Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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