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Comment by Xirdus | Hacker News Reader

I used to have a hybrid job. The company culture was oriented for 100% remote, because it was 100% remote until RTO happened. The office space felt like a coworking space where everybody was a remote worker who just happened to work on the same project in the same company. Nobody ever approached anybody, everything was over Slack. We did have meeting rooms but everybody preferred calling in from their desks. Even for the daily standup! Most miserable workplace experience of my life.

I interpret the study findings not as remote workers being happier, but on-site workers being less happy in remote-oriented companies than on-site workers in on-site-oriented companies.

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I will say I dislike remote work in terms of how much I enjoy work or how effective I am at my job. But having a 100% remote job has made me far more able to maintain my house and be present for my children when they’re still very young. So if we were weighting overall life satisfaction that outweighs the extent to which it alienates me from my job.

Now maybe my employer has reason to dislike that I’m probably like 80% of the worker I would have been if we were in office, but the 80% has been enough to exceed expectations on my performance reviews so there doesn’t seem to be a problem. He has the equivalent of an F-150 that he only ever uses to commute to the office. People seem to be into that.

Commuting wears you out. The energy and stress saved from not having to drive in bumper to bumper traffic or ride public transportation can add a good deal of productivity.

100% agree. I'm the exact opposite of the grandparent - I get much better work done on my wfh days because I'm not drained by the commute.

I'd probably feel different if I had a 5-10 minute walk to an urban office but I never had. (Did have a very short suburban commute for a while, but people I knew were always pulling dangerous stunts when they saw me walking to pick me up so I pretty much gave it up.)

I used to live 15 min walk, 5 min bike ride from an office i was required to go to twice a month. It was a nice commute.

Then I moved and now its a 30 min drive. Not a nice commute.

I didn't hate the 25-30 minute driving commute I had at one point but I had to go in pretty much every day even in the snow which wasn't great. This was a time when you were pretty much expected to go into the office other than a rare state of emergency.

Latterly I had about a 30 minute driving commute again but I was doing so much travel that I wasn't consistently in the office that much.

I feel the opposite. Before the pandemic, I would have said I'd 100% want a fully remote job if I could have it. I even looked at applying to Gitlab because of that. And then the pandemic hit and I spent 2 years working from home all the time. One of the surprising things I learned in that was that I need a commute. I need a physical separation of work and the rest of my life that lets me mentally shift gears from thinking about work things to thinking about home things. I needed some time to just listen to music or a podcast or audio book without any other demands on my time.

And I found that going for a walk or something like that to replace the commute didn't have the same effect, for a number of reasons. There was the mental hurdle of forcing myself to try taking the walk instead of going straight from A to B since I was already there. There was the fact that while I could try to flush home concerns from my mind on the walk, coming back to my home where all those home concerns are right there for me to notice when I walk through the door meant that all that mental flushing was for naught.

Now I admit that I am fortunate enough to have a commute where I'm rarely in bumper to bumper traffic, and it's less than a 30 minute drive. But at least for me, a commute is a vital part of my work routine.

I'm the same way. I absolutely need a commute and a hard bifurcation of my work and personal environments. I've been paying for coworking services of some kind since COVID. That and having a separate work phone has helped a lot.

My best situation was a commute to work that was about 45 minutes door to door and involved a 30 minute bus ride. I mostly got to read novels on the bus. It was nice.

I was childless and petless then though. The thought of squeezing everything in between school drop-offs, pick-ups, after-school scheduled activities, and dog walks is when things get really annoying.

In the last twelve months ive had electricians, plumbers, kitchen renovators all work in my home while I was wfh. In an age gone by I would burn annual leave to deal with this. I dont know how I could handle the logistics of full in office again.

It makes me wonder what people did before WFH was prevalent!

Stay-at-home moms/housewives were the load bearing pillar for that whole lifestyle.

Not sure if you intended to sound like Claude. If so, well played :)

They didn’t sound like Claude; Claude sounds like them.

It really depends on the company culture. Where I work (in the bay area) people come to the office two days a week, but those days are when everybody schedule the important in person meetings. Focused work happens rest of the weekdays at home.

it says a large healthcare org but does not say if that's a care provider where on-site jobs will be completely different from remote-compatible ones, or an insurer where most jobs could be done mostly on a PC.

I get this. What we are missing out on now is being able to read the room and environment PROPERLY. Hybrid jobs won't do this well. WFH won't, above a certain percentage of people working from home, in general, usually.

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