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Comment by nivenkos | Hacker News Reader

More than anything else I'd want better equipment than I have at home - i.e. an ultra-wide monitor, simple USB-C docking, good noise-cancelling headphones and a good microphone or headset and webcam, a US-layout ISO keyboard, a comfortable chair, an adjustable standing desk, etc.

And then food, coffee, etc. to provide the same amenities as at home.

Right now I'd have to pay about $8 a day and 45 minutes each way to commute to the office and then ~$18 a day on food if I don't prepare it before. To then use inferior equipment than I have at home - why would anyone want that?

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You get hotel death at home. At the office you meet a lot of nice people. You get mental peer support: "oh it sucks for them too? I'm not the only one. Maybe it's not so bad." I find those days are best for going to the office when I have the least meetings, and I can just have ad hoc encounters. Even our CEO so fondly speaks of those. "Oh, you thought that we should do X too? I thought I was the only one!" Ultimately you can experience consilience.

I don't try to write that much or have meetings at the office as those are much easier to do at home.

> At the office you meet a lot of nice people

is this satire? many office people are "nice to your face"

Not satire. My company at least really has a lot of nice people. Also my other jobs have been like that. The same has happened to me at university or school. Not all people are nice but you don't then need to always spend so much time with those.

Most people are neither nice nor interesting. Generally the response to this is "get to know them better", which is tedious as it implies everything is nice as long as you know enough about it. This is also not true.

There is a lot more value in having good, supportive friends. Those you can choose.

Why do I want to meet people at work? What is hotel death? Why do I need mental peer support? Co-workers usually cause the problems.

Yeah I need mental peer support BECAUSE of my coworkers. The work itself is enjoyable.

Depends on the company size; My team sits in a different office on a different continent.

I do not get any 'magic' office knowledge in the office.

And frankly its unfair anyway.

What is unfair? That in office people get knowledge and discussions that WFH don’t?

If so, how is it any fairer to level the playing field to the point where nobody gets that? (No, it will never have the same flow virtually, over the past two years it’s become clear that virtual meetings are always formal to some degree)

I don't work to meet people. If I want to meet people I do so elsewhere.

Consider that the world has introverts and extroverts. Consider also that your job is something you spend the majority of your waking hours doing. Consider then that the extroverts might prefer that to have some level of socialization.

The extroverts have been made quite aware of how the introverts prefer things to be in the past few years, and may now be aware that the extroverts had the upper hand before.

It must be feasible to strike a decent middleground.

The middle ground is having extroverts socialise somewhere where it's not a demand that inflicts harm on other people. Where folks can be of their own free will.

Nah, it’s not. Not at all.

You’re asking a portion of the population that thrives on socialization to avoid that for the majority of the day. That is just as bad as insisting on forcing that on the introverts.

No one is asking that. They are asking that they not be dragged into the office in order to fill someone else's need for socializing at the expense of their own we'll being. If other people want to work at the office more power too them, but if not enough people want an to be in the office to fill their need for socializing, they are being asked to find it elsewhere instead of trying to force everyone else to fill their needs.

I don’t think you appreciate how bad full remote work can be for someone that thrives on having people around them.

But I do appreciate the point you make here, asking others to do something they don’t appreciate just because you want to have people around, is not really a viable solution either.

Then again, humans are intrinsically social animals. And communication does work better for some purposes when done in person. The point I’m trying to raise is that there should exist a decent middle ground that lets introverts and extroverts thrive in the same companies. Possibly by asking both to give a bit.

But that point is somewhat incompatible with the “full remote is the way”-stance that seems to be very popular in at least a vocal part of crowds like HN.

A middle ground is to not expect in office work and to structure things accordingly (that means e.g. meetings needs to treat people dialling in on an equal footing, always). I don't mind if others go in to the office. I mind if I'm made to.

But it's also not nearly as simple as you suggest. My girlfriend is very extrovert, but still also prefer mostly working from home, because while she can socialise a little bit while working it forces her to socialise with a small set of people she has not chosen, while robbing her of extra time (the commute) that she can use to socialise with those she has chosen.

Fair enough, but then again if one is to spend a certain large part of one’s day doing something, shouldn’t that be something one enjoys to some degree? And the degree of socialization might matter for the judgement of that.

I.e. if you don’t like your colleagues, perhaps a new job is in the cards. (and yes, i do get the entire point about reducing the number of hours worked as a solution)

The degree of socialization might matter, but it may also not, including for many extroverts.

And changing jobs for the sake of changing colleagues is high risk - you don't get a chance to interview all your colleagues before taking a new one. It's not even necessarily about not liking them, but about not wanting to sacrifice extra time in order to spend more time face to face with them.

> You get hotel death at home.

Is that some idiom? You mean like isolation sickness?

Hmm yes maybe it doesn't exist as-is in English. It's when you just stay at the hotel room alone or with a very small company of people. One would think it'd be nice with no chores etc. But people actually tend to find it very unpleasant after a while.

People like rock stars have something like this and then it increases the likelihood of substance abuse.

I don’t get any hotel death at home. I’ve become closer to my neighbors and people I pick to be with, not people I’m forced to be with. I don’t want to hear Bob’s stories from 1980 about some Pontiac he used to own and how fast he was and how cool he felt for 20hs a week because he can’t get a clue.

I get soul death being prisoner in a fluorescent tube jail that keeps me away from the sun all winter and barely lets me see it during the rest of the year.

This sounds really bogus to me. On the one hand you pick days with few meetings so you can go hang out and have "ad hoc encounters"; on the other hand, you write and have meetings at home because they're so much easier to do at home.

The commute is what does it for me. That and I hate open plan offices.

> The commute is what does it for me.

I would love to see data comparing reluctance to go (back) to the office versus things like commuting mode of transportation (walking, cycling, transit, commuter rail, driving) and/or commute time.

> Car commuters miss commuting the least: 55% of this group do not miss it at all. Commuters by (e-)bicycle are the group who miss commuting the most, with 91% missing at least some aspects of commuting. As might be expected, the feeling of missing commuting also decreases with increasing commute duration (Fig. 5). > The connection between work and commuting is evident in the relationship between missing commuting and the intention to work from home in the future (Fig. 7). Among those who do not miss the commute at all, 72% express desire to work more from home in the future. Among those who miss commuting a lot, 69% would like to go back to their previous work routine.

https://urbanstudies.uva.nl/content/blog-series/covid-19-pan...

This matches the numbers that have been reported in Norway as well, where the percentage that miss their commute are roughly 80% for pedestrians/cyclists, 50% for public transport and 30% for driving (https://www.nrk.no/norge/blir-palagt-hjemmekontor-_-mange-sa... in Norwegian)

Never thought about it this way, but my bicycle commute has always been 30-45 minutes and that's why I'm leaning 60-70% towards "I don't miss it". If it was only 20mins door to door I guess that would be different.

I'm surprised cars have it worse than public transport tbh. I guess it really depends on parking, etc.

Just personal anecdotal data. The main factors for me are just general flexibility and commute. I used to commute 30m-1hr one way. So that's anywhere from 1-2h a day I'm getting back right at the start. Then flexibility: being able to get chores done, run an errand, take a walk, etc. This actually ends up giving me even more time back. I can work when I'm productive. Output is the same, but I'm not forced to pretend to work for 8 hours. It just makes so much more sense. If my office was 5 minutes away and I could still do all of these things without the social pressures, I might consider it.

I liked going back to the office, since it required me to cycle to work again.

In theory I should do some sort of exercise (like cycling around) when working from home, but realistically that hardly ever happens.

That. In my case 45min commute + an "office" as loud as an airport terminal. No access to better food or coffee could ever offset this.

Yeah, I think this is a pandemic-triggered "unbundling" of lots of things that were previously forced together. People may or may not like their office or their co-workers; they may not be comfortable with the level of micromanagement there; but almost nobody likes commuting.

I wonder if this is how the reaction to absurd real estate prices is playing out.

Reality catching up. Louis Rossmann has talked about this for years. Several layers in finance keep this propped up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0Mkx7qtlwM

The company also needs to pay someone to clean my house, do my laundry, take my dog out, and run any other errands that I can fit in during the day.

How about 6h days in office?

Maybe 5. I'm already doing 6 at home, and don't have to commute, so. 6h days in the office is equivalent to 7-8ish (depending on commute times) hours of me not being able to do anything but work. If they covered the other things like I mentioned, then maybe that'd be okay. But otherwise, I need the extra hours to get my shit done and have the free time I want. At the end of the day, I don't want to give up more than 6 total hours of my life per day to my job.

I'd add that I want the office to have

1) excellent ventilation: clean air. This has become an important topic lately and the importance will not diminish. If you're going to share space with dozens of people, who almost all interact with others at home as well, then find ways to minimise the spread of germs (of which COVID-19 is just one). Coming in saying "it's just a cold" is no longer OK. I don't care how mild your case is, that might not apply to people that you transmit it to, so just don't.

2) a locker to keep some stuff (a nice keyboard, a warm top, etc)

> 45 minutes each way to commute

That's the biggest inefficiency about in-office work. Its irreplaceable time lost for the employees, the company and the society. We are needlessly hauling people from place to place to have them work at the cost of losing time and resources.

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