Ask HN: What remote work dreams didn't come true for you?

I know it's cliche and annoying but hear me out first because for me it's table tennis. Or not ping pong per se though I do love that game. But just having an extended, semi-communal break time with low-to-moderate physical activity available and a natural point of interaction with non-eng coworkers was more valuable than I realized at the time.

Yes can I can pick any of those things and carefully create the circumstances for it. I don't want to though. I liked that there was a place and times set aside to combine all of these activities.

I'm fully committed to remote for other reasons and this won't bring me back. But I do miss it, and it's not as simple as "well just go for a walk" or "find time to connect with you coworkers."

How often would you play table tennis at work, though?

A 2 hour round trip commute in exchange for 15-20 minutes of play time does not sound like a good trade.

I wasn't trying to make the point that it was worth it? Just, as an active, social person I figured I'd naturally find or be able to create a replacement for this hybrid workish/socializing/light exercise type time and that hasn't happened.

My happiest work times was when I was remote working at my tennis club. I’d work most of the day then take breaks to either play tennis or workout in the gym. It was great! But then the pandemic hit and they tore down the tennis club :(

This is one of the benefits of remote work for me.

I no longer have to try to work while noisy coworkers are playing foosball or ping pong.

I had hoped I could easily recreate the healthy routines I had when working in office, but it hasn’t panned out. Discipline and routine have been really hard to figure out without the forcing function of a commute. For example:

1. An early commute to avoid traffic forced me to go to bed earlier, get ready for the next day the night before, and wake up on a set schedule

2. Housework seems to expand infinitely when working remote. When I was in office, this didn’t take up much of my mental energy. Now it seems like I always have laundry to do, dishes to clean, etc

I’m going to try and stick remote, but I really need to figure these things out. The forced schedule really seems to help. FWIW I am single. I don’t think it’s the same if you have kids from what I’ve seen.

>>I don’t think it’s the same if you have kids from what I’ve seen.

The endless list of housework expands when the kids are quite young, but perhaps the biggest difference for most parents is the motivation.

Oh yes, I didn't mean to imply kids = less housework. It is definitely the opposite--they have much more work that could always be done. What I meant was that parents get two things from the in-office life by default:

1. A forced schedule, because you have to bring kids to school, cook dinner, deal with homework etc etc. I think this helps you prioritize at work a bit better, because the time limitation is very clear.

2. A heavy baseline social life, because your family is around frequently

This isn't to say that their lives are easier (again, I think it's the opposite), but I think it helps explain some of differences in preferences right now for remote vs. in office.

> Housework seems to expand infinitely when working remote

Yeah we go from spending 4-8 waking hours per day to 14-16 at home - generating so much more trash and spending that much more time being aggravated by the mess.

I can't get my head around that.

I make larger dinner portions so there is extra for lunch the next day, and taking out an extra bag of rubbish every so often is no big deal.

In return you get to load the dishwasher during boring "read only" meetings on mute, run a load of washing, do some grocery shopping during lunch break.

Basically all the housework can be done during what would be office dead time.

Overall I still love it, but mainly I miss being able to idly complain and grouse about things with my co-workers off the record. With all communication happening through company channels, I always assume someone has access.

Complaining about work is a time honored tradition, and bonds teams together.

Not necessarily related to remote work, but when the pandemic started I expected that working from home + the gobs of free time earned from many activities being suspended would give me an immense amount of time to site down, work on some ambitious projects, learn a lot, and give me the time I needed to drive my career in a direction I wanted.

None of that happened ofc, and by the end of the first year not only had I failed to do those things, some other changes I had started making in my life for the better starting just a few months pre-pandemic completely exploded.

I think it's mostly been a net-positive for me. The lion's share of my friends are non-work, so I never really felt like I was missing out socially. I shifted to an early work schedule, 0500 to noon + some time in the evening, which gives me a lot of free time in the afternoons. I've been able to spend most of the winters in Whistler, skiing every afternoon. I've been able to travel, to the extent COVID allows, on extended trips. I've been cooking a ton and drinking an order of magnitude less. And spending more time at home forced me to move from a relatively small apartment to a spacious townhouse, which really added to overall happiness and quality-of-life.

So I think there are three downsides for me:

- The routine of going to the office daily made it really easy to fall into a healthy routine at the gym. I used to bike to work, and did at least an hour of HIIT every day - I was in the best shape of my life for a long time. It has been comparatively difficult to bring that rigour to WFH, despite objectively having more free time.

- There is definitely less connectedness throughout my organisation, and it likely has an impact on the quality of work we ship, how on-time we are, how much we understand the customer. I think during the office-primary days, there was so much learning through osmosis - overhearing another team solving a problem a few rows behind you, talking to other departments socially over lunch, etc. And so much of that is missing now, so I more often encounter situations where people aren't on the same page.

- It's so much easier and faster to solve problems in person. Encountered with a problem now, I spend a lot of time doing research, reaching out to people on Slack, avoiding creating more meeting fatigue, and when scheduling meetings needing to wrestle with availability. Whereas before it felt so easy to wrangle together the correct subject-matter experts for a 5 minute discussion.

A striking amount of responses here make me think “we all should invest more time in non-work friends.”

Easier said than done, especially after the age of 30. Have lost touch with most friends from college as people invariably pair up and move off to different parts of the country, start families, get busier at work, etc. Making new friends and nurturing those relationships takes a considerable time and energy investment (which I do believe is worth it, but doesn't make it any easier).

I had hoped being at home would make it easier to drift to more worthwhile distractions (eg, reading my books instead of the news) but that hasn't worked out. Obviously I'm here.

I always thought that if I don't have someone constantly looking over my shoulder or checking what I do, I might be able to come up with much better long-term solutions and use idle times efficiently for that. Turns out 100% home office is just highly demotivating for me. I think flexible 20% office time per week would be ideal. Also having to take care of 2+ meals a day myself is more work than I thought

Thought I would get back commute time. Instead I just waste it. And now I miss my co-workers.

Make a fake commute? Walk your dog (or someone elses?) or just go grab a coffee.

Hopefully a coworker lives near you. You could meet up for lunch.

I only do things I'm either interested in or that I have to do. A fake commute will just never be a thing for me.

Consider the exercise and change of location something that you have to do.

For me, it's been nothing short of the dream it was supposed to be. My pajamas are so comfy to be in whole day, I don't remember how my jeans fit me anymore -- and I am all the more happy for it to be that way.

I switched roles and got myself away from obnoxious self-glorifying micromanagers who couldn't conceive of the idea of not lording over my shoulder when I'm working. They would never consider WFH even for a couple days a week, ("because I say so") -- until Covid shut them up ("Tell me, Mr. Anderson. What good is a phone call, if you're unable… to speak?").

The irony was as delicious as watching all their pointless flailing. I hope they have figured since that their days of milking workhorses are over, and had diminishing returns from having their pets scratch their back instead of doing real work. Also, pay peanuts, get monkeys. Enjoy what you deserve, suckers!

I've never met my current manager in person, video calls are just as good to discuss business, if not better since there's exactly zero travel to deal with. He isn't even in the same country as I am, let alone an office building. No complaints.

I work exclusively with folks across the globe now and I'm the only one in my TZ on the current team, so going to office no longer makes sense just to have small talk with maybe loosely related folks in the office working on completely orthogonal commitments.

I'm single and have an aging parent who was hospitalized and recuperating, so I can actually cook and clean and get stuff done at home, even on a workday, taking breaks that I need when I really need them, and filling out work at other off-work times of the day that are more appropriate for me.

I have lower-back pain at times and biking (motorcycling) to work over a 50-minute commute was just exasperatingly painful, even for a cruiser. Cars took 1.5h one way, that's a lot of time to get back not having to commute.

All in all, yay. Never been better. The schadenfreude of seeing my previous managers squealing like little piglets at things they can't get their lilgrabbies on, especially after the meltdown leading to the exodus of the most useful people from that team, is so satisfying to watch and it pays for itself every day...

They still want to bracket my days with 10:30 standups and 2:30 catchup meetings that just fuck the whole day up and don't allow you any of the flexibility or focus that working from home ought to support.

I've been doing WFH since before the pandemic, I grew into it well. No disappointments really.

It would be nice to take advantage of travel a bit more, but it seems less pragmatic. I love my desktop/lab, it's way too useful.

Everyone else going remote has been the [momentary] dream killer. I can't passively stay logged in at 8PM anymore looking for fires or smoke.

Everyone is always working and if I don't distance myself, it snowballs out of control. It's exhausting and negatively impacted me for a while until I learned some mitigation strategies.

I had hoped that I would exercise regularly given the saving in commuting time. I also thought I would be pursue side projects and hobbies aggressively. Instead, I put on 30lbs of weight and are in zoom meetings from 9-6 every day. Commuting kind of forces into a daily routine which is hard to replicate with WFH

A lot of the focus I hoped that would materialize. Instead things in some ways are worse needing to be present on slack. While you can shut it off (temporarily) being in slack is far worse IMO than an open office with dozens of conversations, and constantly needing to see which ones might be relevant.

I thought by 2000 I'd be able to, for example, get paid to noodle with Mathematica on a laptop or VR deck on the beach.

I wound up living near the beach in Santa Cruz in 2000 and almost bought a Ricochet modem, but never quite got around to it. No one has ever paid me to just noodle with Mathematica, either.

> No one has ever paid me to just noodle with Mathematica, either.

Get a job at Wolfram as a software tester :) Otherwise, it's probably not going to happen.

Hah. A late friend who got mixed up with those folks had horror stories of Stephen Wolfram calling him in the middle of the night with ideas.

I still like the product, though.

Seeing my own face from one camera angle. So exhausting.

Turning off video and zoning out and losing track of the conversation.

Muting the mic to cough, sneeze, clear my throat, etc now makes me uncomfortable to do so in live meetings.

I hear ya... It was ok for me; 1 year 3 months. I just missed my workmates is all. I could do 99% of what I did before (had some minor hardware duties).

My dream was to be able to move to a bigger and cheaper flat thanks to the fact that I'm no longer tied to a single place, district or a city. That I could expand my hobbies thanks to that more available space, and that would compensate for the lack of social life and meeting with people.

Turns out it's mostly North America thing that you can rent anywhere and anything and that places are generally bigger. In the Eastern Europe it's much harder to find a place to rent outside of big cities (I mean that it's really difficult to find a comfortable place to live & work from in cities other than big ones).

In the big cities it's not any better! People are mostly renting flats that are designed to accommodate at most 2 people, sometimes 2 + 1 family. There are no places for bigger families, and thus no bigger places at all (unless you're willing to pay extra like 100% more than normal rental prices for such comfort, you're steeping into luxury category though, which doesn't seem to be that worthy, and in case you lose a job, it will be a big toil on your finances). It's also that these places are mostly furnished already, and you have to fit into the idealistic view of the owner of how you should live in that place. So even if you find a place which has dedicated room for other stuff, it turns out it's furnished for 2+1 family, and the owner is not willing to change it since you're an edge case.

If you want to live and work from home comfortable you have to buy yourself an appropriate house / flat and make it yours. That means being able to freely hang a damn shelve on the wall, or design rooms that will fit your remote-office life. But in this economy, of prices rising 10-20% Y/Y, even if you're earning a lot it means nothing in terms of your ability to buy a meaningful real estate.

So I'm here, stuck at remote work, living in a really small place, and struggling to find a way out of this situation. But do I miss working from office? Kinda, but what I miss more is working from an office for a startup where you can get to know each other, where staying after work means that you can just casually talk about random stuff, and that "the office" is more than just workspace. I sure as hell don't miss working for bigger firms, where that culture is lacking and you just work 9-5 with no way to enjoy the place you're at.

There is some light in the tunnel though, I recently discovered a local hackerspace, where I'm able to fill the missing social gap, and do some manual work, and so far it's going great. But at this point I'm asking myself - is it really that I'm stuck here even though I can work from anywhere?