I recently turned down a very exciting recruiting effort from an old boss, because it would have required me to commute at least two days a week. I cannot think of anything that could entice or threaten me to go back to the office at this point.
I recently turned down a very exciting recruiting effort from an old boss, because it would have required me to commute at least two days a week. I cannot think of anything that could entice or threaten me to go back to the office at this point.
I turned the consulting just to keep my schedule; it's ..an interesting change of pace. I think people are lucky to be having remote work at this moment.
I don't doubt that you've had trouble finding work, but I don't think the unemployment rate is the reason, or even the symptom. Particularly since it sounds like you are looking for remote only, and the ratio of seekers to jobs (a sort of "unemployment" measure, given that people may settle for in-office jobs if they can't find a remote one) for remote software may be very different than a 6% rate.
I used to commute 90 minutes each way to and from work, back in the 1990's. One day I added up all that time I was spending sitting in traffic and it totaled an entire month of my life just sitting in traffic. My year was essentially 11 months long, not 12. I told my boss "In two weeks I'm not coming in to the office anymore". He said I could work from home, back when 56k modems were the fastest available. The company went out of business about 6 months later, so maybe he knew about that or maybe not, but those 6 months were amazing. I found another job that was a 15 minute bus ride away, and went back to an office but it was a far better situation. Oh, I also gave up driving completely, the city actually towed away my shitty car because it hadn't been driven in 6 months. Good riddance! I didn't drive for about 20 years, until I met my wife who had a car. I got a license so I could drive her around. I still don't own my own car, and now I've been working at home for almost 5 years. I'm never going back to an office if I can avoid it at all.
Even with people using WFH to drop/pick up kids from school, even with afternoon naps, WFH turns out to be a more productive option just for this reason alone- commute/transit.
Commute time, and overall office shenanigans pretending to be productive or busy when you are clearly not(often just sitting in meetings saying nothing) are the top reasons why most people prefer WFH.
Am luckily in a postition where my org is 100% remote (for the time being), and I am cherishing it for as long as it lasts.
Many (most?) HN posts that discuss WFH seem to be from the POV of the employer/management, with topics such as:
* ensuring employee vigilance * reducing employee wasted cycles (with the corner case provided often being workers with multiple side gigs) etc...
(side note: seems like those comments are coming from temporarily-embarrased CEOs-in-waiting)
OTOH, looks like reviews of WFH from the IC level are often pushed aside in HN, and it may show a skewed appreciation for the true popularity and benefits of WFH.
While it may not be for everybody, for a great many of us, WFH is the best thing since sliced bread.
And to have that removed for X reasons (whether legitimate or not) will incur a significant pain for those of us who have aligned to (what I consider) an optimal productivity lifestyle. Let that pain be heard, rather than pushed aside as invalid.
I totally get that folks don't want to back to the office, but my advice is that, if you have to, try to turn it into something enjoyable (noting that I specifically moved to an area that's bike friendly).
WFH allow spread living, allowing a more human society of SMEs, the only who die in this models are the giants, and that's will (not would) be good riddance.
- Not commuting gave me more time to do physical activities socially. Tennis with neighbors / friends in my town. A group spin class.
- More time to embrace serendipitous hobbies in person with friends (or excuse to meet strangers in my town). New Nepalese restaurant with promising reviews? Randomly go with a friend on a Wednesday. New coffee shop? Try out their pourover to see if they know what they're doing!
- Try working from near home. Coworking space, coffee shop, etc. Workbar offered pretty affordable part-time coworking rates last I checked? Cal calls this "work from near home" - https://calnewport.com/thinking-outside-the-home/
- Meet a life partner who also works from home 1-2 days a week! We've enjoyed random 3 PM walks, making breakfast together, etc.
- Remote work works best with results oriented work environment / culture. So feel free to do a tea tasting or go watch a movie in the middle of the day - https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/09/want-to-boost-your-productiv...
- Do 1 completely casual Zoom meeting with a coworker every week, even if you don't directly work together.
The 9-5 commuting lifestyle makes it easy to "bundle together" lots of habits that solve for isolation, time to wind down / prep for the day, and for many a workout routine (workout before or after work in a nearby gym).
When you work from home, these are all "unbundled" so you have to re-assemble the things that matter to you yourself. More freedom but more responsibility :)
I've been working hybrid or fully-remote on and off since about 2009 (with "fully-remote" being my state since about 2019). I get quite a lot more time to spend around people who are close to me -- friends, family, my community -- precisely because I'm not driving 60 miles round-trip every day anymore.
Encountering this same type of dichotomy in my adult context is kinda amusing to me personally, since I encountered it often as a kid, too; I grew up homeschooled, and heard the same baseline assumption (but with "employees at the same company" swapped out for "students at the same school") presented in another frequent question: "but how do you kids ever socialize with other people?"
In reality, I was often involved in daytime extracurricular activities (and weeknight/weekend ones) that had me working, volunteering, field-tripping, or just hanging out alongside multiple groups of adults and other kids on a regular basis.
Living in community can happen by choice, not just by [employer || school] coercion; it just requires that you make that choice.
These "bonds" are an illusion.
>Living in community can happen by choice, not just by [employer || school] coercion; it just requires that you make that choice.
As other replies have pointed out, the school/work bonds more often than not fade as soon as the coercion is removed. Why is that?
One possible explanation is that those bonds were not genuine or desirable bonds, but were artificial or unwanted-but-required ones. In this case, is it really better to enforce artificial, unwanted constant association?
A different possible explanation might be that the replacement of one enforced -day-to-day coercion with another one leaves no room for the previous-coerced-context's bonds. In that case, is it really better to strangle out all your previous connections by unnecessarily forcing you to inhabit a new space on a constant basis?
This brings up the question again of the false dichotomy between "enforced connections with a single artificially-constructed-and-destroyed community away from home" or else "isolation"; I still think _chosen_ connections with a _multiplicity_ of communities that are _close to home_ is a better option.
I wasn't going to encounter some of my coworkers at the 60-mile-roundtrip job outside of work context _ever_ unless I made a point to suspend my non-work life so that I could go all the way "over there" and away from my family and my local community. Encountering them at the park, or in downtown, and having a casual conversation, or even having them over for dinner -- that sort of thing wasn't going to happen (at the very least, not without a sufficiently-significant amount of planning and commute-time sacrifice as to make it extremely rare).
I recognize that remote work comes with a similarly-high "minimum intentionality requirement" for building connections. I just also recognize, from having worked in the all-too-common situation of "commute to/from the office means driving over an hour each way", that in-office work is not much better than remote work in that regard; it just means that you're spending all your time together in the business-activities rather than in the contexts of what each person actually cares about. When I spend time with friends who live nearby -- like taking a walk with them in the middle of the day, because we're both already close to home -- we're not talking or faux-bonding about the latest deliverable or project, because our relationship isn't defined in those terms, and we're not in an office context that's _framing_ our relationship in those terms.
But the costs that in-office work brings compared to remote work are way higher than the marginal benefit of "now we're in-person more, free to mostly talk about work together while we're in this artificial environment that the company controls, until the company decides to can either of us."
I do agree that it's isolating. But only during work hours. After work, and on the weekends, I see people a lot more than I did when I was in the office. Overall, I feel like I get more social time than before, but it's with people and in situations I choose. And I also get a lot more breaks in between, which I like.