Early Remote Work Impacts on Family Formation
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eig.org
I managed to be highly productive, build a career, yet be there for bath times, tucking into bed, school plays / sports days, nursing when ill, impromptu dancing to toddlers programs on the TV.
The year I spent before that I was lucky to see her at all during a day. She wasn't awake before I left (except for the inevitable screaming during the night) and we kept her up late so I could feed her a bottle before she went to bed.
I think it's a huge win for equality and family life. Any boss will have to wrestle WFH out of my cold dead hands.
Our second kid was born a month before the pandemic hit. I was there for so many beautiful moments. With #3 on the way, you can indeed wrestle WFH from my cold dead hands.
Hm, where I live, both parents take roughly the same amount of parent leave (around 240 working days each in total - minimum 90 days for each) from work regardless of whether they work at home or anything else. That's what I would call equality.
By contrast WFH changes the rest of a child's experience for their whole life.
The whole concept of women pumping and then someone else feeding their baby defrosted frozen breastmilk because they have to work is crazy. Women should have at least 1 year with their child, and if that means men need to be off for a year too, then so be it.
[edited to add: even if the mother takes up the majority of the childrearing (diapers, feeding, swaddling, talking, socializing, etc) the father should be taking up all of her previous chores, housework, social maintenance (e.g. familial obligations)!]
I guess my time management and prioritization skill have improved by necessity, but the lack of uninterrupted quiet time is real.
I know it sounds hard to do if your family is used to you 'floating around', but I can tell you with 100% certainty it will just not work out long term any other way.
Do you have dedicated office space in your home? This is crucial.
Additionally, once the kids go to school the house gets very, very quiet for most of the day.
And yes, I am sure once everyone is at school for a big chunk of the day it all gets much easier.
Locking myself in my home office during work hours isn't a solution to this problem. I have to use the bathroom, get water, coffee, eat lunch, take walks, etc. The kids see me and want to play, want to hang out, want to tell me about everything that happened since the last time they saw me. They might come to the office door and start pounding on it, yelling out for Mom or Dad, depending on who's in the office working. At that point one of us has to physically respond to the situation. There's also the simple fact that sometimes only Mom or Dad can truly manage the situation at hand. I've had to go break up fights outside in the back yard after I realized the background noise I was hearing was an exasperated grandparent who couldn't get them to stop.
We have 3 kids, a set of twins and a singleton, whose average age is still under 3 years. It's a very challenging situation and work generally takes a back seat when the kids are in the house.
Sounds exactly like issues at our open offices too?
This week I've just given up on sleep completely, and accepted that I have already gone insane. I got 2 hours last night. After managing to pass out from exhaustion between coughing fits at 3AM, I was called back from the Ethereal Realm to this land of the damned by a mysteriously sweet voice in the dark, asking me for "a piece of cheese", and "bread, the round kind like for feeding a duck". To aid in my quest, I was hastily thrown the plastic base of a holy cheese grater from the land of Ikea; no more questions. Since then I've fed a baby about 5 oz of formula and coughed up about 2 oz of mucus. Like my daughter, it's been sort of fun to observe the change in consistency, color and flavor from day to day.
Overall things have been going well, though. No complaints. There's some clear benefits to operating at my physical and mental limit. I've lost some weight from all the involuntary vomiting and appetite loss. I abandoned my futile attempt to be delicate dealing with our difficult and jaded next door neighbors, and am instead stomping on egg shells calling them out on their unintentional but very rude behavior. I also feel like I've had a lot of really creative and productive, impactful breakthroughs at work lately. My only real disappointment is that I have absolutely no energy left to pick up my Steam Deck, and when I force myself to anyway, I get simulation sickness after 5 minutes.
The noro/rota/adeno/entero viruses are terrible, they tear through the whole class and family leaving a trail of vomit and diarrhea…and usually hit once or twice per year. Majority are just corona/rhino/influenza which are not as bad since they just usually just cause congestion and the kids can play through it.
I notice that my daughter stopped getting sick between 3 and 4 though, so I guess that is how long it takes to build up immunity to most.
I don't think this is actually a good anecdote in support of your stereotype? Let me tell you more about my recent personal work experiences. After taking 3 months of paid paternity leave, I eased back in by working a few 10-20 hour weeks, then my wife broke her leg while we were out of town helping her mother who herself had broken her shoulder. The CTO of my company immediately called just to say not to worry at all about the company, and to focus 100% on taking care of my wife and daughters. I worked a few 5 hour weeks, mainly just asynchronously answering people's technical questions to keep the cogs of progress turning. There was a re-org while I was on paternity leave, and my new manager who was also a new hire was getting worried that maybe I should take some sort of formal leave. To be honest it sounded pretty good at the time, since I was stressed out to the point of having abdominal pain; 3 month old, post-partum wife bedridden in extreme agony, unable to breastfeed, young daughter bouncing off the walls. I called the CTO just to mull over with, then called my former manager who himself had just gotten back from a several month leave that he spent doing yoga on an island off Portugal. He had me fully convinced to just take the next 4 months off, abandon my family and zip off to Portugal; just kidding. The CTO called me back to say that he talked to the head of engineering and the HR rep, and they all agreed that it seemed silly to take leave. They all agreed that I should continue not worrying at all about the company and focus 100% on my family, at least for another month or two. "You've always gone the extra mile for the company, so let the company do the same for you." He suggested that I should only consider taking leave once my wife's leg is better, if I felt burnt out and I thought it would make be happier. He also offered to go check in with my new manager, just to make sure he himself wasn't stressing out about the situation. Then the HR rep called, and clarified that there's no company policy or legal reason why I would need to take leave. She preferred the zero paperwork option of just calling it paid-time-off (the company has an unlimited vacation policy.) I've been gradually ramping up my hours since then, and I would describe my current situation as a positive feedback loop between productivity and sleep deprived euphoria. My work is a lot of fun and very rewarding, and it's easy for me to get sucked into it. https://youtu.be/DOWDNBu9DkU
I've had so many viruses since the older one started preschool 8 months ago, I can't remember what feeling good feels like.
The lack of sleep from trying to help my wife feed the newborn on top of keeping a norovirus-infected toddler away from said newborn in-between my own trips to the bathroom has been.....not fun.
I honestly cannot describe how much better I suddenly feel knowing I'm not the only one in that boat. I was totally unable to remember that this is temporary, we will stop getting sick, and I will feel good again until I read this.
I just smiled at the toddler for the first time in a week.
Our older daughter got hit with the norovirus a couple days before we did, so by the time it took us down she was over it. We didn't take any special precautions to isolate the baby, given that she most definitely got exposed the same time we did. Luckily the baby never developed any major symptoms. My wife was totally screwed with her broken leg. New lifetime achievement personal low. I had a 60 minute window between when she became violently ill and I did, which I used to build her an elevated makeshift bed close enough to the toilet that she could stand up and pivot on one leg. It was luxuriously memory foam padded. Our older daughter had the opportunity of her lifetime: camped out in the living room with the TV remote, Disney + button, no bed time. She's was so sweet and concerned though, that she kept checking in on her mom every half an hour until she passed out from exhaustion. I myself had a relatively tame night; all of my indignities could be kept between me and the washing machine.
A couple weeks ago our dog started vomiting on the mat by the back door of our kitchen. My wife started urgently shouting at me to do something. I kept doing whatever I was doing at a snails pace, probably staring at the hot water kettle or something. She got progressively more frustrated with me, "what are you doing?! Vomit! Hurry!" I turned to her and said, why are you shouting at me? Do you want me to feel stressed out about it? My sole purpose in life right now is to clean up vomit, wipe butts, and be spat up on. Of course Ollie's throwing up right now, it's the perfect compliment to my morning coffee. Just look how masterful he is, our entire house is hardwood and he intentionally walked over to that absorbent floor mat. Let me brew my coffee and enjoy a few sips. Then I'll grab some paper towel and the folex, the trash can, gag two or three times, and then it will be all fixed. I'm an expert at this.
I don't really know what I'm rambling on about anymore, but I was quite amused by the fact that I happened to throw up twice from coughing fits while typing out this post.
It gets better!
Sounds glorious.
If you need some daytime distraction get a cat or dog. Taking the house-beast for a stroll around the neighborhood is good for my mental health, gets me away from work, and keeps the pooch happy. Kids make having a dog easier too -- he can bug them to play while I finish reports.
It is, but also I really miss having lunch with them. And definitely get a little stir crazy if I forget to go outside now, so I usually take a 20-30 minute walk around lunch time.
Phone calls, people talking around you, movement everywhere, unwanted taps on your shoulder and a lot more.
Unless your job provides you with a closed office where you can actually focus on, it's pretty much the same as having kids around.
When I worked in an office I remember the most productive hour I had was right after I got there, because I arrived ~1h early (due to commuting BS) and was basically alone.
Once teammates arrive, it's chaos. No matter how good your headphones are, something will interrupt you at random times just like your kids. Except if you do have an office in your house, you can actually close the door and have uninterrupted time, even if it's in small chunks.
There’s screaming and crying, if your help is needed, it needs to be right now, kids wont take no for an answer, etc.
When I was in an open office, people generally kept a reasonable background volume my brain could tune out. As adults, they respected my answers the first time, and certainly no one screamed at me.
Of course everyone's experience will vary, which kind of invalidates the idea that all of this is because of WFH. It depends on your kids, your home/office, your work office, teammates, commute time and so on.
My point is that blanket statements like "WFH with kids ruins productivity" don't accurately portray the reality and helps bad managers justify unjustifiable RTO policies with anecdotes.
I know you didn't use a blanket statement though. But when I read your comment I could almost feel a bad manager reading it and using it to ruin more people's lives. Sorry about the rant.
In-person interaction can be fun and is important for team bonding and meta work communication but it would be so much better to facilitate that explicitly, outside of the work space.
Optimally this would mean 95% remote plus cool getaways together (at minimum, actually fun evenings out).
It’s like with conferences, the most important learning usually happens outside of the premises.
Why not be smart about that fact?
But the one most-of-a-floor-of-a-highrise open office I worked in, for a "more mature" company than the little startups I usually work for... that was a whole lot worse then even at-home-with-kids (and, not coincidentally, was the least "mature"/professional place I've ever worked, despite on-paper looking far more serious than other places I've worked).
I don't know how anyone got any work done there. I suspect their handful of fully-remote senior devs were doing most of the actual work. WFH with small kids would have been a big improvement.
The tradeoff is being away from the people I love for 8-10 hours a day, and even just being present in a baby's/toddler's life is huge. I'd still stay home again.
I recommend finding a nearby coworking space. Spend 2-4 hours of the house if the chaos is too much.
My company's local office is open, and I do go in 2-3 times a month for various reasons (which I also enjoy as a change of pace). But every time I do it's a total ghost town. And not just our floors, but every floor.
It sure seems to me that commercial office space leases are going to collapse in on themselves over the next 3-8 years as the longterm leases come up for renewal and companies say "no thanks" or "we'll take 10% of the space we currently used".
(As the article notes, Boston has some of the worst congestion.)
FWIW, I commuted through most of my son's childhood. I still made it home for those things you list. But, it did take optimizing house location/commute, etc. I certainly wasn't gone 7am-7pm. Even with 60 min of driving and 60 min for lunch, that's an 10 hour day.
To spell the quiet part out loud here, what you're describing is an extreme privilege in a world where homes near tech campuses often go for $1M+. New fathers aren't going to have a down payment for even $600k+. Tech at this point starts as a rich persons game which is why so many tech workers intermarry with other wealthy people. It takes two or a trust fund to do what you're talking about early on, unless you want to rent in a place where rents are highly inflated. At that point, you're choosing between a family and any shade of financial freedom.
No, it's not.
Working for a huge tech company _and_ doing what's described is an extreme privilege. But working for a huge tech company is a huge privilege in and of itself. And you don't have to work for one of those, at which point doing what's described can become a lot easier.
I'd be more interested in median commute time though.
https://www.zippia.com/advice/average-commute-time-statistic...
Edit: this has an interactive map of bad commute hotspots! https://www.ridester.com/average-us-commute/
My old commute was 12 mile and consistently <30 minutes each way.
My current commute is a 1 mile walk that takes <20 minute. Def. lucked into this - my wife's commute is more typical at 10 miles/20-30 minutes.
My dad's old commute was 5 miles/15 minutes. Mom's was similar.
Of my friends, 2 commute downtown (Flex Time/hybrid) for .gov positions. I can't think of any that commute more than 30 minutes each direction.
Edit - I'll add that almost all of us could take jobs downtown for more money. And either deal with the commute or move into more expensive housing closer in. It's a balance. We're lucky to be in a position to make that balance. But, just about any software developer is going to have that option (except perhaps in SV).
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-...
It's also out of context, which was that two tech parents were discussing having time for family. There's a strong correlation between expensive homes near tech campuses and tech jobs at tech campuses paying over $150k/yr for someone out of undergrad (if HN reports are correct). And besides, optimizing your location includes choosing both job and location; there are tech jobs that are not in expensive locations, and spending most of one's money on an expensive mortgage to buy free time for family is also an option.
Technically, you need to inherit the genes that allow you to do this kind of profession successfully.
we don't need to be reminded there are poor people out there. no shit, really? we see it every day. some of us started out that way, some of us are the children of millionaires. so what? i'm not going to self-police what i talk about on the internet just because poor people exist in this world. i don't feel envy or animosity towards the rich or the poor. some poor people get rich, some rich people lose their damn marbles and go to the poor house, dragging entire families down with them - let me guess, you feel no sympathy towards that type of poor person, right? they deserved it, right? either way, life goes on.
it's like stating that water is wet or the sky is blue and then chastising people about not mentioning the water and sky when they talk about their new smart phone or laptop. absolutely no value add. it's a non-sequitur.
who does this actually help, by pointing this out? nobody is going to accidentally buy a million dollar house with their well compensated corporate job if they're not by definition winning/privileged. we're not selling subprime mortgages here.
It sounds like you prefer a conversation to be more tailored to your experience, that is normal. In places like HN, a large portion of people live in their bubble and don't see out of it. Bringing up a more common experience is necessary to put a topic in complete context in some cases or at a minimum expands the field of view, it's not meant to make you feel guilt.
A part of being human is to point out abnormality, and many times it's done without even a thought. I'm not sure why you're having a melt down, just ignore it if it bothers you. Telling people to stop mentioning their experience isn't going to be constructive and people who WANT to guilt trip you can just fuck right off so don't let it get to you.
i demand that you acknowledge his state of precariousness in a sacrificial caveat before you speak one more word of your laptop-able existence.
afterwards i demand you meditate for 5 minutes and say your affirmations of gratitude out loud three times.
The person I replied to said, "I got what you got working remotely by living close to where I work". Do you understand now why there's such a far degree of separation between those two things? Far more people can afford to work remotely than those that can afford to live near a tech campus.
Having privilege isn't shameful. Often privilege is gained along side accomplishments that were earned. Hybrid work is a relevant topic, and a lot of people readily eschew remote workers experience by saying, "You can have all that by living close to campus! Oh it's too expensive to buy? Just rent! Oh, rent is expensive and not nearly comparable to my 10 year old mortgage? Get room mates!" It gets old, and they're not proper analogs.
Anyway, sorry you raged hearing about why this wasn't an analog, have a better day.
I do get that hearing about privilege, especially if you're exposed to those conversations a lot (or more than others) can be pretty annoying. I've found myself in that seat before and I've felt how, I think, you're feeling.
That said, I've also gotten used to realizing that not everyone hears that point of view every day or even often enough. The hybrid work conversations have been a glass house of just that. Nobody wants to hear how good they have it compared to new entrants, they just want to be getting what they've been getting and in order to do that everyone else needs to fall in line.
The other annoyance that I had was some of your invented strawmen about how I don't empathize for people that make less than I do. I certainly do, and members of my family are among those folks. Like others, I've had to make hard decisions on how to best support them, even if it means at times giving up things that this life could afford me. That's why I do my best to argue for a world where all or most people can succeed; the point of pointing out privilege isn't to say, "You shouldn't have that". It's to say, "Other people should be afforded what you have too, especially if the difference is just geography".
I did mean that I hope you have a better day.
No trust fund here. Parents are immigrants from a farming community in Scotland. I won't deny being more privileged than many, but my socio-economic background was typical professional middle-class (dad=engineer, mom=teacher, own their home, valued education, etc).
I live in the heart or Reston VA, work for a reasonably well-known (but not FAANG) company, and bought a typical 4 bed SFH when I was 26 for well under $400 (back in 2004). When my son moved out (2017), we sold that and bought a smaller TH closer to work for under $500 (which is now worth low-$600s). Sure, it's not the latest McMansion and I don't have a garage, but it's more than adequate.
Is that option available to an hourly retail employee? No, probably not. But, it's certainly available to just about any white-collar couple in the area.
That qualifies as one of the things that I described as a privilege. Making the assumption that two white collar people are married isn't great.
Also, frankly, if you bought in 2004 then you were part of an explosion of equity nation wide. People who are initially buying in in the twenty teens are in a very different market.
I do agree that SV isn't typical, but I wouldn't say that's a reason to write off what I said.
I was always a very detached individual, but the experience changed me and my perspective a lot. The 2 weeks most men get for post birth bonding ( and some don't even have that ) is heartbreaking.
I am not suggesting we move to EU level craziness where a person takes a year off to care for a child, but I am sure there is some middle ground.. and from where I sit, WFH allows just that.
I can, because I lived that life. My wife and I moved from 1 bedroom apartment in the city to a house in a suburb ("only" 10 miles away) and the only time during the week I was able to spend much time with my child was 7am-8:30am before school. By the time I got home, he was going to bed. Generally, one weekend day had to be devoted to home/yard maintenance in the summer.
Before he started kindergarten, my wife and I decided that's not how we wanted to live our lives, so we sold the house and went back to renting w/a 2 bedroom apartment back in the city. My commute was 30 minutes, if I walked, with my son's school about at the halfway point of the commute. I was able to walk my son to school daily, and leave my office at 5pm and get to the sports fields at 5:15pm to coach sports. As a bonus, no house or yard to take care of meant both weekend days were also free. No regrets.
I love having a house and yard, and never having to pollute the environment to shift my bag of carbon water to do the same work worse somewhere less adapted to my being. There will come a time when passions die about RTO and companies stop paying for real estate simply to improve profits for those that don’t need to be collocated. “Culture” and other malarkey will matter not at all once passions die, the current management retires, and the bulk of workers went to college and high school online.
Then children will have their parents again.
In most developed countries, parents already spend more time with their kids than at any point in the past fifty years:
https://ourworldindata.org/parents-time-with-kids
(What they've sacrificed, at least in the US, seems to largely be non-work social connections and group participation.)
I will bet you, furthermore, that pre industrial America parents, fathers included, spent way more time with their children than post industrial and more likely post war America. The data linked only extends to the start of post war American history though, and I’ll wager there’s no quantitative source to back me up. But the commuter culture started with the highway and interstate system, and before that factories brought parents away from the home en masse for the first time. Frankly I see the breaking down of the commute and office culture as a reversion to a more historically natural state where families are generally together most of the time.
That seems very unlikely, if going back more than a few decades. When parents used to work on the family farm one could be around the kids all day.
> tell parents they aren't doing a good enough job
It's not about not doing a good job, it's about wanting to be near the kids when they're young.
Yeah, coming from a horrible situation, everything is an improvement. The article isn't very clear on what qualifies as "kids", but if teenagers aren't pulling the average down, that is still a very bad number.
This is odd to me. This is not a long distance. Is there zero transport infrastructure where you live?
Some of the more dense urban areas(US Northeast and west coast population hubs) have somewhat effective transport in the locality but due to living where it's affordable most workers who would want to leverage this have problematic commutes crossing multiple travel systems. Things change from county to county and city to city.
Look at the cluster that is determining where the California High Speed train corridor will stop along the way and the complications from interests and that. Same story, different protagonist and perspective.
There is, in fact I lived a 5 minute walk from a bus stop and worked near a subway stop. My commute was:
1) 5 minute walking
2) 15 minutes bus to end of subway line
3) 25 minutes subway to transfer
4) 10 minutes subway to stop near the office
5) 5 minutes walk
I later bought an electric blower and lawn mower. They are super quiet. No exhaust. It helps to have a small yard.
Perhaps try a reel mower or an electric mower?
https://www.homedepot.com/b/Outdoors-Outdoor-Power-Equipment...
For instance, I can vacuum and mop my whole 3k sq ft house in a solid hour or so (including the stairs). Do that 2-3 times a month with spot vac in between and the entire place is always super clean and I barely spend any time. It doesn't even kill an afternoon.
In fact, I'd take it over my precious 800 sq ft city apartment. That place got way dirtier way faster due to size and location. And a full mop and vac of it would still take a solid 30-45 min (there are fixed costs involved). And it would need it weekly due to aforementioned proneness to dust and dirt.
The lunchtime breaks were my favorite, getting to see how their day was going and help out or share a quick laugh.
It really was and still is priceless for me.
For anyone starting out, I highly recommend trying to be home as much as possible in your kid’s 1st 5 years before they make strong friendships and when you’re their mentor and best friend.
And now I still mostly wfh. Still loving it. Going to office 1-2 days a week, also loving that btw. Just, overall, loving the new balance. It feels so natural. Have to say, my commute of 1.5 hrs one way was killing me and I was, just before 2020, looking for other jobs, closer to home because of it.
Sure the ease of it all is enable by my wife being at home mostly, but she loves that. And she has the time to properly manange the restructuring of the old house we bought, and to do some handwork herself (applying insulation, arranging/negotiating with contractors etc.) Tbh, I think if my wife as as work focused as me, it wouldn't be so nice for both of us, so I get the struggles some people experience, but they were mostly when the kids were at home as well.
The commute was about 2 hours each way by train with a 5-10 minute walk on both ends. I hoped it might not be that bad, especially working from home a few days a week. Even then it was soul crushing and I only lasted a year.
So WFH gestures in the direction of a return to the historical norm of family-centered life. There is nothing normal about a career-centered life where your family becomes secondary. And because WFH also reduces the need to move, it has the potential to reduce the fragmentation of communities and families. It will be interesting to watch the broader effects of WFH on the broader economy, the culture, and the formation of community life.
It has totally been a blast having the little one around. I work in my living area which is open plan into my kitchen, so I get to see her learning how to eat out of the corner of my eyes when I'm in work meetings, etc.
My personal suggestion: if you're working from home with children, don't try and seperate and go into the study; do the opposite, being out work and make it a part of every day. It's like the photos of your family you have on your desk, but in real life.
YMMV.
We have tons of global conf calls, its harder to do that with kids screaming in the background or demanding your attention. Good luck focusing on that hard task where it takes you some time to even get to mental model of given problem.
The thing is, when choosing priorities, I would have to be really messed up piece of sh*t of a human being to prioritize work over my own kids. So all good on that front. Now I work from my own study room as they are a bit older (and we moved to bigger flat) and its nice to have some privacy too
Distractions at home might be like distractions and interruptions in the office
Paint, flooring, lights, switches, door handles, ask completely different.
It helped them shift in and out and it was pretty cool to experience, similar to when someone has a basement that feels like it transports you to another place entirely in a desired way.
I find wfh and hybrid life has me thinking about design much more
My 9 and 12y old kids are at school until 2pm, I love taking that pause at 2:30 to have lunch with them and then I send them to do their homework. Once they have finished it is either they stay quiet or I kick them out of the house and they have to play in the street for an hour.
You can't avoid all interruptions, like when kids are sometimes fighting which is the moment to be strict.
It’s an absolute joy each morning when I enter that personal, (relatively) quiet space, sitting on my Capisco chair with that beautiful 30” display in front of me…
I used to have my offic in the living room, but as soon as our son could walk IIRC, we moved the office. Office is now separate but reachable for the kids. But the separation is better for my concentration. What was my office in the living room is now the play area, filled with drawing, Lego, cars, and what-have-you.
WFH with small kids is perfect. No commute so I gain an hour a day. When I feel it's been enough work for the day, I'm cooking dinner 10 seconds later. If the kids wake up late, fine, I'll drop you off at daycare later after I did a bit of work. It's 5 minutes on the electric cargo bike anyways.
I don't think I could ever go back.
Can't wait for the weather to warm up a bit and go on bigger trips with the two kids in front.
We tried a few variants, also with 2 wheels in front so it can't fall over in standstill. But that's less stable in curves than a normal bike with 1 front wheel.
It will be a fun ride in the future!
I have multiple children, and I hate (ok, strongly dislike) working remotely. I dislike the lack of separation between home and work, and how it makes my children feel like I’m “always working.”
I love the high-bandwidth communication and collaboration of in-person, as well as the way it naturally fosters empathy and community. It’s a better learning environment for most, and it makes work more fun for most.
I have been an outlier, I guess, and have only been able to find remote jobs for most of my decade+ SWE career. I have a dedicated office space and all the gear, so my dislike of remote has nothing to do with not being properly equipped for it.
I think people have a lot of valid complaints that are actually orthogonal to in-person work:
- Housing is too expensive. True! Not the fault of the office.
- Commutes take too long. True! Not the fault of the office.
- Housing units close to the office are often too small to be comfortable for families. Subjective, but many people feel this way! Also not the fault of the office.
The common theme here is that housing and transportation in America is broken. Utterly broken.
There is no technical or economic reason that we couldn’t have the majority of workplaces in neighborhoods where the majority of employees could comfortably live within a ten minute commute. And I submit that there is nothing better than getting to work together in real life while living comfortably within ten minutes of your workplace.
There’s nothing _wrong_ with remote work, and I think it’s great for it to be an option for those who want it (including all remote companies for those who want them). But remote isn’t morally superior to in-person work, despite the way many advocates talk about it. And an escape hatch from our broken cities is not the same as a solution.
It saddens me that more of us aren’t working seriously on the problem of fixing housing and transportation in the US, and instead are embracing bandaids.
FWIW I do what I can via my work with Strong Towns. If this is a cause that interests you I’d encourage you to read our material and consider becoming a member.
1. There can still be many companies in an area with lots of close by housing such that you’re not tied to a single job.
2. I moved cross-country several times while my kids were young and it didn’t bother them at all.
3. I’m mindful of staying settled for a while now that my kids are getting older and forming real friendships. But this is like a 10-year window of time, not an entire career.
I appreciate that you still support choice in work location, a lot of people (see amazon/twitter/apple ceo's) do not. I think that is critical here. Some people, or groups work better in person, those teams should decide that.
I wouldn't say remote work is morally superior, but it can reduce carbon emissions by truncating commutes and potentially allowing conversion of downtown office buildings into housing. But I'm sure there's caveats here enough to drive a freight train through.
I have four kids. The oldest was born in 2014, and since late 2016 I've spent an enormous amount of time working from home as a graduate student and as a professional during COVID. But our oldest kid recently expressed that I don't spend enough time with her.
At first I thought, "Seriously? I've spent more time with my kids than literally any father I know, eating three meals per day with them, taking them for walks and to the playground or to appointments during the day, changing more than half the diapers, etc." But then I realized that from her perspective, she mostly saw me looking at my laptop and heard me saying "I'm trying to work, I can't do X right now." If I were out-of-sight, out-of-mind, when working and she only saw me for the two hours per day when I wasn't working, she might have a more positive opinion of our relationship.
And, yes, the reasons I like working from home are precisely because, as you said, it helps me cope with all the other problems related to housing and commuting.
I’ve never really understood this “lack of separation” argument. Are your children at home all day long? If not, the only way it would seem like you’re “always working” is if you were working outside of normal business hours. Which is something that would still happen if you were at an office all day, wouldn’t it? If not, why not? Because your day ends when you leave the office? Why not just make your WFH day end at some similar cutoff point? Why does working at home make that less possible?
If your kids do stay home all day, one way to look at it is that yeah, it seems like you’re always working, but that beats “always at the office” doesn’t it?
I think when people say "I hate the office" they (I include myself) use that term to talk about everything the office implies (e.g., commute time). I'm 100% pro work from wherever fits you best. That being said, if the company I'm working for puts an office 5 minutes away from my home on foot, then I will definitely visit it a couple of times per week... but that's just impossible, hence, I hate the office.
Our whole team is remote so toddlers sometimes participate in standups and that is fine - they lose interest after a few minutes anyway.
I can't imagine going somewhere every day and not participating in my child's development to the extent I am now.
This is the way - the more we push people to live in cramped, high-cost places, the less children they will have and the sooner we'll run out of people able to work, much less care for the aging population.
The toddlers or the team? Standups should only be a few minutes anyway.
[^1]: Once they were old enough they didn't need constant supervision. Trying to work from home with a toddler was a nightmare.
That's odd, I had no problem with working from home with toddlers, but I wasn't trying to do two full time jobs, on any given day either I was dedicated to looking after the kids or my partner was.
Looking after a toddler is a full time job.
Kids are "sticky" (once they get into your office for any reason it can be difficult to get them out again).
Number of kids matters, their ages matter, their needs matter, sometimes they "get loose" while carer is busy with one (e.g. putting to sleep), and carers need breaks too.
For my particular situation, I can get noticeably more done on days when all the kids are out, even when someone else is ostensibly caring for them "full time".
We built a garage with an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) that I use for my office. My kids are aged 5-12, and It's great to have some separation. Though now two of the kids have their own computers in the room next to my office, so I've had to teach them that a Minecraft "emergency" doesn't mean they can interrupt me working.
Sorry second kid, you'll have the same attention that I was given when growing up.
On the other hand, people who claim to be more productive with kids running and screaming around them, I think your brains are special. There's no way in hell I can figure out why a dependent service 3 levels deep is OOMing while my kid is tugging at my pants screaming "read to me!!!!!!" And it showed in my performance reviews. I gave presentations with a crying baby in hand, causing me to just totally blank out.
Win some lose some.
My old manager could confidently and happily conduct snr level meetings with her kids not only in the room but climbing on her - I just don't have that mental power to work like that.
There is a definite bifurcation between the (generally upper) laptop class and the (generally lower) caretaker class. I'm not sure what the solution is (shorter work weeks, flexible scheduling, etc), but everytime we pat ourselves on the back for pulling off remote work this comes to of mind to me
Solution is more people becoming qualified to work in the “upper”, laptop class, hence decreasing supply of labor for the “lower” caretaker class, resulting in increasing prices for caretaking labor, leading to changes in caretaking labor environments such as shorter work weeks and flexible scheduling.
I.e. wealth redistribution from laptop class to caretaker class. Or automation to obviate caretaker class.
Automation is probably the route we'll end up taking.
(0) https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/01/06/1069369...
Is that true? I can rattle off a list of male-dominated jobs that are absolutely not remote, like basically all the "trades" and a list of jobs popular with women that are at least somewhat remote friendly.
Does someone have evidence?
It's a fair question; while I recognise the role of women as care givers, etc it's also true that in many countries trades (mechanics, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, buildrs, tilers, etc) are male heavy jobs, point of sale, bartending, etc. have a large number of men, etc.
FWiW I question any demarcation over gender and remote work as here (Australia) women are as capable of doing either (telecommute | hands on) and do so - and whatever splits there are today on numbers may change five years down the track.
There's no question men and women do hard jobs.
Women are disproportionately a shadow labour force at home too that would make most people not used to it fall apart.
That's fair it doesn't and I brought attention to there being a choice to say "yes, and"
Part of the reason I don’t remote work is because I’m unable to focus very well on remote work in a crowded household with small children… I would inevitably be doing more parenting when I should be working. But while that might be bad for work, it’s good for family… (my commute is only 15 minutes, so a lot of the other arguments here don’t really apply. It takes a couple minutes just to log in into the VPN…)
This means any org or management layer that enforce hybrid or in-office on the people who move code, system design, abstractions, product knowledge work, ux work...are contra Family. Those orgs need to collapse and those managers should be fired.
This will happen no matter what - the orgs and managers that lean into the disruption and make the most of the new world will survive and increase their scale and scope. The ones who hold on to top-down force and methods of mind-control and mind-enslavement (Agile, Scrum) will no longer exist for long - any value those processes have will be automated into tools that respect engineers.
when someone non-technical is a scrum master, run for the hills or perform as a 10x engineer until you can automate that person's functions enough that they no longer need to show up at your meetings and just become metrics-readers and team-hype-people for representing your team and not for caring too much about anything that isn't automated metrics and team health surveys from which meaningful ventures forward could be established such as perks and more attention to extracurricular needs if there are any.
ayyyy Corporate family??? gotta take care of everyone more and get outta the way baby, we're moving code here and you're not!
but yeah, 10000000% respect for hardcore startup engineering mentality where agile actually really does mean agile, and it means lean remote agile these days where it's asynchronous comms and as little live meeting bullshit as possible. Learn how to read and write or don't call it agile. be asynchronous or you're not agile enough for me.
My team and I are again dipping our toes to office and our office day is by far most productive day of the week for us.
Only problem is that we transitioned to "open smart office" over the pandemic, so we no longer have personal desks. However that too should be resolved by Q4 as renovations come to and end and hopefully we can carve out our own space again.
Yes, that doesn't happen daily to every one, but it happens quite often when you have 100+ people under same roof. You still have 2 days a week you can spend at home.
EDIT: As a bit tangential question: would you be willing to take a pay cut to keep 100% remote? If not would you be fine with people receiving a "office worker bonus" based on days worked at the office?
I think it's far from clear that remote workers are always, or even generally, providing less value than in physically present ones.
I know I had a lot more time to document and do other kinds of written collaboration, especially across the organization, when I was working more days per week remotely.
As per my previous comment people at the office do provide more value.
Yes, yes, I know your point is that you can spend the commuting time with your kids, but realistically how strict are you about your WFH office? Do you even have a dedicated office where you can go and your kids and wife won't bother you? For most my coworkers that is not a thing. They are working on the kitchen table or in their bedroom while the family goes about their lives around them. Constantly distracting them, constantly bothering them, and more annoyingly distracting and bother other people who are on the zoom call.
As I've said time and time again; life is about sacrifices. You can choose what sacrifices you are going to make, but you have to make some. To me it seems you can either sacrifice say ~1 hour per day of looking after you kids or you can sacrifice 10-20% of your pay check. Or you lower your commute time by moving closer to your office, which probably means moving into a smaller house/apartment, again a sacrifice.
Yes, if you are at the office 24 hours a day like Elon it's likely you'll do incredible things, but to me it's worth sacrificing some of that success in exchange for a family life.
That is a very optimistic outlook. Or the bar for incredible is lower than I think.
Reframing things can be as positive as negative or self enabling or sabolaging as one likes.
As my spouse reminds me the people who will most care when I’m dead grad my kids and spouse if I’m lucky. Everything else is how much good will, memories and moments you can experience with others.
What kind of memory do we want to be? Preparing for and around that for the next many decades allows me to plan and execute in decades and not be obsessed with maximizing work hours now all the time. Outsized impact gets easier with each wave of tech that does more with less.
Big changes go very slow and then very suddenly.
Raising kids is passing too quick but experiencing existence together is far beyond that.
> Remote work has the biggest effects on fertility for women who already have several children, and no effect on the fertility intentions of women who have no or one child.
This is the bigger concern though. I suppose no effect is better than a possibly negative effect which one may predict (intuitively you may meet your partner at work and that may not work so well when remote), but it is the more crucial segment to address.
Less affluent and people with no kids are using their time elsewhere, which sounds like people are doing more of what they want and less time traffic.
I was there for everything so far. But it's not only what I would have missed out on, but also there are so many situations with a baby where it is useful to have a second set of hands. I don't want to imagine what my wife would have had to endure, if I left her alone the whole day.
The idea of even just two adults raising a baby/toddler all by themselves is a very modern phenomena, in only certain parts of the world. The norm was probably a village like setting where many families are raising many kids all at the same time, and the 1:1 intense mother/child coverage was only during the first year. Otherwise, there would be grandparents, aunts, uncles, neighbors, and a chain of children from young to old who could help with raising the child.
This is not acceptable, even though I totally understand these people like that.
Some even have a 40 h job and admit openly that since they are doing WFH, they effectively have the whole day for their personal endeavors. Although in the story I am thinking about, there were no children involved. To the contrary, it is about a person 5 years away from retirement, and their boss has apparently given up wanting to legally fire them and trying to make them do meaningful work. So the solution was to push them off to WFH, and not think about the topic anymore.
so they didn't have any serious work assigned to them, and you wonder why they have the day free for themselves?
they are subtly unavailable during work time. This is not acceptable
when i am focusing on coding i am also unavailable. please don't expect me to be available any time you shout. i am not your personal assistant.
Why? I'm a software engineer working in an agency and I work exactly like you're describing. If I feel like going on a run, I'll mark myself as AFK and go on a run. If I feel like closing my laptop at 3 and go shopping, I'll work later in the day when I'm not busy.
I still deliver on my deadlines and contribute more to the company than most colleagues. If you ping me on my phone I'll probably reply at any given time, and I put emphasis on written communication about issues I'm handling. Ideally, I've already written down all of the information you'd want to talk to me about.
This "style" works really well for me.
I am sure as a dev, with sufficiently large work packages, WFH is just a breeze. But not in my job.
"remote but still sync" feels like a major failure mode of being remote to me. Being able to work and communicate async is important for productivity in a remote environment.
Someone clicking and talking through a question or process at the time that works best so a meeting isn’t needed unless there’s disagreement.
It’s amazing.
Second, people in office can be just as unavailable or unproductive as from home. There are a million ways to slack off or be intermittently absent.
Third, it's a matter of gender equality too. If the childcare is split 50% then one simply cannot work like someone without kids, or one needs someone else to take care of the kids. If it's not split then 99% it's the women who stay at home while the men build their careers.
Your first two points are both ireelevant to me, because "can be" doesn't help in my daily work. All that counts, in this subjective report of mine, is my experience. And I tell you, WFH is less productive when it comes to working in a team, period.
Put it the other way around: gender inequality of someone having a stay-at-home-wife is not reason enough for everyone else to be working the same. Having a stay-at-home-wife can't be the only way to equalize to childless workers.
> All that counts, in this subjective report of mine, is my experience.
My personal experience is the opposite. Office-goers perform worse, are the lesser talent left behind by those that can afford to leave for full WFH jobs, and try to compensate by putting in more office-chair-time and office politics, which just compounds to more problems for those that actually work.
There you go.
Daycare is a possibility instead of having one parent takes care of kids. If that’s not an option there are other creative child care options emerging that can work.
As for not working like someone without kids.. maybe I could learn to be twice as effective with half the time at work like having to be as a parent. Sometimes we can’t reframe work to work harder than we feel we should have to.
The bottom lines is off the life we want is uncommon it might take an uncommon approach and balance.
Many childless people are very inefficient with their time too as contrast.
Managing interruptions and organizing projects into very small steps to better be able to use tiny pockets of time after proving to be critical and a super power.
in austria/germany kindergarten and school traditionally is half day. afternoon childcare is considered special and very expensive, if you can even find a place. finding a space in kindergarten can be a problem too.
many parents want to send their children to childcare but they simply can't
for a 2 year old? hardly.
more research on this topic is needed. i found at least one german report that claims that there are significant risk factors for early daycare that negatively affect the development of children and their relationship to the parents:
bad quality daycare, lack of motherly sensitivity, spending more than 20 hours a week in daycare, daycare before 2 years of age.
that report also claims that daycare generally affects the socioemotional competence of children, and that 25% of children that received full day daycare by age of 4 show significant problematic behavior even if the daycare is of good quality.
the quality of parental care is the strongest factor for the development of social and cognitive development.
another article claims that kindergarten does not have a positive effect before age 4.
on the other hand another article claims that children that receive some (but it doesn't say how much) external care in the first two years of life are less likely to later have psychological illnesses, and children that start kindergarten only at 4 are twice as likely to get sick. (personally i doubt that, but there it is, research is conflicting, and the jury is still out). but that same article also claims that things have improved over time. before the 90s, early daycare had a negative effect while after the effect became positive.
i am not saying that there is only one truth, but as a supporter of the attachment theory of parenting, i tend to side with the idea of keeping kids at home early, and only introducing daycare very gradually and i can also confirm some of this with my own experience.
Why do you need them so highly available? Why can't you figure out what you need on your own by default without ruining the productivity of others? Encourage good documentation, ask fewer and more deliberate questions, etc.
What matters is that employees get their work done on schedule, attend and contribute what's necessary to meetings, and don't struggle to communicate well. It was never easy to get a hold of someone in the office either and you even had to waste time walking around to find out. Nothing has really changed except a lot of good for those who prefer wfh.
Why should someone without a family invest more at work just because you consider work a secondary thing?
It is.
> Why should someone without a family invest more at work just because you consider work a secondary thing?
This is a weird take.
Do you get mad at your coworkers when they take time off?
But dont forget that family is an optional thing, that you decided to go for. Your coworkers without a family actually dont care how you spend your spare time. But if you are using your family as an excuse at work, we start to care, and see that you are trying to enforce unfairness.
Its your family, deal with it as you like, but dont take it with you to work.
You sound like those American walmart managers that tried to set up in Germany and got BTFO because spineless business worship is not entertained.
Bob Slydell: You see, what we're actually trying to do here is, we're trying to get a feel for how people spend their day at work... so, if you would, would you walk us through a typical day, for you?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah.
Bob Slydell: Great.
Peter Gibbons: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh heh - and, uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour.
Bob Porter: Da-uh? Space out?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
It's probably too soon to see it in broad demographic data, but just in my group of friends, it seems like almost all married couples except those who had previously committed to definitively stay child-free are having kids. One third of the people under my direct manager have either taken parental leave since mid-2021 or are planning to take it soon.
Maybe this is just an artifact of my age and demographic situation, given I just turned 30 and know a lot of remote workers. It will be interesting to see if there really is a boom or not a few years out. Maybe as the article mentions, it's an artifact of remote work.
Taking remote days was never an issue for me and spending 15 minutes commuting to the office isn't a big deal and around these parts people always looked me funny if I was in the office past 15:00.
So the expectations of what "office work" means is wildly different.
Europeans, on average, have longer commutes than Americans:
https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-trans...
Elon Musk: "Population rates are collapsing and it's a crisis we need to address!"
EIG: https://eig.org/remote-work-family-formation/
Billionaires should be banned from speaking on anything other than their areas of expertise.
They get an outsized platform to spout absolute nonsense on topics outside their core expertise.
Huge amounts of people don't have enough money to participate in the economy at the same time as billionaires show themselves to be useless or worse, ban them and have a decent basic income - let's say current min wage + some %
Under your proposal are millionaires okay? Or should society ban millionaires too?
If so why are they okay. If they are not okay, what should the wealth cap be?
Is it okay for anyone to have any private wealth? Your proposal sounds similar to socialism wherein everyone has a certain fixed income close to minimum wage and no one may accumulate wealth.
What are the differences between your suggestion and socialism as practiced historically?
Maybe you actually think this should happen (I don't) but it's a much more disruptive change than it sounds like on the surface. You're flipping over the entire economic model to a different one, and this affects everyone not just the super rich. And even if hypothetically the government takes most of Musk's and Bezos' money, doesn't mean that you'll get the basic income you're asking for.
What you actually need is progressive taxation on extremely high incomes of any kind, and fewer loopholes to avoid that taxation.
You know what’s absurd? Money making more money.
Billionaires can be stopped from taking their money elsewhere. Their bank accounts and corporate assets can be frozen or seized, and America's massive concentration of intellectual talent is unlikely to be moving out any time soon.
Going on a billionaire witch hunt would not only push residents out, it’d stop future wealthy residents from coming in.
The US actually doesn’t have much that other places don’t have, especially in the age of remote work. There is excellent education and talent in many parts of the world, often accompanied with a better quality of life too. The freezing of assets and seizures you’re describing would be very hard to enforce. And if such exit taxes were announced, they would likely lead to mass exodus before being enforced.
I’d add that this excessive confidence in American exceptionalism might be what will cause its demise. We already see it happening at the state level. California and NY are so arrogant in thinking they just have the best people, that they’re messing up and losing significant taxable income to Nevada, Texas and Florida right now. At the country level, many Americans are already moving to Portugal, Bahamas, Costa Rica, and others.
As they say, follow (and act on) the money.
I think it’s fair to estimate that policy is extraordinarily unlikely to be enacted in the US.
(I think people give Musk _far_ too much credit by imagining he would have any sort of coherent view on this stuff; he's just parroting stuff he was impressed by in both cases, and doesn't realise the conflict, because that's not how he works.)
Realistically though, the better way to address the problem is to progressively tax capital, no matter the income. A top bracket of 5% of capital gone per year will pretty much solve all but the most efficient of billionaire problems. And progressively tax inheritance in a similar way too.
And this is just one of the problems. What about high-capital-low-margins businesses like retail stores and, especially, farmers?
Also, assessing the net worth of a person is incredibly hard. How much is a private company worth? One might think it's easy because Forbes does that, but they're mostly pulling the numbers out of thin air.
Perhaps not even at that (since they can have undue influence on that area, just because they have more money, not because their ideas are better).
They should also be banned from owning media companies or contributing to campaigns in any way.
Why draw the line at billionaires? BTW is your are of expertise to talk about Musk or what should and should not be banned?
And it also has disparate impact for people with disabilities. I promise you that people on chemo or with IBS are more productive not having to badge into the office several times per week.