In other words, ~67% of people want to work in the office at least twice a week and ~47% of people want to work all five days from the office.
We're not 'ruining it' for you, we just want to work in an office.
We're not 'ruining it' for you, we just want to work in an office.
The cynical view is that a lot of people are lonely at home, and can already go back to the office but it’s too empty for their tastes and want to force people back.
I’m happy to bullshit for a minute, ideally not when I’m trying to concentrate. I tried things like putting headphones in, not making eye contact, cussing at my screen while they’re mid sentence, nothing worked. (Engineers amirite ;) )
I finally escalated it and the visits have since stopped. I get the questions over email and chat now. I still chat with the same people for a minute if I see them in the hall or a break room.
I don’t go to work to entertain people. I have 3 young kids at home. I don’t have time to work hardly at all when I’m not in the office. I have come to resent people who essentially expect me to entertain them AND can’t seem to take a fucking hint.
/rant
I know way less about the other persons lives for sure, and there is less "personal" discussions (perhaps half less ?). But regarding work related communication, dealing with emergencies or anything that mattered in a work context I don't see critical missing bits.
Sounds like you got what you wanted when you stopped hinting. Don’t hint, say!
Trying the same thing over expecting different results etc etc is madness etc
It's very nice to be able to discuss with colleagues impromptu about new projects, what they're working on, what new tech they're studying, etc. Or to walk into a discussion in the kitchen about a refactoring, new libraries, etc.
But if one just stays on their chair X hours with their head in the monitor and never talks to anyone they won't miss the above either. Same for people working for 5 person start-ups where everyone knows what everyone else is doing.
I don't really blame people who want to socialize with their coworkers (I want to as well, sometimes!), it's just unfortunate that we've gotten to this point where leadership seems to be really insistent on choosing the worst way to go about this.
It's an unpopular and superficially brash opinion, but I honestly do. If someone wants social contact during work hours there's a really good chance that they have multiple neighbors who they could meet up with for lunch. Instead, work is misappropriated as a social venue.
I'm not suggesting that we should be unsociable robots for 8 hours each day, either, or that productivity is paramount. Quite the opposite. If someone can only get 4 hours of (highly) productive work every day, and used to spend half the day chatting with coworkers, then double their pay and halve their time.
Then there's also the environmental and infrastructural impact of people commuting daily for no practical reason. Everyone else, especially essential workers (who's job is usually casually linked to a workplace), suffers in traffic.
Need time away from kids? A stipend for a shared workplace would cover that, instead of renting huge amounts of unused office space.
Commuting (where remote work is possible) is a terrible and selfish idea no matter how you look at it.
I think your real complaint is socializing at the office. I had a German coworker once who complained about the same thing. He said,
"In Germany we come to work at 9am, we work until 4pm with a 15 minute break for lunch, and we don't talk to anyone about anything other than work. Then we go to the beer hall and drink and chat until 7pm and then go home to our family. Here in America I come to work at 9am, chat with my coworkers all day about personal things, take a 1 hour lunch to chat some more, and then go home at 7pm. It's the same amount of work but none of the drinking!".
45 minute is the usual break in Germany, who can eat lunch in 15 minutes? Usual workday is 8h work + 45 min break. So 9-17:45 would be usual. Or 8-16:45. There are people in union jobs with 35h work week though, that work one hour less, but if they go in at 9 they stay until 16:45.
If you work over 6h in a day you have to do a minimum break of 30 minutes by law.
So in your example I guess Americans stay 1:15h longer per day than what is normal in Germany.
It’s no different than before Covid - some people stayed in the office late because it was a quiet place to finish up work, some people went home and wrapped things up.
Nobody was forced to stay late.
There are many places where management are demanding people come into the office. Those are "forcing", for all intents and purposes.
There are people who want to work in the office. My understanding is that those people can all do that if they choose so. They can even choose to go every day of the week if they want to.
So what is the problem? Why is there a debate? People can do what _they_ want, after all, right? Except that some people not only want to be in the office, but they want their coworkers to be in the office as well.
That is what is meant by "forcing" in this discussion. And that is where I have read the most pushback (especially for the big tech companies with huge, mostly unused, offices.
If someone decides to come in and you work remote that’s not forcing anything.
Employment conditions are a constant tug of war between employees wanting a better life and employers wanting to extract more value from them. Don't pull on the wrong end of the rope.
That's why in my company the hybrid solution will probably look like "everyone from the team has to be in the office on day X of the week".
I’d suggest your view comes from a bias towards red queen races being arbitrators of value rather than… you know… productivity.
A few years ago the bar was wearing a suit to work every day with sock suspenders. Look up IBMs uniform dress code. Now we all accept that as antiquated, distracting waste.
Which wouldn't be so bad if, you know, I found the experience relaxing or had the slightest inclination to get to know these people [beyond how they can help solve a given problem].
Maybe I just see work differently from everyone... but we're here to do the thing and get paid. I'm not putting in anything more than what's required.
[ edit: if Bob won't do $thing because we don't have enough social points, that's between him and our employer ]
'Team building' through things like these idle pleasantries and bombastic 'collaborative' seat-filling meetings are draining for people like me.
Put it on my calendar, if I think I can help or have an interest - I'll stop by the call... I'm already on your side if we're trying to make things better.
I really like to exercise my salary benefits of finishing my work and doing something else. Seeing the meatbags breaks asynchronous work
If your business wants to demand in-person, then you know what kind of people who you will get: - people with kids who dont have a good grasp on what work life balance is (maybe because of extended debt) - people who are single or otherwise unhappy at home, looking for companionship - people who cant feel good about themselves without chit-chat - people looking to increase their social circle - people who will think they can use social engineering to forward their career
You know, you’re right. It probably is the most efficient way to work, to continuously subject employees to this torture. The problem is I’m a fucking human being and there’s only so much abuse I’m going to take from you. And by being a remote worker you are, necessarily, subjecting your coworkers to this abuse every second they have to work with you. It is inherent to the notion of video calling with consumer-grade hardware on a packet switched network.
While one shouldn't discount those that are stuck in circumstances like that, no, we don't. And when their surroundings are noisy, they can just mute their microphones until they'd like to say something, which is just basic etiquette for communicating online. Or you can even pic up a microphone with a polar pattern that doesn't pick up much background noise for about 20$, which is what i did.
> So wasting 1-2 hours a day being non productive
Wasting in what way? Commuting? I love my commute, it's a nice 25 minute morning stroll on the cycle and provides the necessary motivation/pressure to get out of the house. I'm fine with people wanting to work remotely, I'm just not okay with working together with them (unless they're here at least 2-3 times a week) as it's wildly inefficient, and also not okay with people demanding that any company must offer full 5 days WFH as if it's a god given right.
Good for you as you can always vote with your feet. If others don't want to come in and work with you, then you must find a new job. But don't expect anyone else to conform to your idea of how work should be. If for nothing else but for the same reasons you are using, personal preference.
Sure, that's fine. It's why I'd never apply for remote positions. Luckily, where I work people still come into office.
Commute time is a choice against other expenses. I live 10 minutes from the office because I didn't want to commute. I don't begrudge you for living further but I will say it was a WLB choice the employee made, not the employer.
Remote is absolutely possible if your job doesn't require meatspace/atom manipulation as part of your work product, and to say that it isn't possible 3 years into a global pandemic demonstrating sustained levels of productivity while remote across various sectors is simply laziness and stated in bad faith. I understand that we are just randos throwing opinions back and forth, and that the only recourse available in countries where remote work isn't mandated by law as an option is to hope for remote orgs to continue to cannibalize non-remote/less-remote orgs for top talent, until non-remote orgs concede on their physical presence demands.
I understand the desire to have a cake and eat it but the job was to show up and put in the time. To go back and argue that showing up is now a WLB violation for previously existing jobs is just not defensible.
That said, sure, more jobs should just be WFH. If you want that, find it.
Based on your reply, I don't think you truly understand the situation. The work arrangement is always negotiable, and demanding remote when it's proven it can be done at a reasonable productively level is entirely reasonable from an employee perspective. One does not need to put up with unreasonable employer demands in the current job market, and showing up on site five days a week is arguably unreasonable. The job expectations are to deliver results, not warm a chair with colleagues. Of course, if your job performance was based on warming the chair versus delivering, of course, measure that instead of results.
If you want to work on site, wonderful, go for it. That does not appear to be the direction the market is going based on available data.
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/jobs/2022/02/24/why-remo... (Why remote jobs are changing work for good — if you’re working in the right place; Over 40% of employees say they would look for a new job if required to go to a worksite five days a week.)
https://www.hcamag.com/us/specialization/recruitment/west-co... (West Coast tech firms increase hiring throughout U.S.)
https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/economic_b... (Are Firms Using Remote Work to Recruit and Retain Workers?)
https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/07/workers-quitting-ov... (The People Who’d Rather Quit Than Give Up Remote Work)
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/02/16/covid-1... (excerpts from this link below)
> Working from home is a relatively new experience for a majority of workers with jobs that can be done remotely – 57% say they rarely or never worked from home prior to the coronavirus outbreak. For those who have made the switch to telework, their work lives have changed in some significant ways. On the plus side, most (64%) of those who are now working from home at least some of the time but rarely or never did before the pandemic say it’s easier now for them to balance work with their personal life. And many (44%) say working from home has made it easier for them to get their work done and meet deadlines, while very few (10%) say it’s been harder to do this. At the same time, 60% say they feel less connected to their co-workers now. Most (72%) say working from home hasn’t affected their ability to advance in their job.
> Looking to the future, 60% of workers with jobs that can be done from home say when the coronavirus outbreak is over, if they have the choice, they’d like to work from home all or most of the time. This is up from 54% who said the same in 2020. Among those who are currently working from home all or most of the time, 78% say they’d like to continue to do so after the pandemic, up from 64% in 2020.
Extreme example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15942945
> If you want that, find it.
And create it, if possible. By putting market pressure in favor of WFH so that employers are forced to adjust to worker demands.
I'd like to know where people are working that they used to work with people in an office. I've been developing software for 35 years - a lot of start ups even - and have always worked with an engineering team that's geographically distributed - either in different countries or in different locales. Yeah, most of us went to an office to work, but we were working with maybe 1 or 2 people in the office. About the only thing I got out of working in an office was soul-destroying gossip. For some reason WFH has cut that crap out by at least 75%.
That's substantial. For many people it adds up to hours per day.
Really. I have no problem with people executing tasks from wherever. But Zoom is vile.
Who has to show up is decided by the company and to a lesser extent by the market: if your contract says you have to show up, then you get fired if you don't. And frankly this is what I expect to happen to many of those which discovered working from home during the pandemic and now behave like extremists and want to force companies and their colleagues to change for their sake.
By all means, argue for hybrid or home office, but don't pretend this is normal and anyone that's against it is some barbarian.
So rent your own office. Why does it have to involve anyone else?