Remote workers are increasingly less productive, anxious, depressed and lonely | Hacker News Reader

Remote workers are increasingly less productive, anxious, depressed and lonely

deconstructoroffun.com

42 pointsthatwasunusual104 comments

> It’s time to admit that remote work doesn’t work. WFH Friday is a four-day work week. Full WFH is a two-day workweek. When people are not in the office, every interaction has to be planned in advance. And that means a lot of information-sharing doesn’t happen. Remote is a great lifestyle, not a way to build a great company

If you're starting an article with a strong, absolute, data-devoid, and highly opinion-based quote from an executive (not an engineer or direct manager), then I'm not going to take much stock in your writing.

Look, I'm not saying remote is better or worse. But I will say that as an engineer, a hybrid model works excellent for my personal productivity. If anything, I spend more hours focused when I'm at home or at my local coffee shop. I am fully aware that I am missing social interaction, serendipitous productive conversation, yada yada, when I'm not in the office. I am aware that my company might be more productive if we were all in-person. But statements like this?

> Full WFH is a two-day workweek.

Yeah, fuck off. Why are we trusting executives' opinions on day-to-day lives of their line workers anyway? Their work is different: it's largely based on connections and debates and presentations and deal-making. My work is centered around focused writing and refinement of code and prose. Obviously our ideal work environments might differ.

Also, tangentially, every image in this article seems to be a stock photo of someone stressed out in an office :)

> "Yeah, fuck off. Why are we trusting executives' opinions on day-to-day lives of their line workers anyway?"

'cause executives are the ones whose neck is on the line for success of their business division so they are extremely motivated to keep a close eye on profitability and progress on business goals, particularly when the economy looks wobbly. [mic drop]

(Yes, there are examples of executives who are incompetent and/or just plain dumb, but they are the minority.)

And, of course, before I get attacked as pro-RTO, I myself WFH and only go to the office when circumstances require it.

> 'cause executives are the ones whose neck is on the line for success of their business division so they are extremely motivated to keep a close eye on profitability and progress on business goals, particularly when the economy looks wobbly.

...so? What is the conclusion? You force people to do what they hate and hope for better results? It really makes no sense.

You can definitely hate stuff and be more productive when it occurs.

Imagine how high productivity would be if managers were allowed to literally crack the whip at engineers who slow down after working for 10 hours a day.

We don’t allow that because it’s inhumane. I think a similar principle applies to WFH. Even if it’s less productive it’s still better for society.

Are you serious or just trolling?

> Imagine how high productivity would be if managers were allowed to literally crack the whip at engineers who slow down after working for 10 hours a day.

I'll tell you what would happen. The engineers would quit on the spot and you'd end up with a sea of empty desks.

Why are some managers so dense? Is this an ego thing?

It's hyperbole.

OK, so if you reduce this hyperbole to a normal statement, the parent says you can make people work harder by using negative reinforcement such as harsh words, for example.

Well, it might work for some people, but I guess only short term and they will leave at the first opportunity.

Sure, but just like return to office rhetoric, executives will conspire to make sure there is no opportunity to opt out because all workplaces use the same abusive system.

It’s not really just a thought experiment.

Terrible things like slavery and indentured servitude aren’t wide spread because they are illegal… not because they wouldn’t be wildly popular with the class of people who could actually buy slaves and hire overseers to whip them.

In the past scheme, it may have been indentured servants getting the whip, but today it may be undocumented immigrants and H1B1 workers tethered to their current job.

Sure, but fortunately we have competition and as long as there are companies willing to hire remote workers, they will have a strong advantage over those who don't, and employees will have a choice.

Yeah I saw people trying this on me and on others in various forms, especially in the 90s. It failed or backfired every time.

I think its a good idea to turn this example around to try and understand the executive perspective in this.

If your financial livelihood and the financial livelihoods of many other people are dependent upon you delivering a highly complex block of code—would you want to rely on a brand new production method or tool to deliver it that you don’t trust? A method that departs from successful methods of historical code production that have worked well for you for decades. A method that your peers, whose opinion you trust, advise against? A method that successful industry leaders are publicly moving away from rapidly?

Seems like there isn’t a WFH preaching engineer that is going to willfully move away from their set of tools and comfortable knowledge base to deliver something critical, I am not sure why we should expect something different from these leaders either.

I understand these CEOs might think this way (although I'm not sure if all do, and for sure most have a mix of different reasons), but there is a fault in this reasoning in the sense that working remotely is not in any way novel. I had been working in an international team delivering decent quality code for years that brought my company tons of money long before the pandemic. So you might say these CEOs are afraid of what is new for them, not in general.

Moreover, this line of reasoning completely ignores the influence of employee satisfaction on productivity. They had something they valued a lot, now you take it away. I witnessed it several times and every time CEOs did that, productivity plummeted significantly and people were starting to take photos for LinkedIn.

WFH at scale only really started happening in 2020 because of the pandemic. I realize that there were a growing number of orgs experimenting prior and some were successful with it. I worked (partially) remotely from 2008-2011, then full remote again since March 2020 and have been since.

So we have WFH at scale for 3 years balanced against in-office work that has decades and decades of successful history behind. Also consider that the global catalyst that drove WFH at scale is now no longer a factor.

So when presented with a choice of what’s comfortable vs uncomfortable, people will opt for the comfortable unless forced to the uncomfortable. What’s happening now is simply a restoration to a comfortable business state…from the executives POV because there is no longer a pandemic forcing them to be operating in an uncomfortable business state.

This is a very naive take. I'm guessing you haven't spent much time in large organizations with multiple levels of management where politics, synthetic KPIs and incentives are completely misaligned with What's the best for the organisation.

Middle management are focused on building their own personal power pyramids, and damned the cost to the organization.

Articles like this are just the effect of a parasite class buying off 2nd rate "news" outlets to postpone their demise.

But the status-quo is gone, and it's a positive delight to be able to tell these jumped up flunkies that they are redundant.

Not necessarily. I have spent nearly four decades with a good portion of that working for very large orgs. Those politics, KPIs, and incentives are not always misaligned with what is best for the organization, but may be misaligned with what some people lower in the org think is what’s best for the organization.

You know what you think you know, but you don’t know what you don’t know.

Which is why we always hear about all the executives being the first to go during layoffs.

I think this is just rage/click bait. No one seriously would have a deranged opinion like that.

More of this propaganda? Remote work exposes issues that were previously covered up by being in person.

Society has become increasingly alienating and lonely, going into an office is just a way of papering over that.

Companies haven’t built strong cultures around communicating and mentorship, going into an office is just a way of masking that.

Personally I have worked with and felt camaraderie on distributed teams with people I’ve never met in person. I know it’s possible, but it requires doing things differently than business as usual.

What do you mean when you say mask? To me it sounds like your listing things an in office culture helps with. Yes we could absolutely in theory do different things but do you think the society and companies that have been failing are going to?

Big companies who can’t manage remote work in their corpoate structures are trembling in their pants, remote work companies have the potential to eat their lunch and so are pushing this propaganda while they’re scrabling for a new footing.

sadly the reality is that remote companies that do well is still rare, and large corporations have employees onsite are doing better, and they get even bigger and keep expanding.

I like remote work myself, but if I'm the boss, I might change the idea 180 degrees. It's difficult to stay focused and motivated all the time WFH, it's human nature, sigh. At the end of the day, the company has the upper hand and has the say so they're demanding employees returning to offices more and more now. In two years I predict most of us will "have to" get back to offices.

In my experience people watch YouTube in those corner bench sections, talk gossip for an hour at the cooler and take personal calls in the meeting rooms. Let's not pretend that everyone works all the time and is focused at work. Productive people are mostly productive no matter where, with +/- a couple percent favoring one setting over another.

Society's complete lack of concern for psychological safety or building community is the real problem (at least in the US). Political offices and processes need reform before the world can be fixed. Then you might see people happily going into offices.

Going to an office likely helps this actually, when remote we only interact with people explicitly which is much more of an echo chamber than sitting at lunch and casually joining a conversation about politics you never would have had online

> casually joining a conversation about politics you never would have had online

Yes, what will surely improve my mental health is a workplace conversation about how I should be exterminated. Fantastic idea.

I think in person discussions are much healthier than online ones, because there is a human being sitting across from you rather than a screen name

If your conversations involve people wanting you exterminated… I think in person vs online is even more important. It’s not possible to argue that kind of stance in person unless they’re a crazy person, in which case just avoid those I guess

For example, you found it necessary to personally attack me in another thread, so I think we found where some of the mental health issues actually come from

This comment is funny, because it _is_ a personal attack, meanwhile I didn't even realize you're the same person.

> If your conversations involve people wanting you exterminated… I think in person vs online is even more important. It’s not possible to argue that kind of stance in person unless they’re a crazy person, in which case just avoid those I guess

See in some settings I can avoid them. But transphobic sexist weirdos are not only incredibly over-represented in IT, but also I kinda don't really get to choose my coworkers.

So yeah, I'll stick with work from home, and I'll have, you know, actual friends otherwise. _Some_ of whom _may_ happen to be coworkers past or present.

> The data points above can lead to a hypothesis that remote workers desire more job security because, without strong in-person connections, it's easy to imagine becoming a layoff statistic.

This is such a clear "are we the baddies" line it hurt XD

Couldn't agree more. I remember when I was working in an office and I'd be invited out to social events with my colleagues outside of work, to the pub or whatever, and I almost always turned it down. I got on really well with them, but just being in the office used up my social energy.

When I started working from home, the situation flipped. Suddenly I was the one often organising these social trips, because my social energy was no longer being used (as much anyway, I was still talking to people regularly, possibly even more so). Working in the office was convenient, I could fill my social needs without even doing anything, but it wasn't real. I wasn't actually socialising with people or seeing friends, I was just sitting near people for 8 hours and that tricked my brain into filling that bar.

Personally, I decided I'd rather than inconvenient truth than a convenient lie. Though real socialisation is a lot more difficult, it's also a lot more fulfilling.

Not saying this is the case for everyone certainly, but that's how it's been for me.

I’ve worked remote for a long time. Finding remote workers who can handle working remote has always been a challenge.

A lot of the people who apply to our remote openings think that working remote is going to be a shortcut to working less, interacting with fewer people, and doing less communication. They may have read books or blogs or Reddits that talk about remote work as an opportunity to shrink their workday to 4 hours or less so they can travel the world or something. Or they have fantasies of working two jobs or building their startup while collecting paychecks and health insurance.

Others have good intentions, but then struggle with the lack of face to face interaction. It’s common for people new to remote work to have trouble interpreting text communications or to start assuming the worst. Some people are nice in person but then into flame war monsters when you drop them into a Slack channel where everyone is just a screen name.

I hate it, because the more of these candidates we let through our filters, the less welcoming of remote work the company becomes. Filtering out these candidates is imperative to keeping the remote work going. And sadly, firing them quickly when it doesn’t work out is also important.

This blog is a prime example of what happens when companies don’t filter and instead just let the bad candidates run wild on remote work. You get silly ideas like “WFH is a two-day workweek” because that is exactly what the bad candidates do if left unchecked.

It’s time we stopped pretending that WFH is appropriate for everyone. It needs to be selectively applied if we don’t want the abusers to become bad apples that ruin the whole concept.

Yes, I too worked remote for a long time. I would say I was cut out for it. I had a strong work ethic, didn't miss having co-workers for company and had always kept home and work separate. It's not for everyone.

Once again reading your description of problem people in a WFH situation makes me wonder how good those same people are in the office. I don't have any evidence on this, but if someone is actively looking to shrink their workday to 4 hours then were they actually working in the office or bunking off in some other way? Wanting to work 2 jobs - I have actually seen people in the office who spend all their time with a job search browser window open. If they're a flame war monster at home are they behind social problems in the office?

WFH might not be appropriate for everyone, but perhaps those abusing it actually aren't nice people to work with in an office environment either.

> It’s time we stopped pretending that WFH is appropriate for everyone. It needs to be selectively applied if we don’t want the abusers to become bad apples that ruin the whole concept.

I don’t think that’s a conversation anyone is ready to have. People (online) either dogmatically believe WFH is perfect and without issue and anything by bad is someone/something else’s fault, or is exactly what’s in the first quote in the article (e.g. it’s completely awful and everyone is a lazy slacker if I can’t look over their shoulder).

I keep wondering what it’s going to take to have a real conversation about how, for instance, WFH is terrible for my data team, but fantastic for my engineers and that that’s ok and not, on either side, an organizational or leadership failure. Judging by this post, it won’t be any time soon.

We run a hybrid model at work and it's absolutely wonderful. Go to the office when it feels like to be social and connect with your coworkers, the real work mostly gets done at home. No obligations to show up at certain days or a certain amount of days, just whenever we want.

Different people with different social energy levels and so also different presence intervals, still see each other from time to time. Sprinkle in some nice fun non-obligatory team building activities.. everybody happy and productive.

Same here. Best of both worlds.

Pre-pandemic I usually worked in open offices, and always found them horrible.

I found it insane the first job I had that companies preferred me to work in an open plan office, whereas I could do hobby coding without any distractions at home.

From what I've seen there's 2 approaches to hybrid, both under the same name but completely different. 1) as it sounds like yours is, the office is there to use whenever you like, but you don't have to. 2) Work from home X days a week/month

1) Is perfect for me. Though I would admittedly spend 90% of my time working from home, I'd never complain about having the option. 2) is pretty much as bad as WFO for me, in some ways slightly worse (no consistent routine, no consistent work environment, carting my laptop back and forth), in some ways slightly better, but overall pretty much the same.

TFA did not deliver. I'm left with the idea that I waded through a load of overly verbose propaganda.

There's many quotes from VC people and executives, which is suspicious. Several advantages for remote work are mentioned in an attempt to do steelmanning or whatever, however, the refutation falls flat on its face: Several purported disadvantages for remote work are then paraded around, as apparently evidenced by some questionnaire, without clear presentation of the questionnaire outcomes.[0]

What is this?! Completely untrustworthy, unconvincing article.

[0] there's a page linked on the top stating "the results are in" with some lame pie charts, from which I conclude that people are unhappy if their pay is too low, and that this questionnaire was predominantly answered by people in game dev.

I was remote before the pandemic, when there would be frequent in person team events and company gatherings. This was great.

Then in the pandemic, isolation. Not great, but temporary.

Now companies are cutting costs so there's no in person gathering, no team get together. Being remote is painful. I'm doing it because I'm used to it and can cope with it for a while, plus I work with people I know from previous jobs. But I can't wait until I can meet in person again and do a more "meet once per quarter" model...

I feel very grateful for having had the opportunity during covid to work remotely for American companies. My salary suddenly skyrocketed 5x, the job was interesting and I had a lot of autonomy. But increasingly I am feeling like I miss the routine of going to work, meeting people and working together. I don't know what to do now, though, since I will have to sacrifice a lot of income if I want to find a hybrid or in-office job.

Try working from co-working space if you have something like that nearby, or working from a coffee shop, etc. Or look for any meetups for other remote workers in your area and if there isn't one, considering starting one, chances are there might be others in the same situation around you.

I tried meetups and, while the events are sometimes entertaining, they are too sparse. There isn't the element of seeing a person constantly and the times I tried reaching someone to get to know them better they usually are too busy yada yada. God, I miss meeting tech people and discussing nerdy things.

Use the 2h daily commute you're saying to join a club.

I find people in general are increasingly less productive, anxious, depressed and lonely. It seems to the sign of the times, everyone seems burnt out.

2 days in office to see people, do all of the simian interaction stuff and get a break from my house.

3 days at home at my tricked out workstation that no IT department would ever give me an allowance for. Low stress because I can run small annoying errands whenever I want and optimize my time for flow state. A beautiful garden and park I can access and be back home within 15 minutes to give me an active break I’d take anyway in office.

The option to WFH is an insane force multiplier from me. Take it away at your peril.

The option that is always glossed over, partly because it is the real mode of operation of senior staff in any non trivial company, is that you are effectively remote with in-person meetings for a week or so every couple of months, and a regime of daily communication otherwise. That is far better than either total remote, "hybrid", or full time in one office, as you get the benefits of the ability to do deep focused work, and build successful relationships.

To put this in perspective I still almost daily speak to former colleagues from a decade ago who were located in offices thousands of miles away that I never shared a physical office with.

The problem with the pandemic was that it interrupted that good aspect of occasional interaction, but this deliberate effort to confuse that with the daily open office grind isn't fooling anyone whose salary is not dependent upon it.

I am remote since 2000. I guess my productivity by now is negative and being utterly depressed I am contemplating suicide.

Cut the fucking crap and shove that managers propaganda up yours.

Imagine that other people have different experiences from yours.

They are free to do as they please and so do I. I've got nothing against that particular part. I respect their wishes they must respect mine in return.

I’m not seeing the respect when someone points out real issues that human beings are having and you come in with “shove the manager’s propaganda up yours”.

Because the article IS a manager's propaganda. I completely understand that many people can not manage to work from home for many reasons starting from having too distracting environment and down to having problems being alone. And I do respect the people. Authors who spit these crap articles - fuck off.

I've worked remotely since 2016.

A few of my takes on it:

How conducive an org's culture & policies are to remote work has a direct impact on remote workers. (Companies who were quickly forced into remote work at the start of the pandemic all fired a shotgun from 100 yards and hit the target everywhere. Those who hit the middle realized that remote work had its upsides. Those who missed reinforced their own bias against remote work and dug in their heels.)

Each team's implementation of these policies can vary which gives a member on one team a great experience and a another team a miserable one.

Remote workers all have different social needs. If you're lucky, your team fits your's. If you're not, your potential office BFF may be on a different remote team and you'll never meet them.

I spent 2016-2022 at the same org who was 50% remote and it was great. Early 2022 I moved to a new org and my team never spoke outside morning stand-ups and I hated it. I've now chosen a hybrid position where it's 95% up to me when I'm in office and it's been the perfect fit.

YMMV, not all orgs will do remote well. Not all workers will do remote well. Let's stop demonizing the other side and realize there is no single answer.

Yeah I'm so depressed inner city office real estate is losing value, we must return fellow programmers:)

Not saying anything we didn't already know.

But you'll always have some hippie developers on hackernews who believe remote is the future religiously.

Low effort trolling

"The research, which is not yet peer-reviewed, was based on 2400 employee responses across five surveys between 2021 and 2022." Why is this even allowed to be posted?

Hybrid work was always a nice balance (having been fully-remote & on-premise). But ‘hybrid’ could mean a lot of things. Meeting up once a week, quarter, or annually for some teams & projects are enough to build that missing trust. Sometimes it’s just grabbing lunch with folks. But also, many of us, myself included, need to do better jobs integrating into the community & meeting our neighbors instead of relying so much on the workplace for socializing. I still find cafés an ideal location just because that reset & stimulation of fellow patrons or even the staff is enough to recharge & shake the funk that is easy to get stuck in if limited to just your own home where it’s too easy not to stop. Coworking spaces, labeled as such or impromptu, can help break it up too.

So a bunch of pull quotes from CEOs and one non-peer-reviewed survey study? One would expect that out of all the companies pushing for an end to remote work, one would have solid data they were willing to share.

Sounds like more fuel to provoke corporate into removing remote work

I don't know why this article was flagged. I mostly agree with it.

Remote work is amazing for work-life balance and job satisfaction...if you have an established/high-paying job with an awesome home working space in a town or city you're happy living in and have a strong social network outside of work (or spend less time on work to spend more time on life, which is totally fine!).

If you live in a 1bd apartment/flat with roommates and your working space is also your bedroom, kitchen or closet...WFH sucks.

If you have an awesome office setup in your suburban home that's far away from everything because the alternative is worse and more expensive...WFH sucks.

If a big factor of your satisfaction at work comes from working with your work mates, and now all of them are too busy to hang because they have families and commitments and such...WFH sucks.

If you've just graduated college and are starting your first job...WFH DEFINITELY sucks.

The thing that confused me the most about the push for remote work was the mental gymnastics done in response to the obvious (to me) wage suppression that remote work at scale would introduce.

Why would anyone pay $x for an engineer in SFO when they can pay $0.4x for that same engineer in Kansas City?

Why should the engineer from SFO making $x NOT receive $0.4x now that they live in Kansas City (to take advantage of a $0.4x market?)

Okay, so every engineer is worth $x since $x is determined by skill, not locale. If every engineer makes $x, how do we respond to the insanity that normalizing $0.4x markets into $x markets will bring?

I went full remote with the start of Corona pandemic and I have to say it's been an amazing experience. Granted I've joined a co-working place so I wasn't working out from a basement but the interactions there are more informal and relaxing. I can understand some people are upset because they were forced to go out of office during pandemic and now want to get back to be abused as usual but I'm quite content to stay remote.

The article otherwise looks like cheap corp. propaganda to convince the IT crowd to get back into open spaces. I guess megacaps will want to push for getting folks back so they can be controlled by middle managers as in the good ol' times. I'm not sure if that's going to work as per plan though.

Interestingly enough my mental health being out of the office has much improved over before office work. As a developer I thrive on long focus time and good written-down documents. I don't miss being interrupted all the time, being shot at with NERF guns, being a middle man between people having conversation over you, over lunch work debates, open office background noise, over the shoulder staring etc. etc. Not at all.

Being remote since 2009, founded several full remote companies. I never ever plan to go back to an office. Same for all people's working with me. Customers are totally ok with it, productivity is definitely not lacking. And for social interactions I have real friends and family. Much better than fake work relationships I had in the 10y in office before that. I wonder if some companies are paying for this propaganda.

Remote work makes modern life possible. In almost every major US city commutes, and the pressures of caring for a family 10x'd over the last 50 years. In their heart of hearts everyone knows 90% of the pandemic was not fear of a virus, but coping with exhaustion of a life that had become untenable for most people.

I don't think everyone is as-productive in a remote mode, but knowledge workers who build tangible things often can be more productive, and measurably so.

Excess Management is more visibly pointless with remote work, and naturally excess managers who contribute ~nothing hate it. For example people who manage mediocre webblogs due to be replaced by LLM content such as the author of this document. It makes those people miserable, and the majority of workers in any organization are unproductive. That's all.

There are so many bloody articles going both ways on the WFH. Feels fairly simple, some people enjoy it and some people hate it. Some are more productive working from home, some are less productive. This desire to try and paint everything as either black or white, good or bad, it's so frustrating.

Trying to apply any statistical analysis to this feels like such a waste of time. There are so many outside factors to consider. Even if you do some shit polls and find that "WFH is 10% worse on average" or "WFH is 17.8% better on average", using that information to make any decisions for yourself or your company would be insane.

The way this article tries to legitimise itself with it's shoddy use of statistics is just painful, I couldn't finish it.

I think these kind of articles tend to have a fair amount of truth to them, but a lot of the anxiety etc is caused by the all out denigration of remote workers. People being constantly undermined tend to be anxious about it!

Remote work has some elements that need different attention to make work. I feel isolated at the moment as a remote worker because it feels like suggesting an offsite or meeting in person once a quarter is going to threaten the existence of the remote work status quo.

Intentionally undermining the system to then make arguments against it seems to be the operating model at the moment for people who prefer to spend all their time in an office while making no effort to support remote work, and it is exhausting.

Its frustrating to see “research” like this where you just look at numbers and determine causality.

Very few people ask the question, how much of the remote work productivity drop is actually bad? And how much of the depression and anxiety is related to unreasonable expectations set during the pandemic and the resulting burnout? In the first year or so, as people adjusted to the pandemic, they worked more and slowly that became the norm.

If now people are less productive, are they working less than they did pre pandemic or is the curve coming down to normal? And what percentage of these unproductive workers is because of burnout and unreasonable expectations?

The addition of many remote positions since COVID has been a great hiring filter for us. For the type of work we do (AI, R&D), and the culture that we find most productive and enjoyable (enthusiasm because we love the work, a sense of working in a team), remote was a real downgrade when we tried it.

We advertise the job as on-site only, and because of that the applications self-select for those that want in-office work. It's made our interviews more focused on technical ability.

I think this is a better equilibrium overall. Those on either side of the remote/on-site preference can find the right respective jobs and work cultures.

This thread is a great counter argument to anyone who claims that HN is a place for civil discussion and debate.

People are screaming propaganda and conspiracy as soon as they run into a view that doesn’t align with their own.

How is discussion here uncivil? Something tells me it's just you who don't like the fact that overwhelming majority of people and companies genuinely benefit from WFH. Are you a manager?

You calling people who disagree with you “deranged” in a different comment would be your starting point for that. This overly antagonistic comment is a second exhibit.

Is there a reason you immediately jump to bad faith name-calling (“are you a manager?”) just because GP disagrees with you?

My hybrid experience:

I got to the office to do meetings with people that are at home.

I ditched the hybrid and now 2 days of week I go to an Coworking/incubator space where I have the social and "out of house" needs.

I worked remotely from 2014 and then switched employers and a chose to be onsite after the pandemic.

Reason being it’s so much easier to ramp in person and build trust with colleagues. I now go in a couple times a week on days when I have a lot of meetings.

Another factor is the work environment. My current big tech campus is an absolute pleasure to work out of a few days. My prior grey soulless bank employer was not inspiring at all. I also Don’t like wearing shirts with buttons or hard pants in the summer.

This is a terrible article. The supporting evidence for their claim is 1 study of 2400 participants that hasn't been peer reviewed and an outdated poll from Feb 2022 conducted during the epidemic and economic downturn. The rest are just quotes from biased Silicon Valley CEOs. And the author of the article is also a tech CEO so I'm sure there's no conflict of interests here.

Obviously all the introverts would rather work from home. Do remember though, humans are social animals. Hybrid is best in my opinion.

There will be lots of new "studies" funded by those lobbying to get workers back into buildings. WFH is a cancer to corporate America for those with investments in office buildings and the surrounding industries. The sooner they can erode the belief that you can WFH successfully back to pre-2020 levels the happier they'll be.

One thing that I think gets forgotten in these discussions is the economics of offices. Offices are really hard to convert to residential space, and paying for a space you only use 2-3 days a week can be prohibitive to companies that aren’t huge, not to mention downtown SF is becoming a ghost town with all businesses closed

Since this article makes an argument by starting with a non-peer reviewed survey, then stacking several layers of hypotheses on each other, I feel comfortable countering with an anecdote: the most productive company I ever worked for was fully remote from before covid. So, I guess that’s checkmate.

I am not concerned about my job because I am at home rather than spending 90 minutes a day commuting. I am concerned about my job because our CEO constantly threatens to fire people and then makes good on those threats.

Extroverts who were forced into WFH because of the pandemic having withdrawals symptoms; News at 11.

----

Before Pandemic, people self-selected into WFH/remote scenarios; if you were introverted and just wanted to focus on work, you would have taken the quiet path yourself. If your office offered it, you took it; if not you would try your best to move to job that offered it.

If you were an extrovert who gained energy from social interactions... you would never have chosen such a path, but the pandemic forced extroverts into to seclusion, and they are now stuck.

They can see the clear benefits from a WFH/ remote setup, like being able to focus on work, time/fuel savings from no commute, flexible schedule... but they want the office energy back.

Like boomers, they pine for the good-ol' days and they don't just want themselves back in office, they want the whole crowd, and to make a crowd, you need EVERY one back.

So they are miserable and trying to make us miserable too.

Bosses will do just about anything to point the finger at anyone but their own behavior. Poor strategy, poor communication, changing directions like a 4yo on too much sugar.

I feel like the steadfast RTO deniers are either

1) families or other people who have a large amount of responsibility outside of work, absolutely love hybrid

2) recluse engineers who love being alone and socialize on the internet, even 1 day in an office a week is unacceptable

'denier' implies that they're wrong whereas it's an objective fact: I have kids and a million responsibilities outside work and every 15 minutes saved by not commuting is 15 minutes that I don't have to do chores on the weekend or 15 minutes more with my kids or wife. Will not go back to office until they start pulling my teeth out.

You misinterpret, what I was referring to those who are steadfast deniers, not that anyone who want WFH are “deniers”

Seems to me you're missing a bunch of others.

3) Those who live elsewhere

4) Those who want access to a non local talent pool

5) Those who are local but still don't want to add a commute to their work day

6) Those who don't want to pay for an office. (Including workers who would rather see it in their paychecks)

We still haven't solved out the way to balance offices and remote workers, but I am grateful that we're at least being forced to ask the question. We are recycling formulas from factory work that need to be reconsidered.

Agreed, this was a dumb comment, I think what I was ultimately trying to say is there are also people who like working and want to enjoy the thing most of us spend most of our waking time doing, everyone’s situation is different and there’s no one size fits all anything

I think a lot of people have depended on work for a large part of their social lives, and a lot of others feel conscripted into that. It's going to be a rough transition.

Ultimately I think it's even broader, as we reconsider the 40 hour work week and even the need for universal work at all. And that will be even tougher.

> and socialize on the internet,

Actually I just have friends outside of work. The reason you never see that is that nobody invites you to things if they aren't paid for it.

You seem to be identifying with #2 while defending how you’re not #2?

Lol, if you say so.

No we're not.

C-Suite FUD

Remote work has been very lonely and isolating.

For yourself.

Regarding the trend I am tired of incessantly churned out articles castigating remote work or puting it in a bad light. There are different experiences out there, different outcomes for different companies and so on. Blanket statements like that against one position or another have a an acrid smell of paid influence.

Where you work primarily depends on what you do. If you're a labourer then you may have to work on scaffolding. If you're a bin man you may have to work on a garbage truck. If you don't like this or feel working in these conditions is bad for your mental health, then you may be in the wrong line of work.

Some jobs (like software engineering) can be slightly more flexible. You'll probably need to work at a desk behind a computer screen all day, but where that desk is located, might not be so important depending on the exact nature of your work. If you don't like working at a desk behind a computer screen all day and believe this is bad for your mental health, then you may be in the wrong line of work.

We should remember that regardless of whether we're working remotely there's a lot about the nature of our work that is simply determined by the specifics of our jobs. I must work 5 days a week on a desk behind a screen if I want to be software engineer (like it or not). I'd argue this in my case this far worse for my health than whether that screen is in an office with colleagues or in my house with my family.

If people feel that remote work isn't for them then I think that's fine, but I also think they should just look for companies that are happy for them to work in-office or work hybrid. One of the nice things about remote work is that generally there are other companies out there (if not your own company) that will allow you to work from the office if you choose. When you compare this to people who are forced to work on roofs in the rain, or forced to work under cars in a car garage, or forced to sit behind a stirring wheel for hours in trucks, I think this hysteria about remote work being so "bad" speaks more to the privilege that middle-class white collar workers have. Although I don't want to dismiss anyone's individual struggles.

Again, I've worked mostly remote for decade and in my case it's been lovely. I get to spend loads of time with my partner and we've been able to take 1-2 month trips abroad a few times because I can work while we're away.

Even if you don't like or agree with remote work for yourself what we should all be in favour of is more choice in the labour market, and remote work for this reason should be celebrated instead of repeatedly bashed in the media for not always maximising worker productivity, and occasionally making people feel lonely.

Remote work is a good thing. Not because it's good for everyone, but because it's good for some people. If you struggle to mentally cope with working from your home, you may find most other places of work to be quite rough on your mental health too. I suspect in many cases this may speak more to things going on in your personal life than an issue with your workplace. Maybe the real issue here is that it's not healthy for us to live alone and in recent decades with we've replaced family life with work and with neither some people feel lost.

Sure Jan.

Who's Jan?

https://www.vice.com/en/article/88nb4z/the-oral-history-of-t...

With remote work, every interaction with others get mediated by technology and thus can be stored, replayed, used against you.

this is a sword that cuts both ways though. in my experience, employers are much more interested in minimizing the attack surface for subpoenas than jamming up employees for indiscretions that took place over company comms. companies I've worked for have retained emails and chat logs for the minimum duration required by law and aggressively purged anything falling outside that window.

as always, you do need to be careful with written communications, but I highly doubt companies are recording slack huddles of rank-and-file employees. it's expensive and creates unnecessary risk. there's no real reason to do so when the alternative is, at worst, paying 6-12 months salary while the unwanted employee is managed out.

I’m more concerned about coworkers recording me than my employer.

With special ways to turn it off for its executives: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/23/doj-says-google-destroyed-ch...

This is me. I started going back into the office a few days a week recently and love it. My office’s culture is definitely different now than pre-COVID, and better. We’re like better at respecting each others’ focus time while also making good use of lunch and impromptu white boarding.

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