I am tired of hearing banalities about remote working | Hacker News Reader

I am tired of hearing banalities about remote working

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25 pointsbrainrepo34 comments

Is there an official party line that wfh is in every way for every person everywhere always better, and it’s best not to kick that hornet’s nest? Asking for a friend.

I feel the problem is that many people in healthy offices already have a productive relationship with WFH, and understand the inherent costs and benefits. But there exists a large group who work in inherently toxic environments with sociopathic management for whom WFH is an essential component towards stability and is also the first places trying to force them to be in person.

The option to WFH, and avoid commuting, congestion, pollution, higher costs, disruptions, be closer to your spouse/kids, and don't lose an additional 2 hours every day is indeed inherently better for anyone, everywhere.

If someone likes socializing, they can do more of that when WFH too (especially since WFH really means: working from anywhere, be it a cafe, a coworking space, a village, or wherever they like).

Except it their have issues at their home. But going to an office is not a solution to that, is sidestepping their real problem...

The only place where that's not good is when you need expesinve resources to work (e.g. access to labs and machines).

From an environmental impact perspective alone, the opportunity to free the planet from emissions, lower the demand for vehicles, improve pedestrian safety by staying off the road, and lower commute-induced stressors on our bodies should be enough of a reason to WFH whenever possible. And those are only the first benefits of the practice.

You are conflating automobile transport with working from an office. They are different issues.

Not really different, because a huge part of automobile transport (when it comes to personal cars) is about going to and from the office, not running around for personal enjoyment.

The solution to the issues that the OP posted will persist regardless of the popularity of WFH. The true solutions to those issues are better infrastructure and improved modes of transport.

The emissions impact of WFH is far from clear actually. In many cases lots of people staying home running their domestic heating and cooking etc systems consumes more energy than them using the big efficient industrial ones at the office, enough to outweigh transport emissions. (Especially since the industrial ones are still running in many cases, because people still come in a few days a week.)

You've described a bunch of specific constraints that don't apply to "anyone, everywhere".

None of those items apply to me. It doesn't cost me anything to go into the office, it doesn't take hours, there's no pollution involved (at least, none over just the base rate of me being outside).

The idea that not wanting to spend every day Mon-Fri constantly around my SO means I have "issues at home" I can only really imagine is projection.

I don't particularly care if you like WFH, but pretending no-one actually likes working in person is denial of reality. Hi, I exist.

I don't particularly care if you like working in an office, but pretending everyone likes working in person, in a shared office, is a denial of reality.

People who do better at WFH have had to put up with and deal with the "butts in seat" work mentality for decades, even after remote work has been a possibility, especially in tech. Not everyone wants to be in an office, not everyone wants to be WFH. We shouldn't be forcing people to do either, if they don't want. Choice would be nice, but I'm way beyond dealing with being forced to come into an office as an employment requirement too.

Some jobs require employees to work in person, some jobs require them to work from home.

There is no force involved, that's hyperbolic.

I'm not aware of anyone arguing that everyone enjoys working in person. That would be daft. The existence of this thread disproves that.

>None of those items apply to me. It doesn't cost me anything to go into the office, it doesn't take hours, there's no pollution involved (at least, none over just the base rate of me being outside).

Then you already WFH, or from "next door to home".

What's more, you're an exception, in a world with billions of commuters.

>*The idea that not wanting to spend every day Mon-Fri constantly around my SO means I have "issues at home" I can only really imagine is projection. (...) but pretending no-one actually likes working in person is denial of reality. Hi, I exist."

Again, not everything is about you. For some people WFH is bad because of a bad home environment. In good home environments, the ability to spend more time with kids/spouse is a good thing.

Note also how nothing about WFH means that you need to work from your actual home, or that you need to spend "every day Mon-Fri constantly around your SO".

If you have 3 roommates who are also WFH, is WFH better for all of you?

Part of the reason why WFH seems so much better is that companies made working in the office so horrible. Anyone who promulgated open floor plans should have been summarily fired.

Alas. Here we are.

Add zoom meetings and dogs to the open floor plan, and the office is a terrible place to get anything done.

Dogs? What? I still find it insane that any workplace allows non-service dogs and even more bizarrely, some recruiters list "dog-friendly" as a perk.

Crazy.

Its not that wfh is better in every case, but it does seem to be the case for a large number, if not majority, of people. The other issue is that the office crowd is dependent on others being at the office. I can't count the number of times I've seen someone say they prefer going to the office, but because everyone was working from home, there was no point. The burden being placed on others to satisfy personal work preferences seems heavily asymmetric, with the in-office crowd requiring a large number of others to also come into the office to make it work. If a company can make both work-styles viable, that's great. But too often it seems like the requirements for a bustling in-office environment end up meaning the WFH crowd are forced to come in as well.

Those who advocate for on site work are like people of the old age that advocated for in store shopping. They thought no one would ever shop online because they’d need to touch and feel the products before buying. Same kind of people who thought blockbuster is better than netflix because people want the experience. The reality tho is the world is changing and so is how we work in it.

I thill think online shopping is a very poor substitute for in/store shopping. I bemoan the loss of physical media.

How is in store shopping "of the old age"? Do you ever go outside...?

I don't know what netflix you have but on mine Star trek looks horrible and the sound is so bad that i have to turn the volume to 70% to be able to distinguish what people speak. Online shopping is nice until you realize that the piece of clothing you bought is total crap and it does not resemble the picture on the website. And not everybody has time to spend at the Post office shipping back parcels.

100% agree. For those saying online shopping is bad, revenues say otherwise.

"We want to laugh at the coffee machine."

I actually, initially thought the author meant "ridicule the coffee machine". How rude. ;)

Don't worry, coffee machines don't have emotions... YET!

Funny, I've laughed at the coffee machine at my previous job, because I am a coffee snob. For the past year I've been at a new job with no threat of ever going back to the office, and I get to drink all the coffee I want from a machine that cost me so much I can only smile.

<rant>

If the goal is to laugh with you coworkers, you can still do that. I have all kinds of conversations with coworkers about life, politics, silly things, pets, coffee.. etc

And if the goal is to have coffee with your coworkers, meet them and talk and laugh.

WFH benefits everyone, even the people with jobs that cannot be done remotely. Think about traffic, and rent, the environmental benefits.

</rant>

Speaking about coffee machines i have one of those pods machines and make my own starbucks at home. A delight. Decafo tho. Have 4-5 a day.

From the article's author:

>I am just coming back from a very intense company retirement with activities that helped me reach my limits

Yeah, no thanks, I don't want to "reach my limits" by being pressured into childish team building activities with random people from work I've never met IRL. Not my thing. I have my own groups of friends for that.

>Hei man, if you would see our slack channels, where hundreds of people share opinions, experiences and their pets’ photos, you would understand.

Is there something wrong with me if I don't care at all the about pet photos, and other non work related opinions and experiences of hundreds of people I don't personally know IRL and rarely get to meet? To me those slack channels are just noise that distract me from wrapping up my work sooner so I can go have fun. I have my own Signal and WhatsApp groups of people I actually know personally and care about.

>I can call them friends after seeing them just one time!

I don't think you know what true friendship is about. Last month I got a bad case of COVID, hurt myself seriously, and had to be taken to the hospital. I had 3 IRL friends who offered their help with my recovery on a daily basis. Would your new remote work colleague "friends" that you met once in a company retreat fly over from their countries and take care of you? Probably not. Work colleagues you only met once IRL aren't your true friends. They'll quickly forget about you after the retreat is over and focus on their IRL friends back home.

Lots of strong and loaded opinions on both sides in this article. I don't think one is more right than the other, just that each is working for a companies with different cultures, in industries where one is more modern, one is more traditional and so is their customer base, where one values physical interaction more for business success vs the other, so of course both approaches are not compatible, but that doesn't make one wrong or one right. I WFH so I get the author's PoV, but that's mostly applicable to his/our bubble. From my experience, an engineering or other more traditional company will value face to face interaction and handshake business deals more than web startups or SaaS companies, so his cheap shots at trying to out-smug the author of that LinkedIn post from his SW remote-work high-horse are missing the point completely and don't put him in a better light.

> Would your new remote work colleague "friends" that you met once in a company retreat fly over from their countries and take care of you? Probably not.

Who said you can only have IRL friends through work? It's possible to have interactions outside the work context and to make friends outside of work.

You probably misunderstood my comment. I never claimed you couldn't have IRL friends outside of work. In fac that's exactly my point. Read my comment again please.

> Would your new remote work colleague "friends" that you met once in a company retreat fly over from their countries and take care of you?

You seem to have confused the definition of "true friendship" with "free nursemaid", and are still living in a pre-Internet age where physical proximity is a limiting factor on your friendships. I'm genuinely happy for you and your IRL friendships because everyone needs friends but ever since the Internet, physical proximity is no longer a limiting factor for what constitutes friendship. Some friends are just harder to access than others. That doesn't mean they're any less your friends. You've never had a friend move away for college or work or family?

Think about getting injured while on vacation in a foreign country. How many of your "true friends" can also just fly to said foreign country to take you to the hospital? vs if you're injured while on a work retreat three countries away from home; do you think your work friends are going to dump you at the curb and blindly hope you're still able to make commits come Monday?

The problem, really, is that the word friends is a very limiting word because there are just so many different kinds of friends. Some of them can take you to hospital, some of them can help you debug a particularly thorny piece of code, and others will watch your cat while you're away or send you food if you're hungry. If you're limiting your friendships to only those people who can take you to the hospital, you're missing out.

You have a very one sided view of what true friendship is and how they are built. It's difficult to build stable and lasting friendships fully remotely without constant IRL interactions where you get to experience all sides of the person and the relationship, including the darker sides, which you might not like. Constant IRL interactions in both fun and in challenging situations help you see all sides of a person, the good and the bad, vs online where people have a much more curated and groomed presentation of themselves especially when not fully anonymized. Maybe your online buddy is some weirdo who stalks girls in his free time or scams old people of their money. IRL you have a much better chance of sniffing weirdos out from their general behavior and by observing how they interact with others, not just with you, which is how I dumped a lot of so called friends who despite treating me well personally, I realized they were scumbags in general to others. Online you can't really screen for this.

Just think about where the strongest life lasting bonds are usually made by people: school, university, military service, sometimes work, etc., places where you're constantly together sharing a common struggle through which you build life lasting camaraderie and get to know people thoroughly and having each other's backs, along with a dose of willingness to self-sacrifice for a vulnerable friend in need. Just ask people who served about the bonds they made there. If your friends aren't willing to make themselves uncomfortable for you when in need, then they aren't your real friends. We all know "those people" who're great at having a good time and will always party with you, and keep saying you're "bros" but the moment you need some sort of help, they'll ghost you or make up excuses why they can't help. Those are just fun buddies, not friends. Same with your exclusively online gaming buddies, work colleagues, etc. are just that, gaming buddies and work colleagues, not friends. They'll have fun with you while things are good, but won't sacrifice anything IRL for you when things are bad for you like a true friend would. You need to make distinctions between fun buddies, and real friends which tends to be mostly formed IRL and will also be by your side when things are bad for you.

Saying people you know remotely are your friends is like saying the girl on tinder you've been chatting up for weeks is your girlfriend, when you haven't even met IRL.

Sure, in this day and age you can meet very interesting people online, on reddit, etc witch which you share many things in common and you can end up getting to know them well and share secrets and many intimate details of your life, and yet we still have a loneliness epidemic of epic proportions despite this. That's because once people with exclusivity remote friends switch off their laptop/phone and come back to the real world, they realize that despite all their so called friends, at the end of the day when they're vulnerable and in need, they're still 100% alone.

Thank you for your well thought out reply!

You introduced a few new terms, "true friends(hip)", "fun buddies", "weirdo", "work colleagues", "gaming buddies", "tinder girlfriend", "real friends", "interesting people online, on reddit, etc witch[sic] which you share many things in common and you can end up getting to know them well and share secrets and many intimate details of your life".

What we're disagreeing about is that you're using the word friends only to refer to "true friends", and everyone outside of the group is decidedly not a friend, while I'm using the word friend to refer to basically anyone in my life that I've connected with that bears me no ill will, while still recognizing that the different categories defined exist and are distinct, just as a subset of the superset called friends.

We're not really going to reconcile that difference in definition, but I do want to say that I think we agree on the important point - everybody should have true friends that will back you when you're at your most vulnerable and when you're in need.

My contribution to the collection of truisms:

I like working at home, but I hate living at work.

Only micromanagers and people that need attention or supervision need to go to the office.

Is that your example banality?

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