Ask HN: What problems do you have with WFH? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What problems do you have with WFH?

9 pointslampshades20 comments

I have been tired of working from home for a good while now. I’ve felt like it hurt my productivity and I really couldn’t put my finger on why.

Just now while sitting in a meeting I realized a major issue is how difficult it is to know when people are speaking to me. When in-person, it’s immediately clear, because they’re looking at me when they speak.

What are your gripes with WFH? Do you feel it is holding you back? How do you deal with it? Are you going to RTO?

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I'm lonely. Really, really lonely. To be clear, I'm an introvert. I enjoy my alone time. But three years is way, way too much.

My wife goes to her office every day, and I work from my guest bedroom. I sit in the same four walls all day, every day, with no 3D in-person interactions with anyone. I'm in meetings all day, but there's something different about 2D faces on a screen and being in person.

I miss small talk. I miss spontaneous conversations.

My brain is so dead, because my house is the safest place there is. There are no threats, there are no dynamic changes, there is nothing to possibly make it perk up.

When I hang out with a friend, my brain is firing on all cylinders. At a coffee shop, it perks up when people walk by. I feel more alive.

But at home? I'm lonely and tired and brain dead.

My next job will almost certainly be some sort of hybrid. I don't think I can do 100% WFH for much longer without heading into some sort of major depression.

Have you tried volunteering somewhere? It's a pretty easy way to get social interaction without having to go through a bunch of rigamarole.

I've been going into an office once a week, and I've made more an effort to reach out to friends and try and schedule time to hang out. I've also gone to coffee shops once or twice a week to just work for an hour or two and allow my brain to be distracted by people watching and conversations around me. It's making a big difference in my mental health.

I am terribly shy, so volunteering with strangers sounds terrifying to me. :)

My biggest issue with WFH is that my employer won't commit to it fully. Meaning we're indefinitely WFH until we could be recalled to RTO without significant warning. Thus, I need to maintain a commute-ready vehicle, and live in a more expensive area so that hypothetically I could commute.

The actual work is exactly the same, but with fewer people disturbing me, a two hour shorter work-day (commute), and the ability to e.g. listen to music while I work, or have a TV show on in the background. Plus it has forced my managers to better define expectations because they cannot use nebulous "butt in seat" tracking.

I seem to get sick less (colds, flu, etc), my stress has never been lower, and communications with colleagues has improved as people have learned to use text-chat, and important meetings have a text transcript.

The only one I have is not being able to do whiteboarding effectively, but I solved that by going into the office once a month just to do whiteboarding. Which actually is more efficient that I thought.

> I’ve felt like it hurt my productivity and I really couldn’t put my finger on why

Wait until you go back to the office. You'll see how unproductive you really are

I’m definitely more productive in office. I can look at the work I produced before and after WFH and there is a stark difference.

Are you looking at the time period we were all in a pandemic?

Spending about 22 hours everyday in the same room.

The last three years have felt like groundhogs day, everyday.

Same. The isolation effect for a heads-down IC really wore me down after 2-3 years of doing this.

I tried reverting to a hybrid model myself but too little too late my office was dead, then my company decided to shut it down completely.

I moved to another company entirely so I could spend just 1-2 days interacting with someone. Living by yourself, working remotely on code only is kind of rough for me.

How has it been going back to a hybrid schedule? Has it been worth it?

I've been work from home longer than most, 22 years. I've tried it all, I've gotten up showered, put on work-ish clothing and sat in my office, I've lumbered to my chair in the livingroom bleary eyed in my underware, popped on the TV at 8:00am sharp and fired up the laptop, I even tried to work at a coffee shop. In the end I settled on working in my livingroom unless I have to work with a customer then I go into my office/lab. My biggest gripe is I feel totally removed from my group. I do something group adjacent so while a member of the team I work solo and have for over a decade. Since I work solo I have nobody to talk to about what I do and when the group does get together (virtually) the conversation has little to nothing to do about what I do. We used to do in person training, so once or twice a year we'd get together and learn something new. It was a lot of fun, you got to hang out with your co-workers in a semi-social setting do a lot of knowledge swap and bitch about the company -all that is gone, training now is online and being in training means you have to juggle trying to learn with all your other duties. As others have said I miss having people to chat with, short bullshit conversations make the day go quicker. I miss taking a long lunch every now and then. I miss cutting out of work an hour early to go have beers with the boss. I'm older now and at a very different point in my career than I was when I went into the office and I'd like to give a little more back, when I was starting out in my 20's I got "adopted" by an older group of ex-IBM guys, they found me entertaining and I learned a lot about consulting from them just by hanging out. I'd love to provide some of the same direction to the younger guys but it seems very forced, the guys who mentored me just invited me to lunch for a few years and I don't see how this kind of relationship can be forged via zoom.

I guess to sum it all up, I love working from home, I truly miss the social aspect to work and I think companies could do a lot more to address this without dragging everyone into the office three days a week. Virtual is not a substitute for in person but it will do. My company has been pretty clear we're not coming back to the office but they have tried before so we'll see what happens in the next 5-10 years.

> I have been tired of working from home for a good while now. I’ve felt like it hurt my productivity and I really couldn’t put my finger on why.

Same, I just don't care about anything at work, and without any people around me I don't have a reason to pretend that I do.

In my next job search I'll be looking only at in-office jobs.

I’m doing the same. After my year is up at my current job (I can’t quit because of the sign on bonus), I’ll be looking for something that is at least hybrid.

so you want to go back to the office to pretend to care?

This comment really hit home for me, thank you for posting it. Thinking about it, for the last few years the only motivating thing about work has been to "do it for the person next to you", to try and help them, make their life easier.

I really struggle to be motivated by company mission, values. It might be because recently I have worked in mostly quite boring industries (banking, insurance, retirement funds etc...) with little competition or incentives to be better/go faster.

The financial compensation is also not a great motivator anymore as I've been quite lucky where I feel like if I was to not be able to work anymore, I would still be in a pretty good spot (and might even get to spend more time with my kids!), despite my "net worth" and retirement not looking that great.

The other great motivator of "do your best work" has fallen by the wayside as well due to personal issues and having to deal with the harsh realities of competing priorities over the last decade. It's become more of "do the best you can with what time/effort you can afford to give without your life falling apart".

WFH largely takes away any connection I had with "the person next to me" as they're not next to me. They're just words in IM or a face on a screen. Just writing this down is making me realise how important it was as the last good reason I had for "getting up and going to work" in the morning.

Definitely going to be looking for a job in the office for the next role.

It's made renting costs go significantly higher in my country due to digital nomads in certain places so that in-office jobs in cities require now taking crazy commutes like I'm doing or be unable to save money period all while living with 3 strangers.

Digital nomads are a disease.

meetings, apathy, disfunction and wfh are a bad combo. avoid.

engineering, passion, efficiency and wfh are great. attempt.

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