It's probably even reasonable to organize teams around similar styles, preferences, and demands of the actual work output. But it's good to recognize that a LOT of IC roles benefit strongly from greater control over their work environment and time, which can often be achieved via remote (and even a lot of managerial work that's high contact light touch direction can benefit from the tooling and organization required to support remote work).
What's less good is to universalize. It rarely reflects detailed attention to organizational and individual needs and output. It's more like the fad that produced the categorically inexcusable open-plan-office. Where it happens, it's often a cover for something else, or a reflection of limited interest in good management.
That's an advantage for you, though! Active desire to work in-office greatly reduces the amount of competition you're dealing with for jobs; all else equal, it should ~double your success rate.
I miss nice offices though. Before the whole let's stack people side by side on desks, rather than give them some nicer spaces with lots of room for deep thought. When I was working for HARC, we had a nice former industrial space near UCLA. I totally could go for that, but when the only way to get something semi-nice and private is to work at home, well, that is going to bias people.
The only thing that changed is you can no longer force people to the same degree.
One alternative would be to design offices that people like to work in.
Anyways, it isn't a mystery why people want to work at home these days, and they don't really need to be in the office anyways considering how hard it is to get conference rooms to VC all the time with your partners across the country or world.
The only thing that changed is the power balance. It's still perfectly possible to get skilled workers into the office, they just have to want it.
Your employer rents a desk for you, you probably get to walk to work or at least enjoy a very short commute. You have people from other employers around you for the social aspect. Etc
I guess WeWork was a similar idea that shows now is not yet the time for this.
I still think it’d be great - reduced commuting miles / time wasted. Cheaper offices that are nicer (don’t like this co working space? Just book into a different one) etc etc
If every neighborhood had at least one pub and if every pub had an upstairs co-working space, that would be amazing.
edit: ah, I realize now that I took the word "shops" to mean the colloquial "tech companies", but you probably meant brick-and-mortar retail stores that have been slow-killed by the internet
The background hustle keeps my brain going but it doesn't bother me since it has nothing to do with me. Nice coffee helps.
They don't grow on trees.
Introverts and extroverts will never understand each other. This entire thread is pointless.
But how come every solution to pay these days is a dismissive "just uproot your entire life and community and move to the middle of nowhere"? If you have no social life nor reliance on modern conviniences, sure. But I've been raised in that environment and can't recommend it to most
- it's about as walk-unfriendly as you can get. Because there's a lot of empty land and the only benefit is you buy large swaths of it for housing (at least, "large" compared to urban environments).
- you have very little business to rely on locally. I had a small grocery store, an unkempt library, some liquor stores, a church, and a single burger joint. These were all 3+ miles from my home. Doing anything else required a 40 minute drive to the nearest downtown. Especially emergencies (no local hospital).
-weather in such towns is likely worse. So expect biting cold and dry environments or arid deserts. Not really places you can just walk out and take a quick jog if you're into that.
If all that is worth never coming into an office just so you can have a dedicated office, then sure. Move your life.
I will compliment the lack of light pollution, though. Amazing place if you're an amateur stargazer. Or simply want to see the night sky in the ways Hollywood portrays it.
Should I have stayed in my small town in south GA when I graduated from college in CS in the mid 90s to be close to my parents and friends?
The US is a big place with diverse weather.
I bet you I can find you a nice big house in the burbs of Atlanta, Charlotte, a hurricane mostly safe place in central Florida, rtc.
I in fact moved from Atlanta where I spent all of my adult life since 1996 two years ago with my wife because I wanted better weather and save money on taxes (no state tax) as a bonus.
You adapt, you make new friends. Honestly most of my friends in Atlanta are so busy with their own lives and family, even when I lived in the same metro area, we still had to make an effort to plan quarterly get togethers.
I still do that now - I just hop on a plane.
And some don't. It's a personal choice and comes down to a myriad of factors. Do you want to stay close to family or do you in fact want to be as far away as possible? Is your town a good place to network, if you care about networking? What are the laws/policies in your old and new town (something becoming more relevant by the month)? Is home ownership important to you, present or future? Dating scene, safety, venues. It's hard to distill all those experiences down to "what lets me have a home office for my job?" unless that is your biggest factor.
>You adapt, you make new friends.
Let me know when that happens for me. If I'm struggling in Los Angeles, I dont' want to imagine how it is for smaller scenes to make adult friends. That's a whole other topic.
>I still do that now - I just hop on a plane.
My family and I aren't meeting this holiday season precisely because "just hopping on a plane" isn't an easy expense this year. Planes don't get much cheaper with CoL.
I'm not saying the office is some perfect, joyous or highly social place or anything. I just think for me, it makes a big difference to have a place (different from my house) where people come together to work on common goals, and occasionally interact face-to-face while doing it.
Can you imagine feeling fine with more frequent WFH yourself, if something about the culture changed?
For example, could you otherwise get the vibe that people were engaged and wanted to be working together, even when it was on intermittent chat and videoconf?
(And if there were occasional in-person meetups, if only for more personalizing or focusing?)
But there's a fair amount of forcing involved.
Me thinks you're not going to find many companies filled with people who enjoy living in the office.
Nobody cares what you’re doing because they’re sitting vaguely near you.
Those rose colored glasses are goddamn dark, my friend.
i love commuting and used to travel every week for work and work from customer offices. i intentionally chose this life and absolutely loved it.
covid completely upended this. work travel makes very little sense when most of your employees are hybrid.
for me, wfh has been awful.
it's difficult for me to attach to the mission without physically being with others striving for the same goals. very few people outside of this wild and wacky world of tech understand what i do. i don't really have avenues for vibing on work outside of 1x1 zooms, which are awful (for me).
i can see how it's nice if you spend all day in front of a terminal churning code, but, for me, anything involving other people is just so much worse while remote. body language, dynamism, and humanity are super hard to capture over zoom, even with the camera on. (talking to a camera is extremely unnatural in my opinion; not at all the same.)
it's also extremely easy for work to melt into your personal life, though i've found an old-school workflow that mostly solves for this (separate work phone that's off after hours, being very deliberate about where I work whilst home, etc). regardless, having to be in front of a computer in your own home when the weather's great and inviting outside feels like a mental prison of sorts. the same dynamic exists within the office, but it's _designed_ for that, which makes it different.
while i understand others wishes to be remote, i very much wish i could work in an office (and/or travel every week again).
## preemptions for common retorts!
- "Just make more friends!" can't hang out with friends during work hours. see also: ideate/kvetching about common work.
- "Pick up hobbies!" i have hobbies. i can't do them during work hours.
- "Commuting is awful!" i love commuting.
- "Work at a coffee shop if you need to be around people." i actually do do this, and it's quite nice. i don't work with those people though. i'm still working by myself.
- "Invest in a better home office!" my home office is super sweet. i'd downsize in a heartbeat for a proper office and intend on doing just that when the time comes.
Often the people here on HN try to make it out that anyone who appreciates or wants to work in an office is evil or stupid or the like, but honestly probably half of people actually want a few days in the office. Comments here are not actually representative of the whole industry.
We have forced-office and office-available, no one is arguing for forced-remote.
But no, I don't think I'm grossly mischaracterizing anything. Even replies to my post are literal personal attacks against the OP for not wanting to stay at home, or actually making fun of the reasons people want to go into an office. It's truly toxic behaviour.
Office available with social events and meetups is supposed to be the compromise. The part that I can't wrap my head around is what is gained by making someone who doesn't want to be in office show up? The folks at $dayjob in that position literally just sit at their desk with headphones for 8 hours.
I guess you can say " you can try not to have kids so you can work from an office" . I have no answer to that.