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Comment by legerdemain | Hacker News Reader

Remote work is kind of tough if you're a junior employee. You probably don't own a house yet, you don't have a "spare room." Your desk probably faces the bed you sleep in. You probably don't leave your bedroom much over the course of a day. You might put cardboard over the window to block out the sun. You're basically living in a prison cell at this point.

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On the plus side, wfh allows you to move to an area where you probably can have that spare room. It's the people that get caught out by moving to the city to live close to work and then having to work from home that have a real problem, especially if they and their s.o. are both suddenly working from home. A studio apartment can work for two if it is just to spend time after work and to sleep. But it really doesn't work if you have to spend the whole day there working with two people as well.

We both have family nearby, moving away from them to a remote LCOL area for the sake of work sounds dumb.

Lots of people move because of work. If you have family nearby then that is what constrains you, not the work... And that's the right priority but for a lot of people that would count as a luxury.

So far, my experience with remote work is people telling me to accept a worse outcome and like it, because it's somehow better in their minds in some idealized noble way.

As someone who had to sit in crappy aircraft and sleep in hotels once a week until the pandemic broke out it's been a net positive for me. But I appreciate that this is not the case for everyone and that there are large numbers of people that like to work in an office.

Trust me, I've had to work from client sites for weeks at a time on less than a day's notice, take multi-hour hair-on-fire support calls at 3 in the morning from on-site engineers 12 time zones away, and take over productions systems from international teams with zero continuity. I understand! All of these things are terrible to experience, but enforced remote work normalized many of them. The best work environment is working in close proximity with other people who are all in the same time zone as you, who can tell by looking at you that you're too busy to bother at the moment.

> The best work environment is working in close proximity with other people who are all in the same time zone as you, who can tell by looking at you that you're too busy to bother at the moment.

I think that is a matter of personal preference. I - and my colleagues - hail from al over Europe and even though we miss seeing each other in person the productivity is up tremendously compared to pre-pandemic and the lack of travel, positive contribution to climate impact and extra time not wasted on travel have been an definite plus. But I fully appreciate that that is not for everybody.

That is also the case when studying, and people may go to libraries or other places. That's an option too.

The bright side is that a junior eng. is young, motivated and full of energy, so it can be done for a while until the salary helps to move up. Unless you are in Bay area. Avoid Bay area :D

Libraries are great for studying, not for video calls. Also, having to wear a mask all day kind of sucks.

Yes, life sometimes sucks. It is also bad to have to commute for 1 hour or more when you're a junior and have no car, so what?

When you're young you will struggle with things, we all did.

P.S.: if you are mostly doing videocalls in your daily work, you may want to change jobs. You should be ok in a library and going out to some room or hall for videocalls. Sucks? Yeah, not the best, but better than the jail that you said is your room.

I don't know if we have the same concept of what a library is.

And yeah, it sucks, but I hope things start getting better. I'd much prefer to work in an office, at a company where everyone works from the office.

This was me last year haha. The room I was in even had unpainted walls and bare concrete floor because it couldn’t be painted while I was living there. I just looked up a picture and it almost looks like a prison. But at the time I didn’t think twice about it and I was loving life when I didn’t have to spend an hour getting to and from work.

My last job also didn’t really use webcams so being in my bedroom didn’t really matter.

Were you not allowed to paint your walls? It's not particularly hard...

It's probably hard to paint a room after you have moved your belongings into it and can't leave overnight while the paint is drying.

This was it. Can't paint a room full of stuff. And you don't want to sleep in a freshly painted room either.

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