lolsal

I'm glad I'm not having to work in an office with this person! ;)

> After work drinks and pre-work drinks are just your work getting to consume more of your life than it pays you to do so, whether hourly work time not counted or salaried hours getting diluted.

I think we're misunderstanding something here. These benefits have nothing to do about progressing the work's agenda. It's about connecting with my colleagues in a way outside of work. Socializing, increasing our networks and bonding. Sometimes work conversations happen, because it's something we have in common, but I'm certainly not 'working' at these outings.

> Yet you take it for granted that she will go to lunch with you, and that she will engage in neurotypical "pleasantries".

I suppose I do! I'm not coercing anyone to go to lunch with me, so I'm not really sure what your point is here.

> I'll bet that anyone who doesn't want to go to lunch with you, you will take this as a negative at review time. "They just aren't trustworthy" or "He isn't a team player", despite them being the highest performing person on the team.

Not at all. I'm a results-driven professional and to suggest otherwise is offensive, to be honest.

> I very rarely make it about me, because my goals are to solve interesting problems that make money by benefitting our customers. In this conversation, the problem is "how to maximize productivity at Apple given a diverse workforce". You are the one that wants to make it "about someone". You are providing an excellent example of neurotypical privilege.

I'm talking about: socializing with my colleagues is one of the many benefits that is lost when we transition to full remote only work. The disabilities, preferences, or whatever other flavor-of-the-moment persecutions you care about is irrelevant to me. I'm going to invite people I enjoy spending time with to lunch and I don't consider the persons gender, sexuality, mental health, or whatever else you are talking about when I invite them to spend their lunch with me. I expect them to be honest and come under their own free will. I can't control anything beyond that.

If you want to spend your lunch with me, great! Let's go chat and learn about each other. If for some reason you find this offensive, or privileged, then I think we would not enjoy lunch together and that's good to learn, too! I wouldn't want to invite you to lunch the next time.

Good luck out there.

> Well then you could consider remote jobs to be worth £2k+ more salary, net.

I consider them to be worth a lot more than that!

> Digital whiteboards are trivial to share, recover, modify and maintain. They're light-years beyond the limited physical variety. My team land heavily on Miro, for instance.

I use Mira too, it's great! But it's not the same as brainstorming on a whiteboard with your colleagues in the same room.

> Lunch time is a break. Not everyone wants to spend their break with their coworkers; but even for those that do, nothing is preventing you from having a conference call or video call over lunch.

That's cool and I fully support your desire to do whatever you want on your break. For a lot of my breaks when I worked in the office I ended up sharing them with colleagues and made several (hopefully) life-long friends out of the habit!

> Not everyone understands or can engage in body language. Many people find it ancient inducing that their appearance and movements are under constant judgement. WFH is equalizing for them.

I understand! However I can understand body language and I find a lot of value in it. It's easier to empathize and relate to my colleagues when I can understand them better through body language when we're talking about life. If we worked in the same office you'd be free to have lunch (or whatever you want to do while I go have lunch) by yourself without judgement from me!

> Again, of course not; but if a company is going to expect or require people to do it, it should foot the bill for the inconveniences caused.

Sorry if I wasn't clear - these lunches have nothing to do with work. I eat lunch sometimes, my colleagues eat lunch sometimes. Sometimes we go out to eat together and socialize. Work doesn't enter into the equation. We lose that benefit when going fully remote.

There is value to me in having lunch with my current colleagues. I also get value out of having lunch with my ex-colleagues who are now just my friends in the same city. We still have lunches together. I am thankful that I used to work in the same city as my colleagues so that this is still possible!

> Nothing in all the years I worked offline in offices convinced me that whiteboards were particularly useful.

Wow! That's pretty extraodinary to me. I wonder how we use them differently?

I hadn't thought of this distinction before; thank you for enunciating this point!

> Insisting on a new solution being "exactly the same" to adopt it pretty much ensures you will never leave the status quo.

I'm not sure where you got that I said that, if you read what I wrote you'll see that I've been fully remote for over a decade. I don't in any way insist that fully remote work needs to be exactly the same as in-office work.

> I think if commuting time was fully paid work hours, then companies would quickly agree that minor optimizations like this aren't worth it.

I would argue that you have priced in your commute to your market value when you take a job that requires you to commute, especially since knowledge workers tend to be salary, not hourly.

> Have you ever done a white boarding session where more than one person was writing on the board at a time?

Very often back when I worked in an office.

> The online whiteboard works great when one person is adding to it and it's easier to read (you don't have to deal with people's terrible handwriting) and you can save it.

We took pictures of our whiteboards when we needed to save state, it worked great!

> In most cases I've found that only one person is usually writing on the whiteboard, everyone else is just pointing at it and making suggestions. So the one person with an iPad that is sharing it's screen is usually more than sufficient for online white boarding.

I'm glad you are able to make it work for you!

> But not helpful enough to outweigh working from home

I'm with you on this! I'll never go back to an office full time.

I don't think I understand your comment here - zoom happy hours are not a benefit to me, the other things that they try to replace have more benefit to me.

> No. Online whiteboards have benefits that in-person whiteboard sessions do not, obviously.

Is it obvious though? They're garbage for most of the teams I've worked with. They're tolerable to the rest.

> No, obviously there is value in having lunches together with your colleagues, just as there are downsides.

Ok, but I'm asserting some valuable things being lost by going fully remote only, it doesn't do either side of the argument any good to be so ambiguous and non-committal to a point.

> There is value in body language, just as there is probably more value in well-written communication.

Fair point! I don't know that I have ever, anywhere, read any informal text or technical document that could communicate the nuances of body language effectively and entirely though. I'm jealous that you work with such perfect communicators!

> Many people who oppose returning to the office would agree with you. It's a much-improved work experience.

I totally agree, it is much improved, even if we lost a lot of valuable things in the transition.

> A predominantly WFH experience is, in pretty much all your examples, a better experience than working every day from the office. Suggesting it's merely as good as working form the office does it a great disservice.

I did not do any such thing. I'm saying fully remote work is great, but we're losing a lot, so let's not pretend that we aren't. There are facets to in-person work that are completely lost and not translatable to fully remote work.

> Not for me, no. I'm neurodiverse, and that shit is just lost on me.

I hear you and understand. Lots of people are neuro-normative though, and that stuff is valuable. Let's not assert that remote-only is the Best® though, because for a lot of folks, there is a loss of fidelity in communication going fully remote only.

> You might as well complain that you are missing out on being able to tell racist jokes with your same-race buddies, because you're missing out on the benefits of social bonding.

Believe it or not, some people bond over things they have in common that don't have anything to do with racism. You probably have some prejudices or biases leaking through your comment that you might want to explore privately.

> Sure. single-cis-straight-white-male can be super optimized, or the equivalent in what ever is the dominant race (looking at salarymen in Japan).

When I go to lunch and talk to my colleague about her favorite places to snorkel, my sexuality, gender, relationship status or race never come up in the conversation. Have you tried having conversations with folks without making it about you?

I hear you and see you. Fully remote sounds like a boon to you!

> I think that a lot of those things can be replaced with new techniques as time goes on. Just because this is how we did things yesterday doesn't mean there aren't better ways to do this ...

This is a totally fair point, but multi-cursor online whiteboards are not the same as standing in front of a whiteboard and brainstorming with a colleague. "Zoom happy hour" or whatever cannot replace spontaneous lunches, after-work drinks, pre-work coffees, etc.

> ... it just requires some thinking and investment, IMO.

I agree and understand, but let's not pretend we're not asking everyone to essentially "beta test" WFH and endure the friction of finding these new techniques. There are tradeoffs here and it's not a seamless transition. Remote work is a skill that needs honing, whereas office work is 'the standard'.

> Not to mention the IMMENSE benefits you get from remote work. Having those tradeoffs and changing the way we work: I am all in.

Working remotely has immense benefits, I agree. I agree so whole-heartedly that I will never work in an office again. That being said, despite all its benefits, there are tradeoffs that don't have equivalents in the WFH world. Anyone that dismisses working from an office entirely is either ignorant or being dishonest, in my opinion.

This sounds a bit like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Having lunch with colleagues has nothing to do with 'backchannel communication'. Sometimes it's nice to hear about where we like to go camping, or what cities are nice to visit in their home countries, or ... nothing to do with work or shipping products.

No matter how 'correctly' you think you're doing things, you still haven't convinced me after over a decade of shipping products that online whiteboards are useful, or refuted any of my other points.

I agree! You're welcome to do whatever you want. But I am a friendly person and find it easy to make friends with my co-workers and we don't even talk about 'work' most of the time. I still have lunches with my colleagues from years ago that live in the same city, even though we don't work together.

Not every perk is about oppressing your freedom or exploiting your time and labor.

Can anyone honestly and sincerely tell me that online whiteboards are exactly equivalent to in-person whiteboard sessions? There is no value in having lunches together with your colleagues? There is no value in body-language when communicating? I'm all for fully WFH policies, but I think it's a bit naive or dishonest to say that it's exactly the same work experience. I've been working remote for over a decade and will never work from an office again, but there are some things you just cannot replicate online or with video calls.

> If the true externalities of your consumption are not priced into the product then you're not really paying for it.

This is true, but other than showing up to the butcher with my money, what else can I do? Some _other thing_ needs to motivate these externalities into the price; not the consumer. The only thing I could conceive of doing is voting with my wallet, which I do when I buy grass-fed meat.

When given the choice, choose compassion.

> The need for stricter border security is well established.

This is orthogonal to the humanitarian issue happening in Mexico for the last few decades.

> When our borders are not secure as one political party tends to favor, poor Mexicans die and drug cartels gain money and power. Maybe a fence along with other measures, increasing patrols, harsher penalties, is actually the most humane solution to Mexican drug cartel problem?

Sorry, but you're out of your mind. I'm a native Texan and the last thing I want is a fence separating our us from our brothers and sisters south of the border. We should be helping the Mexicans, not abandoning them to violence and cartel terrorism. I would rather they seek refuge here than die on the other side of a fence.

> I mean your are assuming that with free housing you retain a right to live where you want to live.

I'm not sure why you think that; I never said that anywhere.

> But there are more options available than everyone getting free housing in the bay area, CA.

Cool, are you going to volunteer to leave your hometown and family to live in this free basic housing? Plenty of land in west Texas if you need space.

> "Free" housing isn't charity or magic. It's a public service paid for by society for the benefit of society. Feel free to criticize the core value proposition, but please don't paint it as some impossible fantasy.

I understand it's a service paid for by society. I think it's great that you think that too! A service provided by society is not a right though. I'm all for creating a lot of affordable housing, as soon as we define what "basic" means, and agree to who will pay for it (likely us citizens through taxes) and what sort of requirements there will be to be allotted some of this "free" housing.

If we take "basic housing is a right" off the table and replace it with "as a wealthy society, we should levy taxes to provide housing to everyone that wants housing," that's something I can get behind.

Stop calling it free. Stop calling it a right. Then I'm on board

> It’s often not literally free

Ok, cool. Not what we're discussing though.

> Today's startups are solving the most boring problems imaginable. Gadgets are a snoozfest. Programming languages and frameworks seem to be running in circles.

I'm guessing you have become numb to what is exciting - we're advancing majorly in energy storage, virtual reality is still growing, the M1 chip is freaking amazing, GPUs are getting insane, the watch on my wrist has an EKG, self-driving cars, drones are a commodity these days ... What did you have in mind?

That all says nothing about mRNA vaccines and other insane medical tech that has sprouted up in the last decade.

> Very basic housing should be free.

Please publish where you have developed and built all this free housing so that everyone that wants to live there can enjoy this right.

> Umm, The cold war never ended. It has waxed and waned, and it has rotated into economic, information, and mimetic warfare over the decades. The US government and NATO have been investing in our military for decades for more reasons than just corruption.

Can we avoid the "We have always been at war with Eurasia" style rhetoric?

There have been explicit conflicts and wars over the years (US/Middle East, Israel/Palestine, etc) but we aren't at a constant state of global war or global Cold War.

I also appreciate this.

> Phrase “im proud of <something>” means nothing.

... yes it does. I'm proud of losing 5lbs and accomplishing a goal I set for myself. The feelings I have when I utter that statements are real, whether I act differently (beyond uttering it) to anyone about it or not.