Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office
washingtonpost.com
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Those who are happy to return to the office in general are those who do not like WFH and prefer more contacts and a change of scenery.
A nicer office makes things better but it will not change people's minds on WFH.
Sure, these guys might go into the office but they do so from their pied-a-terre / 3rd home / whatever within a 5 minute chauffeured drive. They do this while maintaining a nearby suburban/exurban estate and maybe a lake/beach/ski houses where they spend the majority of their actual hours.
I was listening to a podcast and they observed that US commuters might have had a boiled frog scenario where you slowly just get used to having a worse & worse commute as you age.. and COVID snapped everyone out of it cold turkey. Now attempting to go back to it is revolting for many.
He couldn't articulate a specific, valid complaint like "I was out at a client lunch and they were goofing off" or "I was on a vacation day while they were supposed to be working".
He was just mad that underlings had the same flexibility that he, as CEO, had always had. This being the same CEO who jets around DJing on the side for fun and has connections to do so at pretty high levels. So even the "cool CEO" is in fact, NOT cool.
It's like getting mad at all the other idiots on the road making traffic, lol. What do you think you are?
The CEO was upset others were allowed to perform as if they were of the same class.
It’s always class when one boils it down, imho.
But the obvious complaint was what are these slobs doing in my summer resort town, dining in the same establishment as me!! Rather than stuck in downtown Manhattan in the August heat. Or - the least they could do is go to Coney Island / Jones Beach / Jersey Shore or something eating some hotdogs.
I have run into this at a peer level though. I've negotiated WFH and extra vacation and have learned to keep it in the down low. They get mad at me, but I'm not the one that is their boss and I couldn't care less if they WFH.
I haven't taken a month-long vacation for a while but when I did a few times in a long-ago role, there were definitely people who were at least a bit incredulous that I could get off with doing so.
Yes it is a thing. It starts when you get promoted to a more senior role. The thing is, nothing much changed inside or outside, so many people feel they need to make a point. They start to dress differently, behave differently, introduce distance - to make sure others understand who is in the "superior" position.
I noticed thin in insecure types or those who need some confirmation of their value. But there are many people who are exact opposites, especially in the younger generation. They understand that being a manager doesn't mean giving orders but supporting your team in their work. It's so much easier for everybody.
That's basically my point.
Probably the worst scenario of business owners you can work for.
OTOH, a good small company can be really good. Decisions get made quickly, you know most of the people and can talk with them, much less BS, and more of a sense of purpose in what you're doing there rather than being a cog. I worked in one a few years back and loved it. They are tough to find, though, as a real 'small company' is different than a startup in that they're a bit less crazy in terms of growth.
The CEO and analyst are both upper class, just different levels of power and seniority.
That CEO is just a power-tripping asshole.
The big push into consumer finance has been a complete multi-billion loss making debacle under his leadership.
The queen bee who owns a share of the hive, decides how many bees to hire/fire, where they work, when they work, what % of the honey to share with the worker bees, etc.. now thats a different class.
Team managers/trainers do not meet most of those criteria. At most the GM meets the majority of them. Only the team owner would meet all the criteria.
Amazon was once a small business. It's possible to grow that hive but the vast majority get exterminated.
It’s rare that those businesses scale to the point of where your role is purely abstract management layers removed from the front line workforce.
If the analyst lives in NYC and makes $250k they aren't living large. If they went to an Ivy League school and have to pay for it they really aren't living large. Regardless, the story makes the CEO look silly.
It is in part. A person on a US$20 million a year salary obviously isn’t working class or even middle class-they might truthfully say they are of “working/middle class background” (if their parents were of more modest means)
Whereas, their 10 year old kid whose annual income and assets are roughly $0 is also upper class-because their parents are. Now, if they grow up and their parents end up disowning them and they end up living on the streets homeless-then they won’t be upper class any more. But if that doesn’t happen, then they are-because even if they aren’t filthy rich yet, very likely they’ll eventually inherit a huge amount of money from their parents (assuming they don’t already have some kind of “you’ll never have to work a day in your life” trust fund set up for them). They could live their whole life in the upper class without ever getting a salary at all
They may never work a day because they don’t need to - they are upper or “bourg.” for sure.
It’s that weird in-between, where one still needs to earn a living and make even more money for someone else.
A 25M / year CEO is far past "earning a living" and really only works because they want to.
Upwards mobility my ass.
Social class is not just about your current salary, although 200k soon after graduation isn't exactly 'average'...
Some might even say that walking up to the CEO like that indicates upper class self-assurance...
In the office setting the CEO would never been seen anywhere near the same floor that such junior people are working or eating, never having the opportunity to introduce themselves. One bank famously had a special CEO elevator so the guy could seamlessly get from the garage to his high-rise executive suite without bumping into a single soul.
I recently found myself out to dinner a table over from a C-suite exec at my company. I did not introduce myself because I'm a socially damaged introvert.
It's a pretty easy bet that the kid was a major extrovert on the other hand, more than some assumption they must already be upper class.
You'd be surprised about the class mobility on Wall St vs other industries. When I graduated, Google famously did not even recruit from anything other than a small handful of schools and screened out a pretty high GPA minimum like 3.75 or so. Meanwhile every bank came to my college and I had like 5 offers. A good number of my coworkers spent some time at community college, had parents without college degrees, are first gen immigrants, etc.
Outside of glad-handing networking roles that lean on peoples connections like in IB, "already rich" is the exception rather than the rule. Bear was famous for saying they didn't hire MBAs, but instead PSDs — poor, smart and had a deep desire to be rich
The meritocrats are the ones that work the jobs where they actually have to make money and profits. Nepos are shunted to roles where that isn’t as direct.
or to use an older one: petit bourgeoisie
Class is defined by one's relationship to the means of production (e.g. whether you work in a factory, or own the factory where people work)
In the modern economy, capital owners are reliant on a class of non-fungible white collar workers that bring their own human capital. The two groups have myriad common interests. Those interests are in many cases in opposition to those of ordinary workers who lack human capital and are fungible and easily replaced.
They’re proles by the definition of how they earn their labor. If the pool of labor expands beyond the available roles, those high salaries would crash down.
Were we to push that to the extreme, the only upper-class at Goldman Sachs would be retirees, either as direct shareholders or as beneficiaries of some pension fund. Even if they were lower middle-class Americans living in an old aging house they can’t afford to fix.
That would be the Value Extraction definition of Class.
Others would argue that class is more diffuse, and that one’s class depends more on their family's history, where they went to school, and who they know, than on how much they have. Which is a valid point.
That would be a Social Capital definition of Class.
I doubt however that anyone would consider a street-sweeping former Emperor (eg Piyin), or some penniless heir to some old industry dynasty as still belonging to any sort of upper-class.
Meaning the actual definition actually is some fluid mix of the two. That and probably some other definitions I’m not even aware of.
> In the modern economy, capital owners are reliant on a class of non-fungible white collar workers that bring their own human capital.
It’s nothing modern. Capital owners always have, since the first scribe, and probably before that (see Japan’s former hordes of perpetually desk-bound samurai).
Still, let’s entertain the argument. I’ll use, and I’m truly sorry for that, a tired analogy.
In the modern world, many people are reliant on many different types of usually non-fungible pets and somewhat fungible, depending on who you ask, animals, for many different purposes. Some of which bring their own highly sought-after hard-earned skills.
Let’s limit ourselves to the oh so tired dog analogy.
A person and their dog have myriad common interests. Those interests are, in many cases, in opposition to those of many other people and animals. Even more so when said dog is considered a family member, serves as a guard dog, as a shepherd dog, or is specialised in drugs detection.
Does that make them equal? Does that change anything to the fact that one is extracting value from the other, and often only pays them back in dog food, usually made from our food industry’s literal scraps and refuse?
So yes, I agree with you: there’s no simple and definitely no simplistic definition of class.
I am still convinced however that, in the specific and limited context of the comment I was replying to, the one I used was good enough.
By your value-extraction definition, Sundar Pichai isn’t upper class. He doesn’t make money from his ownership of the capital—he owns a negligible share of Alphabet. Instead, he helps the shareholders extract more value from Alphabet and is compensated for that work. A definition that excludes CEOs from the upper class isn’t a very workable one.
I think a more useful definition recognizes that, in between shareholders and the workers is a class of people who help the shareholders extract more value from the enterprise, and therefore has interests closely aligned with those of the shareholders. For example in a company like Uber, that’s what the programmers are doing. They’re not creating value, they’re building systems to extract more value from the drivers.
Another way to look at it is that there’s a large class of people whose jobs wouldn’t be nearly as well compensated without monopolistic capitalism. $500,000/year Facebook engineers only exist because Facebook as an enterprise throws off enormous amounts of cash. If you look at more social-democratic societies, the biggest difference isn’t at the very top. Sweden and Norway have more billionaires per capita than the United States. Instead, the biggest difference is in the professional class. Swedish engineers (and bankers and lawyers and other professionals) make a fraction of what their American counterparts make. And that’s because Sweden has far fewer of these insanely high margin businesses.
And yet they are both animals, often get treated as less than most people, the shepherd dog only gets the proverbial scraps. Precisely the analogy’s entire point. I’m Glad I didn’t have to spell it out.
> A definition that excludes CEOs from the upper class isn’t a very workable one.
Absolutely. Hence the "Were we to push that to the extreme", followed by a ridiculous application of the definition.
> Another way to look at it is that there’s a large class of people whose jobs wouldn’t be nearly as well compensated without monopolistic capitalism.
And thus we can differentiate those of these people who are part of the upper class from those who aren’t by wether they get an actual share of the value they produce, or merely scraps. Wether they are compensated as equals, or as useful tools.
Interesting bit about Sweden and Norway. I didn’t know that.
Yes, but focusing on those factors gives you an incomplete understanding of the dog’s place on the farm. At the end of the, day the dog is helping the farmer extract value from the sheep. Indeed, the dog’s very specialized skills wouldn’t have much value outside the context of the farming enterprise. That means the dog’s interests are much more aligned with the farmer’s than the sheep. His unique role, and relatively comfortable position, wouldn’t exist outside the value-extractive context of the farm.
> And thus we can differentiate those of these people who are part of the upper class from those who aren’t by wether they get an actual share of the value they produce, or merely scraps. Wether they are compensated as equals, or as useful tools
Facebook engineers building the infrastructure the company uses to extract monopolistic profits from consumers are receiving a share of the value. The actual value creation ultimately comes from someone making shoes in a factory in China, which sells them to Nike, which uses Facebook advertising and branding to sell them to consumers for far more than they’re worth. Yes, he’s a “useful tool” for the shareholders, but so are the senior executives (besides Zuck). Their ability to command $500,000 salaries or $1 million salaries, or $10 million salaries doesn’t exist outside the context of these enormous monopolistic profits.
You’re getting hung up on “equality” but being in the same class doesn’t mean you’re equal. In a feudal society, knights may be quite lowly compared to a high ranking landowner. They’re “useful tools.” But I’m not talking about equality of rank, I’m talking about interests and incentives. On that front, the knights have fundamentally different interests and incentives than the serfs. Whatever resentment they might have toward higher ranking nobility, they still reap the benefits of the feudal structure. The my would be much worse off outside that structure.
Which, to me, reflects a huge gap in power and freedom.
One decides what the other does. One can decide how much the other will earn. One can decide wether or not the other will still have a job tomorrow. The other needs a job if they want to have a roof over their head and food on the table in six months.
Which is why I still don’t find your definition satisfactory. Sure alignment of interests matters, but to me it’s not enough.
It’s been an insightful discussion, and I’ve truly enjoyed it, but I’m afraid we won’t be able to reach a conclusion we can both agree on.
Class can be more fine-grained than just lower/working-middle-upper
People commonly talk about “upper middle class” vs “lower middle class”, and then I suppose there are even some people in between the two (middle middle class?)
Well, in the same way there is surely lower upper class and upper upper class, and maybe even more levels than that. A person on an annual salary of US$25 million is undeniably upper class but still far beneath the centibillionaire class.
There’s also no clear boundary between upper middle and lower upper. You may think someone on US$250K is “upper class” but they probably only think of themselves as “upper middle class”, and personally I would think the same. In my own head, to really be upper class, your annual income has to be (consistently) measured in millions, not hundreds of thousands.
Who is more upper class, a relatively impoverished Prince of the Holy Roman Empire or a billionaire by marriage and luck? Managers like the mentioned bank CEO, or someone who can rent them a house in the Hamptons because they have lived there for generations? An intellectual who has never really worked, or a wealthy rapper who didn't finish high school?
I think Western society has been undergoing a transition between two different class systems. (Marxists would surely connect this with the economic transitions from feudalism to mercantilism to early capitalism to late capitalism.)
In the mediaeval class system, class was determined by social status which was predominantly inherited, and money alone was not enough to move from the bottom to the top. A person born poor might acquire great wealth, but they would still be locked out of the nobility/aristocracy, unless the monarch deigned to ennoble them. An impoverished baron socially outranked the far wealthier merchant who was born into poverty and worked/lucked their way out of it.
In the late capitalist class system–all that really matters is your net worth. Everything else is secondary. Who cares who your parents were or where you come from once you have a billion dollars to your name – and if a billionaire is excluded socially, it is very likely due to something about their individual behaviour (see e.g Kanye–although I suppose he's an ex-billionaire now), rather than their family background in itself.
The transition between the two systems has been ongoing; it still hasn't completely finished, but we've moved a lot closer to the late capitalist system, and a lot further away from the mediaeval system, than we were 50 or 100 years ago. I don't think the transition proceeds at the same rate in every country either – I think the UK retains more of the old class system than most other places (although even in the UK it is a lot weaker than it used to be); it also arguably retains some strength in the northeastern US, although not to the same extent as the UK.
My point is that different people look up (or down) to different people by different criteria: "net worth" interests competitive capitalist adventurers, "who your parents were or where you come from" remains a high priority when someone is wealthy enough for their lifestyle.
I certainly find it plausible that if A and B are of roughly similar wealth, but A was born into wealth whereas B lucked/worked/married into it, A might see that as a reason to look down on B.
However, I suspect if A was born into $100 million and B lucked/worked/etc into $100 billion, then all else being equal, I doubt A would look down on B in the same way. I expect they'd more likely view B with envy, as a potential business opportunity for themselves, as a friendship which might give them access to things they themselves can't afford, than as a social inferior. When the gap in wealth becomes big enough, it tends to drown out all the other factors.
The huge class divides are not between retail workers, tradesmen and software developers, the divide is between C-suite executives / old money, and... everyone else who has to work for a living.
As a tech worker, I have far more in common lifestyle-wise with a schoolteacher than I do with the SVP of Engineering in my own company.
In the US, working class tends to mean people in food service, retail sales, low-skill manual labor, people relying on gig work, and some very low-level white-collar workers like secretaries. Upper class are basically the very few people for whom work is optional. F500 CEOs, SVPs, billionaire investors, and so on. Their existing wealth grows at a rate that can sustain their and their family's standard of living indefinitely.
The rest is middle class, a very wide range from schoolteachers, to skilled tradesmen, to engineers, to university professors, to small business owners, to doctors and so on.
My point is that people are nit-picking when they say things like "Oh, but doctors are upper middle class and teachers are lower middle class and engineers are lower upper middle class and on and on and on. Distinction without a meaningful difference.
I think traditional concepts of social class count for a lot less in the UK of 2023 than they did in the UK of 1973. But wealth counts for just as much, even more.
Were Rishi Sunak's parents "upper class"? And yet, he'd surely be a far more valuable social connection to have than Baron Forgettable who happens to be the King's fifth cousin. And I think that will remain true even when his prime ministership is over.
The reason they're used more is because there is a very clear distinction between groups even at high levels of wealth due to the need to socially signal. This is what causes CEOs to flip out that an analyst is trying to casually talk to them at a non-work event as if they are equals.
This is class dynamics in action, it's not all about the working class vs upper class, but how these different classes interact internally and externally.
Upper vs working the most important divide (IMHO), but not the only one.
But feeling like you have better opinions or thought deeper about subjects than others or that you know "how it really is", or that you're a better driver or whatever are other common ways. Whatever you feel like you are good at, or have a lot of, you will be tempted to feel superior about.
Fighting these thoughts is virtuous in my opinion. Pretending that only X type of people do it (rich or whatever) is not virtuous in my opinion.
These two classes have largely contradictory interests. People who own companies want to cut their costs, and therefore they want to lower wages, give lower benefits, less time off, and so on. Workers want the exact opposite of that.
People such as CEOs constitute a labour aristocracy where their interests largely align with the interests of large capitalists and they own some capital of their own.
If capital gains hand someone 300k a year, they aren't quite workers, but they aren't playing the same game as someone who is still playing the accumulation game. It's the best trick the late 20th century played: Defined contribution workers are all also capitalists, just like everyone relying on an ever more valuable house.
An actual capitalist makes a living by using their capital as the primary vehicle to create further wealth for themselves and to sustain their lifestyle.
Again, the key distinction is in terms of class interests. What sort of social policies would be of interest to each type of individual is the question.
I'd bet anything this young person is used to having his family name make him welcome at any table he wishes to join, even in the Hamptons. He's on the well-worn path through a brief stint as a junior analyst before he's running some bank or hedge fund somewhere and the CEO of GS hesitates to approach his table.
This isn't the action of someone either boldly or naively misunderstanding his place. This is the action of someone who has grown up knowing his place is wherever he wishes it to be.
Do people really think the "middle class" is dead? I feel middle class is an apt descriptor for someone who is living comfortably but also still needs to work to maintain their lifestyle.
When someone acts as entitled to be where they are and do what they do as that junior analyst to that CEO, it's because their life experience so far has told them, consistently, that they have every right to. It even mentions that he points out his other associates.
He's acting like he's meeting someone who's, at best, an equal, because from his perspective, he is.
I doubt it. Companies that try to hire pedigree know that they are hiring from the same class. The disdain is shock from a junior not working 20 hour days and sleeping under the desk.
Have you ever heard the term "1% of the 1%"?
Or, to put that another way: if the CEO can't use "come eat with me at $place" as a way to say to investors and other CEOs that he's "one of them" and can be let in on the backchannel conversations, then why is he even eating there? It's expensive and the service is awful! He'd much rather not! Now he needs to find a new place to use to signal that!
In Middle Ages, this separation was based on ownership of land and societal structure which soon started being formalised in (both religious and secular) laws. Today, money has the same purpose (being a measure and store of wealth).
If the answer is no then it's 100% a class thing
Musk buying Twitter was the best thing to happen to the work culture of Tesla employees.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_M._Solomon
In fact, almost his entire track history was during COVID.. in a time that the company he runs has had some headline-grabbing losses in their consumer division.
So I think its fair to say he should focus on his own productivity here first.
The scene is notorious for it. It's really not hard to find vids of DJs dancing, pointing, posing, and poking uselessly at a mixer which is obviously just there for the look.
A "live set" typically involves the performer playing synths and programming the drums live. There are no record players, no pre-recorded tracks, everything is played live on the fly. Example: https://youtu.be/cVFzblT5VPE?t=4177 (a daytime one so you can see the gear)
With a "DJ set", the DJ is playing two or more tracks, beatmatching them and mixing them together, transitioning from one track to the next. This still takes a lot of skill. If you see two or more turntables or media players and a mixer in the middle, that's a DJ set. Often the DJ brings their tracks to the venue loaded on a USB stick and plugs it into the media player. Just because there's a USB stick present doesn't mean the DJ set was pre-recorded. Example: https://youtu.be/Ubyd98XV5C0?t=1018
I've never seen him perform but a DJ set ranges from people who just hit the play button and follow a recipe (e.g. Paris Hilton) to very technical mixing (e.g. Maceo Plex). A live set is substantially more challenging (and why few do it) but would be strong support he's not having his released tracks ghost produced.
Either way, good for him in my opinion. I also like mixing as a creative outlet but am terrible at it. If I was worth 9 figures I'd probably get a ghost producer to help me out and enjoy the experience of DJing.
David Solomon only really pitches himself as a hobbyist anyway so I don't think there's anything misleading/shameful about it if he is in fact just getting everything ghost produced and doing a 'lite' mixing DJ set live. There are plenty of full-time "professional" DJs who do the same thing.
If anyone wants some house music to chill to: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7s7In5PLSY_Z1aUMHb2wyw
“His Spotify profile has 550,000 monthly listeners with his debut single garnering 8 million listens.”
It varies but this list is showing several people at close to 1$/year per monthly listener. https://www.internetdj.com/top-djs
Most people come up through the ranks and you can bet the CEO was one time an analyst with a demanding boss. After decades of work he made it to boss. You see this everywhere where you move up the ranks and things get better. That's the apprentice deal for all of history.
Part of his compensation is relative flexibility although I'm almost certain c suite often work a lot more and have higher demands than junior employees.
If you're very valuable to the firm (e.g. CEO) you can get away with more stuff. It's the natural order of things. I don't really see any other way around it apart from a dehumanizing process to treat everyone exactly the same regardless of capabilities
That's like saying all junior-level employees MUST carry a book on top of their heads all the time, and only C-Level executives get to skip that. If you give someone flexibility, you are not taking anything away from other people, so not giving it is only an unnecessary punishment for junior level employees.
After you've been there a while, learned more and are more effective at your job, you're more likely to get the benefit of the doubt but even that has limits.
Why are we pretending like this is all weird? New or junior employees need a lot of handholding to ramp up and it's inappropriate that they just get the same consideration when compared to someone that's been there longer than the analyst has been alive. Have you guys ever worked a normal job before?
I've had co-workers in these situations for a long time. In theory there is no difference. But then...
- suddenly you can barely hear someone on a conference call because they are on a 4G-tether on a beach,
- or because there are tons of bar sounds in the background on a call
- or you have a production issue but cant get the person to screen-share because they are on low-bandwidth
I even had individuals who would block their entire calendar on WFH days and only take meetings on in-office days.
The problem is with those who abuse privileges, not with those who are honest.
Who cares if employee works at the beach?
You need to provide value not appearance of value.
I'm sure there are cases there it doesnt matter, but I was mentioning cases where teams need to work with each other and are paid to work with each other. I specifically mentioned Production Support. How can production support meetings "wait until they are back at the office?" From my standpoint, it doesnt matter where they are (home or office) but if they have no connectivity and cannot jump into troubleshooting meetings during business hours, i'm not sure how this works for numerous situations.
Through my career, i've been on the hot-seat as live applications have gone down. Imagine a DB is down or a pipeline is broken, and my DBA co-worker says "sure, lets take it up on Monday when I'm back". Note, I have no admin rights to the DB.
I had a k8s cluster run out of disk space. I had no admin rights to fix this. If the k8s admin decided he could take the meeting a day or days later, it would be a total disaster.
We're assuming you even read the article.
It clearly says "how the underling walked up at a restaurant, introduced himself and pointed to associates with him"
i.e. it was more than 1 person. Maybe they are doing face-to-face training? Are you saying that's ineffective?
> New or junior employees need a lot of handholding to ramp up
That's exactly what's happening. Why are you assuming it's not?
And of the CEO - was he meeting a client, the board, or simply out to lunch by himself or with family/friends/etc. The article is silent on this topic.
Many of these things are about rite of passage, and people who have gone thru the rites want others to not skip.
It can also be about a power-dynamic, where flexibility isnt given because imposed inflexibility is a power lever.
Executives have not been promoted into their jobs since the 50s.
Lmao. I'm no where near C-Suite but I've also never worked as hard as I did as an intern/junior engineer. Moving up often means working less hard.
> I don't really see any other way around it apart from a dehumanizing process to treat everyone exactly the same regardless of capabilities
This post is about WFH, not treating everyone the same regardless of capabilities. Those are such different things that I'm convinced you must be arguing in bad faith.
That’s not populist at all. It’s just another example of the white collar class enjoying the benefits of technology and globalization while everyone else gets left behind: https://www.epi.org/blog/wage-inequality-continued-to-increa....
Before the pandemic, I already made a lot more money (as a lawyer) than my middle class neighbors. Now I also get to work from home three days a week, and get a lot more quality time with my kids, while they have to go to work every day because their jobs aren’t knowledge work.
Obviously, management versus other white collar workers is one class dividing line that exists. But work from home is a good example if the fact that on many important dimensions, such as work conditions and generational mobility,[1] those groups are in the same class.
[1] CEOs are obviously richer than say accountants of engineers. But in the US, CEOs largely come from the class of these white collar professionals. In that sense, they’re in the same class as most other societies understand the concept.
That said, some COVID era stats showed 50% of working population doing at least 1 day remote.. and 50% is pretty much right in the middle of middle class and fairly populist-ish?
Something like 30%+ are still remote/hybrid today in 2023, so this isn't precisely an elite-only thing ..
There's a lot more to it than that.
WFH has been a godsend for a millions of people who work full-time, but are also poor.
I drove for Uber for a while when I was between jobs. The majority of the people I carted around were people who thought Uber was a godsend because they were too poor to save for a car, and Uber allowed them to have a job that didn't involve manual or skilled labor they couldn't perform. People like call center operators, and medical coders (which is not the same thing as computer coding), and other jobs that aren't suitable for machines, and often done in a cube farm.
The pandemic sent all those people into WFH, and many of their companies found that the price of equipping their people with a laptop and headset was cheaper than paying rent on cubical space.
Now those working poor can put the expense of Uber into saving for a car, or buying clothes for their children, or any of the assorted other things that people need every day.
For millions of people, WFH is a helping hand out of poverty.
Working from home means a parent can be home when their kids are home, available if they need to be picked up from school, and can just generally be more present for their kids. This is all especially helpful for single parents. They can't not work but day care costs keep the family destitute unless that parent makes very good money.
They may have some policy disagreements—but even those are often theoretical. How many professionals who favor universal healthcare are in the 45% of employed Americans who are “very satisfied” with their own health insurance? https://www.pacificresearch.org/americans-are-overwhelmingly.... But fundamentally, they benefit from the highly financialized, globalized economy. Their human capital mostly insulates them from labor competition, and they reap the benefits of cheap foreign products and cheap services provided by non-unionized workers.
There’s no benefit to making everyone go to the office/job just because some people cannot do their jobs without that.
So if I can jockey my keyboard while sitting in my chair at home instead of taking the subway to do it while sitting in my employer's, that's a tiny bit more space for the guy who actually needs to go somewhere and work in person.
For a little while. Until the bus company decides not enough people are riding anf the 1/15 minutes bus becomes the 1/hour bus :/
With all due respect - so what? This seems like crab in a bucket mentality, just because some of us crabs managed to climb to the top of the bucket, we deserve to be pulled down because of some warped view of fairness? We should actually be trying to pull the rest of them out with us.
The wages versus capital distinction overlooks the nature of modern businesses, where ownership is diffuse, and businesses are run by a vast class of skilled professionals. For example, Tim Cook owns just 0.02% of Apple stock, but he runs the company. Many executives below him have tremendous power. Individual engineers can have a major impact on the direction of the whole business. Most importantly, the executive roles are typically filled from that same class of people.
These people aren’t Steve Jobs in terms of their ownership interest in the company, but they’re not Apple Store workers either. Their self interest is fundamentally more aligned with those of the capitalists than with the interests of labor.
Each step is just a small increment worse. But when you go from remote back to the worst level, it's jarring.
Objectively, transit has also gotten worse in some cities (NYC, DC) since COVID and still not recovered. So we are also returning to something worse than where we left it!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/09/22/met...
NYC they are running fewer trains so even if overall ridership is down, the trains are as crowded or more crowded than ever. Further in NYC due to homeless/migrant population growth falling through the cracks, the subway ends up being the shelter of last resort. Finally violent crime on the subway increased substantially over covid, and while down is still not at 2019 levels. So while waiting longer for a train, you are more likely to be dealing with a general sense of crime/disorder/etc.
I found this to be a depressing quality of life trajectory my coworkers were on when I worked in NYC. It was fun in my 20s without kids, but after that, it seems miserable.
Exactly. I've been working 100% from home since 2017 (3 years before covid). I'd rather take a 50% paycut than go back to the office.
Don't get me wrong. I did enjoy my life when I lived 15 min walk /5 min on a bike, from my job in a city. Before I got that job and I had to commute for 20 min I enjoyed it too.
But WFH beats that by a mile. I can live wherever I want (where cost of living is a lot cheaper than central London). I can just go down to my kitchen and make myself proper food any time (although I still miss certain of my favourite restaurants). And most importantly, I get a lot more time to myself and I'm much more effective at my work.
There is no chance in hell people like me will "go back to the office". Furthermore, companies that recognised the benefits early are reaping the benefits. Even just one. Having an order of magnitude larger talent pool by not limiting themselves to people from one place.
In today's marker that is characterised by permanent skilled labour shortage I can't imagine stupidest way to shoot ones company in the foot than trying to force people to "get back to the office".
People should stop saying this. Otherwise it will soon be the standard to take a serious paycut for WFH. .
Although most people don't work in San Francisco with inflated salaries so I'd still rather not make this the norm.
Previously I was priced out of the housing market, renting a small basement suite.
Now I own a large detached home, and thanks to the rental suite, spending less each month than I did before.
And this is all before you consider the equity myself and my tenant have paid down, or even any home appreciation. It's effectively doubled my TC since I moved.
on the Dir level? fine, different story, and being present to have official off the record chats may be required.
Just today I'm seeing stories about how the UPS truck drivers have managed to negotiate themselves pay and benefits up to $170,000/year. Would you rather make $150,000 a year at your desk at home, or $170,000/year schlepping packages for UPS?
If your answer is "$150K," you're taking a pay cut for a better work environment. Does that make you a sucker? No? Well, that's what WFH is about. If you have to leave your current job and find another one to make it happen, it could make sense as long as your paycheck and future prospects aren't too badly hurt. (And assuming you want to WFH, of course, which many people will not.)
I dunno, 7 is a lot of numbers. Work for 5 years, and be close to retirement. Definitely have my house/car and even a few luxury projects paid off in that time. I could work part time/contracts and let the rest of the money gather interest.
But I suppose you're basing this on reality, not a true ultimatum.
Aside from saving them rent on the office space, you should be able to expense several office-supply things that they would have provided previously. Office chair and desk, internet bill (pro-rated by usage), maybe printer ink.
Let's not get carried away. Back then you were paying for your own transportation costs and your commute time. Which is more valuable? Commuting to work every day to enjoy free office supplies and coffee, or WFH but paying for your own chair and desk?
I'd take the latter any day of the week as the chair & desk is a one time cost anyway and lasts 10+ years.
meanwhile, i bought a standing desk and it's mine, and it'll go to my next house and next job.
they can drop ship me a laptop and docking station, and if they wanna be nice throw me a couple hundred as a "office stiped", which would be way cheaper than buying business grade furniture.
My company has spent the last 8 months trying to explain why they want us back in the office for hybrid work. At first it was, "mentoring young staff." And lately it is, "It doesn't look great to potential clients when they visit an office and the office is empty." This new argument sounds like a BD edge case.
It seems to entirely be senior leaders and senior empty nesters pushing for this, while everyone else is not in favor.
In my latest performance review, my manager actually told he and other managers were being forced to ask the question "Do you consider WFH as part of your compensation" by HR/upper management to all his reports (including me).
I'm convinced this is in preparation to either lower salaries, or artificially lowering them by giving lower raises/bonuses to those who work from home since they are starting to call people back to office who aren't remote by title. Most people are back up to 3-days a week, even though 90% of them are very unhappy. I'm fully remote hence why he asked me this question and anyone else who is designated full remote.
Remote work was always an excuse to pay less, much to my chagrin. The fact is that as remote work became more popular, with the increase in positions, pay has actually increased. I'm not surprised that more people are seeing pushback on in the office vs remote compensation as this has been the standard play for years.
I find it doubly frustrating since remote employees are less of a cost sink due to less office space and all the costs that come with it. Remote employees are the most efficient type of employees from that perspective and so it always felt like such a flimsy excuse.
My suggestion is push back on any perceived pay gap between in office and remote work. The work done is at parity (if not more so due to efficiencies of remote work) and so there is no valid excuse to pay less.
Would be nice to see some level of turnabout for everyone that banded together to weather the storm, though.
However - I think some of the CEO class defenders shouldn't delude themselves as to why these people have 5 homes. It is not because they take a paltry 15 days paid time off per year in which they use those homes. They have the flexibility to dictate their schedule, and they use that flexibility to be where they want, when they want.
At one fund I worked they Dual-HQd NYC & Miami (plus they all keep a Greenwich footprint) so that some of the execs could sleep outside NY State for statutory 183 days/year and avoid NYS/NYC 10-15% income tax on high earners. Plus they maintained their country homes outside the city.
If you make $5M/year, the 2nd/3rd/4th home start to pay for themselves with those economics.
Sleep in Greenwich Friday to Tuesday. Monday work from CT office. Blade to midtown office Tuesday AM. Sleep in your condo Tuesday/Wednesday and then back to Greenwich Thursday night to work remote Friday. Next thing you know you're in Manhattan for a paltry 2 nights/week, maybe not even every week if you go do a Miami 2 weeks/month, or for majority of winter, etc.
A large company can probably do that with smaller offices or with setting up the coworking spaces themselves and renting the spaces left without occupants.
The commute is not bad when they are localized due to the team members having worked together in the past.
You never have to move to the exurbs though :)
Most of our C-Suite doesn't live near an office. Or, to be specific WE MOVED HQ to where they wanted to live.
We have other VPs and whatnot who live not near an office, or have winter/summer homes they go back and forth from.
Meanwhile our mandatory "3 days a week in the office" starts September.
The guys who get to choose the office locations happen to choose ones that are good for the locations of their home(s). Also, a reminder that C-suite guys that have multiple homes do in fact actually use those multiple homes.
How do they do so? They have flexibility!
There were always times I needed to be present in person and I never scoffed at those. What I found recently, is employers are trying to shift from one extreme (fully remote) to the other. I hope we land back in the middle because I'm happiest when no one tells me what to do. I want to be treated like an adult and measured on merit and performance, not physical attendance.
One remote work hater I really like to listen to is Scott Galloway, that keeps on harping that remote work is horrible but doesn't even live in the same country where he's running his business anymore. Flexibility for me but not for thee.
We'll see what happens in 20 years. But my money is on a resurgence of the rural village and a lot of empty office towers.
This is a key part of the discussion.
Pre-covid, I spent ~90 minutes one way to get to the office (this included a transfer from train to subway + 10 minute walk) and used to do it every day. At the time, I thought nothing of it since it was time to read/write code/watch a movie etc.
Now, I find it hard to imagine I spent ~3 hours/day commuting but part of me also misses the time to myself but it's balanced out by seeing the kids more etc.
Why on Earth would you accept an office attached to your home?! Seems like the worst of all options...
During covid having a place I can shut the door on at the end of the day, was amazing. I watched friends work from kitchen tables, while I had my own office in the garden.
For a while it did 'spoil' it as a playroom/fun room - but I pretty quickly learnt to make it work for me.
Having an office attached to your house is amazing (and is the largest drag for me returning to the office).
But I've been looking for work for 4 months, and it's a hard line to hold.
Fully remote jobs have gotten scarcer, and there's more competition for them thanks to this year's layoffs.
I.e., when the two of you are finally home alone and awake, because school is in session.
I suspect for some marriages, WFH has been a real blessing.
He used it to his advantage to show his face in the office, but rarely ever put in a full day. So sure he might show up on reports as being a 2-3x/week attender while others were doing 0-1, but many of those were morning-only, afternoon-only, or drop-ins for an in-person meeting of importance. Plus the occasional Friday solitude getaway to the empty office.
To his credit he really put no RTO pressure on us relative to his management chain.
I really don’t get when people defend WFH as a Holy Grail and complain that are catalogued as lazy or freeloaders, only to become fierce critics and cataloging anyone who prefers going to the office as boot-lickers or mediocre middle-management (not your post SteveBK123, but a common attitude across this type of thread)
Everyone has different circumstances, different jobs, and our minds work differently. Let’s live and let live.
That said, five minutes means one could come home for lunch.
But anyway, five minute walk to work is highly unlikely; a lot of people (most? citation needed?) have a commute to work, either driving or public transit. I'd rather have a nice private office or small team room than a big open and loud office space.
Long time ago I used to rent a room in a shared house 5 min walk from work. My housemates were all cool people, but working on a laptop sitting next to the bed I slept in every night would e far worse for me than just going to the office. But this was decades ago. I can understand why someone in such position would prefer an office.
But if you can have a house, and you're mid/senior in your role there is nothing better than wfh.
Also I've recently noticed a disturbing trend. Companies advertising 100% remote work, then you go through the whole recruitment process and at the very end they tell you. BTW, it's not 100% wfh. You gotta come to the office 1 day per month (sometimes even 1 per week). Anyone looking for real wfh job should be aware of such tricks to nip them in the bud early on.
This would have been much more uncomfortable in a smaller 2BR apartment and almost unmanageable in any space smaller than that.
Given my space, my WFH desk is much crappier and smaller than my personal one, but still so much better than losing my life commuting.
It's much easier for some to have a complete separation of work and home spaces. Also a change of scenery in the morning and getting to move a bit before starting to work is nice.
If you work 5 mins from your home you can just walk there for lunch. No need to bag a lunch, no?
But at home I have side projects or learning projects. I get the 3 hours back and can spread them throughout the day. One hour in the morning, another one when I'm bored or tired of the job etc. If I go to the office it's nothing but a rather unappealing job domain and nothing else. Too tired in the evening to learn anything anymore, too stressed and still sleepy in the morning as well.
So fuck the office, they'd have to pay me 50% more to compensate for the time lost in transit and I would still not take it.
In mine I have music playing, I have a guitar for when I need to stop thinking about a problem, I have a bookshelf of books I love, I have a plant I care for, I have my own whiteboard, I have artwork, I have a balance board, and (fortunately) I have an amazing view. When I need a break, I can close my door to read, watch something, call a friend, or take a nap.
Now I don’t find myself watching videos, napping, or playing guitar all that often, but I don’t when I’m working from home either.
>> In mine I have music playing, I have a guitar for when I need to stop thinking about a problem
I had a chessboard in my office at one time. It was basically a decoration, I think it was a secret santa gift or something, and it was never used until another guy and I started playing once every other week or so, at lunch.
One day, over lunch, we were playing a game (and eating at the same table), and something $PRODUCTION crashed. Someone came into ask about the problem, we stopped what we were doing, and fixed it.
Sometime after that, something else crashed, and then it became, "All they are doing in there is playing chess, no wonder x isn't working!".
I took the chessboard home.
I can see plenty of people who are enjoying WFH, but would be willing to return to the office if they no longer had to work in a cube farm, but could have their own private office, that they could decorate to their taste, and where they could play their own music. And, perhaps most importantly, have a door that they could keep closed so that if anyone wants to interrupt them, they actually have to knock first.
As someone who has done a 30-minute commute to a cube farm, a 45-minute and a 5-minute commute to a private office, and WFH, there's basically no reasonable amount of money you could pay me to go back to a cube farm, but if I didn't have specific personal reasons for wanting to remain fully remote, I would be very willing to consider another job in a private office.
A cube farm is massively preferable to open offices. I never want to go back to working in an office but I especially never want to go back to an open office. The mixture of seeming too available, loud people all over the place, zero privacy, etc were revolting to me.
In my experience with offices at a couple of different companies (of much different sizes), the social convention was door open unless you were on a private call/meeting or really needed to go heads down on something. It would actually have been considered rude to knock on the door because they door would obviously not have been closed unless there was a good reason.
A lot of people seem to imagine that offices mean you shut the door and don't interact with anyone and that's never been my experience.
Frankly, I consider the expectation of constant availability to be another abusive part of work culture, very closely related to the "everyone must return to the office so I can see for myself that they are in their seats (which means they must be working)" mindset. Let people keep their doors closed to promote focus.
Or those with distractions at home. They can WFS, but I can see them being ok returning to an official office.
i still go only once a week.
why? because i have more comfort, more silence and, most important, more privacy, at home.
I could do an office again though if it weren’t too far from home. Working from home can be strangely lonely, maybe I should just be better about organizing co-working with friends virtually or in person.
Anyway, I'm thinking more about city dwellers who generally live in apartments.
That’s a lifestyle that makes significantly less sense for remote workers in the long run though.
This is the original one I saw when I considering doing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pABvTWSxOes
One more DIY with fabric and rock wool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPEouyiEt3Q
I had to wade through a lot of conflicting advice when I did it.
I suspect a big factor is that most people do only a handful of implementations, and might overgeneralize the lessons they draw.
Also, for a given structure and environment, most people can only afford to try 1-2 soundproofing approaches (wall structure, ventilation, etc.) So it's hard to know if they picked a good point in the tradeoffs space.
I think the sweet spot is at most 2-3 people in a space. That could work well collaboratively if they do the same thing but not if there are going to be lots of conflicting meetings.
I think I would be more amenable to working at an office if the experience felt like more than being in a high school computer lab. "Just wear headphones", imo, is not an adequate response to complaints of the office being noisy. Want me to stay in the office longer? Uninstall that piece of shit kombucha tap or sparkling water dispenser (neither of which are even operational most of the time) and replace it with another fridge so I don't have to cram my food into the one fridge shared by the entire building. Make an adequate number of power outlets available. Don't provide free snacks and then eliminate them to cut costs. If I have a designated spot, do your best not to move me around every few months.
Yet every office I have worked in embodies various failures that diminish the experience, making it hard to deny that working at home can be a lot better for many people. How am I supposed to feel dignity in my line of work as a senior engineer when I don't even get my own cubicle; meanwhile, people I know who make a third of my salary get their own cubes! And these companies are wondering why their employees would rather build their own private office at home? Are you kidding me?
I don't even need a corner office with a door that closes and a personal secretary. Just give me something more than what I would get working out of a Starbucks, and allow me to feel like the professional I am, as opposed to a replaceable cog, which is everything the modern tech workplaces symbolizes.
At my current job, there's something ironic about that. The people who never come back to the office despite being allowed to are also the people who live the closest to the office. (We have a big office that allows people to come back but is totally optional. Hotel desks for the entire office basically.) I asked one of them why he doesn't come in and he told me, "The reason I moved so close to the office in the first place is so I can minimize my commute. Now that I don't have to, why would I do the commute at all?"
I think some people are just completely dead set against commuting or even working from an office. Another coworker told me, "Do you know how great this is? I can do my laundry in between meetings."
From my experience, my employer's current situation is probably the most accommodating policy. If you want to work in an office, you can. If you don't, you don't have to. I do have coworkers who are actually suffering a bit from lack of interaction with other people but I think those people are starting to trickle back into the office for no other reason than for the socialization and interaction.
Since I live close to it, I never even though about doing this. And of course, the people that live the furthest away get the most value out of it. So, yeah, it's probably a very strong correlation, and not only for negative reasons.
So your office is crappy?
Similar story for my office. It's very close, but the facilities people made it terrible to work from. Why go in when I would get half as much work done?
At home I'm either working or not working. I don't have to wear my public face. Wearing a public face is, if not tiring, at least irritating, like a mild itch you're not allowed to scratch, even though you could, but you shouldn't.
Didn't mind working in the office, it was nice enough, coworkers are all friendly.
But having to live anywhere near my office in a high COL area means I was priced out of affording even a 500 square foot apartment. Going remote meant that same salary bought me a newly built detached 6 bedroom house.
I didn't mind the office, I minded being a poor renter instead of upper middle class. Office inconveniences pale in comparison.
WFH for 2012-2023 here.
With our first home purchase in 2018 being on the smaller size, and the introduction of our first child to the family in 2021, I started keeping an eye on nearby options.
In March of 2023, a perfect little spot opened up that could support me and another employee in the same town. Pitched it to our small company, and now I have a dedicated office that is a 4 minute walk away.
Cannot stress enough how impactful those few minutes are (or more, if I need to decompress more than normal) are for separation of concern between home life and work, especially with young children in the picture.
Still get to enjoy lunch with stay-at-home wife and kiddo almost everyday.
It also shares property with a great pizzeria and one of the best taproom/bottleshops in town, which is a great perk beyond my waistline and liver... looking forward to taking the new bike to the nearby bike trail when it isn't 110° everyday.
I'd like to do this as well.
It is a rather unique build done by a lawyer-turned-metalworks artist a little more than a decade ago. Multiple units with adjoining walls, each with a private patio, minisplits, and a rather raw aesthetic. Very high ceilings, plenty of outlets of various voltages/amperages available. Our neighbor makes bespoke cycling bags and such. Other tenants range from retail and services to private offices.
> and how did you pitch it?
The founder of the company lived here for many years, and paid for coworking access pre-COVID when it was still a startup (now general cloud/software consultancy for public health agencies and the like).
WFH and the vacation of many of our decent coworking spaces due to COVID took a toll on him, and moved to PHL about a year ago for a change of scenery / be closer to some of our larger clients.
With that context, it was pretty easy to pitch it as a physical "hub" for him when he visits family/friends, myself, and our other employee who lives in the same town. We still have a good physical location for our corporate entity, and the cost difference between 3x coworking offices at post-COVID rates was not too much for him to stomach.
> The other employee lived in the same town already?
Yes! We had become good acquaintances for a few years before COVID as he worked remotely for an organization in Ireland from the same coworking space.
When COVID hit, his team were among the first to be cut, and as his skills meant I would no longer be overextended between cloud and frontend, it was one of the easiest hires we've made to date.
Clean desk policy, no take-home printouts, clear whiteboards with confidencial information, etc…
I had a WFH employee who once burn himself at home while making coffee with his own coffee pot, and sue the company as he claimed was a job-related accident. We had to settle and pay him, or have Unions making a big fuzz.
There are all sort of people in the workplace, and policies try to accommodate not only CEO whims, but also to manage a crowd full of many different types of people.
Having worked DoD in the past, I can completely echo that it would be quite a challenge to explore something like this for many organizations.
> I had a WFH employee who once burn himself at home while making coffee with his own coffee pot, and sue the company as he claimed was a job-related accident. We had to settle and pay him, or have Unions making a big fuzz.
"This is why we can't have nice things," personified.
been remote since 2015. absolutely agree with this, even though I'm still remote. the only way I'd go back to the office is if it's close to that experience -- a 5-10 min walk away.
living close to a coffee shops, gyms, and other amenities meant that I did a "morning commute" to get coffee most mornings -- more expensive than petrol, but still cheaper overall compared to driving. multiple choices, so could hit the local as well as chain shops.
a gym and grocery store being nearby also meant that I could so an "evening commute" and workout, snag groceries, run errands, etc.
having young kids makes it great too... most of the time. it's nice to be able to walk upstairs and play with the wee one.
If companies want people back in the office when they could WFH instead, they're going to have to compensate them, time and costs, for the commute.
Apply marginal thinking the way economists do. People's propensity to return to the office falls on a spectrum ranging from 0 ( the people who are already back in their cubicles ) to 9 ( "You'll need a SWAT team to get me back to the office" ).
A 5 on that scale is a marginal worker. Provide an incentive for them to return, like a nice office, and they become a 4 and return to the office. Now give a nice office to a population of 1000 workers who are distributed evenly over the above spectrum. They all move down by 1, and about 1/10th of them return to the office.
Saying "People who like WFH will never want to return to the office" is only true of the 8's and 9's, not of the marginal worker. They are the ones who respond to incentives.
So yeah, it's almost 6PM, I'm at home and starving still because I was lazy to cook.
I think the reason is my team is fully remote for me. Not having to worry about food would be nice :)
Was working in DC on Capitol Hill. Had a 30 minute bike ride to work right down the center of the national mall. Had a private office half the size of my apartment with a really comfy couch and a few well worn armchairs. Coworkers brought their dogs and one liked to sit on my feet under the desk. Office was chock full of interesting people, activists, authors, photographers, lawmakers wealthy folks, connected folks. After a few hours working on the databases and maybe getting roped into some tech support in the Capitol building, the CEO would grab a beer from the keg which was the signal for the rest of us that the afternoon had become wet. Then I would meet up with friends for some kickball on the Mall, then swing back through the office after a few hours at the bar for a nightcap. Very occasionally I slept over on the couch but there was a shower in the office and I kept a few changes of clothes there so it was all good.
this core preference in environment and vibe is the main difference between the 2 camps. I was desperate to be in an office where there was a buzz of high energy and a go, go, go environment like skydivers jumping out of a plane. Would still prefer a private office though so get deep focus when necessary.
Not sure if its nature or nurture, since I grew up doing team sports year round.
I'd much rather just find another job entirely than come back to an office, and I imagine a lot of people feel the same. I think part of the problem is that a lot of companies don't really appreciate what people would be giving up, or that they see much less value in it than the people they're trying to convince.
You'd need to offer something pretty special just to compensate for the cost of the commute, let alone the time lost (which for a lot of people is significant).
While I do agree with your overall premise, having had offices at multiple roles over my career, it is a major improvement over cubicles and open office.
Having a space to work in complete, uninterrupted quiet is wonderful. The simple social signal of the door being opened or close implying availability to chat works great to balancing heads down time and chat with colleagues time. Have a white board of your own that you can stare at throughout the course of a project, that evolves with discussions has not be replicated yet either remote or in a shared space.
You can also get pretty wild with customizing an office for comfort. I used to know many people that brought their own lighting in, completely solving the problem of constant overhead fluorescence. And brewing your coffee the way you like it in your own space in the afternoon is very refreshing.
Even given all that I'm sure many people would still prefer remote work (I would at this point), but I can image a fairly large number of people that would be very interested in a set up like this. It also mean your home is completely work free again.
I actually enjoyed going to that office because it was very quiet and I didn't have a proper workspace at home. My commute was ~30mins with a motorcycle. Yes, sometimes the A/C or the lighting must be compromised with other coworkers, but that's still okay if you get to socialize in exchange.
The major aspect was obviously noise. But I also felt dignified in that office. It was not status like C-Suite offices, just feeling a nice environment instead of being crammed in a chicken coop.
In my time at Apple I had a real office with a real door for about half of my time. Of that only about half was an office I didn't have to share with someone else. The lone offices were the most productive I ever was while working there. I could close the door and go unbothered for hours. I turned off the lights and had my own lamp that was much more comfortable.
Sharing an office with coworkers wasn't bad on its face but it's difficult to focus if the other person is talking with someone else. It's all manageable but objectively worse than a single office. The open floor plan at Apple Park was just fucking horrible. Constant distractions all day. Sure you could collaborate but when trying to actually get work done it was in spite of a hundred visual and audible distractions. I'm sure I distracted others inadvertently as well.
A giant spaceship of a campus and they couldn't manage to give everyone a private space. Just the stupidest design for a building.
While spending more time at home may lead to a marginal increase in expenses for utilities, compared to the cost of commuting they would be a rounding error.
The other issue is that we're a lot more globally distributed now. The 9:00 I chose to go to today had nine other people in it. Three in India, one in the UK, one in BC, two in the midwest somewhere, and two permanent WFH. Meeting with these people is always going to mean putting on a headset and looking at a screen, no matter how diligent I am at getting in to the office every morning.
I hate open floorplans for working (fine if I'm walking around to get coffee or something). The biggest draw of WFH is that I don't have to put on headphones just to get some quiet time.
If I were to take a job downtown, my wife would have to get a different job, we'd have to pay for some level of child care, arrange transportation for school, drop various activities, buy a second car so I could drive to the train station (which comes with maintenance, insurance, registration, etc).
The amount of money that would make any of this worth it is not small. You'd have to cover the additional expenses and then write a big check on top to compensate for disrupting our way of life.
I worked for a company that gave everyone an office. Just long hallways of offices with floor to ceiling windows and a door. It was a startup that grew to 200 people and was the best job I've had, a large part due to the atmosphere, and part of that was the office setup.
When my current workplace shutdown the office for covid, they sent out an email asking for suggestions for a new office setup. I told them to make everyone offices. We have a huge open floor and it wouldn't take much effort, just money. Money they are planning to spend anyway. Instead they raised the height of cubicle walls, added a ton of glass (disease spread fear I guess), and gave everyone whiteboards and motorized standup desks.
Now on my required days in the office I am annoyed by the constant chatter and noises around me which I cannot escape even with headphones.
So no matter how nice a place it is, and how close to my house you put it, it's never going to be right on that good right point break in Oaxaca where I like to spend my winters and also at the AirBnB next to Green Lake where I can visit my friends and family in the summer.
It's also not in any of the other places I choose to set up shop at for a few months at a time to do my thing.
So it doesn't matter that it has free food, a masseuse, and is in a really cool neighborhood where I'd actually like to spend some time. I still don't want to commit to living there 50 weeks a year.
That's why I'm remote.
I'm more productive, I find new ways to make myself valuable in some of that free time whereas in the office I'd just be bored out of my skull instead because I had to keep my butt in a seat to make someone happy.
Fortunately my management is looking into downsizing leases and recouping savings instead of forcing people into the office. They've waffled a little about pulling people back in but they just aren't that serious about it in general.
I suggest you consider behavior on the margin. Despite the fact that there are lots of people vocal about how much they love/hate RTO, there are also people that are indifferent or slightly prefer one or the other. Improvements in office quality will meaningfully persuade some number of people on the margin.
It’s an open question how steep the curve is (ie how much office improvement required to persuade 1% of people to change their mind) but I think it’s myopic to just look at the partisans.
All that said, sure, there is a nontrivial percentage who you couldn’t change their minds with something like a dedicated office. But I think your claim is too strong that it’s binary and all WFH likers will not be persuaded by this proposal.
That employers aren't jumping for joy that they can offer such a massive benefit for essentially free (if not save money themselves) is astounding.
Its not good for the environment, bad for my company and terrible for me.
It's clear, forcing a commute is an implicit paycut.
Disagree with caveats. A nice private office makes a world of difference. I'll do a lot (in time and/or money) to have a nice private office where I can actually work (which requires silence).
Working remotely is awesome but not literally from home. With a family, that's too distracting. Since the pandemic, I rent a small private office walking distance from home. It's a great arrangement, I'm very close to the house, can walk or bike there, private window office. But the downside is that it costs money (lease, utilities, internet). And for meetings I'm still stuck in a little zoom box.
If the company offered a nice private office, I'd take that. I'd save the costs and I could have a silent private space to work but still be able to step outside and have meetings in person. The tradeoff is a longer commute but as long as it's not too horrible, I'd take it.
My office is a 20 (tarmac) - 25 (forest) minutes bike ride. I don't have any problem working from home but if the weather isn't too bad I go to the office regulary - even if I sit there in the same remote meetings all day as I do at home. For me the change of the scenery and the "off" time by doing the commute are worth it.
Going to move out of range of an office for this company in a year. Thinking about joining a coworking space then for it.
That probably sidesteps a lot of the guesswork about what makes a person most productive.
Layouts with many closed offices would cost far more to build, and take up more square footage to host the same number of employees.
At a time where savvy businesses have dropped their commercial leases / gone full remote, and the more conservative / less accepting of change ones are left holding the bag, I would not expect anyone to make big investments into office space.
The in-office days are social collaboration days so it doesn't make sense to keep people in separate boxes for them. Then people's home office setups are their cubes if they want them, which most people seem to.
This doesn’t sound like a stable equilibrium to me; more like a transition to full remote that you do when you’re waiting for your lease to run out. Not even having your own permanent desk sounds like utter hell.
Even ignoring increased happiness, this enables giving employees their own tools: keyboards, chairs, monitors, workstations, tea, oscilloscopes, papers, etc.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90285582/everyone-hates-open-pla...
I've also worked in a big open space where, while all five teams worked on the same product, each individual team had their own section. But for that one, you could hear the next desk block over talk about football and another block talk about what THEY're working on, which is highly distracting.
Another one was an open office across three floors with a central auditorium (that is, big open central space cutting across all floors), which in theory would be bad but they had enough noise padding and ceiling-high walls / whiteboards between the blocks to not be an issue.
Another one was one where we were asked for input; they initially wanted to make it an open space, but we convinced them to divide it up into rooms instead. They ended up being rooms with glass walls, some matt glass, but that was enough for team privacy and limited noise.
My current spot has a mostly open plan space, but they have heaps of noise padding; felted panels on walls and dividers, in between rows of desks, and desks arranged in groups of 6-8. It's manageable, although unfortunately the walkways are in between the desks so people passing by having conversations is annoying, and the meeting rooms' noise insulation is inadequate. That said, we're only there two days a week so it's manageable.
It's either going to be working from home or a new employer for me.
It seems downright trivial to me that giving employees 4' desks packed side to side, back to back in rows requires less square footage and no walls, vs. an office.
(And thus, the race for short-term gains in terms of less real estate trumped the long-term gains of SWE being able to think, and the race to the bottom began. It seems to me the costs of open-office are all after the build out: lower morale, higher noise, lower productivity, faster disease transmission, etc.…)
Are you even reading the comments about studies showing the lost productivity (and therefore revenue) caused by open office spaces?
I didn't say it wouldn't cost one penny more than an open office, I said it wasn't wildly different. So many buildouts go halfway already with the tiny "phone rooms"; it's not in any way a budget buster to keep that idea going, except around a central shared space where meetings can take place.
I.e., the claim, as I read it, is that construction of an open office is more expensive than a non-open floorplan, per employee.
(If you consider that, yes, I think open office is the long-term worse option, and the parenthetical in my comment pretty clearly denotes that.)
> I didn't say it wouldn't cost one penny more than an open office, I said it wasn't wildly different.
This still isn't clear to me. An office is probably, what, 10' square, at least? Google thinks, "The North American office size average is currently 150-175 square feet per employee. Open office spaces for tech companies typically use even less at 125-175 square feet per person". That's considerably more room than an open office floorplan, which is probably closer to 4'x4', maybe 4'x5'.
> So many buildouts go halfway already with the tiny "phone rooms"
My company had 3 of those, back to back to back, occupying what like 30–40 sq ft total? That's hardly "halfway".
You asked me to justify it, I did, and you replied with a generic moan. Alright?
That figure absurd in the context of an open office floorplan, and I suspect they're doing some "damned lies" statistics to arrive at it, such as amortizing the common area across the occupancy. I think every open office floorplan I've been in has had 4' desks. The next desk is flush against mine, and there was someone sitting directly behind me. At best, that's 16 sq ft. Generously 20. I have no idea how you arrive at ~150 sq. ft.
(Still don't think it will happen - but that shift occurred when leases on commercial real estate were at all time high)
I think that it was just as motivated by the way you can walk a potential investor (or a worried current investor) through them, and make grand gestures with your arm indicating all of the busy beavers working on making things happen. Then the group can be walked from rockstar ninja to rockstar ninja, looking over shoulders at unintelligible screens, while having smoke blown up their asses.
An open-plan office is primarily a theatrically staged office. 20 years ago I was paid as a temp to sit in one and type random numbers into a noisy electric printing calculator while a random spreadsheet was on the screen. After a few hours, a small group walked in, led by a man who was obviously giving a presentation, with wide gestures of his arms. They were in the room for two or three minutes before being led out. Twenty minutes after they left the room, we were mostly dismissed, except for the younger guys (like me) who were offered a few hours more work moving boxes.
The end of free money might make open plan offices more popular among a certain type of company.
https://news.yahoo.com/activate-space-wework-founder-adam-18...
Wall Street tech it's pretty typical to do your own SRE/L3 and honestly even L2/L1. Everything from business user "hey how do I.." customer service questions down to "the server is on fire, alerts are coming in .. ".
Open floorplans mean even if you have an agreed PagerDuty type rotation, everyone gets sucked into or distracted by it. It's hard not to want to lend a hand when you see your buddy getting blown up by some difficult user or your inbox/slack is getting filled up with alerts.
We had in sequential rows - Level1 support, R&D, Development. Sat like this for years.
So R&D was sandwiched between the team that was constantly on contentious urgent calls, and the dev team they ran over to ask for help.
Best open floorplan seat I ever had was in a far corner way off from most dev, sat near a trader who spent all day on the phone yakking. Just like a total storyteller kind of guy, incredible yarns were spun .. kind faded into interesting background music for me. Like leaving the History Channel on in the back. Philosophy, science, history, movies, politics.. etc.
If you hire explicit 20% staff to do operational tasks, and also wall off a fixed rotating 5% of your dev team to assist them.. then you've made a conscious decision on resource allocation of 25%. If the other 95% of the dev team is getting interrupted every 30minutes by "questions" then your operational staff/rotation is not resulting in better runbooks, etc.
If you want better SLA and your operational staffing is not sufficient, then you should see your SLA breach, make staffing/process changes, etc.
When development just papers over these issues you end up with great operational metrics and bad development metrics, so then everyone can be even more upset at dev!
If the oncalls don't have the knowledge to solve the issues they encounter, they need to escalate them and somebody needs to put more time in developing a more comprehensive knowledge base for them to reference, not just "steal" time from other company functions.
If you want to be metric driven, it's important that the processes be allowed to fail. Otherwise you are robbing Peter to pay Paul, and the KPI that looks BAD is not where the process is failing necessarily, but where the time got stolen from.
You are saying that people will be blamed for taking too much time to an example saying it would took 10h of someone's time instead of 5 minutes. Why the company will value more "your" deadline than "the operation" deadline? You are basically saying you are okay with "operation" being the target of people unhappy as long as they are not unhappy with you.
You are saying people should escalate. But on the example, the person who has the solution is the person you say should not be disturbed. So you are just asking to disturb uselessly people who cannot help, so your solution is even worse.
You are saying more time is needed to develop a more comprehensive knowledge base. But who should take the time to fill up the knowledge base if not the people who have the answers, which, in this example, is the people you say don't have time. (and moreover, funnily, those people complaining to be distracted are also very very often not doing any effort to share their knowledge somewhere accessible).
I'm slowly getting very irritated by the whole WFH debate: there is way too much arguments that boils down to "the problem is that _I_ am the one that people distract, so let's do my solution that is sooooo much smarter, let's do something where _I_ am happy even if it makes the situation worse for everyone else". That slowly creates this impression that a lot of pro-WFH are just little kids.
Having proper knowledge bases and procedures, including how the ask "the team"/seniors "ad-hoc" questions and get feedback reasonable fast is what you want to have to solve that problems IMHO. Because that also tends to work if e.g. some people are sick or gone (knowledge bases) or can't come to the office (e.g. sick kids at home).
Through most important I would say is that communication in remote work is very different to office work and "just throwing slack into the mix" and doing the rest like before isn't going to cut it.
And yes that needs proper tooling, too and yes most of the tooling marked for this purpose today is .... pretty bad, sometimes utter garbage creating more work then they save time. Similar the part of procedures is often completely ignored, too.
It's very easy to say "hey, can you share your screen" on a remote conversation. While in person that will require moving at minimum 2 people (often more) into a compressed setting with bad visibility at some random place of the building.
I am on a distributed team with no in-person interaction, and I love commuting even though I don’t see anyone I work with. But, I hate the physical space.
But "collaboration"....
I had a lot more of the stuff that required focus at the beginning of my career. In my last few jobs it's been more about hooking together subsystems from 11 different teams/companies in six different timezones.
Most bugs seem to happen because of misalignments or miscommunication. Intense focus just isnt as important any more.
To me, though, that calls less for private offices and more for effective async collaboration. With 11 teams, nothing is going to get done over meetings except some basic alignments. The actual work of integration needs to be fully documented and agreed upon in writing in a way where provider and consumer can look at while actively developing, like a living API spec with specific schema, response and error codes etc. all laid out. If any team fails to adhere to the spec, well, the spec is right (as of any given version).
Even if we were all in person in the same conference room talking for hours one afternoon, none of that is going to stick around more than a week or two before some detail diverges.
The meetings are perhaps good for managers to walk away with some basic summary of a decision, but the actual engineering and IT work can't happen in them. I wish more managers would realize that and give teams more time to actually collaborate through individual async contributions, not just sitting together in a room -- there's a big difference.
Turns out, it was just advertising that made the cash all along. The silly "collaborative" environment had nothing to do with it.
The peons all had desktop computers, while middle management had clunky laptops with docking stations. You knew who the executives were by their small laptops that were clearly designed for traveling by the jet setting class.
I’ve come to think that the ultimate power move for the movers and shakers at a company, would be to have a traditional office with a desktop computer that they cannot take with them. I remember being excited the first time I was issued a corporate laptop. I felt like I had finally arrived, and finally was one of the powerful and privileged. Now, I look back on those days of desktop computing, where I could not take my computer home, and where there was no expectation that I would randomly work from home as the very height of luxury.
I had them from 2001-2014, 2017-2018.
Later worked as a govt contractor and could leave my laptop at the office 90% of the time. Never realized how good that was until I switched back to a job with an on-call rotation.
I personally don't mind sharing office space with less than about four coworkers. In a small(!), shared office there is enough social pressure to keep concentration periods quiet, or agree on shared music choices, &c. and still maintain the advantages of having what amounts to a team meeting space for collaboration in the same footprint.
I don't think single person rooms are necessary (but better), but open office is definitely not grate and without noise canceling headphones completely unbearable.
With rooms with small number of people (2 or much worse 4) it also depends _a massive lot_ on the layout. But also the other person, i.e. do they constantly click their pens, do they interrupt you all the time, do they have ad-hoc meetings with other people at their desk etc. etc. The problem is such factors are hard to "control"/estimate/plan with.
Through similar considerations apply to home office too, i.e. people need room in their home which can become office space. E.g. working in you bedroom comes with a huge number of problem, which can be overcome, sometimes, but it's IMHO not as simple as "just" having a proper desk and chair.
Its common sense that for work requiring deep periods of concentration, eliminating distractions is key. Easiest way to eliminate distractions in an office environment is being in a room behind a closed door. Cheapest way to do that these days is WFH, assuming people have that space where they live.
Companies can't fit enough of those in as it stands. How would they do it for every employee? The square footage needs would be huge.
Open office floorplans take ~75 sqft per employee. An office would take ~150.
I vaguely remember IBM cubicle farms from visiting their offices as a child. They took up a ton of space, requiring huge office towers. That means lots of elevator trips and conference room needs.
Elsewhere boiled frog and class have both been mooted with regards to office. That's definitely my experience from working the last few decades. I started my career having an office for almost every job. But that slowly fell away as corporations discovered cubes save money and is now completely gone where I work now unless you are very senior indeed. We're talking there are only a handful of offices per floor vs nothing but offices on every floor.
Class comes in to play because at least where I work the people setting policy for the average worker to sit at a cube not only have their own offices, they have their own building! One that you don't get access to by default. Yet, as cost-saving-measures we've enabled people to collaborate across regions and timezones to the point that coming in to work in a cube farm is actually counterproductive. Very few people are customer facing and need to get face time with clients to do deals. The rest of us can happily WFH. Perhaps as Wall Street slowly weans itself from CRE, that will in fact be the next benefit that's pulled back: sorry, you need to be really senior to come into the office / square footage is for closers. I can hardly wait.
I’ve tuned out the entire wfh debate for this reason. We just need some patience and we’ll have an answer. There’s no need for all the angry debates.
Where does this come from? It's something that sounds right, but then I look back at my parent's office jobs and pop culture from 20+ years ago and it doesn't line up. Open office spaces have been extremely common for a very very long time, with private offices reserved for higher level people.
In the first case I shard a closed door office with one other person. Each of us had a large desk, bookcase and great space.
In the second case I had my own office with my own desk and even a table with two chairs for receiving people.
I was pretty low in the institute food chain. Only the PhD students were lower, and they shared 2 or at most 3 person closed door offices .
Its perfectly doable.
Employees have realised we are equally as effective working from home and simply do not want to waste 2+ UNPAID hours of every day travelling to a corporate building for the sake of it.
Nor do people want to spend £10+ a day on food and drinks which they have in their fridge, at home.
Then there is also the social pressure of having to go for after work socials at the local boozer/cafe/restaurant, or be seen as the person who never joins the team for social stuff.
There are so many benefits to working from home which reach beyond personal and into society/the environment but very few benefits to going into an office. The one reason which supporters of the original office model tout is ‘collaboration’ but I call BS.
With today’s tech we can literally be collaborating in real-time with people from any corner of the planet from the comfort of our home office. How would that change in office?
Then you have the whole “oh, but, learning” as if it is simply impossible to part with knowledge via any medium other than a coworker’s breath hitting another’s eardrum.
Long commutes aren't practical when the roads are bad and the fastest mode of personal transportation is a horse.
Not only is it unpaid, it actually costs the employee money. In the worst case you need a car + the insurance, fuel and maintenance costs associated. In the best case you still need to pay for public transportation.
> Nor do people want to spend £10+ a day on food and drinks which they have in their fridge, at home.
Eating out regularly is also hazardous to your health. In my experience and opinion there is no such thing as a healthy dining option. There are varying degrees of poisonous; some options are certainly better than others; but if you're trying to be strict with your diet then forget eating out daily.
Then add the stress of a commute, workplace hazards, risks associated with commuting (I have a ZERO chance of getting killed in a car accident when I'm not travelling in a car), risks associated with communicable diseases and there is a case to be made that working in an office is actually hazardous to your health.
I say this as someone that loves working from home, but before I did so I would get thousands of steps in every day running towards the tube in London and around all the platforms. Dunno, maybe the positive health benefits of the steps are outweighed by how polluted the air in London (and likely even more so the tube) is.
But getting less steps in every day due to WFH is a real problem.
Edit: I will also point out that, in my opinion, when I'm choosing my own "WFH" arrangements, the onus is on me to make whatever choices suit my health and lifestyle. The employer has no obligation or responsibility to actively promote and encourage any lifestyle choices in my opinion (I actually get really annoyed when employers try to do this - just let me do my job and stay out of my personal life). But they sure as hell have a responsibility to reduce risk and hazards while on the job to every reasonable extent.
It is! The solution is to walk more and everyone gets to decide how, we're all grown ups.
6-8 weeks later, I wondered why my back hurt so damn much.
I had no idea how much my office’s slow elevators and 5 flights of stairs had been helping, had to manually add that back into my life.
“Come back to the office”
“We’ll be resuming periodic Active Shooter drills”
My home's policy is the active shooter gets shot immediately until they are no longer a threat.
It really is a weird reality we live in. You can't have all of the above and not be subjecting innocent people to violent criminals.
EDIT: In other words, you want dense cities? Then you need exemplary policing (both in terms of respecting citizens and keeping them safe).
You don't want police? Then people need to defend themselves and protect themselves.
You don't want people defending themselves in urban areas? Then you either have to have exemplary policing or less urban areas.
Don't want endless rural/suburban sprawl of people trying to escape crime? Then let people defend themselves or guarantee their safety through exemplary policing.
You can't have it all.
Commuting is also the most dangerous thing the average person does.
My wife only commutes in 4 days a month, and we still have dashcam footage from multiple close calls.
Recently a pickup truck cut someone off and hit their car, then proceeded to flee during rush hour. In traffic doing about 20MPH he swerves though a hair away from my wife at over 60MPH. She asked me to check the footage because the wind force was so strong she wasn't sure he didn't graze her.
Everyone looks at you crazy if you want to do an extreme sport, or even something like dirtbiking, but on my old commute there'd be 2-3 major accidents a week, a death every week or two, and nobody bats an eye. All so I can log into a data centre in North Virginia, that's nowhere near me.
I find it a lot more effective to msg technical questions instead of talking as I can reread a dense statement to help internalize and can also reference it later. WFH is great for learning
Today I pair programmed with a junior engineer across the country, he was in his own 21x9 setup, with his colour scheme, and I was on my laptop at the office with my light theme. It was perfect.
Junior: sure.
Slightly easier than traveling half a country!
I work remote and we don't have an office near me, but I'd love to go back. My job is where I spend the majority of my life. I like to get to know the people I work with by socializing over lunch, after work social events, etc. It's how I meet people.
Collaborating remotely also sucks. You miss out on a lot of non-verbal communication vs in person.
It's fine if it's not your jam and all of the above sounds like hell to you - it just means I don't want to work with you.
why? because i like having my own office, with a door that i can close. i like that i have my own setup, specifically designed by me so i can be as comfortable as possible. i love that i can stop work for 30min and just play with my dog or talk to my wife. oh, and i LOVE that i have privacy and i don't have someone looking at what i'm doing for 8h.
I like when it's quiet and private but I also like to come work from an office... Even though it's a basic small shared space and I literally work from my laptop (can't be bothered to hook up the screen etc). I do like not having to do it every day so I am free to come or not but I look forward to it usually. Or I may go out to that area for other reasons and just drop by.
The CEO said that we should just feel grateful that we have an air-conditioned office with snacks to come back to, poo-poo'd the concerns over: a lack of desks, the high noise-levels, the fact that most teams are distributed and so much of the open office is sitting in a remote zoom call talking over one another...
It's an incredibly hard environment to work in, and I was shocked that my company's CEO was so out-of-touch. Of course, he has a private office.
EDIT: Furthermore, I think some execs in tech companies (particularly those who never were engineers) really believe that's how software development happens! Like if you ask your company's CEO how software gets written, he pictures this Wall Street-like trading floor where engineers are yacking at each other, and having standup meetings and flailing about at whiteboards, and that's the sound/busy-ness of engineering being done!
It doesn't stop there. When I'm actually at work, I'm constantly waiting for hours for responses unless I pull in a manager to move things along. While it's true that with today's tech we can collaborate anywhere, that's not what I see happening in practice. I constantly see miscommunication and misunderstandings that normally would take 10 minutes at someone's cube to resolve that end up taking DAYS to resolve.
Edit: oh, it's probably the autism.
Mostly just shocked that this is what the site comes to, but I should have known better.
Yeah, I'm a dick online, it's an outlet. No hard feelings.
problems change, and some problems get worse while others get better. No need to be snide, it's honestly a thing to consider when talking about these situations.
I looked into the employment laws long ago about commutes to and from your home to your workplace. In general, you can't be paid for the commute unless it's to an "unusual" location more than a certain distance from your assigned workplace. It's been a long time since I read up on this subject, so I have no idea where I got the info.
I wonder if WFH will affect these rules - if your originally assigned office was "remote" and now you're forced to go in to a physical location, it could be argued that your employer changed your office location and will have to reimburse you for any commute.
There's nothing barring an employer from paying employees a "commute stipend". I think you probably read about what is taxable/nontaxable. It's probably taxable as income and that's the "can't", which isn't really a "can't" at all; it's more of a "won't because it's taxable".
from my experience, collaboration is nice, after you establish the design. WFH was awful for brainstorming and more than simple design/architecturing processes. That delay in communicating ideas on a virtual whiteboard can be felt.
Most were effectively fools to not realize that before Covid. Now when will they start realizing that out of the 5 days that they work in a week they are working without compensation anywhere from 2 to 4 days effectively for the Govt/corporate/overlords because of taxation at various levels. ( taxesincome/property/sales, inflation etc.)
To summarize the meta problem is the minions, not the corporations. In this day of automation most people should be having a lot of free time and relatively little work, but here were are in the year 2023 working and commuting our asses off.
My commute time has turned into workout and cooking time, (as expected I'm in the best shape of my life,) my only coworker is my spouse and best friend, I get to live closer to my family than ever before in a quiet, LCOL town, and the impact on my career and for the company has never been greater
You'll have to do a LOT better than my own closet to convince me that wasting my time commuting every day, from a place I don't want to live, to spend time in close proximity to people I might not care for would be a better proposition than the one I have now
Meanwhile startups who could never compete with FANG on pay are eager to swoop up talent at a discount.
TBH that's the part that scares me. I feel this is yet another avenue of socialization that is closing down in modern young adult life. People kept saying that the best place post college to meet friends is at work, and now some industries are going the direction where work may not even have coworkers in your area.
So where now if you don't drink? Hope to hit it off in some meetup with a person who shows up once? Community service simply so you aren't stuck in the house 24/7?
Local meetups, sports clubs, classes, hobby clubs (think board games, chess, ham radio, LARP), conventions, church if you're religiously inclined
And with the advent of the internet, there are forums, if not large social media groups, for all kinds of interests designed around connecting people. For example, I'm really into homebrewing consoles, so I'm in a few discord servers with others who share the same interests, and I like playing certain games online, so I keep contact with a few good people who I play with regularly
If all else fails, I find that most people get at least one acquaintance during their school years or still have family of some sort. Definitely ymmv if they were toxic in any way, but if not, you already have a foot in the door for maintaining a healthy connection to them
I apologize if this post sounds condescending or like I'm just preaching common sense, but sometimes it's easy to take these kinds of social groups for granted or overlook them in our hyperdigital age. There's so much toxic irony growing up as a millenial on the internet that made me think 'I'll never be like those losers' as a teen that evolved into 'Wow, they had it figured out all along' as an adult
Of course YMMV based on hobby, area, personality, and overall luck but: I haven't had luck with most of these and its not for the lack of trying
- I tried meetups for years pre-pandemic, and I could never quite get a constant connection going. "Flake" culture hit me hard whenever I tried doing something outside of the meetup. Post pandemic I can definitely tell a certain change has happened. I was optimistically hoping that maybe others would be more willing to go out and meet people live, but it seems to have had the opposite effect. Things simply feel more dead than before.
- Conventions theoretically sounded like the perfect situation... and I learned quickly that conventions are very much more "come with friends" sorts of fairs. You can still talk to people in happy hour, but not really expect anything deeper from a con. It seems you'd only go further if expecting a business connection, and I wasn't.
- Not particularly religious so church isn't an option. But after my current ordeals, I "understand" church now. It's not the kind of scene that is for me, though.
Classes are going to be my next faire once I get my finances re-stabilized. I tried a few online classes over the pandemic and they were about what I feared they'd be: go into a class with mostly cameras off, with some sort of discord/slack server that is mostly dead. So maybe live classes can get that feeling back.
>If all else fails, I find that most people get at least one acquaintance during their school years or still have family of some sort.
my old friends and family are fine. just long distance. So not really much option. Parents will contact me once a month but the thing with friends is that they can just pop in/out of chats/calls for months on end. Last non-local friend I talked to was in June? And it was a very brief chat. Time before that must have been in January or so.
>And with the advent of the internet, there are forums, if not large social media groups, for all kinds of interests designed around connecting people.
And to be frank I blame this for it being so hard to locally connect. I don't know how or who are the kinds of people that can talk on Reddit or Instagram or Hacker News and think "this person is someone I want to DM and talk to IRL". Forums just feel like the modern bar scene but online. Nice to share some shallow bonding with but at the end of the day they stay more as a bar friend. Not someone you'd bring around to your house or whatnot.
But at least bars had a face to connect to so I can see how those connections can form. Here, I'm not sure if I'm talking to a teenager or an older person who's well past making friends in lieu of family.
Remote work just makes that entire concern irrelevant. You can now live in the same location all your working years if you wanted. I see people talk about things like not having to commute as being big factors, but this benefit of not having to uproot I think is even more significant. Moving is terrible.
add kids and their schools & playgroups to the mix and the prospect of having to move becomes stressful enough to shorten the lifespan :)
They’ll have no choice but to work.
The expectation that it's going to be business as usual is just as short sighted and archaic with regard going into an office as it is with the idea of work in general.
I hope that by "trickle down to the workers" you aren't talking about technically illiterate workers who are not actively contributing to the automation effort. Unfortunately, they will receive some benefits as well, which is completely undeserved.
Sure, most of us have used copilot or other AI tools and seen some benefit. But there's a point of no return where suddenly those tools are able to do the other things we think only we can.
What happens then?
I'm talking about every single human being who has been brought into this world through no fault of their own and deserves our empathy on that point alone.
They'll have no choice...
- visa workers who have no bargaining power.
- younger people who are mobile
- moving offices to other places
There have been a few recent posts about struggling to find jobs... every time it turns out they are only applying to online listings for remote jobs, and have high standards. That's not a situation you're likely to stand out in.
I just don't see how global remote work as the norm is "pro worker" for anyone except those already well established in their career. Besides being more disposable, what happened to complaints about companies not providing job resources or training? Did we give up on that one?
It was necessary because many, many US citizens hit hard by The Great Depression figured out in that time how to live without depending on regular (or any) work.
Tent cities; hunting; scavenging; farming; begging; stealing; mutual aid networks; etc.
It wasn't the best life, but for many it was found to be preferable to the factories or the docks.
To even consider returning to living a life dependent on a wage, Uncle Sam needed to offer them a new deal.
But you knew that.
They give you the least they can possibly get away with.
Sure - some small subset of employers competing for the best employees will do this. But the average employer? I'm skeptical.
Employees are literally willing to pay employers to stay at home. The middle manager who is awful at their job and so insecure they need to "see employees working" is costing the business not just in talent acquisition but when pulling in the dregs they're paying a premium for it. The center cannot hold.
The center isn't just insecure managers. Plenty of people want to work together... together. I happen to run my team remote, but to reduce a real issue to insecurity is to starve the conversation of meaningful contributions.
What makes you think upper management in public companies isn't mos interested in self-preservation also?
The idea that upper management is some benevolent and wise dictator while middle management is a different class of incompetent morons is strange.
They're cut from the same cloth.
There's only so much upper management can do to set incentives (Goodhart's law) without micromanaging the middle managers.
Indeed, middle management is the plight of modern civilization. They'll probably get replaced by AI soon enough.
How many people do you think a VP-Eng or CTO can manage and still do the rest of the job?
So, I think we'll see 5 middle managers replaced by 1 or 2 middle managers + AI. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
Directors are often the group that is doing all the work nobody else is assigned. This goes from scheduling off-sites to preparing for audits to determining who handles unscheduled work that doesn't neatly fit into any one team. Directors are responsible for coaching engineering managers and are the backstop for problems outside the skill level of the eng manager.
They also handle project management because in smaller organizations, those positions have already been condensed.
Now, I think there's an alternative. You could hire an executive assistant that offloads some of what directors do. You could have a project manager or two handle all the projects across the portfolio for medium sized orgs - you're likely looking at 1.5 project managers for a director salary. (I think there is a place for AI there, but I actually think we have a better algorithm with Monte Carlo simulation.) You could have non-directors doing 85% of what a director does today, but you're still hiring high-skill people.
But if AI could replace a director then so could an EM. An EM can write a weekly status better than an AI and if a VP-Eng could rely on that, directors would have been replaced long ago.
It's a big deterrent IMO especially compared to Spain where healthcare is free
I don't think people do, but the issue is that they lack the bargaining power to do anything about it.
A tech worker making 6 figures? They aren't going to pushed around as easily as someone who is living paycheck to paycheck just for rent. they can forget to empathize for those who literally are chained to a job.
Yup, and now that employees have had a taste of freedom from that, they are very resistant to returning to that. Why is that hard to grasp for companies?
Absolutely, but that line has shifted majorly. To the point where it won't make sense for "average" employers to even try to bring people into the office. I'm not going to sink money into gas or public transportation just to be imprisoned in a meeting room when I could just take the call at home from the porch, a treadmill, or a couch.
You're obviously not an average employee then.
And employees should take the most they can possibly get away with.
When an employee doesn't behave like that, he is acting against his own interests.
The working class, low class, and middle class are all tax cattle. We have to take ostensibly dangerous commutes on highways with people too tired/too rushed/too busy to care. We have to eat inside of a certain timeframe, respond chipper no matter the circumstances, and when they're done with us they just let us go in a "right-sizing". We are subject to panopticon levels of surveillance with open offices, late nights because you don't want to appear to be the guy leaving early, etc. If you're lucky you get a few dozen hours a week with your family, maybe have some hobbies.
Cattle, imo, actually have it better because at least Farmer John drives them to work and they eat for free.
The Cxx's are always so chipper about coming into the office because they make, on average, 20x more than than the engineers doing actual work, and they can work from home/beach/yacht as they please.
Employers would be wise to treat employees with what they want. WFH is a net savings for them unless they're locked into 20 year leases. Many companies happen to get their lease through their VCs so it explains entirely why they are so keen on coming back to office. Employees will just leave to companies still offering remote. The problem for the employers who refuse to change? In a "fully" employed recession wages will not match the environment. If they cannot make up for lost wages with benefits like remote, paid healthcare, 401k match, etc they will die because without tax cattle, they are nothing.
This was simply the cattle waking up and realizing that they are the ones with the actual power. Any power a CEO claims to have is simply voodoo. The issue is employees still don't see this. Even without a union having enough people just walk out because the company doesnt respect them will crush the company. Rightly so.
This. While unionisation and labor organisation in general are a good thing for the workers, just people deciding they have had enough and finding a better employer (and maybe pulling out a couple of colleagues via referrals) is going to hurt companies.
it's a prisoner's dilemma, and the risk for a minimum wage worker walking out when it's not enough people is the worst case. they get fired, nothing changes, and it may even discourage others from trying.
You can only walk when you either have a next step or the result makes no difference. Many don't have that step and it's not QUITE so dire that food stamps are better than working. It's getting close, though.
I don't get where you are coming from.
You can't be serious.
> During a recession, it is either social assistance or one takes the job that is available.
It's only this way because we allow it to be. Huge productivity gains over the last decades have been captured by the .1%. There's nothing ambiguous or mysterious about it.
I have to agree with the parent post here. What do you think the median age of HN commenters is? I'd say it's probably mid-late 20s, in which case most people graduated after the great recession was largely over and only experienced the COVID blip that wasn't a cyclical recession in the normal sense and mostly helped tech workers instead of harming them.
Based on that.
And this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2322031
Which has more links to older surveys. Thus 40.
Ok, im serious. It's silly to quote someone when you don't have a rebuttal.
2008 was 15 years ago, and didn't hit tech as hard as other industries. The last serious one was early 2000s. A significant number of people "in it for the money" or with non-traditional credentials simply had to leave the field.
Anyone that worked through the dot-com bust is late-forties, at minimum. But they'd have to be mid-50s or older to really feel the effects and know what changed. And people in their mid-50s+ are a strong minority in tech.
If the median tech worker is 32, they would have graduated college after the GFC was over (2014ish).
IMHO, for jobs that can be done either in an office or remotely the crux is the company's management team: Some people want to be in office to keep an eye on staff and maintain status, some don't care as long as the work is done.
Likewise "outsourcing" could result in a net increase of WFH given that contracting companies already support it.
Not certain what you mean by vanished and where the 2.4M number came from. CDC says 1,136,473 died in the pandemic [0], although a significant portion were not likely members of the labor force. As it stands the number labor force members caught up to pre-pandemic numbers in August of 2022. [1]
Feb 2020 164M
Apr 2020 156M
Aug 2022 164M
Jul 2023 167M
The "Civilian Labor Force Level" isn't a relevant statistic because of its definition:
> Civilian Labor Force is the sum of civilian employment and civilian unemployment. These individuals are civilians (not members of the Armed Services) who are age 16 years or older, and are not in institutions such as prisons, mental hospitals, or nursing homes.
This, by definition, ignores people who exited the workforce. Here is the two charts you want to compare instead:
- 2019: https://www.bls.gov/cps/aa2019/cpsaat03.htm
- 2023 https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat03.htm
Specifically the "Not in labor force" column. That's a 4M loss. Out of those it is disproportionately women and older people.
Ok, here is the same data from fred (sourced from BLS). Both the labor force and "not in labor force" increased by ~3M from pandemic to now. Given overall population growth of 8M, it looks like normal numeric growth of any statistical cluster within a growing population.
Date. Labor Nonlabor Pop
Feb 2020 164M 95M 259M
Apr 2020 156M 104M 259M
Aug 2022 164M 99M 264M
Jul 2023 167M 98M 267M
Net. 3M 3M 8M
Nonlabor: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU05000000
Population: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CNP16OV
> Out of those it is disproportionately women and older people.
Is the loss disproportionately among women? In terms of people not in the labor force, I don't see strong evidence for that. Stats for both women and men not in the labor force have returned to pre-pandemic levels.
Is job loss disproportionately among older people? Given that numbers of people in the labor force are now above pre-pandemic levels, we would have to posit a counterfactual world without a pandemic. I'm not going to do a whole regression with it's own assumptions of biz cycle etc. Eyeballing the chart, the current level could be in the range of alternative futures starting from April 2020. Its hard to say though with the boomers retiring out how many retired early or decided to not retire late.
All, Men, Women Not in Labor Force: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?id=LNU05000000,LNU0500000...,
There are a large number of people, namely on HN, that have never known anything other than $120K+ compensation, constant stream of offers for changing jobs, all while working from their home and doing about 4 hours of real work a day.
I don't think a recession is necessarily coming, but a reversion to the mean is going to leave these people obliterated.
The thing is, this has always been the case for the white collar world. Lawyers, executives, etc. The real change is that ICs that aren’t playing politics are able to live that life now. The reversion to the mean isn’t happening until those people stop producing massive economic value.
Personally, I will work in a warehouse before I go back to the office. Do twenty hours a week temp work while I work on setting up a side business. It’s never been easier to start your own business, and we don’t need big companies to make a living anymore. The real reversion to the mean is cutting out the rent-seeking middle men that extract value from our economic output while contributing little themselves.
No idea if I should be rolling on the floor laughing or extremely saddened reading that. I might advice taking a reality check before spurring this kind of non sense in public if you want to avoid sounding both entitled and utterly disconnected.
Maybe I'm uniquely on a path to burnout, but I put in at least 6 hours of what I would call hard knowledge work per day as a SWE. Throw on 1-3 hours of collaboration and an hour of truly useless meetings and I'm at a 45+ hr week.
Factor in commute time, via bike so counts towards exercise minutes, and I'm working 50 hr weeks + 24/7 15 minute SLA on-call once every other month.
It's unfathomable to me that this isn't the average experience, and that anyone would get paid more than $120k doing any less.
One of the consequences of working from home is I tend to work 8-12 hours a day. Sometimes it's hard to mentally shut off work because it's in the same place I live. I don't know how anyone works 4 hours a day, unless they simply don't have a lot to do.
Not if they 'made hay while the sun shines' and are now financially independent
Seems like it is that employees should never ask for better working conditions because, it may be taken back when conditions allow employers to be more abusive? Is that really a point worth making?
This is only true for people who don't have essential skills at a high level. For senior people, this won't be a problem. I cleaned up during the last two recessions, partly due to the prevalence of M&A activity during recessions, and was able to buy property cheap at auction post 2008 due to high foreclosure rates.
If you're just starting your career in a recession you're pretty screwed, if you're mid-career with a specialized skillset that is essential to core business function, you'll be completely fine.
Everyone getting an office with a door -- even a small one -- would go a long way toward making the office a good place to work.
Alice looked through the small door...
https://images.genius.com/80f6b055d05188b3ae126e3be56a5134.1...
i go for a quick walk to a nearby park and i listen to an audiobook for 30min. or i walk my dog. or i get my steamdeck and play something for 30min (with baldur's gate 3, it's hard to stop after only 30).
[1]: If your employer doesn't like if you take a longer lunch break or something to get this time back, then it's time to start looking for a different one.
I do sometimes work late when chewing on a more difficult problem, but if I don't stop early enough to leave a decent gap between end of work and bedtime, it can sometimes be difficult to get my head turned off and get to sleep.
I miss my teens and early twenties when I could flop into bed and fall asleep no matter what I had been doing prior.
Workers want lots of things. Eg money. It's a negotiation.
One of the best tactics to learn about negotiations is negotiating on multiple fronts. Did salary negotiation turn sticky? Shift to negotiating for days off, or title... on the employer side.
One reason that this works is that negotiations have their rationale/objective side and partially contradicting other sides.
Case in point, the value of an employee, particularly a specific employee at a particular time... can be extremely high relative to alternatives. The alternative can easily be spend 12 months paying salary equivalent cost without the benefit.
Lots of positions are hard to adequately fill. 12 months of hiring, training, fail, rehiring, etc. That can easily be your mean alternative. It's very common that someone good leaves a team and 12 months later you have not really replaced them.
Yet... That reality rarely translates to practicality outside of executive comp. Investors certainly act this way, but hr doesn't. The rationale of rehiring cost and risk/difficulty of hiring are understood... but there are still limits to the number they are to put on this. It's never 300%. It's 10% or maybe 25%. Willingness to pay correlates to value, but it isn't proportional.
Anyway... WFH is currently an extremely irationale space. No one is being quite honest about it's full benefits, costs, risks, etc.
It's a benefit that neither employee or employer is usually comfortable about outright "negotiating," like offering less money for remote.
So... WFH is not-negotiable-for salary benefit that is #1 or #2 on both parties' priority list, second (often prior) to salary. Unlike other primary benefits, employees know who gets what.
Currently, it's all about perceived negotiating power.
But you can't just "go home" at 3 PM. So you check some emails. Look over your shoulder and pull open Reddit or – dare I say – Hacker News and you while away those final 90 minutes until you can walk out the door having said you worked a full 8 hour day. Neither you nor your employer really want those 90 minutes spent that way, but it happens, and it's demoralizing all around.
When working from home there is sooo much more flexibility to match productive hours with working hours. When I'm excited and energized and a project is in that flow state I might actually put in 10 hours. Other times at that 3 o'clock slump, I put headphones in and phone into a meeting (or listen to a recording) while doing random chores around the house. What time I check out of work is now a fuzzy mental calculation of how much energy I have, how productive I'd be, how much demand there is for my time, and, yes, a little bit of a simple desire to have life outside of work.
I have reached this state, and it feels surreal to complete a day's worth of work in my morning, so I have the entire afternoon for chores, research and other unstructured me or family time.
The silver lining of the pandemic is that it might be the first step towards the abolishment of the 40 hours week. We're talking about 4 day work week now and it's still far too much time dedicated to your employer, that's still filled with mostly nonsense. We should be pushing for the 15-20 hour work week instead. Or just be your own boss I guess.
I hope this is dark humor and not meant to be taken seriously. For me, about half the reason I prefer my home office is that I don't feel like I have to look productive. I can get my stuff done in my way, and as long as my boss is happy with the result it doesn't matter if my way "looked" right.
The acoustics are also terrible, as are the visual distractions of watching people walk past and peek in every 20 seconds.
It was great. You could write on the glass like it was a whiteboard. And the knowledge that everyone else could see you were in a meeting was an incentive to only be in meetings when you had a real reason to be.
In their minds, they don't pay you for results - but rather for your time. If you complete your tasks fast, and deliver the desired results, in let's say 20 hours instead of 40 - that means you have 20 more hours to do something else. It's the "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean" mantra brought to the white-collar world.
If you work from home, they can't micromanage or monitor your hours as well as in the office. They don't know if you're a very efficient or average worker. Their fear is that you finish your tasks, and then spend time "slacking" at home - doing house chores, watching tv shows, or whatever, on their time.
That was literally the first thing I learned when I entered the workforce. It's always better to do nothing and look like you're doing something, than to do something and look like you're doing nothing.
I don't say this often, but I feel blessed to have a remote boss that doesn't give two shits about what I / we do with our time, as long as we deliver results. But so far he seems like an anomaly.
Background: I graduated from school in Spring 2020 and started at my first full time software in Aug 2020. I've began going to the office about 4 days a week since Feb 2023. Prior to that, I had only been in an office twice ever (excluding my 2019 internship).
Here's some points that make in office tough for me to enjoy.
* When I'm in office, stuck on a problem and need to just think, what can I do? I can stare at other people. I can hear other conversations, others typing, etc. When I'm at home, I can do basic home chores like fold laundry.
* When I'm in office, my lunch options are more limited. I either need to buy lunch, bring it, or select from what work has catered. Bringing a lunch limits options and takes time at home to prepare. When I'm at home, I can eat whatever, whenever. No pressure to sit with people I with with. No comments about why am I eating what I'm eating.
* I typically feel more isolated in the office than I do at home. In the office, I can see others walking around having conversations. I don't know anyone outside of my direct team. Even then, collaboration is very low. With no meetings, I'll talk for maybe 15-20 minutes in the day. At home, I am alone, but I'm not watching others actively socialize. This is more of a me problem than anything.
There are also things I don't like about being in the office in general. I don't like that others speak in languages I don't understand. The monitors, chairs and lighting are worse than at home. The office is in a not great area, and I walk so it's not a nice commute.
Overall, I've come to really enjoy and be excited for my work from home days.
I can see this being highly variable for the type of position / work. As a software developer the ability to schedule face time and use messenging for low-priority is way more productive than an unexpected door-knock that demands an immediate response.
Apart from that, I was going to comment saying the exact same thing. Not having a commute is non-negotiable for me. That said, I have been working from home long before the pandemic, and for the one year out of 20 that I worked in office (was a once in a lifetime job opportunity) I rented a condo across the street from the office. Life is way too short to waste 1 - 2 hours per day driving. I also finding driving to be one of the most stressful activities in life. Not because I don't enjoy driving itself, but because of traffic and having to share the road. In other words, I am positive that working from home is literally adding years to my life due to drastically reduced stress levels in addition to having more time to actually enjoy life.
So no, I will never accept a position where I need to commute for work regularly unless it is temporary and a very special circumstance.
The point of life is not to provide your employer with unrestricted access to your time for their convenience.
depends on your life goals. If you're just minmaxing money and want to retire by 40-50 with time for the family or leisure, sure. You ideally want to minimize time working, and not necessarily maximize efficiency. If your goal is (personal) growth or expertise in a domain, that communication gap can potentially impact your growth, perhaps even cap you without outside study (which turns into work outside of work).
There's no right answer, you simply have to be honest about your end game.
Anyway, one thing that gets thrown around a lot is the 'hallway conversation'. This idea that work is suffering because people aren't getting together spontaneously, or they're lacking the high-fidelity in-person exchanges, etc, etc.
But the funny thing is, over the years I've been in countless in-person intensive sprints. Week long exhaustive affairs where people are all in a room, brainstorming, planning.
Great ideas happen! But, how many of those sprints actually lead to action in the company? Once the herd-followers force everyone back into the panopticon, what then will they blame the lack of innovation on? Or are we simply pretending that prior to the pandemic every company in the world was truly operating at genius level, and it wasn't largely a by-product of a zero-interest-rate phenomenon?
"Sorry – gotta go, someone else needs this room."
Except they used the pandemic to close down a site and merge two offices, so there aren't enough desks. So, everyone who isn't full time in the office has to use hotel cubes, so I had my cube taken away a few weeks ago.
I quickly found out that most of the hotel cubes are several floors away from my team, so its incredibly rare I actually see anyone on my team when I go in. I usually sit in silence on a different floor and interact with my team on zoom.
To the best of my knowledge no one is taking attendance yet, so I'm doing 1-2 days tops.
My hotel cubes are several states away from my team, so I drive downtown, sit in my hotel cube, and get on zoom calls with my team that's in a different time zone.
Yucky company.
1) mean fewer offices (per unit space, since they are bigger)
2) make people more likely to come in (since they are nicer)
The point where those cross over seems like a good target, the highest number of happy office workers you can fit.
I think this is rather optimistic. If you give more square feet per employee and expect most/all to come in, the idea that it will mean fewer offices doesn't really add up.
Of course, this is under the assumption the company wants people to come in willingly. They could just try and force their employees to come in, but people are really into work from home and good employees have more options.
My criteria - Is there a reason for me to be in the office on this specific day? Will my team be there? Is there an upcoming milestone where having everyone in a room together for most of the day will make us more productive? If the answer to all three questions is yes, then I want to be in the office that day. If it's just to go to a physical location where I will be on Zoom calls all day with team members all in offices in other locations, then hard pass on going into the office and it doesn't matter whether it's an actual office or a cube.
I guess some people have all the luck. By the time I graduated:
- my family was across the country
- neighbors have never been really friends
- close friends mostly went to San Fransico. No one was in my town.
- Meetups didn't form any relationships.
If there was no work I'd just be lonely, and not for the lack of trying.
At one point I went to a lot of tech meetups and I think they're cool for other reasons but not for forming meaningful relationships. The things that have been most fruitful in that are ones that bring people together for value-based reasons: religion, volunteering, organizing for a specific local cause or movement.
In between are activity-based things like book clubs, sports leagues or game groups. They are good for meeting people to hang out with but individuals in them tend to be transient and I haven't formed many deep friendships from them. Sometimes the line gets blurry though, like martial arts dojos & boxing gyms are activity-based but tend to form tight bonds.
Co-workers? their boss? some entity of the company they are employed by?
Are these farmers/fishermen working solo? it could be their family, but generally in such a situation their family is also employing teenage labor in the form of offspring.
>You would just talk to your family when back at home.
how does that work when you have no family? In the classic times you'd also gather around at a bar to discuss the day with strangers. That doesn't quite work out so well in modern urban environments where even bars come in as groups.
As far as social situations go, colleagues rank somewhere near the bus driver I greet every morning in terms of how much fulfillment they give me.
If I graduated amidst COVID, I may legitimately not have anyone to talk to.
The kind of software job I'm in though, it's absolutely possible with the right policies and technology to have the same kind of productivity as in the office, it's up to the employer to fix whatever they think is missing.
When I’m in the office, both these problems don’t exist; in fact 1:1s become ‘walking 1:1s’. I feel more healthier; the commute back allows me to disconnect from work and decline meetings.
This is not to say working from the office is better for everyone. I wish I had the discipline to be better at WFH.
Our office had ice cream fridges, candies, people ordering in daily, etc.
I threw away a lot of money and ate a lot of extra calories because acting as a group was strongly encouraged, meaning I would go out with the team every "let's eat out at a fast food place Friday" (if not more often).
When I am at home in my controlled space, there are no snacks because I do not buy any. There are no restaurants because I live far from downtown & fast food places by choice.
When I have a lot of willpower to do so, I even workout during the day and then take a shower. The best I could do at the office is go for a walk next to a road filled with cars.
- As a lone single male, it pretty much meant I NEVER had to leave the house. Maybe once a month for groceries, but with doordash/instacart there were periods where I could spend 4+ months cooped up inside. And as the former implies, I also ate out a lot. costing money and health. think I gaied around 40 lbs from 2020 to now.
- Work/life separation breaks down, as I had no friends to console to, no family to worry about, and overall a feeling of nothingness outside of games/movies. Sometimes I'd simply fall asleep in my office at 11PM and wake up at 6AM slumped over. There's nothing/no one else to take my mind off of work
- grooming went off the wayside. I wore so little clothes I could spend 4-6 weeks between laundry, felt no need to shower for weeks, and overall lack of will to do anything more than make sure my face isn't a mess. Even then I also just let my hair grow way out. There's no really to care about how I look otherwise.
- house goes out of care. There's usually small things I'd do when I get home from work to at least keep the place from going on an episode of Hoarders, but boxes can stack up and dust gathered very easily when all I really did was walk from room to office to room.
It felt like being a NEET, but I was still working and not really even enjoying much media (I didn't really watch much anime since the pandemic and I used to be a seasonal watcher). Worst of both worlds?
I started this year trying to make myself go out at least once a week, but even pre-pandemic I was feeling this sense of loneliness. Even post pandemic I can feel the effects being worse off compared to 2019.
Mostly this was because I felt that I wasn't as effective working in the Open Office.
I was told time-and-time again how the open office is the standard, I figured the problem was me and looked inwardly at solutions (some of which I documented on my blog).
I later discovered I had many markers of ADHD, meaning that fighting myself was actually an unwinnable battle. -- and all those days of going home exhausted after having done nothing that day, only to pry open my laptop at home and finally accomplish everything required -- was something that was not a personal failing.
I envied people who had their own office, or even a shared office; I was told I couldn't work from home unless I was sick or unable to get to the office, and truthfully it was painful to do so anyway due to the corporate VPN being a shambles.
I'm so glad that we are collectively pushing back on this; we are told on one hand that rents are so expensive that it necessitates the open office push, but when that argument is invalidated (even lower rent if you don't need the space at all!) we are told to return to office anyway.
That said, there are advantages to being on-site if you have a nicer working environment, getting away from the house (and the mental context shift that follows) along with access to certain equipment that might make your life easier. It's just that the juice isn't worth the squeeze. And boy, have we been squeezed.
Options where basically: Imagine that you have an office that surrounds you, try to feel like you really own your space. -- Also you can shift your working hours slightly so that there are fewer people around. (I recommended going early since there is a perception among managers that "early bird gets the worm" vs "oh he has to stay late because he didn't finish up everything").
Looking back it seems so surreal like thinking about when people used to smoke on airplanes. I can’t imagine ever going back to that.
No carpets, no canvas on the walls, nothing - just a new paint job, a couple of kegs, some ping-pong tables, and maybe a cornhole setup for maximum tailgating vibes.
Maybe it is time for employers to pony up or STFU.
WFH means my whole life doesn't center around my job and its schedule. I'm home for when my kids go to and return from school, I can make lunch or dinner while sitting in the kitchen with my laptop, and I don't have to spend a couple hours a day commuting.
Gas + commute time + increased likelihood to eat out (leftover chicken breast) = more money out of my pocket.
And I could stretch even further with the endless banter, getting yelled at for not understanding things the first time (I'm not an auditory listener), disrespected for how I look, more reasons to waste money on therapy. Obviously that's personal, but you couldn't pay me more to go back to the cattle stall we call an office...
I do miss wearing dress shirts and slacks while I eat your free pizza!
Dunno. I do the same during WFH, only with having no pants on.
Not only time but expense and accident risk, especially for an automobile commute.
Obviously don't get queso dip or soda, etc
Personally, if I made enough, I'd eat out all the time too.
Talking sports and politics are the main reasons why you won't find me in the break room.
And the pandemic blessed us with the opportunity to say "for what?"
The only reason to make employees work from an office when they could work fine remotely is so that they can be micromanaged - it's just a needless waste of building space, public transport capacity, employee time commuting.
I totally agree that it helps to have people come in now and then though, I think the social part of working with other people is still relevant to us as hoomans and it's useful to have everyone come in once every x to get to know each other, in jobs where you're working in a team.
It's really simple. My office at home is better than any corporate owned office could ever feasibly be. A major reason why is because it's /mine/, I have absolute and complete control over it, and basically no budget restrictions. My home office is /comfortable/, /relaxed/, and /nice/. None of which are things companies care about when they start putting numbers in spreadsheets, and even if they did care about, they'd have to standardize it. My home office is also /personal/, which a corporate office can never be.
I will /consider/ going back to the office when I get a 15m^2 space to myself with a locking door that closes, a window view, and a $30k/yr a budget to do whatever I want inside that office on top of world-class pay, and I can commute there in under 20 minutes. When all of those things are true, and only then, does it even become a consideration that is comparable to working from home permanently.
Pre-pandemic office life was pretty crummy: you had crowded, noisy open-plan spaces. Most employees sat at their desk, put on their headphones, and quietly plodded away until quitting time - leaving their desks not to collaborate but to service their basic biological needs.
Giving people quiet, private spaces that they can personalize would take much of the sting out of returning to the office.
BTW I keep hearing benefits of "RTO" - but I've never worked for a company that only has a single office, so we end up on video calls with other teams and team members anyways even when the company didn't allow WFH.
This has been my experience at every company I've been with in the last 15 years. The reason why I don't find these "increases collaboration and teamwork" arguments persuasive is because when everyone has been in the office, the work processes and level of collaboration were not different at all.
I only miss the meals with colleagues, but that is not worth the extra time wasted on commute and the productivity loss of being interrupted by noise and jack-asses.
Middle managers are missing the sense of control, I think they rarely pay for themselves, with WFH this is even more apparent.
Maybe tech workflow has a more natural fit with WFH, and tech attracts more introverts, so WFH could be the doubly reinforced preference.
It seems psychologically plausible, but what is your experience?
I am dating a wide range of men, but I avoid engineers, because I don't want to date nerds like myself. Anyways, from my experience, the vast majority of the guys I meet is absolutely shocked and often disgusted by the idea of 100% homeoffice as I have it. "But don't you miss talking to people?", they ALL say. (I don't, I hate people)
So in short, I am convinced you are right.
The open office plan just might be #2 though. ;)
More importantly, return to office, as the end goal isn't a good end-goal. Sure it can work reasonably well when everyone is in the office, but the pandemic 'experiment' has clearly shown us that remote, hybrid are also workable models. Each model: all on-site, hybrid, flexible have their pros and cons and the outstanding organizations of the future will be the ones that can create an environment where people who thrive in each model and co-work.
The right end-goals should be around more around the lines of productivity, teams hitting/exceeding their goals consistently, employee retention, employee happiness among other things.
I work at a company where we're in office all the time. This is what I like and that's who I like to hire.
I used to love my job. All my life I've loved programming, and I used to love being able to solve other people's problems for them by doing the thing I love.
And I used to love being surrounded by other people who were interested in the same things as me, all collaborating on a project to make something useful.
The open-plan curse killed it for me. For years I've done as little paid work as I can get away with because I hate trying to think in an open-plan horror so much. It's like having my brain in a blender.
I still program, and think, a lot, but I only do it for other people when I need the money.
I am in the middle of having to tell a top engineer (and team lead) who was hired remote that they can no longer be remote and need to move to one of our office locations (thousands of miles away of course). Just for the privilege of being on a video call with the PMs who of course don't live in the same city anyway.
Sadly, it's like people running these companies are drawing inspiration from Vladamir Putin and saying "Fuck it - I want people in the office". This may be off topic from the article - but I think leaders are just going to say fuck it - you are coming in or you are getting fired.
What data do you have to support this, other than a personal anecdote?
If RTO proponents had any hard data, wouldn't they shared it by now? It is _they_ who are making the claim that office work is more productive, so it is on them to _prove_ it. We are being fed some fables about "spontaneous interactions at water cooler" and other such bullshit instead.
How is this fair to say at all? It may be true, but there’s no evidence that this is the case.
In a sense, I think this is much of it.
Commercial real estate used to be a fairly predictable investment. Costs were mostly predictable, rents would increase over time, etc.
Now, we have all these vacant buildings and it's highly disruptive to the investors and owners of those buildings. You have companies in the middle of 5, 10, 15 year leases, and they're paying on those spaces with no hope of getting out of the contract. So the companies have a large incentive to justify that spend, which is really only going to happen by utilizing the space, which means in-office work.
I think if there was a viable way for these lessors to get out of those obligations we would see more of an embrace of WFH or hybrid work.
There is also part of the issue where for some people and tasks, an in-office scenario is higher net productivity to the company (but not necessarily the employees).
Additionally, you also have companies where a large contingent of the workforce can't WFH (eg: manufacturing, assembly, etc.). It creates animosity among the workers when the higher paid people also have the luxury of not needing to come to a physical location.
Overall, I think the deck is stacked against WFH becoming a long-term trend for a majority of the workforce. I think it will become a more common perk, something that is earned and not granted.
Except that the first people who would leave might also be the good experienced engineers, but that loss is a little hard to see on paper at first, to predict and so it doesn't get accounted for very well.
> But remote workers don’t build the skills and connections that can help them one day get a better job.
It is so wrong yet it's repeated so much some people started to believe it. Maybe at some specific jobs or in some companies where management doesn't understand remote culture, but otherwise it's blatantly false as evidenced by all the people who switched from one remote job to another with a salary increase.[0]
[0] Could they get an even better job if they had worked in the office? Maybe, maybe not, but it's clear what was important for them.
When I started in the late 90s I had my own office as an intern in a huge fancy building in Amsterdam. They started the cubicle transition soon after.
This brought me great comfort when I struggled to hear anything during any of my meetings (all of which were still remote in nature due to a diversely located team).
Ironically, I moved to California because I was told we'd be working onsite...three years later and I _still_ don't have a badge because the back to office mandate never came.
I use my lunch hour to workout because I can just eat at my desk. I wish I could afford a bigger house so I can have a home office instead of sharing my office with my bedroom but hey, Cali's expensive (but oh so nice).
With remote, I simply exercise _during_ work with my home equipment, it's fantastic.
Or how annoying people in the office are… looking at you people who reheat fish, or try and peddle your kids’ cookies and bags of popcorn, or show up sick and act like you don’t think they rest of us notice you didn’t wash your hands after blowing your nose.
Or how literally everything in my house is more comfortable for me. I don't want florescent lights, or bright lights at all... I want my dual 4k monitors and comfy chair that doesn't get stolen by some random dude while I'm in a meeting just because they ran out of chairs in the conference room again.
I don't want pointless "all hands" meetings once a week where some guy who wants to hear himself talk stands up and bores everyone with new HR policies or sales numbers, while serving a few bits of snack food that people flock to like it's their last supper.
What do I miss about the office? Meh, I miss how easy it was to grab a few people and do a happy hour after work. I miss some of the "culture" like foosball tables, or pranks, or stupid inside jokes about how the Keurig machine on Floor 2 will electrocute you... I miss being able to race up and down the stairs and the feeling of getting a win when I beat the people who took the elevator. Stupid little stuff I guess.
But it's going to take a lot more than just an office to make me not want to work from home.
Actually, I'd rather the Post reporters not sit in the same room all day--better that they should be out talking to persons who are not their co-workers most of the time.
There are new cubicle designs with lower walls that still foster interaction but allow for focus time.
Hotdesking is so bad for morale, especially for people who have dedicated so many years of their life to their employer.
All of our desks were pushed together in the middle of the room. The _room_ itself would switch from chat mode to quiet mode.
Though I think the quietest member of the team would have preferred a solitary arraignment, I can only speak for myself.
My mortgage is $2k a month and my finances are in fantastic shape because I was making hay while the sun was shining.
What's more likely? They'll convince me to uproot my family and pull them across the country and away form their grandparents to increase "in-person synergy..."
Or I'll just take a marginal-paying job at a startup working remote? Heck, I'll start applying for jobs at the local sewer plant ($22/hr starting pay with benefits!) than move my family back to the bay area.
The thing is, if you only talk about the annoyances of an open office, there's no comparison possible.
There's one type of office plan that i find horrible though. Cubicles: the combination of annoyances from noise and feeling isolated, without the benifits of immediate feedback and more ad hoc communication.
Oh I wish...
/s obviously https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...
I love an open space which is a bit loud rather than quiet. It actually makes me feel more privacy than a quiet room full of people.
But here's a recipe. Create an amazing office and don't force anyone to go there! No "once a week" rules or similar. Make it completely voluntary. And see what happens.
A great office located closely, ideally walking distance, where you can discuss ideas and offtopics with your coworkers, have great coffee, not worry about snacks and stuff is like visiting an all-inclusive hotel, but for work. This statement isn't true for everyone. For some people working from home will always be better. Don't force them to change. But see what happens when you have an inviting place that's available for people to visit for as long and for as short as they want.
All the manager types, HR, comms...people that spent all day talking, they all want more "collaboration" rooms.
All the other types, people actually doing tasks, want more "concentration rooms".
The collaboration people don't like that. There can't be too many concentration rooms and attendance is max 2 hours per day.
It's all so pathetic. It's truly baffling how in our society that ordinarily aggressively optimizes for costs and efficiency, businesses really believe that employees should collaborate MORE.
The entire fucking problem is that there's TOO MUCH of it. Endless meetings, emails and chat with very little to show for it. How can you stand by and piss away all your money on buildings nobody wants to be at to do absolutely nothing of actual value for most of the day?
Make it make sense.
And I understand how it's great to work from hom. I also have the luxury of a proper office room at home. I don't like my commute either, but having the laundry, family, whatever available as distractions is not always great in my opinion.
Any productivity gain/loss is negligible for most types of white collar work. Forcing people to go back to the office is about deliberately increasing attrition and the immiseration of employees because they were got too uppity during the labour crunch.
Offices means bars/restaurants/ready-made food delivery/cleaning services/rents and so on in cities. Means the base needed to head to a 2030 where "you'll own nothing" because anything is a service of someone else.
This is clear, what's not clear is the fact that such model is untenable. In an era of abundance we can keep money flowing with bullshit jobs, in an era of scarcity we can't.
Long-story short:
- most people will resist with any means because WFH means much to them
- most service economy will collapse anyway
- the disaster made in the meantime will push much more poor in cities, creating a bigger disaster thereafter.
Some I've no doubt think they can also profit from it...
I know offices can be noisy and distracting. So can a home when you have children (and dirty dishes in the sink, unopened mail, etc.) Sometimes I look forward to having more time to code uninterrupted on Friday, when fewer people are in the office and there are no meetings.
Consider that if you can do your job fully remote, so can an engineer in a country where the pay is 1/10 that of the U.S.
I especially like the last one. How about increasing a number of family houses in the city using that space, at least a little? That would get some tax back and improve the situation with housing at the same time.
> cheaper real estate presents an opportunity for employers with vision
On top of any deterioration in office rents, companies need way less space than they used to since people are working from home many days. This opens up many possibilities that will IMO keep offices in prime markets filled:
-companies take more space per person in office for same cost, providing desks
-companies that couldn’t afford prime markets move in and use them as mainly collaboration spaces (“let’s all work out of Manhattan next week while we finish this project”)
-companies downsize in prime markets but reorient toward specific events - brainstorming, project closings, strategy retreats, get to know each other, cross department workshopping etc etc
As with any benefit people who have little other option or who like socialising (young city dwellers) will return to open plan bull-pits.
For others, the next proper recession (with actual unemployment) will potentially tilt the % again towards company preferences. I say company preferences as there’d be huge savings from WFH if they can make it work by then.
The fact so many companies are pushing for return suggests that it must be more profitable for the companies in question, for sales it certainly is. Their arguments > our arguments here as they have their own data.
This all flips around at some point though. Maybe 10% unemployment?
For me, I'm looking incredulously at people making decisions on where to live assuming that "work from home" is locked in forever. I know someone who is in the process of settling on a house in the middle of nowhere working for a large publicly traded company remotely. The company just posted their first quarterly loss in forever.
If she ends up losing that job, she'll be 100% dependent on being able to find another remote position or be forced to sell her house.
I can generalize it a bit: put your offices in a part of the country where people want to live, give each of them a private office, and pay them enough to live a reasonable distance, and you might find people lined up to apply.
Zero effort was put in to make desks less distracting. Only some desks are height adjustable. Chairs are cheap.
They were hoping all the “fun” stuff would lure people back. It didn’t work. Because while fun stuff is nice, if work doesn’t happen, we get fired, so the working area has to be good too
Same old same old. All that changed was the language to describe the offices and the “experience”
That will be a whole new fight.
More pay would absolutely bring me into the office though- especially if it means I can afford the wear and tear on my car plus the 20 hours of my life drained being stuck in traffic each month.
But at the same time, I'd much rather be given the freedom to prioritize life over working... So I'd consider coming in every business day if I could make full-time rates at part-time hours. Just cut my salary and working hours in half and let me do my thing!
But ultimately my work day is still 2-hours longer vis-a-vis commuting AND I am required to live in a much more expensive area to make that commute at all, essentially reducing my wages yet further. WFH is a 25% shorter work day (8 actual instead of 8 + 2) and I can live in a 20%~ cheaper home, how are you going to compensate that?
You can either offer me WFH or increase my wages 40% and give me an office. Seems like WFH is the economically most efficient for both employer and employee but what do I know?
When I worked “from the office” I routinely had to work from home to focus on high stakes projects, because the office was interruption hell. The office, especially open plan, is good for catching up but sucks shit for focusing and getting stuff done.
Or do you just work on small projects that you can finish by yourself?
That makes no sense. If you research the impact of interruptions on productivity you will find that interruptions unanimously destroy productivity. For engineers, it takes a significant amount of ramp-up time to get into flow, and being interrupted resets that ramp.
When coming to the office, all the home tasks are left for later, where my cognitive level is below ideal or where businesses are closed.
There is also child care, where when working from home, you can pick up your kids, where you are present for them.
I thought it was brilliant. Pack more people into a space, and make your distance to your nearest neighbor farther. Plus you naturally had a comfortable place to sit, 2 filing cabinets, and 2 spots for bookshelf, whiteboard, or whatever. And a lot more desk space than you'd expect.
I was always puzzled that nobody else ever tried that design.
Open offices < cubes < private offices
Personally, I will never again work in an open office setting, or even a "pod" setup. I've learned my lesson.
- we donate to a charity of your choice and keep the tax writeoff - we let you rent a hotel room from us - we have a special room, where you can cloister yourself for a little bit when you want to be alone
By comparison.. your own office is an actual perk.. either WFH is getting close or someone with actual ear to the ground is listening. It is still wrong. But it is less wrong.
Separate offices would go towards driving up the value of commercial real estate which seems to be important to companies.
What would help is paid commute time (or at least reimburse my commute costs), and paid lunch. Literally going to the office costs me 20-30$ per day, which is almost 10% of the salary I earn that day.
Not that there is anything scandalous on my screen. It is just that my screen feels very intimate, private. I rarely share more than a window at a time when on calls.
I just don’t want people to be able to read my screen. I can’t explain why, and I know no one is even interested in it. I don’t want people looking at it anyway.
Management in many places seems to insist on getting people into offices, but cannot explain why?
And they think people will spend 2h a day and 100s of dollars a month because they shuffled some desks around and bough bagels?
And the idea that you just trust people to be productive or god forbid actually check Vs just relying on social pressure to "look" productive is out of the question
I'm just baffled.
Also, companies really should be adding some incentive for that 1.5-2 hours wasted each day.
"There is a lot of talk about how open plan offices foster more communication, transparency and honest conversations.
In my day, I would invite you into my office, I would pull out a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. I would pour each of us a drink and we would have an private and honest conversation."
You really do benefit from being in person when doing something meaningful and impactful. It just works much better, and you only need a few people to do this and delegate the rest of the work to the WFH crowd.
I've personally and workwise developed hugely in the last 3 years, despite being remote. I have built networks with people I've never met and picked up skills and work I'd never considered before.
And then you need to talk to one of them, they pick up the phone in that room, not even walking out. Absolutely horrible.
Is that where this comes from?
I can fully understand why people dislike this kind of thing, but the fact that it shows up in multiple contexts suggests it probably does achieve what it’s aiming for.
But no tech companies set up small offices where I live so remote it is. And that's fine with me. I like where I live, the people around me, etc.
The debate about all this is endless and companies are going to do what they feel they need to do and so will everyone else. Right now employment is pretty fluid and that's good.
Interestingly the execs who push hardest for WFH are a) almost never at the office and b) have a nice private office with windows.
Fascinating silver lining.
All these articles from media controlled by capitalists hellbent on shaming workers and insisting the problem lies with employees rather than employers at every turn. Fuck them.
Returning to an office is my idea of hell though. Getting I'll because some random employee won't take the time off or WFH because they have a cold/flu/covid is plenty enough reason to say "no"
Between that and the benefits of working from home (having lunch with my local friends or eating leftovers, no commute, control over my environment, being able to work from my partner's occasionally), I really don't think there's a realistic amount of money I'd go back to an office for. Onsites are fine, but RTO 5 days a week 48 weeks a year? No thank you.
Open regional offices perhaps? Or rent space in smaller towns like Idaho falls.
I've worked not even with a decent chair.
I'm not sure if the author is serious or trolling. Looking forward to another series of articles "I gave them glass offices, why won't they come back in?!"
So much of this libertarian/right-wing/capitalist junk is ironically top-down and authoritarian. Maybe WFH is bad for innovation, or maybe RTO is bad for focus and thus innovation. Let's let the market sort it out, including the labor market.
In the late 90s, I was an early adopter of XP. Pair programming and borg like unity seemed really cool. I had a set of motivated peers. We actually had to get lots of special permissions and suffer raised eyebrows to take down some of the cubicle walls on our own time to create a more open collaborative work space. This was really cool at first. Over time, as the makeup of the team morphed, it became less so. What had been open tables of people working side by side, morphed into everyone sitting around the edge facing outwards.
Now days I’m working in a larger lab with two of us as permanent residents and two others that sit in there with us sometimes. My commute to work involves two lights and a seven minute drive to work. I’ve been given the opportunity to occupy a soon to be vacant solo office across the hall and I’ll be jumping on that. Our lab has become a constant cross roads of visiting, much of it not even remotely work related.
After these various experiences, I’ve concluded a couple of things in the final legs of my career journey (I’ve got around 15 years left).
1. Individuals will absolutley work and thrive better if you give each one their own space where their own identity and choices are manifest — this means real walls, a closeable door, the ability to play music (quietly) if they want, sunlight, and plants if desired. I have especially observed this with interns and new hires. They need their own little den to hide in. Most people will appreciate it (in the long run) if the space is actually small enough that while they can express some autonomy/agency, it’s not a large enough space for others to corner you and talk to you because they’re avoiding work.
2. Collaborative desire comes from within a person. When it manifests, you should absolutely enable and support it, but never compulse it. The company will realize cool 1 + 1 > 2 effects if they do. Providing open spaces with tables, boards, at near convenience to said office spaces is a great thing. But you can’t force people into those spaces. “The fishbowls will continue until creativity and innovation thrive” is synonymous with “the meetings will continue until morale improves.”
3. I recognize the above is the least efficient from a logistics point of view for the office planners. Not just one space per employee, but two? And how do you scale it with people coming to/leaving from organizations? I honestly don’t know. I’ve been told for years “how hard can it be? It’s just software?” So to you office planners, I’m passing on this encouragement “how hard can it be? It’s just peopleware?”