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Comment by nextlevelwizard | Hacker News Reader

I can't wait to get back to the office.

I don't have dedicated remote work space and that really eats into my productivity. Also being home and having no external pressure to keep working I can already see any breaks people tend to take are way longer than what they would take at the office. (Now someone is going to tell me that this just shows that people need more breaks, but I don't believe that)

It also helps with my physical fitness. Now it is super hard to go to the gym in the morning just to come back home. When I commuted to work the gym was just on the way and it was easy to get out of the bed and go work out.

Food is also big draw. Now I have to worry about what I eat every day and make my food. That's extra stress and cognitive pressure that is completely avoided when I get to just eat lunch from office's cafeteria.

And of course other social aspects i.e. since I am already outside it is easier to do other stuff, but when I'm still in my underpants at home after work it is way harder to dress up and go do stuff.

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> I can't wait to get back to the office.

> I don't have dedicated remote work space and that really eats into my productivity. Also being home and having no external pressure to keep working I can already see any breaks people tend to take are way longer than what they would take at the office. (Now someone is going to tell me that this just shows that people need more breaks, but I don't believe that)

> It also helps with my physical fitness. Now it is super hard to go to the gym in the morning just to come back home. When I commuted to work the gym was just on the way and it was easy to get out of the bed and go work out.

> Food is also big draw. Now I have to worry about what I eat every day and make my food. That's extra stress and cognitive pressure that is completely avoided when I get to just eat lunch from office's cafeteria.

> And of course other social aspects i.e. since I am already outside it is easier to do other stuff, but when I'm still in my underpants at home after work it is way harder to dress up and go do stuff.

These are the typical reasons I see for going to the office and they all boils down to you not wanting to make your own food, not having the self discipline to work out at home, and getting started in the morning.

I mean, it's fine, but I think it's helpful if we realize what going to the office is just making some people like yourself more comfortable, and others less comfortable.

Because to me, that commute is killing me, and getting interrupted in the office is wiping out any energy I have at all to commit to working. At home I have food I selected myself to eat and I have a nice twin monitor setup with a comfortable chair and silence to focus. My workout routine is body weight exercises right before lunch, and I have time to relax and have a shower as well since there is no pressure.

I'm the same. Working from home means i no longer have to spend 2-3 hours commuting each day (add many hours to that for times when the trains breaks down, which is annoyingly often in Sweden).

I have also noticed that my own productivity has skyrocketed now that im working from home and dont have the regular office distractions. I can put on music that i like myself, sit in silence while drinking coffee and think about what im currently doing and how to solve a current issue.

However! It should be noted that i do miss the office from time to time, i havent been there in 1,5 years now. And will probably visit a couple times a month in the future when things start to clear up. But i will never go back to full-time-office-work.

P.S. it should be noted that i do have a dedicated "office" room in my house which is a luxury not many have. This helps alot with working from home. Had i had to do this from my living room or my kitchen i would have not survived this mentally.

At my work, we are currently in a kind of hybrid situation, where people come in 2 days a week. I am not sure if visiting a 'couple of times a month' is a viable option.

There is still a benefit to it if you are in a project where you need to have in-depth, technical discussions. But the social benefits of being at work, and the 'chance encounters' which would help starting new projects or to bounce ideas of someone are largely gone.

I am curious to see how companies will handle this. Our boss wanted to have feedback from the team on how to handle this in the future and suggested to introduce a weekly 'work on site' day (and make all other days optional), which I think is a decent idea which we should try.

I could pick part your routine/things as well, but that would be as silly as what you did. Your routine works for you, you can keep it. My routine suites me and I am going to keep it. I see no actual argument here.

Making own food that is the same quality as the hot foods at cafeteria is easily 1 hour a day extra.

Not being around colleagues affects more than just self-discipline, you lose the random encounters with colleagues that often leads to new ideas and collaborations.

These differences are real. And even if productivity is not affected, the new ideas that normally sparked from random interactions are diminished.

I dont even care about random encounters that lead to ideas, i miss them because they were random and had relationship at work with people with whom i have no work overlap whatsoever,yet we bonded while making coffee and other type of office routine activities. Now, i rarely recognize people on slack

You see it as OC making excuses or not having discipline, I see it as you wasting valuable time by taking it upon yourself to do things you can ask or pay others to do for you. You might as well reprehend OP for working smart because you work unnecessarily hard.

I mean, the attack is so deeply personal yet you don’t know anything about OC’s circumstances. Maybe OC knows how to cook a little but he really sucks at it? Or he’s just not interested? Or he doesn’t have as much free space at home as you do? There are so many possibilities and you’re very quick to blame it on discipline, lol.

You've tried remote and it doesn't work for you. Great, more power to you! However your comment about other people is out of place.

Is other people taking longer breaks affecting your productivity? If so, have you brought this up to them? Otherwise it shouldn't matter to you.

Personally I find remote a bliss, and I'm one of those. Almost every day I take 1 or 1:30 hours to cook some homemade meal and eat with my wife. When I feel extremely sleepy or tired in the early afternoon, I can take a quick nap and go back to work fresh and full of energy. I also take a break for exercising before my meetings in the late afternoon.

To a casual observer it might look like I'm taking breaks and working less, but actually I end up doing overtime many days. I just found a flexible schedule that works for me. Butting into other people's schedules is not so different from micromanagement.

>but actually I end up doing overtime many days

I am not american, so working overtime for no reason is not the norm. In fact most of the team are contractors who can not work overtime even if they wanted to.

You shouldn't take my post as personal attack

I have the opposite problem working from home: I take almost no breaks, sometimes it happened I even had lunch from my desk and worked longer hours than in the office. This sucked at first, until I realized I couldn't do this for long and started being more conscious about my working hours. In the office I feel I take so many breaks, short coffee chats, water cooler chats etc. I think what you say that "any breaks people take are way longer than in the office" is not extremely accurate.

> I can't wait to get back to the office.

> being home and having no external pressure to keep working

> it was easy to get out of the bed and go work out

> I get to just eat lunch from office's cafeteria

> still in my underpants at home after work it is way harder to dress up and go do stuff

The paradox in this situation, is that some employers are considering cutting the pay [0] of people who have the self-discipline, drive and focus to not need the artificial crutch of going into an arbitrary office-space to find the motivation to do their work.

[0]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/aug/12/google-st...

Intuitively, I'd think, it should be the opposite - no need to pay for the office space, money saved, can give that to the employees. But no, instead - save money on the office, and then save even more on the salaries. Just wow.

> then save even more on the salaries

the problem is that remote is seen as a benefit (which it is), and so naturally must be priced as part of the salary.

The fact that being remote requires some discipline, and this discipline makes for a better employee doesn't play into it - because a employer would already expect such discipline, whether it actually exists or not.

> Intuitively, I'd think, it should be the opposite - no need to pay for the office space, money saved, can give that to the employees. But no, instead - save money on the office, and then save even more on the salaries. Just wow.

Capitalism in a nutshell. :) Don't have to compete for your labor as aggressively because there are more candidates available for a lower wage.

Until companies are fully socialist entities (I think the Starship Enterprise will come first), you're gonna keep seeing whatever saves the company the most money (or whatever goes straight to the execs pockets at least).

Your reasons are mostly individual and to some extent based on a lifestyle that you got used to because working remote wasn't an option. I often hear "i don't have a workspace/desk at my home" as a pro-commute argument. But the reason you don't have that desk is because when you moved into your flat, you didn't think of this. But if more and more employers allow to work remotely, people will make different choices on their rentals / housing construction.

I personally worked remote numerous times before the pandemic (self-employed contractor but very often onsite) and made arrangements that WFH is a pleasant experience. That also included getting a coworking desk for limited periods of time, because socializing with other people is an important part of your wellbeing. The benefit of a coworking desk is, that if you go out for lunch with your collegues, you don't talk about work during lunch.

Exactly. Our societies/cities were built for in-office workers. The fact that despite that there are many people who still prefer remote work shows how much potential there is for a remote lifestyle.

Every house has a bathroom. Now imagine we lived in a world were the norm was to shower at the office. Then suddenly a bunch of people starts to question whether we really should shower at the office or if we could do it at home. There would be tons of people saying 'But I don't have a bathroom, I have to shower in the sink, that's stupid and impractical!'. Well, that's exactly the situation we're in right now. Most people don't have a spare room for working at home in good condition, because buildings and cities weren't built to accommodate WFH.

The bathroom example is well chosen, to this day you will find apartment buildings in Berlin with a shared bathroom/toilets for all the apartments in the building (and no individual bathrooms in the aparment). Given the tight housing situation, landlords exploit that fact by asking very high rent for those apartments and still find people willing to rent.

I don't want to pay more for larger apartment just so I can have dedicated office room and exact same argument goes both ways. I live 20minutes away from my office, that is by choice. I was even considering moving closer (so I could ditch car to a bike or maybe even walk) here I read that every one has 2-3 hour commute, that is on YOU and YOUR poor choices.

> I don't want to pay more for larger apartment

And thats a perfectly valid choice that you should be allowed to make. If you want to work at an office, you would make sure during the hiring phase that your employer agrees and provides that office to you. If the employer says that you HAVE to work from home, that is a factor that you should consider when accepting the job offer.

Yes. Exactly. Just like if remote work is no option people who need it can consider something else. I've always had option to do both, so on days where it is beneficial for me to work from home I can still do that (like if I'm expecting a delivery), but I rather be at the office as per the reasoning in previous comments. There are many companies and many employees. I don't get why so many people are angry that I liked the pre-covid situation.

I am all in for WFH, but deeply agree with your points.

Having a dedicated working space is not trivial; and it's not just isolating the space, there is all the "office management" part, having well fitted furnitures, lighting, drinks, noise management etc. Basically what was someone else's job is now each employee's responsibility. I'm fine with it, but it should be noted.

Physical fitness was already in that realm I think, though we were forced to have at least some exercise to move to the office. My hardest impact on that respect is that my calm neighborhood is less fancy than where the downtown office was, and it's less fun to just go walk for 20 ~ 30 mins and stop by nice coffee shops or museums. I could move to a more crowded place, but it's just a different tradeoff. Buying a better bike was the best investment on that front.

I also prefer working in the office but this feels a bit over the top.

Is it really way harder to get dressed at the end of the day instead of the start? Is it that much cognitive pressure to feed yourself? Working in the office has its benefits, but working from home is not a crushing experience for a programmer compared to most workers.

Think about why the NEET / basement gamer stereotype attracts such disgust, derision, and pity.

The only thing different about being a remote worker is that what's on your computer screen is on average less engaging than a video game.

This whole post sounds like you don’t have control of your life. Why do you need to find an excuse to do things you want to do?

Commit to a workout routine, commit to getting food or learning to cook to save money, commit to some mindful exercises to have more focus

because the weed, it makes it hard to hold it all together

Edit: okay fine the stoners just want to stay WFH and blaze up during the day

Plenty of folks work long and difficult jobs while on Cannabis. Before it started giving me anxiety, I programmed on it for years. It made hard tasks more exploratory and fun. OP just sounds like a lazy manlet, not drug-induced malaise.

The whole argument against people who prefer not to WFH seems to be that they are "deeply flawed individuals that do not have control over their own life". This is ridiculous, working in situ is a legitimate preference of many people, for whatever reasons, and we need not be judged about it.

>Commit to a workout routine, commit to getting food or learning to cook to save money, commit to some mindful exercises to have more focus

You can do that. I can just go back to office.

>Food is also big draw. Now I have to worry about what I eat every day and make my food

LOL

That does indeed sound like a trivial problem to solve. Pick a local restaurant and treat it as your new cafeteria. Come lunch time, go there. Ideally, your employer would compensate you for the office benefit you're missing (at least when talking about pandemic-induced forced WFH), but WFH is likely already saving you more money, so you can probably afford it anyway.

It's not that trivial to have a one-hour lunch break if the local restaurant is 30 minutes away, near by the closed office. In some countries the suburbs have very few services.

Also, if the subsidized commute costs 3 euros a day it is also not trivial to spend 14 euros for lunch.

Do we really need this baby sitting? Are we seriously complaining of working from home, not having to commute, and cooking our own food is a problem? In the age of groceries delivery from a click on my phone.

I just can't believe it. World is going to hell and were like crying babies that can't prepare a meal by themselves.

The available selection could be a problem. Near my home, there's a sushi place, two pizzerias, a Subway, a chinese and some cafes that don't really serve anything I'd call lunch. After 1½ years I'm sick of all of them. I've been ordering from further away, but that costs 50-100% more, and many types of food lose quality in transit.

Compared to the 30+ places reachable by foot within 45min lunch break at the office (and having real people to talk with while eating), WHF has really destroyed my lunch breaks.

Assuming this isn't a troll, I guess learning to make a sandwich or a salad is not outside the realm of possibility.

A increasing fraction of people in the western world are unable to cook and/or prepare food. So probably not a troll.

Neither of those are actual meal

??? Generally in the UK people don't have a 3 course catered meal in the middle of the day!

Looks like I to explain the background a little bit more to be not mistaken for a troll.

I know how to prepare meals, in fact we make over 90% of our dinners ourselves from ingredients. Having something else for lunch is for me an important escape from our own cooking, for both the effort and the taste. Not that it's bad, just that it also gets repetitive. We also have the small child aspect to consider for the stuff we make at home, he's a bit picky (e.g. only eats fish in a soup or fishfingers) so we can't quite do the variety we'd like.

There's nothing wrong with a quick salad or sandwich occasionally, but that gets boring too. Same for yesterday's leftovers, we usually make our dinners for two evenings, if I eat also the same stuff for lunch in between that's a bit too much.

Edit: Now I'm curious, is wanting to eat lunch out really such a weird thing it could be nothing else than a troll?

Generally 99% of people I worked with in IT (UK) over the last 20 years either make a sandwich for lunch, eat leftovers or eat at the work canteen which isn't free and normally isn't great either. They have their main meal in the evening. Of course people have the occasional lunch out but it's normally once or twice a month. In big cities of course this is often pretty different.

I used to eat lunch at the canteen fairly often out occasionally have leftovers. Since covid I'm at home and normally make a sandwich or salad with whatever is in the fridge.

Ok fair, it's a culture difference. Here in Finland, a sandwich is what you'd have for a coffee break snack, and a salad for lunch means you're worried about gaining weight or about to go out with someone for an actual lunch later. =D

I did once work in a place where all of the tech team would bring lunchboxes or microwave meals (ugh). Normally the percentage is much lower, I'd say maybe 20%. Of course it depends on what options are available.

If the canteen is the only option around and it serves crap, it'll get fixed pretty soon, because the bosses eat there too.

Just go to the supermarket and cook real food like 99% of the population that's not dying from hunger does.

It takes 10-15min to prepare your own lunch at home... There's no need to blow tons on money on eating out or ordering all the time.

What kind of food you make in 10minutes? Are you calculating also doing dishes? What about the time that goes into deciding what you are eating or are you eating same thing every day?

Any local delivery food costs 2-5 times as much as the office caffeteria and I can only get fast food delivered. Jumping into a car and driving to actual restaurant would take way more time and cost 3-4 times more.

Comments like this make me understand why the world is going to hell. Mankind is doomed.

No Machine Learning cookies?! I can't handle all of these decisions!

Conversely I do less work but generate more ROI at home.

I rather like worrying about food. I made myself jerk chicken and rice for lunch yesterday by taking ten minutes out to pop the chicken in the oven and then an hour out for lunch to do the rest.

During the chicken prep time I thought through a problem and solved it in half the time while the chicken was in.

This is a much better way to live than being time sliced into a corporate convenient canteen.

Maybe you do benefit from going to the office then. But here's the thing, I don't mind if you go to the office. You can even take your free lunch, I don't mind. Just don't expect me to come in every day to make you feel bad about how long your breaks are.

I don't understand why everyone commenting takes my comment as some kind of personal attack. I don't give a flying fuck what you guys do. I, personally, can't wait to get back to office.

Because your description of "the office" includes me. Specifically, that "external pressure" you are talking about. You seem to require the office to be filled with drones who are monitoring you to make sure you are working. If you were just talking about working in a location that isn't your own home, then fair enough. But what you're actually talking about is going back to that broken culture we had before where everyone commuted to the office for no reason.

>You seem to require the office to be filled with drones...

Stopped reading here. There's no point since you are arguing imaginary things.

In that case please tell me where this "external pressure" is going to come from.

>Food is also big draw. Now I have to worry about what I eat every day and make my food

Haha. Not sure which country you're from, but this definitely sounds like a first world problem.

Your statement tells me that you could afford to only eat food others prepared for you in the past. (Not sure if that was a free office cafeteria)

For many that is expensive and could even be an unhealthy way of life.

I've never really thought of going into an office because pre-prepared food is easier to get. That's a new one.

TBH if you're a programmer in a 3rd world country you probably earn 3-5 times the median wage where you live and you can afford as much services at local prices as programmers in 1st world. Possibly more when it comes to things like food.

When I was up to my eyeballs in debt, I'd eat at the office because it was a way to save money. I consumed a lot of cereal, milk, bananas, snacky things, etc. Often for dinner I'd simply eat 200g of little cheeses.

Food at work caffeteria costs 6€/meal. That's 120€/month. The food is "home style", so just normal food with salads, bread, and desert. Any food I make at home is going to cost around same. I mean you can go down obviously (just buy bag of rice and can of beans), but I don't get why this would be valid argument when we are talking about tech sallaries.

it's good to know what you need so you can select for environments / help create environments that support you :).

i personally want local offices so i can have somewhere that isnt home to work without a commute. like a library for work. id hope i get to finally integrate into the local community a little better then too.

I've been working from home since last February, and since then I have been more productive and worked more hours than when I was in the office.

Open plan office are an absolute productivity killer for me, as they are noisy and distracting and really the worst environment possible for development! Working from home there are no distractions, so I'm able to concentrate far longer. For me it's pointless to commute three hours a day just to sit in an office and not speak to anyone, when I could use that time for other things (plus saving £3,500 a year on travel).

As someone who trains at the gym two hours a day most days, working from home allows me to train more and eat better. It absolutely great being able to cook and eat proper food in my own kitchen!

Frankly, this sounds like you are an actual manchild.

> I can already see any breaks people tend to take are way longer than what they would take at the office

Just because you don't have any self discipline or work ethics doesn't mean everyone else has the same problem.

Just because you have no control in your life and need the structure of an office work day to get stuff done both at work and privately doesn't mean this is normal, or that it's a good - or even any kind - of argument to force everyone into the office.

Calling names makes you the mature one for sure

No need for being nasty about it, the comment flags clear things about cognitive load of choices, and you hand waive these away. Yet, actively choosing to not take these choices is a valid choice that may free up energy for other activities.

I don’t see how the comment actively argues for forcing everyone into the office. Sure there’s a point about taking pauses, but that’s it.

I fully agree with the social aspects, but the gym and food argument feels like a lack of self-discipline. Don't start your work if you are still in your underpants !

Just use money saved on the commute and spend it at the local restaurant or order a catering.

Hot take: learn to cook

fitness:

office: go to an office, sit in a chair 8h a day with barely any breaks.

home: get up any time you want, walk around, lay in bed, go outside buy something, no one looking or making comments.

productivity:

office: too many people moving around and talking, use headphones to isolate yourself

home: no one around you, play music in the background, relax

food:

I think it very much depends on the company you working for. Many companies don't offer lunch, and you're going outside. What's the difference from doing it from home?

Agree with the low productivity and social, but that's temporary because covid. You're forced to stay home and unable to have any fun and social times.

My biggest asset as an employee is my ability to befriend and network with boomer middle managers. That is my real job. The software is just a part of the larger game. If I am remote, I will make less money as a result. The only reason I want to go into the office is to leverage my social capital because I want to bring home the most money for my family.

Just rent an office space or coworking desk. Problem solved.

Using a significant chunk of my own salary each month to pay for something I used to get for free (and that my employer should provide) hardly seems like the ideal solution.

I would rather pay a few hundred dollars for a private space and have control over my time/work hours, than be forced to physically commute to an office. Time > money.

In my experience, most decent employers have a stipend for co-working anyway.

But I already have control over my work hours. I don't have to work 9-5 as long as I work 37.5 hours a week. My commute is at worst 25 minutes with car (at best 15 minutes if no traffic).

I can easily get up at 6 go workout for 1-1.5h then drive to work when the morning rush is gone.

I can get some co-working spaces that look infinitely better than the office I was going to for $480/mo. For a dedicated desk with locking storage, etc.

I'm saving at least $400/mo just on parking and gas right now.

Even if my employer wouldn't reimburse anything (never asked), I'd eat the $80/mo to save myself 2-3 hours a day commuting.

This is perhaps why many people look at the drive to lower the salary of people working from home with some suspicion. Wfh saves employers a lot of money in terms of providing office space. And in some concrete ways increases expenses of employees at home. (If gives back some commute costs as well as other freedoms too though). I think both employers and employees will take some time to sift though how the benefits/drawbacks rebalance from the changes that come from wfh.

depending upon where you are located and your method of commute, it's likely you're spending more per month commuting than you would on a local co-working space.

This is the case for a large proportion of people in the South East of the UK.

let your company pay for it. they dont need the big office space. thats how we do it.

It's about the same cost as commuting, so no difference!?

Nah, better to force everyone to go back to the office so I get free food and I can look busy all day.

I can also play games while on the shitter for free! Once Gaben's steam deck comes out my steaming turd breaks will be even better! And don't get me started on the free 1-ply toilet paper. What a deal!

I mean it might be a temporary solution at best, but there aren't many places that rent less than a floor around me.

> I can't wait to get back to the office.

That is a valid point, since different people work better in different settings. I am personally in the opposite group.

Overall, i get way more done at home, because of my 4 monitor setup, privacy, peace and the ability to take walks to clear my head and breathe some fresh air while i consider how to solve technical problems. I cannot do that at an office setting and my mental health has improved bunches. Also, no commute has done wonders for my sleep schedule and productivity. I no longer waste 10% of my life in public transportation.

My physical fitness has gotten way better since i started working remotely - i've lost about 12 kg in 2 months, since now i exercise for 1-2 hours every single day in the countryside. No anxiety about how i look while working out. No shame about not living up to anyone's expectations. Just me, nature and listening to a podcast while i jog for 5 km and do sit ups, push ups, pull ups and whatever else i want.

I think that people should always make their own food, since it's both economically more responsible and on average also more healthy. I now enjoy a primarily veggie based diet and communities like /r/MealPrep have been fun to explore! Plus, my cooking skills have gotten way better.

I get to chat more with my friends remotely on my down time. I no longer worry about how i look. I no longer have to worry about someone dropping by and just making me lose the mental model of the code that i have in my head. Meetings are properly scheduled ahead of time. Noone makes assumptions about me based on my gender, age, looks or anything else.

Frankly, it's great. It won't be that way for extroverted people, or those that prefer in person collaboration for any reason. It also won't be that way for people who live in the city, at least sometimes. But, living in the countryside, it's absolutely great! Also, no overpriced real estate or rent to take care of.

So basically, you lack the self-discipline to be satisfied with your choices, and prefer to be enlisted in some type of nanny service? Cool, I'll opt out and instead focus on bettering my defecits so I don't need to outsource my mental fortitude.

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