Ask HN: Have you noticed any side-effects from 100% work-from-home?

My experience with working from home is that it removes a lot of the more stressful time wasting elements of an office job (the commutes, the need to look busy at all times, etc), but can create a feeling of emptiness and meaningfulness if the social aspects aren't taken care of elsewhere. Like, if you don't have much in the way of hobbies to fulfill the same social needs, it can become very easy to stay as a shut in 24/7. That may be okay to some people (especially those on the extreme introvert side of the introvert/extrovert spectrum), but can become a recipe for depression for those that aren't.

It also feels like it works better if your job gives you plenty of things to do everyday. Like, if I have 6-8 hours of tasks to take care of a day, then work from home makes me feel more productive than ever, since I don't have to stress about commuting and there's no context switching necessary for things like popping out to lunch or going to physical meetings. But if there's barely anything that day... well I'm kinda stuck. I can't really focus on my own projects, since there's a chance my actual work could come through at any moment. But because the work isn't there, I can't do anything productive for the company either.

So you end up in a situation where you have free time, but don't really have it, and you can't afford to focus on anything in case something more important pops up.

> So you end up in a situation where you have free time, but don't really have it, and you can't afford to focus on anything in case something more important pops up.

Nailed it. I have hobbies, but most occur on the weekend, or in the evening once or twice a week. When it's a slow week the empty time during the day hits me like a freight train- I've found myself slipping into a depression a few times.

Interesting question. I have an interesting observation about others, to start.

I worked at my last gig both before and all through COVID, so I got something of a front-row seat to the changes that occured.

One thing I definitely, very particularly noticed, that I found quite shocking, is that colleagues I knew to be on the more extroverted side have had negative personality changes. They have shorter tempers, they actually argue with colleagues in Teams meetings, they are more bitter and angry in code reviews. They get upset with negative feedback about their code/work. I can go on...

It has been really shocking seeing some colleagues that I knew for over 3 years that were great humans, come out the end of the pandemic situation so poorly.

Colleagues that I knew to be more introverted, or had close families (were a father/mother, for example) seem to be affected far less.

This has made me conjecture that extroverted people suffered far more, socially, than introverted people, by the very nature of "lock-downs" literally being an introverted environment. It could all be anecdotal, but it still interests me.

It's actually one of the few reasons why I moved on to other opportunities. When it's your adjacent colleague, you can adapt and deal with the shorter tempers, bitterness, and such. However, when it's a significant proportion of your leadership team, that's another question!

About myself:

* I am far more productive.

* I don't have to look busy.

* I nip out to meet a friend for lunch.

* I have free-er choice when pimping my dev setup.

* Better snacks :)

* Better tea

Overall, I see it as an absolute win for someone like me.

You know how sometimes you become aware that you need to breath and this completely messes up automatic breathing? Well, during the tail end of full WFH (we're hybrid now), I became acutely aware of what I did every day in the house in a way that became uncomfortable. There used to be five day gaps between two full home days. It made me think a little harder about sabbaticals, early retirement, etc.

Socially, I am an extrovert and it has been tough adjusting. Almost all of my friends in my current location were tied to my previous job that was not WFH. It's already hard to meet new friends in your ~30s when living in place that you are not from - not seeing humans at work really compounds that.

Physically, going from a very physical previous career field to sitting for the past year and a half really took it's toll on me. I have recently gotten into a routine of going to the CrossFit gym early in the morning before work. It makes me feel a bit more 'alive' and more like what I used to call 'normal,' it also puts some of that socialization back into my life. I also stand up much more after reading some of Dr. Kelly Starrett's "Deskbound," which quite frankly scared the crap out of me.

Professionally it has been great. The new management I work for is much more like 'leadership,' and truly promotes growth even though that eventually means moving on. My workload is very much seasonal and I've been able to study new things and pursue different certifications.

I’ve got much fitter now I exercise instead of commute.

I can focus more and get more done in fewer hours.

Communication has got more efficient because it has got to.

I don’t miss the forced pub time which I hated anyway.

I am much more confident that I could get another job quickly if I had to, which means I’m not being abused by tyrannical slave driving boss anymore.

I spend more time learning new skills and sharpening existing skills because I don’t feel the pressure to “look busy” all the time, so I can stop and watch a 20 minute YouTube video that levels up my skills.

Middle managers are disappearing, being replaced by Ticket systems and source control, good riddance.

I have developed closer relationships with coworkers because when you’re chatting in chat rooms, the pressure to answer immediately is not there like it is in face to face communications, so our conversations and more thought out and answers are deeper. I know this communication style doesn’t work for everyone, but adapt or die

Overall it’s excellent, I am never going back to the office

Same here. Working in a global company I’m on zoom with coworkers from 6-7 cities on three different continents daily. I have much closer relationships with all of them.

The lack of a 2-hour commute is an incredible boost in energy and productivity.

Quality affordable home cooked meals, pleasant spacious ergonomic work environment I have 100% control over allow me to minimize interruptions and do deep work.

After work I “commute” to the beach for a run.

Most of my communication is in written format - organized in Basecamp, easy to locate and leaving a visible paper trail of my activity.

I think communication about technical topics has greatly improved. Opportunities have opened up for those who are better at writing than speaking. When speaking is required, meetings tend to be shorter and less exhausting. Productivity is about the same or better.

On the other hand, it took a while for it to not instinctively feel like punishment. My coping strategy was improving my living space and meeting up exclusively with people that aren't my coworkers.

Overall, I think this is the best thing that ever happened to me. While uncomfortable at first, my quality of life has dramatically improved. I still feel lonely most of the time, but it's easier to see why now that I have more control over my time and physical presence.

I’m currently hybrid: 2 days at home, 3 days in office but no one’s really counting. I realize I’m not quite the target of the question, but even I can the difference.

It’s very easy to never leave my home on WFH days and that absolutely has a negative effect. It makes the days going back to the office feel more refreshing, like I have more oxygen. That said, there are of course plenty of upsides to WFH.

I’m not sure what a software solution would like. Maybe reminders to get out of the house, or something that tracks how long it’s been since I’ve seen a friend in person.

> It makes the days going back to the office feel more refreshing, like I have more oxygen

For some reason, every time I'm in a conference room I inevitably pass out. Even if I'm not tired and perfectly energetic on the way in, I can count on one hand the number of times I haven't just mentally gone while in one. Wonder why.

A side effect for me was receiving a final warning for my work performance. For me WFH is like how most people would respond to being asked to sleep at the office. Im an architect and have a relatively enjoyable job but I would just procrastinate and do a whole project overnight before a deadline. I couldn’t do the things I enjoy because I would be working in the evenings. It was horrible. As a result, during the pandemic, I chose to be the only person present in a 25 person office, which meant I was answering all the business calls, which meant I couldn’t do much work when I was in the office, and even resulted in complaints about my phone manner.

At home I have an immaculate setup with multiple layers of internet blocking tools. I have my own office room with a standing desk and 5k monitor. One friend noticed how nice my workstation was and could not stop laughing when I told him I now work 0 days days from home. Covid made me realise I might need a formal ADHD diagnosis but also how much I value the office. I love helping people at work, giving and reviving advice, and learning from what is going on around me.

Closer with our neighbors! We have weekly happy hours at a rotating house, it's super fun. There's a group neighborhood text chat where we share bird and wildlife pics.

I have sort of the opposite experience of this compared to many people: I worked from home as a freelancer for a couple decades, then spent a year actually in an office job again until COVID forced us all back home again.

I’ll admit the first few months or so of being in the same physical space as my coworkers was pretty nice! There were snacks, there was freeform conversation, you’d overhear something at the next desk and join in. We went out to group lunches together and got to know one another, etc — all good stuff.

After a while the conversations at the next desk started feeling kind of distracting, the snacks weren’t as appealing as what I had at home, I’d gotten tired of spending $$ on the same lunch, it was a pain finding a conference room or a place to have a quiet phone call… it was almost a relief when COVID hit. (I mean except for the plague part. That sucked. Just the getting to work from home part was good.)

Couple years later I feel just as personally close to the people who got hired after WFH as I do with the people I worked with in person, we get the same amount of work done (if not more), and I’m neither more nor less lonely or isolated feeling than I was when I was surrounded by people all day.

I feel like I get the same structure and routine in my day from the job whether it’s in my house or theirs, and my house is a lot nicer.

The blurring of boundaries and/or the lack of separation in everything from small home tasks to personal calls and cooking and cleaning the kitchen to caring for family = chaos and complete energy depletion for this introvert. See, I almost forgot to mention work in the previous sentence. Odd how separation via things like a commute are actually needed by some of us.

While WFH has definite benefits, the downsides of WFH are numerous for roles that require technical knowledge or experience to be shared across the team, let alone inspiring team-work or team cohesion. e.g., Slacking "dumb" questions in public for public shaming and having no management correction of the behavior (because sometimes it is management) is just toxicity online instead of in-person. And bonus! It's permanently enshrined for all to see, misunderstand, and revisit.

Well, humans gonna be human. Given a choice, I'll take the hybrid schedule.

Yes, employees have become more reactive than proactive. This is especially unfortunate if you are in sales or creative roles. At our company, in WFH the company communication is much better, the use of Teams & 1on1 during the pandemic has removed what use to be more like departmental islands. Reactive, meaning people process out their tasks like, emails, to-do, meetings, but it tends to fill there day checking off all these boxes. In proactive roles you need creativity to chase the goals, and management needs to coach their goals...I find that proactive part of job responsibilities are falling off the table. We have moved to a hybrid schedule so their is consistent facetime for development, employeed feedback/discussion, and manager coaching. It is changing our business, and Q4 is/has shown a recovery.

I find I am much less stressed and I feel I am more productive working from home. I find it hard to set work boundaries though as I often log back on in the evening after working a full day. Probably because I don’t feel like I am working hard as I am always home. Something about spending time in the office makes you feel like you accomplished something even if you didn’t accomplish much of anything.

I don’t miss in-person social interactions at all. I don’t miss in person meetings.

Honestly WFH is one of the best things that ever happened to me.

I am happier, more productive, less stressed, using better equipment, and working in an office that doesn’t suck. What’s not to love?

The only losers IMHO are incompetent middle managers who doesn’t know how to manage based on results instead of endless BS meetings and time-spent-looking-busy. However I have zero sympathy for those. Their salary money is better spent hiring more developers.

It's easier for me to put up boundaries / say "no" to others (even if they're great ideas! And if I like the person!) over Slack than in person. I'm much more focused now than I used to be.

It's also changed how/when I eat — I realized I like eating a small meal around noon then something else around 2-3pm, but that's really hard when I have to slog to work and have meetings all day, so you eat early, against my body's will.

tl;dr: I think I get to manage my energy levels better (boundaries, when I eat) when I'm WFH, which means I'm getting more done w/ fewer hours.

wfh was, net-net, a terrible and somewhat unhealthy experience for me.

socializing with people is an active effort for me. i am very good at it, but i have to do it often, or I will naturally hermit and want to be away from everyone, including my wife, who I very much enjoy spending time with. (we don't have children.)

full wfh during 2020 and 2021 slid the notch well into hermit territory.

i was not good at vocalizing when i need time alone (as I discovered, thanks to covid). this led to me being mad at everyone and everything a lot of the time. i am unbelievably thankful to be with someone who dealt with (and deals with) my bullshit when i got (and still get, albeit much less so) like this.

gyms being closed exacerbated this. i did bodyweight and walked a lot, but nothing can replace the rack.

(keeping a daily mood journal and spending a few months in therapy helped a ton here.)

we were also in a two bedroom 1200sq apartment, which made it somewhat worse because one of us had to use the living space as a work space, which introduced work-life balance issues. moving to a bigger place helped here, but that happened after vaccines were widely available.

i am also insane and LOVE traveling for work and being on client sites.

the chaos of enplanement/deplanement and irrops. Hell, everything about aircrafts. Earning points for my wife and I to enjoy amazing vacations with. Working in different offices and experiencing different work cultures. Exploring new restaurants in new cities and hanging out with my coworkers, who were all lots of fun to be around. Saving tons of money through expenses. I love ALL of it.

getting an 80% travel gig was a dream come true for me, doubly so when my wife told me she 100% supported it!

(every hiring manager thinks I'm joking when I say that I prefer 80% travel and will go anywhere in almost a moment's notice. I'm not joking. I can pack in ten minutes and be in the air in two hours. my wardrobe is heavily optimized for travel.)

most importantly, traveling gave me four days of time to myself and time to hit my work and side projects (when i did them) insanely hard without feeling like i was neglecting my wife.

it refilled my solo time cup, and made me be able to give 1000% to my wife and acquaintances without feeling like i'm losing out on me time.

trading the travel for zoom calls fucked that up in a big way. after customer or project work, gym, dinner and spending time with my wife, i often feel like I have almost no time to myself. this has made me irritable at times (see above). i took a solo vacation for four days this year JUST to get my alone time back...and I didn't feel good about it. i've enacted strategies for dealing with this, but travelling for work made this problem so easy to deal with.

most comments about WFH on Reddit and HN gush about how awesome it is for lots of good reasons, so I spent lots of time really thinking about _why_ i love the travel. i concluded that traveling for work is integral to a happy career for me because I just friggin' love it! (I've also never been one to stay home very long; I found ways to be out of the house long before COVID.

I made moves to travel again. I'm traveling more and am much happier overall.

that said, i definitely empathize with people for whom WFH was a blessing in disguise. so many parents got time with their children back. i am not normal; most people HATE commuting, and not having to do it was tops for them. lots of folks have to wear clothing that they hate when they'd rather work in comfy clothes; wfh gave them that. wfh also made it easy to schedule chores or other home obligations without giving up productivity. (i liked this because of its flexibility, but also hated this because it felt disruptive.) lots of folks liked working in an office or room that they designed with their own equipment stocked with their own food and coffee than a shitty box with crappy coffee and food lit with fluorescent lights or arrays of LED downlights.

this was long; thanks for reading and giving me a space to air this out.

one more thing that didn't help the hermiting is the whole mask and politics thing.

between that, seeing people support people who think that my homosexual friends are mentally ill and that I am "lazy" and am better off performing low-skilled labor for them, and seeing the glass ceiling I am definitely subjected to (go ahead and count the number of Black and/or Latino staff/principal engineers, engineering leaders and executives in the industry; i'll wait), it made it really hard to strike up conversations with anyone like I used to. not impossible; just way harder.