I will always prefer to work from home | Hacker News Reader

I will always prefer to work from home

shavingtheyak.com

Here's a reason I never see brought up in discussions like this. For me, it's as important as the others:

Being an introvert, I always used to be exhausted at the end of the work week. I liked my coworkers a lot, and I liked spending time around them, but it didn't matter, I'd still feel wrung out at the end of the day. And by the end of the week, each day's exhaustion would have accumulated to the point where I needed two days spent doing absolutely nothing just to feel right again.

Going for a weekend trip? Impossible, I barely want to shop for groceries. Hanging out with friends? Not going to happen, I talk to people all day at work. The weekend didn't feel like a vacation, it felt like a time to catch my breath, and nothing more than that.

Since WFH, I don't run my batteries down during the week, and suddenly I have all this energy on Saturday and Sunday. I've taken up new hobbies, I visit places, I catch up with friends, I exercise, I go to restaurants. I've done more interesting stuff in the last 4 years than in the previous 10, because suddenly I have usable time and available energy. I thought I was a homebody, turns out I'm not. Imagine not finding that out for the first 20 years of your career! I'm not going back to the office, that's for sure.

I find Zoom so much more exhausting that being in the office, I am way more wiped out by my 2023 job than by my 2019 job

Yeah - last job I had was a nightmare of 5-6 hours per day meetings. Not a good fit at all. Current one is much better, better team, maybe 1 meeting 4 days a week at most (who does standup on Friday anyway? Nobody)

We do standup once a week and I think even that is too much. Our team is too big. There's like 30 of us, we barely fit in even the large meeting rooms. No one listens to what anyone else has to say. I don't know who the meeting is for. It's not like any of us are even working on the same project. One person per project or you'll never get promoted; even the managers admit that.

I used to be more exhausted from 5-6 hours of in person meeting than 5-6 hours of camera off zoom meetings. Sometimes I do things like fold laundry or eat lunch during meetings where I dont need to talk and this gives me time to have an actual break later.

Off camera meetings are great. Especially when I don't need my computer and can sit I the yard watching the bees work.

I sometimes go for walks during off camera meetings where I know I won't need to talk. It's amazing.

^ this. Thanks for putting this into words, I have always felt the same way and just haven't been able to be aware of it in a way that allowed it to come out verbally.

So much this^

It's an extroverts world and we're all forced to conform to the "extroverts narrative".

When all the extroverts were losing their minds because of COVID induced forced WFH, I frankly had no sympathy (and even a little sadistically felt a little glee). Didn't like your work environment for just one or two years? Cry me a river little extrovert and try it for a whole life time.

Hear, hear. This is especially tricky since being an introvert doesn't mean that one is completely unable to interact with people, just that it's super draining. "You an introvert? Impossible." - is a typical reaction. WFH is a massive quality of life improvement.

Similar here. I like being around other people to some degree, and it can be energizing in some ways, but it also uses energy.

It also uses attention, and maybe engages different kinds of thinking, so I can't focus as deeply on hard problems.

One of my programming styles, for example, is "meticulous zero-defect and resilient", and when someone is in social proximity, it gets noticeably much harder, to impossible. I can do a routine UI design and coding when someone is right next to me, but even then, don't expect me to flash on a brilliant insight into creative UI design or application opportunity -- only to do something that I don't have to think about much.

(This is also one of the many problems with Leetcode hazings/shibboleths -- if you're trying to think, rather than just instantiate the interview ritual you've memorized and practiced so much, that you can do it in your sleep.)

(A related poor awareness of interviewers is that I'm pretty sure many don't realize how much signal interviewers can pickup on intuitively, from language, voice, and body language. That note at the start of the syllable in the middle of innocuous-sounding sentence the Leetcode whip-cracker just said... can tell some interviewers quite a lot about what the person is really thinking, or can even be a concerning flag about their personality. Which can be very distracting when you're thinking about an algorithm that suddenly doesn't seem like the biggest problem at the moment. And if you have to also break your focused thinking to keep up a real-time expository narrative of your process for interview ritual purposes (which isn't going to match actual cognition, so extra load)... careful not to start also narrating how you simultaneously need to figure out how to gently show them something they seem to misunderstand, without risking an insecure backlash when they do the interview writeup, because they're coming across like that might be a risk.)

Maybe you don't need to talk to people all day at work if you could do your work without talking to them all day long during WFH. Work places must be quite, it's not for chatting with others.

If you are bored of office, you take a leave or you quit the work, problem solved. If you are bored of work at home, there's no place you go.

I feel these discussions always go the same way. Working at an office sucks because of some combination of {long commute, open office plan, team not being there}. I quite like going to the office myself because my situation is the opposite: I bike to work, where I have my own office, and my team likes to come in too. Hating the office is totally justifiable given that my setup isn't common; most people are forced to deal with crappy built environments.

Yes! This! I think anyone would not mind the office if they werent treated like cattle.

I dont think people dread going back to the office. People dread going back to the open office.

Some people really dislike open offices (or just spending the day around a lot of people generally) but I'm betting commutes are the #1 reason most people have against going into an office. Unless you can walk or, for some, bike any meaningful commute is basically a not very pleasant hour+ out of your day.

Agreeed! Commute is rough also.

I'm used to open office. Not sure it'd matter if I had my own room. I'd still get dragged into useless meetings that interrupt my flow. If I can even get into a decent flow because our DX is so atrocious.

I know a few retired guys who pay their own money to rent office space away from the house. They don't even have kids living at home any more. If you have a nice office, it's...well...nice.

They do it together, so it's a shared space?

If they work at the same place, or own the company, isn’t that just ‘the office’?

lol no

yeah, switch this with open floor and bad peers and you get a ptsd swamp

I worked at a place years back that was expanding; bought a second building - 2 stories. Downstairs had semi-open cubicles, and a wall of private office spaces (8 IIRC). All empty. Cubes were full. I was in the other building, told we were needing to move over the next couple months. I asked for one of the private spaces. They weren't really that big, and had no natural light, but... they did have a door. I'd been wrestling with being in an open cube next to marketing people (trying to juggle multiple dev projects), and routinely had 3-5 people on the phone around me. Very distracting.

"Nope, those offices are for managers".

"But... they're empty now".

"We're putting together the budget for next year to hire more managers".

"So... those will sit empty for the next 6-9 months and I have to work in an open cube environment, being distracted by the growing number of people around me".

"Looks that way, but don't be so negative about it. I think we're done here. Close my door on your way out please".

I left a few weeks after that exchange.

I don't even need a private office. One of the best environments I've ever worked in was a hybrid office/open model. Basically a bunch of conference rooms where each team got a room, and within the room the desk walls were low. Decorate it however you want, if you agree on style then you can have ambient music, etc. It was pretty great.

But then they knocked all the walls down and put in rows of desks because they could cram more people in that way. Within a year probably 25% of our development staff walked.

Worked in a place like that - mostly open cube space for around 80 inbound call agents, and a few 'side rooms'. Worked with 5 other dev/tech folks in one of those 'side rooms' - a suitably sized office for the 6 of us.

It was reasonable, in that we were generally all quiet or talking at the same time, and was not the worst place at all I've worked. Dedicated private space still works best for a lot of type of work (obviously that's "imo" but seems a standard POV from most colleagues today).

People here talk a lot about being able to have closing doors. My experience with private offices was, barring confidential conversations or rarely going really heads down for a few hours, the unwritten policy was you kept your door open. I've never worked anyplace where private offices generally had their doors shut.

It may be cultural, but in here offices are usually closed. It is kind of "weird" to see them with open doors.

I don't have a large sample size but across multiple companies in both New Orleans and New England, closed doors sort of meant: "I have a specific reason not to be disturbed." Which didn't include I just prefer to be in "flow" or whatever. The situation is probably different if you're on a busy public corridor as can be the case in universities, etc.

When I have work I'm focusing on, I close the door. When I'm OK with being interrupted (work or casual), I leave the door open.

Agreed, but having a door meant you could put the "do not disturb" sign up. Of course that's pretty specific to your companies culture, but if someone closed their door at my office, I'd stroll around later.

One of the biggest benefits of course is that you have a lot less sound travel. Doors open and you'll still be able to have a neighbor that has an open door meeting, phone call, etc and it won't interrupt you.

After moving from a private office with a door to a team space, I missed it severely. Now I'm WFH and when my kids aren't home generally my door stays open.

Post-covid WFH discussions have led to a collective amnesia about this. We also spent buckets of time complaining about offices before it because almost every employer made decision like yours. Most offices were terrible places to work and non-technical managers ignored common sense and science to cram as many people as possible into their existing real estate costs. We'd gone from yearning for personal rooms from our cubicles to yearning for cubicles from our loud open-plan spaces.

Yes I remember I had an office in a major office building in Amsterdam.. as an intern.

Shortly after the open plan craze started. And now there's the hotdesking nightmare. I feel much less valued and respected every time.

One side-effect of the WFH period for us (and I assume a number of other EU companies) is that once we went WFH, we also went remote; previously we had two offices and everyone worked in one of those two cities and today we have (IIRC) five and people work all over the country and take rail into the nearest office when necessary.

This has... mostly worked out OK. In any given office there's some spaces dedicated for the people who work there regularly, at least a room or two with a half dozen seats for hotdesking, but then - three dedicated, closed-door single-person offices exclusively for the executives, who of course never show up outside their home office (if even there).

That's what we've been seeing. My team were all in one corner of one room. Then "one day", we were all sent home.

Someone left, and was replaced by someone in another European country. He's nominally "in the office", but since it's not the same office as the rest of us (and we're not in ours anyway), he's free to come and go as he pleases. It's not like it makes any difference to us.

Then our manager moved on, and was replaced by someone in yet another European country. He was WFH / fully remote before "this" even started.

By time they tried to sell us on RTO, exactly 50% of the team are still here. And going to the office now, just makes it less convenient to call the other 50% of my team. (Yes, call. Call me old fashioned, but I love a good bitchfest, and a good bitchfest shouldn't be in writing.) My manager genuinely advised we ignore the RTO missive and see what happens. (Spoiler: not much.)

Then my boss's boss moved on, and was replaced by another remote position - and now the murmurs of RTO have died down.

Now we're hiring and the net has widened yet again. They need to be in a country where we have a legal presence, and need to be willing to work European hours.

It's amazing how much has changed in relatively little time. It doesn't feel like that long ago I was trying to make the case for WFH on weekends.

I think that's the situation at many places. They've had three years of hiring and organizational changes where, by and large, they didn't really pay a lot of attention outside of gross timezone or language factors to where people physically lived. So now they're in a place where they really can't just undo those three years and move back to teams being mostly colocated. At least without a lot of organizational turmoil and at least some cost.

People evidently were ignoring the rto mandate at my company too. But the VPs noticed and said they'll start docking our perf if we don't start showing up.

Also, wfh weekends? What the heck man. 40 hours M-F tops. Even that I'd like to see dropped to 4 days but that'll never happen.

“Sure, here’s your office - cell #510J”

https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2023/11/13/aws_prison_office...

Why office sucks can be for any number of reasons, I think it's more of a long tail phenomenon with a myriad of distincts personal preferences and special needs.

For instance office drinks can suck, and someone drinking 3 to 5 cups of warm drinks a day, being able to prepare delicious beverages with specialized equipement is a godsend.

Or people who work sitting on their bed. Or want their pet around. Or don't want to wear makeup and get out of the house at all. Those who squat during the long meetings. Those who usually need an hearing aid but can instead just push the sound up if they're at home etc.

Sure, any of those could be addressed in an office setting, but you still only have one office for hundreds of people who probably wish for different things. Most will just give up on comfort, where WFH is an option to be in a better situation.

> Most will just give up on comfort, where WFH is an option to be in a better situation.

It’s also an option to be in a worse situation. My office is all setup for work and has the best perk, I can physically leave work behind each day.

> My office is all setup for work and has the best perk, I can physically leave work behind each day.

You can also have a room setup for work at your home.

Not everyone has a spare room for that purpose.

Right. I joke that my corner in my bedroom is my home office, workbench, rec room, music room, data center combo.

The use of vertical space is real. Family of four, 2bdrm 1100 sq ft divided across three floors. I'd love another room. Do they sell those at Costco? Can I put it on the lawn?

I work from home full time, and while it was harder in the beginning, the click of the KVM button and putting my work phone on the charger is enough of a signal.

> I'd love another room. Do they sell those at Costco? Can I put it on the lawn?

Unironically they do - https://www.costco.com/medano-10%27x12%27-studio-shed--%E2%8...

That's actually amazing.

Bad news. The front lawn is only 9 feet across. There is no back yard. Sorry for not being clear and up front in the requirements.

That's cool. I've known people who have had something in that general vein built.

Given that this is probably something north of $25K by the time you pay for everything though, it's not obviously a better deal than just getting something custom built from some plans.

I could definitely build something less nice but just as functional for a fraction of that price.

It is basically a shed with a nice front window, as it says on the tin.

I'd also probably go with a different design for a northern climate, depending upon the lighting of the locale.

And not everyone has one in the office. Did we learn something besides platitudes now?

This is my #1 complaint for WFH, if you do not have a spare room / office in your home to do WFH, then IMO your productivity tanks and you are not really working from home... you are at home and maybe doing some work likely far less than if you were in the office.

If you are sitting on your bed, a kitchen table, or some other like space then i question how much work you can actually get done.

Also people are TERRIBLE judges of their own productivity, most people claim their productivity sky rockets when at home, were alot of data shows this not the be the case as time is focused on household items, cleaning, taking care of children, laundry, netflix, etc.

people that are successful at WFH and where doing it before COVID has a dedicated space for "work" in the home. With a Door they could close to block out all other household interruptions focusing on work, and would take defined breaks just like if you were in an office.

I worked in an office, then at home where I worked constantly, then back to the office where I appreciated closing my laptop and being done.

Now I've been remote for many years and am happy to say I've trained myself to watch my hours and leave work even though I'm home. I change my slack status, minimize all work apps and walk away. When I come back to my computer for something personal in the evening I don't look at work. It took some practice, but closing things down walking worked for me. Now if I could only stop solving work problems as I try to fall asleep...

Good for you ! You have no specific reason to really want to WFH, and that's great, probably a strong asset to get hired.

Some people will also have no specific reason to want to live alone and can join dormitories or share houses. Some don't even need a stable home and can join military camps etc.

We all have different thresholds of what we want or can deal with in our lives.

FWIW, my dog and I do makeupless squats on my bed after work.

I appreciate a hard division between work hours and personal hours, and WFH (for me) makes an already tenuous line even more leaky.

> I appreciate a hard division between work hours and personal hours

Agreed--this is why I've got an office at home, and it's bigger and better-appointed than any company would ever allocate to me, with a better desk and a better chair (when I use it, because that better desk lets me stand).

I'll spot them the rent for not having to make the commute, but I need the firm separation.

Wow working and living space that's great, good for you

One of the nice things about working at home is that async tasks can be taken care of during the workday. Laundry doesn't need a lot of hands-on time but does have a lot of waiting time. It's also easier to get local errands like grocery shopping done during lunch than if you're at an office. Even lunch itself can be easier, with a couple Instant Pots, lunch can be ready to eat right at lunchtime. None of these tasks take a consequential amount of time away from work but they do give you back quite a bit of non-work time.

Yes there are benefits to that multitasking

So maybe many people just really hate car dependency and long commutes which should push us to move away from such a model of urban planning. More offices seamlessly integrated into middle density housing similar to a lot of cities like Stockholm where big towers and suburban detached homes are more rare.

The RTO discussions for us in Germany (30m train commute in/to a city center) definitely begin with a very different tone than my friends in the US (60m car to an office park with a sandwich shop across the street) seem to have.

I like both pretty much equally. I also bike to work and share an office with another dev, who is very easy to share a workspace with (in terms of habits, noise, distraction, etc). But I also enjoy working at home, going for a 10-minute walk around the block to clear my mind, opening my patio door and listening to birds while I work, etc. Hybrid works perfectly for me: a minimum of 1 day a week WFH, preferably 2, but no more than 3.

If I could easily walk to or even take a modest transit ride to the office I'd probably go in once or twice a week for the change in scenery. But the only company office it makes any sense for me to go into at this point is a two hour commute each way. I would need to have a specific reason to do that and no one I work with regularly is in that office. (I'm a 30 minute drive to another office but no one I know is there, it's in a boring office park, and it's closing.)

Guilty as charged.

I almost commented about how I bugged HR to let me return to office when it became available (having some months earlier signed a permanent work-from-home contract). I like walking to work and having the work-life separation. Not to mention my office is tricked out with sweet posters, mostly of the transit and active transportation propaganda variety.

The million dollar 360 views are a nice bonus though.

Of course I still work from home on days where it is really inconvenient not to, but I tend to not enjoy that nearly as much now.

Aye I'd happily go to an office every day if it was within walking distance. The problem was the commute and all the time wasted to and fro. If anyone ever comes up with working teleporters I'll go back to the office no bother

Also punctuality and butts-in-seats, but that whole thing turned out to be adhd (working from home gave me the time to figure that out!) so might not be an issue now I can get up early enough to not have a mad panic rush every morning, haha

As someone who has been remote since '12, I absolutely agree. Nothing is better than having a cool/fun office environment close to home where you have things set up to an ergonomic ideal. I've been a member of many co-working spaces because of this.

The problem is 95% of the time it's not like this.

While your setup now is great, just know that it can change at any time. I know multiple people whose companies are finding a new address for their office for one reason or another. Some of them in completely different areas. My mom, who used to live a 5-10 minute drive from her office now has to drive about 30-40. My office being at home, I'll never have that problem as long as I don't change jobs. Granted I know multiple people who had WFH jobs where the carpet was swept right out from under them and they had to start coming into the office or be laid off, which is the flipside to my argument, though it doesn't really affect me because my company has no central headquarters so some huge internal changes would need to happen for my situation to change.

Anyway, biking to work is awesome, that's a cool setup too for sure. I used to bike 10 miles into one of my previous jobs (and then 10 miles back home.)

Even if I lived next door to an office where I had a private room and my teammates there I wouldn't want to go at all, for many reasons. Off the top of my head:

- Even without commute there's at least 30-45 minutes of preparation to be decent for the office,

- The office invariably doesn't have the setup that I want and have at home,

- People are able to come "bother" you all day long.

None of those are things I'm willing to put up with.

Agree - though from a personal perspective the first ~7 years of my work life was sitting on a trading floor layout, and then I got an office and hated it, still don’t love it. I think the personal office thing is partly personality/experience, partly job function, and partly convenient excuse.

I'm a remote working veteran, having worked in that arrangement for over a decade. Recently I changed employers, to a place down the street, and I loved going to the office before RTO (we're expected to be in the office 3 days a week). Most of the team voluntarily came in every Tuesday and Thursday. We had a lot of fun. Then RTO came, and it seemed to coincidence with every other large employer in the area forcing RTO, and most of the things that were great about it evaporated overnight.

Now the campus is crowded and noisy. Parking is annoying. The lines in the cafeteria and nearby restaurants are insane and simply not worth the wait or frustration of trying to coordinate timing. There's a lot of small battles being fought about temperature control, lighting in the office, etc. ~Half the team is still geographically remote to our main campus, at smaller satellites across the country or they have long term full-time remote arrangements. So we're on Zoom regardless. And I still between someone on my team and someone on an adjacent team, and frequently find myself sitting in between them while they're on separate calls. Even with headphones on, it is fucking madness.

It's just annoying again, and needlessly frustrating, and reminds me of why I originally sought out full time remote back in 2011.

I love the mandates to RTO to only get onto Zoom or Teams meetings with people in multiple timezones and offices all traveling to the office to fulfill the RTO mandate and yet...the only thing that changed was the blurred backdrop.

For my company, the worst thing is that we have hot desks, which wouldn't be a problem if there were enough seats if, say, 90%-95% of all staff came in on the same day and had their own seat. However, one of the floors that my company leases out is undergoing renovations and they shifted all those employees to other floors while keeping the same in-office weekly requirements. Way too many times, I've went into the office just to not be able to find a seat. We have a hoteling reservation system, but even if you reserve a seat, if you don't come in by 8:50 or so, someone will have taken it. I've complained to our corporate services team and have never received a response.

> Working at an office sucks because of some combination of {long commute, open office plan, team not being there}

Working at an office sucks because it is a massive constraint on where you can live, even if you can tolerate a long commute. If you live with a partner who also has a career your options are even more constrained. I find it miraculous such a situation works out for anyone.

And yet for millions of people and many years, it has worked out.

There are tradeoffs, sure. But there are a lot of jobs in a lot of fields in a lot of places.

The venn overlap is not tiny.

Trends happen a lot faster and make people miserable than you can definitively say "it's working out".

>it has worked out.

Hardly. This is actually kind of insanely tone-deaf statement to make. People have uprooted their lives, spent lots of their wealth in expensive real-estate markets due to artificial demand, given up time with their families, etc etc.

Saying it's "worked out" is a really bland dismissal of the entire conversation.

What alternative do you have even for many highly-paid professional jobs like doctors?

Doctors are somewhat unique in the fact that they can live and practice in a wide variety of places. Anywhere there’s a hospital, you will have them. Where they will choose to work/for how much is a much wider decision matrix than it is for many white collar organizations which would have no reason to exist (physically) in a small town of 20,000 people. Such a town would require at least a single hospital employing many medical professionals, depending on how far it is from other forms of medical care.

Doctors are just one example and there are many reasons why a doctor may choose to practice in, say, the Boston area than in some 20,000 person town in North Dakota--though you're right than, in many cases, medical professionals have a pretty wide choice in where they live and work depending upon how choosy they are.

But a ton of STEM jobs do require access to labs and other facilities or may have requirements related to security clearances etc. A lot of skilled people can't just work from home and many others travel a lot even if they don't regularly come into an office.

What was artificial about demand?

In the context of the modern American nuclear family, the concept of both adults working is relatively new. The traditional arrangement was one breadwinner, one homemaker, and ~2.5 kids.

Which is still common these days, but not to the point of exclusivity: I work remotely, but my partner works hybrid.

Both opinions are valid and fine.

What is not okay is that the work-from-office people seems to want to force everyone to work from office. (not directed at you. This is directed at the company execs)

Meanwhile, the work-from-home people advocates for everyone to be able to choose. Akin to being the pro-choice side.

You' re missing a point, quality of life

I have a very short commute, 5 min walk from door to work. So that's 10 minutes a day.

With 260 workdays a year, for me that's 2600 minutes - or 43.3 hours, just over 5 workdays, spent to and from work.

One of my colleagues has a 1 hour commute, so for him that's whooping 520 hours / 65 workdays spent on commuting!

But anyway, the commute isn't the only factor for me: During my 30 min lunch, I spend maybe 10 minutes eating, and the rest 20 mins is spent on shooting the shit with colleagues, scrolling the phone, or similar stuff.

When I work from home, I can spend that time doing chores. I can put on clothes, do the dishes, cleaning, or whatever. It's amazing how much you can do, by just spending 10-15 mins here and there throughout the week.

My weekends do feel a bit longer, since there's less housework to be done.

I spend less money on fuel, and shop less.

Of course, I do enjoy hanging out and talking with my colleagues - but I don't feel like I'm "missing out" if I'm at the office 1-3 days a week, compared to 5 days a week.

So, mostly just benefits for my part. Can't really imagine going back to a typical "butts in seats" with lots of facetime type of job.

Commutes can be amazing. Biking home after a shitty day and getting a few segment records on Strava is so great. I also like a commute via train or maybe even bus where I can zone out with some music or reading, then when home have the energy to get something done.

A long commute via car is pure evil.

> A long commute via car is pure evil.

Not everyone hates driving. I think it's better than sitting on a full bus.

Yeah, a long daily commute on public transit is nothing great either. I did about a 90 minute one about half the time for 18 months and it was not sustainable long-term.

I like driving when it is driving not rolling through a traffic jam.

I’ll take 20 minutes in a car over bike on a cold rainy day every time.

Unfortunately one can't reconstitute minutes saved here and there into long blocks of time that can be used later. That limits the practical impact of these sorts of commute comparisons and other time-wasting activities that we all do.

In office work is relatively new in humanity, even if no one alive today existed before such a time.

At one time your neighborhood was not zoned as a monoculture, but included a lot of places to congregate. People got their socializing not from people who were paid to sit in the same room together, but from people who came to a cafe or restaurant or pub to sit in the same room together.

If your commute is close to an office it’s also close to a communal space. Instead of doing chores at home during lunch, why not leave your home and your job and be with the people you live around? The people who share your neighborhood are more a feature of your life than the people who share your payroll, in so far as they exist in the same context as you for longer - if you let them.

I actually find it sad we’ve lost our communities and traded them for our workplace cliques. We huddle in our break rooms and exchange banalities and assume this is in fact a bond we are forming. We all then commute home to our real life and the two don’t cross over.

But life isn’t actually split into two realities, it’s all one thing. We just insulate our valued life over our work life, trying to make a balance between our sacrifice and our existence. This is a new phenomenon in human existence, and I don’t think it’s strictly necessary. And I suspect it’s not healthy.

But why does it feel so lonely to work from home? Because we don’t have the skills, mental framework, or neighborhood infrastructure any more to build social connection outside of the artificial community of the office.

I do dishes when I need a break from the computer too. I kinda like it. Or midday shower? Glorious. Pupper enjoys the extra walks too.

Who is this meant to convince? Has anyone ever changed their mind as a result of reading a listicle of complaints? This seems more like something for people who already agree with the author to read and self righteously think "yeah, this is THE way"

There isn't some objective right answer here. Different people value different things, and that's ok. Companies can set their RTO policies as they see fit, and that's ok. People should try to find companies that match their preferences. Let's not turn this into yet another tribal schism...

This particular one needs to be a tribal schism as the preferences cannot coexist.

WFH people will always be miserable with in office people and vice versa.

Different companies can set different policies. A large enough company can set different policies for different orgs.

In the long run this is how it will work out, and people will choose companies that match their preferences. In the meantime there's a culture split within many orgs, with each faction wanting their org to end up on their preferred end of the spectrum.

It's not as black and white as all that. People also just have different home situations and different commuting situations. I'd routinely come into our downtown office if I could walk or hop on the subway for a few stops. But it's a two hour drive or train trip. I'm not coming in just to keep you company.

> Has anyone ever changed their mind as a result of reading a listicle of complaints?

I thought ‘no’, but then remembered how John Siracusa works.

If he ever reviews something you like, turn away. The previously hidden defects and problems will suddenly be very obvious.

It's not meant to convince anyone, it's meant to build the author's brand. They're the hip work-from-home type and they're never going back!

And they really, really need you to know that because otherwise they'd have to admit to themselves that they're shouting into the void.

Some people write or blog just because they want to. I have a blog I post on sometimes. Do I care if people read it? Not really. Certainly not trying to build a brand.

Someone once nailed a list of complaints to a church door and it seems to have convinced quite a few folks.

I think I get your theses.

Up until pandemic it was impossible for me to convince mgmt that I can work remotely just fine. Then it turns out that it's viable, personally I'm happy there are people shouting about it. On the other side you have biased articles how WFH slays businesses, I see no problem with both sides being remindered about an alternative, especially in times when it's a hot topic

I don't think I wrote this to convince anyone of anything. I think its internal kickback I have that flares up when I hear about companies trying to force employees back to the office. I think the end point that I probably need to add to the post is that I believe that the way forward is for companies to actually listen to employees and allow them flexibility if they desire it, assuming the work gets done.

> Has anyone ever changed their mind as a result of reading a listicle of complaints?

Maybe they should have, because people were complaining about mandatory office work for no benefit for years, especially when open office plans, and most businesses ignored it entirely until a pandemic forced them to actually evaluate it.

Most people would rather have a choice. Being told that you will be fired unless you bring your company laptop into a loud office and do work uncomfortably that you'd do more effectively and efficiently at home was insulting. You knew there was no benefit for you, the pandemic proved that, and then forced RTO regardless of all evidence and data that your own company published showing no loss in efficiency just makes you lose all trust in management.

I think that’s the thing that’s most frustrating, is all the emails and published metrics about “great job being even more productive during the pandemic!” And then in the exact same breath saying “and you’re all coming back to the office.” Like, if the former isn’t true then don’t lie to us, say we were less efficient.

I understand why these get posted. But not everyone is in the same situation as the author.

I can bike to work, I'm extroverted, and I like free coffee. So I go into the office 2-3 days a week by choice. I have no on-site requirement. I also get quite depressed in winter working in my cold basement office with a space heater :(

But that's just me. And I don't feel like I should force my WFH opinion on anyone else.

> But that's just me. And I don't feel like I should force my WFH opinion on anyone else.

The problem is that company management often does force their WFH opinion on everyone else.

On the flip side, if I was required to be in an office for any job, I would not be working in this industry because the only jobs in my area are paying literally $10/hr for this work and it's mostly just building brochure sites on Wordpress.

Being able to even go to an office is a luxury for a LOT of people.

"But Josh, move to a place that has jobs, duh!" Yeah, I highly doubt any place in this world is willing to not only pay to relocate me, but also my ex-wife and her family because I can promise you no job in this world is worth giving up my child for.

I even went to the library when studying for exams in college even though I didn't have to. I consider myself introvert, but I just like the physical separation of work and leisure. And I have a beautiful commute by bike.

I feel you on the winter thing. I added an electric heater to my office so I can keep the temperatures a bit higher than the rest of the house (mostly I do this for my fingers, honestly). And through the magic of LEDs I have a fairly ridiculous amount of light I can turn on. Makes winter more bearable when I can make it as bright as high noon in July.

I totally get wanting to go into the office. I would go in a few days a week if they hadn't put our new office 20 miles away. Not close to where anybody lives, but it's in the trendy part of downtown.

My fingers get SO cold. Literally to the point I'm about to wear gloves.

Every couple hours I'll thaw them out against the space heater..

Any other hacks for this are welcome. Exercises?

> My fingers get SO cold.

Raynaud’s or other similar condition?

My only other method for dealing with it is alternate ways of getting warmer. When I don't want to turn the space heater on, sometimes I'll fill up a hot water bottle and put it under my feet. Warming the blood up there is reasonably effective at warming up my whole body and thus my fingers.

Maybe a heated desk pad, or some other kind of keyboard heater?

Maybe something like this: https://infrarot-fussboden.de/220-Pro-Infrared-Desk-Heater

Heated desk pads are great, cheap and low-profile.

Maybe there is a cheaper alternative as effective and comfortable, but I can only vouch for these:

https://thewritersglove.com/

When I got gloves too small their support was quick to help too.

Navigating again to their site they now have some sort of LED heater?

It always confused me that we would sit in these large offices together, chatting with each other on Slack. It was like the idea of working from an office had greatly outlived its utility following the development of the internet, yet nobody got the memo until the pandemic forced it into our conscious awareness.

I will never go back to an office again.

Agree on all points in the article.

One of the most underrated features of WFH is my own private bathroom. This is something I would never have at the office.

As someone who had bell/chili pepper family triggered IBS for 6 years without knowing the cause. This 100%.

I'd chip in doing laundry or dishes whilst on a boring call I'm forced to attend. Just don't forget to mute the mike on the headset.

That's definitely a big upside. Things like dishes and laundry are great background tasks. Doesn't take long to set up, then a machine handles the rest, swap out the laundry and keep going. Barely interrupts my day job, and the impetus to get out of my chair is welcome anyway.

Personalized climate control; a useful (clean and fully equipped) kitchen, with private storage...

There are all kinds of features, with varying value to everyone and that people insist on ignoring.

I can settle for a public bathroom, but surely we have the technology to construct walls without significant gaps. Spend the one-time extra investment so that I can pretend I have some privacy.

Especially considering that many people tend to get their BMs around the same time, after coffee or a meal.

Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime. That's why I poop on company time...Love to have someone else clean up the empty bathrooms at work every day or so; shame that job was almost two hours away for the 2 days a week I had to go.

I did contracting for Deere & Co, because of how close they are to my home, they requested I be on site.

Wanting to be a team player I agreed, it was only a 3 hour round trip, they even agreed to pay me for the commute. My time started the second I left my house and didn't stop until I got home.

But here's the thing. The days I was on site, I sat in my own cubicle and didn't converse with any of my colleagues except over Teams, and then when we had a meeting we all filed into a meeting room, where we got on a video call with the teams in India.

None of my reason for being on site mattered outside of them being able to claim I was there in the office.

*on site :)

At this point I've stopped trying to correct autocorrect when it decides a word I spelled correctly isn't the word I wanted and changes it with a different word.

I hate how autocorrect has evolved into something that tries to actually rewrite words that I've written, even after I've moved onto the next word. And sometimes the old trick of just backspacing and typing it again doesn't convince autocorrect that I in fact know what I'm typing and want to keep it.

I'd prefer to just have it highlight the word it thinks as wrong, and leave it alone. Kinda like when I'm on my computer.

Then you actually do typo a word and are one letter off and is clearly wrong and it’s like “nah that’s good we’re not changing anything”

yup, exactly what my situation is and a bunch of my colleagues.

A large percentage of modern physical workplaces are purposely designed to isolate people from each other for security reasons, but they keep pushing Work in Office for the "benefits of non-isolation".

Under-appreciated: not wearing shoes all day.

Anytime I need to spend a day in an office now, when I finally get home and pull off my shoes and sweat soaked shoes I'm so glad I don't have to do this on a regular basis anymore.

Perhaps your problem is that you’re wearing 2 layers of shoes. Try socks instead. ;)

Try wearing socks with those $45 foam Birkenstocks as your daily driver. Black on black doesn't look bad.

When I lived on a beach I didn't wear shoes for years. The combo above was the only way I could reenter society.

Yeah, I used to have black office sandals that I wore with my black socks. No one noticed that they were not black shoes. I stuffed them in my office locker overnight. Worked a treat, no longer sweatty office feet...

Though it was a toss if I changed them when going out for lunch, usually I did not even in winter time (London). Though as my last non-WFH gig the team had a habit of having "lunch" standing outside a pub it was sometimes a little chilly in January..

(I still have my last pair in black, which I am not sure they sell anymore https://www.crocs.co.uk/p/mens-swiftwater-mesh-deck-sandal/2... )

It's not even sweat, you need to take off shoes after hours sitting at a desk because feet swell from the blood not being pushed back up as you're not moving your legs. There are few things I hate about office work as much as not being free to work on my slippers in the winter or flip flops in the summer.

> Under-appreciated: not wearing shoes all day.

For me it's regularly putting my feet up, standing up to stretch, and looking out of the window into the distance for a few minutes.

You know, just some things you should absolutely do if you value your health. And yet, having coworkers around tends to guilt you into not doing them.

I'm going to stop wearing shoes at the office. collaboration bro!

I have worn slippers at every job (only 3, but still) I have had.

Btw in Estonia, we don't usually wear shoes in the office: instead we wear slippers, indoor shoes or just socks.

In fact, many Estonians take off their shoes inside the plan or the ferry as well.

I think what’s missing in these conversations is the cost of living near an office.

Housing costs are very high. If I could live 10 minutes from an office I’d go all the time. But most live much farther, which puts an untenable strain on them (and the environment, infrastructure, etc!)

Of course the C-suite class probably DOES live 10 minutes from an office. They can afford to, unlike most employees.

If you want RTO build more dense housing near where offices are located. And build solid transit and other means of getting to an office quickly.

The underlying thing here, like in so many cases, is coercion: we should structure workplaces and workforces to treat people well (and optimize for their long-term productivity), rather than squeezing them for short-term outcomes.

Whether that means working from home or an office depends on the person, but the corporate policy is the same regardless: let people work where they do their best work.

Here is an argument in favor of WFH that I hardly ever see:

Growing up in a second rate city in a country with little tech scene, my and my colleague options to advance our career was to leave our city or our country behind. Having to choose between family/friends and career is a pretty tough choice to face. My sister in law moved to the capital for 2 years and had a distance relationship until she was able to transfer back to our city.

WFH makes this much less of an issue. Now someone can have a successful career more easily even if they live in a small town. Having more choice of career while not sacrificing friends and family is something I wish I had 15 years ago.

At the same time people starting their career tend to be the ones who benefit the most from an office setup, so there is probably still a tradeoff to make.

As a mechanical engineer, I want to offer some perspective on how specific this is for people working exclusively in software. I would never ever even consider working fully remotely, mainly because my job involves designing physical things. The prototypes and models for them are not and cannot be in my home. A big part of my job involves making sure the technician can actually assemble the things I design, which requires going to the place where they assemble it. My company employs many software engineers, and they work from home more frequently than the mechanical or electrical engineers, but they are much more hesitant to allowing full remote just because the work is so centered on the physical product. Every time I see an article posted here arguing one way or the other this rarely comes up. Regardless of the pros, cons, or preferences this just is not an option for a lot of technical people.

This is fair, but I think software engineering is more typical of most knowledge work in this respect than mechanical engineering is. Most knowledge workers aren't handling physical objects for their work beyond a keyboard, mouse, and possibly a high-quality headset.

Software is probably rare among engineering disciplines in never requiring physical access to specialized equipment, but it's pretty normal in the scope of white-collar work in general.

I'm not so sure about that, scientists need labs, academics have labs and lecture theatres, lawyers (some of the time) need courts and to meet clients or counterparties, very few doctors can work from home a non-trivial amount, etc.

I agree it's unusual for something we call engineering, but I don't think needing more than a computer is that unusual for 'knowledge work'. A lot of finance has been more changed by computers than professions like accounting say which you could roughly say just swapped paper for computers and always could've been done from home to a similar extent. I suppose it's the internet being the significant piece, or just needed as well as computers themselves.

I’ll admit that I do miss when everyone else wasn’t remote. Once Covid handed everyone remote on a silver platter it diminished some of the perks.

Everything used to be completely empty during normal work hours. This is was one of my big life lessons that it’s better to not advertise things that are truly great in order to help prevent the utility of it from being crowded away.

Case in point are “day in the life” TikTok’s about an awesome lifestyle. These egotistically blatant brags end up bringing attention that threatens it.

At the same time I see “day in the life” TikTok’s about working onsite at a FAANG and they are the biggest jokes of software devs I’ve ever seen.

If someone were to ask me why I prefer WFH, my answer would be: bc I fucking feel like it.

I am not obligated to justify my preferences to anyone. Ever.

Totally true. And yet, if you do explain your preferences, your leadership can know their people and try to build an environment that works for them. Hard to blame them for not giving you a good environment if you've never been willing to tell them what "good" means for you.

They ask because then they bring some of that stuff into an office and then claim the office is better than WFH.

For example: One of the biggest things people pointed out at my current job was the long commute/gas money. So company offered to recompensate gas for anyone up to 50 miles or something and claimed now there was no reason to complain anymore... which is obviously untrue.

I've seen this at 2 of the companies I've recently worked for where they do silly polls as to why people prefer WFH, make some small tweaks to the office that still come nowhere close to the convenience of being remote, and then claim there's no longer a reason to WFH anymore since they have made the office more preferable.

Most people who are remote will never want to go back to an office, regardless of what happens.

They might've done a bad job of it, but if they looked at how to make the office more comfortable and then implemented the suggestions, that sounds like a good thing?

I like working from home, but I definitely want to see my co-workers in person sometimes. So if they can bring some WFH benefits to the office, that's great!

I like to go into the office for the social interaction, but I also like working from home one day a week.

From the article, the con about being interrupted while working in the office applies equally to WFH. Your train of thought can be just as much derailed by a Slack/Teams message as by a colleague wandering by your cubicle.

Not even close. I can mute slack. I can’t mute the office.

I can't mute the family.

It's interesting how my daily interactions have evolved since we all went remote. A lot of people at my company seem to have given up on email, and the go-to solution for communication now is a direct message with a request to join a "quick" zoom call.

I've had to get a bit militant about it. Some people still get a bit snippity when I tell them I don't have a moment right now but I'll touch base with them when I reach a stopping point. As if my mere presence on Teams means I ought to be available at any moment to entertain them.

This is silly; I can just silence slack whenever I need to or simply ignore it. I can’t ignore a colleague standing next to me tapping my shoulder.

I wonder why companies feel the need to set physical presence policies at the company level. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to do it team-by-team? Is the unspoken admission that nobody would choose to pick a collocated team if they could join a remote one?

A team composed of 4 people, where one’s in SF, another in NYC, etc is having a very different experience from one where all 4 people are all collocated.

This question was recently asked at a company meeting when they said they were increasing the number of days in the office.

The response was it "wouldn't be fair".

Which I thought was an interesting response, as it at least demonstrates they have some awareness that the move back to office isn't popular.

I manage multiple teams all across the world. Other than being able to lock ourselves in a room to fight a fire, why do I need to have my onshore people in the same building as me? Its nice to have them close for when things get sporty, but at the end of the day, its all about theory X managers wanting to get their Taylor on.

Yes great points. But most WFH advocates forget to talk about juniors or people who are just starting their careers or people who just cannot wfh effectively. The article talks about Management's arguments against WFH but fails to mention any of the points I mentioned.

The best solution in my opinion is hybrid especially for juniors and I will die on this hill.

Juniors are hyper-online, accustomed to COVID classes etc. Maybe it is methods of training that need to shift.

Not sure why you can't just teach juniors how to work from home effectively, just how you teach them how to do their job. It's all part of the same thing. I've certainly helped juniors over a video call just as effectively as being next to them physically. In one case I point a finger on their screen, in another I point my mouse cursor on their screen.

It's much harder. We are social animals on a whole. Nothing beats in person interactions. I am not against remote work btw.

And we continue to be social animals over video chat. Harder in what sense? I hear this a lot, but I rarely hear concrete examples. Feels to me more that people are just not accustomed to fully online communication at work rather than that it actually being harder. Change is hard, yes. But that doesn't mean that what you change into is actually more difficult.

Also, I'm not sure of newer generations where you're from, but here what I see is less and less want from people to have in-person conversations. Newer generations have everything done remotely. Ordering food, socializing (online video games, etc), that in-person conversations often are intimating to them. Which begs the question, have the people who say juniors need in-person help actually asked juniors what they would like? Or is it more that _you_ are more comfortable _teaching_ in-person, in which case again, the problem seems to be you, not the juniors.

All-in-all, I'm just not seeing the difficulties people seem to say they have. Just my $0.02.

The single biggest issue I've noticed is that body language communicates a lot, and in remote environments you cannot see this. You don't feel at all invested in the other person either, and I've noticed people multi-tasking instead of listening to what the other person is telling them - often followed up with a "Sorry, I missed that. Can you repeat it?"

As another example, I've worked with some people who are quite confrontational and dare I say, aggressive, on camera, and have raised their voice a couple of times in the past. This same person has very different interactions in real life, a lot more empathy, where it becomes apparent the other person is in fact, an actual person with emotions.

The disconnect is real indeed, and in my experience mostly solved with company get-togethers. After the first get-together, people have a much better idea of other people, vibe better together and thus have a lot more empathy as well.

That said, if a person is unable to conduct themselves professionally whether it is via a video call or not, I think it has nothing to do with remote work and all to do with that particular person being bad to work with.

You can be social over a video call. No one needs to suffer through all of the bullshit of modern offices just to lean over someone's shoulder to read some code.

Sorry to be all 'yet you participate in society' about it but it's notable that you're choosing to have this conversation on an international, text-only website on a Sunday rather than in a local public space. Nothing beats in-person interactions, except perhaps the ability to interact with a community with niche knowledge that's thousands of times larger than what's within a 30 minute drive.

At 3 AM when alerts are firing, documentation beats half-remembered talks with former teammates. We need to get over our aversion to writing stuff down, or at least recording our impromptu brain dumps.

And if anything, it’s much better remotely because you don’t have to be hunched over at the same time as someone else on a single keyboard.

I've onboarded juniors and interns remotely at a couple of jobs and it's been fine. It doesn't work well if your onboarding process is osmosis-based & you want them to just pick stuff up by being around others. But if you are invested in the success of a junior and establish good patterns around how to communicate, there's no real risk there, and if anything it's healthier and more repeatable.

For the team I am on maintaining virtual office hours has really helped in this respect. One or more (but at least one) senior+ person just working/hanging out in a zoom call where others can drop in and talk about whatever.

With remote teams you have to explicitly solve this issue rather than just having it happen like it does for healthy in office teams. But, it isn’t like this is some unsolvable problem.

The only case where being in office is better for Juniors is when the organization is dysfunctional and doesn't know how to properly do remote.

I absolutely have worked in companies where my onboarding was such a mess that the only solution for me was doing hybrid. They sucked at remote work and if you were not in the office you were not seen.

My first Junior job was in a remote-first company and it was an absolute non issue and I don't think being in office would have helped in any form.

The difference is, with remote work you need to have processes in place. You can't just stuff people in an office and hope for the best. You need a mentoring program. You need to encourage pair programming. You need to build digital spaces where socialization can happen and people can just hang out.

> people who just cannot wfh effectively

Yeah but don't forget that for many people with special needs, WFH can be a huge blessing and allow them to work in the first place.

And yes, some people thrive more in a hybrid environment. Though often it because their home situation is non conducive for work, lacking space, too many distraction and so on. I think co-working spaces can be a great solution for that.

I spend a lot of time working with the junior developers on my team, mostly because that's part of my job. There's also a selfish component: if I don't help the new people get up to speed and improve, then I will be less confident delegating tasks.

IMHO, there is sufficient motivation for senior developers to work with the junior members of the team that are unrelated to physical space.

> Just when I am deep in some twisted train of thought involving a failing JS callback or missing network packets in Kubernetes someone ambles over to my cubicle to ask me some random question about helm that they could have answered in 2 seconds using the search function of their web browser. Train derailed.

> Don’t talk to me about collaboration when I sometimes have to turn off slack to be able to hear myself think.

Why not communicate to the people that interrupt that they should not come to your cubicle to ask their questions, and should send you a Slack message with their question instead?

And then, if you are deep into something and you don't want to be disturbed, you can mute your slack notifications.

It feels to me, from the tone of the post, that the writer prefers WFH because it allows them to side-step issues that they could have resolved with communication. Of course this doesn't apply to the practical issues (time lost commuting, ...)

> Why not communicate to the people that interrupt that they should not come to your cubicle to ask their questions, and should send you a Slack message with their question instead?

Because then you're the weird introvert, and "not a team-player". People will get surprisingly hostile.

> should send you a Slack message with their question instead?

> you can mute your slack notifications.

These things can be done from home or a remote location, what was the point of forcing them to come into the office in the first place, none.

The second quote was the author's response to the argument that working at the office increases collaboration. My point is that some perceived benefits of WFH can be achieved when working at the office with some communication. That way you can keep the benefits of working from office.

I think by now it should be pretty apparent that people are different, and some prefer working from home, some prefer coming to the office, some prefer open spaces and some prefer personal spaces. Most people are somewhere on a spectrum and like a different ratio of each. Posts like these are about as useful as an article on “Why I like gray socks more than blue socks”.

What I would love to see is some data on why so many companies that previously said during Covid “Oh wow, this remote work is great! We’re going to stay like this” are now saying “Sorry, changed our minds, now we want you back in the office”.

Office space isn’t cheap. Requiring employees be local limits your pool of talent. A lot of people like being remote. Companies must have a strong reason, hopefully with some data to back it up, but I’ve not seen any hard evidence for the about face yet. Anyone got any pointers?

> Companies must have a strong reason, hopefully with some data to back it up

This isn't how companies or indeed people work. Most decisions are made emotionally while trying to find data to back up what one already believes. This is especially true when we have bought into the idea of an army of professional managers who are neither any good at the actual work nor management not because this is a useful social organization but because it provides a useful justification to reinforce the existing stratification of society.

We bless folks who prove they have enough money to earn a potentially useless degree with a position in the social hierarchy that befits them.

It’s not only about personal preferences. Being able to work from city X for a company that has its HQ in city Y within the same country is a game changer. I don’t know who would refuse to such. Note that I’m talking about remote working within the same country.

I'm mostly in favor of WFH, but there are a few missing spots:

- toxic people ? if you're in a small team, or it's your direct lead, you will endure his toxicity even when remote

- dedicated space for calm/silence: unfortunately not everybody has an isolated spare room. And personally I don't mind house noises, but the person there can get pissed if not very angry very often during zoom calls and it may/will eat your energy.

Other than that the luxury of not having to commute or avoiding very bad workplaces is still something that should be the norm and part of worker union rights. If there's a coworking space and positive teammates I will come to see them very often, after all what's better than having a good team to work with closely ? but this is not the average experience.

WFH is much nicer, the toxic person will need to call you and this is extra effort. But in the office you’re few steps away, so the whole day can be poisoned easily. My stupid manager (and former brilliant technical contributor) once sat for tho hours between my and colleague’s tables and watched what we do. Because he had nothing to do between meetings. I understand, that this is not everyday’s normal situation, but still not pleasant.

yeah that's for sure, in remote you're one button away from peace :)

but when you have mandatory regular calls with the somehow just slightly too toxic but not enough to grant company action.. you know it's gonna be a long term issue

I've worked in many different jobs throughout my life: in the office, freelancing from home, renting office space, or working on company and university campuses.

I feel cubicles are better than open plans.

Allow people to WFH. Personally, I don't mind in office work, but I prefer mostly from home (I am raising the future work force).

Commutes are horrid. Here in Seattle, road rage shootings are common. In San Francisco, on the BART, one could get into an accidental fight with strange people.

Make sure the bathrooms are clean, and don't assume men's bathrooms should be smaller. I find it absurd to stand in line.

Free coffee and candy are not perks.

Homogeneous workplace application is a thing of the past. Flexibility is the future.

I used to work at a fortune 500, my commute (each way) was 45 minutes in the best of conditions. 100% of my job could have been done from any location.

Back-of-the-envelope calculation for how much time in a year was spent commuting (conservatively, and not factoring in public holidays and vacation days) would be 15 days/year commuting.

So as a proposal, give employees who can fulfil their duties from anywhere, the choice - Want to work from the office? Your commute time will be compensated in days off, or extra pay, or a mixture of both if you want.

I think that has a lot less stink to it than, for instance, Amazon's recent move to block promotions from WFH insisters.

I thought I would, but I'm no longer sold on full remote work having done it since 2018.

I didn't realize just how much of my social interaction came from work and it's something I've not been able to recreate outside of work in my free time. I am hopelessly lonely and the mental health affects have at least in my case been dire.

At the same time I'm afraid to RTO because if for some reason I need the flexibility of WFH again there's a good chance I won't easily find another job that allows it.

We talk about the loss of third places, but some of us have lost our second places too.

Your colleagues are not your friends. You’re more like passenger in the same bus where somebody will depart in the next stop. It’s dangerous to build relationships with people who are about to leave.

I have made many life long friends at work, who I am still friends with to this day, many years after we left the companies we both worked at. I'm sure many other people have too.

You need some kind of social bond with the people you work with. What are you going to do instead? Treat the people you work with like robots where every interaction is a barter or request of some kind like "Hi, can you review this please. Thanks." every single day for the entirety of your employment at this company?

Nice that it worked out well for you. The last friendly colleague relocated to the other town. Guess if we will meet again with 1,5 hours driving distance. It was nice relationship with 35 minutes driving, but now obviously it’s over. I will have new colleagues and he will be envy, that I left toxic place and he stayed.

The colleagues are not much more than robots. Wait for another promotion or layoff round. Nice for you if you’re not competing with others for more money or job security.

> The last friendly colleague relocated to the other town. Guess if we will meet again with 1,5 hours driving distance. It was nice relationship with 35 minutes driving, but now obviously it’s over.

Some of my old colleagues moved across the atlantic. We still keep in contact - one of whom I speak to daily. Have you tried contacting your friendly colleague or tried meeting up with them? 1.5h is not very far.

Without fail this is always the response "coworkers aren't your friends".

I didn't say they were and more importantly coworkers don't need to be your friends for you to have social interactions with them. I found those in person workplace interactions helpful for my overall mental health, because even a throwaway conversation at lunch time provides some contact with another person.

99% of the time these days the only person I talk to on a given day is the cashier at the store. I think you don't appreciate how bad some of us have it on this front, but for some of us work was a social outlet.

How about some volunteering in the community? There are many opportunities for communication. Even more if you have kids. I have elder lady next door and we have random lunch conversations when I fix occasionally something in her old house.

> It’s dangerous to build relationships with people who are about to leave.

Why? I get the argument about not getting too close with coworkers (although I've never encountered those problems with mins, and I've made good friends everywhere I've worked), but why are people who are about to leave worse?

I am also a dedicated worker-from-home, and I know plenty of other people who are smarter than me who work by choice from the office every day.

Even confining the discussion to those of us who logistically can do all of our jobs over the network, I've come to think that there is no single policy that can be applied over an organization that won't alienate a significant fraction of your staff. Organizations that don't find ways to accommodate the whole spectrum of, uh, "work-remoteness" are going to be at a serious disadvantage in the years to come.

Speaking personally, I felt way too shut-in during my fully remote pandemic time. But I’m also quite glad that the work-week has relaxed such that I can work from home when I want to. Just a couple of thoughts on this part:

> being a ‘tech person’ who needs to focus on things in a deep way, and having to share some open plan office space with a hundred other people every day… The two things just don’t mix well.

I’ve totally argued this myself in the past. Long before the pandemic I even tried having office hours, and hanging ‘don’t talk to me right now’ signs on my char (with limited success at best). But for most software engineering I now disagree with the ‘I need deep focus’ arguments. I have watched way too many people go off and write the wrong software when left to their own devices, me included, claiming they needed space for deep thinking. Over-engineering is a widespread problem and a massive waste of time and energy, and a lot of people are better off with frequent check-ins and budgets on their alone time. Everyone hates having budgets and micromanagement too, of course, and it’s possible and common to go overboard on that in the wrong direction. It just needs to be balanced, but on the whole this is one of the reasons that being in the office sometimes is useful.

Another good reason is that co-workers need help, information needs to flow, and allowing knowledgeable people to avoid all interruptions is bad for the productivity of team. I have also seen many of the best engineers write large systems and get them deployed widely, with not enough documentation, and then make themselves unavailable and act like questions are too burdensome on their time, saying they require deep-focus time for whatever they’re working on.

+1 to this. I feel like a lot of the time the "focus time" blocks in their calendar are just because they can't be bothered to deal with meetings or talking to others - basically they just want to do the parts of the job they like (code or whatever) and to fuck with the bits they don't like. "Sorry - can't do that planning/bug triage/training/mentoring/interview session - I am in my focus time"

When you get to the more accomplished/senior levels of impact, it is all about scaling your skills - i.e. using your skills and knowledge to accomplish more than just one person can do on their own by sharing knowledge, helping others etc, leading a team/teams in the right direction and so on.

Locking yourself away so noone can talk to you for hours/days at a time are the hallmarks of a selfish engineer (or at the least a very junior one who doesn't yet realise their place)

One of the (many) parts of the article that annoys me is that they basically push a grand conspiracy theory where apparently nobody running any company anywhere is/was able to actually measure employee productivity in any way, but him, a random person, somehow knows better about worker productivity and what's better for these companies, than all these companies with years of experience managing their workers do.

How are people having so many meetings per day, they need to complain about it? I have literally four meetings each week: company, group, boss, focus group.

It sucks.

I basically talk with myself to solve problems and see zero appreciation from fellow employees about how it impacts them, or what they’re struggling with or working on.

Not arguing for office life, but interaction is needed to some degree to feel value in the work.

Maybe it’s just my employer that isn’t doing enough?

Offices, along with mass transit, are superspreader sites, but we're asked to pretend that they're not, even after going through a pandemic during which we were told to be in constant fear of killing grandma and potentially everyone else we come into contact with. It's amazing how quickly things like caring for the environment disappear the instant they become inconvenient for businesses or governments, and the same is true for just about every single thing that was rammed down our throats during the pandemic that should be forgotten so managers can look out over their underlings and extroverts can get their unspoken fringe benefit of using the office as a place to socialize.

COUGH COUGH! Oh well, none of that pandemic stuff really matters anymore, right? Which is weird considering how much messaging there is around everyone needing to get more boosters. Can't even go grocery shopping with it being announced. So, what is it? Over or not? If it's still on, why are superspreader activities allowed, especially when there's a viable option of not maximizing office attendance?

Can we have a quick roundup on where each of the faangs and household names are on going back to the office?

Can report that Spotify is firmly work-from-anywhere and wouldn’t have place for everyone if they went back on that. People sometimes work from exotic locations and it’s normal to not having met teammates in person etc. Productivity is generally high and not adversely affected.

Tangentially to the topic of the blogpost, has anyone else noticed that many recent articles on Hacker News feature AI-generated illustrations? They seem to have a unique, AI-specific style and that weird "uncanny valley" like quality where you can easily tell it was, in fact, a machine generated thing?

I have a 100% remote job, but I had them set me up with a desk in a coworking space. I just felt that being alone all day was just a lonely way to live my life. It was great at the start to have so few interruptions, but y'know we're not building the pyramids. Everything we make in tech becomes legacy pretty quickly and eventually forgotten about and lost. I think a lot of life is what happens in the interruptions. That's where you find out about the guy that goes ice fishing and get invited along, or about someone who plays in a band and introduces you to a weird new music scene or something like that. I think everyone should get to work however they feel they need to within reason (I like the coworking space vibe myself), but I just hope people aren't giving up more than they realised.

I much prefer working at the office.

There's less distraction and better divide between work and private time. When I leave the office, I'm done for the day.

I find somewhat ironic that people use an alleged higher productivity at home as justification for remote work, but but doing chores around the house throughout the day always comes up as a perk of WFH. Doing chores and being productive are antithetic.

Anecdotically I live in Europe and don't know anybody of any age who wants to work 100% remote, although obviously everybody likes the flexibility of working ~50% remote. Hating the office to the point of wanting to be 100% remote seems to be a very american thing, I wonder why. Average commute time the the US is among the shortest in the OECD btw, so the reason must lie elsewhere.

> Doing chores and being productive are antithetic.

Creative, high-leverage work like programming isn't a linear function of hours-in-chair. If working from home lets you focus better and be more creative, you can absolutely be both more productive and have time to do chores/etc.

I personally really enjoy my commute. It does take 25 minutes, but I cycle, enjoying the views of parks and multiple gorgeous monuments. It makes me move a bit, as opposed to my usual very very sedentary days when I wfh. I imagine this isn't as frequent in the US, as I live in Germany.

I have actually moved to a team that doesn't do wfh so much anymore because my days were long and boring. Life is much better seeing humans on a day to day basis (and I still have some flexibility for wfh and working from abroad).

> There's less distraction and better divide between work and private time. When I leave the office, I'm done for the day.

I am glad I have the luxury of having a separate room as my home office. When I’m done for the day, I leave that room and close the door, and don’t go back in unless it’s the next day or an emergency.

Luckier than you think! Having a door to shut isn't all that helpful when you have a crafty and desperate special needs kid.

Actually I do have a special needs kid (my daughter is deaf). I do keep my door open during work hours.

Does your team use Slack (or something similar). Don't you get random pings, mentions or calls for help/input. Is there an expectation around for you to respond within a short period. I have been 100% WFH since last 5 years and I am only productive after 5 pm.

Yes a big downside from wfh is that you don’t need to book a meeting room :(

This means people can book meetings when people are free instead of being limited by the availability and preplanning of big enough rooms!

You can ignore those random pings of all kinds until you at a good place to stop what you are doing and help out. If you are responding to all of those the second they come in, you are encouraging the problem by building a culture of over-responsiveness.

I've been on teams where we explicitly defined expected response times. 2 hours was the typical answer on teams where I've worked.

I've also been on teams that didn't define the expectation, but nobody I work with expects Slack to be real-time. The only time we respond quickly is when we have first asked, "Hey, let me know when you have a couple minutes to chat." And then I either stick around until they have time and quickly have the chat/huddle... or if they don't respond and I need to step away, I delete my message.

It sounds counter-intuitive but you can often build a better remote culture by being a little less responsive.

My team does use Slack, but I just have it muted for most channels and check it in predefined intervals. I don't have DM's muted but we also don't have a culture of DM'ing people, calls for help are posted in designated channels.

In my opinion and experience there are very few issues that require you to actually respond immediately, I just find many teams don't understand this. Everyone thinks their specific issue is the highest priority thing going on, and I'd say product teams are especially bad about this. Asking for status updates all too often and interrupting developers days just for small things that could've been done at a scheduled time or just been an email.

Obviously this can somewhat depend on your role since your role may be something that tends to require immediate intervention. But I check Slack once every 30 min to an 1 hour or so and have no issues with my response times.

Don't you guys think that WHF makes learning for Junior Devs relatively much more difficult?

I have noticed it is harder for getting people straight out of college used to a professional working environment. However, I haven't noticed any difference in getting them up to speed technically.

When I was a junior my manager was in a different country. What's the difference? It's like how companies didn't used to support WFH right up until the moment they wanted you to take some work home for unpaid overtime.

The article rehashes some well-known arguments, but the most interesting part of it for me was this:

> “People need to be in the office to be a part of the TEAM”

> This gets at a much deeper issue, however. Should we be loyal to companies who would lay us off at the drop of a hat to pad their quarterly earnings? Companies who decide the projects we work on have no merit but can’t be bothered to reassign us to more critical work after spending the time and money to get us in the door? Many of us feel the need to be loyal but what are we getting in return?

The author acknowledges that team-building may be easier in the office, but the question is whether team-building is of any benefit other than to keep employees stuck to their employer.

I like working from home because of its flexibility. To separate my workspace from my living space, I rented a co-working station similar to WeWork, which is a 10-15 minute walk from my home. I usually spend 4-5 hours a day there, focusing on tasks like hard problems, and work from anywhere for less demanding tasks, like squashing bugs. On a weekly basis, I find myself spending more productive hours this way than I would if I were going to an office. Additionally, this approach allows me to learn more; I can freely explore new frameworks or technologies unrelated to my current work, without the pressure of product deadlines breathing down my neck.

I enjoy working from the office when the atmosphere of the office is aligned and there aren't a hundred abstractions of self justification and internal status signaling, though that's very rare in most companies.

I liked this post. A lot of the pros/cons resonated well with me. Going to save this for anytime some corporate person tries to "enlighten" me about the benefits of workers returning to the office.

Introvert and HSP software engineer here. Not only working from home comes naturally for me but I have to say that since I started WFH 15 years ago, I've been a top performer in most of the teams I worked for (and that includes some teams where I was the only remote worker). I don't see any reason why I should work from an office at this point in my career and it actually makes little sense to me why some companies are losing top performers just to enforce some silly back to the office rules. I guess they just promoted the wrong people :)

Something I have been struggling with as a remote software engineer is 1. getting reviews from coworkers and 2. being able to communicate asynchronously with coworkers, even those working on the same projects. I find some of my coworkers are quite good, but others much less so. Sometimes I've waited 48 hours to hear back on a DM, and in other cases 3-4 weeks before getting reviews on PRs. It feels like in a remote environment it's so much easier to ignore other people that you work with.

> I've waited 48 hours to hear back on a DM, and in other cases 3-4 weeks before getting reviews on PRs.

This sounds like a performance management or team expectations management issue, not an issue with remote work.

Perhaps. I ended up going to a coworking space with this person for a day as the latency doing it remotely was just too high.

And both those things are much less an issue if you can physically bother the person whose supposed to be doing them.

Like sure, we should be able to fix them. But if WFH creates extra friction that doesn't exist in-office, that's an extra resource drain that ought to be accounted for.

I'm in the partial "work from home" group and I agree to most points and would stress it is in my experience by far easier (and less stressful) to have a very good equipped home office than an at least half-decent equipped office.

For my home office I simply buy the equipment I need. But for the companies office I have to ask multiple level of management for simple equipment like a mouse with more than 3 buttons just to be told that a 3 button mouse was good enough.

Agree with writer, apart from a challenge on the "I get pestered at the office/on slack too much!":

I see this complaint quite frequently about flows being disrupted due to office/slack, having to "mute slack to get anything done", etc. In my experience, those who I have observed IRL complaining about this are, more often than not, those that tend to struggle writing clear and maintainable code, those that struggle writing concise and readable documentation, those that struggle writing up tasks properly, and so on. Equally more often than not, I have found that they often fit into the "Super Smart Engineer Individual Contributor" bin, who are clearly incredibly good at solving very challenging problems, sometimes performing great, field-leading feats of engineering, but fall short on the human side of the job. I know this is highly generalizing and not all fit this description, but it truly is what I have seen.

About me, I have been WFH for a long time, before the pandemic: <2019 60+% WFH, >2019 100% WFH.

* Saved 2,500 hours by no commute - around 100 extra days of life.

* Saved ~15,000-20,000 GBP by no train/car commute

* I'm quite particular about my food and drink, and invest quite heavily in it (some would say too much when it comes to tea and coffee :P). I fear hot drink vending machines, "nespresso pods" (which I disagree with on perhaps a spiritual, even cosmic level), and/or plastic "bag tea". Eeeek D:

* I'm quite particular when it comes to peripherals. My back hates Herman Miller knock-offs, generally any kind of "different" from my at-home setup to be honest. Thunderbolt, in 2023, remains at best a challenge, at worst a mystery for multi-million and a number of multi-billion companies.

* Office equipment in the last ~5 or so years has been on a somewhat downwards trajectory since 2019. Companies don't invest in quality software engineering equipment like they used to (understandable as paying for equipment that few use is a waste). This troubles me often; I fear that the pandemic has sparked a rapidly spiraling, high momentum, positive feedback doom-loop, i.e.:

1) Pandemic --> 2) WFH --> 3) Companies invest less in office equipment --> 4) More employees want WFH for better equipment --> 5) Companies invest even less in office equipment --> GOTO 3

My thoughts are that people that maybe will return to office or mixed setups will be completely different group than one left office in a hurry. Like in my case we have some pressure from management and some excuses to avoid open conflict and not do RTO. I agree that younger generation that wants to grow is really disappointed in ways current wfh works. I think opportunities to improve wfh setups to better teach youngsters are not exhausted yet.

I agree with almost everything there except the point about powering through and working when sick.

If you are sick (proper sick not just slightly under the weather) then take those sick days. That is what generations of workers before you fought for, so that you wouldn't need to.

On the subject of wfh I do 1 day a week at the office when feeling like it and my productivity usually goes right down to zero on those days. But I like that little bit of social exposure.

I suspect the author was talking more about being just under the weather with this point. There have been plenty of days where I would have called in sick to an office job, but was fine working from home where I could sit in bed with hot drinks, tissues, and access to my own bathroom.

I’d be happy to work in an office, had I little commute.

I moved from Boston to Providence in 2019. The thought of doing 4-5 hours of daily commute to get into Boston, pay for parking, deal with taking food there or daily expense of eating out, wear and tear on a vehicle… fuck no. Tech barely exists in providence though, so most in office jobs would be in Boston

I did this to myself yes, but having a house that wasn’t tiny and expensive was important to me

I 100% agree, the commute (90+ minutes twice), the open office space where people walk in and out and interrupt even without checking if you are in a meeting or concentrating on some complex problem and the team not being there (I start early and leave early, other do both late).

and yes, the team thing is hard, but we do have office days when we all show up and have an agenda of things to discuss. That's when the team building happens!

I'm an introvert, but it feels very isolating working from home by yourself day after day. I also live in a 2 bedroom apartment, and my office is a gigantic 52 story building with free coffee, events occasionally, and plenty of space to focus and think. So if you're in a beautiful house in the woods and your office is a soul draining place in the middle of an office park, I totally feel you.

EU perspective: i work remotely in a german company, and my salary is way higher than the top engineer/engineering manager/director of engineer salaries in my country. There is no office/commute/etc debate for me, more like if i had to work to a local company i would need to take a massive salary cut. Hence I will try to work remotely as much as possible.

My work is 20 minutes away which consists of a 10 minute walk and a 7 minute tram. I also get free lunch at work and since I'm single, it's also the only place where I can talk to people in real life in the weekdays. Furthermore, my gym is also next to my office. So, in my case I will always prefer to work from office until I get married and start a family.

I always felt like work from home is an extension of slacking in an open office plan. Work means a lot more than sending keystrokes to the computer. There are labor laws, information safety guidelines, tons of things you can't do at home alone by yourself. How can you be sure that your neighbor is not creating something competitive to the product you work on?

Not to mention the ability to do work holidays, where I go to the beach or whatever and work from there for a week or two. And the sick days is a big one that benefits the company. I've never once oficially taken one since WFH. I might have been mostly just standing by if I felt like shit, but still available for anything urgent.

With current gas prices in many countries you would have to pay me 500$ more for me to even consider driving to work and spending 1h in traffic jam every day.

The times when ppl considered commute time as opportunity cost are long over.

If my work does not require me to be “there” to do my work, no way Im going to waste my time.

> and spending 1h in traffic jam every day

I see mention of traffic a lot, but I work on the east coast in the defense industry where flexible schedules are the norm.

Traffic completely dies down out here by 10AM and 6PM, so I work 10-6, sometimes 10-7.

Is traffic just not as bad in Maryland or are flexible schedules not the norm outside of my industry?

Don’t forget about the often critical, but almost never mentioned directly, argument for returning to the cubicle: office spaces are essentially an investment, which may very well go down in value when the general way of thinking becomes “WFH is better, offices are obsolete”.

Offices today are merely a justification for managers (the useless kind, which is about 90% of them) to not become redundant, and for the C-suite to keep getting those sweet sweet tax breaks.

Which answers the question by itself.

"Should we be loyal to companies...?"

Ultimately its supply demand. Lots of people prefer to work from home, lots of employers prefer people in the office. It makes sense that eventually people in the office will get paid more than those at home.

I don’t mind the office, but I do mind that without remote work I cannot work for a company located in Berlin while living on the other side of the country (e.g., Düsseldorf).

Interesting point about not being loyal to a company. If this year is any indication it’s not taken into account when layoffs are done and the only winner is the overemployed.

This headline doesn't make sense. Whatever dude. Someone wants to work from home. Someone wants to be vegan. It doesn't tell me anything.

Worked FH for a year. Hated it. Between TV and refrigerator, not much work could be accomplished.

Same here. I value the time I save by not having to commute at all.

Back. To. The. Office.

Yet another reason why WFH is useful is meetings. Now that I'm more senior, I'm in a lot more meetings. I average 7 meetings a day.

At the FAANG I work for, you have to be a vice president before you get your own office room.

That means an hour of my day would be taken up by finding and going to different conference rooms. Now that RTO has happened, folks find themselves having to go to different buildings to find a place to talk.

It is like nobody thought this through.

Microsoft campus (a few years ago) had little "phone rooms" where people could go to get private or quiet zoom calls done. This was great. They also had larger rooms with a desk to get some focus time. Unfortunately, people would camp out in these rooms all day, and they became filled. It became a territorial thing as my manager did not have a private office so he would "claim" one of the smaller rooms and would grumble loudly if someone else took it.

Well said.

Some of these issues would go away if the author used headphones and the office used an open floor plan instead of cubicles.

Open floor plans are super loud and distracting… what issues would this solve exactly? I think it only creates more issues.

>what issues would this solve exactly?

Other people not knowing that he is in deep focus.

They still interrupt you even with headphones on.

Let me be crystal clear: NO ISSUES ARE RESOLVED by an open office plan, unless your issue is "productivity"

It resolves the issue of killing productivity and making most people feel miserable.

>NO ISSUES ARE RESOLVED by an open office plan

It is easier to communicate with teammates when they are near you. Both communication via words and communication via body language.

Please acquaint yourself with the term "interrupt overhead". Then with the term "email". I can suggest a number of books on effective communication as well. Few of them recommend randomly interrupting people busy actually doing things.

In the TFA the OP is being interrupted in an office without an open floor plan.

I am saying that an open floor plan would make it easier for others to read his body language that he currently does not want to be interrupted.

Why does body language need to get into involved? It is a simple flowchart.

Is a building on fire? Yes? Interrupt. No? Email and trust the person to properly prioritize your email between work items.

>Why does body language need to get into involved?

Because it doesn't break your concentration to communicate via body language compared to telling someone that you can't talk right now.

ASSUME people shouldn’t be interrupted.

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