Working from home is here to stay
wolfstreet.com
wolfstreet.com
After that job I spent a couple of years working in offices. It was absolutely helpful in some ways (I worked and learned from smarter people (MIT, Dartmouth grads, etc) and less productive in others (employer tried to work us 100+ hours per week for months on end). Looking at the code you wrote at 3am the next morning and wondering what the hell you all were thinking (pair programming) was eye-opening.
I am so much more productive at home and more importantly I'm happier. Sure, it's nice to see people I work with a few times per year. But the fact is we're distributed all over the country (and the world for that matter). My neighbor works at IBM. She's been forced back to the office where she spends her day on Zoom calls. It's madness.
Shame on companies who use RTO and AI to disguise layoffs. Fuck these companies. Man-up and just say you want to save money.
Add commute time... did it stink? Did people shower? Did they eat? Did anyone die?
This was early on in my career - I'd already had 2 years of dev work under my belt. But most of the devs there, this was their first gig out of college. They didn't know this wasn't the norm I guess.
Yes the commute was awful (Boston). If I left for work before 6:15am I would get to the office in 15 minutes. After 6:15am, it was a 45 minute traffic jam.
They would feed us dinner. Nobody died. They had their own gym, and yes showers at work too. I quit after a few months. They laid everyone off 9 months later. I should have taken the hint right away when I saw they had private nap rooms with beds, alarm clocks and everything. Can't make this shit up. Loved my peers there, but the company (management consulting company trying to turn their "IP" into software) had a shit culture. Our managers were trying to make partner and didn't give a shit who they grinded into the ground to get it.
For example, I don't usually do well at all. I get distracted all the time, my brain doesn't seem to feel it's in work mode and so on.
I actually prefer to commute (I take the tube, read and listen to music; my brain is gradually turning on) and work from the office, have some chitchat, meet new colleagues, enjoy the snacks and beverages and then once I'm done I go home and the commute back is like a shutdown of my work brain.
To each his own I guess, I highly dislike polarising opinions (WFH is the best for everyone! or Everyone should be in the office all time!).
We can easily show a lot of people why WFH is the correct way, but some people will ... you know, still enjoy a good piss on the street. It's like, something is wrong with them you know?
So we can't really consider the pissing on the street people's (in this case, the people that love the office) opinions too seriously. It's unhygienic.
RTO people are trying to make the world worse.
Instant win in any discussion because nobody wants to be considered unhygienic, even if it makes zero measurable difference. Same as "security" because nobody wants to be blamed for a security incident, even if costs of potential incident are less than the costs of maintaining security solutions. Same as "return to office" because nobody wants to be blamed for negative consequences of WFH even if they're negligible.
We just need the courage to keep crossing the Bering Strait.
Their class loyalty is just way higher than the workers'.
Programmer coops are not really a thing. You wont get the deals.
Rebuild these apps without a single one of those bastards is what I’m saying. We could do it if wanted to. Rebuild GitHub, rebuild LinkedIn, rebuild Jira, without all the grifters.
It's actually pretty common, usually small consulting firms and web site boutiques.
Full remote is not for everyone. Full time office-based can be hard for parents or people living far away (or just suck if the office is noisy/messy).
Being at home 100% of the time works if I have perfectly clear tasks and deadlines. But as soon as there's something that requires collaboration with multiple people it's just SO MUCH EASIER to do it in person with everyone physically in the same room.
Zoom is good and all, but it's always janky the more people are in the meeting.
On site you can get more of the subtle hints off of people and the conversation flows better when you can talk over each other without the software deciding whose voice gets through.
Then you make the decisions you need and can hole up in your comfy home office for a while before needing to emerge again to collaborate.
It's the little things, isn't it? Like when someone starts talking one second before you finish and you can't hear them, and then you ask them to repeat, and there's some lag, and you are not sure if they really said something or it was a glitch... Then you lose 20 seconds doing the "did you say something? No no, it was my cat passing by" and everyone lost focus.
All this can be mitigated with processes, but it takes conscious work to keep it up.
Who the hell enjoys office snacks?
Also my office often has great snacks. We also have a barista and that alone is worth it.
Ala Atomic Habits, my home environment is set up to make my personal life easy. During the workday it’s way too easy to slip into leisure activities, while on personal time it’s easy to unwind. The office, on the other hand, is the opposite: it’s not full of things I enjoy doing, so distractions come with a lot more friction.
Working from home can be a net negative for some, even if it is a huge boost for many.
Even before COVID and the standardisation of remote work I got my best work done when I just grabbed my laptop from the office and went to a pub or a cafe to work.
There's some actual science in there how changing the place where you work makes it ... different somehow and you can focus on what you need to do instead of falling into old habits based on the location.
The office is just the most reliable “not at home” environment for getting work done for me—there’s no guilt about camping out all day, seating is always available, internet is reliable, and so on.
Staring at a screen to figure out what to write in an email looks like slacking off, even though it has a much higher productivity than meetings.
I am much more productive working remote. It isn't even close.
The dysfunctional slacker at the office though can get some productivity squeezed out of them at the office. Remote, they are completely useless and dysfunctional.
Then take the average worker with kids who can save a ton of money by not sending the kid to daycare and the loss of productivity from that.
At some scale, the productivity increases do not make up for the productivity loss in aggregate. The more you scale up, the worse it gets.
Remote is only going to work long term for small organizations who won't be much effected by this scaling property.
Honestly, I think part of the issue I see with this is "squeezing productivity" out of them. Almost every other manager I've spoken to would see this as a complete waste of their own time and would simply fire the slacker instead. I know that it's easier or harder in different companies/countries. Maybe it's a sign that the slackers are in HR? ;-)
Good riddance then.
I think that chicken in a cage is much better metaphor for staying at the office than for WFH.
- People hanging around socializing loudly rather than working
- The unhygienic and jerk habits of previous users of hot desks
- Uncomfortable, unergonomic hot desks
- Pointless, wasteful, and expensive commute times and expense
- Inferior meals and snacks
- Contracting things from ill people who refuse to stay home
- Disruptions
- Superficial interactions
Let’s make it so we all deprive ourselves of an hour of sleep each morning.
Let’s deprive ourselves of an hour when we get home too (the commute home).
Let’s not let families spend most of their time together, even when we have all the tools to do so.
Let’s deny ourselves the freedom to live in affordable parts of the country. No seriously, lets literally deny ourselves this and slave away on this hamster wheel stacked on top of each other in these god forsaken overpriced cities.
Let’s do this for 40 years.
And when offered a miracle to rectify all of this, let’s reject it. Let’s talk about how great the office is for some people. Who are these selfish maniacs?
Madness. There’s not enough poetry in the world to capture the madness.
The core thesis of this, with data to back it up, is that there was a RTO push in the wake of COVID, but its stalled since 2023, and the amount of workers returning to office has been flat. The partial WFH or "hybrid" schedule is clearly shown in data, with huge variations in certain regions between different days.
> The average occupancy in the top 10 office markets in the latest week was still only at 54%... with Houston being at 65% at the top end and Philadelphia being at 44% at the bottom. The epicenter of WFH, San Francisco, was at 45% (chart from Kastle, click on the chart to enlarge it):
Which looks to be pretty constant for years based on their data. And, again, there is huge daily differences showing hybrid work is popular, but also not equally.
> The average occupancy on Fridays in January was 28% in San Francisco and 30% in New York City. Even at the high end, in Houston, it was only 48%.
The final bit of interesting data, which cements their thesis that WFH is here to stay.
> In January 2025, over 29% of all full paid days were worked from home, up a hair from the Januarys in 2023 and 2024.
> So the share of WFH has given up about half of the Covid spike (which peaked in June 2020 at 62%) and then got stuck at a share that is roughly four times higher than it had been in 2019 (7%).
Presumably because a lot of the push for full RTO was just a means for companies to implement layoffs without calling them what they were. Once the target was achieved, everything went back to business as usual, including WFH.
I took my first remote role in 2015 and even back then it wasn't my only option. What's more interesting is that organisations which were remote first only doubled down on it after 2020, as e.g. cutting flights was a great way for them to save money.
All that being said both then and now promotions are more likely to be dispensed to those who show up.
Which makes sense to me. In office is very much useful for collaboration, team building, etc. But you aren't doing that 5 days a week anyway.
Seems like a massive time waste for no benefit. I go to the office 1-2x a week and that's enough for me to meet my team members and collaborate. But any more than that is too much!
My hunch is that team-building and the more social aspects need far less than justifies anything like once a week; and collaboration is always best done at point of need, not to a schedule, in my experience. That need might be week-long! That can happen! But to assume everyone's best served by some arbitrary ratio is patently absurd; so much so that I find it hard to take arguments for it in good faith.
I will acknowledge that new starters and juniors do need hand-holding, and in most companies that's hard to substitute out. The mechanisms for doing that face to face are well established. But I don't think that's impossible to migrate to a mostly remote experience.
For my team we picked Mondays, so we can have our chats and meetings then and focus on work the rest of the week.
They're copying a technique from the minimum wage employer playbook, where you would lay people off, replace them with whoever (or no one at all) and rehire your original staff once they softened up while firing those new hires who proved problematic.
Of course companies don't do it in concert, so weirdly it's easy to both get hired and fired in this space, but net effect is that people keep getting paid minimum wage.
And therein lies the crux of the issue - our employers are pretty well synchronized in their layoffs so they're not worried that their projects will stall for a few months, as everyone else's will as well.
In a competitive market, there would be defection from any layoff cartels, to gain market share.
If the employer has a monopoly, they are mostly competing with themself.
Here it seems that the moment LLMs hit the market in earnest, every C-level started asking themselves if they have the manpower to compete in this space and ultimately reached the conclusion that no, they don't, so they started doing layoffs, (correctly) assuming that everyone would have the same strategy.
We will all be rehired eventually, but the perception of our value vs that of AI is lower and that is reinforced by the number of people currently looking for a role.
In a sense the press was right - developers were replaced with AI - at least temporarily.
Funny thing is this happened to a project I was in back in 2017. The company figured that instead of building a huge system using a team of 40+ people they'll... use Watson.
That could mean 2 more years of LLM CapEx running air cover for engineer labor OpEx tax policy, which ironically puts humans and servers/GPUs/robots/AI on a comparable depreciation schedule. Meanwhile, an LLM subscription would be immediately deductible, while the developer's salary would require 5 years, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34627712
Albeit open-plan, relatively quiet has been replaced with just a bunch of people on teams/zoom calls talking loudly, whilst the constraint to meetings that physical meeting rooms provided has disappeared.
I have no idea what the hell the business owners were thinking, but working there was one of my worst jobs I've ever had.
Coworkers just do not care, and are happy to put my life at risk! Their pets are "hypoallergenic" and usual BS. I am evil, for not wanting to lick their pets!
Final insult is we are not allowed anything with traces of peanuts. One person has a peanut allergy and they could accidentally eat my lunch!
Office is BS!