wrong-since-our-process-says-otherwise-oh-wait-our-process-is-shit-what-now-MORE-METRICS unbelieveable bullshit.
All because somebody in high level management managed to bend somebodys ear, and the parent company got swindled into it.
So glad to be gone.
Outsourcing for talent is fine, but there is plenty of competition to make India rare, at least around here. So when I hear India, it's unfortunately a pretty safe assumption that someone went for bottom of the barrel cheap.
I'm not saying this is right or fair.
I think the best programmers in the world get sucked into US companies so while there are decent programmers around the world, the quality isn’t the same. Whether it’s 5 or 25%, I don’t think there’s quality parity.
As anyone who's done serious hiring can tell you, judging candidates is damn tough. There's only a loose correlation between how a candidate looks on paper and how he performs. Now imagine translating this process to a completely foreign culture halfway across the world. Do you know which universities in Romania are good? Do you know who the most prestigious employers and positions in Romania are? Do you have a network of Romanians to recommend new hires?
In fact, even if you try, most likely you'll be stuck with below average engineers. Not only will the top ones get scooped up by those with better local knowledge, but the lack of knowledge goes both ways. Top engineers aren't going to join some fly-by-night employer with no local brand, track record in that country, and no career track to senior positions.
The only way I've seen a company actually succeed at this is by being willing to fully embrace the country. It's not just enough to hire off-the-shelf Romanian engineers, the company has to actually become "Romanian". Are companies willing to hire senior management from Romania? Are Romanian employees "first class citizens" with equivalent work to their American counterparts? Is the company raising money from Romanian VCs? Are they pushing Romania as a primary markets for their product? If the answer to any of those questions is no, then it's highly unlikely that you'll succeed in recruiting, interviewing, hiring and retaining top talent in that local market.
There is quite a lot of red-tape involved with hiring foreign workers though.
"Combining pan-European firm-level IT data with our management practices survey, we find that the US IT related productivity advantage is primarily due to its tougher "people management" practices."
So it's not related to IT engineering skills but rather how the company handles those engineers. An US based company will handle EU based engineers like their own, thus nullifying your argument.
I've worked with many people from abroad (even some from the US) and truth is : there were people better than others, there were people who worked more than the others. But this is never tied to nationality. It is much more tied to : does the guy want to be top notch ? If he asks the question then he probably has the ability and willing to make the sacrifices.
That could very well be due to differences in management and in fact that seems to be the conclusion drawn by your link, which states that productivity among European companies increases when those companies are taken over by American firms.
Right from the abstract:
>US IT related productivity advantage is primarily due to its tougher "people management" practices
You could get that in Canada. No language barrier, same education, same culture (largely), same exact time zones, flying folks in if need be is far simpler.
I've interviewed and hired many engineers from the UK and the first thing you'll notice are candidates with resumes filled with pointless certifications and years of cookie-cutter experience at financial institutions working on old technology. I could get into the more esoteric aspects of what happens in really hyper-growth SV startups but it would come as a culture shock to a 9-5'er from London. It also involves sacrifices and lifestyle changes I think most of those folks would be unwilling to make.
As for everything, there are plenty of exceptions: two of the most talented and fastest growing Software Engineers I met were Americans - and they didn't have any formal CS education.
Over the years I definitely picked my political incorrect biased list of countries to avoid for talent sourcing. I could spend hours talking about funny stories involving bad contractors from India, Hungary, Eastern Europe and Spain but it's absolutely pointless.
You'll find terrible engineers everywhere, even in the states. USA companies have incredible wealth compared to other companies and they can afford to spend ridiculous amount to try and weed out the majority of terrible engineers.
Having hired contractors who used to work at FAANGs, I can tell you I found some pretty terrible hires there as well. Almost like memorising algorithms and CS exercises and then spending 4 years trying to build a case for your promotion isn't going to make you improve as an engineer.
For every competent Indian that moves to the US for a tech job, there are 4 that decide to stay back home for a $10-15k-ish job.
India is increasingly training several orders of magnitude more engineers than the US. Even if estimates were overestimating the number of competent Individuals in India by an order of magnitude, the number will still over shadow the American workforce.
It has already happened once with China. It would not be surprising if it happens with India. Only this time, the competing workforce will be fluent in English.
Given the vagaries of the US visa regime, plenty of talented Indians can't come over even if they wanted to.
Wait, what? Several orders of magnitude, like at least 3 orders of magnitude? So even though India has 4x the population of the United States, it's training at least a thousand times as many engineers? That's amazing!
It's also totally not true at all. Spend a few seconds on Google.
Note that I don't particularly disagree with the rest of your comment.
An order of magnitude does not need to be decimal. Order of 2 is also sufficient.
The US produces between 50-100K CS grads (depending on how you count majors). India produces about 1 million by the same metric.
That's a 10-20x difference.
Have you paid attention to the housing market, car market, or really... any market in the last year?
Could you expand on this?
And on the flip side, it hasn't been too rough for my company to replace them because there are now a huge number of devs in places like the West Coast that wouldn't have been interested in working for us prior moving to remote work who now are.
I suspect some of this will all calm down a bit as the new order of things settles in, but for now, remote work is shaking things up in terms of opportunities for workers in a big way.
That would seem to indicate that you can make and maintain relationships over text and video chat.
I mean, personally, I’d count as my best friends of nearly two decades two people that I’ve only ever seen in person… 3 times?
Building and maintaining those relationships is different from in person. It’s certainly not impossible.
Perhaps. On one hand, the office was clearly one barrier separating onshore and offshore talent. On the other hand, there never really was a lot preventing companies from setting up offshore offices to attract cheaper talent worldwide. The fact that many US jobs remain still quite expensive compared to the developing world implies to me that there are still some barriers there above and beyond the ability to drive to a shared office.
Aside from the commute itself I don't mind working at the office and seeing people.
It ain't good to be holed up like a hermit not socializing.
I'd like a good balance of some office days and WFH days.
This is what always jumps to the front of my mind when I read about WFH on software engineering forums.
I'm lucky -- I have deep technical expertise in a very uncommon intersection of economically valuable topics. I never compete for positions, because there is way more work than available skilled labor. Even still, I'll be back in the office. One day the education system will catch up -- or my skill-set will become obsolete -- and at that point having a decade-long in-person relationship is my only bulwark against ruin.
I can't imagine being a SWE working on a standard tech stack without deep personal connections in an application domain and thinking of WFH as anything other than an enormous and terrifying threat.
Mentoring remotely is definitely a skill that us older workers had to be intentional about cultivating in ourselves. The moment pandemic started, I bought a top-of-the-line iPad for whiteboarding, insisted my new hire mentors get the same from the company, and called up a couple old professors to get all their tips on remote teaching.
Hopefully the next generation will have it easier; their mentors experienced remote learning so might be better equipped for remote teaching/mentoring.
Some companies do actually have explicit "new grad hire" cohorts with additional onboarding support targeted at new grads -- eg a seminar series or dedicated networking events.
Sometimes it's less formal or there's even no structured support at all.
But, in any case, I'm referring to companies that hire enough new grads each year to have an entirely separate recruiting mechanism for that population. When that's the case, it's just more likely that people are being hired as generic candidates rather than onto particular teams. And when that happens it's easier for people to fall through the cracks, because the direct manager didn't specifically pick that person as a good match for their specific need.
Now I'm curious. What is your secret power?
The topic is more popular now and funding agencies are starting to fund more graduate training in this area, so my current moat won't exist forever. But by then I'll have dug my current moat deeper, hopefully.
Key to this is understanding the difference between capitalism and materialism.
The former drives innovation and improvememt.
The latter breeds envy, poorly sorted priorities, and, ultimately, misery.
But is not exclusive to materialism. It can be a part of capitalism.
I am miserable. I have to work for food, shelter, medical care, etc. I do get some othe material items, but usually they are very cheap things for hobbies. I just never have enough time to do the things I want to do because working for my necessities takes up too much of my time.
Capitalism is abstract and plural; the avarice of materialism is concrete and singular.
The minimal regulation that stanilizes the sustem offers competitive feedback to mininize the tyranny of oligarchy that sets in when sellers get materialistic and buy the marketplace.
Capitalism and materialism aren't necessarily one or the other (plural/singular concrete/abstract). They can be applied both ways since they are adjectives. You could be describing an individual act or society as a whole.
The predisposition of capital ownership and control (a materialistic view) can take place in socialist or communist marketplaces too. Sure, technically the ownership is either owned by the state or the people, but really the oligarchy ruling the state are the ones with power anyways.
Capitalism is about minimally throttling creativity and private property.
Communism/Socialism (thinking of the EU here) seem to view lack of regulation as chaos.
No. Do not want.
On top of that, sick days are much less frequent now I daresay.
But to be honest, that's fine/expected? There's a quite large range where I might not feel up to the commute/office (or not want to cough and sneeze at people - aside, I bet that's going to be more stigmatised in the near future) but up to doing what I can from the comfort of home where it doesn't matter that I'm curled up unshowered or whatever.
I did that a couple of times even when I went in to the office five days a week - gives me something to do other than lying in bed feeling sorry for myself or doing something and feeling guilty that it's not work, and gives my employer a bit of output even if it is less than 100% (which isn't the alternative, 0 is).
Sort of like how flu cases went down during the pandemic — with less interaction from abroad less germs are transmitted.
So talk to them about those expectations. Let them know that you won't respond outside of X hours, etc.
There are times when your most important work is being available. Maybe less than some managers seem to think, but it does happen. I can go make myself a complicated snack or step outside to do some yard maintenance for half an hour here and there and still be back to my desk in 5 minutes if someone actually needs me for something. At lunch time you can usually stretch that to 15 minutes, which opens up a lot of options for errands.
When there's more competition, the guy willing to work longer will always win, especially if the work is such that he can work longer without a decrease in quality.
We're automating more things, there's more of us around, and we're connecting job markets better every day. There's more competition.
So, nowhere in reality.
My hypothesis is that Americans cashed in on their increased productivity by socializing at work or browsing the internet at work. In Germany, it's extremely frowned upon to talk about non-work stuff at work, so they could cash in on this increased productivity by shortening working hours.
Many people, yes. But the beneficiaries of an increase of minimum and hourly wages, which would affect like 60+ million US workers - they show up and they just work all day, they're not socializing, they didn't cash in anything.
What you're saying may be factual to some degree, but it almost universally talked about in bad faith.
It would really upset societal order if suddenly two once comparable jobs suddenly required drastically different time commitments. People will find all sorts of reasons to fight against a shorter workweek, but I think this is the main reason why. We like the stability of believing that everyone (or at least working people) are 'equally yoked' at least in terms of time commitment.
With manufacturing, I disagree due to the impact of automation - especially when analyzed over a long time frame, productivity has exploded whereas the number of employees has shrunk drastically and their inflation-adjusted wages barely growing.
In retail, restaurants, even in some parts of healthcare (think lab work) the situation is similar. Automation, mass manufacturing and containers (the physical things, not Docker...) have slashed costs on the input side, menial tasks like stacking shelves or cleaning got cost-cut (by outsourcing and by exploitation of undocumented workers), some places like IKEA and Amazon even eliminate the cashiers by having the customer do that themselves.
The owner class has reaped all the productivity gains and given back little to the workers who made it possible, and now they are asking "why is the American/Western market for cars shrinking and the only growth in China"... well easy, too many people don't have the cash on hand to splurge on a dozens of thousands worth new car!
However, I still think there is a disconnect. Even with productivity gains, output still basically scales linearly. When your job is producing a specific physical artifact consistently, you are always going to make more of them, the more time you spend doing it. The same is not true for many 'knowledge workers' whose output is not measured in 'lines of code' or 'meetings held' but looser, larger objectives that are fundamentally more limited in how many you actually want. I think you more rapidly get diminishing returns for a lot of this type of work. Even if a project manager could manage twice as many projects in twice as many hours, would that benefit the business?
I wish my German co-workers felt this way. It would cut hour long meetings by half, usually. Not to mention the long list of my other non-American colleagues who are quite chatty. In my experience, I don't really see how one can generalize this behavior by nation...
For me it came from handing in my 2 weeks notice to take some time off from a company I worked for for over 5 years at the time, and then being offered a schedule of my choosing instead. I didn’t even know it was an option, else I would have just asked instead of quitting.
So if you’ve been there a while, and can afford it, I’d suggest you ask your current employer.
So I think the decrease in daily overhead from the remote-revolution will actually serve an increase in productivity, and not be budgeted toward work-life balance.
I'm saying this and I've been remote for years, and promoting WLB aplenty. But my coldhearted crystal ball hints me that larger forces at play will not primarily favor WLB.
and for the same pay!
https://cepr.net/this-is-what-minimum-wage-would-be-if-it-ke...
Our personal theory is that the next equivalent to remote work will be the four day work week. We work way too hard as a society; the 40hr work week is based off the point of diminishing returns for factory workers. There’s not a lot of reason to believe that continuing this pattern for knowledge work is desirable for the company or the employees.
I actually just launched 4dayweek.io - Software jobs with a better work / life balance
This is not inevitable, it is policy we choose, as opposed to some European countries where workweeks have actually shrunk and retail hours are much more restricted. We have decided much of the gains from automation and better average human health and lifespan should go elsewhere.
- Part of management will be against WFH, as they want to have their workers under direct control, politics is much easier this way.
- Finances will like the idea of having to rent less office space.
I am getting popcorn for this fight.
For me I'm not "working from home", I'm "living at the office". I deeply resent that my work has taken over a part of my home. For the record: I love my job. I also really miss working from the same physical space as my colleagues. Meetings which I used to enjoy are now awkward and draining. Lastly: I even miss my commute home in the evening (not so much my morning commute, to be fair). It used to give my 30 minutes in which to decompress and switch my brain out of work mode.
I was absolutely fucking livid. Can't a man just be left alone in his own home any more?
It seems that I am in the minority here.
I'm young (26), but successful by financial standards and before the pandemic my apartment was just the place I slept so I had a studio and I liked it that way.
Working, sleeping, eating and socializing from my 800 sqft studio is frankly maddening. I feel like I'm always on call and connected where before my apartment was the place I decompressed and escaped.
It's lost its sanctity and I want it back.
At the start of the pandemic I lived in a house full of people working at tech startups in Oakland. So I understand having no space as I worked/lived from my tiny room. But, I was able to leave the bay area, as were my roommates and now we all have our own places (some rent some own) because the same rent in Oakland was able to afford private spaces in other parts of CA.
So I empathize with your position. I recommend trying to move out of the locale that only allows you to afford an 800 sqft studio. Even the shittiest tech jobs in the Bay would allow for you to have your own 2 bedroom apt in other parts of CA. This is how you take advantage of the WFH opportunity as a younger person.
I was never home by choice in the before times and I don't want to change that. I want to go back to getting home at 10pm sleeping after work, socializing, going to meetups or whatever and then leaving at 8:30am the next day. The extra space would be wasted in that case. Plus saving 35%+ of my paycheck was/is great.
I only spent time in my apartment later at night and sometimes on the weekends.
Moving away from the city won't help me there. I imagine it'd actually be worse.
It would seem that this issue is more around the pandemic itself and less around WFH. Once things open up your home would only be a place where you work and sleep, and you'll be able to spend most of your time away from your apartment. And if you expanded the size of your apartment to a 1 bed instead of a studio, you could theoretically reduce this issue by having an isolated work space that you don't share with your recreational activities.
So yes, if things return to how they were before you're right my issues will be resolved.
I lived next to the office before I ended my lease and moved in with family so I wouldn't be completely alone, so the office was never a hassle. I was a 20 minute walk away and the weather is usually nice.
I had a clear delineation between work life and personal life. My home was for relaxing and play, the office was for work. It helped me keep my priorities in order. Going into the office helped me mute out the personal distractions of life - personal projects, entertainment, etc.
I have a dramatically different experience at home. I can hardly focus because it's next to impossible to fully separate myself from my toys, as it were.
It's driven my stress levels through the roof because I know I'm less productive. No one has said anything to me about it, nor brought up anything, yet my self guilt is consuming me. It keeps me up at night and I'm dreading performance reviews...
Yup I feel this exactly. I had the exact same separation and the exact same issue when it stopped existing. I'm still struggling with it and we've been living this way for over a year now.
1. Bathroom break. Better not take too many or it'll be noticed.
2. Coffee/smoke break outside. Not much scrutiny of this, but I do neither.
3. Exercise break where people walk around the campus for a bit. Not too fun to do in the middle of either a hot or ice-cold midwestern day.
Anything else was viewed with a jaundiced eye.
- Social chatter.
- Making friends with old employees who I didn't know, and connecting with new employees.
- Work Life separation (balance).
- Sense of belonging.. team outing, weekday after hours beer.
- Intra company sports and games, and then teaming up with office colleagues to play inter company tournaments.
- (Not me but others) Meeting potential dates
- Office facilities for breakfast, lunch.
Get a beer once a month with coworkers, sure, but relying on work to be a primary social outlet always seems risky.
I am squarely in the WFH is great if it's possible camp, but perspective is necessary here. Pushing / demanding that the entire work arrangement norms for the majority of the workforce change for a vocal minority is exactly what gives people with cushy desk jobs their (deserved in this case) bad names.
Team admin is tag-teaming a physical presence at the office, the big boss likes to come in, there's one person in sales who likes to come in, and the guy who assembles the hardware has to come in on a number of days. I think that's about it.
Almost the entire company chose to go remote, and we're never going back. The big boss indicated towards the end of last year that we're giving up the lease on one of the two office spaces.
At least one person has already moved hundreds of miles to Yorkshire where he's simply having a better life. That's what it is. It's the opportunity for a better life, just waiting to be grasped.
I do have sympathy for people who have discovered that their social well-being depended on physical interaction with people in the office; I would hazard that the solution to that is not to go back to the office. There are better ways to get that. There is a better life to be had.
Had a guy go back home to Spain. Two back to France. They're just all so much happier being around family and friends in the parts of the world where they feel most comfortable.
I don't have children and I'm not married, but even I agree with them the a job and an office is not something I'd choose to do if I didn't have to; not having to physically transport myself and sacrifice large parts of what actually matters on the altar of employment makes a big difference.
Hyperbolising for making a point, I suspect that for people who are married and have school-age children, any office culture is bad in that it sucks up time and attention from the things that really matter [0].
Maybe it's about what matters to the individual. If the job and the office is the most important thing in someone's life, then I can see that they'd want the office back. And genuinely, good for them, hope they enjoy it just as much as I hope the people above enjoy spending time with their kids and family.
[0] Yes, I know, recharge the batteries away from the kids, maybe I hate my family, etc etc. There are always exceptions.
I still prefer working form home, because I can pack my bag and go back home anytime I want.
Soon, I'll likely go back to a co-working space because right now, I miss those things as well.
These are needs that all previous generations fulfilled through their community, or by meeting strangers. But I have the feeling that (some subset of) current generations find that proposition unacceptably risky. And I guess the offense comes from the idea that we should all be inconvenienced for their sake, and also from how the idea "I can only make friends in a safe space" is presented here and just expected to be believed.
I feel like it's really easy for people to not get out of a comfort zone and meet people just /randomly/ on the road or at the Grocery store. Especially to the point of being friends.
Sadly our community has died, church attendance is massively down in most of the world. Which killed that social circle, clubs seem to not really exist anymore. Basically we're down to meetup.com, work, and bars.
It seems at least there you find people with shared interests rather than the random sample at work or church.
I met my friends through language classes and meetups as I emigrated.
Company sports are great but those can be replaced by sports with friends. Dating at work is... Well I'll leave that alone. And food I cook is better than any office food I've ever had. That being said I havnt worked in a FANG office that has a chef.
What I need for that is high quality audio and video for meetings.
Do you think that is possible?
But everyone working in an office means that if you aren't interested in those things, (you already have friends, a family, hobby groups, etc), you are forced to spend time away from them to participate in the in-office culture. It seems extremely backwards to me.
Its like if people who make church their social group, which is very common, required people who aren't interested in church to attend to enable their social lives.
I don't know how or why a large number of us have made work a substitute for our social lives, but it has been a major problem for the rest of us who haven't.
* Volunteer as part of a local organization
* Find a meetup based on a personal interest (foreign language, programming, art, gaming)
* Join an athletic group (biking, running, hiking, martial arts)
* Go to an activity sponsored by your library (my library has everything from workshops on things like gardening and meditation, to a maker-space, to a Hamilton-sing along choir. Lots of libraries have activities like this).
* Find an open source project to contribute to
* Religious (or even slightly spiritual)? Find a local church you enjoy
You are definitely right about the cafe/bar/club being a terrible place for meeting people. But there's lots of places in most communities where you can still socialize that aren't work.
Something I've noticed while talking to my older relatives outside of the US is that their social life often are the people that they meet in their (first) job in the location they ended up staying in. It feels straightforward that the people that you spend 8+ hours a day with are going to be the people that you feel like you know and can trust.
It seems like some odd modern/corporate idea that work is just for work. Imagine if we had the same mindset for school, and tried to make things "productive" by eliminating all breaks and the assumption that students should get to know each other during class/free time.
I think we need to accept the idea that work is really going to be much of your social life when you move, work friends are not your best buds, and only later on can you have a social life that doesn't deeply involve people at work.
The gist is people used to have at least three social circles they'd hang out daily: family, work, friends outside of work. Note that I don't mean "participate in activities" with any of them, just be among these people, even without any goal.
We've lost the third place. It's only family, work and hanging out with friends sometimes, usually to _do_ something. I've noticed this big disconnect looking at older people in Southern Europe which spend their afternoon at a bar playing cards, or in the recent ages men hanging out in clubs and women in sewing/book/gossip clubs or when I visited family in central Africa where it's common to just hang out in the porch after dinner and chat with passers-by and just be there and _socialise_, without any goal in particular. I had the luck of experiencing something like that for a few years and it was incredibly nourishing and I miss it dearly.
Until we restore this third place, and find a way to make it work in the modern world, the loneliness and unhappiness epidemic can only grow, is my opinion.
Having multiple outlets for socializing, and making work a smaller, secondary one, makes for a much more resilient social life in my opinion. Which is obviously a major part of why some have found the last year of remote work hellish, and others, just fine, or even quite freeing.
Also this is just my opinion, but I find it odd when people's social groups are... just people from their job. There is so much more to life than just people who work in the same company or industry as oneself.
Being able to turn your head over to a coworker and say "hey take a look at this" and they take a few steps over to see your monitor is much less of a hassle than ringing their computer for a video call and screensharing which may be better or worse depending on either of your internet connections.
Not to mention depending on your monitor sizes it might not even work properly. i.e. if you're using a larger monitor where everything is rendered smaller so more can fit on screen, it will probably be too small for them to see on their laptop. And in the case of ultrawide monitors, just give up the idea of screensharing on that entirely. At least if you use Teams where you can't share a portion of your screen. -- only the entire thing, or a single window which has problems of its own. Oh and Teams doesn't even let you draw on the other person's screen so they can't point to things!
Alright this is turning into a Teams rant now.
On place I worked with 100-120 people in the office saw 5 marriages. A big part of that was they employed a lot of single 20-somethings, but that's a lot of couples who met at work.
- Social chatter.
- Making friends with old employees who I didn't know, and connecting with new employees.
- Work Life separation (balance).
- Sense of belonging.. team outing, weekday after hours beer.
- Intra company sports and games, and then teaming up with office colleagues to play inter company tournaments.
- (Not me but others) Meeting potential dates
- Office facilities for breakfast, lunch.
- it's part of a political power/control game
- "this is the way we've always done it"
- they buy into the myth that "magic" happens in hallways conversations and nowhere else
There are plenty of large companies (and god knows how many startups and SMBs) who have recognized what a colossal waste it is to maintain permanent offices and mandatory facetime. It's time for the rest to stop pretending it's 1980.
Anecdotally, the dichotomy I'm observing at my company is young/single/apartment-dweller people want to get back to the office because they don't have enough space at home to make it a nice experience. Many I know in this category are also eager to get back to screwing around at the water cooler. Meanwhile, the older, family-oriented people who own or rent a home in the suburbs want to WFH forever because that social dynamic isn't worth the hassle of the trek in for them.
Though it does probably help that my commute is only 900 metres.
It's stressful, expensive and dangerous. I'm really hoping work from home becomes a permanent thing.
There are plenty of non-car-centric expensive cities that one can travel across in less than an hour.
Once I went to car free I got rid of about 25,000 in credit card debt in 6 months or so. Much of why so many Americans are so desperately poor has to do with car ownership. While it's possible to get Uncle Jimmy's Old Jeep running, most people just finance something. Once you make your car payment your insurance and gas, that's easily a third of your income. Compared to a $100 a month bus pass
1. Expensive
2. Not particularly family friendly
So if you are a high earner with roommates or a partner and no children, you have options. For the remaining 90% of the workforce, it isn't particularly feasible.
(Don't worry, I know that my only experience is not enough to make statistics, but check that out with your friends)
To be fair it's also a problem in some cities outside SV though (Austin, Atlanta, Seattle) but the overwhelming majority of Americans don't face this issue. Even Americans working in tech.
Again, the overwhelming majority of Americans don't face this issue to the degree being discussed here (1+ hour commutes)
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/tr...
This article [0] claims the national average is 26 minutes total, so I guess my org just has a rough time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit#Origins...
Car companies may have dismantled some streetcar systems years ago, yes. However, we continue to build car focused communities largely because people want to live in big lots in suburbia. Density that can support transit is just not popular in the US.
It seems to me that the pandemic and the practice of massively working at home has mostly raised this question: how had we accepted for such a long time that so many people go through a commute nightmare every single day of their work life? How can we establish working standards that require neither turning homes into offices nor going back to the commuting nightmare from "old normal"?
Years ago, I commuted by walking 10 minutes. I loved that; get outside, stretch your legs, put some music on, if I forgot something at home it was just a jaunt away. Today, I commute about an hour each way by car. I love it too. It forces me to wake up early, which is something I enjoy but have problems doing naturally, creates a ton of time for podcasts, I've got my car right at the office if I need to run anywhere during lunch (versus, previously, it being 10-15 minutes away), and there's a delicious doughnut shop on the way in so I can sometimes stop and grab a morning snack for the team (or just me).
Maybe two hours each way is too long. But, you're also strawmanning. The average commute in the US is 27 minutes [1] (in 2019).
[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-...
Your statement raises an interesting point. The "savings" in remote work really aren't there, when you take into account the need for people to have dedicated space in their homes.
Seven years, one house, and three kids later, we had to make sure to plan a dedicated office area when we built our current house.
Some of us were 100% OK with that, and some were really not - since the job wasn't expected to be a WFH job, not everyone has a good location to work from, or reliable internet, etc., etc - those people have been able to work from the office at various points over the last year as the pandemic ebbed and flowed. As a consequence, my employer has walked the office closure back a little - we're still all full-time remote, but there will be a smaller office available for e.g., project kickoffs, or people who want to get out of their house for a bit.
- From my observations, people with commitments (family, partners, pets .. etc.) prefer to work from home while single people prefer to go to the office. This will create a noticeable gap between the two groups.
- While working from home can be productive for med to senior-level employees, I suppose it will be a nightmare for juniors and interns. They will have no one around to mentor them or at least to ask for immediate advice. When working from home (as pointed by others), we tend to get into deep focus on avoiding distractions from messaging tools.
To clarify, when I start hiring, the work will be fully remote, but I just wanted to list observations from different perspectives.
In the remote work world, junior employees can only see their seniors at defined events. Lots of mentoring needs to move to explicit mentoring relationships, and people have to move from "showing the right behaviors" to "explaining the right behaviors". And that assumes the mentee/mentor even know what behaviors they need to focus on! In person, you just get to see everything.
I also have seen the opposite.
Some folks with family want to work from office, so that kids can play loud without interrupting and when coming home it's clearly family time.
And I living alone like the flexibility. Got a new partner? - I work from their place. Want to visit some friends/family in a different town? I work from there. Want to hang out with some friends? I work from their office.
Very individual choices.
In our company all new joinees (during covid) were paired with existing employees and we were able to onnboard and get them contributing in a short amount of time. The new joinees included both recent graduates and experience people.
Once the engineers become senior and start families they will go remote.
- Asking for help means laziness. There is a high chance that this is the first job for juniors or interns. They need someone to tell them how to find the answer. What is obvious for you is not for others.
- Everyone is working on something that can be Googled. Which is not the case. Even for tech, there will be some specific tasks that are related to the project, domain, company that can not be Googled.
- Documentation? really? If you're fortunate to work in a company that has proper documentation for every single task and are always up to date then not many people share this experience.
When we do work together we use a new code-with-me feature of IntelliJ and I'll lead the development but when I need a utility function or something I ask him to write it and he goes off and writes it separate from my current coding.
This is a legitimate help, not a burden. He wrote an interface to another service for me, and I never had to be distracted by it. I had a concern about something but he said he had read the documentation and that the way he wrote the code was correct. I trusted him, he turned out to be right.
In the editor this is like having 2 or 3 cursors moving around in the project editing things independently, Google Docs style. I flip tabs to check in on him periodically. If I want to show him something I just place my cursor and type, in contrast to telling him what to type with words which was never very effective in the office. This is a form of pair programming that is actually productive and enjoyable, imagine that!
If he were sitting 5 feet from me I would want to collaborate the same way. Two screens, keyboards, one codebase, casual voice communication. We have all this.
2. "They will have no one around to mentor them or at least to ask for immediate advice." This is a meme most loudly heard in Cathy Merrill's disastrous Op Ed and has no basis in fact. When I sat in an office, a junior sat opposite me behind screen. When they wanted help, they could stand up and ask for help. Now, when they want help, they ping me on slack, and we start a screen share / voice / video chat. I have my own computer, I can find the necessary information using my setup and my tools, and guide them to a solution more quickly.
"Think of the children^H^H^H interns" is propaganda and we should push back on that nonsense whenever it is expressed.
- You have to look a certain way.
- You have no opportunity to break up your schedule.
- You have to pretend to enjoy being around people.
- You have to commute (much too far).
- You cannot leave before a specified time.
- You cannot arrive after a specified time.
- You cannot open the windows.
- You cannot change the room temperature.
... etc, etc, etc.
The list goes on forever.
Also, I guess technically I have to "look a certain way", like have clothes on. But I'm going to look that way anyway.
this is what gets me. i already finished my stuff for the day, i want to go home to do something -- nope, can't. you have to stay until you clock in 8h.
need to arrive later? sucks to be you, you have to clock 8h no matter what, so now you are staying at the office until late hours.
WFH means i can just finish work and relax. if anyone needs me, they can ping me on slack, send me an email, or even call me.
Speaking from experience.
Everyone was expected to be available 9-5ish for potential collaboration/questions purposes, and you had to inform the team if you’re gonna be afk for anything longer than 30minsish
Some teams even had a norm of leaving a “signing off for the day” note and a “getting lunch” note
If there are remote companies out there who truly let you be flexible with your schedule, I’d love to know about them
You only have an opportunity to break up your schedule if your employer allows it. WFH doesn’t just magically make work asynchronous.
Commuting is true but varies a lot on individual. (My commutes are trivial and I found them to be too short sometimes!)
You cannot log out before a certain time on WFH.
You cannot log in after a certain time on WFH.
Varies on office. We opened windows where I worked...
We changed the room temp but usually it was comfortable enough for all of us. But sure been there.
The list doesn’t really go on forever. You’re describing different types of working cultures, not working at the office vs remotely.
Working from home this last year has not changed one bit of the work culture we had when we were in office for where I’ve worked. Async and all that shit is not a thing. We’ve logged more hours than ever before and had to be online for an ever expanding set of core hours that kept going from 9-5 to 9-6 to 9-7 etc etc as the year progressed.
What kind of company do you work at that you are not able to do development on your local machine? Wow.
Too short a commute? What a strange flex.
I never said you couldn't do development on a local machine.
A lot of your arguments stem from a different work culture and aren't particular to WFH. You want async work? Argue for that. WFH isn't async. You want to wear whatever you want? Fine - argue for that. WFH doesn't mean you are never seen or heard.
You're arguing for things that aren't part of WFH or remote work. They're entirely separate, part of a entire work culture, and I've seen both in-office and remote to prove such.
I'm not a fan of this framing by Bloomberg. It's not that the workers are quitting, it's that employers are failing to attract/retain workers.
Living in a high cost of living city, with a high salary, has its advantages - many goods have the same price point nationally, holidays cost the same regardless, and any raise or bonus calculated as a percentage of your base salary will be more generous in absolute terms. The housing market will be brutal but if you plan to relocate eventually, you'll be way ahead.
Instead of allowing it, companies can start requiring it and save quite a bit not just on office space, but supplies, equipment, etc.
I’m hoping smart companies get on the ball with equipment allowances.
Also, I think it will finally get us to a “green” office place as COVID finally stopped the oldsters around me printing copies of everything. So the sheet amount of paper saved is quite nice.
I kid you not, my company recently had us print something out, scan it, and send it in. From home. I had to run out and buy ink. I wonder how many of coworkers had to run out to buy printers.
I was already fuzzy on the concept of "company culture". But if executives are worried about it at the same level as "productivity" or "profitability", I'm definitely missing something.
Only in the eyes of the employer. People have always taken time out of their day for things like buying food, cooking for yourself, exercising, etc. Those things aren't burdens when your employer isn't demanding complete control over your life. And they are only "perks" in a culture where they do.
I go to the grocery store quite often and find it just a huge waste of time. We get things delivered more often but I’m not a meal planner type so it doesn’t work well. Commuting for 10-15 minutes each way to get to nearest Whole Foods is a PITA. Having someone plan meals for me is a huge timesaver at every step. Same with exercise. Great if the equipment is right there, pound some weights just before eating lunch or play a game of basketball, etc. don’t need to manage a membership, coordinate with friends over fifty messages, etc.
Totally could do those things outside of work but they take more time. Gotta go to the gym from my house or work. Gotta go to a specific park and hope there’s a pickup game that I can jump into. Etc.
The hilarious thing about office for me was most meeting including daily morning meetings still happen over webex. So nothing of that in-place collaboration crap.
We even had those staged bullshit videos with management where they tried to show how they were in office during pandemic. Basically if they can manage to work from office with their executive compensation then anyone with 1/10th or 1/100th of salary should be able to do that.
So my rule of thumb for that is, if they're talking about Corporate Culture, it means there is none.
Company culture is just a way of saying we want to control you out of work and we want you to like it.
Remote work lowers switching costs for employees, and makes it harder to distribute and monitor the consumption of corporate “sweeteners”.
It tilts favor in the direction of companies that are actually fulfilling to work for, and not merely “sticky” (in the high fructose corn syrup way). I think executives are right to be worried, to the extent they fall in the latter camp.
As to why they’re worried about it: if you have high churn, it means your training costs and hiring costs are much higher. And this directly impacts profitability and productivity, which like you say is what they “actually” care about.
Still, I'm curious as to why maintaining current culture is seen as important. Is there a loss of productivity / profitability associated with the non-transmission of culture?
As much as it can be corporate BS, I do think there are companies that have a culture that gives them an edge over the competition.
I worked at one place where the culture was very much about treating everyone as valuable contributors regardless of level, and pretty much every Friday you could chat with the CEO (and most of the VPs) over beers if you felt like it. As a junior it made a huge difference in how much mental energy I put into innovating and helping others succeed. Just as an example, I could see that kind of thing being hard to maintain in a remote context with thousands of employees.
It's easy do dehumanize a voice on the phone. Many people don't want to even use cameras for video calls. How much empathy do you have for a voice on the phone versus a human being you interact with in person on a daily basis?
I think the benefits of remote work far outweigh the work that needs to be done to maintain culture remotely, but it is a new challenge that doesn't have a lot of good understanding around how to make it work.
Calm down, you're overreacting. A single sentence is hardly "perfect evidence of inability to empathize" with others. Talk about "exaggeration"...
I somewhat agree with lupire: If someone only has empathy with their coworkers – who they're interacting with daily – if they can physically see them, then that's saying something.
Your posts contain one personal attack after the other. Really: please take a step back and relax.
Sociopaths are an outliers and rare. But most people empathize less with people they have not met in person (prof: the internet, even before social media).
Add deadlines and stress to that, and you have otherwise normal people behaving worse than they would otherwise. Source: me, working with remote teams for past 20 years.
Like the person above said, you (or someone) have to be actively on the lookout for such issues, or things can get get bad really fast (I am talking days and weeks not months).
Judging by the toxic office culture at some traditional (non-WFH) companies, lack of empathy has little to do with only hearing "a voice on the phone" vs interacting with "in person".
The main aspects of firm culture that make difference in a day to day life are minimizing company politics, avoiding blame-game, honest interaction and manager's support. In my experience, it is the manager who contributes the most towards either improving these or screwing them up. None of these things require you to be physically present in office. Rest of stuff like events, group lunches etc are nice to have but not having them won't impact you as much as a political and toxic work environment would.
> How much empathy do you have for a voice on the phone versus a human being you interact with in person on a daily basis?
Since when basic human decency became incumbent upon seeing someone in flesh in front of you? Are you saying that people can't behave professionally unless they are not physically in office? How do fully remote companies work?
> Many people don't want to even use cameras for video calls.
For the same reason people hate meetings - resolutions to that are also the same that apply to face-to-face meetings.
> I think the benefits of remote work far outweigh the work that needs to be done to maintain culture remotely, but it is a new challenge that doesn't have a lot of good understanding around how to make it work.
Agreed on that - a good starting point would be not use culture as a justification to force people to be in office.
> it is a new challenge that doesn't have a lot of good understanding around how to make it work.
It's been going on for decades now. Time to catch up. Good WFH culture is matter of effective management. Skills required:
- good communication (knowing how to use the tools we have, like IM, video, and yes, even email)
- being responsive (this is a habit that must be cultivated in many cases)
- focus on goals and achievements instead of distractions like seeing someone in a hallway and assuming that if they seem to be working, they must be working
A lot is embedded in that, some execs give it a 'very high' importance.
These are some examples that can degrade culture if missed for too long, so they definitely require more explicit actions from everyone.
[Edited wording]
- decrease your number of friends
- increase your likelihood of divorce
- increase your over all mortality
And then with kids the reality is you have this 3-4 hour window when you can see them each day. Not to mention the struggles for shared and single parenting.
The curtain has been pulled back and it's going to be a lot harder to justify the kind of rigidity that existed before the pandemic.
My approach was to express (honestly) that I wanted to stay with the company, but the opportunity of living in a state closer to my friends and with a calmer pace of life was too much to pass up. In my case I bought a house for $150k and will be paying much lower property taxes than I did in NJ.
This move and 100% remote has been a major win across all dimensions for me.
Then, after quitting, covid occurred and they went fully remote.
For myself it's the last big raise I've gotten in some time, and I expect I'm far from the only person for whom that's true. Going back to work for these people is going to reduce their effective salary back to what it was 15 months ago.
Environmentalist should up in arms about return to the office. 2 hour commutes are terrible for the environment. 2 hours of an idling car not moving at it's true potential. (I understand that when the car is idling or stuck in slow traffic it is burning the most fossil fuels.) I'm not saying that WFH is going to solve our environmental problems, but taking a few cars off the morning commute surely can't hurt.
It also takes money away from big oil and our criminal frenemy, MBS in.
Ultimately, some companies will move to completely remote work. Most will go back to at least a hybrid in-person model. For the latter, I suspect that most WFH employees will eventually go back to the office once they realize that they're second class employees and that they're effectively frozen out of the traditional career progression model by being remote.
I disagree. This is a problem if the majority of workers are in the office full time and only a small group are remote. If the office is entirely WFH or hybrid, then everyone is a remote worker. Also, the traditional career model has been changing drastically even before the pandemic. These days workers need to move horizontally, across companies, to achieve any kind of progression in their careers. The vertical move up the corporate ladder is becoming a relic. Mind you, I'm not saying that is good or bad, just commenting on the current situation.
Ironically, today is our first day where the office here in LA is generally open, so I’m driving in at some point for the celebrations. Because I’m going in, I’m going to miss my son’s nighttime routine (which I’ve missed maybe 7 times in his 18 months).
The life choice of being able to be there for the development of my son is one that many fathers here in LA do not get to make. The commute alone would be coming 100% out of my time with him.
And, with that, I’ve gotta jet. Time to go run around and then go on our hour walk around the neighborhood. Remote may not be the best for everyone, but it’s certainly a wonderful addition to my life.
Without productive staff, businesses can either change and thrive or resist change and become Dinos-R-Us Inc.
Now we’ve had a couple generations of women in the workforce en masse, partners who have stepped up household responsibilities, longer commutes, and more being asked of all workers.
The only time to get household crap done has been late after hours and the weekend, aka “leisure time.”
It hasn’t been tenable for a while and now the pandemic showed us another way. This is an improvement.
Offices mostly facilitate interruption, but also collaboration on a good day. So much of that can be done virtually.
Half-day whiteboard sessions are great IRL, no reason why they can’t be scheduled a day in advance, or later in the day and give people time to get to a common area to do so.
The office had its issues and the pandemic is forcing a reckoning of them. Great!
I can work for several hours then put in laundry. Or take a nap. Or collect my parcel. I can sleep until it is work time. I can do work at 11PM as that is when there are the fewest distractions.
It's been wonderful.
I prefer working at the office given the choice, it allows me to see some of my co-workers and helps me with balance. I get distracted at home. Also things that happen organically at the office like lunch together and happy hours are nice to have.
At the same time, I have a VERY short commute compared to most, I can imagine I would feel differently if I lived 30 minutes+ away from the office.
My company has announced we will do "3 days minimum" in the office once things are "normal", this made a lot of people upset in our company with good reason. I think we should be more flexible, but I still appreciate the option.
I feel there is a growing wave of "WFH only or bust", which just throws away the opinion of people like me.
I've been working from home for 18 months like a lot of others, I don't mind it, but given the choice...
1. While some employees legitimately like the office, the push to return there is coming from executives. The motivation is pretty clearly control.
2. For the first time ever, work style is favoring introverts. Their feelings were never taken into consideration, yet through the accident of the pandemic, intovert friendly work is now the norm.
3. Cost of living is through the roof near traditional office space.
Because the stakes are so high, the change so recent and the pushback so authoritarian, people are “fighting” to retain WFH. It also feels like a winnable battle for the first time ever.
I've never worked from home until recently and now I find it very isolating. I feel like a device a tool not a person who has coworker friends I only interact via emojis towards usernames. There's no flow to the day it's quite compartmentalized.
Sure the commute short which is great but my small home has lost a good part of space what was formerly not an office. I like the separation of work from home even if it involves a commute. It's great sometimes but not all the time.
Six hundred and twelve hours. Almost a solid month.
So, I worked my way into 100% remote, and I make it clear often that it's mandatory for me. There's no going back. If I'm forced to, I'll quit.
1. Everyone comes back to the office (extremely unpopular)
2. Everyone continues to WFH (gives management the hives)
3. Some teams WFH full-time, while others go BTTO).
4. A hybrid schedule where you come into the office once a week, and WFH the remainder.
I don't see how these can work. BTTO is going to cause huge issues, the cat is out of the bag. And if some teams get to WFH, but others don't then that will cause turmoil as well.
A hybrid schedule seems to be the worst option actually. Say that everyone has to come in on Mondays for team meetings. Then Tue-Friday, the office is a ghost town. If you're required to come in one day a week (but you can choose), then the odds are the most of the office will be empty, and that's a waste of company resources in having an office sized for pre-COVID times.
If a hybrid BTTO plan is for F2F with mgmt, then it'll need to be mandatory, on the same day. Otherwise my poor manager has to be in the office 5 days a week. Eventually, mgmt will just require everyone to come BTTO.
Changes like what COVID caused aren't bells you can unring. It's like having women work in factories during WW2. Sure when the troops return home, things seem to go back to "normal", but that's just delaying the change. Remote work is here to stay, and the companies that embrace it will have a leg up. All the friction that we experienced in the las year will diminish over time with faster/better Internet, with workflows and communication tools that are better suited to WFH.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2018/09/20/650061560/stuck-in-traffic-yo...
Lots of people both live and work from within big cities reasonably close to their job. For those people, their commute is likely less than 30 minutes.
For people who are outside of big cities and have to commute in, or live in one city and commute to another, they will have longer than 30 minute commutes, almost certainly. That applies to most people who live in the suburbs.
Also note this quote from your article: "Speeds over the five or six years that Uber and others have been in existence have dropped from a very slow 6.5 mph to 4.7 mph," Schwartz says about New York City.
4.7 miles per hour. So that suggests that if your home is as close as 5 miles away from the city, it could take you an hour just to drive into the city during rush hour.
I'd argue the human contact in offices is rarely used to foster healthy long term relationships, and the improved mental health of remote employees appears to have a productivity benefit. Think of the anti-patterns that people use in offices because it works for them, and how those anti-patterns don't work anymore and they must find better tools.
I can see how it's hard for superfluous managers who must compete to extract value from the same set of resources, but for a well aligned organization, remote is a potential renaissance.
Research shows that women are 50% more likely to prefer full remote than men[1]. For better or worse, much more of the burden of childcare falls on mothers in our society.[2] Women are also much more likely to sacrifice their own careers to relocate for a spouse's career.[3] Along similar lines, that tends to mean women prefer careers with geographic flexibility.[4]
Tech companies have spent the past decade sprouting platitudes about creating a more welcoming workplace for women. Now they actually have a real opportunity to make a difference. Transitioning to a remote first model would massively improve gender inclusivity. Yet, despite widespread employee satisfaction with remote, senior management in most places seem to be pushing back as hard as possible on outdated (and often sexist) notions that "people who hustle show up to the office".
[1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-01/americans... [2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4131769/ [3]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/11/28/why-c... [4]https://science.sciencemag.org/content/205/4412/1225.abstrac...
I never understood how people could handle long commutes, plus all the wasted time and money for work clothes, to sit in front of a computer in a building instead of home.
- stress free working if I actually want to get stuff done
- no open office or any obnoxious sounds just me in my room and I can make whatever sounds I want
- don't have to pretend to work hard, just get stufff done and don't be a slacker and I can literally be productive 1/2 days and relax/be async 2/3 days because I can focus very well. No complaints whatsoever from stakeholders or the business.
- not being hyper alert of how I look or what I wear, just my top needs to look presentable when in an meeting with camera on and can wear sweatpants and no shoes or whatever is comfortable without dress code
- can fix the temperature to the exact degree I want it
- no social interactions whatsoever. no "get togethers", Friday drinks with people I don't like, barely any casual conversation just straight to the point business and that's it
- no morning talk or "how was your weekend" NPC tier conversations for the sake of conversing just a daily stand-up (we actually sit) hyper-focused on work and that's it
- eat whenever i want whatever i want no more sandwiches in a box or overpriced canteen food, bake french eggs for lunch or make a soup. Fitness during a break. Take a walk whilst being in a "meeting"
- no commute whatsoever, can practically roll out of bed into my chair if i wanted to
- not ONE colleague seen at the coffee machine or when getting water no SMALL TALK OR STARING of colleagues begging for me to say hi and them to ramble about their kids or whatever uninspiring thing they did in the weekend. I have friends and colleagues. I don't want to socialize with these colleagues, I wouldn't even think about small talking with them in a bar why force it in an office?
And best of all no SJW office politics whatsoever. All of that seem to have disappeared with WFH. Just get stuff done, get paid and that's it. I'm never going back to the or any office.
My employer trusts me to work from home, that's good.
If they suddenly announced I had to come in because some disconnected management chain doesn't trust me to do the thing, or wants to make the policy because some managers can't handle it, or other employees can't handle it. That changes the relationship entirely, I'm just a widget, I'm way more likely to move on.
It also impacts my family and that changes the dynamic as well.
The employer might see it as a rudimentary policy, but to me it is a lot more.
Now, obviously my current situation is not going to last. Sooner or later others will come back to the office and it's not going to be that quiet anymore, my boss might be around, etc. However, I actually look forward to that. Going out for lunch with co-workers etc. I'm still planning to keep things as they are now. Coming and leaving whenever I want, mixing it between WFH and from the office. Meetings are going to continue to be fully remote anyway, since we have people all over the world. I see the office as a place people can come to have a quiet time, enjoy the office perks, and socialize. Different than what the office used to be pre-covid (at least at some places). Since we have a large office with many areas to connect your laptop and work, I'm not even planning to sit together with my team.
The one thing I'm not looking forward to is rush hour. I'm really enjoying my commute these days, much more than pre-covid. I hope that things will never go back to pre-covid levels. (most likely given that WFH has become much more common)
It's no surprise that the business leaders focus on "culture". "Oh, they have to be here four days per week or we don't have culture". Not effectiveness. Not satisfaction. "Culture". And by "culture" they mean "kissing ass" and maintaining their lordships feudal demesne.
They make noises about "bums in seats" being necessary for productivity, yet they either don't have measures in place to measure productivity, or conveniently forget them, since the data shows that productivity is the same or better when an employee is allowed to choose where to work.
Then there was that article about how junior employees wont be able to learn from senior employees, which is arse. If anything it's easier to work together remotely. Bonus, nobody putting their hands on a junior as they lean in "to get a better look at your work". But in any case, junior employees aren't going to learn from senior employees if the senior employees arent there.
I'd do 4 day weeks in the office; I'd definitely do 3 days in the office and one at home and I'd take a 10% pay cut to be allowed it with basically no difference to my productivity.
If you're offering nothing and simultaneously aren't able to give clear reasons why working remotely isn't a valid option I don't see what you can expect other than people quitting.
I'd take less money because I dont really care about how productive I am on aggregate, I just care about how much time I have where I am completely free to not be productive. I think the example I gave is a touch extreme though; 5% deduction for alternating 4 day weeks remote and in the office.
I can code fine at home (better, actually, with more privacy to focus), but I can’t do the meta-stuff nearly as well. It’s the soft-skills that suffer.
I think my pandemic-era company failed (we got acquired but, it was a failing-up situation) because we lost the ability to have course-correcting conversations outside of formal meetings. Which is to say: we just weren’t as smart, as a group. We should have done a daring pivot, but there was no way to discuss it (zoom+figma “brainstorming” sessions were completely useless)
I think my ideal would be to have somewhere that we met in person semi-regularly, maybe optionally, like a study hall environment, where we could pair or whiteboard or just chat.
I don’t want to go back to being crammed into an open-office with too many people, that is just awful for coding. and Slack is like being in an open-office 24 hours a day; I hope my next gig doesn’t use it.
The key aspect I miss the most from my office days is networking, or the capacity to build and maintain a consistent network of contacts. Maybe because I'm latin working in Latin America. We are high touch by definition. But I really feel that remote work damaged my capacity to keep my network of contacts. Now I see myself with the mission to find a new job, and I'm not sure my current network will be enough help.
It might not be for everyone, but I absolutely love it. Of all the benefits, the biggest is time - it's a precious resource, and for me at least, working in an office wastes way too much of it (commute, tons of meetings, etc.).
Now I haul my laptop from home to my cubicle to fight over the phone booths for endless remote meetings. I don’t work with and have never spoken to my neighbors. My work goes home with me.
Working from home isn’t better, but the office is worse.
Reading lots of comments here and it's clear there are two camps. Which is great. There will be a big realignment of people switching jobs to go remote and moving to cities to get to work with a cool in person team.
But there's also the middle of the road hybrid model where you can still be remote but there will be offsites every month or every quarter.
Everything is workable now because people are still at home but as soon as the offices reopen it will be atrocious. This is especially true once the weather turns shitty - snow can easily make a 1.5 hour commute take 3.5 hours even excluding the new homes.
It's so inefficient it boggles my mind we're still doing it.
Commute time, expense and risks are other benefits but others are talking about it already.
Just have some companies work entirely remotely, and some work entirely in person, and have employees choose their employer based on that just like how they choose their employer based on headquarters location etc. now.
I have found a forever remote in a FAANG and it is the best decision I have made in a long time.
If you want to keep people working in the office you need to pay more. At least 2 hours per day more.
“They feel like we’re not working if they can’t see us,” she said. “It’s a boomer power-play.”
I'm not an "OK Boomer" kinda person but this is spot on. However, I would add that it applies to the Boomer generation and older. I worked at a company a few years ago that was started by a man who was in his late 80's at the time. A good man, I should add, but he was all about "butts in seats" (he is also a former Marine).
He didn't understand technology at all and was constantly at loggerheads with my boss about where her people were. She never could get across to him that just because he didn't see us didn't mean we weren't working. We took the department from barely breaking even to being the most profitable in the company in nine months, so, obviously we were doing something when our butts were in different seats.
COVID accelerated remote working but I suspect it won't become fully embraced until the Boomer generation of managers and company leadership retire.
For service providers and retail folks, obviously this is not as much of an option.
If most of the gains of going fast go to capital holders, who cares if they make $900,000,000 this year instead of $1,000,000,000?
Maybe they now have remote work options, or having tasted a year without a brutal commute, they take jobs paying less, but closer to their homes.
"A May survey of 1,000 U.S. adults showed that 39% would consider quitting if their employers weren’t flexible about remote work."
And towards the end it references a tweet that went semi-viral and got a lot of responses.
https://twitter.com/GenieShinobi/status/1389286585347235847
edit: also here's a non-paywall link. https://archive.is/Yc5UW
A may survey of 1000 people reported that 39% would consider quitting if their work didn’t provide flexibility.
I’m no statistician but the red flags are n=1000 and “would consider”. This is a hugely hit button issue right now, great for clicks.
It's been awhile since I've taken stats, but people semi-frequently overestimate the necessary sample size needed for even a 99% confidence level.
Depends on the standard deviation for sure, but some quick napkin math suggests that a sample size of ~700 people is more than enough to draw inferences about the entire western hemisphere at a 99% confidence level.
Reasons for enlarging samples have less to do with accuracy than with resolution. If you plan on looking at specific cross-tabulations or sub-populations, you need a sufficient sample size (typically n>30 for large-sample statistics) to draw inferences.
Error decreases with the square root of sample size. To halve error you must square the sample. A 1,000-element sample has half the error of a 31-element sample. To halve error again would require a 1,000,000 element sample.
"Would consider" is a fair catch, though here the question is how that compares against previous measures / trend.
Archiving is a way around many paywalls.
The article itself was short on substance. A bunch of anecdotes without any hard numbers of the amount that are quitting.
I've seen very little dismissal of the trend that cannot be traced to commercial real estate, banking, or investment interests. Interestingly enough, all sectors which can themselves utilise remote office or work-from-home arrangements.
Bloomberg are first and foremost an investment information service.
Collaboration, maybe.
Company culture is not diminished, it's merely changed.
Management has been reduced to counting butts in chairs.
Reading the comments here, I worry how much the WFH newcomers will have their goals of continuing dashed by the crab mentality of those who want to go back to an office.
For me there's no turning back. The cat is out of the barn and the horse out of the bag. That ship has sailed and it hit the iceberg. The fat lady sang her swan song.
Sorry, bums-in-seatsers.
Easy peasy. I don't understand why this is not automatic for these companies.
How surprising!
I was surprised that the first question was: "Will I have to be vaccinated or show proof thereof?"
Why is that? I thought there was very little hesitation. Was it the sample the author chose?
Or will office only businesses fail to compete with work from home businesses?
I hope the market decides.
I think the biggest challenge from in office businesses will be brain drain why commute to a shitty office when I can get paid more to not do that.
The power, control and ability to monitor workers to ensure “productivity” is part of the decision making matrix.
You don't need to pay for an office just because you want to power trip on spying on people. Over covid Microsoft have added a bunch of spyware into office365 for companies to spy on their employees.
I don't really know why #3 is said like a bad thing, but I wonder about the other two. If this is clearly and advantage that is sure to happen, why hasn't it? There's still time zone issues and cultural bridges to gap, so I don't know how far one can really go before it becomes a lot of effort to be productive. And speaking as a Canadian who makes what appears to be a university grad-level wage in the states, I wouldn't mind it at all if that forced the more local wage to be a little higher to compete.
Once you accept AGW, you have to commit to seriously reducing energy expenditures until the planet is 100% renewable and we've maxed out our carbon capture mechanisms. Commuting takes energy. Even in an urban environment.
Arguments about the positives and negatives of WFH, which have been discussed in many popular threads on HN ad nauseum, are really secondary. Incentives to reduce energy usage will eliminate commutes and reshape society. Covid helped kickstart the transformation but it would have happened eventually anyway.
I've always been of the presumption that market forces will align workers with jobs, but it's clear in places where there is little to no choice (i.e. the small towns Amazon puts their warehouses) theory doesn't exactly work out in reality.
That's led me to change my thinking a bit, but I'm having trouble getting over the notion that it's a job, and if you want a job, you work, if you don't want to work at a particular place, you go work somewhere else. I bristle at the notion that employees should, could, or can bend a company to their preference.
It just seems we've gone from free lunch and massages to employees dictating business decisions. I'm not sure if that shift in power is wise.
This is free society functioning how it's supposed to: free agents negotiating their terms and coming to mutually beneficial arrangements.