Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?
@bckr submitting this as an Ask HN[1], but I think we would all get better insight if this were a poll
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30239283
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30239283
Now, I know that I badly need some amount of in-person time with my coworkers on a weekly basis, or I go crazy.
It's a motivational thing for me. I thrive on solving problems for and with other people, and there's an "out of sight, out of mind" effect for me over zoom. It's just harder for me to get my brain going.
I wish I were better at WFH - maybe with the right type of work I would be. I love everything else about it! My home office setup is awesome, I always hated commuting, I love the flexibility of doing chores during the day or getting some work done at 11pm because I don't feel like sleeping.
But man, I miss people.
I've always loved working from home (and was doing it for almost a year before the pandemic started), I'm quite self-driven, but I do recognize that it can be difficult to get back into the groove once you've been out of it for a while - meeting colleagues in person would help with that aspect.
Ideally, if my colleagues weren't some 3000 km away, I wouldn't mind going to the office once a week or something.
I agree I think the best of both worlds would be some sort of schedule, maybe ~1-ish day a week on average. Personally I'd love something like Monday-Tuesday in the office every other week. But everybody is different, which in turn makes it really hard to coordinate and make everyone happy.
Yeah this would be fine/nice as well.
If nothing else there's at least been a strong step towards the potential of WFH with all of this, even though it hasn't lead to ideal outcomes.
But that is not without difficulties.
This is the sort of honesty I’d love to hear when interviewing candidates.
Maybe really good for maintenance work
There are good and bad fits for that attitude
But I don't know, I only learned recently that my own team members had been working around a broken feature that I maintain for over a year without telling me. I kind of feel like I've been abandoned.
I keep getting this happen. Someone wants an improvement/fix to something and just doesn't communicate that, probably because it has to be very intentional now, whereas it used to be something you'd mention over coffee when you saw the right person.
If I could offer some unsolicited advice - tell them that you feel that way! I am quite confident that no one wants you to feel abandoned, and they would be unhappy to know they're making you feel that way. They might not be able to fix the situation all at once, but I hope you're able to get a better situation soon, one way or the other.
My employers are getting half the efficiency they used to get. Anything I used to find enjoyable about the work is now gone.
I'm probably going to go on a looong sabbatical soon.
On the other hand, the pandemic really took the fun from meeting people all day, so I don't think I'd be happy in an office either, at least under the current circumstances.
On the flip side, being able to drop everything and go to the DMV without feeling the social pressure to skip lunch or work late is nice. I feel like I only have a finite number of super productive hours a day, and it's not eight, and they're not always squished together back to back.
But man, I miss people.
Although, it's doubly tough when things aren't good at home. Because during those times, the office provided some solace. But overall it's been positive.
Have you gotten at least some kind of positive tradeoff in terms of more friends+family time, exercise, etc?
But at some point I realized that I really missed work people! I got into software engineering because I love talking about engineering with other really smart engineers. Took me a while to realize that was what was missing.
One company was absolutely abysmal. No video chat ever. None. Never saw my coworkers' faces. Who can work like that? Obviously they can, but man that sucked.
Second company was a bit better, but not great. Avoided collaboration and/or video chat pretty strongly but not entirely. Which was weird because when we did do it, everybody was very chatty and they were also good working sessions.
Current company has been great. Strong collaborative culture but they also respect if somebody just needs to focus solo.
I would say that overall this company scratches like, maybe, 80% of my itch as far as being immersed with other engineers (in terms of actual collaborative work, and random tech talk bullshit) is concerned.
Any companies not offering remote now that instead want me to commute to an office and lose all of that personal time, are an immediate rejection.
On the other hand, young professionals who have moved into a city and our just developing their career, they want to be among peers, socializing , learning and building a network.
Now I almost long to get off work and do some choirs outside instead.
I would like to talk about it but I'm kind of sick of seeing the discussion framed in term of people who only socialize at the office.
The fact is, in the office we have many in-person interactions spread throughout the day. Socialization isn't fungible, we can't simply replace interactions in one context with interactions in another context and assume people will be happy with it.
I got into software engineering because I like solving problems, but also because I love solving problems with really smart people. Turns out that it feels really good to do that in person!
Coffee breaks, lunch outings, being able to stop by someone's desk and shoot the shit or see what they're working on -- I've realized that these things are not only enjoyable for me, but critical for both the actual quality of my work and my motivation to do it. Not to mention any kind of whiteboarding / collaborative discussion, which I think is pretty obviously nicer in person.
So far, nothing I have tried remotely gives me the same kind of satisfaction that just physically being with my work partners does. I do think there's something very deeply ingrained in me that's responsible for that, and I know it's definitely not something everyone wants or needs.
So long as the other person feels the same way. One of the reasons I enjoy working from home is people can no longer wonder by and shatter my concentration because they're on a break. They can ping me in chat and I'll get to it in my break.
thanks to hybrid work, ppl can hide at home all they want.
ps: pls also consider parents that get interrupted far more frequently when working from home.
But why do such people say such silly things if it's not true?
Do I think it's 100% true?
No, but it feels that way for them.
I f*king hate useless meetings where my time is wasted. I had a coleague express the same thing about a topic.
Business replied "well, we only had 4 meetings and at least 2 were really required so it was not excessive".
So who was right?
Everybody was right, business did not feel it was excessivez the developers felt it was excessive.
WFH works, 2 years of pandemic proved it does. Some people like it and some people don't, it's not about arguments but about preferences.
I used to really hate it, now I just hate it -- like letting someone else sample my food.
I really hated it because of all of the pollitics and egos and because I was really passionate and brought a lot of insight to the table while 90% the time the others just brought their egos to the table.
Now I'm just jaded and I hate it because 90% of the time the solution really doesen't matter and people just waste eachothers times in endless meetings about details that really don't matter.
Just let them do it before you taste it, and then pretend you're royalty and thank them for testing it for poison.
What worked for them was therapy, creating a morning routine of moving their work forward and demoing their progression with short <2 minute Loom/Slack video clips. They also invested into one of those drawing tablets for $80.
Like another commenter said, I find it easier to care about the concerns of people around me, so if that's a bunch of people at my company then I'll care more about them and what they need. It makes a difference for me if physical presence and work presence are aligned.
Probably for a similar reason, I've found that I can't reach 100% productivity consistently (over weeks) unless I'm in an environment where people around me are working. So that means finding a coworking space wherever I go.
Also, in-person conversation is so much higher bandwidth than anything else. Those couple hundred ms of latency do matter. Being able to party on the same physical whiteboard is really nice.
I have this sentiment, yet I hang out with one or two friends once or twice a week, occasionally some family every couple weeks or so, and constantly on a daily basis get to socialize with the parents of my dog's friends while on walks.
None of that makes up for working alongside people. And I don't just mean work specifically but forming connections with my coworkers. I'm a huge proponent of making real social connections with coworkers so that it's easier to be collaborative with them. There will be times when your work is not siloed and you either need context about something that your coworker has contributed to before but you haven't, vice versa, etc. and it helps if you both have some kind of connection and stake in the work relationship. If there's no stake in it, then other than the bare minimum (such as not wanting someone to totally screw up something owned by the team), nothing will be contributed. It can make gathering context brutal, work more competitive (resource starvation where one coworker can let their coworker have more trouble which results in them getting a better pick of things to work on, etc.).
I work remotely for a U.S. company with coworkers from Ethiopia and other countries.
Pre-pandemic, they flew me to the U.S. and I met the U.S. and Indian coworkers, and we went to a conference together. It was a HUGE help - but I think it's something that can be done a few times a year or even once a year, doesn't need to be an everyday thing.
I miss the office for..
- Free and convenient food.
- Social chatter & engagement.
- Making friends with employees who I don't know and connecting with new employees.
- Work life separation (balance).
- Proper workstation, climate controlled environment.
- Sense of belonging - team outing, after hours beers..
- Intra and inter company sports and games.
- Meeting potential dates.
That's the problem with people that doesn't want WFH: they also want their coworkers to work at the office so they don't "go crazy".
What I do know is that I did work from home for four months and I was miserable. Any job where the norm is at least three weeks at the office would be a huge plus for me, and if choosing between jobs that are mostly remote and jobs that are mostly in the office, I would take a paycut for the job that is mostly in the office. I realize it may be the other way around for other people and am really curious what the norm will be in the end.
Personally just being lifted from a 1h + 1h car commute has dramatically increased the quality of my day to day life, so much that friends and relatives noticed an uplift in my mood.
I’m the opposite. Part is that I irrationally hate lifestyle change. Part is that I work with so many teams.
I hated switching. I liked my busy workspace and being able to jump in and help people around me, get info, etc. I had the benefit of also having a private office I could retreat to when I needed long focus time.
I also love routine. I like predictability of my schedule.
But so much of the teams I primarily work with had been spread across the country. 3 cities at the time. They missed out on the hallway chatter and always felt behind.
After a couple months, I got into my groove. I was collaborating with the folks outside my city (and building) much better. But I was overwhelmed by notifications, and was working too many hours.
I disabled all chat notifications on my phone. I started enforcing a beginning of the day and my kids pop in to remind me it’s over (I lose track of time when I’m focused).
Those teams are now in 6 cities. I’ve learned to schedule collab time, offer myself up to teach new folks when I have time and jump in on things I don’t know the same way.
I also schedule 1 hour meetings with close coworkers for 10 minutes of decision just so the conversation can wander. We have an open biweekly call to just joke and wander into something brilliant.
Folks got super aggressive with meetings. So I block off focus time on my calendar and reject meetings that should be emails. I reject emails for things that should be public. I ignore “good morning” chat messages from people I don’t know. When I’m focusing, I disable notifications and turn my speakers off.
I’m more productive and collaborative now. I have more control with people not able to just walk up to my desk. I’m not distracted by others’ more appealing problems except when I plan to be. Folks in other cities have equal access as local.
I also switched to waking up early for my quiet time at home, before the kids wake up, and not staying up late. I stopped eating lunch out, but always take an hour away. Sometimes I just eat a snack and take a power nap. I quit drinking soda. I stopped caffeine after noon. COVID got me doing outdoor activities that I love regularly out of necessity.
I’m 60lbs lighter than when COVID hit, and just feel a lot healthier. It wasn’t an arching intentional goal, just a change here and there to feel better.
Also, I’m naturally an introvert. At work people don’t see that because I am jovial, kinda loud, and opinionated. But when I clock out, I’m done. I just want to chill with my family.
I’ve dabbled in hobbies. Outdoors stuff like fishing and hiking. Picked up sewing bags and masks. Small home improvements. Goofing around with guitars and drums. Making my own guitar pedals. I just don’t force myself to finish anything, it’s just entertainment.
We’re starting back “hybrid” soon, with “team days.” For some that’ll mean 2-3 days per week in office.
But my teams aren’t local, so I really only see that happening when we can get folks traveling again for planning events. I’m not going to the office to Zoom, when I can do it at home without shoes. Maybe the occasional whiteboarding session. I haven’t found an adequate digital replacement for that.
I don't miss the office-loud-laugher, or the drive-by-tell-you-a-dumb-joke guy when "I'm just trying to get my work done please". My manager wisely scheduled a daily team meeting so I get to see my team every day via Teams.
I've been working from home for over six years. I never want to return to the office. I will change careers before I return to a software development office.
Everyone is different, but my ideal work environment is library quiet. No music and certainly no overheard conversations or people constantly walking past. I’ve never worked in an office that was willing to provide such an environment, but I have it at home.
Another colleague reused his earmuffs and earplugs from the gun range, but I think most of those are pretty uncomfortable.
Another colleague reused his earmuffs and earplugs
from the gun range, but I think most of those are
pretty uncomfortable.
Ideally, everybody struggling to work in an office would wear big, absurd earmuffs.
Maybe if management looked around and saw that 80% of their employees were geared up like they were working on the tarmac of a busy fucking airport just to get some work done, they would rethink the hell of open offices.
Nah. They wouldn't.
The only people I've met who seem to like them are people who do sales for a living or the exact kind of coworkers who I would really not like to be in an open office with.
I have a really nice office in Seattle. Since I am the second most tenured person on the team, I even have a water view and am right next to the snacks. I haven't seen the inside of this office since May 2020, and probably never will again.
All of my colleagues and I have agreed that we don't see the need to go back and our employer is likely going to sell our admin building (we have several other buildings for actual patient services) and distribute some of the money to those of us who worked in that building as a bonus or as an allowance to buy equipment for home.
I've visited the open offices at friends who work for Microsoft and Google and they're just awful hives of noise. I would rather have my own door and own bathroom.
Can walk, get some exercise/sunshine, nap, even have a quickie with your partner or look at porn, etc. No matter how awesome one's office is, those things are generally not options.
And even if you bike to work that latter point still stands due to the passively homicidal assholes driving cars out there.
I get the occasional day off to go do things that don’t require brain. They only pay for bites of the donut with the jam in them.
It’s a net win for everybody.
I think of the benefit of the office being the opportunity for continuous partial attention. It affords the ability to be aware of what's going on about you, to learn & see a lot more. But one has to be attentive-ish, have some receptivity, to benefit from this. I feel like I can work without interruption in an office. But it's a risk or a sacrifice to do so: giving up my option of awareness, giving up the chance to share, the chance to learn or teach, the chance to discuss, to focus on my own things.
Rather than argue against open office as a bad construct, my main grievance is that most engagement points are synchronous & exclusive. Those not in the room at the time are not included, in most organization. Most learning, most deciding happens in the moment, in confidence. The open-office works because people are unable to find good forums for important conversations, and so ad-hocracy is an acceptable all-connected fallback.
Remote tends to be way more deliberate. Ad-hoc interaction is replaced by smaller networks of who-wants-to-talk-to-who. Most actions are private & hidden. It's even less communicative.
I'd far prefer an organization that can find more enduring, participatory, accessible ways of communicating. True for organizations which are remote, and those that are in person.
Exactly this.
The "hmm I should get lunch WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT'S THREE O'CLOCK? CRAP" days are the most productive.
I absolutely cannot get anything done with open office floor plans. And commuting is life wasted.
I get way more work done in a lot less time, save time and stress due to the commute, see my family more, and have significantly better mental health due to all those previous points.
I did miss the office a bit earlier in my WFH career when video conferencing wasn’t as common, but these days it’s not an issue at all and you still get face time with your colleagues etc.
This is extremely situational. When I was in a larger house and had no kids, WFH was an easy way to avoid interruptions.
Moving to a smaller house (more expensive city) and having kids flipped the situation around. Avoiding interruptions at home was extremely difficult because I was always only a door away from someone asking a “quick favor”.
It’s not just me: As a remote manger I can almost always tell when summer break starts for everyone’s area because there’s a stepwise decline in productive when people’s kids aren’t in school.
Likewise, the office environment makes all the difference. I’ve worked in open-office spaces where everybody respected each other and concentration was the default. I’ve also worked in private-office spaces where I could expect knocks on my door every 15 minutes or less because the culture was so bad that interrupting the engineers was the default practice.
Lately, I’ve felt that fully remote has been the worst of all worlds. Once Slack becomes the default I’m pinged from every angle all day long. It’s hard to push back against people who want answers now now now and know they can get your attention by typing the right few characters into Slack. Comes down to culture, but Slack makes it easy for people to quietly interrupt people directly whereas it was much easier to police the interruptions (as a manager) when I could literally see the offenders bothering the engineers.
I lived in an 800 square foot home with one bathroom for five of the last six years, with my wife and two children. My desk was beside the front entryway, with no door.
> Avoiding interruptions at home was extremely difficult because I was always only a door away from someone asking a “quick favor”.
That's a problem of setting boundaries. It never gets easier, but at least the spouse works and the kids go to school and day care.
> I’ve felt that fully remote has been the worst of all worlds. Once Slack becomes the default I’m pinged from every angle all day long. It’s hard to push back against people who want answers now now now and know they can get your attention by typing the right few characters into Slack.
More setting of boundaries. Be firm and say no. Better, don't respond outside of your core hours unless you're explicitly on pager duty.
Whenever I hear about somebody's hellish Slack culture at their workplace and they blame Slack I always think, "That sounds like a bad office culture that would be bad even if Slack was removed from the equation."
Slack builds a culture of hyper-immediate distraction which seems difficult to avoid.
But tools have their own culture as well.
I've loved email for 30+ years
With effort it can be tamed. Filters and so on. But I've never gotten to a great place with it in modern times. With new sources of crap pouring into my inbox every day it is, at best, something that can be tamed but requires constant attention and maintenance.
Of course, this is all subjective and personal. It's working for you! Kudos. =)
Yes, that is the key.
Beauty of email is that it can be done because it's all open protocols.
I've been dragged into a signal channel and that's one untamable firehose. Sequential stream of messages via proprietary UI so there is nothing I can do to automatically file messaged into various folders. Nothing I can do to auto-process certain messages, nothing I can do to mark some things read and some unread, etc..
Email allows for infinite flexibility in configuring it just how you need to work best.
If you have just one inbox and everything lands there all the time, I can see how that's a firehose that's not going to be pleasant. But with email the tools exist to customize this away.
Once Slack becomes the default I’m pinged from
every angle all day long.
(above paragraph edited for clarity)
It's been awesome. Very respectful environment. People @ you but you are not expected to stop what you're doing.
By the same token, I can @ others without fear that I'm causing them an undue interuption, because asynchronous messaging is the norm.
The point being, if you need an immediate reply, you're expected to explicitly mention that. Otherwise it's assumed to be async.
It's working well IMO.
Where I work people can call me on slack or otherwise of it is urgent (no one has abused it so far).
If I am in hyperfocus, anything in text is assumed asynchronous and won't get looked at until I resurface.
Thanks!
How does this work?
Becuase the problem as a recipient is that now I still need to read every.single.message.all.the.time to see what it says, which is ridiculous waste of time and source of continuous interruption.
I much prefer to check email + slack once or twice a day at most, batch process them then. It's the only way to get any work done.
When you have a moment, read the message.
Go back to what you were doing before.
It literally takes seconds to read a message and decide “is everything on fire and I need to respond to this or can it wait until later”.
Mostly, it can wait.
If it can wait, wait. Ignore it. Go back to what you were doing.
Take your time folk, you dont have to respond to every email or every message ten seconds after reading it.
…to be fair, it is a bit rude to leave it for 4 hours before you even look to see what it was.
But hey, as long as you set expectations with your coworkers, that’s fine too.
Slack is only a problem if you can’t control your Pavlovian response to the little red icon.
You’re not a dog; you can choose how you respond to this stuff.
You make it sound like this part is zero-cost, when it absolutely is not.
This comic expresses it more clearly than I could in words: https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt...
I guess your company has a lower message rate than what I've seen. In current company there are 30+ channels and a message arrives on average about every minute.
Each of those "few seconds to read" is a mental interrupt. Happening every minute. This leads to not being able to switch onto concentration mode to do actual work all day long.
The only solution is to switch it off entirely, only check at specific times. But if the company culture is to expect prompt response at all times, that's a conflict.
I guess your company has a lower message rate
than what I've seen. In current company there
are 30+ channels and a message arrives on average
about every minute.
Regular vanilla channel messages should never be expected to be synchronous. As you noted, that's completely unworkable.
DM's and mentions should be IMO be "semi-synchronous." Don't expect an immediate reply unless you've explicitly told the recipient that there's a blocker or there's some other time-critical situation.
Admittedly yes, that does require some attention on the recipient's part, because they have to scan the incoming message to see if it's critical. And some discipline on the sender's part. And even a few seconds of interruption can (worst-case) result in 20-30 minutes of lost productivity if one has to dump their entire mental stack.
So, yes it doesn't scale up endlessly. Multiple "semi-synchronous" mentions/DMs per hour would be a real attention drain. Possibly appropriate for managers, but a real deal breaker for individual contributors.
But at that point I would see it as an issue with the role or with the culture itself.
The only solution is to switch it off entirely, only
check at specific times. But if the company culture
is to expect prompt response at all times, that's a
conflict.
It is unworkable! But becomes the expectation.
> How would you establish a healthy office communication culture?
The same way it has worked well for the ~30 years of my career before slack-obsession. Have something to discuss, put it on the calendar for the relevant people. For smaller things, send email and don't expect an immediate response. If things are truly on fire right now, make a phone call.
Curiously, in decades past we always used IRC which is basically same thing as slack. But IRC never grew this culture of obligated insta-response, it was more for chatter that one could read or ignore depending on how busy. Not sure why. Perhaps because slack is a paid product, it's now part of the business so everyone is expected to take it Very Seriously and be on it all the time.
The same way it has worked well for the ~30 years of
my career before slack-obsession. Have something to
discuss, put it on the calendar for the relevant people.
1. Physically walked over to my desk and interrupted me in person
2. Sent me an email, often expecting a near-instant reply, requiring me to choose between "getting work done" and "monitoring my email."
This is why I feel that it's more about company culture than the tools themselves.
To be clear, a couple years back I did work at a company with a horrible Slack culture. I don't mean to defend Slack per se, and I definitely don't think it's the answer, but I don't think it's the problem either. Inconsiderate coworkers gonna be inconsiderate.
Curiously, in decades past we always used IRC
which is basically same thing as slack. But
IRC never grew this culture of obligated
insta-response, it was more for chatter that
one could read or ignore depending on how busy.
"Back in the day," generally it was the tech/engineer types using IRC. We all generally understood the concept of focus time and understood that IRC should not be used with the expectation of synchronous responses.
Now, with Slack, we have a lot of corporate/managerial/whatever types using an IRC-like tool, and they often just don't "get it." Much like my elderly father initially struggled to understand that text messaging wasn't something that guaranteed an instant response.
IMO full remote can eliminate the need to live in a small house in an expensive city.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is a strong correlation between the number of people (partner,family,kids) and how much people enjoy working from home.
I live alone in my apartment and going the first year or two of the pandemic seeing people I know once every few weeks drove me mad.
I always sought to establish a clear distinction between my work life and home life and the enforced work from home due to COVID has made the two blur to a point now where I feel like I've lost all rhythm. Now living through a pandemic itself has a way of disrupting the rhythm of life but I feel that the collapsing of space into a singular living and work area doesn't help matters.
Another unexpected thing I've found that I missed while working from home is a commute. Now I imagine a person's opinion of their commute is highly conditioned on the mode of transportation but in my case it's a mostly relaxing public transit ride where I had 20-30 minutes of unstructured time to read, listen to a podcast, or just zone out. It similarly helped create additional space to separate the work life from the home life.
This second point on a commute would probably completely change if I had a 90 minute drive in bumper to bumper traffic. If that was my life, there's a good chance I'd find work from home preferable.
Hard agree on a clear distinction between work life and home life. I require an office in the home with a door that closes. When I am in the office, I am working. When I leave the office, I am not working. The closed door separates my work life from my home life.
My kids are trained not to come into the office, and my wife respects the boundary and messages me instead. I don't work from the living room or dining room. (I've tried, and I can't do it anyway, I become nearly useless to both the family members trying to talk to me, as well as my employer.)
Or am I going to have to start a new SaaS?
A good way to enforce this separation is by hardware. (This has many other benefits as well.)
I have a work laptop which is for work only (provided by employer). I switch it on at 9am and I turn it off when the day is done. My own machines are mine, no work or work-related communication happens on them, ever.
While these machines are only a few feet away from each other, once the work laptop is off, it's off.
home maintenance and electricity is also conveniently ignored by my employer (internet bills are flat so I don't mind). someone else does and pays these back in the office. staying at home longer means it gets disorganized faster, especially with work stuff thrown into it.
i had also always hated remote (micro-)management, even before the pandemic. now that's not just the norm, that's the only option. there are a lot of things that are not communicated verbally/textually. a lot of details get overlooked as we are only using documents as a guide instead of the actual stuff that is being built/developed. things look nice on paper, but the reality is full of duct tape solutions. there are also a lot of decisions that can be made better if you are at the workplace seeing the actual work.
it's also kind of insulting to do "extracurricular" work that would have been tolerable in the office. i had spent hours making "educational" presentations that had nothing to do with product we are developing, only because it had been a tradition in the workplace. when i'm doing stuff at home it's hard not to question whether it is ultimately meaningless.
The President of the United States has worked from home for centuries, but the Oval Office and West Wing are well separated from the residence. “Oh, but I don’t have room in my West Coast studio apartment to do that.” If you’re working remote, why are you in a West Coast studio apartment?
First job of my career, they told me I would have an office of my own. First day I came back in for full time (I had interned there with my own office as well), they tell me they're switching buildings to go open office in about a month's time. I got a precious few weeks with a personal office, and then it was all gone. I hated this change of scenery immediately, but I guess I got used to it after a few years.
Working from home took me back to that zen. I didn't even know how much I had missed it - how much I needed my own space to feel productive.
I've since changed jobs, and I kinda dread having to go to the open office nightmare once this is all over. The facilities are way nicer than my last job, but it's still an open office.
Open. Office. As. Implemented. In. Our. Industry. Is. Stupid.
I know my own opinion of WFH improved once I got a desk (once there was finally stock…) and a chair.
It might be that the grass is always greener, but I feel like having the ability to close the door & have a private room (at home or in the real office…) can be a huge plus if you need some quiet time. Similar to the desk/chair, it's just a better working space.
Open office floorplans were effective paycuts, IMO; nothing more than less space == cheaper, and no thoughts were given to the long-term effects because nobody in our industry thinks long-term about anything. Who would when whole companies turn over every two years?
I'd love a home office… but real-estate prices are ridiculous.
For a lot of people with long commutes or terrible work offices, "minimizing suffering" is working from home/a co-working space regardless of what those look like.
For a lot of people with terrible home office setups or lack of boundaries with family and short commutes, "minimizing suffering" is going to an employer's office.
Personally, I think work from "home" (anywhere) is the better path for most of the HN-types. At its core, it's us taking back _control_ over our workspace and we have the resources to make it better if we choose to. I can move somewhere with a spare room to use as an office. I can't make my employer give me a private office.
Which is all to say yes, I'd love to see a more in-depth poll/study on _why_ people are making the decisions they're making. My suspicion is that it largely comes down to which problems are easier to fix for that individual.
For me? Never again.
I like the office and am currently working in the office but I just... get up and leave whenever I want. Come back whenever I want. No need to pretend to work 9-5.
The programmer then informs the manager that this is what it is like to write code all day. But since programming looks like you are just sitting there not doing anything for much of the time, then you have to pretend to be doing something whenever someone walks by so it doesn't look like you are just goofing off (otherwise they feel that they can interrupt you breaking your train of thought). And that makes programming less efficient.
The manager was then enlightened.
But like the real fix is a path to a much better optimum, which is giving employees autonomy, trusting them, rewarding them adequately, getting them to actually care, so that they don't need to be watched over as individual code monkeys.
I am a hard worker because I send 2AM emails (which I may have scheduled in advance to give that impression).
> Why are you pretending to program the full 9-5?
I'm not, because I now work from home. Where people value my actual work output, and not the hours I'm sitting in a chair, where my manager can see me.
At home, I get a "guilty" feeling if I don't work 100% effectively for the whole day. At the office, I never felt pressured to "code" the full eight hours, as I could see nobody was doing so (in Slack it seems everyone else is always green/present.)
At the office, I'd fill the day with conversations, lunch and coffee breaks, and other meaningful interactions with other programmers, managers, designers and various other stakeholders.
At home, when I need to take a mental break I just get bored and start procrastinating with the computer. If I go see my family to the other room we talk family business.
I look forward to returning to the office. Immense amounts of information just never get communicated over Slack & Zoom. I feel like working in a dark tunnel for the past 2 years and going.
If I wanted to sharply focus on a specific task for the whole eight hours I could do unlimited remote already pre-Covid. I used this option rarely, as these days could get quite exhausting.
When WFH I'll often just check out for multiple hours in the middle of the day. Go on a walk, take a nap, whatever... Sometimes I'll just do more hours later that night to make up for it, or sometimes I'm just on top of everything anyway, and the break helps keep my mind fresh.
I never felt like I had the ability to do things like that when in the office
In my experience, remote work typically has no direct productivity downsides, but team cohesion absolutely can take a hit. I find being in the same room with someone doesn’t help us work any better, but having been in the same room with them at some point (ideally not all that long ago) absolutely does, likely even more so having had a beer with them.
I'm sure this varies based on the type of work you're doing, but I found the hit to team cohesion led to long term productivity losses. At first we were getting more done than ever. As time went on our raw work output day-to-day did not decrease but a lot of unneeded work that previously would have been headed off at planning and discussion stages would get through.
This was on a team that is specifically doing speculative high risk/reward work so that might be applicable to a lot fewer people than I imagine.
It obviously ought to, right, or else why does (should) anyone care about team cohesion in the first place?
Of course, in the end this all affects the company productivity, but it's really not as straight-forward [0] as the productivity of a single team.
[0] "straight forward" is a bit of an overstatement for measuring team productivity, but that's a different discussion.
Why?
Writing software, especially in a large organization, is often an inherently social job, just like many others. You often need heads down time to actually get into flow and produce code, but that doesn't mean interaction with others isn't a significant part of it as well.
I don't know much about the nitty gritty of what kernel deving looks like, but it's possible that the work there looks more like longer stretches of heads down time than average. E.g., I can imagine you could be pretty impactful being heads down for weeks or months at a time micro-optimizing the performance of various components. I think this tends not to be true of most software.
One thing I do know about the social dynamics of Linux development is that Linus can be an asshole and flame at people a lot. You could worry that this would be more intense and thus worse in an office, but IME this kind of stuff tends to get better once people can see each other as actual humans and not just text on a screen.
I mean that e.g., software in large organizations often needs to fit in with the rest of the software the organization is writing, and that producing code is only part of the work; there's also working with others to find out what the right code to produce is.
I can only imagine the amount of institutional knowledge that is being lost right now. Workers that are low to the ground and sociable who form informal bonds between departments are hurt by being limited to only online interactions, and as a result, the organization suffers too.
Throughout the pandemic we surveyed employees and they largely preferred to WFH. A lesser but significant cohort preferred a hybrid setup. Almost nobody at all was in favor of full-onsite. I was in the hybrid camp. I thought I could have the comraderie of the workplace and the dynamism of a bustling city, plus enjoy the comforts and efficiencies of WFH. On paper it sounds great. In practice it doesn't work at all.
As an employee: I found that the office felt empty and dead which made me question commuting in. Nobody was really around to go to happy hours or have events. A significant portion of the people I wanted to be around were opting to stay home more.
As an employer/manager: We found capacity planning to be hard. You can't save by scaling office space down if everyone is hybrid and still coming in on the same days (tues, weds, thurs, obviously). You also can't have a lively environment with A/B days and half-staff, and it creates headaches around who needs to be in together and when people want to be there. Communicating is easier if everyone just joins the meeting from their own laptop _wherever_ and doesn't need to arrive to a conference room and fight with some silly speakerphone-camera-tv thing.
So I'm ALL IN on remote work. Does it have downsides? Of course. I miss bonding with coworkers, going out to coffee/lunch, and impromptou hack-sessions. What I have gained is different and so much more valuable: Hours of extra time per day to devote to family, friends, health and hobbies. Work is work, and life is life. It's a revelation to realize that you don't _need_ to be IRL buddies with coworkers, just do great work together, and then go do your own thing.
Commuting is literally wasted money and life-- Full-stop. Corporate workspaces are redundant if the work can be done from home rather than letting that space go unused. This is just trimming wasted time and money and putting it somewhere more useful. I also find office attire to be insane. Countless individuals stressing about what shirt/pants/shoes combo to wear... ironing and paying for dry cleaning. Just go on your zoom call wearing something and use your brain to get shit done. Thats the whole point of work.
Having a fixed office day really helps. Also, what I really liked about the hybrid approach is that the commute can actually be better; i.e. I don't mind driving 1h to work if I do so once per week.
> It's a revelation to realize that you don't _need_ to be IRL buddies with coworkers, just do great work together, and then go do your own thing.
You also don't need to love your job, you just need to pay your bills. I don't think this is a revelation; at least for me, being friends with my coworkers is a significant part of what makes working fun. And even with WFH you still spend a lot of time working. This is of course just preference; if you're not much into socializing, cutting out that part of your life and instead spend the time somewhere else can make sense.
Commuting is not the same as setting time on fire. The distraction endemic negates the advantage and makes it worse. The forced time in the car with limited options lets me use it somewhat productively, notably makes me do one thing. I spend that time thinking about work, taking phone calls, sometimes listening to podcasts and audiobooks. I have read zero books, but finished 2 audiobooks in the car this year. I find myself setting time on fire during weekends on social media. If instead of commuting the hours are spent on Netflix/Social media etc has gone up then the point is moot.
Generally we're talking 20-30 mins though. A much longer ~hour commute or something would definitely start to wear on me I think.
Less time driving and travel costs.
Freedom to take a breaks however you please.
Fewer distractions (YMMV).
More autonomy.
Better office equipment (depends).
When we were in the office, there were many random events that I miss.
Eating lunch with people, often from other departments/projects.
Free food in the break room.
Playing MTG with coworkers.
Playing Smash Bros with coworkers.
Random hallway discussions.
As an introspective person, I think WFH has done hidden damage by enabling my introversion to an extreme degree. However, I think that's more of a strike against my personality than against WFH.
I thought WFH would be great but it happened too early in my career. I had no savings and too many roommates, and I was not learning nearly as much on the job as I was while we were all in person. I still had to learn how to do my tasks but stopped having conversations with random coworkers about projects they were working on, stopped gossiping about our personal lives, all of our activity became measured and quantified (I freaking hate the MS-Teams online status) and my motivation suffered hard for all of it. It's hard for me to tell if it's my workplace that became dysfunctional or myself, but I wish I had spent long enough time in the office to get sick of it before being wfh.
I think I'd have already gone completely insane if I were still a bachelor when this pandemic WFH experiment has been thrust upon me. I go stir crazy when I'm home alone, but I'm not really a social butterfly either. Work was a good compromise.
For one thing, I don't have the luxury of an entirely separate space to dedicate just to work -- my home office is also my bedroom and personal computer/gaming space.
And as others have noted, its just... way too easy to fall into a pattern where you literally turn into a technological anchorite. I have refused to let myself use food or grocery delivery primarily because I realized there was a point in the depths of 2020 when I hadn't left my apartment in almost two weeks, and it really frightened me how easily the time passed, in a beige blur of life.
This is the issue with all of these anti-WFH posts and threads. It was in the midst of the pandemic, where you were not strongly discouraged from leaving your home and socialising. I imagine if there was no lockdown yet everybody similarly worked-from-home, the answers would be markedly different.
But at the same time, the flexibility of working from home is incredible. I have been baking like a fiend because it's perfectly suited for the periodic breaks I take during the day. I can take a nap or go for a walk almost whenever I want. I don't feel bad about these things because I'm not wasting time walking to a meeting or waiting in line for the bathroom, and they make me more productive.
So, hybrid I guess.
On the one hand, I feel like working in the office makes me more productive and is better for my mental health. It's a change of environment, and I'm working around colleagues who keep me a bit more focussed (less likely waste 30 minutes watching YouTube if a coworker is right beside you).
Also, on the hour-long commute I tend to read, which is terrific. So many of these books have changed my life for the better. When I'm at home I find I have too many distractions. You make a cup of tea, the cat meows and you let her in, she meows again and you let her out. You decide to read outside. Then you realise it's too sunny and grab a hat. Before you know it you've burnt through 30 minutes.
On the other hand, since working from home during the pandemic I've filled the time saved with a lifelong dream of mine - learning to play guitar! I'm absolutely loving it.
So a mix is a pretty good compromise
Regarding your comment about work/home separation, similar to what someone else has mentioned in another thread, I have the work laptop that my company provides to me, and my personal laptop. I have no personal files on my work laptop and no work files on my personal laptop. I don't even have any work-related app (Teams, Slack etc) on my personal phone (my thinking is that if the company wants to reach me through those on a phone, they need to provide me with the phone). I only have my work laptop turned on when I am working. When I close my work laptop, I am done for the day.
Coworker acts curt to me as though they are superior and more productive than me? Rage ensues and I get an ungodly amount of work done.
Come across an inspiring/encouraging coworker or get recognition for something? I feel great and feel like I take more risks.
Coworker types super loud or acts inconsiderately? My productivity is hampered and I keep focusing on that instead of getting work done.
Attractive coworker or someone I want to impress within sight? I can’t concentrate on actual productivity and try to overcompensate by typing more and acting zoned in.
Feel like a social failure during lunch and forced to sit passively as a couple douchebag workers on adderall dominate the conversation? Feel like a bitch for a few hours.
At home, I’m as productive as I need to be and my motivation allows me to be. No more emotional volatility regarding how I relate to others around me.
Fucking incredible if you ask me.
2. I'm pretty empathetic and emotionally reactive, and honestly I've found that WFH makes this worse in a lot of ways. Working IRL helps humanize people. A disagreement over text might make me feel like I'm being attacked, but it's easier to see it more as just a discussion if it's happening IRL. People that I view as being malicious start to seem more human and relatable IRL. I'm better able to vent and commiserate with others IRL than over text.
Your framework of dealing with people seems different from mine. What in this post strikes you as “opting out”? That comment doesn’t make sense to me and some clarification would be great.
Also, do these things not bother you or do you simply have a different way of dealing with it so that you don’t feel bad about it?
I brought up bad people in part because some people do just suck, are toxic, etc., and often just cutting those people out is the right move. You're not really getting anything by letting them influence or affect you; it's just negatively affecting your quality of life.
But I think ~most people have some good and some bad about them. Things about them will annoy, bother, anger, or distract you, but other parts of knowing them will be rewarding and fulfilling to your life overall. So I think it's valuable to learn how to weather the bad so you can benefit from the good.
You might be able to tolerate something but choose not to expose yourself to it unnecessarily. In the other comment you posted, you mentioned how working from home makes you more sensitive to such issues. That seems to be a direct parallel of this situation. You should do what's most convenient for you, not forcefully expose yourself to a shitty situation for no reason.
Well my whole point is that there's not 'no reason'. (Except sometimes in the case of genuinely bad/toxic people, like I mention).
Maybe a more general way of saying what I'm saying: I think convenience-maximization finds local optima too aggressively. I think life oughta be a bit more like simulated annealing.
True "remote as an office" and "working from office" work styles are inherently incompatible. And trying to compromise will probably make everyone unhappy.
Maybe we don't need to. Maybe different companies can have different cultures. Or, in a compromise with your idea, maybe you split up teams in a company by their preference.
Sure, there are many advantages to being in the office, learning and career-wise. But those advantages are related to just one aspect of life: work. With WFH I get perks in every aspect of life, plus it is healthier for me and to the environment, while also being better to the community I'm in - I get to spend my money here locally and not in some corporate park.
I get more work done at home than I ever did in an office and I have 7 kids and we homeschool.
I started my career in an office - a very fancy one at that with an incredible view and great coworkers. But office life has never been for me.
> I have 7 kids and we homeschool
Impressive.
Last spring, I left a company I'd been at for five years and had made several friends at because they wanted us to return to the office. I ended up landing at an all-remote subsidiary of a multinational that's super cautious about covid and hasn't even started to reopen their offices at all aside from a small handful of people who do shipping and receiving and need to do physical stuff in person. I don't regret it one iota. I ended up getting a drastic pay increase and a seriously more impressive title out of the switch.
Back in October, I went out drinking with my former boss and he told me my old company cancelled their return to the office and went all-remote again when the delta surge started. I'm enjoying my new company too much to go back, though (and, no, they haven't replaced me, and that's a long story).
Some clarification on the subsidiary I work for: they were remote-first even before covid, and while they had an office, nobody was required to work there in person even well before the pandemic started. While our parent company wasn't remote-first, as soon as covid began, they immediately told my subsidiary's landlord that they wouldn't be renewing the lease. I've also been told that the parent company has 100% committed that all meetings will be Zoom-only forever even after offices reopen, because they've found that, as a multinational company, Zoom-only meetings have solved a problem where, pre-covid, if a team had 1-2 members in a different office than everyone else, those 1-2 members would be marginalized on the team and cut out of major decisions. Zoom has been the great equalizer.
Edit: Oh yeah, the best part is that I'm in Texas but everyone else on my team is on the east coast. So I get to work from 8-4 and then close my laptop and enjoy the rest of my afternoon. Getting off at 4 every day has done wonders for my mental health.
A few years ago (end of 2018) I ended up with a debilitating combo of anxiety, panic, depression, and stress from being overworked. That year and the following were the most difficult of my life. I had quit my job at the beginning of 2019 because I couldn't even think about work due to the cinstant chest pain. After half a year, I'd improved somewhat but began running out of funds and found another job. Unsurprisingly, my health improvements stagnated again and I continued to deal with chest pain and throat issues.
Then 2020 came. My team went remote and, suddenly, I was able to rest my back, improve my diet, avoid the majority of stressors (aside from pandemic-related ones). I ended up leaving that job for one that was intentionally full-time remote. Working remote has been the best thing to happen to my health in years. I've lost 40 pounds, eat healthier, and have total control to manage my day.
I know others prefer the office, but I don't think I'd ever want to go back regularly.
Now in 2022 it sort of feels like living at the office, and the lack of separation between the two can be annoying. The flexibility to pick when I want “intense focus” time at the office has been working really well for me. (Thank goodness my company allowed us to be hybrid.)
I have hated every minute of it. I used to have a 15 minute commute which was a nice bit of time to get my thoughts in order. Now I roll out of bed when my alarm goes off and do daily stand-up on zoom in my home office literally 5 minutes later. My brain is literally still asleep.
I miss people, I miss spontaneous interactions, I miss interactions with people who are not in my department. With very rare exception, I have not spoken to anyone outside of my department of 15 people in 2 years. There are over a thousand people in my company.
My wife works nights and I work during the day, which is the worst of all worlds. I hear her TV shows, TikToks, etc through the walls and they really distract me. I have noise canceling headphones, they only go so far.
When I worked at the office, my brain knew it was work time and could focus. At home, my brain is like "oh you should do the dishes", "what was that loud bang, you should check the basement?". My output has completely crashed.
My friends all had kids and moved to the exurbs, so I've seen them a couple times since the whole thing started. I'm genuinely losing my mind from lack of social interaction.
I want to go back to the office so badly.
You can fix this yourself, incredibly easily. Personally I have never changed my alarm clock based on if I'm WFH.
My wife is happy to pop in her headphones if I ask her to while I'm working.
I keep scheduled breaks. If I decide in the morning that the dirty dishes are bothering me then I might do them on my lunch break or when I "get home". And to be fair, if you heard a loud bang at your office anyone would go check it out immediately, no difference at home.
Of course, this may be partially explained by the structural pressure against WFH, which has left its proponents on the defensive. But it strikes me as anti-compassionate.
But seeing people complaining because they refuse to set their alarm clock or take any basic ownership of their own lives, c'mon!
The comments have the tone of someone telling a person with depression to stop being so sad.
This has nothing to do with my alarm clock and I have no idea why you’re so stuck on it. If I set my alarm clock earlier, I do what? Stare at a wall for an hour I could be sleeping? Come on. The entire point I was making was the pandemic took my thing to do before work, my moment of Zen.
Kids would be great. Kids would give me something to do, something to live for. I don’t have kids, we can’t have kids, it’s a sore spot, thanks for bringing it up.
> My wife is happy to pop in her headphones if I ask her to while I'm working.
I’m not married to your wife. Different people have different relationships. My wife is going to want to use the entertainment center in her time off, and it wouldn’t be fair for me to put limits on her time off.
It’s also fine and dandy that you’re able to ignore your life duties at home, but not all of us have that luxury; not all of our minds work that way. It’s simply not a thing I can shut off. I am at home, my brain is in at home mode, which is consciously aware of all the responsibilities of being at home at all times.
My life has two states right now, trying to work in a place I find lonely, isolating and highly distracting, followed by hours of being alone after my wife leaves for work a little before 3pm. It’s not great, I do not like it, no matter how much you tell me I should and it’s my fault I don’t.
I love my wife very much, more than I had any idea I was capable of loving another person, but I go literal months where she is the only human interaction I have outside checkout clerks. I am losing my goddamn mind.
We got a dog early into the pandemic. She’s beautiful and the one saving grace of the entire thing. She’s not a great conversationalist though. And before you bring up walking the dog as something I could do before standup, my dog literally gets irritated if I wake her up before 10 AM. She’s a Shiba Inu, you can accurately read the irritation level from the amount of side-eye she’s giving you.
Here is her Instagram, my wife runs it https://www.instagram.com/yubabaandcompany/
Yeah, we are planning proper "meatspace" get togethers, which will help gel the team more. But that's 2-4x a year. I don't think that needs to happen a lot to really reap some social benefits.
For everyone seeking more social interaction; just go find it locally, outside of work.
I guess I'm fully in the camp of work being intense, but time bound. And that's what remote work affords me, though I've learned to draw the lines between my work time and my personal time starkly. Once you get it right, office environments feel like such a drag in comparison.
I recognize other people prefer office work and that's totally fair. I'm just glad that the pandemic has opened easier avenues for people like me.
Though another issue is that my home office is also my bedroom, and after a while of working from home I get an intense feeling of being cooped up that doesn't go away even after going outside. On the other hand, my office at work is very quiet and isolated. I realize for people with a decent home office but who have to work in some kind of open office at work, these experiences might be the other way around entirely. Apart from that, I was already allowed a lot of flexibility in choosing the hours I come and go, so I never had an issue with commuting or taking breaks for things like appointments with doctor/dentist/hairdresser/... etc...
Either way I'm genuinely happy for people who prefer WFH having that choice more and more, and occasionally I enjoy the flexibility of WFH for a day or so.
When people ping you on Slack or email and ask you in a really curt/terse way for something it can feel very transactional without the occasional small talk to humanise your coworkers. And I find it really hard to do that sort of small talk remotely/virtually.
So I think personally I need to have a day every week or two when you have a coffee/lunch/beer with people and get a chance to really have the small talk and put a face with the name. I also love huddling around a whiteboard for certain problems. Before Omicron I started going in one day a week and focusing it on the socialising and the meetings where in-person felt useful.
The catch with that is that it means 'work from home' can't be 'work from anywhere' - as everybody needs to be an occasionally commutable distance from the office for it to work. I also realise that it doesn't save the company money on the office if every team comes in the same day - so you might need a roster kind of thing to maximise the space. That sounds solvable to me though - enough so where it is my preference if we can make it work for 2022...
What I really miss was the period in time where I could work in the office and everyone else was working from home. The quiet of no-one else around, the productiveness of not being at home and the commute for that period of time between work/home where I can have some time just to myself.
I think "working remotely" is more accurate description because one can work remotely without working from home (eg. working out of a coworking space, coffee shop, or park)
But what I discovered was that since I had made "home" as much an office as "work" I didn't have anywhere to go that wasn't "work." That was very stressful for me since sometimes you really do need to get away.
After that experience I became much more judicious about working from home. A trick I used to help maintain mental sanity was to "set up" a home office for doing work when I needed/wanted to work from home, but then taking it down when I was done. That it wasn't there was the important bit in allowing me to not get stressed out about it.
WFH for me has been amazing, I get more personal time, more family time, less stress, less commute - feels like a total win for me. Like many corporate employees I am lamenting being forced back to a 3/2 hybrid arrangement in the near future. And like many I’m looking for a new employer.
Unless the hybrid schedule is optional, expect to be back full time in under a year! You'll know you're about to go back when your managers manager has an all hands and mentions something about people being confused or not knowing when their team will be in the office.
They'll manufacture consent by doing a bunch of surveys that they claim people want to go back.
Then 3 months later they'll mandate teams return to work full time (with a flex alternating friday off or something) for 'team cohesion'.
You can actually be a change management consultant. It's big money.
I do it too (there are a few in my comment history), but I don't quite understand why. It's maybe something like: if I state my stance (wfh, prefer working from office, for the record) then maybe the comment-section-at-large will stop assuming everybody else wants to WFH forever. But it rather feels like the community has a collective neurosis, chanting their opinions on the subject in a loop with no purpose. Perhaps we can do better.
I can imagine doing offsites together with my team. Or client workshops. But regularly driving a quarter hour into the office is off the table for me.
Three days a week I start with swimming between 07:30 and 08:30 am. Sitting at my desk at 09:00. The other days I start early and am able to get some hours done before the meetings are killing productivity. And this way I am able to call it a day quite early.
I don't like zoom calls, especially since we have so many pointless ones. Half the people (or more) don't even turn on the camera, and nearly all of them have crappy microphones. It's mostly an exhausting waste of time.
There are a bunch of nearby teams that I'd interact with daily at the office, but we have no real reason to talk most days when we're just plugging away on our own narrow slice of the work, so that connection is fading. I feel more mercenary than I ever have in my working life before.
To me, it's just less friction to be in the office, where I don't have to care about anything and can just do my work without distracting tasks like making sure there's coffee and food and avoiding doing chores "oh, I could clean a bit while thinking through this..."
I'd love to work in an office if I had my own room, or share one with a few team members at most, but nearly all jobs have open offices with tons of distractions. My last office had 12 employees in a room designed for 6: it was draining my energy and cut my productivity in half.
I'd work in an office if it was actually a place conductive to work, but I'm never working in an open office again.
I do go into a corporate office about once a week and candidly I have issues with concentration and productivity because of the open office and stark lighting. To take calls or video chats you have to step away from your desktop setup (monitor, etc) to find any empty conference room so you don't have to compete with other people talking in the open office area. Sometimes when I go in I am the only one on a floor with 50+ desks. Those days are slightly better for productivity, but the vaunted social aspect of the office isn't there anymore. Or other team members are in so randomly and infrequently that the serendipity of water-cooler world problem solving never happens.
While I prefer WFH for a number of reasons, I can understand why people prefer the office. But even on the days I appreciate having a corporate office, I still hate the open office configuration. It's almost like WFH has evolved and changed to be much better, and the office is stuck in the past. Candidly, you won't get me to come back into an office consistently, until there is a way for the office to be more like WFH.
Overall, not having to commute to the office (and pay for trains, fuel, lunches, etc) is saving me over £8k/year, and I still have the advantage of being able to go in when needed (such as if there's a social planned for the evening or suchlike).
But I've noticed that our jr programmers haven't improved since 2 years ago.
Plus there is absolutely nothing that can beat lunch hour siestas in my own damn bed, let me tell you
For all of the benefits of working from home though, it’s really a tertiary concern for me when I prioritize remote work. Much more important are the larger set of opportunities I have not being limited to one particular region, and the greatly improved quality of life I get from not commuting.
As someone who lives outside of a tech hub, the value of having access to remote work can’t be understated. There is certainly enough work for a software developer in my city, and some of it pays well enough even if it’s a bit lower than what I can make doing remote work, but none of the companies locally are invested in technology as a business strategy. If I were restricted to local work I’d be stuck working as a cost center at a regressive thinking Big Corp adding features to a decades pile of technical debt. Even if I relocated to a tech hub, I’d be stuck with the startups in that particular city plus the companies large enough to open satellite offices around the world. As it is, working remotely I can stay in a town where I have friends and family and work at jobs that are interesting and let me stretch my skills wherever they happen to be.
For the most part, everyone is still WFH in my company even now, though that's beginning to change. I prefer this for mostly selfish reasons. I'm no longer an outlier, someone that they need to remember to loop into meetings, or that single outlier with an odd schedule. That part has made my job easy.
What's not easy for me: I'm now seen as the expert on how to WFH efficiently. I know what works for me, but communicating that to people in wildly different living arrangements, or just different work styles is surprisingly hard.
And, it turns out I do miss meeting up with colleagues in real life. I used to travel to our different offices a few times a year and meet with colleagues. As much as I'm one of the ones that's really adapted well to WFH, turns out even I need some face-to-face time. I suspect I'm going to be a bucket of nerves and stress next time I attend a conference.
Now in my ideal world this village would also have lots of amazing companies with cool offices that pay lots of money.
But that's not going to happen. So even though I do miss in-person stuff, I'll take the peace and quiet and not having to commute.
It took me a while to get used to remote work, but now I couldn't have it any other way. I do miss the social aspects of being in the same physical space as other people, but I greatly prefer the other freedoms like not wasting 1-2 hours of my day commuting to work. I used to get pretty bad seasonal depression over winter which has now disappeared as I'm not longer coming home in the miserable cold dark for a few months of the year.
I'm also grateful that I have a decent apartment with a seperate and dedicated office that is a very distinct area from where to cook, eat, and sleep.
I'm thankful that I have a good social circle (who I all met through past jobs in an office...) that still regularly hangs out. One silver lining of the past few years is that we just go over to each other's place to hang out, which is much more comfortable and cheaper!
It's not really the _location_ that I care about but the environment. Going into the office and shooting the shit in a care-free manner with my co-workers.
My industry kind of just disappeared when WFH came in and I've been on a sabbatical since.
I don't want to go into an office and then do video calls, or have to work around some silly "if bit of paper says this then half the office does video calls", or listen to some sort of speech about responsible standing or whatever, so at least for the time being I've left software and I'm studying instead.
I was, for a while, waiting for 2019 office work, but that's probably just gone forever, which means I'm not a professional software developer any more, I think.
Basically I'd need to find an office in which everyone agrees with me that corona is an overblown threat. Most of my friendship groups and meet-ups are on the same page there, but barely any companies are if any.
I'd rather just go up sporadically for socials as and when they occur. If I could just walk into an office that would be great, but that's impractical because flats/houses in walking distance of major employment centres are really fucking expensive (or extremely poor quality for the price, you decide!). Not to mention that I have a partner who works in a completely unrelated field such that we wouldn't both be able to benefit from that arrangement.
And if everyone who works in an office or from home tried to benefit from living within walking distance of work, all at once, they wouldn't be able to because there's just not enough accommodation in those areas for it to work.
The most obvious part was becoming my own office manager, somewhat stay motivated and focused, adapting the new work rythmes, getting clues about how coworkers are doing etc.
Then scheduling that with family and maintaining the home on the private side.
But it is really worth it. Mental health has improved a lot, even as objectively I’m doing longer days in total. Getting to interact a lot more with my family is a big part of it. It also means better understanding how the day goes for them, instead of the end of the day self-report at the dining table we were used to.
Work quality improved, there’s just way less “doing random stuff to look busy”.
Social life went way down, but the parts that stayed are also way more meaningful.
My hope is we see the light at the end of the “how do you socialize remotely ?” tunnel and find a middle ground between the current situation and the having everyone commute/wander in the city.
Back when I started working solo around 10 years ago, I remember it wasn't easy and it took me a long time to find out how to do it right (e.g. things like "you still need to decide what your working hours are", or "you need self discipline" etc.).
Back then, I remember having a hard time and I could not wait to get back to an office - which I did around 2015.
But this second time around, I knew what to expect and I was able to adapt well from the start. Plus I have awesome coworkers and boss, that makes things a lot easier. We do things like virtually hang out once a week to play games etc. - that helps with not feeling lonely.
EDIT: but the biggest difference is probably that I now have a family. Back then I had flatmates, but I guess it's not the same.
Now I'm in a new company, still in Singapore but doing basically the same job. I work in retail POS professional services, and my reports and colleagues are scattered all over Asia and Australia. This is because our customers are also equally distributed, and most of our time is spent engaging customers and collaborating remotely.
My manager is in Utrecht but soon will be in Sydney. Fortunately, she doesn't care where I work as long as I get the work done. That's also my message to my reports.
It's a unique job and set of circumstances that lends itself to WFH, but it suits me perfectly. Now I can't imagine going to an office every day.
Working in a remote first organization is better. No asses to kiss. Just results. And ample amounts of free time.
I actually have the ability to exercise, cook wholesome meals, spend time with my girlfriend and invest the time spent travelling into hobbies / businesses /
Never again will I be in an office. It's a hard limit for me now.
I'll rarely make any progress on my "sprint" tasks during the in-office week, but I organize fun social events after-hours for all the other remotes that fly in at the same time (and any locals that want to spend after-hours together). Last time I did a screening of Princess Mononoke in the main office gathering area, and then we went out for drinks & dinner 2-3 times that week. One evening we all went out to play ping-pong.
I much prefer to work from home when I work at companies that have a small percentage of women on my team (which is every software job I've had in the last 15 years)
My only conclusion is that everyone else had shitty 2 hr commutes in heavy traffic from their large house with extra rooms.
Others, like myself, had a pleasant subway ride playing games/listening to music from my cramped tiny apartment.
I do miss some professional interactions. My plan is to start regularly attenuation Meetup type groups as we return to normalcy. This is likely even better than only networking with folks who work at the same company as me.
Fave work environment was at a co-working space in Bali. No talking allowed in the AirCon room. So, you're around two dozen people whom are intently focused in getting work done. No interruptions and yet high energy. For Human connection, just pop out into the other space, where talking is allowed. Plus, shared lunches or tea throughout the week. Best of both worlds.
I totally understand why some people would rather be in an office, even those who are “just” writing code. But I’m just not a very social person and I value time with my family over in-person social interactions with my coworkers (despite my current coworkers being very nice and awesome people).
There’s also just zero need for me to be physically colocated given the work that I do, so any benefits are greatly outweighed by the commute and lack of flexibility that comes with a requirement to be in an office everyday.
I’m married and have two (teenage) children and have been working from home 100% for (going on) 8 years, and have very little issues with feeling alone.
Obviously if I lived alone, it would be a different story, and I would likely prefer going back to the office.
It seems like we constantly discuss and compare WFH and WFO without really discussing the difference living with others makes, especially if you have older children (where “older” = are mostly self-sufficient, which I consider about 10+, give or take).
The fact that my work is not WFH has the side effect of limiting the talent pool to those who can move to the Bay Area. I bet there are thousands of people world-wide who could do my job better and for less pay, if only they could immigrate to the U.S. I expect that paying Bay Area compensation for remote roles is transitory.
I think the most interesting thing about a lot of this is how wide the spectrum of desires is. It ranges from "you couldn't pay me enough to work from an office again" to "you couldn't pay me enough to WFH".
Its a LOT harder to maintain "flow" in open-plan.
But my ears hurt less when I don't have to constantly zoom in with 'phones. That said, Because not 100% of the overlap worklife people are in the office at the same time, most meetings incur a zoom cost anyway.
Generally it's worked out well - more flexibility and better work/life balance, but does need adjustment, especially if you have a busy household.
We try to get together for monthly all-hands, and usually try to have some social/team-building activities at the same time (conditions permitting - only remotely during the pandemic).
I'm the opposite, its work and everything is a transaction.
Nothing worse than pointless 'hi how are you?' Slack messages where the other person doesn't give a shit about your response, just ask your question as concisely as possible.
Other great reasons: not spreading germs. get chores done during lunch break. see more of kids. look after pets. easy take holidays where you work from another location. own office space. decent coffee machine. not being caged in a city centre during lunchtime. bring in washing if it rains. be near school if there is a problem (like kid is sick). conversation over zoom means both of you get to work at a desk and have good ergonomics while solving an issue.
So if someone is a situation like I am in, I really really recommend cycling (or some outdoor sport). It really helps with the mood.
I also appreciate the separation of work and home that my commute provides.
Also while I am very much allowed to work from home the customer I work with really live the effect that we older teammates have on younger ones. (The young ones currently in the teqm in my team are brilliantly smart and hardworking, we just share experience so they don't have to learn everything the hard way.)
I mostly just like having the division between work and home: I work at the office, I don't work at home. I think my ideal work location would be an office in town, but not in my company's building.
So I need human interactions but it’s fine if it’s another group of people. I have hobbies outside with people too, but the mandatory aspect of a job, and the variety of people (compared to a hobby where we all like the same thing) just makes it better.
As it is, I think I have one more year of SiValley before I can't stand the competitiveness or the iciness of the tense, joyless local population. Financially it was a good move for a while, but joy is too precious to sell for a few more dollars.
While I love the convenience of working from home, making an office space at home takes a huge portion of the square footage available for me. My company offers $100/mo as a stipend to work from home. This is approximately the cost of .25 square feet of real estate.
I can't afford to work from home, but I have to anyway. Most companies I know have closed down their offices. :(
What I do miss though, is hanging out with my colleagues. It's nice to go for a coffee break or lunch break with a co-worker and just chat about (mostly non-work) stuff. We can organise socials etc. but it's not the same.
I do have my own friends and family that I hang out with anyway, so it's not really a problem for me.
Happy employees are better employees.
My problem with home office is that I don't have a dedicated room for my "office". Also my heating costs went up, so did my power consumption. I still need to pay for car insurance and maintance :D.
I seem to work more at home. My stress level actually increased.
Also some people don't understand the concept of home office, and are now bugging me during work (my mom e.g.).
Source https://github.com/gabrielsroka/gabrielsroka.github.io/blob/...
And during the lockdown they were open throughout. My frequency of going there roughly stayed the same (once or twice a weak). A co-working space gives you most of the comforts of a workplace. Except my direct colleagues are not there and I don't have a fixed desk.
It's great. Even just the bustle of other people around me doing whatever it is they are doing puts me in a mind to do something myself. I actually go there when I want to focus. When I have online meetings, I prefer taking them from home. It's more quiet there and it's just easier.
During the lockdown, I actually joined a local startup as the CTO. Most of us are in the same city (Berlin). But we rarely meet in person. I meet some of the people for coffee or socially once in a while but we run the company like it is a remote company. We don't even have an office. It works but it's not ideal and we are eager to fix our office situation as soon as funding permits. Specifically, I'm eager to get our engineers (the usual selection of mostly introverted types) in one room to force some communication to happen a bit more naturally.
We use a mix of discord, google meets and slack to meet online. None of these is ideal but collectively they have a feature set that's workable. Google meets, makes my CPU spin like crazy. It's alright when all you are doing is attending the meeting. Slack is on permanently but we never use its audio/video features. When I want to do pair programming with engineers, we tend to use discord. We could probably lose slack completely since discord has most of the relevant features. But for historic reasons we just have it and we get very little out of moving over. We are on a freemium plan with both.
During the lockdown, I also started doing long walks. That's something I now actively make time for since I usually feel great after having one. I can walk for hours if time permits. I'll put some BT headphones on and listen to podcasts. Sometimes I bring my camera to shoot some photos along the way. For a lot of people, a commute more or less fills the same role.
My company is currently planning on doing 40% in the office, 60% remote, however with everyone picking their own schedule heading into the office for 2 days a week seems stupid if I'm just going to be on Microsoft Teams there.
That being said… some people lack the mental fortitude and responsibility to sit by themselves at a desk and deliver their work when no one is watching. I notice people all the time that must be slacking a lot! There can't be any other explanation. They simply can't work by themselves.
However knowing that it's never likely to be the same, as people get used to WFH and companies realise they can save a load of money without creating incentives to get people in an office, the office is going to be far less desirable.
I'm down for a mix or even WFH, but I miss the socialising greatly.
However, my mom lives with me and recently she has been suffering from various health problems and I don't see myself going back to the office even now that I'm done with my schoolwork.
Stay healthy everyone.
Given the chance, I'd go for a 100% WFH option again in the near future.
Now I work for a different company. I’ve never met any of my coworkers. None of them are in the same city. Most are on different continents.
My ideal situation is working in office for a year, then work from home.
I'm getting a bit annoyed with the the lack of core hours. You don't need to pretend to be working, but what happened to being reachable during work hours? I feel like what was once a quick walk across the office room can be a two day turnaround these days.
It's always possible to organize regular (weekly?) meetups at convenient locations where you talk shop, thrash out issues and socialize. Even if you rent a conference room in a co-working space or hotel, it is still less costly than maintaining unused office space in a downtown location.
Get the benefits of working from home (no commuting, no traffic, closeness to family)
Get the benefits from the office: other professionals with whom to share, clear boundaries between work and family.
And even something that neither can provide: networking with people outside of your coworkers. And a healthy walk every day.
For me, the ideal is my own private office at work, and my commute to the office is walking distance.
There, you have the benefit of serendipitous encounters, own space for zoom meetings, and quiet space for uninterrupted work.
I like living close enough to office that I can go there to meet people without advance planning.
I like the idea of having an office day once a week, but I don't like waking up early enough and completing morning routines in a hurry to actually go there that often.
So I guess it's the "daily/weekly mix" option.
I have taken less pay in order to keep this going. It's well worth it when you consider the costs of commuting.
For “I like a mix of both” I would like to see what that mix is. From 1/5 days office/home all the way to 4/5 office/home mix :P
Also reason why for either side would be interesting (no separation between office/home, want to be away from kids, no commute, etc)
1. It makes you to do work. End of the day you have to show your progress. WFH forces that coz everyone will now focus on your output than ever.
2. Forces documentation of your work. Everything needs to be documented.
3. You exactly know how your time is spent and with whom.
I mean...what I ACTUALLY like is not having to work for a living, but I'm a wage slave, so that's not an option
Saturday shitty weather, I work. Sunday shitty weather, I fix stuff at home and visit friends. Today wonderful sun, I get on my bicycle and go on the hills near home.
"home" and "office" are not the only choices, I sometimes enjoy working from a third location (e.g. a cafe).
but give me an office with my own space, a nice view, natural light, and a walkable neighborhood, and i’m very much in.
Along with that I didn’t have coworkers so things got pretty lonely.
Lacking both structure and socialization allowed me to be completely wiped out emotionally for a long time when I lost an important person in my life.
I got a job, luckily an office job… in the second half of 2019.
Covid hit and I was work from home again. But this time I had structure. I had some socialization with coworkers through messaging and occasional virtual meetings.
This was a really great middle ground. For awhile I suppose. My office is still closed and I would enjoy the option to go in, but only for in-person socialization.
That’s a pretty self-serving reason for an office though. I’ve recently found other means of feeling a sense of community, and I’ve literally have never felt better in my life.
I guess my tl;dr, in-person work had been a long term substitute for community for many people. Remote work is great, but try to maintain structure and become part of a true community.
I am most productive working at a cafe or an outdoor sitting area (in a campus).
Now that I'm not: work from office.
The office itself is another matter. Like most offices, mine is an open plan office, so continuous noise, constantly people talking, phones and the works, and that's not counting casual interruptions. There's days where I arrive at the office, some people see my face, and I know in advance they'll drop by one after another to "talk".
I take countermeasures for the noise. I work with noise suppressing headphones on, playing some music that gets me "in the zone". A large chunk of my work requires long periods of concentration, so with some downtempo music I hardly hear the guy in the desk next to me shout on the phone about god knows what.
The interruptions are what gets me most. Just as you're "in the zone" working on an interesting problem, that guy who saw your face in the morning decides to come by to have a chat. They've got a problem they want your opinion on, which for the most part is okay, or they want to have a short pre-meeting to prep an actual meeting which is almost guaranteed to be a waste of time. The problem is that you get pulled out of "the zone", and you need a few minutes to get back in there and get back to your line of thinking. There's days where the interruptions are almost continuous. A coworker once joked I should setup a system with tickets at my desk, like at a butchers shop in the '80s, so you can call a number for the next person to step up. There have been days in the office, where I have done very little except for getting in the zone, being interrupted, having to find the zone again, and being interrupted.
There's a hurdle now with WFH for the real time wasters, the useless pre-meetings have all but disappeared except in the cases where there's a problem that actually requires an in-depth discussion beforehand, which I suppose would be "useful" pre-meeting. I've also noticed that the casual problem solving discussions have become more well thought out in most cases, because for some reason people seem to think more about the problem before asking my opinion, so I'm quite pleased with that.
We keep the teams together via an informal coffee break twice a week. It's basically a lunchbreak where someone plans a half hour meeting, invites a bunch of people and you talk about whatever you want to talk about. The topics vary: sports, news, entertainment, rumors, sometimes just talking shop. The coffee breaks at the office tended to sometimes lead to interesting conversations and ideas. I suppose that if I were to miss something, those conversations during the random coffee break would be it.
The commute disappearing has given me a lot of time to spend on something useful. Sometimes that's more work, most of the time that's spent on myself and the people around me. In general I'm happier nowadays, gained some time to exercise, spend more time with loved ones, and in general things feel less rushed than they did before. Having more time on weekdays has made the weekends less busy.
For work-home separation I have a ritual. I have a small office setup at home, desk, comfy chair, monitor and something to play music on. Every morning I make myself a thermos of coffee, walk into my office and close the door, grab my laptop from my bag and set it up, and start working. At the end of the day, I put the laptop back in the bag, clean up the desk, grab my thermos and wash it out in the kitchen. It creates a mental boundary, a moment in time where "home ends, work begins" and "work ends, home begins".
I've been to the office once this year, which was a matter of necessity to physically deliver something. I have zero intention of going back to the office multiple times a week. Company policy has changed and WFH will remain the way it is now, but if it changes back to the way it was, I will likely start looking for other opportunities. I won't mind going to the office every now and then, for example once a week on average, but I don't intend on doing that commute again every day.
There's some thing that are less convenient with WFH, but for the most part, the benefits have largely outweighed the detriments.
I like a mix. The last 2 years has been basically hell on earth for me. I live in the peninsula - one of the most expensive parts of SFBA. I feel my money is mostly wasted due to this. I’m unfortunately unable to afford SF proper in the way I’d need to in order to be happy. I can afford the peninsula in the way I need to get by. (Detached in-laws are more common here) I live where all the children and spouses are but I am a childless divorcee. It’s miserable AF area to live because of that - yet I can’t move due to needing to be in the area.
The big issue is that I fucking cannot stand the way people interact online. Zoom calls are a plague. Most of my coworkers are already socially awkward - add in another layer like Zoom and it just goes through the roof. It feels like everyone has Asperger’s when they’re on Zoom. Even for my more “social” coworkers who definitely think they’re highly socially skilled (PMs, execs, directors, biz ops, sales, etc) - they are 10x more inept over Zoom or especially Slack. For some of you, this might not be an issue. You’re anti-social yourself and treat your job very much as a 9-5 clock in and clock out thing. I’m extremely social and don’t have the mentality of someone who can clock out. I’m someone who is obsessed with getting ahead and being at least 2nd best at everything. This means that my ambition levels are unparalleled and so anything that gets in my way (e.g. social stupidity) is very aggravating. I’m not going to explain how this aggravates or gets in the way of advancing - someone who is social already knows what I’m talking about.
Not being able to work with people in person has shown that most of my coworkers treat each other like they’re not real people. They’re just faces on a screen like hostages in a cs_assault. They don’t care and really see them as an objective and a means to an end. Again - for some of you - this is ideal because you’re a borderline sociopath who shouldn’t really be interacting with anyone to begin with. For the rest of us - it’s banal spoon death. This treatment is lessened when people see one another in real life. Thus, I prefer hybrid. I’d like full in office being the default with the option of being at home if you want - but the office would need to be really good. I’m not into shitty loud open offices where loud sales jockeys with gongs and noise makers are going off and shitty music playing the same 60 minute set in the background - I’m not talking that. I also don’t need offices or whatever. I just want a sane office environment. Not a bull pen. Not a library. Something that has a reason to go in besides all your coworkers being there too. (A gym, basketball court, parks nearby, good meeting rooms, food, etc.)
Anyway - I’m annoyed. I lack all of the good of WFH and the good of office. I mostly experience the worst of both so far and I’m very bitter about it.