Ready to Work at Lesser Salaries or Even Quit, Employees Want Only WFH: Survey
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The clamor to come back to office is only from upper management whose primary concerns seems to stem from the fact that having control over physical bodies in an office is a sense of power. They also have nice offices, views, facilities, space and desks. The rent extracting industry is also going through a crisis of sorts and the political class is deeply invested in rent extraction.
COVID hasn't gone away. Long term effects (cognitive, cardiac) of a COVID infection are not being accounted for either. COVID highlighted the fact that you can get digital work delivered from anywhere.
I don't expect it to happen under current management but as we promote new middle managers, I'm sure we'll have a push for it.
But all of the reliable evidence is that if you’re vaccinated, boosted, etc., the chance of you being seriously ill from catching COVID is really no more likely than the flu.
And statistically, everyone is going to get it eventually.
That's not to suggest no risks should ever be taken, but if going to the office in person is really basically pointless that's a very unnecessary risk on top of the inconvenience of it. May as well delay getting it as long as possible since it's constantly changing right?
I think we know roughly why K-12 schools are like they are -- teachers didn't know how to use computers much at all in the 90s when I was a kid and it's a running gag that they never really understood them. Now they do, so it's a new option that I think it's fair to recognize truly is new.
I do work in education and spent a ton of time figuring out how to make video lectures for instructors in the department that were effective, and tons of new online teaching tools were tested that there was never a huge push to play with before.
I don't think it's malice, it's simply that those professors have been doing it one way for 30 years and asking them to learn to do it a whole new way is a big ask. They have to spend all their time writing grants and other bureaucracy, mentoring students, and from personal experience I think it's fair to say that there is little appetite for changing everything to something no one knows how to judge the quality of due to lack of experience in an active classroom. It is the software equivalent of pushing a change straight to a live server, except in this case if you screw it up and do a bad job you're impacting the quality of education being provided to at least dozens of students who deserve better. It's really hard to just in-place make a change without the ability to actually test it.
I hope more people get something closer to your experience, I think the last few years have pushed a lot of people on that education side into a much more open mindset now that online classes are less risky. I think it does serve a purpose to have high school kids in person because of social things and the reality that a group of 20 kids will on average do a better job of finishing stuff they aren't really excited to do whereas one kid remotely is more likely to slip through the cracks. There's also issues with equity when internet and computers and space to learn aren't uniformly available.
But I think you're asking the right question. Let's get cars off roads and turn these stupid commercial parks into residential areas please, we need more affordable housing, not redundant space for people to work in when they're not at home... and the climate control for these giant unnecessary buildings... heck, the parking lots alone are a huge net negative especially if you account for the reality that many many fewer people really need to visit those buildings on any given day.
While I e hot working remotely, face to face time makes a huge difference and at least meeting your coworkers and customers occasionally. I work in the cloud consulting department at BigTech.
It is often beneficial to me as well, I've been full time back in the office since last August.
It is often the case that going to the office is literally counterproductive, I get less work done, and I have to commute. Working at home is more comfortable, and far better for 60% of what I do.
If I also get the benefit of reduced risk of getting COVID for not doing something that I didn't want to do anyway and which was not helping anyone including myself...
well, if you consider that "not living life normally" I kind of prefer the new normal.
edit: for reference, I am immunocompromised yet still somehow capable of seeing balance in the risks I take (especially the unnecessary ones) instead of jumping to binary "live life normally" or not because life is never going to be fully "normal" for me. If I'm taking risks with my health I want them to be for a reason that actually matters at all.
Argue with someone else if you're going to make up a position for me to defend instead of reading my comment. Your argument style is indistinguishable from an antivax bot.
Normally, my asthma doesn’t bother me. I did all of the safety protocols before vaccines were introduced and I got them as soon as I could.
But after that, we have been living life normally. I am considerate of other people and get tested regularly before I travel for business or to see my parents.
We went on cruise last year. I got Covid. I didn’t realize I had it until the test came back. I did my normal cold regiment - psuedophredrine and asthma meds[1]. I coughed like crazy for a couple of days, self isolated and by the end of the next week, I was back to exercising - at home in my home gym.
[1] this is the recommended treatment for asthma sufferers. But
Citation for your health claims?
> And statistically, everyone is going to get it eventually.
That's not how statistics works.
The best of my understanding is that the evidence indicates that if you're vaccinated and boosted, you'll likely test negative for covid. Testing negative seems great, but what if the whole story is that while you do test negative, you still end up suffering seriously from a covid-like illness you wouldn't otherwise have experienced if the pandemic wasn't raging?
Basically, there's not enough data out yet to say if those who test negative but get a covid-like illness fare better due to their vaccines in terms of hospitalization and death. But Chris Masterjohn is doing some awesome research to try to find out. In short, he's trying to figure out if the vaccines are worth taking at all. At the end of the day, people want to avoid suffering the symptoms of a disease and couldn't care less if they can merely pass a test.
But we do know that Covid isn’t going anywhere and we aren’t going to beat it like we did Smallpox. That isn’t a controversial opinion either. No one on either side has claimed otherwise. At this point, you will eventually get a strain of Covid unless you never leave the house or socialize with anyone.
But that goes back to my main question. What are you going to do except accept the inevitable and start living life like you did pre-2020?
The only thing I can do is follow the mainstream medical advice and get tested often just to be considerate of others.
At this point the only time I wear a mask is when it’s mandated or when I’m going to the grocery store or drug store. Those are places people have to be even if they are immune compromised.
I'm not denying that some people who are vaccinated test positive, but I'm saying they dismiss people who test negative as not having Covid. So if vaccinated people catch Covid and test negative for Covid, their illnesses and hospitalizations are completely dismissed as if they aren't part of the problem and the pandemic. That means vaccines are being given credit for keeping a whole lot of people out of the hospital who haven't been kept out. They've merely managed to test negative whilst still being hospitalized with very serious symptoms. The data that shows this is that the vaccinated get hospitalized 6 times more often than those with natural immunity. Working vaccines would lead us to expect something closer to 1:1. None of these vaccines would have ever met the required 50% efficacy threshold to get approved if we started over today using what is known as a starting point. I still feel blessed I had the opportunity to choose NOT to try an mRNA one, just looking at my congenital heart defect and myocarditis risks I felt way safer with J&J.
>start living life like you did pre-2020?
I went so hardcore for so long, and was so sure I'd die if I caught it, I reached a breaking point August 2021 where I just didn't care and couldn't care anymore. March 2020 I had gone 100% on social distancing, I didn't speak to anyone for around 16 months. Flew to South Korea to hide when they had 30 some cases a day nationwide, spent 40 days in various government quarantines (Thailand's as well) to stay in hiding and out of high risk countries. I actually had anxiety about whether or not I'd ever be able to reintegrate into society and socialize again.
Not just deaths but the health effects of even a minor accident can be life altering. And traffic deaths are up for whatever reason.
I don't think there is anything else more illogical in modern society than waking up in building A, hopping in a car and fighting traffic for an hour to get to building B just to sit in front of a computer for 8 hours (perhaps with a few minimally productive meetings here and there), then commute back to building A 8 hours later.
Building B sits empty for 16 hours a day while Building A sits empty for 10 with both being heated/cooled for 24 hours. The employee wastes 2 of their 16 available waking hours in the non-productive commute while incurring significant financial costs (lease/insurance/fuel/energy) in order to support this patently absurd activity. Similarly the employer wastes time and energy negotiating leases, re-arranging offices, purchasing AV equipment for meeting rooms in building B in addition to paying the likely enormously expensive lease itself.
The impacts on the environment, the number of hours of human life wasted in commute, the pointless buildings and associated costs to employers as well as the public infrastructure to support it (roads, trains, busses, etc.). Surely, all of this could only be justified if physical presence had a dramatic impact on productivity. Yet, we cannot tell one way or the other if it actually improves outcomes. Let's face it, it's dumb.
I once taught a course and the first thing I was told was to look for a green glow on people's faces: it meant people were playing solitaire on the class computers instead of listening.
A whole lot of managers knows only the work equivalent of that: they've learnt simple proxies for actual management that let them think they know when people are working well from walking rooms (or having people reporting to them do so).
People working from home means they actually have to figure out how to track output, and that takes effort. Effort many managers are not used to.
I had to learn a whole lot to start managing remote and distributed teams. It takes away a whole lot of lazy shortcuts to management.
Lucky for me I was forced to deal with that many years ago, but it was uncomfortable and a big change, so I'm not at all surprised that many resist it now.
It's certainly true that managers are lazy and they would rather measure illusory proxies for work rather than work itself, but America also became a major economic engine of the world by exerting control over people's bodies without paying them. Even though that practice ended several generations ago, the attitude that equates "success" with "power over bodies" is still very common in America. Many states are now trying very hard (again) to control women's bodies with the force of law, to cite just one example.
The actual economic data doesn't support that. Slaves were never more than 17% of the population, slavery was only ever legal in certain regions, and use of slaves was mostly relegated to a subset of agricultural labor. Moreover, slavery was outlawed in 1865 and the United States would not be considered an "economic engine of the world" until at least the 1880s, and it would not be considered one for its agricultural output but for its industrialized economy.
Furthermore, countries in the new world (e.g. Haiti, Brazil, that practiced slavery for longer and on a larger scale failed to develop strong economies anywhere to the degree that the United States did, so the line from "had slavery in the past" to "became economically prosperous" is tenuous. In fact, slave labor (and adjacent systems like serfdom) historically tends to hamper economic growth, prevent industrialization, and stifle innovation.
Not all tech work is about sitting in front of a glowing screen, writing code. It’s about achieving a business goal that brings in revenue, and all the alignment throughout the org that’s needed to get that done.
Repository layout, test framework changes, factoring out core components to make a long term stable branch, persuading teams to collaborate at their bleeding edges rather than by internal releases, how to ship auto formatting code with the lowest negative impact on everyone else…
Decision making, even on technical topics, is a people-centric skill.
The problem areas — and the reason you’ve basically all got to be in the office at some point — are decision making ones where a group of two or more people fervently believe in two or more mutually exclusive ways forward. Even when I worked remote for a company multiple timezones away, I would be in the office one week every quarter to first build social capital and later to cash it in when building consensus.
I also think back to one of my stakeholders was an underperforming SWE intern. The rate of online engagement that best suited them was zero, and yet — as with any intern — it was crucial to us that they left feeling positive about their time here. That stuff is really hard over the phone.
And you force everyone to commute into the office.
I've been working remotely for 6y; we have multiple external business partners, and a team of over 50. We have team members and business partners in Russia, Finland, Sweden, Germany, UK, France, NYC, BC, Cali, Japan, and elsewhere; we operate without core hours. I, personally, regularly interact with people in all those listed locations every day.
Never once has there ever been a need for an in-person meeting. Never.
Those kinds of situations are much easier to keep on track in a call / video conference, and easiest in person, when you can have ad hoc conversations after the meeting has ended. (Video conference products I have used — all the standard ones — don’t really have a way of ending a meeting other than hard-stop-return-to-isolation for all participants, whereas in real life it’s much smoother and more continuous than that.)
While I'm a huge proponent of WFH-forever and eliminating the commute, I have to say that it hasn't increased my time much.
That's because with everyone commuting, we approximately never had meetings before 10am since everyone knew everyone might be stuck in traffic, so no point scheduling anything earlier. And certainly no meetings after 5pm since everyone had to hit the commute nightmare.
With the pandemic WFH, I'm seeing meetings as early as 8am and up to 6pm, since there is no "excuse" of having to commute. So the time I was sitting in traffic I'm now sitting in zoom.
Sure, I'd rather take zoom than traffic, but overall it didn't free up much time.
Which leaves the question of what is motivating it? I feel like this is more managers struggling to recapture their previous sense of identity which was founded in some way on there being a physical place full of warm bodies with a specific culture shaped by management through various decisions. Without that managers are left with a much more intangible sense of what their role and value is. Everything seems a lot more hollow if your only reason to exist is to deliver on bare bones work requirements. Then, managers also feel they have a lot of influence over employees by controlling their physical environment which they don't have with WFH.
The problem the managers have is, the factors in favor of WFH are pretty clear and objective. Just eliminating commute saves most employees a couple of hours a day which is already probably more productivity gain than you could achieve through any other kind of workplace measure. The benefits for the environment, reduction in burden on infrastructure, etc etc are all pretty easy to add up.
So we are left with management weirdly struggling to assert a rationale made up entirely of intangibles against pretty obvious hard objective facts. It's going to be pretty interesting to see who wins this one.
As someone who works in a software shop that sells directly to this sector, I have a guess (and it’s just a guess but a quasi-informed one):
Office/Building leases.
As a notable example, it's much easier for employees to hop between remote jobs. Forcing you into a physical location is a way to lock you into the job: you socialize and make friends at work, you buy a house close to work, you build an entire life around work.
No employer will tell their employees "let's all get back to the office so you will find it harder to leave your role even if we underpay and overwork you."
For some barely logical reason the more complicated work and the higher salary came with a kind of military authority position that use to be reserved for the level above or (longer ago) didn't exist.
This gets interesting where management tasks, like all other tasks, need to be optimized. If it is the same person doing both the tasks and the planning optimization happens naturally. A is compared to B, one goes over the advantages and disadvantages of either and makes a choice.
But now the manager has to chose between his own comfort and/or the effort he has to make and that of his underlings and the actual productivity. I don't think we need numbers to know what most would chose when the options are themselves or others. Its a damn hard choice to make objectively.
But the thing is, didn't we get these big brain high salary guys to make everyone under them work more efficiently? I think comfort in a job makes the largest contribution to productivity out of all factors. At one end of the scale people just start walking off at the other you get the [rare] unimaginable performance only seen in people who love what they are doing.
WFH is going to make management that much harder but also more valuable. If one is not excited about that the job seems to have evolved beyond capabilities.
What more do we need than the employee himself stating: "I cant do the work like this" in a context where we know others are doing it with great success.
Video chat is like the way PDF tries to replicate the paper office. I'm sure people are already building parsers for video chat and failing to match organized exchanges.
I imagine some kind of analogy with using whatsapp as a bug tracker. Surely it would kinda work to some extend? You would be able to find things you know are in the log but if you don't know it is there it is going to be a huge waste of time. If the person filling the ticket has the tools to make that extra inch of effort it saves the person on the other end of it a mile of scrolling.
A water cooler is designed to provide cups of water. It is only suppose to do one thing and it does it well.
I refinanced last year to a 15 year mortgage planning for this to be our “forever home”. I woke up one morning and I asked my wife did she want to move to one of the tax free states. We can save $12K a year and try some place different for a few years.
Managers happy that employees bought a house bc “now you’re stuck here”. Which isn’t too far from the truth.
There are or where a lot of places where a specialty like networking and various tech fields might only have one or two major employers in the area.
Is it the banal they vs us, search for an enemy and cause of one’s unhappiness?
That's my view that management are there to enforce the often unpleasant demands of those above. In most cases anyway.
While I'm not "resisting" (I'm communicating that this is the organisational preference) I'm making it clear to the team that as long as they stay highly functional and get work done, there's going to be no mandate and people can make their own choices. They are all choosing 80% WFH.
But our office space sucks. I think it would be a little different if we had really nice space.
Additionally thats one company, maybe you just have a particularly social group of swes who like each other and a good office environment
Space is ridiculously expensive in Europe and nobody is used to it, so the market rarely offer that.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/456925/median-size-of-si... [2]: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/ahs/data/interactive...
Nothing productive was getting done during those office days but they definitely made the job more tolerable and contributed to me not job hopping earlier.
That generational housing affordability factor might also help explain some of the WFH sentiment split between older and younger generations, and between management and IC. Older generations tend to as an aggregate have already locked in their housing cost basis in generally desirable areas with better commute characteristics, and be more represented in management.
Combine this with the fear of many managers that they will not be able to change policy once they allowed everyone to work fully from home and you get the prevalent policies
and why, as an manager, take on that kind of liability unless you absolutely need people to be on-site?
Reminds me of an anecdote where a guy was working at a UPS near 9/11 ground zero and the manager tried to stop them from leaving work.
Is it just the Will to Power? or am I missing some convincing opinion pieces in The Economist or FT? I'm so genuinely curious about why a manager would be compelled to insist on on-site.
Cynically, I know it's easier to switch jobs if both are WFH... Would hate to think that Big Tech companies conspire to jointly enforce on-site (as an addendum to that infamous no-poaching agreement).
but change and learning are inherent to this field of work, so there must be something else.
for large companies, it's real estate. nobody wants to sell a huge corporate campus at a loss.
IMHO companies where possible should scale back to the bare minimum on site and build a strong remote-first culture. Sell offices and move to smaller locations if it makes sense to reduce that footprint. This doesn't mean no one can work on site, or that no one can work remote.
(Edit: As a concrete example, I once worked on an all distributed team where it was abundantly obvious to the whole team that a new hire was goofing off. If they were simply having issues meeting productivity expectations, that would have been one thing, the kind of thing we could hopefully resolve with closer mentoring. But they were also really difficult to get a hold of during the day, and frequently made lame excuses - or obvious lies - for why they couldn't be available for meetings on short notice. Things like that.)
When I was doing IT Support for employees of this one company I certainly got questioned why they pay me and what I do all day when everything worked. They would certainly notice very quickly when I wasn't doing it and they did notice quickly that things where not working anymore when I left and wasn't keeping these things running anymore. This was when I was going into the office every day and I think this would be even worse if I was doing this from Home.
No one had a clue about what I do all day. The same way that I have no clue who does payroll at my current employer or what they do all day, but I would very quickly notice if they decided to slack off.
The problem is that there wasn't really any way to track my performance or any way for me to show that I did actually work. The systems for that just where not there. So the only way my manager evaluated me was by me clocking in and clocking out every day at the front desk.
Even if I had introduced a standup meeting or status meeting, I don't think I could have gotten my manager to participate in that. What exactly would that have done? If you work under a shit manager none of what you suggest would have helped.
More like wtf is their actual job
We would have forever worked in those awful open office plans if this mass scale experiment had not happen. Now the cat is out of the bag and everyone knows wfh works.
Somehow I had not considered this, but it seems like the dominant factor.
I'm pretty sure that's a huge tipoff to HR.
Side note: If anyone is working for me and is/wants to be interviewing, I welcome them to talk about it and/or to just to book a conference room and take the interview from there. Taking 2 hours and hassle is worse than taking 1 hour and feeling like we’re all adults.
On the other end, I've told four different bosses that I was either considering looking or actively looking, and why. Sometimes that ends up in me changing jobs; sometimes it doesn't because we can address what isn't working for me or reach a middle ground that works.
I think people assume far too much ill intent on the part of managers. To me, I want you working for me because you want to be doing the work we're doing and are happy with the pay we're paying. If you're not happy, you're not going to do your best work, you're not going to grow as much as you are capable of, and selfishly, the company is not going to get the best output from you. I don't need everyone to be ecstatic and grinding away with perfect devotion, but I generally want people to be happy (for them, for me, and for the company).
From that, you'll correctly guess that I've 100% had employees reserve conference rooms to take interviews. It's no problem in my book. (Other employees: the first I knew they were looking was when they handed me a resignation letter. That's also perfectly OK; your business is your business.)
Not ill intent, just basic human fallibility. I would be worried that my manager takes it personally, and has difficulty trusting me going forward. So I would be hesitant to do something that I fully expect to be severely career-limiting should I decide not to pursue this other opportunity.
It's not entirely dissimilar from how most people aren't comfortable being in an open relationship. Wanting one's partner to be monogamous generally isn't about carrying ill intent toward them. It's more likely to be about everyday human insecurity.
This is not the norm. A petty person might hear of an employee interviewing and do any number of things. It would be what an old boss called a “career limiting move.”
I’m glad managers like you exist.
Same for my directs, I even helped them to find new gigs.
I care more about the relationship with a fellow IC than keeping them in a company where they're not happy.
Who knows, they may refer me for my next gig.
I'm not getting a bonus if I retain people (or punished if they leave), anyway.
I've put for similar options, I even offer to be their reference. True, we should be all adults, anything else is stressful for all involved.
We do have a similar numbers of total conversations in our hiring process, but they're grouped into a smaller number of chunks/days; only some of those are an hour with 2-4 of them between 15 and 45 minutes; and we span many time zones and biorhythms on several continents so we can accommodate candidates who prefer to interview when they're at home.
That said, over my pre-pandemic career I think I've undergone interviews from small conference rooms or "phone booths" at workplaces before, with any bookings labeled as something like "personal call", or at cafes or quiet outdoor spaces near workplaces; most of my office jobs have allowed a certain amount of WFH too even if not a majority of my time.
Now I (and most I’ve talked to in my network) ask the recruiter up front about the interview process.
This BS is a non starter.
I had to do a presentation to a huge group on why I’d be a good fit followed by 3 hours of group interviews. This was after a tech screen and a fairly intense live coding tech interview.
I’d never do that again unless it’s for my “dream” job. I got that job but it was nothing special.
I then had to sit in on these as senior eng I had to be part of the hiring committee. Such a time sink for all involved.
- Communications are different. I think we're all trying to figure out the "right" protocols[1] for video meetings, as an example. That kind of thing hits managers especially hard. Managers (and PMs) are there not to wrangle code, but to wrangle meetings so the devs can be more productive!
- Control changed. Micromanagement in any form (except via malware stalking) just got a lot harder. Even the softer "managing by walking around" doesn't work now. Delegation is more important than ever. And most managers were promoted into position because they did things well, not because they loosely lead things into happening. So it takes some manager (re-?)training.
- Leading vs Managing is a more important divide than before. When people are left to themselves more, they'll find ways to solve their own problems. Partly because people have to solve more of their own problems and partly because managers haven't caught up to how to manage in a perma-demic, that means workers are more likely to self-organize.[2]
- With the lack of human physical contact, we have to focus more on how to measure productivity than on the way it was perceived in the past. This is likely to shock many people, managers or not, who focused more on social aspects. Lots of "soft" measures like "happiness" or "asshole-free-ness" change when the social conditions change. We still don't want to work with assholes, but what that means is shifting.
- Other
- Profit?
Manager Hint: delegate until it hurts. Hurts you and the person you delegated to. Set up checkpoints. And be available to help. Especially with firefighting and scutwork. That helps your team grow and act independently. Even if we ever get back to the office, that habit will pay off.
[1] Pro- or anti-occupy, politically, they addressed comms problems with large open-air meetings meant to include everyone. We need to think along those lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_movement_hand_signals
[2] Yes, "organize" was an intentional pun. Unionization in lots of fields, lots of shops is on the rise. And a shocking number of strikes goes unreported in the mainstream media (I can't find my original source, so Bloomberg will do). https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-10-20/the-re...
We're not quite there yet, but I'm encouraged rather than discouraged by the totality of what I see and think we’re way past the halfway point in the time dimension of the pandemic phase of the virus, that we’re headed for a future where SARS-CoV2 is about as disruptive to society as H1N1 influenza, and that, except for a lot more tech WFH, that February 2023 will look a lot more like February 2020 than Feb 2021 or Feb 2022.
Despite many people's wishes, yes the world will eventually go back to normal. To suggest otherwise is very myopic. If you take the pandemic having an end for granted, then yes some companies that wish to return on site will do so before others
But by all means, if we can convince companies to go remote with this bs, go ahead.
At the same time, I'm tired of restrictions to my personal freedoms to save literally 5 people (living in nazi Europe, restrictions are bad here, unlike USA / UK / northern europe)
lolwhut? No one is liable if you die from covid at work.
Go out and live life, there are near zero restrictions on you seeing other people in person. Almost nowhere requires masks right now either.
Do you draw a line directly specific from work-from-home to your current state? In the past couple of years we've globally had economic strife, millions of deaths and political unrest at enormous scale in addition to the switch to Zoom calls. Would -all things being equal- your desire to self harm be eliminated if you and your fellow employees were back to exchanging pleasantries at the office?
Honestly, going to an office everyday just helps me keep a schedule better and makes me more disciplined. It’s very hard for me to be productive when I can get into the habit of just wearing sweatpants all day and barely showering.
While never a transit activist, I would be in favor of dense, walkable cities regardless of work-from-home. I think these are more healthy in a multitude of ways.
If people can live in low population density areas while eliminating 90% of the miles driven per year, that's considered a bad thing because it doesn't support the urban vision they have that can only work if alternatives aren't allowed to exist.
Can you really eliminate 90% of miles driven by doing work-from-home in an entirely car oriented place? I live in small city surrounded by rural areas. Plenty of people have to drive five mile or more to get to anything. If someone did out once every ten days, it would unhealthy in other ways even if it conserved fuel, imo.
I live in a low-ish density section of a city. If I still lived in my old mid-density apartment, I’d have broken my lease early in the pandemic to get out to get more space and not have people walking above me all day.
I drive less now that I work from home in the country than when I commuted in the city, though the rise of two day shipping (Amazon, best buy, Walmart, etc) contributes a lot to that as well.
On top of that, I have access to forests, rivers and a prairie preserve without having to drive, and it is fantastic. I'm not saying all 7 billion people need to live the way I do, but I'm glad the option exists and WFH helps make it possible.
I just love the buzz and activity all around me. People having fun, drinking, playing music. As I live alone I know I would be extremely isolated in the countryside. I've lived in more remote areas in other countries which is precisely why I moved here :)
But people differ a lot and there's not one size that fits all. Some of my friends live in the areas I call "boring" and they actually hate coming out here. Where I live is pretty much the hospitality / nightlife center and although I'm too old for all night binges I just love the feel of this in the area. When people are having fun that kind of radiates.
Well, I happen to know most people in rural areas in the US don't have anything like this. Nearly all land in the US is cris-crossed with fences and "out in the country" on average presents one with no place to hike pleasantly anywhere in walking distance to one's private property.
The last time I lived in the country, I could walk along a busy highway to a small graveyard and that was it. Living in-town, Nevada City, I have far more walking options and can see forest, rivers and mountains because having lots of paths helps this place maintain it's tourist town status. Of course, when I lived in Berkeley, CA, I also had lots of walking options, including through forests and hills and that was full "urban" experience.
American rural life is often unhappy for this and other reasons. A lot of people living in rural areas are poor and angry with little interest in despoiled, formerly natural areas they grew up in since they generally descend from workers in extractive industries that have moved on (mining and logging).
So, I remain an advocate of dense, urban living.
This is a fair description of a lot of dense urban living as well. There are a lot of boring rural places- pretty much anywhere that is heavily dominated by farmlands. That doesn't mean that there aren't tons of beautiful, rural places as well. Go to any major city, and you'll find the same- bad neighborhoods and good. The (obvious) difference is that they're a lot closer together.
And while you said you have access to some trees and stuff without driving - you apparently do have to derive to get any groceries and that’s the point. Same for other services that people rely on. And someone has to drive to your place to deliver your shit. So the miles are being used by someone.
Btw - I use two day shipping all the time too and I live in SFBA. You know why? Less time consuming than going to the store and dealing with the checkout process and finding out the item isn’t actually there even though they said it’s there in their inventory management system. (Or it’s there but it’ll take someone half an hour to find it)
As for high density living, there's simply no substituting actually not being around other people. Noise, trash, wildlife- it's a fundamentally different experience to be able to go out in the wilderness compared to the domesticated parks that constitute green spaces in large cities.
On top of that, I don't share walls with other people- no obnoxious noises or smells, listening to neighbors fight or their dogs bark incessantly. If I had stairwells, they wouldn't constantly smell of piss and ramen like that one apartment I lived in.
I've upgraded or otherwise modified the cabin I live in to be as off grid as possible- internet and electric hook ups are required, but if push came to shove and our electricity got cut I could survive indefinitely out here, even in the heart of winter. Heck, last year the power cut for 6 hours due to a brutal storm with -40 wind chills and I only noticed because we also lost our internet connection.
Didn't say a post office was within walking distance so I presume you drive for that? That's extra fuel.
Again - you really should look at the Not Just Bikes channel. You're really not paying attention to what I'm saying.
That said, the post office is within biking distance during summer months if I need to send something. There's no biking or hiking anything over a mile here during the winter. Even that would be extremely unpleasant in January.
In the nearest dense city to where I live, you'll occasionally see someone biking to work during winter, but even then only on the best of days. Mail, packages, and commercial shipments all still get around by truck (the total distance driven is shorter, but more trips have to be made to accommodate the extra people).
The issue is mainly people wanting to live in a large city, but also wanting to live in a single family home (and most of them, although maybe not on HN, seem to favor residential zoning instead of mixed) which results in really shitty cities that are environmental disasters with endless sprawl, long commutes in city traffic, having to drive even for basic things like going to a grocery store, etc. And you don't have a "prairie preserve without having to drive" in that case, in fact you more likely than not have a longer drive to get out of the city than a person living in a denser city. Check out Perth, it's probably the best example in the world of this being taken to the extreme, with almost the entire city being just endless rows of houses.
People who are really against an idea tend to not think of solutions to downsides.
The company isn't saving $5400 of transit-related costs, an employee is. Putting the savings in terms of cuttable salary is kinda ridiculous. Surprisingly, most people work at their jobs in exchange for remuneration, not the satisfaction of reducing costs for their employer; you must be management.
I did not experience this. Even though I did eat out less, I seem to be eating more over all, and with the massive inflation in food costs I seem to be spending more than ever on food.
In the office it took effort to get something to eat, i had to drive someone, or prep a meal to bring with me, etc...
At home I just have to walk to the kitchen and eat....
I don't think WFH solves the worlds problems.
Before WFH I lived in a city and rode my bike everywhere. Went to a shared gym, because I lived in a city, owning a car was difficult etc.
Now I moved away, live in a house, fill it with stuff I probably didn't need and drive around. I will say I do all I can to not drive, I still have my bikes, but I'm still driving 100% more to when I didn't even own a car.
Say you have a mixed workforce where they have to be in 3 days a week. They are going to commute to work, sit at a desk, and spend all day on zoom anyway to accommodate the 40% of workers having a WFH day.
Also consider the companies that allowed a subset of workers to go permanent remote. If you work directly with even one of those ppl, all your meetings are now zoom meetings.
In both cases the person in the office is penalized. They have a WFH experience but they have to needlessly commute to get it. Is the salary boost worth the commute costs and time lost?
There's a thousand other ways for us to solve quote unquote mental health issues related to WFH. The lockdowns are over. You can join a club. You've got 2 extra hours in your day from no commute to tend a community garden, join a rec league, go to the local pub. You don't need coworkers or employers for these things.
I don't think businesses will continue to provide for these employees after the commercial real estate correction. In time, having an office flips into a multi-faceted liability.
But until that happens, the leases were already signed so let the good times roll. These employees and employers form a complementary artificial need for an office.
Why is that not a good reason? Our surrounding very much impacts many of our thinking, productivity. And some people do benefit from a focused environment, you can't really dismiss that as "artificial need".
If you can't work well from home, but your company is remote, you will be an underperformer. It would be your responsibility to rent a co-working space (cheaper than most monthly commute costs) or create a home office.
The artificial need isn't the mental space to concentrate; it's that your employer has to provide that for you.
If you live in East Bay and ride BART however, the math would not work out.
The typical arguments of social interaction, in person brainstorming and so on, vs free time, no commute, can work from anywhere, "zoom is just as good" always went round in circles.
Now I see those in the mainstream and HN seems to have cross over almost completely to the WFH side.
I wonder how "converted" HN-ers got where they are. If you're here and changed your mind regarding remote work since the pandemic started, I'd like to hear why; what, other than the obvious pathogen, has caused your change of heart?
It’s less my attitude, more managing other’s attitudes (esp management)
(I don't stop people from going in to the office of course, I just don't push them to, and the company has told us "do what works". I just started going in one day a week, and it's been nice. We will do a week-long in-person gathering later this year and include the remote folks we hired since covid.)
[0] Yes, high output even when normalized for various factors that were dramatic early in the pandemic, but are tapering back to a new baseline, like people not taking vacation, or working longer hours because there was nothing else to do. Yes also, my team reports many downsides to being distributed. But the sustained net output is high, and we're hiring great people twice as quickly.
In other words, the herd moved towards WFH and got used to it. Now there are less rationalizations for commuting.
The few actual thoughts based on real-world observation now have actual experience of WFH to reference, which means fewer made up nonsense reasons to dislike it.
One thing that always stupidly gets left out of these conversations is the radical difference in situations for some people. Before, when kids were at home also, some parents were literally required to do two jobs while at home -- teacher and their normal job.
Or some people had spouses who did not understand WFH and did not respect boundaries.
But with the kids back in school it's a totally different situation for many.
Many teams had to discover those practices during the pandemic; companies that didn’t adopt them effectively likely lost a lot of people to frustration or apparent underperformance. After two years, many people have had the time to find places where those practices are understood and practiced, or at least have met people who know they can be.
The half that thought those were impossible or unlikely discovered it was possible, even enjoyable way of working.
There are still people, many of them my friends, who know and practice those deliberate communication patterns and who still prefer an office—–in particular for small start-ups. In some cases, those make more sense. But they are now a minority.
Other companies haven’t transitioned because they never really tried; many blamed the circumstances for the increasing disfunction of their teams, rather than learn and adapt. With some team members remaining remote, or contagious, unavailable, companies that have not adopted at least some learnings from the forced isolation can now seem very frustrating places to work. Fewer people are going to defend what they increasingly see as a suboptimal system.
I don’t think that the breakdown is as strict as you say. I think that many people have had the opportunity to see the benefits not of remote, but of a way of working that doesn’t rely on the crutch of an office. Some do it well, but a few still prefer the ease of interactions——a minority that typically don’t have time to comment here. Many haven’t learnt but won‘t comment either, because they don’t know what good should look like anymore.
I think discipline is important, but I can also see how they must not have been adding enough value for them to remain a thing.
That way I can get quick heads up and plan to ask others for assistance, as needed. Get all the shouldertaps done quickly.
It would be nice if we had bot to automate posting the original comments, but we haven’t got around to that yet.
I feel like the real story is something like this: a lot of people on HN are folks who have a highly introverted nature and work in jobs that demand extensive quiet time. Also, most are pontificating on the internet, but still haven't returned to the office. They have almost completely forgotten the velocity achievable when a team works together.
Can you overcome the limitations of remote work with better, more intentional documentation? Yes, to an extent. But my experience is that once you go back to working as a group, you'll re-discover that in-person communication has orders of magnitude more bandwidth. And if you have those best practices in place and work in an office together, you're even more efficient.
I don't hate remote work -- I do it myself, sometimes -- but nothing works as well as in-person communication. I forsee a future where most companies embrace a hybrid schedule, but demand in-person attendance on a regular basis.
Other people seem to be wired differently.
In other words, remote work is a lot like multi-tasking. People swear that they're uniquely good at that, too, and insist that it's only the old farts who can't get with the new trends.
Regarding productivity, if someone does their best work at the office communicating with other people but prefers working at home, wouldn't they fall behind their colleagues when they opt for a WFH setup? And if they're still happy in that case, who are we to say they have to change the way they work? So let people realize that the decide for themselves instead of doing the reasoning and making decisions for them that they may not agree with.
Regarding social interaction, getting surrounded by other people at times is nice, since we're inherently social animals, but why would we utilize work to fill in that need? Getting isolated for an extended period of time would drive me insane, but getting surrounded by other people, who I may not be comfortable with, would also do the same to my mental health.
As for my case, I have found that people can disregard the practices we have developed in the WFH era since they can "communicate faster" now and that has been giving me lots of headaches lately. So when people say they are more efficient at the office, I automatically associate that with the tendency to ignore clear, coherent documents because people think they are "cumbersome".
> Regarding productivity, if someone does their best work at the office communicating with other people but prefers working at home, wouldn't they fall behind their colleagues when they opt for a WFH setup?
Generally agreed, but caveats apply here: a lot of folks may prefer to work from home, but don't necessarily prefer the approach that leads to their greatest productivity. Also, most people don't properly account for intangibles, such as the creativity benefits of an environment where people spontaneously interact on a daily basis (it's famously the entire reason the Pixar studio building is designed as it is), or the mentorship of new people. Costs like this may be OK for a year, or three, but will eventually come back to bite you.
Finally, many people have reliably mis-aligned notions of what "productivity" is. For example, when a junior engineer disappears down a dark hole of code, it's usually a bad sign, even though they almost always think they're being very productive (I say this from deep personal experience, having fallen into this same trap many times over). The danger of this one is that even if you're evaluating by "outcome", nobody really knows if you're unproductive because you're drifting, or because you're distracted, or because of something else. And if you're far from the group, it's even harder to tell what might be wrong.
Remote work feels bad for junior employees, for exactly this reason. So many times in life you're stopped from going down a dark path not because of a meeting or a status update, but because you started chatting with the other people on your team over lunch, and found out that Bob had an idea the other day that would make your change ten times easier to implement, and Alice was refactoring some other bit of code that solves the bigger problem. And oh yeah: haven't you heard that the manager of the Chaos team is talking about eliminating that use-case anyway? Spending too much time there would be toxic for your career!
I haven't found a way to replicate this with zoom.
Juniors aren't going down a darkhole. They are asking on expert forums and trying out different things. It's part of becoming senior. They don't need someone to rescue them.
People interact on a daily basis remotely. It's form is different but it matches the medium.
This sounds like a lack of technical leadership. If the junior's boss is an engineer, and they do their job, then this won't happen. The story reminds me of my first job, which wasn't even remote, where my boss was a non-technical person and I was going down "dark paths" constantly because he couldn't recognize it as he lacked the expertise.
Your comment simply assumes that superior "velocity" to exist. Many of us have not seen it. For myself, and many of my fellow engineers in other companies, I found that I'm much more productive in remote settings. Our team's productivity objectively increased after we went remote. Conversations with colleagues shows this to be somewhat common in many other teams and companies.
Maybe your personal in-office experience has shown this fabled "velocity". For many of us it never existed, and instead we experienced constant low-value interruptions leading to inefficient loss of focus, lots of time spent "at work" but not actually working, instead socializing or wasting time in other ways that feel good.
I don’t really care where I work, but I’ve come to strongly value travel / face time with my coworkers given that my team is fully distributed and Google Meet is just not the same as meeting someone face to face. For example, I ended up having a 5 hour rambling conversation about the history of our company with another coworker which suddenly shed a lot of light on why I wasn’t able to make progress pushing for certain org-wide changes. This would’ve never come up in a WFH context, since it’s “inefficient socializing,” but in the long run it’s going to help my communication skills a lot.
And the last thing: whenever I’m in the office, I get lots of interruptions, mostly from other ICs (I’m a tech lead). Although my personal progress slows down, I’ve noticed that my coworkers all move faster because they tend to be more likely to ask questions in person than scheduling meetings to pair. In person we tend to dive a bit deeper into the “why are we making this change” which helps people grow more than a direct answer to the “what”. To be honest, Slack and email are far worse distractions for me than the office ever is.
I think my ideal would be wfh 4 days, office 1 day. But I totally understand companies not wanting to maintain a building that is only used 1/5th of the time.
Also, kids are back at school.
It’s time for you to find a different company that hires people who can communicate or teaches them to do better.
2 years of "if you do not want isolation you want to kill grandma" will do that to you.
For my part my mind has not changed at all, I have no strong opinion either way, WFH or In Office has no impact on if I will take a job or not.
Salary, benefits, Vacation, etc are all 1000000000000x more important to me, and I will drop a WFH job in a hot second if the in office job pays more or provides me with something else I need / desire
By August, I was enjoying forced-WFH. Around November, we went into the office to collect our belongings and during the 8.5 mile drive over there in zero traffic, I thought "damn this is taking forever, I hate this drive!" :)
Now, while our company is remote-first forever, I just got back from a 3 day in-person offsite in FL with one of my leadership teams and have had a few others over the last year since the vaccine was widely available. They are irreplaceable and I'd take a full-time in-office job before taking a all-remote job where in-person meetings a couple times per year was not feasible.
But WFH was a net win for me. At least it gave me some freedom in other ways. People no longer interrupt my concentration, they consider my status on teams more and ask before calling.
But these things are highly personal. I had other things that did and still do depress me heavily about the whole situation :(
My commute is a 10 minute train ride followed by a 30 minute walk. I never realised it was actually a net positive, but it forces me to do a minimum amount of exercise every day, which significantly improves my life now we're back in the office.
Whereas at home I have a toddler and a newborn climbing on me.
>Whereas at home I have a toddler and a newborn climbing on me.
You could always find a co-working space.
Also if you’re in a small town without a co-working space, there probably aren’t many software employers either. So you’re either working from home, commuting to an office, or commuting to a co-working space.
A co-working space was considered (and is still being considered), though we find our current strategy of 4 days wfh and one in-office day to be a good mix. Additional considerations involve the geographic make-up of our staff. This context, of course, wasn't in my original reply up above.
My main point in my previous reply was to provide a counterpoint to the argument that a commute is completely wasted time, in specific situations, it can be very useful, and not wasted at all.
As is typical, another drive-by HN commenter will now say I should plan my day better, but without knowing my day, how can one judge?
Given I'm at 50% work capacity right now, I actually do spend many hours of most days of the week with my children.
I'm not saying there's a recommended maximum of time to spend (24 hours a day seems to be the ideal number recommended by mommy blogs), but after a certain point, I am out of energy to thoughtfully and meaningfully engage with my children.
It really puts into perspective the work childhood educators do on a daily basis, actually.
In other jobs I've had 1 hour driving commutes which could go up to 3 hours due to heavy traffic in the area. It was absolutely exhausting and depressing.
So this depends a lot of your circumstances. Also, many people love to drive. I hate it and it stresses me out especially when I'm stuck in traffic.
Prior to this I've done 1hr+ public transport commutes, and I'm not willing to say they're a net positive, but they're better for me than no commute.
It's actually better than it sounds for me because the metro makes a huge detour during those 20 minutes. Walking is a lot shorter than the metro route. It takes me about 1 hour. 7km or so (some uphill though :) )
Problem is where I live it gets quite hot in summer and it makes a 1-hour walk after work exhausting. In winter I do it more often.
And that was actually very reasonable. My only experience before was being on a team where one or two people were WFH out of 10-12. They dialed in to our meetings and it was a mess. They couldn’t hear us well, we couldn’t hear them at times, lots of interruptions. It always felt to me like “we” were having a meeting and they were occasionally butting in. It was really hard for them to be truly included, and they were cut out of in-office stuff. So I didn’t want to WFH and get left out, or have others do the same.
But that’s not the case anymore.
In the time since then EVERYONE was WFH. We quickly got used to it. And we got some team members in other locations. Now that some people are back in the office it’s more even. It’s not the one or two people who aren’t there, it’s half the team. So the WFHs can’t be ignored, everybody stays in the discussion. It works far better than that old arrangement ever did, almost as well as when everyone was in office.
As for me I’m happy. I still get my office social interaction for the most part, it’s just often over chat/video. I feel more “free” because I can work where I want at home instead of at my one little cube in my one little chair. I can use better equipment (like my personal nice monitor vs corporate standard issue) in some cases. I don’t need to use headphones for music/podcasts.
And no commute.
At first I was unhappy “playing office” at home. Stuck at one desk, in one chair, with nothing to look at but a PC and a wall. As soon as I realized I didn’t have to do that I started to really enjoy WFH.
We had a callcenter in Romania where they had a "relax" area and people used to nap on the couches there during lunch but it's always a bit awkward. And my office had nothing like this.
Myself I'd prefer to be back in the office. Just not the office I was in that was 45 minutes away. Working from home was dragging my soul down.
So I quit, living off my RSUs for the time being. Wherever I end up though, I will be asking for some kind of office, even if it's just me in a WeWork or whatever paid for by the company. That's just part of negotiation for me now. Being at home with the dogs and the kids and the distractions is unbearable.
I remember an old adage about adding a remote team member... "if one team member is remote, all team members need to behave like they are remote"
When some communication is electronic and some is verbal, the team members who can only see half the conversation are going to be left out of decisions.
And I don’t mean suggesting being in the office is better. I mean expressing a personal opinion on the matter makes people defensive and hostile.
You say you enjoy talking to others and would like to see people more often. Introverts will chime in and say, “but that’s not everyone! Not all of us enjoy idle chitchat! Oppressor!!” Yet - you never said you wanted to force anyone who wasn’t into that into that situation… And never implied it either.
It’s weird reactionary shit that adds nothing to the conversation. Expressing a personal opinion must be met with an equal or more severe personal opinion of the opposite. No circle jerking allowed anywhere!
I’m sure someone will chime in now that this isn’t actually how things work so that we can prevent any circle jerk.
If you are interested, I wrote a lengthy bit more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28831828&p=2#28836750
This might be because some of those of us who want WFH perceive this as, in practice, carrying the (unintentional) implicit threat of forcing us into physically mingling with the crowds again. After all, you can't see us in person without us seeing you in person, and on the way to that in-person meeting we're seeing a substantial part of the city's population in person.
The pandemic forced me to build a home office, of sorts. I don't actually have an "office", per se, as real estate prices are bananas. I have a corner in the living room. But my corner has: 1. a window 2. a desk that's about 2× bigger than what my employer would provide 3. more space than what my employer would provide 4. is often, but not always, quiet
Also got a nice chair, which improved the WFH situation greatly. Need a second monitor, at some point.
But also my company keeps thinking not of a full return-to-office, but "oh, maybe like 1 day a week with hotdesking" and … no? I don't particularly want to haul things like my keyboard back and forth, & the company laptop is a MBP, so a. it's keyboard induces RSI and b. it's got those butterfly switches that fail easily, and mine have failed.
I do miss my commute, when my commute was a bike ride.
Unlike the article's survey, I think people absolutely can be convinced to go into the office in exchange for a salary increase. If the survey is getting "no", well, you're just not offering enough money. But, they never do.
Further, many people find enjoyment in socializing both at home and at work. Removing half of that socialization is also a problem for some. I know indie game collectives and they love their work and love doing at an office where they all collaborate. That feeling doesn't come from zoom.
After a couple of years, I changed jobs. I realized open offices aren’t that pleasant, the food kinda sucks, the beer fridge is full of trash, and my coworker relationships are very superficial compared to my actual friendships. I started working from home 2-3 days a week because my slightly longer commute time on the subway just wasn’t worth being in the office.
Then covid hit. Everyone started working from home. I pooled resources with my significant other to put together a great coffee setup at home, nice desks, cooked lunch together every day. I moved cities to be closer to things I want to do (and cut down on the NYC drinking culture). Now I’m actually planning another move to be someplace where I can actually afford a house in the next year or two.
I changed, the work environment changed, the world changed, and… work from home works better for me now? When I first started, I had a remote teammate, and it actually really bothered me — I felt like it ruined our team culture because we couldn’t include that teammate in lunches, he forced standups to be on zoom, etc. But now that I’m more established in the field I totally get it. If I had a family, no way I’d want to raise my kids in a US city right now. I’m sure it could work for other people with different preferences but to me it’s just too expensive, too much driving, too dangerous when you try to walk or bike, and cuts me off from the things I really enjoy, like biking on dirt roads in the woods, cross country skiing, downhill skiing (when it’s not busy), and easily visiting family.
I'm pretty sure remote positions I'm qualified for will be open. I could get by with about half of my pay if needed
The idea of adding such dreadful routine to the day around already stressful work puts me over the edge
For context: Architecture/compliance/operations dude with a lot of hats
I think a better way to frame this: "No one will ever be willing to pay me enough to".
Because everyone has a price for just about any job imaginable.
There is also this site, which I've not really explored yet https://4dayweek.io/
Really I just want the choice in it all. I think if you explained to people that either is okay, but some things need you in, that seems quite fair.
> Since the pandemic is around the corner and situation can go from bad to worse at any moment, it has to be considered is what has been reported.
I don't trust that things will improve for 95% of people long term, I think the agenda is clear. So, I'm looking for some hard lines that my employers can't cross.
I like what I do. I like my team. But I also like not having brain damage: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04569-5
Anyone who started WFH within the last couple of years likely haven’t realized that yet, granted.
WFH is just a small transitory step towards work from the cheapest 3rd world country you can find.
WFH it's ok, but outside my new home on mountains I need groceries, health services, real-life leisure services etc those can only exists in a new old distributed economy because who want to open a megastore on mountains collecting a small fraction of people of even a small city?
Such transformation is needed ALSO for environmental reasons: we can't make "green tall buildings" simply because we can't practically upgrade them, while we can make homes "for a human life" to be destroyed and rebuilt with modern techniques of the present time forever. We still need factories, witch still need many humans in place, witch means a new kind of society where the wealthy are physically far from poors, poors are concentrated in factory-smart-cities-labor-camps-alike places and wealthy are spread in the territory, but since in nature there is the principle of communicating vessels that can't really last longer etc. Actually ALMOST NO ONE want to face such big revolution, also neoliberals schools believe that population can't really evolve in "short" time, even if some try hard to push them to a new and better life. That's the challenge and probably the response will be "individual" with big unrest in the meantime...