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Comment by sbrother | Hacker News Reader

I think the worst part is 9) at night, do more work that requires focus time while no one is bothering you, since expectations got calibrated to when everyone had a private office and more control over their own time.

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Yep. Many of my days are 4-6 hours of meetings in the morning, 2 more hours of paperwork/email/coordination activities, go get dinner, then work another 2-3 hours.

Thank goodness I can work from home. I know in some ways that makes my flexibility more damaging to my work/life balance, but the tradeoff is worth it to me.

Yep that schedule is pretty familiar for me as well. I’m willing to do it when necessary; I feel like it’s fair given the flexibility and trust I’m given as a fully remote employee.

When I’ve worked in the office in the past, the laptop stays closed as soon as I leave work at 5. They don’t get to have it both ways.

That’s how it was for me circa 2004-2005. The only way I could get anything real work done was from home, after hours. During the day all we did was sit in meetings and report status to each other and to the higher ups. Worse, then the higher ups decided that we don’t need a sustained engineering team for the past two releases (boxed software) and the team would context switch between building new stuff and patching what’s already out there, 2 releases back. I said fuck it and left.

So stop doing it. It’s making it worse for everyone else who has boundaries and a life outside of work.

There's no way in hell I'd agree to additional remote work if I'm being demanded to return to the office. Either it's remote or it's not.

If you won’t, others will. That’s this job market.

> since expectations got calibrated to when everyone had a private office and more control over their own time.

which is why you should not be doing overtime to meet expectation. Expectation (aka, productivity) needs to drop when RTO is mandated.

the only thing I can do more efficiently in the office is socialize, so I assume that that's what they're talking about when they talk about collaboration and culture and all that shit, so how's the wife?

Don't forget 10) get your ass in bed by 10pm so you can haul it out at 5 to get to work again on time tomorrow.

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