Hacker News Reader

Comment by mensetmanusman | Hacker News Reader

As others have mentioned, I also wonder how much of this annoyance to return has to do with the failed open-office concept.

People more-or-less occasionally like having their own place during work where they can some action (e.g. closing their door) to focus 100% without interruption.

Cost-cutting open-office plans that let management see their flock typing away destroyed this option, and covid has reminded people how valuable and productive this option is/was (for those at home with this option).

We are now in new territory, as we are experiencing the end of the first pandemic during the information age. What we decide now will resonate for many years.

Something to think about: for most millennia of human experience, where one worked and where one lived amongst the family and community were one and the same. It’s only a blip in post-industrial history have we had this situation of leaving the family (et al.) behind to pull levers and receive $coins.

If the internet lets us go back… that would be huge

View on HN

Not an Apple employee but for me it would be the commute not the office that’s the pain point

Driving or even bussing down or up or across the bay to get to Apple is a huge stressor. Doing it every single day both ways easily kills 2 hours of my life.

If I stay home and work instead I am better rested, more relaxed, and consequently more productive

This is interesting on so many levels. Not saying I don’t feel for a terrible commute.

But has anyone ever been on Blind?

A lot of these people are kind of awful, rich, a-holes. Now coming in the office is too much to ask?

The best part is what can Apple really do here…

I think a reasonable compromise is cut their salaries by around 20% if you optionally work remote and donate it to education in less fortunate communities in these cities.

Be interesting to see how many people show up to the office.

I would take that in a heartbeat. Also fifty percent cut for par work during child rearing years (which I was able to negotiate for myself but was a thought fight). And yes I am blind. I suspect it is a bit of posturing mixed in with a bit of not hiding ones true but shameful beliefs.

Keep in mind, the users on blind are not necessarily representative.

I know. Just, no shortage of verified Apple emails commenting.

In all seriousness, I am just concerned for greater income equality from increased remote work.

I never understood why someone would live over an hour away from where they work. There's been numerous studies showing the number one cause of unhappiness/dissatisfaction at work is commute time, especially when it reaches over 40 minutes one way.

If you live in San Jose, getting to Apple would only be 15-20 minutes.

I once had a coworker who lived an hour and 40 minutes away, literally wasting almost 3.5 hours of their day.

Why would people sacrifice time for a better home for their family? I guess love for their family?

Except they get less time with their family. And seeing the average size of a suburban home, is that amount of space needed to love your family or is that an ideal we feel we must have?

This isn’t a complicated scenario to research.

My own story is pretty basic. I don’t work for Apple, but the housing near my org is very expensive. Schools aren’t very good. To find the first public schools and safe neighborhood combo, that was 45 minute commute. That was years ago and jobs changed but family is still in same house.

Two common reasons:

1. Buying a house

2. Renting a better place

In the Bay Area houses are extremely hard to transact and jobs are very easy to change. You can’t keep moving around with your job.

> I never understood why someone would live over an hour away from where they work.

Lack of housing / housing affordable at your price point (even if it's high). I don't know the peninsula, but I doubt that 15 minute drive is a 15 minute commute, due to rush hour.

In no way would it take them 15-20 minutes to get to the office. Unless you worked off rush hour.

I lived in Sunnyvale for a while. Hour of sitting in bumper to bumper traffic just to get to/from Mountain View on a shuttle.

Sunnyvale to Mountain View? I'd bike that.

I'd electric bike that.

Living down in SV is boring as hell for all the time you're not at work, and it's hard to get paid as much up in SF if you don't want the instability of startup life.

Wow, so you mean change home just like that to live near office. I am not at Apple or even in bay area etc and at a distance of just 9 mile on a straight stretch of road. But from home/office it takes 45-60 min during peak hours. One possible thing I should do is to permanently rent a room in Drury Inn near office, especially since they have great corporate discount for us.

My impression is people who live far here are either:

(1) Ones with family who want rent/buy cheap and they'd live in east bay or somewhere much further south (e.g. Gilroy, South San Jose). Its understandable being its expensive here.

(2) Young (and/or single) 20/30 something people who either dislike living in suburban environment, or just find it "uncool", or just need better social life. They are actually spending more time in commute + spending more money in rent.

I live in San Jose, pretty close to work, but am considering going into category 2 (will use the company shuttles). But if things were perfect, I'm fine with a nice spacious suburban house and save those 3 hours.

Apple is in Cupertino, one of the most expensive housing markets in the U.S. Numerous of the competing cities are in the immediate vicinity.

"Cheap" housing is at best across the Bay. Commutes from Santa Cruz (itself small and not cheap), the East Bay, or Central Valley are not uncommon. Traffic is insane.

Mean housing price is > $1,000,000. Median gross rent $3,335/mo. Population density is 5,418/mi^2 (compare SF at ~17,000, NYC at ~27k, and Guttenberg, NJ at ~57k/mi^2).

California has had an utterly dysfunctional housing / work / transport policy for the past 50 years. Cupertino makes the state as a whole look sane.

http://www.city-data.com/city/Cupertino-California.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

> I never understood why someone would live over an hour away from where they work

property prices.

- It's thrifty: houses further away are cheaper.

- It's good for the kids: suburban schools perform better.

- It's a sacrifice: a family man is supposed to prioritize his own comfort last.

- It's accessible: we don't look at bankers or tech workers and say how great it is that they're doing so much for the families. That's just classism and privilege at work. Maybe, if we're feeling charitable, natural-born talent. But we, too, could deliver a better life to our families by driving longer hours. We just don't have the stomach for it. So we respect those who do.

Of course no one cares what it's doing to the environment. That really ought to factor in the moral calculus. But right now super-commuting is just about the most virtuous thing an American middle-class adult can do.

> a family man is supposed to prioritize his own comfort last.

A family woman isnt?

Often yes, but in different ways. Parents make sacrifices all the time.

This all depends on whether or not the 2 hours you're losing everyday with your hypothetical kids is sufficiently nullified by the (marginal)savings. Your kid's grade school academic performance is more important than effectively a full extra work week worth of availability for the family? Doesn't sound so virtuous.

But father/husband travelling that much have negative consequences for both wife and kids. If they live where worker travells over 2 hours a day and he does it, she cant work. And they dont spend time together either.

> I never understood why someone would live over an hour away from where they work.

A lot of people are married to someone who works in another part of the bay area.

A lot of people buy houses and change jobs later.

And then there are safety issues. I don't feel safe in San Jose.

Why don't you feel safe in SJ?

Uh, random dudes smelling like drugs yelling at me on the street? Some of them looking like they have mental issues? And then some yelling direct racial slurs at me? Homeless tents everywhere? Reports of assaults every few days?

I’ve worked a year in downtown Palo Alto, five years in San Francisco, three years in Mountain View, a year in Walnut Creek (their branch office in San Francisco didn’t pan out), and four years in Palo Alto down by Los Altos. Each of these was at least twenty miles away from the next. Even for renters willing to move continually, it’s pretty easy to get stuck with a bad commute until your lease is up.

Personally I love my commute time. I split my journey into two parts: bike and subway train. In the train I relax and I do what I want, usually I learn something new. On the bike I enjoy the surroundings; often I try new routes and explore new places. In this way commuting becomes pure pleasure, and especially the way back home lets me relax and basically forget about work stress.

Wholeheartedly seconding this.

I've been hating commuting with passion for my 15+ years of work, and WFH then back to the office made it worse.

I once visited an apartment complex almost facing my workplace. Going from my bedroom to my office would be around 5 minutes.

Money was the only issue, otherwise I'd have made the move.

I lived in San Jose and worked in Cupertino. 15-20 minute drive only on a weekend, or middle of the day. The morning/evening commute time average was 45 mins.

Same. If I didn’t have a crazy Californian commute if love to go into the office. The new space ship campus looks amazing. I’m sure I could make it work. A lax approach that allowed for teams to decide how best to work be it fully remote or fully in the office or somewhere in between seems like a better solution than a one-size fits all one. But TC is the boss and if he doesn’t relent then people will have to adapt or leave I guess.

Too bad they chose a city with zero train service and zero public transportation.

1) Fix public transport so gridlock is lessened 2) Fix housing regulations to increase supply 3) Fix open concept offices so that people have diversity of work environments are the office and allow people to work from home some days

It's easier to leave the state than do any one of these things.

I was sitting in gridlock in LA traffic when I calculated how many hours a year I'd been doing that. I did the math in my head and figured I must be wrong. So I did it with a calculator when I got home. I was not wrong.

It was pretty close to a solid year in every 10 years because I spent as much or more time in traffic on the weekends.

Part of me suspects that at least some of the WFH productivity boost companies see is attributed to home offices being quieter. My home "office" is on the attic landing, with no door, and I have a 3 year old running around the house. It's been quieter and easier to stay focused here compared to my company's open plan office. I went back to the office for the first time in over a year a few weeks ago and I was flabbergasted at how low my productivity was despite working hard the whole day.

> It’s only a blip in post-industrial history have we had this situation of leaving the family (et al.) behind to pull levers and receive $coins.

A bit of history: actually that was the industrial revolution and until the the 1970s the open plan office was the norm even for white collar workers (the cubicle was invented in the late 60s as “liberation” from the open plan). I remember being shocked when I first saw the open plan return, back in 2000, and since the productivity of offices (for programmers) and cubes was so well documented I was sure it was simply some weird experiment.

In the end though it will be trade off between the value of the ad hoc interactions vs the cost of real estate.

The kind of close-minded people who consider their colleagues (ahem, “workers”) to be merely fungible resources will make their decision solely on the price of real estate.

Note I started my first “mostly remote, work over the net” company in 1989. It’s not a new idea either.

Two main reasons that I'm aware of: (1) employer distrust of their employees being hard at work when not in full view of said employer and (2) the cubicle area put an automatic lower limit to the amount of floor space a single employee would occupy.

before the pandemic i would have killed for my own cubicle.

nowadays i just don't want to go back to the office.

Everyone would be going back into the office... if there wasn't a shortage of skilled workers to fill positions.

As the labor market is, companies have to bend to some of labor's demands in order to attract and retain talent.

This isn't the worst state of affairs.

You say that like the company's purpose is to be as bad to employees as possible. I get where the idea comes from, but that's not true everywhere and companies did remote work before it was forced on them. It doesn't have to be "bend to some of labor's demands", but rather "choose most effective hiring and working strategy".

>You say that like the company's purpose is to be as bad to employees as possible.

Where? I don’t see that in what they wrote.

> Everyone would be going back into the office... if there wasn't a shortage of skilled workers to fill positions.

A different way to read that is: people would do as told and not ask to work remotely because they could get replaced.

But that applies only if the company does not care about the employees and wants cogs instead.

Alternative rationale: institutional inertia prevents change.

Remote work is a big change.

Ergo, absent an exteral driver of change, companies will continue doing what they've always done.

This is a failure of the job to be done though. The JTBD for the execs at these companies forcing in person work isn’t to be efficient. It’s to make themselves feel good. They feel better when they see asses in seats. It’s really that simple.

If efficiency had literally anything to do with it we would have all been remote since 2005.

Misread as assets in seats. Still works

I think that's a little simplistic. Lots of people are just as productive, or more productive, at home as they are in an office. But I've also had a lot of other people tell me they struggle to work remotely. It really depends on the individual, where they are in their career, and what type of project they're working on.

I think there is a significant amount of companies (and a substantial portion of the government) in the US that operates on a philosophy like "How much can we extract from people before there is any push back?" It is a nation entirely built on micro transactions.. I am sitting in an airport right now. Baggage carts are free to use. The last time I flew in the US it was a $5 fee. Why? Because it's just enough to extract value from us but not enough for anyone to complain in a significant way.

I don't think that companies are deliberately trying to be awful to workers. They are just using the standard American model.. "How much can we get away with?"

The country is in desperate need of widespread unionization efforts.

Do you think this is a uniquely American issue? Having lived in other countries it’s worse.

I don’t think all companies are as adversarial towards their employees as this makes it sound. Great companies recognize they benefit when they are proactively trying to do what’s best for the employee as well as the company.

Companies that I’ve seen do it well have an executive level employee advocacy position. Typically in a human resource department, but less concerned about the policy and regulatory requirements and is specifically tasked to be a champion/voice for employees.

> The country is in desperate need of widespread unionization efforts.

No thanks. I don’t like working with clock punchers nor do I want to get paid as poorly as programmers in Europe/Canada.

Until unions in the US stop prioritizing seniority over competence for pay, they need to stay the hell away from this industry.

Good pay is nice, but it's not the only variable to the equation.

I worked received great pay in the US, but made the decision to return to Australia. I have some regrets, but the lifestyle I get from not being in the Bay Area pretty much offsets any pay difference.

What I miss most is the scope and pace of the work and the incredibly intelligent people I got to work with. Thankfully I'm beginning to see the genesis of this in my local market.

And what do you think unionization in the Bay Area would have done to fix your issues?

How come when I look at unionized companies and countries, they don't have it much better, and their pay is whole lot worse?

The company's purpose is to make as much money as possible. That means that their interest is to make their employees work as much as possible while paying them as little as possible.

If they try to make you do better/more work a nicer or a ruder way is an implementation detail. The goal is always to extract as much work as possible from you at the lowest price.

Sometimes the goals of the company converge with the goal of employees. Most of the time they exist in a state of frozen conflict. It sucks, but that's just how the employer/employee relationship must work out in general.

> shortage of skilled workers to fill positions

Companies are willing to do anything to attract skilled workers short of raising wages.

> the failed open-office concept

That to me seems like the main reason to hate Apple Park [1] and to prefer individual walled offices like Infinite Loop used to have:

>"Greg “Joz” Joswiak (VP of product marketing, 1986–present): They built this campus fast, and it was obviously a bright shiny object. Everybody wanted to move in. It was a gigantic shift in the way we worked, because we went from being in cubes to, all of a sudden, literally every person had an office." [2]

[1] https://www.dezeen.com/2017/08/10/apple-park-campus-employee...

[2] https://www.wired.com/story/apple-infinite-loop-oral-history...

> for most millennia of human experience, where one worked and where one lived amongst the family and community were one and the same

Hunters and foragers went out. Working from home seems like a blip compared to that.

Hunters & foragers went with their family. Both activities were group activities done with family & tribe.

Hunters and foragers didn't sit at a desk or in a car all day when they went out either. They also got to head back whenever they hunted/gathered enough food, instead of stick around until they put their 8 hours in.

"A study back in the 1960s found the Bushmen have figured out a way to work only about 15 hours each week acquiring food and then another 15 to 20 hours on domestic chores. The rest of the time they could relax and focus on family, friends and hobbies."

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/5510187...

I've been working remote for over a decade and if/when I go to the office I basically get nothing done. It's great for morale and building relationships but for all individual contribution work it's awful.

I thought open-offices were mostly a dud: they were trendy a few years ago, then most companies switched back when they realized the open offices actually decreased productivity.

I haven’t heard of a single company that switched back.

I think, unfortunately, the big tech companies might disagree with your take on this issue. They continue to invest millions in new and "re-designed" buildings based on open-office plans.

Sadly it seems like the trend has only picked up. I haven't seen a new office buildout in the past 5 years that had individual offices except for sometimes for the managers.

To be honest even though I hate open office with a passion and cannot concentrate single person office is not ideal at least for me. A large part of my time at google we had a shared team office for 4-10 people and that was never an issue and has all of the collaboration. Another time my desk was in a noisy open landscape next to the main reception and a busy cafeteria where the kitchen staff would often chat loudly and play video on their phone using the speaker.

I wonder if the open office is broadly disliked or hater by a very vocal minority on the internet I haven’t heard in person hating on it

Assuming people don’t mean some dystopian 30 rows

Most people that I know get very lonely working from home.

I saw it in my developer group, where all single people would try to go to office during covid, because it's so lonely at home.

Colleagues with small kids are unable to get any work done when there is no babysitter.

I personally have no problem working from home, but I see that's a real exception. And even I don't mind going to the office once every week, just to get the social interactions and be away from home once in a while.

So I think you are right that people who don't want to go to work at all is a real exception.

> Colleagues with small kids are unable to get any work done when there is no babysitter.

Yeah, but if they’re small enough to need a babysitter you can’t leave them home alone and go to the office either.

True, but this example is a pure Covid situation. Sorry to mix those two.

My experience has been similar to yours, with the addition that married people without children never wanted to go to the office. It was basically the best of both worlds; you aren't lonely, plus your spouse (usually) understands that they shouldn't bother you while you're working, while kids don't.

>Colleagues with small kids are unable to get any work done when there is no babysitter.

Speak for yourself. Give credit where credit is due to the heroic efforts of employed parents who got work done and took care of the kids.

I remember a production outage of some database, I can’t remember the db details, but it was when my then three year old hit the limit on her ability to enjoy Sound of Music alone. The last half hour or so of the call was done with a toddler sitting on my shoulders.

But did you die?

I am speaking for myself as a father of 4 kids, who has spent a lot of time raising them.

When you have a 1-3 year old, getting work done while babysitting is just not possible. Anyone who has done that knows.

And I don't judge my colleagues who are in the same situation: they tell this themselves.

I have experience with them in two places, one good and one bad.

The bad experience had no separation between the engineers, kitchen or sales people. Sales tend to be extra noisy- high energy, always on the phone, etc. Kitchens are also loud for the obvious reason.

In my good experience, we had physical separation from anything not engineering. People moved and talked around you, but it wasn't obnoxious and frequently informative to overhear.

Of course, I wouldn't give up working from home for anything, so it has become a moot point.

Even at the 'good' example you state when engineering was separate from other departments, I would still find that there could be 4-6 different conversations being held within a few feet of me at various times in the day (every day) at a recent job I had. And usually there was at least 1 or 2 conversations within earshot for most of the day.

I had no choice but to where headphones in order to drown out the conversations to focus. A year and a half ago I developed a constant Tinnitus in my left ear, and I suspect that job contributed to it.

So that's fun, and something I get to deal with for the rest of my life. Thanks open office.

I’m very much inclined to agree with your wondering. I feel that there is a certain personality type that despises the open office, and that most others are fine with them.

Anecdotally, a group at the company I work (pre-Covid) had the opportunity to contribute to designing their own new working space, as part of an empty floor was being retrofitted for them. The standard at our company was either individual cubicles or quads, but these folks chose open plan of (as far as I know) their own free will.

For anybody wondering, this is two teams of about 12 or so developers each, mostly relatively young.

It's a little awkward to criticize it in person. It's not like they will change the office on opinions of a few staff. It's a take it or leave the company kind of thing.

The issue with the open office is that any given time you can hear multiple conversations making it hard to concentrate on actual work.

The  HW org "open office" concept is just this. 5 linear feet of bench space; no dividers or any other sort of line-of-sight blocking.

The SW org packs people into tiny rooms with slightly more space (maybe 6'), but there is literally nowhere to go to get away from having someone breathing down your neck.

In my opinion if you go open office as a company everyone should work in the open office including the higher ups

Rackspace actually did this. They didn’t do well as a company but their culture was pretty great for a long time.

This is a great concept, but higher ups are on the manager schedule, meetings all day long. They live in conference rooms. If they are at their desk, most people will think twice before interrupting them.

Individual contributors however live at their desks and no one hesitates to interrupt them.

So having your execs in the open seems egalitarian, but it is an empty gesture.

What's wrong with reaching out to managers? If they are in meetings all day long; there is no need for having their own office anyways ;)

Same. I noticed younger colleagues (<30) tend to prefer open office where older crowds prefer more separation.

On the other hand, I've lost count on the number of Bose/Sony noise cancelling headsets I came across in the office.

Why is the presence of noise cancelling headsets considered a symptom of something being wrong?

Most often, I like to have a mix of time spent interacting with coworkers and time spent working “by myself”. I like to be accessible to coworkers and have coworkers accessible to me if I need their assistance, but I don’t necessarily want their full attention all the time, right?

I kinda expect the office to be a bustling place. Not loud and shouting all the time, but just a lot of activity of people discussing things.

I was fine with open office. The only time it was annoying was when people beside me were on calls all day.

Apple doesn't use an open office.

Yes, they do. Source: I work at Apple Park, at least notionally

Reply on news.ycombinator.com