I miss some interaction/bonding with coworkers and certainly acknowledge that "hallway talk" helped clear up requirements but the pros of work from home life are incomparable to the cons. I will never go back to an office
> I step outside my home office to see my family and start unwinding for the evening. No wasted time on commute
I find the commute (by train, I'm lucky enough to get a seat) far more effective for unwinding to be honest. And once I'm home, I'm far more engaged with the family due to having that buffer time between work and home.
> the options for places to live are endless.
That never actually stopped me before. Hence the commute
> Not to mention I eat my own food on my lunch break.
the biggest thing I miss about not commuting into London is the food. The variety, the quality, and above all, not having to cook it myself. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind cooking. But a lot of eateries do a lot better job of their signature meal than I could.
That all said, I'm in no rush to go back. And when I do, it'll be a hybrid approach. Some days in and some days from home.
edit: why am I getting heavily down voted for discussing personal reasons why I enjoyed working in the office? It's not like I'm telling you your opinions are wrong or that you should go back to the office. All I'm doing is voicing that there are some who do enjoy travelling into the city most days. Is it really that offensive a view point to read? Some people on here don't deserve to have moderation privileges.
It's also not always about personal time, sometimes it's just catching up on sleep on the train. Without wanting to go too much into personal circumstance, that sleep was really valuable in a way that trying to have a nap at home isn't. And that energy went directly back to the kids.
While I might have gained an hour during the week by not commuting, in practical terms that hour doesn't always translate into more engagement with the kids -- much as I'd love it if it could (again, not wanting to go too much into personal circumstance here).
Anyhow, I'm not trying to paint the picture that I'm better off commuting. I'm definitely better off working from home. I'm just trying to illustrate that some people do extract value from their commute.
There's nothing preventing such people from commuting wastefully to their own home if the value is high enough.
Last I checked there was nothing prohibiting commuters from commuting in loops, and there's nothing controversial about appreciating some time away from the people at home. You can get in your car or board public transit if you want, that nap sounds pretty good from where I'm sitting atm.
I used to commute to a cafe for the separation and enjoyable travel time vs. just staying at home. The salient point is you have options with WFH, it isn't some kind of prison sentence unless you make it one.
No. You only have that option if your company supports flexible working. Your approach of saying everyone has to work remotely regardless of whether they want to is as toxic as those who suggest everyone should work in the office, even if they want the option to work remotely.
This is what the "remote brigade" need to comprehend. Those of us who say "we like offices" aren't trying to take your freedom away. We're simply asking that you don't take our choices away when advocating for your flexibility.
Flexible working is the approach we should be striving for. Those who can work remotely can continue to do so. And those who want to come in to the office can do so. We shouldn't assume that remote work is a one size fits all and that's exactly what comments like the GPs does. Furthermore we should assume that those who do like office work are the unreasonable ones. We're not. We're still happy for you to work from home. We just don't personally want to do that every day ourselves.
This isn't just theoretical. I run 3 teams of engineers and push this rule onto them. Thus far it has been very successful.
I'd get to work, and right off the bat I'd be on calls with people who weren't working on prem. So I'm either that jerk on a call in the open plan office while everyone's trying to do heads-down work, or I'm scrambling to find a phone booth.
So I'd end up spending half my days crammed into a phone booth at the office so I could meet with people who weren't there. The office contributed zero to my productivity, it was just a miserable time hoping I could even find an available phone booth because there were a dozen other people on the office vying for one.
If we're going back to on-prem, even as an option, we should combine it with admitting that open plan was a mistake and doesn't work with the mixed remote/on-prem model.
It's not that hard of a problem to solve. Easily more of a solvable problem than telling everyone they either have to come into the office or work fully remote without giving a crap about the employees personal circumstances.
> I'd get to work, and right off the bat I'd be on calls with people who weren't working on prem. So I'm either that jerk on a call in the open plan office while everyone's trying to do heads-down work, or I'm scrambling to find a phone booth.
Sounds like your office needs more meeting spaces. That's as true a problem when you have everyone in the office as it is when you have teams of mixed office and remote working.
> So I'd end up spending half my days crammed into a phone booth at the office so I could meet with people who weren't there.
Why are you in so many meetings in the first place? Are you not an engineer? That sounds like a bigger problem than your office space.
> The office contributed zero to my productivity, it was just a miserable time hoping I could even find an available phone booth because there were a dozen other people on the office vying for one.
Oh right. So you're just making up bullshit exaggerations to justify why your preference of working from home should be FORCED on everyone regardless of their preference or personal circumstances. That's a real dick move imo. Why not let other people chose how they work best for themselves just like you have done for yourself?
> If we're going back to on-prem, even as an option, we should combine it with admitting that open plan was a mistake and doesn't work with the mixed remote/on-prem model.
It sounds like your office specifically might be a nightmare to work in. However not everyone's company office is a large open plan space with people from different teams mixed in together. In that I don't work in an open plan office (there's just ~15 engineers in the same office. The sales people have their own office, and so on and so forth).
I think the real problem here is that you specifically just want your own space and you want it at home. So anything that doesn't match that is going to be a point of complaint with you. That's fine for you but please don't assume your preferences should be enshrined as company policy for every Tom, Dick and Sally and in every other company. Please don't assume that what works for you should work for everyone.
I'm actually not completely against on-prem, or open plan, just against them as they've been done in 100% of my experience. Bullpen, team-focused open plan is fine, but that's not how open plan is done typically because it's not any cheaper than cubicle.
> However not everyone's company office is a large open plan space with people from different teams mixed in together.
There might be open plan offices where this is true, but I've never seen one. The general pattern of open plan has been to tell everyone that open plan is a wonderful enhancement that increases "organic interactions" or whatever, when in reality it's to shave 20% off seating costs. I get the allure, but this has been studied to death decades ago (see: Peopleware) and the finding (which tracks with my personal experience) was that the 20% savings in seating costs came with a 30% drop in productivity.
Most of the companies I've worked for has been set up like that. So they do exist. Not saying it's universal or even the norm. But it's certainly not something I've made up :)
I wonder if some of this is down to the American vs European cultures.
Please don't make bullshit assumptions like this when I've already said I didn't want to go into personal circumstances. In my case, the problem is medical, not motivational. And that's all I want to discuss because it's personal and, frankly put, none of your fucking business why I'm tired on an evening.
> We shouldn't be going into offices for these secondary effects.
I'm not advocating that people should be going into offices. What I'm advocating is that people should be allowed to decide for themselves if they want to go in. Having someone like yourself tell me I should work from home is just as toxic as any discussions arguing that employees should go in. What I'm suggesting is companies should offer flexibility because people will have different preferences.
Also you've just latched on the sleep thing as if that's the only benefit I get from going into the office. That's simply not the case. It was just a detail this tangent zeroed in on.
However I do completely agree with you about going for a run. That was the one commute replacement activity which I did find worked for me. Unfortunately the UK's weather often discourages one from non-mandatory forms of exercise. When it's raining, it is far easier to be motivated to walk home from the train station than it is to leave the house to go running. This is obviously a poor excuse but it is still the pragmatic truth of the matter.
From the article, it sounds like the CEO wanted to get rid of remote work all together.
I do agree with the GP, there is something about the separation between work and living. I miss the feeling that when I did work from home "after hours", it was for special cases, rather than the "same old".
Most companies I have been at just ignored the CEOs stupid out-of-touch WFH proclaimations. This was tech though. The other departments usually obeyed on a case by case basis.
Thankfully there are a good number of companies (in the UK at least) who are allowing their employees to make this decision themselves.
There will always be instances where fully remote people might still want to come in (eg someone leaving social). And there will be reasons why people who normally like to come in every day might chose not to (eg a doctors appointment at lunch time).
I’ve found myself taking the car for a quick drive downtown where the grid locks, after I finish working from home. Can’t wait for it to be mandatory again!
Make them non-impromptu. Since the pandemic started I have made a 20 minute lunch walk, and a longer (30-90 minutes) walk part of my work-from-home routine. I have maybe skipped one if them five days the last 18 months.
This evening I walked 7k in 12C and a light drizzle, so the weather isn’t great here either.
On the other hand, I live alone and enjoy walking so I realize that it is perhaps nit as easy for everyone.
No one is stopping you from unwinding after work if you work from home. Hop in the car when you're done with work and enjoy a relaxing "commute" on your own terms.
But the real point I'm trying to make isn't that everyone should commute. No. What I'm saying is I'm as entitled to enjoy my commute to work as you are to enjoy working from home. A good company will offer flexibility rather than applying the same rule to everyone universally.
They call it congestion charge but it's more your suburban commuting habit is making everyone that actually lives here miserable.
Plus if you didn't want your home town to be invaded by commuters each day then a city, any city in fact, is absolutely the worst place you could chose to live.
This was before WFH was a thing.
This isn't that unusual for European cities. Often you'll find the city centre will be buildings of historic significance so a lot of the office blocks in the city centre will still be multi-story but not 10s of floors. Even in London the skyscrapers are generally just outside the centre.
From what I gather about London, most of the skyscapers are pretty expensive units to rent so many offices find the relatively smaller blocks a more attractive option. Usually renting space from those skyscapers are more a signalling of importance -- or rather a business attempting to signal that.
Nobody's stopping you from going for a couple hour-long drives on your own dime before and after work, if that's what you're really into. The pandemic has really shown everyone how absurd it is to take on the risk, expense, and uncompensated time consumed by commuting when it's been proven to be unnecessary in most cases.
> That never actually stopped me before. Hence the commute
There's a lot of miles (literally) between endless options of places to live, and places that are within commuting distance to the office.
But there is a vocal minority of people who do not want to go back to the office and they consider our position to be threatening. There are benefits to the hybrid model, which is what I’ll be pursuing.
My guess is that there has been chatter on how discussions on WFO, specially in tech forums, are brigaded by shills to sell the illogical idea that getting back to the office is fantastic and awesome, and the hallmark of these shills is the fact that their arguments in favour of returning to office are simply unbelievable. And quite frankly you post reads like that.
I have to say that I found it very weird, and outright unbelievable, that someone was arguing that commutes were "far more effective for unwinding". To me that makes no sense at all, because when working from home you are free to pick whatever you'd like to do with that time, instead of being forced to sit in a car or public transportation and waste away your life while you endure traffic. I mean, if suffering commutes is something you enjoy then if you work from home nothing stops you from hopping into your preferred means of transportation and go anywhere you'd like. But you can also do any other thing. Is driving to/from the office during rush hour the most pleasurable and relaxing thing possible? I quite doubt it.
So why claim that being forced to do something is more effective at unwinding than actually pick whatever you'd like to do? It makes no sense.
Switching to WFH was way better. But I was reading a sci-fi book a week on the commute, after the shift I was lucky to get in four a year.
In theory I could set aside 80 minutes a day for personal reading, but in practice it feels incredibly selfish to not help with the family and housework.
Do I want to go back to muni hell? No. But I can understand how someone might have enjoyed their (non-car) commute. I will shoot myself before I ever go back to driving an hour each way on the 101 though.
Have you considered that perhaps people making comments like mine are not shills, they just have different personal circumstances that you hadn't encountered before?
They charge pricing here that could get me a year country-wide travel first class card in Switzerland.
Ex (multi) FAANG engineering director here. I personally find that a 30 minute commute home is more effective for separating work and home than just the clock. The data published (by MSFT) shows employees are working more hours now than ever before.
Now, those pale in comparison to things like on-call rotations, email on Cell Phones, Slack & Team's notifications on mobile, etc. The Amazon practice of "DevOps SDEs are always on-call" that's spread across the industry makes disengaging from work in order to engage with family & friends generally impossible, even on vacation.
Current FAANG engineer here. I totally disagree, and the numbers support my case. My organization saw a jump in productivity when switching to WFO accompanied by a considerable increased in job satisfaction.
WFO, accompanied by flexible work hours, allowed everyone in my team to benefit from more personal time and also opportunities to research topics of interest, which already paid off in the product we developed.
You're moving the goalpost on this. For me, as someone else stated, the separation between home life and work life is a bit easier with a commute. That's not touching on productivity, overall job satisfaction, or anything else.
I'm not even talking tradeoffs here - there's no "I prefer to work from the office because XYZ". I prefer working from home, for a variety of reasons. However, I do recognize that in this one specific area - separation of work/home life, the commute was beneficial.
Were I to list 50 pros/cons of working from home (which I've done), the winner is WFH. That doesn't mean an absence of positive aspects to the "work from the office" column.
The point is that separation from home and work life does not require or mandate a commute or even getting back to the office. That position is indefensible. Being forced to endure something unsavoury against your best wishes ever single work day is not easier nor the only effective way to get some separation between your personal and work life. That's something you do, not something that's done to you.
Some people are quite happy with a home office, some people opt to work anywhere. I have a team member that works by the pool, and another team member who worked while travelling through Europe. If you are not forced to be present on a specific cubicle in a specific building for X hours a day then you have quite literally the whole world at your disposal, and your imagination is the only limit.
And you know what? That reflects on quality of life work/life balance, and overall job satisfaction. Your life matters and enjoying how you live it matters. That's the whole point of working, not a whimsical position where a post happened to be moved.
So no, being packed like sardines along with dozens of depressed and tired and often smelly fellow drones in a train or subway or bus, of being forced to endure traffic jams or road rages, is neither the only way to separate work from personal life, nor the most enjoyable or even effective at all. There are far better things to do in life, and you're free to pick them all.
The position that everyone should have to work from home even if they don't want to is also indefensible. What myself and others are saying when we argue the benefits we get from office work is that employees should have the freedom to chose the flexible working arrangement that works for them
There's a real tone on HN lately that everyone should work remotely and anyone who doesn't support that is against them and frankly I find that attitude to be just as toxic as the CEOs saying everyone should come back to the office.
Even yourself are saying all the reasons we like office work can be replicated when working from home -- maybe that's true on some level but it doesn't matter. If some of use want to come into the office then why can't we?
Flexible working is the approach we should be striving for. Those who can work remotely can continue to do so. And those who want to come in to the office can do so. We shouldn't assume that remote work is a one size fits all and that's exactly what comments like the GPs does. Furthermore we should assume that those who do like office work are the unreasonable ones. We're not. We're still happy for you to work from home. We just don't personally want to do that every day ourselves.
This isn't just theoretical. I run 3 teams of engineers and push this rule onto them. Thus far it has been very successful.
Anyone advocating that people must return to the office are extreme lone-wolves. Or a CEO fronting as an employee.
What I would like, as a manager who had to do quarterly planning would be a week a month or a week per quarter for cross functional in office planning. It would help with a lot and probably be enough time in office to fill many of the real gaps being remote has left without being required full time.
I'm sure mileages vary, but between wasting a significant portion of my life commutting to be able to experience water cooler talks, and hugging my wife and children once I step out of my home office, you can keep all the water coolers in the world to yourself.
Work/life balance shouldn't fall all the way to the work side of the scale just because some managers struggle with remote work.
If you're struggling to fill the gaps or onboard people at a certain point you have to admit to either managerial or organizational failure to adapt. It's called taking responsibility
I’m asking because my experience is largely with <200 people companies (more so with <50) and onboarding and such is always very scant at startup stage and only starts to happen in my experience at stages of intense growth and post series C/D, but I may be in a weird niche.
These things also tend to happen organically at different stages depending on the team but don’t become mandated/invested in until later.
Hell, put it in a fun location and call it a retreat.
Nobody said anything about work activities after 5. You can go do whatever.
But hanging out with coworkers when you’re all seeing each other for a rare or even first time seems like a pretty common whatever.
I planned to fly in where ever for that week, not commute every day.
It's now impossible to get 3 people in a 15 minute meetings to clear requirements.
Before: email -> problems -> let's do a zoom call -> done.
Now: email -> problems -> nobody has time in the office for a meeting.
It might be the culture but still...
I hear that because informal stuff can solve a lot of problems, or prevent it even arising, but at the same time, it papers over a lot of cracks that should probably be exposed.
I've taken to virtual coffees during the week with people on a semi-regular basis to try and keep that sort of stuff going.
The pros are mostly yours, and the cons are mostly your employers. The labor market is finally shifting to the laborers having the leverage :)
Working for a flexible work arrangement employer has made me appreciate the following alternatives to what I used to consider pros of working in the office.
- Hall way chats are now Slack chats. These are more likely to be in the open and allow more participants. When gathering feedback or ideas this allows interested parties to participate asynchronously, which they may not have been able to do in person.
- Quick tap on the shoulder assistance or conversations. These were always a little disruptive. With Slack statuses and huddles, I'm finding we can have explicit do-not-disturb signals and when everyone is ready, a quick low-friction way of having a discussion.
- Group meetings. There was always a limit to the effectiveness of this depending on the make up of the group and the size of the group. Being forced online means it's even more obvious when people are not comfortable participating. The solution being more async collaborative RFC-style processes before meeting in Zoom to discuss only the points of difference.
- Recordings. Often we would need to take notes, etc. Now everything can be recorded. Minutes are still good, but no longer need to be taken all the time. If the meeting was a bust and nothing of value was gained, you don't need to type it up. If something important was discussed, you don't have to rely on memory and can transcribe off the recording.
All of the above I consider to be a benefit to both the employer and employee as it allows for greater flexibility in how and when we interact and automated digitisation means a much easier process of persisting and communicating institutional knowledge that is being created among a group.
This sounds like nonsense to me.
If there are cons to the employer, that means I'm worth less and can demand less salary - the market might take a bit to adjust for that, but probably not long. It means that I'm going to be working for a less successful company, which is a lot less fun.
Employers and employees are usually in a mostly cooperative relationship, this adversarial view of it just strikes me as wrong.
(And no, before someone accuses me of being biased, I do not and have never run a company or anything like that)
There are certainly both pros and cons of remote work, but the total cost/benefit will end up being a mutual one, in the same direction and of similar scale for both the employee and the employer.
That's wild. Personally, I've thought about the pros and cons to me as an employee a lot. Hard to imagine anyone thinking that isn't a worthwhile exercise.
> There are certainly both pros and cons of remote work, but the total cost/benefit will end up being a mutual one, in the same direction and of similar scale for both the employee and the employer.
I think it will end up better for both parties as well, but most employers have a lot of work to do, updating processes, organization, and expectations, before they share that sentiment. Until then, they aren't going to like it.
It's not exactly that I think it's not a worthwhile exercise, it's that I think that unless you're considering the "second order" pros and cons to you as an employee that come about as a result of the company (and team) doing better/worse you're missing half of the equation, and that those second order effects are roughly as strong as the first order effects to the other party.
During the industrial revolution, some employers saw that there were significant pros in employing children and working them 12 to 14 hours a day for a fraction of a grown man's salary. Not being able to employ children was a significant con.
How did "the market" handled that?
There's more to life than what's convenient to corporations, and the despair of self-hating employees to think that self-deprecarion is a competitive sport.
Eliminating competition on the labor side of the market is also different, because while it hurts companies, it also makes employees be in higher demand. That's also a relevant difference here.
So, your analogy is just a poor one...
But while I'm at it, you'll notice that for the kinds of business that are easily shipped over seas (where the government regulations don't apply) and you can be outcompeted by people using child labor and paying below minimum wage (another case of government regulation) that did happen to an extent, see textile manufacturing for instance.
It really isn't. It just stops unscrupulous employers from abusing their employees. There are already plenty of tech companies that went full remote, and clearly they don't interpret that as a competitive disadvantage. The lockdowns also showed productivity increases and improvements in the quality of life and work/life balance. Therefore, returning to the office has absolutely nothing to do with productivity or company culture or dedication. At best, it's just lazy thinking enforced by strong-arming employees into positions that is overwhelmingly against their personal interests and quality of life.
> It really isn't. It just stops unscrupulous employers from abusing their employees.
If you're objecting to my use of the phrase "forces everyone", fair enough, but the point stands. If you're objecting to the point being made, I'm afraid I've missed your point.
> There are already plenty of tech companies that went full remote, and clearly they don't interpret that as a competitive disadvantage.
Indeed, one imagines that's because they don't see the (total) cons as outweighing the (total) benefits, and they (like me) don't see much use in separating out "benfits to employees" and "harm to the employer"... this is basically my original point (though going in the employee->employer direction as well as the employer->employee direction).
I'm not sure I would even agree with this. I have a better monitor setup at home, a quieter place to work and think, and I'm spending less of my day in pointless conversations for the sake of politeness.
My employer simply gets more out of me when I work from home AND turnover is reduced.
I think the pros outweigh the cons for employers, even if they don't care at all about their employees and even if we weren't in a tight labor market
Frankly, I think that executives get a big ego boost seeing hundreds of workers working in an office of their design, and they miss that. I think that's why their arguments for returning to the office come across as ... strange and unpersuasive; they don't actually have a productivity based argument for returning to the office and they're trying to shoe horn one in anyways.
At my work, like most other works, productivity didn't go down with remote, and the company saved massively on office space.
It seems the people pushing for more office-time are in management, and this situation leads me to question the extent to which this change helps _their_ role rather than the company, and by extension their ability to manage their own conflicts of interest.
> The central sticking point, and cause cited by many people who recently left, was Smith’s strong push this year for all Blue Origin employees to return to the office.
This is without a doubt about Blue Origin's call to return to office.
It’s hard to keep working after five when the kids are home and making their usual racket. But it’s also hard to disconnect because the line between work and home is nonexistent.
The free breakfast and lunch at the office were much better than anything I can make or buy myself. Talking to random coworkers during the breaks made me feel more like part of something.
I didn’t even mind the “standing in a packed subway car” part that much. That’s just city life; I want more of it again.