For me, the utility of being at home versus being at the office is massive. If I need a 15 minute break, I can start a load of laundry, or run the dishwasher, or do some other chore.
I can wake up later since I don't have a commute. I don't lose two hours a day due to the commute.
I can wear as comfortable clothing as I desire. I can delay my shower until after my daily workout (Which I can do since my workout equipment is at home).
I can control my environment so there are as many or as few distractions as i like. I can put on videos or audio that might not be considered work appropriate. I can use speakers since no one is around me to hear the sound.
The number and magnitude of inconveniences we subject ourselves to by heading to an office every day has been fully revealed. I will do all I can to work from home for the rest of my life.
I've been doing WFH for 5 years and feel like the rest of the world just caught on. In addition to what you mention:
- Control of food. No more bagels or carb dumping ground. No more limited food options. My own kitchen.
- Control of equipment. Need a 4k monitor? Need a trackball? No approvals needed.
- Control of ergonomics. Get exactly the chair you need. Get an electric height adjustable desk without going through facilities.
- Control temperature. Never be too hot or cold.
- So many great options for breaks. Walk down the street. Meditate in the garden. Play Beatsaber. Take a nap, naps are magic.
- Control your lighting. Good color temperature and comfortable brightness make the space more relaxing and can aid sleep and wakefulness.
- The ultimate corner office. Privacy and separate space that you can personalize to your heart's content.
- Location flexibility. Work from a beach rental. Do a city-stay near a WeWork. Find a mountain cabin with high speed internet. Move to a new state without having to change jobs.
- Finances. Live in a low tax state. Have an older car. Spend less on clothes, lunches, parking, gas, tolls. Live in cheaper square footage without worrying about what it does to your commute.
- Stress. More emotional speration between you and your work. Relationships are through Zoom and require less emotional investment. Work forms less a part of your identity and changing it involves fewer changes to your daily routine.
- Caffeine. With more tools to manage your wakefulness, less need to lean on the crutch of caffeine. For me, less caffeine means less alcohol as well.
Other people are free to have their opinions that they don't like WFH or can't wait to get back into the office. For me, I really struggle to understand how you cannot love it. With total control of my environment, I can easily correct for minor downsides such as needing to maintain work-life balance and good social connections. After years of optimization, I have a better quality of life than our CEO. I'd be insane to give it up.
The other thing I don't see mentioned enough is the impact on disabled people. Thanks to spine issues, I can't comfortably drive. That has limited me to either working where a train line goes or at the same place with my wife where I can carpool with her as a passenger. WFH is one of the most freeing things that has ever happened to me. It not only frees me to work anywhere, but it also means I don't need to take as frequent breaks. I used to have to work at places that could accommodate my need to lay down to decompress several times a day, and that meant I couldn't do any actual work during that time. At home, I can much more easily keep working from bed when sitting or standing gets too painful.
Not just disability — basically everyone in every marginalized group is doing better working from home. My queer friends are thriving in this environment. You don’t have to code switch online to the same degree you do in real life, and it gave people time to consider the cognitive and emotional toll that code switching takes.
Like, I’m trans and have kept it hidden most of my career. It’s always been hard on me, because I have to carefully curate my image because if I don’t I opened myself to discrimination if people could tell.
I started a new job during the pandemic and went full-on “fuck it” mode and I couldn’t be happier. Joined the LGBT ERG and helped organize some of the younger trans people at my company into pushing for expanded healthcare benefits (I don’t need them personally, but they will). I don’t think I would have found the energy to do any of this if I was also worried about how I was being perceived by others — all that energy would have gone into creating an illusion that’s acceptable to the people who do my reviews and sign my paychecks.
It's also applied to switching dialect, word choice, and even accent. Lots of people in the US who grow up with any kind of regional or ethnic accent or English-variant end up being capable of code-switching to Standard American English, especially if they move around much and/or attend school somewhere outside the area where their dialect is normal, though even regional schools will provide some social pressure to avoid non-standard accents or dialects that are common in their areas. AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) is a commonly-cited variant from which one may wish (or feel strong pressure) to code-switch to SAE, but similar (if less race-fraught, so perhaps not directly comparable) pressure exists for people with strong Bostonian or Appalachian or rural-midwestern accents, or most anything other than SAE.
The positive reason for this, is that it allows potentially extreme variants and dialects to co-exist while letting everyone still communicate clearly with others (by code-switching to whatever's considered standard). The down-side is that it often exists alongside negative stereotypes about those who can't, or choose not to, code-switch to SAE (but, of course, refusing to becomes its own counter-signal for very high status—Fussell, for instance, observes that adhering to SAE is a middle-class and up tendency, but not among "old money" or his "top-out-of-sight" rich, since they don't need, at any point in their life, to give a damn whether some employer or other gate-keeper judges them worthy or intelligent or whatever).
I didn't get what code switching meant until my first job out of college. I had a coworker who would copyedit what I wrote to a level that would impress an English professor. It was great, he made me sound so much smarter to the rest of the company. When we became Facebook friends, I was surprised to see that he had a totally different manner of speaking to his friends.
I can't speak for the GP commenter, but from my own experience being non-binary, I have to expend cognitive energy every morning thinking about what I'll be doing that day (what meetings, any errands, etc), before deciding what clothes I can wear. If I'm staying home all day, with no meetings, or only meeting with trusted colleagues, I will dress differently than a day where I need to go to a store, or if I need to meet with coworkers I've never met before.
For trans people, just existing without conflict or judgement from others is a constant struggle between society's normative expectations and the desire to express who you really are.
Yeah that’s basically it. Working from home I can be in a t-shirt with no bra and a days worth of stubble and nobody is the wiser. It helps that I pass without makeup though.
I have cystic fibrosis. It's fairly mild, but I do have to do daily breathing treatments, and it's so nice to be able to take care of those needs while working. To say nothing of when I'm ill but can still be fairly productive around rest. I've even gotten work done from the hospital during an admission.
As a kid who grew up with a father who worked from home, I will say I loved it, though. I knew I shouldn't bother him much while he's working... but I could if I really needed to, and he was around if something important happened. His flexible working conditions also meant he could be a part of everything and take you places and then you'd want to do something he'd find boring and he'd just say "I'll sit on this bench, come get me when you're done" and he'd put in a half hour of work in the middle of nowhere as he could (his job also was for a company half a world away, and so he didn't really need to be in contact with them constantly--pre-Internet--or work very specific hours). So like... it might be a bit harder on you--particularly when the kid is young enough to not understand "work"--but I feel incredibly lucky that my father did that (and like, he actually was gone three months of the year to work for that company "in the office"... but I still feel like I got much more of a father than anyone else I knew).
Yes, familywise it's great, I just came back from a 1h lunch break on the beach digging sand castles for a good 30 minutes of it with them all, something impossible with any other setup.
I didn't technically ever work without internet access, but since it required an expensive long distance phone call (10 to 25c per minute) over a 2400bps modem, most work time was offline.
I'd typically do a short dialup call in the morning and one in the evening to upload emails I queued up to send, download any emails I received and sync up code repositories.
Honestly I often wish for similar conditions today (except the 2400bps part!). The productivity and mental peace of zero distractions all day long was so much better.
As to how to work? No different from today really. Sync up the code repositories and do all development locally for the day. Or work on architecture/design documents.
I sometimes seek that peaceful working condition by working remote at locations with no signal. Wish I could do it more often.
Any intellectual work that typically traded on paper.
-Design jobs like architecture and drafting
-Small device repairs (where the device is high value and can be mailed)
-Creative labor like copy writing, editing, etc
Also, where I grew up in rural Montana, a lot of jobs that are considered to require an office but which can be done over the phone were worked remotely up until recently. Sales in many industries was done over the phone with people stationed throughout the Western U.S. states, each managing about a 100,000-300,000 sq mi area.
The answer to your direct question is, in fact, "fax". The digital fax machines that started to come out were able to send documents without much loss and then print multiple copies of them (rather than essentially attaching a modem directly to a glorified receipt printer like earlier ones had).
He had a Palm Pilot he would scribble on a lot to work out of the house when those became a thing, and he had one of the first actually-portable laptop computers. We (he involved me in a lot of his process of learning tech) tested out early tablet computing devices (running Windows 3.0 "for Handwriting" ;P).
There are different answers to this, depending on what "without the internet" means. Pre-internet it was phone or fax, but early internet it was intermittent/dial-up internet, meaning you could do offline work that you upload later. Even during ADSL neither I or any service on the internet relied on always-online assumptions. Think git (but before actual git).
> Sometimes your SO forgets you are not "Home" and this also can be bad, as it can create stress between you 2.
Simple solution, put a sign on the door that indicates you are working and only to interrupt if it's important. You can still set boundaries here without it being an issue. Be creative, talk it out with your SO.
This can help when kids get old enough to understand as well, but admittedly won't work with small children.
> miss software design sessions with my team, we would go thru issues 2x faster being together.
I think this is something that can be solved with software but it'll take some time to develop workflows that work for everyone. Talk to your team to try to find ways you can optimize.
> - Onboarding new team members is a lot harder and they feel less part of the "team"
This comes down to the culture, which is your last part.
You can help new members feel included in simple ways. Or simply include them in decisions and discussions is helpful. Really it's the same as when you're working in the same location. You just have to be proactive about including someone that you're not seeing. This is more on you and less on the new person.
I suspect anyone that enjoys living in a high cost of living city (SF, NYC, etc) and isn’t obscenely wealthy is working from their living or bedroom. If you’re not living alone, WFH becomes a lot harder.
I would prefer to live in SF and go to the office (because my house/apt is too small) than live elsewhere but be able to afford a house with a dedicated room for an office.
How about a middleground solution: Live close to SF (say San Mateo, ~30 mins to SF)? That way you can get dedicated room for office and be in proximity to the city.
Still EXPENSIVE as hell, and no big open spaces to yourself, but also still not a quick stroll to all the world-class amenities of SF.
Maybe it varies for other people, but when i think of "live in to enjoy the city" i think 2 blocks from enough food to never cook again, new bars every friday, a quick transit ride to almost any activity i could want - and no car ownership needed. Its a lifestyle of living out of the city as a communal space, not a destination to visit on weekends.
Well it comes down to personal preferences. For me, SF is unhabitable due to crime, shit + syringes, homelessness, and the fact that it's a ghost-town on weekends.
Combining that with the fact that we don't do bars, we cook and need car ownership so we can do hike-trips...
I work from my living room, my girlfriend works from the bedroom. Sure she sometimes comes out to get water or something and walks past me and into the kitchen and I can see her and hear the sink running but it isn't exactly a huge distraction
Oooof, that sounds painful but also a pretty atypical experience for people not living alone. My girlfriend has a job where she's on the phone a lot, but in the other room with the door shut that isn't really a problem at all. I can barely hear it, and if I have my headphones on I can't hear it at all
That's another thing that a permanent WFH mindset can solve - move. I've been WFH for ~20 years, and can't imagine giving up the freedom I have in selecting a home.
I still live in the Bay Area, but it's a 45min (no traffic) to ~1:45hr (typical) commute to the South Bay. It'd be hard to do this every day, but I don't have to.
As a result, I get to live on huge chunk of land, with an office to call my own, for the same $$ I'd spend on a 4br/3ba 'normal' house in San Jose.
A) It’s not a multimillion dollar home, and B) that’s not really relevant - the point is that WFH frees you from having to live in high cost areas, which means you can also afford an office in your house.
I've onboarded a few people over the pandemic and that's really the only downside. I can't really gauge their mood while pair coding over zoom. So its harder to pick up on where they are struggling to keep up.
All that has meant is that ramp up time is a little slower. And I can come into the office for 2 weeks for the two times a year we onboard people. Hell, if we did an office rental then neither of us would have to commute into town. It may be shocking to hear, but new people typically live in the outskirts where housing is cheap. Right next to where I live...
Great commentary. Regarding 'I miss software design sessions with my team, we would go thru issues 2x faster being together.' My team struggled with this at first, mainly because we had a massive markerboarding wall in the office. We tried setting up whiteboards in our home offices and doing some whiteboard sharing. There was just something about marker on markerboard paint we missed. Then we found Miro which allowed us to virtually markerboard remotely and asynchronously with ease. It doesn't hurt that our video conferencing app Whereby has Miro share feature so we do it directly within Whereby and not have to context-switch so much.
<plug / request for feedback from targeted, experienced user>
Please check out https://sharetheboard.com -- we too didn't want to give up markers (on paint or boards or anywhere else). We're working on a number of integrations at the moment. Hadn't considered Whereby yet (Miro is on the short list) but open to suggestions.
This is true, the thing is kids grow up and then that stage is gone. With my oldest and second I missed so much, not something I would want to repeat again with my current 18 month old. Kids settle down as they get older, and I'd much rather have a quick play distraction than the annoying conversations that you get sucked into around the water cooler. And I'd also rather get locked into WFH roles now and put up with the young kid noises now with the long-term payoff of less distractions.
How many of us are newscasters anyway? I've given up even instructing my wife to take the kids out unless it's a really important presentation, because so many of my co-workers are in the same boat.
> This is what can happen when you WFH with small children:
Very early in the pandemic our CEO was doing all hands sessions with the company and these things happened on and off.
I still don't know if it just happened naturally or if it was staged, but either way it was brilliant. It set the tone for the company that if even big shot billionaire CEO was having kids wander into meetings, it was certainly ok for everyone else.
Those are all good points. Which is why I think we need to distinguish between different actual situations when we talk about this stuff.
The fact that you are not going to the office is too broad of a category. I mean just look at the name, work from home, and it is misleading right there.
You may need to look into a co-working space or other option to get out of the house with so many distractions.
It's also going to be totally different for people who have no kids or who are employing nannies or day care to occupy the children.
The software design sessions thing, I absolutely do not buy the idea that this cannot be done remotely. Use a Zoom meeting, one of the many collaborative whiteboarding sites/programs and get people Wacom tablets if desired. But just a chat room, phone call, Discord voice channel, etc. should actually be adequate most of the time.
For onboarding and culture, just because people are not coming into the office does not mean that it has to turn into a free for all. You can still have rules about being around at a certain time or using certain software or video calls or whatever you feel you need to keep people integrated or whatever. The only thing that needs to be different is the literal physical presence of the person. Virtual presence can still be facilitated and required if you feel it is necessary.
> Onboarding new team members is a lot harder and they feel less part of the "team"
On the other hand, we onboarded someone who lives in Vermont (the rest of the team is in the same town on the west coast) and since we are all working remotely, other than changing his working hours to align with our own, you can’t tell the difference between him and us.
> For me the perfect balance is to be at the office once a week.
Out of necessity I've been WFH for the past 2 years. While overall I have enjoyed working from home, the issues you describe are real. Once it is no longer necessary for me to be WFH full time, I think one day a week in the office would be ideal.
I'd go further and say, make both optional. Come to the office space when you need it, stay at home when you don't. Once a week? Twice a week? Every day? Once a month or never? Doesn't matter.
Maybe some things would need to change in terms of what office space is leased, and the capacity, in order to manage the cost.
I think there's value in consistency in terms of setting expectations (both for my family and for my colleagues) the the flexibility to determine what that consistency looks like is key.
You need to get one of those screen protectors that prevents people from seeing your screen form different angles, and make sure you get that corner seat.
I liked how to worded "emotional separation"
The reduction in my stress has been amazing, especially considering we've been in the middle of covid. My moods are way better regulated now. I'm no longer trying to ignore my angry office mate who's muttering under his breath. I didn't realize how much upset people influence my own mood. I thought I was good at ignoring angry people, but the action of ignoring took up a lot more energy than I previously thought. My biggest worry about back-to-office is how I'm going to managed my increased stress levels.
Same, the whole elbow office politics is definitely much smoother. I had a few situations where a work colleague would try to convince me in joining his angry crusade when we had a call. But from home it's much easier to distance from that or just escape the call. No more people coming unannounced to me asking me for unreasonable work tasks. I will very likely switch if office presence becomes mandatory again.
I am the same way. I am very sensitive to the emotional states of the people around me. I think most people are. A stressful office environment was a pressure cooker where we stewed all day in each other's stress hormones. My stress was off the charts.
> - Control of equipment. Need a 4k monitor? Need a trackball? No approvals needed.
No approvals, but you have to pay for it.
Prior to COVID, I used vacation time every summer to work at an academic summer camp for three weeks. Most of the other staff members—largely college students—had to go through this dumb supply request system whenever they wanted materials for an activity. I just ordered whatever I wanted off Amazon, which was expensive, but I figured I was technically on a sort of weird vacation, so screw it.
My point being, you can make this trade-off in many workplaces. Working from home just normalizes it—and sometimes removes the choice.
In open office or hot desking environments, you really might not have the choice. My last office from 2015 on Market Street was all hot desk. You could not have any personal items left on the desk at the end of the day. The only way to get a standing desk was to get a doctor's recommendation and have an ergonomic consultant approve it. You could use whatever peripherals you could fit in a backpack.
I now have an electric standing desk with memory settings, a cushioned standing mat, a great office chair that fits my back perfectly, a kneeling chair, a yoga ball, a stool, plants, original artwork, fidget toys, cozy lamps, excercise equipment, ergonomic keyboard and mouse, a large external display, the best video conferencing headset I could find, laptop and monitor height adjustable stands and probably a few other things as well. I changed jobs recently and didn't have to do anything but swap out the laptop.
Jabra Evolve 40. I chose wired so I didn't have to deal with Bluetooth audio issues. I wanted something with a professional appearance and strong mic and headphone performance for voice frequencies, plus a mute button. Very happy with it.
I'll heartily agree with this recommendation, though I have the Jabra Evolve 75. As best as I can tell it's exactly the same as the 40 with the addition of Bluetooth. I happened to pick it up in February of 2020 and it's been fantastic for my hours of daily calls.
They don't put much pressure on the head, certainly not enough to describe it as crushing anything. A characteristic of this type of headset is light weight, so the clamp pressure does not need to be strong to keep them in place.
As a result they're significantly smaller than over-ear cans, and able to be stuffed in a laptop bag easily.
The style can become fatiguing with extended wear, that is probably their biggest flaw along with limitations on how much sound isolation they can achieve.
I'm not OP and it's not a headset, but I have to say—nothing beats the Blue Yeti for microphone audio quality, and there's a headphone jack on the bottom you can just use with any pair of headphones.
It's a bit of an investment, and very slightly cumbersome at times versus a wireless headset, but I think it's worthwhile in order to sound good.
(Well, okay, a truly professional microphones would presumably make you sound even better, but you're very much past the point of diminishing returns.)
Sidetone. The essential hardware feature that Blue Yeti and few others get right. I've had one on my wish list for a while.
On the main topic, as a boomer who suffered through office work for decades (the dictation system in my first job was a DictaBelt, and electronic forms were what the secretaries stored on their IBM Selectrics), going 100% remote 12 years ago was the greatest productivity boost I've experienced since my first work PC (which I built from parts sourced at Jameco Electronics... in 1988).
There is _no_ way I'll ever return to an office, with all the distractions (we used to call them "drive-bys") and already mentioned ergonomic barriers. My manager is a genx who is fully behind remote work, but there are lots of late boomer and genx execs who are really uncomfortable with it for a load if reasons -- including that it denies them opportunities to intimidate through physical presence (never a problem I experienced personally, mostly because those same sorts of managers tend to be intimidated by age, experience and credentials).
I find it ironic that so many execs who now lament the loss of "collaboration" weren't voicing those concerns a couple of decades ago during the massive push to outsource and offshore. I know from personal experience that collaborating remotely is not only possible, but often superior to in-office -- as I think dozens of my colleagues across a couple of oceans who I worked some pretty difficult technical issues with would attest.
I’d get something like the AT2005USB or similar instead.
Besides being half the price, it’s a dynamic mic instead of condenser.
True, a good condenser will sound marginally better, but it will also pick up a lot more background noise more readily. Better off to pick up cleaner audio to start with rather than try and filter it out after.
And to your point about diminishing returns, I think especially over the generally iffy quality conferencing software we’re all using something like a Blue Yeti is already well into the diminishing returns.
How does the yeti perform on echo cancelation and background noise isolation? In my experience, the Evolve 40 is good enough that I can turn off Zoom's software filters and get a further quality boost.
That is basically because it is near you and far from anything else. So it doesn't have to do anything to not pick up background noise. You can do that with any mic, headsets just have a bit of an advantage in having a fixed placement right near you however you move. I have a mic on a boom over the monitor so it ends up close to me and I wear headphones so that has much the same effect. But its all about placement.
In my home office, I've got pushup stands, a pull-up bar, suspension straps, an ab roller, yoga mat, resistance bands, and some dumbells that I use in those moments while something is compiling. No back pain for years and I'm in great shape.
If I did this in an office, I'd get endless remarks and cocked eyes, eventually being told by a superior that my "coworkers find that a little weird". (i.e. stop doing that)
I do this too! It's especially great when I'm starting to doze but don't want a full nap...I can hop up and do a set of whatever. After that, I'm good to go!
Same here, when the gyms closed I immediately bought the equipment I use and it made for a much better work experience and home experience as there is the extra time from not going to the office or the gym. It’s also more peaceful to exercise in quiet rather than get blasted by loud ads all the time.
This is a cultural thing that varies a bit. It wouldn't be unusual to spot workout equipment at or around an engineer's desk in sports and fitness tech.
I loved working from home because it allowed me more time with my dog. His need to be taken outside occasionally was a perfect reminder for me to take a break. Plus, the light snoring coming from under my desk was super comforting.
While I was more productive at home, I think that came at a cost to others that I work with. Every interruption that I avoided while WFH is a slowdown for somebody I work with.
I'm back in the office again but I'm hoping that I can one day arrange to work from home most days and only occasionally come into the office.
> Move to a new state without having to change jobs.
I see this point but it's often not a guarantee, particularly if you work at a small company. In the US if your employer is in State A and you want to move to State B, then your employer must become registered as a business in that state and abide by that state's labor laws. Many small businesses aren't capable of (or interested in) maintaining compliance with every state's laws.
I believe this will change in the future, but right now I wouldn't bet on it.
I actually went through really severe caffeine withdrawal last year, it turns out that the always-ready coffeepot at our coworking space was keeping me way, way more caffeinated that I could reasonably do at home
I also spent the year stressed out by the endless stream of Slack messages, eating poorly, forgetting to take breaks, and slumped on a couch rather that bothering to use my nice ergonomic chair, so, YMMV
> After years of optimization, I have a better quality of life than our CEO. I'd be insane to give it up.
Maybe you did run in to it but haven't mentioned, or maybe 5 years is not enough to see it -- have you noticed that a big part of the "remote culture" that few know how to build, is proper recognition of remote workers in the mixed- or dominantly-office- teams?
Those CEOs are perfectly aware that your life quality is higher than theirs on a much lower income, they know full well you are not going away anytime soon...
One thing people are going to have to learn is to not have mixed teams. I don't think you can avoid the problem you describe with mixed teams. Even if a minority on the team are office bound, if they are in the same office you will essentially end up with two teams. You also need to divide things by timezone if you are global, as otherwise cliques will emerge. At a remote first company, our product teams are timezone restricted remote, our follow-the-sun support is three sub-teams. The office bound teams, where people came from that sort of environment, are dissolving into remote work, more quickly thanks to a big push from the pandemic.
Yes, working from home can be very comfortable if you invest in comfort.
But for me, comfort isn't everything. I'd rather be a bit less comfortable if it means being able to feel part of something nice. I really like being among people, experiencing things together. For me, that feeling easily outweighs comfort.
Then again, my work is a 10m walk from my house, and I have quite a bit of influence on how our work environment is shaped - so that may be easy for me to say.
I've been doing WFH for the better part of ten years. So beat you. Lol.
But it is kind of vindicating seeing people everywhere start to have the same philosophy. It makes me hopeful that other good things may catch on in the future eventually.
The next stage is possibly moving somewhere with a lower cost of living. Been spending most time in Mexico for almost three years.
I've been WFH for 20 years (by the end of this year).
I've considered moving for a lower cost of living or living the "nomad" life, but I honestly prefer big crazy cities with tons of people and endless possibilities every day.
And so I've lived in big cities the whole time and have loved every minute of it. I pay more, and I charge more, and generally try to make sure my clients aren't local so they don't suddenly get the crazy idea that I should pop into the office. But, even when they are local, I keep office visits to a minimum (once per month or less).
It's been pretty great to see so many start to see the delights of working from home. It get that it's not for everyone. I'm positive it's for a lot of us.
I don't optimize for cost, I optimize for quality of life. I'm a semi-nomad and try to be in places that offer family, friends, walkability, and nature.
It is my equipment. I am not buying it for them, I am buying it for me. My health, my back health, my eye health, my wrist health, and my comfort are 100% worth the investment. I don't expect any company to take care of my health for me. I take care of it myself. Are you renting your company access to your car when you drive in? If so, I guarantee you spend more than I do.
In addition to all you said, you mentioned your car...do they also pay you for your commute time? Of course not.
Say you have a 1hr each way...2 hours/day, 5 days/week, 48 weeks/year, $100/hr: $100 * 2 * 5 * 48 = $48,000. WFH literally just saved you $48k of billable time.
Buying a 4k monitor (that you can also use for non-work activities) on your own dime is probably reasonable.
There are specific carve outs in employment law and car insurance for commutes. Try using your personal vehicle for work with out additional have an accident and your insurer will wash their hands of you.
Most people can do this in their office. Unless you’re hotswapping (uncommon in my experience) then you can just bring whatever equipment you want in. We had plenty of people do that at all the jobs I’ve worked at.
Some professionals, notably those whose work culture encourages self-determination, can be allowed to bring in their own hardware or request custom hardware. These are usually the outliers, rather than the norm (and in fact, this is often advertised as a "perk" of being employed at that particular place).
The vast majority of corporate environments are rather locked down and standardized, understandably, with one-size-fits-all or a set menu of tech provisions, depending on role (e.g., designers often get larger screens than accountants).
Even as a developer, I had to fight for larger screens for my team, as IT saw no inherent need for larger screens beyond what they initially provisioned.
Contrast that with my WFH setup, with my 3-monitor setup on a 7-foot standing desk...
Okay? But I’ve never been in an office or seen one where they banned bringing in your own equipment. Even in places that had the set menu for different roles. If you had some stuff you wanted to bring in, go for it.
I've worked in several in larger/Fortune 500 companies, including one where the desk setups were handled by a labor union, any changes required multiple approvals, and DIYing anything (using personal equipment or even adjusting the existing desk position or height) was a rules violation and prohibited. You wouldn't be able to get past security with personal equipment larger than what could fit in your pocket, and carrying so much as a monitor or laptop that didn't have a company barcode on it already would get you stopped.
So yeah, these sorts of workplaces exist and thousands of people have to contend with their on-site limitations.
Besides the sibling comment, here in Germany it is common to have electricity certifications on equiment done by external companies.
If managed to bring through securty some stuff that you plug into the office network, isn't certified and something goes wrong, short circuit or whatever, it is on you to deal with whatever might happen including dealing with the insurance company.
Even if allowed, if you want similar equipment at home and in the office you'd have to buy two of it all, or tear it down and take it home with you every night. If you just work from home you don't have that problem.
I’ve never run into this personally. And I’ve worked in some old ass enterprise type companies. Maybe for high security clearance places this is an issue or something...
I wouldn’t focus on niche places that do this though as an arguing point. It may as well be, “but some chipotle’s don’t offer guacamole. So, ya know, can’t rely on it.” Might be true but sounds rare.
I've worked at old-school telcos and startups alike.
It was acceptable to bring your own keyboard and mouse to two out of the five companies, other than that, no other hardware was allowed to be brought in. So you are stuck with the monitors provided, with the rest of the hardware that was provided, and while you could bring in limited ergonomic stuff, you were also limited to whatever office furniture was available.
I worked for a US health insurance company for a while, and they were almost this strict.
People got away with breaking some of the rules, but it was definitely a risk - it was theoretically grounds for dismissal to bring in your own hardware, IIRC, let alone to run unapproved software.
The concern in that case was a PHI (personal health information) breach, which could bring the wrath of the US judicial system down on the company.
So, not top-secret or anything like that, but still very conservative and with decent reasons to be so.
Huh - I worked in health with HIPPA data issues as well - never had this hardware specific issue. But, we were a group of software engineers who weren't idiots - so... we understood that bringing our own monitor or keyboard/mouse wasn't likely to do anything and not a real risk.
I have a keyboard that runs custom, open-source software.
It would be easy to figure that out about me, if you cared. Say if you found a list of employees and contractors.
A sufficiently-motivated attacker could backdoor my firmware with a timer-based exploit (e.g., start your keystroke payload after ten minutes without input events)
and I might well not notice if it was a deft-enough change.
It might not be worth the cost, given that I might well notice it and it might not pay off even if I didn't.
Still - the point is that keyboards are not innocuous, harmless devices that it's a no-brainer to allow.
I brought in my own mechanical keyboard to the office. It has clicky keys so it's not quiet. I haven't gotten any complaints yet, but that could change depending on who my next cubicle neighbor might be.
This is the social equivalent of the opt-out dark pattern. A lack of complaints should never be interpreted as approval. Generally people try to be agreeable and avoid conflict. You clearly know that people do not like your keyboard but you are putting the burden on them to ask you to stop. You have made a decision that internalizes the benefits but externalizes the costs.
Which also comes with all the hubbub which was already mentioned before. Freedom of choice comes with the burden of payment.
Here's an idea: instead of expecting the employer to provide more than a basic level of ergonomics and potentially having to go through all the bureaucratic and mental hoops, both on receiving and on returning, we just.. pay the employees more money so they can decide for themselves.
Why you're putting this in the frame of "employer is not your friend" is beyond me, no one was framing it that way to begin with. If anything, it is because we can't expect employers to deliver beyond a basic level and introducing all these rules to make it harder, that it makes more sense to bite the bullet up front and be in control.
I get the idea you are in the UK and I think that accounts for a significant difference. In the US, employers have very little legal or ethical obligation to their employees. Decades of pro-business lobbying have basically solidified our status as an exploitable resource that companies can use up and dispose of "at will". An employee lives and dies by their share of political capital. I could use my political capital to try to get home office equipment, but the $500 I might have been able to expense is really not worth it in comparison to other perks I might be able to "purchase" with my political capital instead. These asks need to be carefully considered. A team mate asked for an ergonomic chair and was denied. I have asked for far more valuable things and been allowed.
I save 160 Euros per month by not commuting. I invested 3 months of these savings in a height-adjustable desk and a 4K monitor. The 90 minutes time each day I keep for myself. I wouldn't call that a bad deal.
I'm glad this works for you & others and that you are happy. However, every time WFH comes up here, people present their preferences as universally better or best. I hate WFH but that is my preference. I really wish these discussions were more about how happy people are that they now have a choice instead of things being so authoritative.
For clarity, I enjoy having a hard separation between home and work. If I'm at home, I'm more likely to be distracted with chores instead of working. I leave my laptop at work so I don't need to work off hours unless there is an emergency. I enjoy my 30 minute commute. I listen to podcasts or design board games. I understand I could do those at home, but I'm more likely to just watch a show or something instead of dedicating time to just listening to a podcast. I enjoy being around friends that I've worked with off and on for over 20 years. We go to lunch together and talk about life. Sometimes we play board games at lunch. I enjoy collaborating over a white board trying to solve a problem. It is sooo much easier to do that in person. I personally feel more part of a team in person than I do if we just communicate via Slack. But these are just the things that work for me. I don't expect anyone else to feel the way I do but there are lots of others out there like me too. I'm glad more companies have options for those with a preference.
To add to it, WFH has one clear massive weakness: the lack of face to face interaction leads to quite a bit of atrophy when it comes to team cohesion. I've been managing WFH teams for the better part of a decade and I've yet to find a satisfactory solution other than getting people together every couple of months to work on hard problems together and build some trust.
I'm really bullish on the hybrid model right now. I think having an office designed more like a co-working space that can serve as a central meeting place for teams is what the future of software development looks like. No expectation that everyone is in the office every day, but rather reimagine the office more as a place where people come together when they really need (or want) too.
We're experimenting with that now in my organization and the results so far are pretty good. Some people come in every day. Some people come in every now and then. Others come in when their teams needs them. We're continuing to use all of the best practices for remote work and I think people are finding a really good balance right now.
I don't understand how the "work from the office one day a week" thing would work. If you mandate it's the same day for everyone then the office is empty 80% of the time. That's a huge waste of money. If you don't mandate everyone come in on the same day then all the benefits of being face to face disappear because the person you need/want to be face to face with chose a different day.
It is for sure a challenge, especially where people work across multiple teams and each team has a different 'standard' office day. That unfortunate individual is now compelled to come into the office multiple days.
And folks that work across teams like that are often gluing the organisation together in subtle but vital ways, so anything dis-incentivising it is a dark pattern.
I think the important distinction for us is that it isn't "work from the office one day a week". It's work from home unless your team needs you. Our ask is that team leaders work very hard to limit the days that people need to be in the office and that when they ask folks to come in there is a clearly articulated reason and objective. Basically the idea is that we want coming into the office to feel valuable and therefore worthwhile.
In reality most teams don't need people to come in that often... I'm concerned about some long term drift where some teams never come in and others find themselves schlepping into the office a lot, but I think it's something we can manage with good coaching for our team leads.
WFH and working onsite are two polar opposites, and I personally think that hybrid models are bound to lead to either model being used 100% fairly quickly. Either work and communication is structured in a way that it can be done fully remotely, or it’s not. If it is, then what‘s the point of onsite? If it’s not, well then everybody needs to be onsite.
„Your team needs you“ is a far too unspecific constraint to implement btw. That’s an invitation for extrovert team leads to pull in the whole team for minor issues.
As far as I know, no one is mandating that every comes in the same day. So you can reduce the office space by some percentage, assuming people come in on different days and not all at once.
If you have 10 teams of 5 people each in an office, in a 3/2 hybrid setting you can expect you'll have 30 people in the office. You can pad that to go to 40 people in the office on any given day -- this gives you a 20% reduction in required office space.
The way my team (informally, management isn't in it) was to create a Discord with several rooms. If a couple of you are working together, you can jump to a different room and screen-share. If you want a chat, move to a busy room. If you want to do some head-down work, mute and deafen. It's been really valuable, especially for someone like me who joined during lockdown.
Probably not, because as with many of these studies, people that can impose their preference will do it and rationalize their preference.
There was a study about US companies moving headquarters in the 60's. There would be planning committees, analyses, the whole shebang.
This later study found that almost invariably the new HQ would be closer to the CEOs home/hometown/home state. Some of these companies even failed because obviously people working at the NY HQ would not necessarily want to move to the Texas HQ.
In Romanian we say: "cine împarte, parte-și face": he who shares (does the sharing/gives things out), gets his share (cut).
If most people had an enjoyable 30 minute commute like you do, there would be a lot more people who agree with you. It's not that working in person doesn't have tons of meaningful benefits (to most people), it's that 10 hours of miserable commuting every week is such a soul-sucking curse that a lot of people would trade almost anything to get rid of it.
At one point in my career I had a 30 minute commute on a two-land road through beautiful hilly vineyards, and I'd end up at the beach where I could watch the sunset. Even if my workday was hellish, by the time I got home i felt great.
At another point in my career I had a 30 minute commute in stop-and-go traffic on an ugly highway. It was soul crushing - I could feel the minutes being stolen from my life.
Too many people quantify commutes in minutes, but should probably be looking at the drive itself when choosing a job or a home.
I agree. In my case, living in a medium size city of Spain, I get a 30 minute commute from to the office, driving on a very good condition highway, on low-medium density traffic.
For me, a relaxing listening audiobooks while safely driving is like a warm-up for my workday. An activity I wouldn't have time otherwise.
I have worked in IT for two decades and usually I spend some time working on something in the evenings as well. If you make a clear separation, it's hard to spend time on expanding your knowledge, whether the goal is to use it for the next day at work or for own personal programming / tech projects.
WFH lets me mix those two a lot more and become more efficient. There's less interruptions since I am not going to the office, and also I have supreme "quiet time" after work, usually between 9pm and midnight.
As someone who has been working from home for 20 years, I've come to realise you need to be set up for it. I've gone from working in a spare bedroom to building a garden office, so there really is a hard separation between home and work.
Well said. Indeed, the whole "battle" over WFH should be about giving people the ability to choose what works best for them, not forcing either option. And that may even change for a particular person from year to year or job to job.
> People who want to come back into an office most days but don't want to come into a ghost town with most meetings over video anyway.
I think this battle is lost. Even if people go back to offices, a lot of meetings will happen over video anyway. This has been the norm in some large companies already.
It's been considered best practice (at least according to the people I follow on twitter) that if 1 person is dialed in, the whole meeting is dialed in. The 5 people at a table and some other people on Webex or whatever just doesn't work.
Yeah, I work with teams that have that as a rule. Pretty clearly it's a best practice in most contexts. (There are some exceptions like a scheduled on-site that someone can't travel to but for most things.) My guess is that a lot of people have noticed that video calls have been working better during the pandemic because of this.
>>I enjoy my 30 minute commute. I listen to podcasts or design board games. I understand I could do those at home, but I'm more likely to just watch a show or something instead of dedicating time to just listening to a podcast.
You don't have to do them at home. Take a 20-30 minute walk before work and it'll be the same thing, plus you'll also get some exercise!
The location flexibility is big too. I live in Austin, and my parents live in Kansas. I drove up to Kansas this past Saturday and will work from up here and drive back next Saturday.
I've worked from home for a few years now, and before that I would have to take vacation time to go visit them.
For real. My wife picked up travel nursing and it's been a huge life improvement. Just check the taxes in the states you are working in. I have 25 work days in Illinois without income taxes, but all states are different.
There have been some efforts to rationalize this at the federal level but AFAIK they haven't gone anywhere. And some states seem to basically have zero thresholds for this and enforcement for business travel seems to be ratcheting up. Some people are probably going to find that they need to file more state tax returns.
This is gonna be the real challenge for the WFH movement. NYC is trying to get income taxes out of me because I worked for a NYC based company in 2020... even tho I never stepped foot in their state.
Obviously, people are different. Some people prefer to work from an office (like me) just because you get to spend time with people (I live alone). Me and my teammates also become more efficient when we work together in the same physical space than remotely (we've tried bunch of things like perpetual video calls, among other things). We all live in the same city, the longest commute in our team is ~30 minutes, but we all feel like it's worth it to go to the same physical space and work together instead.
Unless you live outside big cities, I'm not sure if 2 hours of commute is that common (at least with my South West European perspective, maybe is different in the US/elsewhere?).
> Me and my teammates also become more efficient when we work together in the same physical space
I've found it the complete opposite in software. Zoom screen sharing is so much easier than peering over someone's shoulder at their dark-mode IDE. Copy-and-pasting a command in the chat window - what an improvement! How many times have I said this to someone?
> "s c p space s v 0 1 colon forward-slash t m p"
Ug.
Design meetings are so much easier when I can see the UI on my screen, instead of halfway across the conference room.
We also do a lot of work with a team at another location and again - when we are all on zoom together now we can all see each other, we can all interreact when each other. It used to be 6 of us on one conference room and six of them in another conference room trying to talk to each other over a tinny speaker.
I hope I never have to go through any of that ever again.
It is surprising how antisocial is the new generation. The dynamic between colleagues is something that comes naturally when the team has great cohesion. Half the time I didn't have to finish the sentence of what you describe and they are on it. I can't remember how many great ideas have come up during the "hey let's get a cup of coffee" break. Now we look less like humans and more like avatars.
It is surprising how social is the old generation. So many face to face interactions could have been taken care of by a 1 line email.
Like, a couple weeks ago I had to waste half my day to go into the office and sit in a 3 hour meeting. I got some useful information out of that, but there was SO. MUCH. OVERHEAD. I could've watched the webex from home and saved so much time because the relevant parts were 2 10 minute sections spaced out by like 2 hours.
Plus I hate sitting close to people who had onions for lunch. And alcohol. And it's always that dude you've gotta pair program with that smells like a gorilla and has bad breath. xD
All of those things are also possible in person. Of course I just send an instant message to my coworker across the hall. And I don’t clutter Slack when I want to make lunch plans.
I don't know what "all those things are possible" means aside from "all those things are possible as long as we zoom together while in the office". You can screen-share in the office - as long as you are both on zoom ( or equivalent ) at which point why is it better to be at the office?
It would be harder in the office - too many people talking over each other in separate meetings. I can't imagine. So we all end up fighting for few conference rooms, or we squeeze once again into each others cubicles, losing the advantage of multiple screens and trying not to talk to loud and disturbing everyone around us.
I've spend decades developing in offices with other engineers, collaboration is always difficult when what you are collaborating on is always tiny text on a small screen. Zoom is better.
The places I’ve worked had lots of elegant and obvious solutions to shoulder surfing. Mirroring to a big TV was something we did all the time.
I find Zoom in particular to be a crude place to get this type of work done. Why do I have to send a huge video stream that roasts my laptop just to share a few kilobytes of text? I can’t scroll around or select text to point something out.
If the streamer’s text is too small, I’m shit out of luck there too.
Visual Studio Code has great collaborative coding tools that I have found work really well in a local network setting sitting near coworkers. Zoom is a total cudgel in comparison for this task.
I don't know if it's just our org, but we do local + slack + conference sharing (ie, you have multiple ways of viewing the content). This, like for every meeting.
How do you manage when different people in the same area are in different meetings? That's where I see the problems occur - there'd be 4 people in my immediate vicinity having 4 completely separate conversations. That would never work.
That seems like a different problem - I'd assume you have a meeting room for each conversation. In your case we'd have headsets at desks - we do that too. The previous question was how meetings are handled (in a conf room). Regardless, chat+conf for everything even if it's in-person in the same room (audio off if local).
This seems to be the general consensus for folks like yourself where work is the primary focus in their lives. It's understandable, people are lonely and work is the only social interaction for many. If I didn't have a family and lived alone, I would definitely want to return the office. I'm curious if you're the minority or majority? Most people I talk to never want to return to the office. My company (major corp) basically had a revolt during a company wide all hands meeting. It was so bad that they basically said people will be only required to come in 1 day a week and they can pick the day.
I am a father of four (though they're here less now that they're leaving the nest), happily married, active in a committed church community and love outdoor things like water skiing, flying planes, snow skiing, biking, etc. I build things like legos, stand up paddle boards, Ford ranger engines, and the 1000 ft addition we added to our home. I enjoy my work--sometimes I love it even, and other days I'm ready to rage quit, because I'm one of those difficult to manage dramatic people--it is hardly my whole life though.
I have spent nearly 10 years (2 different gigs) of my 30 working years working from a home office. In both instances, it was awesome at first, and then I came to hate it. I totally concur with the GP. I'm just not as productive at home. I know that most of us in all 3 teams where we've done some remote work are generally more productive when gathered. No amount of technology solutions has improved that.
My suspicion is that there are other factors at play here. In my case, I've worked in companies where the software development components of the company are relatively small (anywhere from 2 up to at most 18 people). My commutes have all been (relatively) short (15 minutes or less). I've always had flexible schedule available to me--come go when you need, get the work done. And at times, I do actually choose to sequester myself at home to write a mountain of code that just needs a mountain of direct writing.
I'm curious if perhaps it's not so much work at home, as it is some degree of autonomy that needs to be given to people to manage their own work load. That kind of autonomy tends to go down as company size goes up. If corporate overhead burns up a lot of ones time, then it may indeed be that people feel they are getting more creative work down at home.
What I'd like to see is more flexibility, less middle management (because I think this is the real source of most of these issues) and more of the "teach the employees correct principles and allow them to govern themselves" gestalt.
If I could go back to a campus where I had an office and we sat around watching the coordinated people do bean bag tricks and talking about whether we needed a formal state machine for something or just a few flags and also did you see the cool library X did for something, sure, I'd go there. But to go to a crowded place where people take stand up meetings seriously and there's so much noise and I'm cold all day and the coffee sucks, eh, not so compelling. I went into the office park with offices even when my creeping environmentalism had be taking 90 minutes of subways and a bus (tho not 5 days a week). My take is always if you have a lot of work to, it's better to do it from home. If you need more work, go into the office and find it.
This is how I see it as well. If I had a private office in Bell Labs with plenty of co-working space I would prefer to go into the office to WFH. The reality is that the majority of office environments are loud, cramped, stressful, distracting sweat shops. If I had to choose between that and WFH I will choose WFH every time. If my work provided me with a nice private office with plenty of coworking space I would probably prefer the office to WFH.
> This seems to be the general consensus for folks like yourself where work is the primary focus in their lives.
Big incorrect assumption here, my primary focus is not my work but my hobbies, family and friends. I don't like working in the office mainly because it's social but because we all are more productive. I like to be efficient at my job, even though I don't think it's my primary focus in life.
> Some people prefer to work from an office (like me) just because you get to spend time with people (I live alone).
You can't just write something like that and then accuse someone of a "big incorrect assumption". Work is work, I work to do my job, if you want to go to the office to be with people because otherwise you live alone that's okay, but you can't just turn around an say "I have plenty of friends, it's about being more productive".
I've found that too, I'm more efficient working in an office, but you know what, I don't care as much anymore. Being at home, in my community, with my family more often and for longer time throughout the day, taking breaks to do whatever around the house of go for a walk. That's what matters now. If I'm less productive, I think that's fine because my overall happiness increases. Companies should just factor that in from now on and many do.
Subjectively, commutes are bad in the US and getting worse, because housing is getting more expensive relative to wages. On top of that, we live in a car culture, and it's much easier to build more freeways and housing developments than figure out how people can sustainably work and live in employment centers.
The pandemic has done some of that figuring out for us.
Housing is a huge issue in Europe as well, yeah we have shorter commutes, but that comes at the cost of higher population densities which often means living in high/medium-rise flats.
These flats would be considered tiny by American standards and you have a lot less privacy/independence from your neighbours.
That little kid that was shot due to road rage recently. That’s how bad commutes are. People who insist we go back to the office have blood on their hands.
That wife that was shot due to domestic violence recently. That’s how bad working from home is. People who insist we stay home have blood on their hands.
> Some people prefer to work from an office (like me) just because you get to spend time with people (I live alone).
And/or (like me) you like work being somewhere different to home, and don't have room for a dedicated home office. In fact even if I have the room I'd prefer for work to not be in the house. Being able to work from home is useful to me on occasion, for both work and personal reasons, but I did not like it nor feel myself to be productive when I was there all the time. If I had no choice but to work remotely I'd probably rent an office space and have to factor that into my costs and benefits analysis of the job.
Then again I currently work a 15 minute slow-ish walk from home (or less than a 10 minute run back) if I take the most direct route, and can get home to entertain the cat at lunch many days, so the commute isn't a significant factor like it will be for many.
I live in a big city not the suburbs. No traffic it’s twenty minutes to the office but during 7-1030 am and 2-7 pm it’s 45 minutes to an hour and 5. I listen to a lot of podcasts and happen to be learning Italian as well. Podcasts are not popular at all in Italy and I can only assume it’s becUse of what you describe with the lack of commute. I’m glad to be fully remote now.
I used to listen to a bunch of podcasts on my commute to and from work, and thought I was a big podcast person. As soon as we went to remote work, I stopped listening because I realized that I only "like" podcasts when there is literally nothing else to do while sitting in my car. I would listen to at least 1 podcast episode a day pre-pandemic to not having listened to a full podcast episode once in the last year.
I used to listen to a mix of audiobooks and podcasts on my drive to work, but not 1 podcast since last spring. I still have listened to a few audiobooks though.
I live in a big city and while I don’t have a car, I’ve stopped using Uber/Lyft during rush hour because walking or bicycling is faster. Boosted Boards (et al) offer similar gains.
Your top speed is less and your average speed is more. Cars never seem to get past 15mph in that kind of traffic.
Motorcycles are nice too. Good top speed, lane filtering to avoid traffic, plus real brakes, rear-view mirrors etc. Feels a lot safer than my electric skateboard used to.
> Some people prefer to work from an office (like me) just because you get to spend time with people (I live alone).
I live alone too and I hate for me when people at the office became an erzats social circle. It is not. It is not a social circle but a workgroup you have little control over; you might end up with really difficult people, great teammates you love might leave, project might get cancelled and that group might get disbanded altogether.
Even if you had the best workgroup, most of the time those people will not be in your life for long or deep. They won't help you move, drive you to and from an outpatient procedure, won't play with your kids or even be by your deathbed. And you do need people who would do those things in your life. For this reason, I liked the social lack WFH created because it was closer to the state of reality, and forced me to invest in my real, non-workplace relationships.
To be clear, I am not saying you can't make lifelong friends in a workplace, I am saying you shouldn't satisfice your social needs with a workplace. Just like hunger is a signal to point you towards nutrition, loneliness is a signal to point you towards nourishing allies. And workplaces are not places to procure that.
I only have superficial social needs for the most part, anything more is somewhat exhausting, I think the work place interactions fit that quite well.
Any deep social needs are satisfied by my long time close friends who I see every few months or my partner if I'm dating.
I don't think you can make that call what someone should and shouldn't do to satisfy their social needs because everyone has very widely ranging needs in the first place.
I feel perfectly topped off just by being in the room at a coffee shop with people for a few hours for instance.
> I don't think you can make that call what someone should and shouldn't do to satisfy their social needs because everyone has very widely ranging needs in the first place.
That is why I said satisfice.
Good on you that you know exactly what you need. I thought I did too, and it took a burnout and extended time off work to realize how I was mostly deceiving myself. Most people are not that transparent to themselves, that is why they have to be careful with the stimuli that seem to fulfill a need in the short term but create serious deficiencies in the long run.
A bag of potato chips will curb your hunger but you'd be severely malnourished if it was the only thing you ate for a year. Cocaine, amphetamines even caffeine will give you an elevated sense of agency but you'll quickly spiral down to addiction with little corresponding real-world, long-term gains. A workplace, a coffee shop or even binging netflix alone might create a sense of a peopled life, but none will be real allies that can have your back in a time of need.
Well for a one hour commute, you lose 2 hours of your day. That's massive and equals around 1/8 to 1/9 of your time awake depending on your sleeping habits.
8 hours of sleep plus 8 hours of work leaves 8 voluntary hours. You could make a case then that 2 hours of commute is giving up on a fourth of your weekday free time. Factor in the prep for commute or time needed afterwards to decompress and perhaps a third is more accurate.
Also, I'm not following your calculations. If we establish that your 'free time' is 72 hours per week (8h/weekday and 16h/weekends), and the commute time per week is 10h (2h round trip x 5), it would be 10/72 or roughly 13.9%.
I used to read books during commute. No time was wasted. In fact, now I seem to have a lot less time for reading, because there is always something more pressing at home.
I guess the same can be said about doing laundry, sitting and watching the machine while it does its job would lose you an hour or two. Luckily both of these activities can be done while doing other things like reading/listening to audio books or catching up on other things.
The same thing can't be said about doing laundry. If they are doing the laundry at home like they said, you are sitting and watching the machine, you are starting it and letting it do its thing.
And besides that, laundry is going to have to be done regardless, so its not like they would be saving time by commuting to work instead. The laundry will still be waiting when they get home.
> If they are doing the laundry at home like they said, you are sitting and watching the machine, you are starting it and letting it do its thing
You can do the same way with commuting, enter the bus/subway/train and then do other thing while there, you don't have to wait until you arrive to start doing other things.
> And besides that, laundry is going to have to be done regardless, so its not like they would be saving time by commuting to work instead. The laundry will still be waiting when they get home.
You could have someone else do the laundry for you.
Maybe it was a bad example. I wanted to compare activities that we usually do where you can perform multiple things at the same time. Commuting is generally a passive activity while we wait to arrive to our destination, just like laundry is a passive activity until the machine is done.
> You can do the same way with commuting, enter the bus/subway/train and then do other thing while there, you don't have to wait until you arrive to start doing other things.
In my pre-covid life, I often couldn't even hold a book on the subway as it was too crowded for that. There were times (near daily) I couldn't even reach into my pocket to take my phone out to put on a podcast due to the crush of people (and oh my god the stress when your headphone's cord would get hooked on an exiting passenger).
My commute, while long enough to do something useful, was never useful. Crowded platforms, crowded trains, and transfers down long crowded corridors made it impossible to do anything else. And I'll be damned if I'm going to do more work on the way to and from work!
> You can do the same way with commuting, enter the bus/subway/train and then do other thing while there, you don't have to wait until you arrive to start doing other things.
This works but only in very specific types of commutes. I used to take the train which took 30 minutes each way and I always got a seat, perfect for reading, maybe even light work. Now after almost 2 decades I know that that's the exception and almost always my commute was pretty much wasted (I don't consider listening to music or podcasts productive, it's nice but not productive).
Yes, you can make the most of your commute by listening to audiobooks, etc. But that's so limited in utility compared to having 2 hours of extra free time at home where you can do so much more. It's almost an apples to orange comparison.
> Me and my teammates also become more efficient when we work together in the same physical space than remotely (we've tried bunch of things like perpetual video calls, among other things)
What do you do?
Constant talk and interruption are not conducive to the work of a software engineer.
If anything, I'm collaborating more as a senior than I did as a junior. Junior dev work often means getting a work assignment and working on that by yourself. Senior dev work often means getting together with different stakeholders to work on a design.
(Although obviously those statements aren't absolutes, hence the use of the word "often".)
at my company the seniors are mainly responsible for driving projects/design and leading teams of juniors who do the implementation. working independently is not really an option
LOL. I feel for you. It's the same way in a lot of places.
Your seniors should definitely be thought leaders, but when they get "too senior" or "too important" to write code, the company is done innovating. That's a major organizational smell.
If your design is so detailed that any code monkey can implement it without screwing it up, then you've probably spent more time writing design documents than you would have spent just building it.
And if your code isn't expressive enough that the design can be extracted without major effort, then the two will inevitably diverge at some point. Many bugs will appear.
If you're really working totally independently, then you're running a 1-person company. As soon as you get two "seniors" on the same project, if they're working independently, then you're just going to two different, unrelated outputs, by your definition.
More seriously though, it's part of skilled project management to organize work in such a way that seniors don't need to constantly collaborate to stay in sync.
It's skilled software architecture. Some layerings of the problem into decomposable pieces allow for less communications and some layerings of the problem require more communication. The emergent but desirable property of more parallelizable is dependent on details that are small and subtle. Project management cannot possible guarantee this. The outcome of the architecture, how much do people need to communicate, is an input to the project management.
Your “skilled project management” is my “unnecessarily complex process.” There’s a reason collaboration of this sort is used in real engineering disciplines: it’s because it’s more efficient than having some middleman (and/or process) mediating all the communication.
I didn't mean middleman/process mediating communication. By "skilled project management", I meant structuring tasks and setting priorities in such a way as to minimize the required amount of communication - particularly, synchronous communication between the workers. An hour (on average) or two per day replying to messages and doing code review, an occasional meeting every other week - sure. But if your senior devs are spending most of their time each day in meetings, then either you're running a bootcamp, or something is very wrong.
We are not microservices. People in a team have a lot in common, they do systematically the same type of work albeit in a different context and they can be a lot more useful to each other when they communicate seamlessly instead of at scheduled time slots.
I don’t live outside a big city. I live in a Canadian city of only 1 million people.
Thanks to the incredibly bad city planning (which is common all across North America) and complete joke of local transit options (also common in NA), you regularly see folks with 45 minute to 2 hour commutes one way.
Folks are losing as much as 4 hours out of their day even though they live in a small city that should be easier to commute but isn’t due to corruption and laziness of the city.
To be clear, we’re not talking Seattle or Portland, we’re talking obscure cities like Ogden, Calgary, Edmonton, etc.
North America is a massive turd compared to practically anything in Europe. Some of your far flung towns have better transit than some of our metropolises.
tldr; it is drastically worse for commutes in any non-major American cities. You have no idea how good you have it in Europe.
>Me and my teammates also become more efficient when we work together in the same physical space than remotely (we've tried bunch of things like perpetual video calls, among other things).
I tend to agree with this, and I've worked remote (hybrid) for over 12 years now. For me, a hybrid is the best. Most tasks and problems can be solved well asynchronously and for those, give me a WFH option. It's great for all the reasons this thread creator mentioned and time cannot be understated. The commute alone typically requires a vehicle and the much of maintenence time I spend in my free time comes from wear and tear of commute driving as do expenses to expedite repairs for necessity of a car for work. This stuff all adds up.
Once every now and then, in person meetings and problem solving synchronously is good where virtual just fails. Usually this involved external clients and so forth or some physical, hardware related aspect of work. Software alone I can typically do fully remote as it's assumed everyone is competent and can easily share needed information and visuals with one another.
>Unless you live outside big cities, I'm not sure if 2 hours of commute is that common (at least with my South West European perspective, maybe is different in the US/elsewhere?).
I lived in rural US and my experience is that commutes tend to be longer, both in distance and time, in rural areas. While traffic related commute times tend to melt away, with less density, people tend to drive further for better employment opportunities. Sometimes this involves living near but not in a large metro area and driving hours daily to pull in high income with low COL at the sacrifice of great commute times. I know a surgeon in Texas who commutes around 4-6 hours each trip (nearly doubles his income), someone near NY/NJ who commutes 6 hours daily to drive in, and people in small areas that would drive 2-hours to a nearby plant that pays more. One of my peers used to work 3 positions and one required driving an hour each way to. One of my older directors actually lived 2 hours away and purchased a condo near his job where he worked and stayed throughout the week then returned home on weekends. I presume his wife who didn't work would sometimes stay at his condo but never felt comfortable breaching that discussion.
For them, the time they lose can't be spent working elsewhere and average out to the same higher rates and they're willing to sacrifice that time to pull more in and provide for their families. This is ultimately because good paying opportunities are often few and far between in low COL areas and highly competitive as well. For me, living in a metro area makes more sense these days. You pay more for property but recover that in terms of commute time and TC. You also have more security depending on the area by there being more opportunities to transfer to should you want/need, without changing commute times too drastically. If you live in a rural area and the diamond in the rough position you found disappears, you have to consider significant lifestyle changes for you and your family or even consider uprooting and moving. There are trade-offs either way you go.
Let's look at a 1-hour round trip commute assuming 240 working days per year. This means 240 hours gone in a year to your commute. That's 10 full whole days. A 2-hour round trip commute means 20 full whole days... almost a whole month gone. 3-hour round trip commute = 30 full days.. and so on.
Do you pay the quite significant rent increase to reduce the commute, or do you pocket that money & try to deal with the lost time as best as possible?
At some point, I'm going to want to buy a house (so money now can be saved), the total cost of which is >$1M in not just the Bay Area (which I've now left, for these very reasons); even where I am now, housing remains that pricy … unless you give up having a sub 2h commute.
> A 2-hour round trip commute is insane.
My employer doesn't believe that. If they did, they would pay me sufficiently that I wouldn't need to choose. The Bay Area doesn't believe that: if they did, they'd address the housing crisis.
> My employer doesn't believe that. If they did, they would pay me sufficiently that I wouldn't need to choose. The Bay Area doesn't believe that: if they did, they'd address the housing crisis.
There has to be a name for the logical fallacy of treating the market as some kind of oracle, as if it was a global optimizer, instead of a greedy optimizer that will happily ignore the costs it can externalize.
"The Bay Area" doesn't "believe" the housing crisis needs to be addressed because for most interested actors, it's in their personal interest to further the crisis. You paid a lot for your house, and you want it to appreciate in value. You paid a lot for your house, because others who bought before you wanted theirs to appreciate in value. Someone else will pay a lot for their house, because you want yours to appreciate in value.
That's a good one. I propose "Efficient Market Fallacy". The Efficient Market is such a tempting idea with simple explanations for complex human behavior. The reality can be very broken, very inefficient, wasting many human lifetimes and with tons of horrific externalities in situations that basically amount to a kind of organized crime.
Potential solutions to that: prohibit ownership of residential property (whether small scale, like single family up to 4-unit properties, or large scale, e.g. apartment complexes) except as a primary residence by foreign individuals or businesses that have foreign individuals as their true beneficial owners, and have additional taxes on properties that are not owner-occupied a substantial fraction of the year (say, 9 months).
And it's often not just more expensive living near a big city, it's also a different lifestyle. The type of housing near in to the city where I work is different than the housing further away. For example you may have to live in a smaller apartment/condo in a more urban neighborhood vs. living in a SFH in a more green neighborhood. Some people like the former, others like the latter.
While this "enumerate all the costs and benefits" calculus is really appealing, the "how much is the land (de)appreciating?" factor dominates everything. This is why most people can buy homes without much serious thought and still come out very happy and ahead, because the land appreciation (or depreciation) sort of bakes in all your complex considerations for you.
Equivalent housing on overground commuter lines to London in the UK, compared that of inside London, is basically <rail fare> per month cheaper to mortgage.
For many people it comes down to whether they can afford to deposit or get the income multiple loan to buy in the city, not monthly expense.
The difference being that the UK's rail infrastructure (especially around London) is orders (plural) of magnitude better than that in the Bay Area.
I lived and worked in London (South Kensington/Pimlico at college, Streatham, Walthamstow, Acton Town, Notting Hill - all over, really) for about 16 years. I've been in the Bay Area for ~17 years. There really isn't any comparison. Londoners have it made, even if it doesn't feel it when the train is packed/a few mins late/cancelled.
I see the light-rail here going by on occasion. It's empty. BART is inadequate (there are 270 stations on the tube, there are 50 on BART covering a larger area), and it runs with a 10-20 minute cadence, not the 2-5 minute cadence of the tube. As far as real trains go, Caltrain is pretty good if you're on the track (really, the train itself is nicer than most in the UK) but it's coverage is very limited.
Just like the NHS, you don't know what you have until it's gone.
I know people who had 4-5 hour RT commutes in the Bay. (Tracy <-> SF) It's ludicrous, but I suppose it's a bit of a boiled frog scenario. People just got used to having to commute from further and further away as housing has gotten less affordable.
I'm in Livermore, so not as far out as Tracy, but depending on traffic, the one-way commute can be 1 hour 45 minutes (best case) up to 4 hours (worst-case Friday 4:00PM before a holiday weekend). Usual case is a little over 2 hours each way. The real soul killer is the unpredictability of it all. Every morning there's at least one jackass on each interstate highway leg that manages to crash their car into something, slowing everything down in a random, unpredictable way.
If you're not having to drive then commutes can be easily optimised. You can read a book, chat to your commuter buddies on the train/boat/coach (in some instances over a beer so it's little different than being down the pub). I've even used my commuter time to catch up of pending PRs on open source projects I maintain.
This obviously depends on your city / county / state having good public transport infrastructure but if the option is there and its practical then I'd take the train over driving to work any day of the week.
I had one of those--typically by train--for about 18 months though I didn't go in every day. I had to get up by about 6am to drive to the train station and it was just a big chunk of the day. I don't think I'd have found it sustainable over the long-term.
But it makes equal chores split with partner regarding kids literally impossible. Practically, you barely ever see them and your dad role amounts to being wallet.
Fortunately, they aren't the boss of me, and also fortunately, the job market means my skills gives me enough power to push back against this idea all on my own, with no support from a union or strong laws or anything. A family isn't just a responsibility, it's a delight, a fulfilling life, human connection, everything you need wrapped up into a big ball of inconvenience and imperfection.
That may sometimes be the case, but it's definitely not the case with my post and nor am I a "pro-office" person. I don't miss the office. I miss the beers, the commute and city centre eateries. But I don't miss the office.
People on HN often love to get on their high horse about parenting responsibilities but the fact remains that even the best parents need some "me" time occasionally. We do our best parenting when we're not mentally and physically exhausted. Much like a good company shouldn't allow their employees to burn out -- a good family shouldn't let either.
So my point about the commute was about how that time can be optimised for relaxation so you can better serve your family once you are home.
I'm not talking about offloading everything to the partner either.
It sounds like you've only worked in organisations that force a really shitty work/life balance on their staff but I assure you that you can have your proverbial cake and eat it. Maybe it's a US vs Europe culture but here companies are generally (not always, there's a fair share of shitty companies here too) accepting of employees working from home when they need it. I've never once had a job that hasn't allowed me to work flexible hours to accommodate school runs and other family commitments, nor take time away when my child is ill.
In fact because my wife is a school teacher (and thus has less flexibility in her job), she is the one who depends on me most of the time. The commute was the one little block of the day (and it wasn't every day) when I wasn't running around for a wife and two small children.
So you can absolutely have a commute and still be dedicated to your family. You just can't work for c*nts who thinks a working relationship should be one way.
No it doesn't. You can still flexible working even if you have a long commute. eg you might work from home 2 days a week. Your employer might allow flexible hours so you can do school duties. Your employer might even offer fewer hours or not mandate overtime.
This isn't a theoretical argument either: I spend more time with the kids and help out with more duties since taking up a job with a 3 hour round trip of a commute than I did when I had a previous job in the same town.
The distance will obviously have an impact on your day, but what matters far more is the employer. Plenty of employers enforce an unhealthy culture of > 40hr weeks. Whereas my current employer is very family focused and offers a lot of incentives to enable parents to balance work and home life.
Getting down voted for this despite saying I have first hand experience of this being true.
I suggest people open their minds a little. IT is a broad industry and there are plenty of good jobs around doing interesting things that pay well and also offer a good work life balance. Again, I know this from first hand experience :)
I had a 2h round trip daily commute from downtown Sunnyvale (about 10 minutes walk to Caltrain) to downtown SF (2nd and Folsom). It was pretty normal.
Basically an hour each way, of which 20m fast walking, if you timed it right. Hit a slow train, try for the 10 bus and miss, get rained on, train late, miss the train, train runs over someone — sometimes it took longer.
I moved up to the city and had about 40 minutes each way by bus, and if you haven’t tried it let me tell you: an hour on Caltrain is much nicer, not to mention safer, than half an hour on a MUNI bus.
On Caltrain I could at least read the news, on the bus it was pretty much watch your back.
I haven’t commuted at all in the last 12 years but I accept that if I ever work onsite in the USA again I probably will need to, and the trick is to try and find a form of commute that isn’t a complete waste of time.
When my commute was biking 30 minutes from the inner sunset to SoMa a few years ago I found that I really enjoyed that. Honestly a 30 minute bike ride is my ideal commute I think.
It's just someone prioritizing things differently. I would never commute more than 20-30 minutes (one way) pre-COVID. I will only work remotely from now on, maybe a scheduled day in the office every week for a killer opportunity with a resume-changing company.
But if you live in a HCOL area, and you want a yard, you're pretty much locked in to hour+ one-way commutes.
Back between 1990 and 2005, I lived in Austin before moving to north Alabama. My commute when I was working on Redstone Arsenal was exactly an hour each way. I didn't really mind for several reasons.
One of which was that my 6 mile commute in Austin took between 45 minutes to an hour.
I think it's very common (I'm in Europe/UK). Things add up extremely quickly to reach ~1h door-to-door between home and office.
Saving that time does make a huge difference, indeed.
It's exactly my case, actually. My commute was just under an hour each way, walk and train, so I have been saving a lot of time and money since WFH. I go for a walk at lunchtime, though, in order to do some exercise but it's much nicer than walking on busy roads to train stations.
It's not insane. It's what people do to feed their families and keep their kids in the same school. It would be better not to, but it is far from insane.
I wouldn't like a 1-hour commute either... but it's not time 'lost' - you can use that time to read, work on your hobbies, listen to music, have a drink or supper, or just sleep if you want. Doesn't have to be wasted if you don't want to.
You ever try standing on a NYC subway, surrounded by strangers, at least a few of which are playing video games or listening to music videos / TV out loud on their phones, having to move every 6 minutes as the doors open and close, and having to keep tabs on who's around you since there are sometimes shady and angry individuals -- for a 45 minute stretch mornings and night? I have, and I can assure you, it's no way to start your day - or end it. Reading is extremely difficult with a bag on one arm and a phone or kindle on the other, if you need to hold onto a pole to not fall over.
I commuted 45 minutes each way to a prior job for a couple of years. Yes, I ate my breakfast in the car on the way there.
No, I didn't sleep, read, or do anything distracting on my drive because when you're in deer country, dawn and dusk are times to be vigilant and ready to brake or swerve if horribly necessary.
Still had $4100 of damage one January.
Commutes can be anywhere from 0 - ? percent multitaskable.
You conjure up the idea of a Victorian train carriage with plenty of space and waiters to serve you dinner etc.
Most people are experiencing a noisy packed out train car lit by bright fluorescence lamps, full of tired, irritated people, where they could easily be standing for half the trip.
Not exactly the ideal environment to dine or work on your hobbies…
Personally, I'm looking forward to going back to the office. I am an extremely introverted person and during the pandemic, I've gone upwards of 5 months without saying another word to a person face-to-face. I personally prefer that and don't feel lonely or anything; I just don't need social interaction in my day-to-day life. But I know that in the long term, it's going to have negative consequences for me in terms of networking and just friendships in general. These are basic things that you need that I am completely incapable of achieving without it being forced upon me in an office environment.
Yes, I hate driving. But I'll move closer to the office (which we're relocating to a much further location currently) and I'll get it to <20 minutes each way, which is acceptable.
Just because you can't find arguments for it in your life doesn't mean others can't. I need that environment and if my job went remote-only, I'd quit without any hesitation just as employees are quitting after being asked to return to the office. We shouldn't go from one extreme (everyone has to be in an office) to the other (there is no office at all).
We need to accept hybrid solutions where an office exists and maybe you're expected to be there once every week or two or something. We need to accept that some people work better remote and others work better in an office. We're trying to build the most efficient working environment for the team in general, not just one or two people one way or the other.
If everybody's only there once every week or two you're looking at something like 10-20% attendance on any given day. Some teams or individuals might coordinate being on-site the same day but so far our experience is that you basically sit in the office talking to the same people as always on Zoom all day.
Unless you're in an industry that requires actual physical presence I don't think you're going to see the same office experience any more. Companies aren't going to keep an office big enough for 100% attendance when there's only a need for a smallish fraction of that.
I'd start looking for other ways to scratch that socialization itch.
I suspect that will be pretty common even if there's more people than that. Which means that people who want to get back to the office of the before times (as opposed to just some office outside of the house) aren't going to like the ghost town very much.
I'm not an extrovert but like the office because I live in a one bedroom apartment and I don't like working from my living room, and at the end of the day, being in my living room.
I do like the social interaction and joking, or venting, with co-workers, even as an introvert.
I don’t think we need to do anything of the sort. Companies will sort themselves into all remote/all office/hybrid before “lets make everyone moderately miserable equally” becomes the mandated approach for everyone.
I'm a software engineer like 90% of HN. I have plenty of online meetings (I'm actually on a team call right now listening to someone discuss a solution to a problem). It doesn't fill the needs, though. Without the in-person and more frequent interaction, I can feel my social skills slipping even further. And I rarely interact with non-developers and non-managers now. It's not ideal for me. It 100% does not work and I need to go back to an office. I fear if I don't, my already-limited social abilities will zero out and I'll have to rebuild them. I now know I can go months without speaking to anyone and be okay with it; that itself is a problem in my mind that I need to address and an office environment fulfills those needs.
As a compromise it'd be nice once things are opened up for companies without fixed offices to subsidize passes into coworking spaces, so people can work in public areas more quiet and professional than cafes around others, but not necessarily the actual office.
When interviewing with a company who demands commuting say, "I value my time as I'm sure you do. I will commute if required but I charge a premium for my commuting time. My rate is $x/hr and since I will be commuting 2 hours a day, 5 days a week, an estimated 48 weeks (accounting for holidays, vacation, sick, etc...) a year then I request you increase my salary by $x * 2 * 5 * 48."
I say that partially in jest because, of course, no employer is going to increase your salary by $48K simply because you value your commuting time at $100/hr (a reasonable rate if you're in tech). Still, I think it's a useful way to gain a perspective on just how valuable one's time really is to them.
Rail too. You can easily spend £3-5K/yr on a season ticket + another £2k/yr for tube travel, so once you factor back in tax you could easily be talking £10-15k of salary
The commute isn't always dead time though. For me, the 3hr round trip was spent playing computer games on my Nintendo Switch, or reading a book, or just letting my mind wander while listening to music. All of these are activities I don't get time to do at home because of the thousand other commitments I have at home.
You'd think working from home would give people more free time, but that's not always the case, for example if you have small children. Don't get me wrong, I love spending time with my family, but the commute was the only "me time" I had in a given day and I miss that dearly.
The pre-WFH work 10-15 minutes away from home routine had, for me, the same hidden benefit.
Now that I've been 100% WFH for 14 months, I've realized how easy it is to just get caught up even deeper in the assumption that "you're home, can you do _?" and wind up devoting more and more time to the house and projects and the pets and realize that the last time I was in a space by myself, at least briefly not 'monitoring' or 'on deck', was how many days/weeks ago?
That time where I'm not on call every second to potentially deal with a pet or household or any other 'now' thing, is way more precious than I realized. I've survived with very little of it this past year.
But this sounds like a personal boundaries matter that's helped by having a work commute, but not dependent upon it. Perhaps the commute could be replaced with a dedicated time for oneself for a walk, fitness, meditation, etc. That time shouldn't be (indirectly) provided by one's employer.
In theory yes. But you have to be disciplined to do this yourself (it's so easy not to bother when we have a world of distractions and comfort at home). Ultimately though, I'm not suggesting people take up long commutes for the sake of meditation, I'm just saying long commutes aren't necessarily dead time.
It saves me even more time than that because of tasks like laundry that are mostly hands off and waiting become easy to intersperse with my work. I can also throw one of my pre-prepped meals into the Instant Pot at 11am and have it ready when I start lunch at noon. Those who work at a desk all day should get up to move around at least once an hour anyway. These small tasks the start hands-off processes are a good way of making that happen.
covid gave us a lot of data, and things are not as obvious as imagined, many people said they just couldn't operate at home, but it seems the majority was utterly happy
It does depend on the type of commute. If you walk or ride a bicycle to work that is at least somewhat personal time, and I personally enjoy the structure. If you use a train or bus or something similar and don’t have too much rigmarole around transferring etc, that also can be personal or work time or a combination. The only real lost time is driving, and even then some people enjoy podcasts etc.
In the Bay Area the train and bus system is a crammed, stressful experience where you have to worry about being robbed, harassed, or being annoyed by loud music, homeless _smells_, or inebriated people trying to smoke in a packed car. Regarding cars: don't forget the increase of risk of accident and death from driving, as well as the constant stress of avoiding collisions; I can barely retain podcasts while driving.
Agreed, and the resources that a commute consumes (time, wear and tear on a vehicle, fuel, mental reserves either sitting in traffic or dealing with other people on public transportation, etc) are not considered in compensation...
Your most valuable resource, time, which can be neither replenished nor its true quantity known, is being wasted for very little gain.
Often it isn't much of a choice at all. American cities are such that living near a workplace simply isn't feasible for many. It is common to be financially intractable, and American cities are actively hostile to families/children. So the people who get to "choose" to prioritize living near their workplace is generally restricted to relatively high-income earners who are single with roommates or perhaps are dual-income with no children.
I go to a coworking space. Having some semblance of separating home from 'work' (even though I do sometimes 'work' from home) helps. I did total 'work from home' - working out of a converted bedroom - for years, and... it's functional, but the process/ritual of leaving and coming back does help me.
I still 'work remote', as a freelancer. I have had engagements where I go to a client's offices, sometimes for somewhat extended periods of time. I will travel if needed.
But the majority of work I do is still done on terms I have some control over, which, ultimately, I think is the key part of the whole discussion. Where I work, what equipment, what hours, when/where I travel, what I wear, etc - things you were mentioning above - having control over those is key, regardless of whether you want to work from home or in an office or somewhere in between.
I think it's interesting how "the ritual" of going to or leaving work. Is such a big part of the discussion around working from home.
I felt it myself at first. I had to do something to break up the day into work and not work. At first I'd pretty much just walk to the bus stop and go home from there. Basically pretend I took the bus. After a month or two I think I stopped. The walk was the new commute.
The ritual part just became moving all cables back to my own computer from the work laptop dock. A quick minute and it's over. Work has ended and all is well.
I have a similar thing with my laptop. I have lots of variance though, I have co-working space I can go to, and I often take my laptop to various places around the city just for the wander and to feel connected again. (The pandemic hasn't really affected my city in Aus)
The reality is that working from home means I end up spending almost all my time at home. Almost all 24 hours of it. I think about how quickly life goes by, how much I've already spent behind a computer, and realize that's not going to work for me long term. I will be very disappointed if I look back on my life and saw that it almost entirely occurred behind a computer in the one spot.
I need to separate work from home and home from work. My home is filled with distractions and the first couple of months of the pandemic were horrible becuase I couldn't get anything done. I started going back in to work in the summer (2-3 minute commute depending on the single traffic light along the route) and my productivity went back to normal. It was actually better than normal because work was mostly empty, so I had a big office building designed for 600 workers mostly to myself. Now, unfortunately starting today we are all back in the office, so I'm having the same transition issues as all the WFH people, but because my nice empty office building is now filled with people.
That's the key for me. I think every remote company should pay for co-working space for their employees if they choose to. Also, it's important that co-working spaces design it to be more like a quiet office with stations with big screens etc. Not like the old co-working concept where it's like a cafe, cramping multiple people together.
I recall once interviewing at a startup. Their office was in a co-working space. When I arrived in the morning I knew after 5 minutes that I'm not going to work there. The entire team of 4 people, including the CTO who was supposed to be my manager, were sitting together in a tiny room with zero privacy.
I would never use a co-working space. I want to be home, not in some pseudo office.
I also wonder how the end of pandemic norms will effect people who claim they want to be in the office. If they can get their socialization outside the office, we could see a resurgence of neighborhood clubs.
Different strokes, but personally, having worked remotely for several years, I like having it as an option. There's a space not too far from my house with a reasonable day-of hot desk rate, with a nice view and the usual amenities. I like working from my house, but a different scene once or twice a month (that isn't a coffee shop) is refreshing for me. It's also good to have the escape if something noisy turns up in the neighborhood and I need to get away. :)
I hope we do see a resurgence in local clubs and venues. Modern communities can be so isolating, it's no wonder people get most of their socializing done at work.
Our space is pretty small. Main room has seating for.. perhaps 8, and a separate conference room and a separate smaller 'single desk' space. There's usually only 2-3 people in at any one time - 5 is a big day, and for most people, it's a "part time" thing to get them out of the house.
It's not 100% the same thing as 100% total privacy, but it's generally not very noisy, and there's enough quiet to concentrate and focus when needed. There are some larger spaces in the area I've been to that are nice looking, and conducive to group work/meetings/collaboration, but don't work well for "I need solo time to think/work".
Agreed! I had an hour-long one way commute too and it's been great. My work day went from 11 hours to 9 at most. I have more time to cook, I can get up later of earlier, I can do laundry, dishwasher etc...
My company wants to go 2 days home and 3 days office. I've said I'd do it the other way around.
I do miss my colleagues as well, but two days a week should be enough to garner most weekly advantages of being in the same place.
And it's not just convenience, either. 2 days in office would open up immense possibilities for me regarding housing, I can live in a cheaper home outside the big city and still commute less than 10 hours a week.
> My company wants to go 2 days home and 3 days office. I've said I'd do it the other way around.
That's exactly the same as me. Company is talking about everyone coming back in for 3/2 starting in mid-September. My response is I'll see you for 2/3. I have a 20 minute commute which isn't too onerous, and I like having some in-office time as I find it valuable.
What will really be the test for me is how I feel after a month or two of the kids being back in school. Right now being home is still fairly social for me. Previous times I've tried to work remotely it was the loneliness of having only myself in the house for days on end that killed it for me.
I'm also a bit of a realist, though. Being remote (or at least 'more remote' than the rest of the team) is a serious career limit, so if everyone else starts spending most of their time in the office, I will probably follow along.
I suspect the partial in-office/wfh arrangement will be fairly rare. Office space is costly to use only 2 days a week. Companies can do hoteling but it breaks down when you have very technical employees who like very particular desk setups (multiple monitors, chair positions, special keyboards/mice). The more common arrangement will probably be mostly WFH but meet up occsionally in some per-hour rented office for collaboration. Sucks for WeWork to have blown itself up before this :).
> Office space is costly to use only 2 days a week.
So downsize. We were doing partial WFH before the pandemic because our office had more people than seats (open office seating); everyone picked different days they preferred for home and office, and the office ended up mostly full most days.
Also, depending on the type of commute, I need to factor in the exhaustion that comes with using public transportation like Bart. So for me it was an hour each way plus a substantial time to decompress from standing in a packed sweaty train. In the evening it usually meant that I was just too tired to do anything else after work.
Before the pandemic I did a lot of WFH, looking after my chronically ill partner. I basically got my face-to-face load out the way on a Monday, which was Meeting Day.
At least for Bay Area companies, the "hybrid" 2/3 or 3/2 or whatever schemes are insufficient. They partially alleviate the long commute problem, but they do not solve the high cost of living problem. WFH has been nice in that it lets me skip my 4+ hour commute every day, but what would be even better is 0/5, allowing me to completely move out of the Bay Area and still keep my job (at lower comp, fine).
I presume you’re in eng because we’re on HN but are you not? If you’re in the Bay Area, you should be able to afford an okay home here (assuming you stop playing the startup game and join a public tech company). Being only able to afford Tracy or something sounds like very low pay...
My company is going to a 2 days at work and 3 days home setup. But they won't pay for anything except the computer -- if I want a monitor or a docking station I'm on the hook for that, they won't provide it. I recently shelled out for a $500 chair, and I know two colleagues who paid $2-300 for docking stations (I think I'd be happy with a cheaper one, personally).
I think they'll pay for a monitor if you're full-time WFH but that requires special permission.
1. Why? I can live 2 hours from my office and still have a total weekly commute that is less than my pre-pandemic commute. If I can somehow fix an overnight in the city it's even less.
2. This is true, although you get 'reimbursed' for that by not commuting. And since you don't commute you can live somewhere cheaper, or get a bigger house for the same price.
3. My company paid for all that, so no issue here.
If you live two hours from your office and go in for three days per week, that's 2h per leg * 2 legs per day * 3 days per week = 12 hours per week on the road.
You were spending more than 12 hours per week in traffic?
The average commute in the United States is a little less than 30 minutes [1]. That's 5 hours per week for someone who works five days per week.
I used to commute 1 hour one way pre Covid, so 10 hours per week. If I go into the office for only 2 days a week I could live twice as far from my workplace and still only commute 8 hours a week. I was meaning to say that even with 2 days in-Office per week it opens up possibilities regarding housing.
I was spending 1,5 hours per day in a train, and walking to the station for 10 minutes or so, yes.
I guess it depends on the type of job, but for me (software engineering), WFH works extremely well.
I often -often, not "sometimes"- get more done by 8AM, than I used to get done in over half a day (or even the entire day) at the office.
WFH won't work for everyone. It takes real self-discipline, and not everyone considers home to be a suitable place for work.
Even in these cases, I think we'll be seeing alternatives, like small "work hubs," ala WeWork, that are close to people's homes, and allow them to have a lot more autonomy than the main office.
I’m the same I had been WFH in SF for at least two years and joined a new employer pre covid that required me to go into the office. Once COVID hit my manager was really surprised by how much more productive I was. At this point we’re on a flex schedule going back, will see how that goes.
My hope is two days in the office for meeting days or interviews, rest engineering time at home.
I've worked from home for years, and found the same thing - it's made me look like, maybe not a 10X dev but definitely 2X.
But now everyone else I deal with is WFH too and... It turns out they don't appear to be benefiting in the same way and performance has probably dropped on average.
Give it a couple of years and most people will be back in the office as before, I expect.
I have gained a kind of hyper-focus and desire to do the work I had entirely lost thanks to the 9-5 grind, I've been working from home since before covid too. 9-5 5 day weeks seem almost designed to cause that kind of long-tail unproductivity.
Agree with all of this, but it also requires to schedule pretty much any interaction. Also all the interactions are going through your employers systems, which are all recorded. So any gossip or informal catch up, or sharing real “corporate incorrect” opinion is out of the door (if you work for any large organisation).
It was fine the first 6 months of working from home but I feel increasingly professionally isolated, not knowing what is going on, even though I spend half of my day talking to people on a headset.
> but it also requires to schedule pretty much any interaction.
That's a small price I'm willing to pay.
> So any gossip or informal catch up, or sharing real “corporate incorrect” opinion is out of the door (if you work for any large organisation).
Just speaking personally, any company I've worked at where gossip/whispering/staff looking over their shoulders and feel the need complain/etc. were important factors was not an environment I wanted to be a part of anyway.
> but it also requires to schedule pretty much any interaction.
This is another positive.
> So any gossip or informal catch up, or sharing real “corporate incorrect” opinion is out of the door (if you work for any large organisation).
I'm not sure what "corporate incorrect" means here, but gossip is generally a net negative in the workplace that tends to build cliques and factions that often manifest in a bigger problem.
Assuredly there are other non-company channels to do those things, but the question is ... why?
> gossip is generally a net negative in the workplace that tends to build cliques and factions that often manifest in a bigger problem
It isn’t useful at lower levels. It’s pretty much the definition of senior management. I wouldn’t have wanted to discuss replacing a senior person, whom I found to be ineffective, on corporate Zoom, for example. That said, temporary hierarchical rigidity and some people explicitly opting out of the promotion race isn’t a bad thing.
A problem for whom? Unionisation is a net positive for everyone not interested in profit; a good union ensures good working environments which improve efficiency (amount achieved per time spent), and it reduces worker exploitation (e.g. fairer compensation for labour).
How do you arrange something like that behind your boss's back if you can only communicate with your colleagues via corporate-approved communication channels?
Technically planning unionizing inside of the workspace has always been legally dangerous - the correct way to do it is to meet outside of work, at say a cookout or over drinks. Those methods can work too, although being remote can make them impossible. Unfortunately a fully remote company is much more union-proof, and that’s a very sad tradeoff.
It's not legally dangerous. Legally, you have the right to discuss unionization with your co-workers and your employer is legally forbidden from preventing it or retaliating.
It's dangerous for practical purposes, because that law is not well enforced.
I use my personal communnications devices to communicate with colleagues when communicating in a personal context.
I use my work communications devices to communicate with colleagues when communicating in a work context.
I suppose some people may have employers that prohibit them from having personal communication devices in their place of residence, but that's going to be a very different high-security type environment anyway.
I don't have a problem with asking a colleague to give me their personal cell number on a work communications channel. I don't think I'd want to work in a place where doing so was prohibited.
> How do you arrange something like that behind your boss's back if you can only communicate with your colleagues via corporate-approved communication channels?
I'm a Betriebsrat, a Germany-specific "workers council", member at my employer. By law, the company is mandated to provide us with the resources we need (e.g. access to company wide email distribution lists, a private MS Teams channel, private folders on the file servers, a locked office for personal meetings of the council and with staff members) and is prohibited from interfering with all our duties. Any form of censorship or surveillance would be a big no-no which could even land our execs behind bars.
Why does it cause you to pick the evidence that confirms what you already believe in? Do you think that being blind to reality is good for your "team"?
I'm not being blind to reality. The only unions I have ever interacted with have been good ones. I've only ever heard about bad unions on Hacker News; even police unions are good at being unions (though when you're unionising against the people, that's an inversion of the power dynamics a union is meant to promote, so I still don't like police unions).
Believing second-hand rumours on the internet would be less intellectually honest than believing my anecdotal evidence.
> The only unions I have ever interacted with have been good ones.
Wild.
As a non-American non-employer, my current job is unionized, and I believe that union to be a major factor in the rampant dysfunction, though probably not the driving factor.
I think that every time I've had a friend or family member working in a union environment that wasn't more-or-less minimum wage (e.g. unionized Starbucks workers are a counter-example to the pattern I'm describing) they've had similar observations.
I'm still very hesitant to attack unions in general, because as a student of history it's pretty clear that the situation we have now is better than the situation without unions. So I'd rather live in a unionized society than a non-unionized society, but I'd rather work for a non-unionized employer than a unionized employer.
> The only unions I have ever interacted with have been good ones.
Well, that's what I would expect to see in US too, but it's a survivorship bias at work. Obviously, in country which is (quite commendably, in my opinion) anti-union, only capable unions would be able to survive.
> that's an inversion of the power dynamics a union is meant to promote
Power dynamics that you are talking about are pieces of fiction, which oversimplify reality in order to boost one or another political viewpoint. It's a very popular piece of fiction, too: paint one side as "the ordinary people", the underdog, morally superior, and thus taken advantage of. And the other side is, obviously, the devil.
Anyone sees these stories quite for what they are when it's the story from the other side of political spectrum. For example, if anyone would come here to HN and tell the story of immigrants taking "our jobs", it would be dead in 5 minutes, and all the logical inconsistencies and fallacies in it would be split open. And, just to be clear about my personal political opinions — this takedown would be completely correct.
But it works for both sides. "The people" are often not much of an underdog, as are "the workers". I know quite a lot of real businesses, even in IT, where "the man", the business owner, takes home less money than he pays his senior engineers. The situation with police unions just highlights this disparity between the story in a way that you can't just sweep under the rug — but it's always there, even if less apparent.
> It's a very popular piece of fiction, too: paint one side as "the ordinary people", the underdog, morally superior, and thus taken advantage of. And the other side is, obviously, the devil.
? That's not what I mean at all. Think of Uber; the drivers don't have much control over when they work, if they want to afford to live in a building. The people in charge of Uber, however, do have control over when the drivers work.
In a school, the teachers have more power than the children – but oftentimes when that power is exercised, it's in dealing with bullying or classroom disruption.
Acknowledging that some people have more power than others is not the same thing as declaring the powerful evil.
> "The people" are often not much of an underdog, as are "the workers".
I know plenty of people, myself included, who consider most of what you described as a blessing.
Not having to have "how are the kids?" conversations and instead being able to play a video game or watch a TV show during some down time is worth every bit of company gossip I'm missing.
not sure how "corporate incorrect" you are intending, but I feel pretty open to discuss things I'm dissatisfied with with my team. I suppose if push came to shove, I would be fine with that being public record.
Another equivalent view point is that your commute was being compensated and that now employers will begin to pay less as the supply of people who are willing to work remote increase.
The biggest perk for me is the ability to hit that bong in a middle of work day, while watching weird ass japanese hentai with my surround sound home cinema.
Depending on your company culture, you could do that in the office as well. In some companies I worked at, weed brakes were an everyday occurrence for engineering, but gamedev in general and Tel Aviv in particular are a bit different from the usual white-collar office culture.
Though I'm sure the hentai lunch breaks aren't on the list of perks at even the most relaxed of FAANGs. No idea though, I'm pretty far removed from that world.
Going along with the other reply to this comment, there are a select few individuals who can handle low/medium doses of sativa strains and be shockingly productive.
I use it for focusing on purely creative works, but I definitely can’t use it in a professional setting.
I can just start calling people, no need to find a room with my laptop where I only have the screen of that laptop, just to not disturb the others in the open office.
I have breakfast with the kids, am home for package/groceries deliveries.
I have much better relations with colleagues in other countries because cam on is the default and we are not with a group of locals and 2 people on cam. It's a big equalizer.
I like it like this and would be annoyed as well if this was taken from me.
You are pitching being able to do laundry, dishes, clean, etc. as a perk. I feel like it’s a negative as part of my mental space is occupied by household chores as well. Blending errands and cleaning with meetings and focused work is a pain now. It feels like I’m doing an insane multitasking balancing act most days.
This as much as you want to do it though. I share OP's view point, but will also let those house keeping tasks rote away for a while if I'm not in the mood too.
They'll still need to be done at some point, but now we have more choice on when we want to do it, and not just between 8PM and 8 AM or only on weekends, as it was the case before.
So keep doing them on weekends or evenings if that works best for you. WFH gives you the option of doing them at other times if that meets your needs better.
Not an uncommonly long commute, perhaps, but only because—particularly in the US—we’ve made some really unfortunate choices with regard to city planning. It shouldn’t be this way.
Pretty much anyplace where someone commutes into a city from comfortably outside the city is going to have a substantial commute. I'm actually very convenient to a decent commuter rail system to a city with a good mass transit system. And it would take me around 90 minutes door to door to commute in. It would be shorter if I lived closer in but it would be hard to be much under an hour.
I live in a fairly large city with decent transit options (for the US), and (notably) a high-speed commuter rail system going into the city. I'm considering moving out of the city in a year or so, and if I do I want to be convenient to a station on that rail system.
Using a friend's address in the suburbs as a proxy (who lives near where I might be moving), Google Maps puts the travel time from there to my office at 32 minutes via commuter rail. That's with an 8 minute walk and 11 minute walk on either side, but if you assume a bike ride rather than a walk I'd imagine you can cut each of those down by at least half. The rail line has headways of a little under 15 minutes at rush hour, so that could possibly extend the trip a little bit if your timing's not perfect, but still well under an hour.
Of course if you need multiple transfers to get to your destination (and your local transit system doesn't have very short headways) that will increase your travel time substantially. The commuter line I'm thinking of takes you right into the heart of the city where many jobs are though (including my own) so that's not always a concern.
That's probably an unusually good commuter rail system. I'm about a 10 minute drive from a less frequent commuter rail, so figure 15 minutes out the door until the scheduled train comes. There don't seem to be any express trains running right now so it's over an hour into the city and that's assuming I don't need to catch a subway on the other end--which I would have to do to go to my company's city office. So, for me, at least 90 minutes--and that's for someone fairly far out (it would also take me a good 60 minutes to go in by car with nominal traffic but more like 90 anywhere near rush hour even leaving early) but convenient to a rail line.
I actually did this for a time, fortunately not every day but frequently enough. Wouldn't really have been sustainable long term.
The inherent problem here is that you work in the city, but don't live in the city. I think that with better housing policies (namely, better density), this would be far less common.
That presupposes one wants to live in "better density." A lot of people who work in cities have no desire to live there. (Or they have a partner who works in the suburbs, want the better suburban school options, etc.)
It's not like the only two options are cities and sprawling car-dependent suburbs. (Well okay, in the US those are mostly the only two options.) That suburb I mentioned in a sibling comment thread with the 30-minute rail commute is a town of about 13,000, houses there generally have backyards (though not huge front yards), there are plenty of quiet side streets, it's still walkable, etc. It's an "in between" kind of density. The problem is we've mostly legislated these places out of existence; you can't build places like this anymore in almost all of the US. I just happen to be in an area that was built up before modern zoning codes prevented it.
Of course, if you want to live super far away from the city and drive in, that's fine, I just wish that wasn't basically the only option besides living right in the city. Places like this still exist, and I think there's a lot of demand for them, but because they're not expanding (again, legislated away) the cost of living there will just keep going up because supply will never increase.
I would love for more of the housing you are talking about to exist, but one has to deal with reality as it currently exists even while working to change it.
Yes, that's true. But you do also need to work to change it, or it won't change.
Unfortunately that probably means that if you have a city job, for now you'll be stuck with either long commutes, living right in the city, or expensive housing in the remaining walkable suburbs.
Or you can move somewhere that has already figured this out. :) But I understand that's out of reach for many people; it's out of reach for me.
IMO, that also falls under "city planning". Why do the suburbs have better schools? Maybe if we had better public parks, people wouldn't feel the need to have individual private backyards? Etcetera.
Now, sure, if your partner works XX miles in the opposite direction from you, and/or you have some other unique community attachment, and you can't change jobs, you're always going to have a long commute, and that's a life choice you're going to have to make. But there's no reason that should be the norm.
It's the kind of commute where you have said you don't want to be a renter for your entire life nor devote your entire paycheck to the mortgage.
That said, I actually like my commute that is 30 minutes of bike followed by 30 minutes on the train. I get exercise in the morning and evening and make steady progress on my backlog of books.
I would hate it if I was driving. That's just wasted time.
> I can wake up later since I don't have a commute. I don't lose two hours a day due to the commute.
Commutes are also dangerous if they're by car. Not only are roadway congested, everyone is in a rush, and people are driving after just waking up and then again after a full day of work.
From a purely economic standpoint, commutes are responsible for a 10% drop in hourly wages[1].
Depending on company culture, meetings with 10+ people can end up with just a few people talking and others not participating at all but still being forced to attend. Tolerating such events is much easier when you simply turn off your camera and lay on the couch, stretch around etc. instead of sitting awkwardly and pretending to care.
Hear, hear. As someone with dietary restrictions, the ability to make lunch at home every day is also huge (to say nothing of not being in an office which "helpfully" offers the temptation of junk food during moments of stress).
I'm not gonna lie, it lowers my stress levels by at least half. The sheer fact that people can't randomly drop by and I can more control the flow of my day by ignoring email and slack until reasonable interval checks. People can still get me if there's an "emergency" but those are few and far between.
My mental model on commute time is that every 1 hour is a year of my life wasted over a 24 year career. More than that if I work for more than 24 years.
I recently committed to a 40m commute for the next three years to take my young child to our chosen school. I rented a desk near the school b/c of course 40m is too far for multiple round-trips each day.
I used to commute an hour pre-pandemic so I thought, how bad can it be?
Let me tell you - after a year of working at home, any commute feels like a giant waste of time and energy, which of course it is. I cherish the time with by child, but being strapped into a car seat in the back of the car is hardly quality time.
Not only that but when you combine it with having the freedom to relocate to a low cost of living destination suit your optimal lifestyle the benefits stack up even more.
For example living 15 minutes to world class hiking trails or surf spots. Not having to take a flight or drive for hours each way to go do those things on weekends you can now do them every day before or after work. Getting to live in a large house out in nature, far away from the city crowds.
> I don't lose two hours a day due to the commute.
Realizing I was basically using an entire work day or even a little more per week just to commute was what made me put in the effort to move to remote work(pre-pandemic by a couple years). And once I started, I noticed the little niceties as you mentioned and it would take something drastic to get me back into an office again.
I 3d print and make useful things for my house on CNC mill machine I received few months back.
At this point if a company wants me back in office, I'll go and work for the one which doesn't really there's no value in being packed in a shop with people who don't want to be with you.
It's other thing to orchestrate something by purchasing bit of inputs from everyone on team.
The pandemic has flipped things on their head. Before it was “how can I know that you’d be productive outside of the office?” and now it’s “how is the office is any way necessary or an improvement on working from home?”
Businesses have to justify offices and cubicles to their workers but from all of the arguments I’ve read, they’re coming up short.
I've been working from home for years, and while all the things you listed are huge. The number one thing I missed the most in the 20 or so times I've been to the office in the last 7 years, is having my own bathroom.
That said, I miss going out to lunch, accidentally meeting people from other teams, reading on the train, meeting friends in the city right after work, and just being around people in general.
I wish I could get an in office part time job that paid benefits, but I don't think those exist.
Agreed with the above. I'll also add that for many years my wife and I have had the goal of living in Europe (we're Americans) but finding suitable work in Europe seemed nearly impossible:
* EU work visas seem very hard to get
* EU software jobs seem to pay ~40% less than comparable American jobs before taxes (and EU taxes are more significant)--this leaves little slack for travel
* My wife's field is communications/marketing and she's pretty specialized to English/American-culture and the demand is quite a lot lower for her industry than mine
Then there's the hassle of long-term remote: figuring out taxes, selling our home, the logistics and costs of moving those possessions we're unwilling to sell to Europe, etc.
Work-from-home enables us to work from Europe for a few months at a time--we'll have to work odd hours (~2pm-9pm iirc) and we'll probably have to pay Europe rent and our American mortgage; however, we'll probably take most of our vacation during our abroad months so the odd hours will only apply for a few weeks and we can afford the additional housing cost (especially if we save for it during the months we're in the US). I think the tax situation should be okay since we'll be in the US for the majority of the year, but I need to find out for sure.
IANAL but technically you working remote from Europe on a tourist visa is a violation of a bunch of immigration laws (and probably some tax treaties).
Will your firm catch you? Likely not if you are only working abroad for a few weeks, if you're doing it for longer, you'll probably get an email asking for clarification on your tax status (at best). At worst, they'll pull your VPN logs and demand that you get back to the states before you trigger some payroll issues.
You're most probably wrong. The limits to working in a foreign country usually apply to getting a paycheck from a local employer, or performing tasks that are locally regulated. Nothing's stopping anyone from writing a book anywhere, for instance. You clearly don't need any kind of work permit to do that kind of work. But you can't call yourself an independent contractor and start fixing houses in a remote country while invoicing from abroad. Doing software development is much more like the former than the latter.
Consider also that foreign employee of foreign firms have long traveled for business (well pre-Covid they did) and there is typically no work permit required for short/medium stays. In most places it just requires a typical tourist visa or equivalent when under 3 months.
Maybe this will be much more common and laws would change, but it's hard to see why countries would resist such residents; they bring their own job, they spend foreign money locally and they're no strain on the local social welfare system. Economically, they're just as beneficial as tourists and not as much of a risk as the average immigrant.
It does really depend on the country and visa, so certainly look into it. It's not a default no-no, and tax treaties often exist to make international economic activity easier not harder.
My country has a tax-treaty with the country I do most of my work for, and so I only pay taxes in one not the other. Without such a treaty I'd have to pay taxes in both countries and it would make it unviable.
How would you go about finding out for sure? Do you need to visit the foreign embassy? Or is there some kind of lawyer you would talk to? If so, which kind?
As a non-American working (legally) for a while in America (in Silicon Valley), I ran into a situation where my visa lapsed and I wasn't sure where I stood legally (like I wasn't sure if I was even allowed to be in the country any more). I can't remember how I found a lawyer. Anyway, I did a 15-minute consult over the phone. Actually, he was really casual about payment, at the end he said "mail a cheque to my secretary" and hung up, haha. Probably was mostly treating the call as a loss leader.
Anyway, among other things, he said that doing any work inside US borders, if not on a work visa, is technically illegal. Like apparently if I'm on vacation in the US, and I pull out my phone to answer a few work emails, that's technically a visa violation, not that in that case anyone's gonna mind. IANAL TINLA. And of course you're interesting in jurisdictions other than the US.
So, yeah, I think the way to find out is find a lawyer in the jurisdiction you'd be wanting to work from, one who advertises themselves as specializing in visa issues.
I looked up the relevant tax codes myself and got them vetted by my accountant, but I'll admit it was a really clear cut situation for me and my government has really well written descriptions of the codes online.
Thanks for the heads up. I'll have to look into this more deeply. I'm curious if anyone knows where the appropriate place to ask would be (foreign embassy?). FWIW, I'm not planning to hide this from my firm.
Not sure about other countries but it's pretty much automatic in Germany for any job over EUR 55k (or something like that). Which is nearly all software jobs worth taking.
Really? I've looked at France and UK specifically and the requirements on paper seemed really difficult. You basically had to have a letter from the company saying that they couldn't find a EU citizen who could do the work, and even if that's pretty laxly interpreted and IIRC many employers weren't even willing to accept candidates outside of the EU. Perhaps it's changed or I'm misremembering.
Post Brexit the EU thing is no longer applicable, but the news recently makes me fear for anyone trying to travel here for work or leisure. EU citizens visiting family being thrown in jail and deported. We are turning into Gilead. I’d wait it out a few years until we’ve managed to get rid of Johnson, Patel, Gove, Raab and all the other swivel-eyed loons.
>> If I need a 15 minute break, I can start a load of laundry, or run the dishwasher, or do some other chore.
That is not universal. That is a subset of work-from-home. Many people working from home can no more step away for a break than they would if at the office. For instance, customer support/contact people cannot just step away from the phone. Others working at home have employer systems that monitor them live. Any unscheduled breaks get noticed and recorded.
Even amongst highly-paid "knowledge workers" there are issues. I do occasional home days but am not able to take breaks. At any time one of my five bosses might call. We don't have any monitoring software but they expect me at my desk ready to respond, not walking the dog or doing laundry.
Or my talk therapist girlfriend, for whom working from home still means having phone or video appointments starting and ending every hour. Though at least she can take a short break if someone no-shows (most of that time is for doing notes).
I suspect most people working from home have some opportunity to take breaks here and there, though. I'm aware of certain professions with invasive monitoring (I've seen nurses that work for pharmaceutical companies report this), but it doesn't seem to be particularly widespread. I'm not familiar with anyone in my personal life who have an expectation of immediate response to superiors (though on the rare case the CEO contacts you, you should make sure to get on that pretty quickly ... but that's why I get email on my phone/watch).
I like to take walks around the blocks during very long conference calls. And for that matter I will walk around my house and advance the laundry or make a cup of coffee or just pace and wave my arms for a shorter and more involving call.
It depends on whether you are working primarily via email/text or live talk/chat/webcam. When my boss calls me on the phone during the day he expects me to answer.
Not being able to take even a 15 minute break and having to report to five different bosses sounds like an outlier occupation in terms of austerity. What if you need to go to the bathroom?
> I don't lose two hours a day due to the commute.
One of my bitches about Silicon Valley is top managers of tech companies locate their companies a short drive away from their homes and estates in Palo Alto, Los Altos, Woodside and force the schmucks that work for them into long commutes.
It is time humanity takes lesson from all that happened in the last two years and aim to build a more sustainable environment. Not just for us but for our future generations.
Yep. I just changed jobs to have a shorter commute to support my wife and children better, and also expect to only be in the office ~3 days a week.
Working from home has been an absolute boon to me. I've done partial WFH for my entire career and it feels totally natural to me. I do miss being in the office, maybe once a week or so.
Just to add to the plusses you already mentioned, the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere just by the practice of driving to the office everyday is immense.
I was a long-time skeptic of remote work, but after this last year I am convinced it can work well - and perhaps not just work well but work better than traditional office work. Our experience has been that people are just as productive in a 'visible sense' as when they were forced to commute and come into the office. But I also get the sense that people are happier, because they are able to skip frustrations (commute), retain their family life in a better way (seeing kids more), and free up mental bandwidth (by taking care of little chores/errands at will). They are able to create the work environment they want, eat more healthily, and do things like go for a walk and recharge. For creative work, I think there will be significant long-term benefits to having a work force that isn't just productive, but also happy, healthy, and fulfilled. Companies that are trying desperately to hold onto the old working model with stopgaps like "hybrid work" are simply dating themselves and will lose their best talent.
OK. I WFH as well. I know all the benefits. And as I'm WFH for pandemic only I've been trying to find remote work post-pandemic and there I realized some bitter points:
1. I compete for positions with people all over the world. Who can complete with a fraction of the salary I need.
2. As a remote worker -most often working as a contractor- I'm even easier to be replaced in a heartbeat. No severance or anything alike.
3. Did I mention that I compete with all the planet? That makes competition for good roles really crazy.
4. Work blends into life and it is very hard to keep it from. This gets worse depending on the company/role but in general these things tend to go the employers way not yours.
5. You need to find new ways to socialize (and the motivation to do so is minimal) or you risk mental health issues.
All I'm trying to say is be careful what you wish for because you might get it.
> Work blends into life and it is very hard to keep it from. This gets worse depending on the company/role but in general these things tend to go the employers way not yours.
Am I one of the few that sees this as an enormous benefit? Work becomes a series of tasks I need to achieve throughout the day, like all the other tasks like laundry and doctors appointments.
I get to restructure what I need to do in a way that suits me best. I can push code at 11PM and go for a nap at 4PM if I choose (assuming no meetings).
Then my life isn't segmented into exclusive blocks. It is just one seamless integrated life.
When an emergency comes up, you are right by your desk and it’s hard to not sit down to address it right away, even if it’s 11 PM. When you have a deadline it’s so easy to log back in after dinner and burn your night away working. As the work life divide begins to erode, burn out is a real risk. I see my computer and if I’m stressed about work I get stressed at times I’d have normally left it behind and not thought about it. I feel guilty if I’m not working late on something I think I’m behind on.
Keep in mind I have kids, a social life, etc. I’ve built my time around work/life balance and keeping the two distinct. It’s healthy for me in ways that having the two conflated never was. May not be an issue for everyone.
>When an emergency comes up, you are right by your desk and it’s hard to not sit down to address it right away, even if it’s 11 PM.
That happens when I work at the office. At least at the roles I work, I'm expected to be on call all the time to support production environments. I'll get a text or something and usually have to address it.
I realized that may have been a poorly made point on my part. If you are on call you’re on call. But a lot of “emergencies” in non-operational contexts can wait till the next day in my experience, and often do due to societal norms - everyone is home doing other stuff in the evening, we’ll reconvene first thing in the AM when everyone is together and fresh.
I can definitely see it when someone works later than usual (me) and is in the middle of something and has a question for someone who usually works at normal time or earlier than everyone else.
When I'm in that situation, I don't expect a response immediately. I know I'm a night owl and other people aren't. I'm sure other people do. At the same token, when I work late and the early people schedule an 8am meeting, it's the same.
Having said all that, the only difference for me in this scenario is whether or not I commute to the office every day. Same, same.
Consider a new, better role if you’re not properly compensated for both when you’re on call and when a response is required. Remaining in such a role is a choice.
Ideally (and, outside of the US, by law) the employer should set up a rotation schedule for being on-call. 24/7 on-call is toxic as hell, it only works for young singles that don't have any other responsibility than making rent.
Everyone in the team sharing the 24/7 works well for small teams. Nothing sucks more than knowing you are on call an entire night and having to remember not to do anything that may cause you to forget you're on call, become unreachabld (leaving your phone on silent or in another room for hours etc)
If I typically work in an office and an emergency comes up I have to address it anyways... historically, if you were not provided a laptop, this involved driving into the office.
If you personally struggle with keeping your work and personal life separate that's a personal problem and shouldn't be used as a bullet point in your list against WFM.
Well, that personal problem affected _all_ of my co-workers when we were sent home during 2020, so even if experienced remote workers get it figured out, I think it still needs to be addressed and listed especially for those of us who are new to this.
Also, the downside is not just because of my struggle, management attempts to hinder that separation: "Its 8pm, but since your there with your laptop, would you mind...". And things that didn't use to be emergencies are now, since the level of effort to address them is considered significantly less (by your manager anyway).
This is good if you want work to be a part of your life, which almost nobody wants. It's terrible for a good work/life balance, pretty soon you're going to be stressed 24/7 because you "should be working right now".
If you work in a team that requires lots of collaboration, you might not get to restructure work.
Can people call you or message you to clarify what you just now pushed at 11pm? Do you respond immediately? Let's say you do immediately because you restructure your night time as your best work time, does that mean you're automatically exempt from 8am meetings in a few hours?
Come to think of it. Pushing code at 11pm is not that unusual even pre-covid, but the expectation for the associated communication might be totally different.
> Work becomes a series of tasks I need to achieve throughout the day, like all the other tasks like laundry and doctors appointments.
I don't know about you but I'm not smart enough to feel that my job is as easy as doing laundry or going to the doctor. I'd rather finish all my work in one focused block of time and not think about it the rest of the day. Due to the pandemic destroying most childcare options, this is an unattainable dream for many.
Not to mention that the notion that there's a huge global pool of talented devs is largely a myth. It's true that labor is cheaper in India or Russia, but research confirms that the average engineer is far less competent than their American counterparts.[1]
Software wages in the US are high, because it's very hard to replicate the quality of an American workforce. By and large global differences in wages reflect global differences in workforce quality. It's not like this is the first time companies have realized that global labor is cheaper. They've been trying to capitalize on cheap engineers in developing countries since the 1980s. It's always the same issue. Lower price on paper, but delivery and quality issues that scale far beyond the up front cost savings.
A company outsourced some work to India. They wanted to add a few forms to their application for managing roughly the tuple (name,surname,medicine taken). A few weeks later, the first release came in. It contained everything to manage the tuple (name of medicine taken, surname of medicine taken). I stopped worrying about India about that time.
Don't get me wrong, there are smart people in India. But if you're outsourcing for cheaper labor, you're not getting these smart people.
This generalization that happens every time "outsourcing" and "India" get mentioned in the same thread needs to stop. The culprit here is your employer who is probably hiring graduates in India at 5-10% of SV salaries, while to get competent graduates you need like 20-25%. So you can still outsource for cheap labor, but don't make the mistake of being too cheap.
My experience is western europe, smaller cities. For 25% of SV salaries you get close enough to the local salaries. Add a language barrier (we dont speak English), a time zone barrier (I like my meetings between 8:00 and 17:00 local time), and a cultural barrier, and its simply not worth the hassle.
Outsourcing for talent is fine, but there is plenty of competition to make India rare, at least around here. So when I hear India, it's unfortunately a pretty safe assumption that someone went for bottom of the barrel cheap.
Disagree. Let's assume 25% of a graduate SV salary is $25k. That's €20k. With this salary you can only hire bottom of the barrel graduates in Portugal (cheapest country in western europe) since most graduates leave to other EU countries. With that money, in India you can get many more graduates with good English proficiency from world-class universities that are extremely hard to get into. Plus cultural barrier is overrated, if there is a barrier it's only disappearing in this internet era.
The support contract for a huge multinational I was a small part of a while back, was bought out by an Indian-based company, who wanted the prestige and new line of business, but bit off WAY more than they could chew, and threw the entire tier 1/2/3 process into near chaos.
Had they looked even a little deeper, they might have realized that they had no pratical experience in customer facing sw/hw support, and saved everyone two years of flailing, panic-driven, blame-everyone-you-can-point-a-finger-at, the-technicians-are-wrong-since-our-process-says-otherwise-oh-wait-our-process-is-shit-what-now-MORE-METRICS unbelieveable bullshit.
All because somebody in high level management managed to bend somebodys ear, and the parent company got swindled into it.
It is still true that the very best of India is suctioned into the United States- though there is definitely some backflow as they gather enough capital to go back and invest in Indian based companies.
The gravity of magnitudes better compensation insures that the very best will migrate.
FAANG level engineers are completely insulated from overseas competition due to this, but of course the lower echelons will have to worry about this if the current demand spike falls off.
I would expect that if software programmers were of similar quality they would produce similar per capita software products, companies, and open source projects. But it’s not nearly as common.
I think the best programmers in the world get sucked into US companies so while there are decent programmers around the world, the quality isn’t the same. Whether it’s 5 or 25%, I don’t think there’s quality parity.
Even between the US and Western Europe, there's a significant gap in workforce quality. Researchers have found that American companies consistently achieve higher levels of IT productivity than their Western European counterparts.[1]
"Combining pan-European firm-level IT data with our management practices survey, we find that the US IT related productivity advantage is primarily due to its tougher "people management" practices."
So it's not related to IT engineering skills but rather how the company handles those engineers. An US based company will handle EU based engineers like their own, thus nullifying your argument.
That article talks about multinational companies, not individuals. In other words, American companies are more productive instead of American software engineers being more productive.
That could very well be due to differences in management and in fact that seems to be the conclusion drawn by your link, which states that productivity among European companies increases when those companies are taken over by American firms.
Right from the abstract:
>US IT related productivity advantage is primarily due to its tougher "people management" practices
How do you think they achieve that ? We use the same tools all over the world, maybe the same processes, intelligence is uniformly distributed. Maybe training ?
I've worked with many people from abroad (even some from the US) and truth is : there were people better than others, there were people who worked more than the others. But this is never tied to nationality. It is much more tied to : does the guy want to be top notch ? If he asks the question then he probably has the ability and willing to make the sacrifices.
Not saying that there aren't talented developers overseas (I have worked with many) but in general, the culture isn't at the caliber of what happens in SV/The Bay.
I've interviewed and hired many engineers from the UK and the first thing you'll notice are candidates with resumes filled with pointless certifications and years of cookie-cutter experience at financial institutions working on old technology. I could get into the more esoteric aspects of what happens in really hyper-growth SV startups but it would come as a culture shock to a 9-5'er from London. It also involves sacrifices and lifestyle changes I think most of those folks would be unwilling to make.
> But you could hire devs in Western Europe at 50% of SV salaries
You could get that in Canada. No language barrier, same education, same culture (largely), same exact time zones, flying folks in if need be is far simpler.
I would disagree. Canadians share same culture, same education, and same language (natively). The same cannot be said about Latin America and the Caribbean
Logical fallacy. The average competence of an engineer in a pool does not imply that the number of the talented devs in that pool is small. The global pool of talented devs will probably be several times the size of the US pool simply because of the world population (would be good if someone has actual numbers on this though).
This presupposes that a hiring manager can perfectly judge the quality of candidates. There are a ton of great engineers in, say Romania. But unless you know how to find and discriminate, you will be stuck with the average Romanian engineer.
As anyone who's done serious hiring can tell you, judging candidates is damn tough. There's only a loose correlation between how a candidate looks on paper and how he performs. Now imagine translating this process to a completely foreign culture halfway across the world. Do you know which universities in Romania are good? Do you know who the most prestigious employers and positions in Romania are? Do you have a network of Romanians to recommend new hires?
In fact, even if you try, most likely you'll be stuck with below average engineers. Not only will the top ones get scooped up by those with better local knowledge, but the lack of knowledge goes both ways. Top engineers aren't going to join some fly-by-night employer with no local brand, track record in that country, and no career track to senior positions.
The only way I've seen a company actually succeed at this is by being willing to fully embrace the country. It's not just enough to hire off-the-shelf Romanian engineers, the company has to actually become "Romanian". Are companies willing to hire senior management from Romania? Are Romanian employees "first class citizens" with equivalent work to their American counterparts? Is the company raising money from Romanian VCs? Are they pushing Romania as a primary markets for their product? If the answer to any of those questions is no, then it's highly unlikely that you'll succeed in recruiting, interviewing, hiring and retaining top talent in that local market.
I disagree, I worked with a lot of terrible American software engineers. I would never work with an American developers because I'm competing on price with American employers. If someone is looking for IT work outside of the states, they're most likely not good enough to work for better paying companies in the states. Likewise, FAANGs routinely hire talent from abroad.
As for everything, there are plenty of exceptions: two of the most talented and fastest growing Software Engineers I met were Americans - and they didn't have any formal CS education.
Over the years I definitely picked my political incorrect biased list of countries to avoid for talent sourcing. I could spend hours talking about funny stories involving bad contractors from India, Hungary, Eastern Europe and Spain but it's absolutely pointless.
You'll find terrible engineers everywhere, even in the states. USA companies have incredible wealth compared to other companies and they can afford to spend ridiculous amount to try and weed out the majority of terrible engineers.
Having hired contractors who used to work at FAANGs, I can tell you I found some pretty terrible hires there as well. Almost like memorising algorithms and CS exercises and then spending 4 years trying to build a case for your promotion isn't going to make you improve as an engineer.
For every competent Indian that moves to the US for a tech job, there are 4 that decide to stay back home for a $10-15k-ish job.
India is increasingly training several orders of magnitude more engineers than the US. Even if estimates were overestimating the number of competent Individuals in India by an order of magnitude, the number will still over shadow the American workforce.
It has already happened once with China. It would not be surprising if it happens with India. Only this time, the competing workforce will be fluent in English.
> several orders of magnitude more engineers than the US
Wait, what? Several orders of magnitude, like at least 3 orders of magnitude? So even though India has 4x the population of the United States, it's training at least a thousand times as many engineers? That's amazing!
It's also totally not true at all. Spend a few seconds on Google.
Note that I don't particularly disagree with the rest of your comment.
The impacts mentioned by OP aren't predicated on companies hiring globally. Simply expanding hiring across the US (or even just your US timezone) will result in a significant drop in salary for your average role.
Employers aren't going to drop salaries in the midst of a pandemic, but if remote work persists, salaries will drop substantially. It's simple supply and demand, and I'm sure there's data out there (for existing remote positions) that corroborates this.
Many of which are completely orthogonal to where the physical office is; if a company hadn’t completely or heavily offshored its workforce for cheaper talent already, it’s not clear why WFH would be the final straw.
There are legal barriers around regulated activities and tax problems too, at least in my line of work (particularly tax residency of companies/corporate vehicles).
Many of these are temporarily waived by the authorities for the duration of the pandemic but that won't last forever.
Globally may not be a problem but it does make it far easier for hiring managers to reach outside their immediate area and look nationally. That may not change things much in Europe, where distances are short but in the US that's potentially a huge hiring pool. Even if you limit yourself to just your time zone, how many competent developers reside in EST?
> I compete for positions with people all over the world. Who can complete with a fraction of the salary I need.
This is what always jumps to the front of my mind when I read about WFH on software engineering forums.
I'm lucky -- I have deep technical expertise in a very uncommon intersection of economically valuable topics. I never compete for positions, because there is way more work than available skilled labor. Even still, I'll be back in the office. One day the education system will catch up -- or my skill-set will become obsolete -- and at that point having a decade-long in-person relationship is my only bulwark against ruin.
I can't imagine being a SWE working on a standard tech stack without deep personal connections in an application domain and thinking of WFH as anything other than an enormous and terrifying threat.
WFH absolutely screws over younger people joining an industry. There's nothing like face-to-face learning, and I don't envy anyone who's had to start their career recently.
I've heard this idea repeated several times from people I respect, and thus I take it seriously. That being said, I've seen some contrary evidence. At Innolitics, we've hired several engineers out of college who've blossomed into talented and independent contributors within a couple of years. I'm not sure if we're doing something special or different that has solved the "junior's need face-to-face learning" problem, or if it's not as much of a problem as many people think.
I just meant places that hire enough new grads to have separate "new grad recruiting" teams.
Some companies do actually have explicit "new grad hire" cohorts with additional onboarding support targeted at new grads -- eg a seminar series or dedicated networking events.
Sometimes it's less formal or there's even no structured support at all.
But, in any case, I'm referring to companies that hire enough new grads each year to have an entirely separate recruiting mechanism for that population. When that's the case, it's just more likely that people are being hired as generic candidates rather than onto particular teams. And when that happens it's easier for people to fall through the cracks, because the direct manager didn't specifically pick that person as a good match for their specific need.
I've had excellent experience working virtually with new hires, but I've also seen a lot of failures.
Mentoring remotely is definitely a skill that us older workers had to be intentional about cultivating in ourselves. The moment pandemic started, I bought a top-of-the-line iPad for whiteboarding, insisted my new hire mentors get the same from the company, and called up a couple old professors to get all their tips on remote teaching.
Hopefully the next generation will have it easier; their mentors experienced remote learning so might be better equipped for remote teaching/mentoring.
Answering this in any detail would almost certainly dox myself, but I have a PhD in a hot topic that was nascent and not in vogue when I started, so my thesis work was immediately useful to lots of companies and there are very few other people who are experts in this niche. On top of that I have some deep industry background in a key application domain that, again, few other people with phds in my particular niche know anything about. (By deep I mean "hard earned knowledge about all the gritty details", not "spoke with a guy about it in the office once")
The topic is more popular now and funding agencies are starting to fund more graduate training in this area, so my current moat won't exist forever. But by then I'll have dug my current moat deeper, hopefully.
At your place of employment, talk to the business side and learn what they are doing and why. Copy/paste front end javascript workers are a dime a dozen compared to someone with competence and knowledge surrounding the industry. Simplest way is to talk to the product side. People like talking about themselves, particularly when the other person takes an active interest
I'm not really sure this provides a meaningful moat these days. Talking to people on the business side is not difficult -- it's probably even less of a moat than knowing how to copy/paste javascript.
2. As a contractor, yes, As an employee WFH changes nothing here, particularly in countries with worker favorable employment laws.
3. See 1.
4. True, remote workers need to maintain a 9-5ish routine. meaning that remote means you can be flexible about which 8 hours you work, but you should still stick to the 8 hours you are paid for
5. True, but you now have more time to find a social group to join, closer to home and more into things your interested in outside of work.
About 1: Are you saying that the competition for a role offered in Munich is the same as for the same role offered remotely within +-5 hours CET or planet wide?
I really don't think so. And I'm afraid that this is a classic race to the bottom for the most of us.
> I compete for positions with people all over the world. Who can complete with a fraction of the salary I need.
Perhaps. On one hand, the office was clearly one barrier separating onshore and offshore talent. On the other hand, there never really was a lot preventing companies from setting up offshore offices to attract cheaper talent worldwide. The fact that many US jobs remain still quite expensive compared to the developing world implies to me that there are still some barriers there above and beyond the ability to drive to a shared office.
This can't be understated, at least for some of us. I'm in the Midwest and in the last 6 months about 20% of my company's engineering team has left and taken positions at new companies. Virtually none of them had anything bad to say about the company, its just that for a developer in the Midwest, the number of jobs that have opened up to them that were unavailable to them a year ago is unbelievable.
And on the flip side, it hasn't been too rough for my company to replace them because there are now a huge number of devs in places like the West Coast that wouldn't have been interested in working for us prior moving to remote work who now are.
I suspect some of this will all calm down a bit as the new order of things settles in, but for now, remote work is shaking things up in terms of opportunities for workers in a big way.
Might happen for some companies, but the vast majority not. At least in Europe I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be replaced by someone from India because they don't speak our language, they live in vastly different timezones and their culture is different which doesn't make for the most efficient collaboration.
You really aren't, if you are from US most companies that are advertising remote positions really want you to be located in US, I've been looking for remote work and I don't really believe that its possible to get a US job as a foreigner.
1. I kind of expect a general reduction in the "living in the USA' salary premium for a lot of jobs. It sucks for the people getting paid less, but hopefully the deflationary effects on the economy make up for it a bit.
I hope this is the start of a nation wide trend towards better work life balance. Production output has gone up over the past few decades and we’re expected to work the same amount of hours. I think the future probably looks something like 4 6-hour work days each week. Life is way too short and precious to be spending so much of it working for somebody else, even if you mostly do love your job.
>Production output has gone up over the past few decades and we’re expected to work the same amount of hours
My hypothesis is that Americans cashed in on their increased productivity by socializing at work or browsing the internet at work. In Germany, it's extremely frowned upon to talk about non-work stuff at work, so they could cash in on this increased productivity by shortening working hours.
This is an interesting point but I do think the causality goes both ways. Yeah Americans are probably more inclined to want to socialize at work, but American companies also are way too obsessed with butts in seats. If you're being forced to stick around for 8 hours but you only need 6 hours to do your job, of course you are going to fill the time with something.
'do your job' being excessively nebulous. Finish up all those tickets we gave you at the beginning of sprint? I've never once had a boss that told me to go home, they just dig into the backlog and throw some new tickets at you.
> My hypothesis is that Americans cashed in on their increased productivity by socializing at work or browsing the internet at work.
Many people, yes. But the beneficiaries of an increase of minimum and hourly wages, which would affect like 60+ million US workers - they show up and they just work all day, they're not socializing, they didn't cash in anything.
What you're saying may be factual to some degree, but it almost universally talked about in bad faith.
The divide between 'hourly' workers (even if paid a salary) and white-collar knowledge workers is likely the largest obstacle to changing the 40-hour workweek in the US. Many jobs, and often the highest-paid, could be nearly as productive working 4x6 instead of 5x8. However, there are lots of jobs where output really does scale linearly with input time. The obvious ones are hourly service workers in retail or restaurants, but even some 'high status' jobs really require the hours (healthcare, airlines, union manufacturing, etc...)
It would really upset societal order if suddenly two once comparable jobs suddenly required drastically different time commitments. People will find all sorts of reasons to fight against a shorter workweek, but I think this is the main reason why. We like the stability of believing that everyone (or at least working people) are 'equally yoked' at least in terms of time commitment.
> However, there are lots of jobs where output really does scale linearly with input time. The obvious ones are hourly service workers in retail or restaurants, but even some 'high status' jobs really require the hours (healthcare, airlines, union manufacturing, etc...)
With manufacturing, I disagree due to the impact of automation - especially when analyzed over a long time frame, productivity has exploded whereas the number of employees has shrunk drastically and their inflation-adjusted wages barely growing.
In retail, restaurants, even in some parts of healthcare (think lab work) the situation is similar. Automation, mass manufacturing and containers (the physical things, not Docker...) have slashed costs on the input side, menial tasks like stacking shelves or cleaning got cost-cut (by outsourcing and by exploitation of undocumented workers), some places like IKEA and Amazon even eliminate the cashiers by having the customer do that themselves.
The owner class has reaped all the productivity gains and given back little to the workers who made it possible, and now they are asking "why is the American/Western market for cars shrinking and the only growth in China"... well easy, too many people don't have the cash on hand to splurge on a dozens of thousands worth new car!
This is a great point, and I wish productivity gains in all sectors had been more equitably split. In fact, I think that automation-based productivity gains could extend to the other sectors I mentioned as well (more surgeries/hour, etc...)
However, I still think there is a disconnect. Even with productivity gains, output still basically scales linearly. When your job is producing a specific physical artifact consistently, you are always going to make more of them, the more time you spend doing it. The same is not true for many 'knowledge workers' whose output is not measured in 'lines of code' or 'meetings held' but looser, larger objectives that are fundamentally more limited in how many you actually want. I think you more rapidly get diminishing returns for a lot of this type of work. Even if a project manager could manage twice as many projects in twice as many hours, would that benefit the business?
In Germany, it's extremely frowned upon to talk about non-work stuff at work
I wish my German co-workers felt this way. It would cut hour long meetings by half, usually. Not to mention the long list of my other non-American colleagues who are quite chatty. In my experience, I don't really see how one can generalize this behavior by nation...
Most people I know work nonstop until the bell, salaried or hourly. The chitchat and internet browsing is not sustainable at the vast majority of workplaces, you will fall behind and there will be questions asked. IT can also pull logs of internet browsing and show your boss your reddit history.
To me that sounds like wishful thinking. In my experience, even talking to friends and coworkers, hours have gone up and the expectation is that you are available on IM all the time. Maybe not 24/7, but definitely more flexible than the old 9-5 expectation.
On top of that, sick days are much less frequent now I daresay.
> On top of that, sick days are much less frequent now I daresay.
But to be honest, that's fine/expected? There's a quite large range where I might not feel up to the commute/office (or not want to cough and sneeze at people - aside, I bet that's going to be more stigmatised in the near future) but up to doing what I can from the comfort of home where it doesn't matter that I'm curled up unshowered or whatever.
I did that a couple of times even when I went in to the office five days a week - gives me something to do other than lying in bed feeling sorry for myself or doing something and feeling guilty that it's not work, and gives my employer a bit of output even if it is less than 100% (which isn't the alternative, 0 is).
Also could be less frequent as you are exposed to less germs from people forced to go into the office when they are feeling a little under the weather.
Sort of like how flu cases went down during the pandemic — with less interaction from abroad less germs are transmitted.
I'm pretty sure my coworkers have been using this to accomplish the reverse, and I have dabbled.
There are times when your most important work is being available. Maybe less than some managers seem to think, but it does happen. I can go make myself a complicated snack or step outside to do some yard maintenance for half an hour here and there and still be back to my desk in 5 minutes if someone actually needs me for something. At lunch time you can usually stretch that to 15 minutes, which opens up a lot of options for errands.
My wife works for a company that was fully remote before the pandemic, and they certainly were self-aware that being remote was a competitive advantage when it came to hiring and retaining talent. Unfortunately for them, that competitive advantage is now gone, given that they now have to compete with companies that are now remote and have deeper pockets.
Our personal theory is that the next equivalent to remote work will be the four day work week. We work way too hard as a society; the 40hr work week is based off the point of diminishing returns for factory workers. There’s not a lot of reason to believe that continuing this pattern for knowledge work is desirable for the company or the employees.
I'm doubtful the US would be comfy becoming less productive, when competition abroad is heating up and challenging the US empire. On the contrary, I think Americans will feel challenged and a renewed sense of purpose, versus the last 30y of having no contender to measure itself with. I'm already seeing a bunch of people annectdata-ly getting into covid-inspired ventures, and all the "buy made in USA" people being vindicated by political pressure to develop advanced manufacturing within the US (and aligned countries).
So I think the decrease in daily overhead from the remote-revolution will actually serve an increase in productivity, and not be budgeted toward work-life balance.
I'm saying this and I've been remote for years, and promoting WLB aplenty. But my coldhearted crystal ball hints me that larger forces at play will not primarily favor WLB.
My concern with this is that we'll get result inflation. I'm not sure which is better - enforced butt in seat for 40+ hours or forcing productivity that whole time. Working in consulting I know that it's kind of a unspoken truth that even though you're billing and "working" on something, you're not always 100% working at it.
I really don't see that happening except in the very upper echelons of work.
When there's more competition, the guy willing to work longer will always win, especially if the work is such that he can work longer without a decrease in quality.
We're automating more things, there's more of us around, and we're connecting job markets better every day. There's more competition.
People have been saying this for more than 100 years - see the old popular mechanics articles predicting a 10 hour work week due to automation's production gains, quotes from Buckminster Fuller, references to Kurt Vonnegut's "Player Piano", etc., but instead of coordinating these gains with one another we have left them up for grabs for whoever scrambles harder, and the baseline creeps upward. Just like the economics analogy where some people in a seated audience stand for a better view, requiring everyone to stand for more or less the same view as before but with more effort, only with some American Horatio Alger pull-yourself-up-by your-bootstraps mythology mixed in.
This is not inevitable, it is policy we choose, as opposed to some European countries where workweeks have actually shrunk and retail hours are much more restricted. We have decided much of the gains from automation and better average human health and lifespan should go elsewhere.
Corporations naturally compete in race to the bottom on labor rights, because labor rights are in direct conflict with productivity. The only way we're getting a 6 hour 4 day workweek is through legislation setting that race to the bottom at a higher threshold. That's what the minimum wage does (and also why it should be raised).
I took a (quasi) sabbatical recently. I worked 1.5 days a week for one year. I dialed down my expenses so it was enough to pay the bills. It gave me the opportunity to work on some hobby projects, spend more time with my family and just enjoy life. It was fantastic. Now I am planning to repeat this every 5 years at least. I only wish my overworked friends did the same so I could spend more time with them as well.
I did almost the exact same thing in the last year. (2 days a week)
For me it came from handing in my 2 weeks notice to take some time off from a company I worked for for over 5 years at the time, and then being offered a schedule of my choosing instead. I didn’t even know it was an option, else I would have just asked instead of quitting.
So if you’ve been there a while, and can afford it, I’d suggest you ask your current employer.
Will be interesting to see the impact this has on children growing up in the next 10-15 years and I'd guess it's largely positive. Parents with jobs that required business travel have found they can do their job and be present for their children. And yes while it's not all positive e.g. domestic abuse stats have gone up, I would suspect the overall impact has been generally positive for families.
I would hope it's a net positive. My basic theory is that abuse stats have gone up because exposure to the parent has gone up. I would hope that abusers make up a small percentage of parents. If so, I would hope that means exposure to all the 'good' parents will yield positive results.
Maybe it will also change the nature of spousal relationships, as well. We can no longer collectively escape to work to avoid our problems; we must confront them and hopefully grow in the process.
"The latter breeds envy, poorly sorted priorities, and, ultimately, misery."
But is not exclusive to materialism. It can be a part of capitalism.
I am miserable. I have to work for food, shelter, medical care, etc. I do get some othe material items, but usually they are very cheap things for hobbies. I just never have enough time to do the things I want to do because working for my necessities takes up too much of my time.
Capitalism is buyer, seller, and marketplace with enough regulation to keep the trifecta stable.
Capitalism is abstract and plural; the avarice of materialism is concrete and singular.
The minimal regulation that stanilizes the sustem offers competitive feedback to mininize the tyranny of oligarchy that sets in when sellers get materialistic and buy the marketplace.
Capitalism is really about the means of production, capital, being private and for-profit. You can have buyers, sellers, and markets in other types of economies, like communism or socialism.
Capitalism and materialism aren't necessarily one or the other (plural/singular concrete/abstract). They can be applied both ways since they are adjectives. You could be describing an individual act or society as a whole.
The predisposition of capital ownership and control (a materialistic view) can take place in socialist or communist marketplaces too. Sure, technically the ownership is either owned by the state or the people, but really the oligarchy ruling the state are the ones with power anyways.
> Capitalism is really about the means of production, capital, being private and for-profit. You can have buyers, sellers, and markets in other types of economies, like communism or socialism.
Capitalism is about minimally throttling creativity and private property.
Communism/Socialism (thinking of the EU here) seem to view lack of regulation as chaos.
Good for them, and good for everyone else here who's happy about the switch to remote working. That said: I think I'd almost rather quit than "work from home" indefinitely.
For me I'm not "working from home", I'm "living at the office". I deeply resent that my work has taken over a part of my home. For the record: I love my job. I also really miss working from the same physical space as my colleagues. Meetings which I used to enjoy are now awkward and draining. Lastly: I even miss my commute home in the evening (not so much my morning commute, to be fair). It used to give my 30 minutes in which to decompress and switch my brain out of work mode.
Fully agreed. I didn't endure over a decade of an abusive household and even a few months of homelessness just so my employer could close down its offices and forcibly relocate them into my living room.
I was absolutely fucking livid. Can't a man just be left alone in his own home any more?
I hope we can find a solution where people can choose to work at an office or from home. I expect that the compromises necessary will be difficult. For some, like yourself, meetings were a source of pleasure and are now draining. For others, meetings were a place for dominating (usually male) colleagues to enact competence dramas, often at the expense of more competent but quieter ones. I know some people who already head to the office, but prefer that the meetings are still virtual. For many people getting to the office really is just about having a physical space to work outside the home. So there are a lot of factors. In the end, the market will decide.
WFH is great for > 30 yo, and those with money/space and worse for people just starting out or who live in a studio.
I'm young (26), but successful by financial standards and before the pandemic my apartment was just the place I slept so I had a studio and I liked it that way.
Working, sleeping, eating and socializing from my 800 sqft studio is frankly maddening. I feel like I'm always on call and connected where before my apartment was the place I decompressed and escaped.
Apparently it's an unpopular opinion, but I am completely in this boat. I suffer from ADHD and my productivity and emotional wellbeing cratered when WFH started. I eat worse than I did at work, I put on weight, etc.
I lived next to the office before I ended my lease and moved in with family so I wouldn't be completely alone, so the office was never a hassle. I was a 20 minute walk away and the weather is usually nice.
I had a clear delineation between work life and personal life. My home was for relaxing and play, the office was for work. It helped me keep my priorities in order. Going into the office helped me mute out the personal distractions of life - personal projects, entertainment, etc.
I have a dramatically different experience at home. I can hardly focus because it's next to impossible to fully separate myself from my toys, as it were.
It's driven my stress levels through the roof because I know I'm less productive. No one has said anything to me about it, nor brought up anything, yet my self guilt is consuming me. It keeps me up at night and I'm dreading performance reviews...
> My home was for relaxing and play, the office was for work
Yup I feel this exactly. I had the exact same separation and the exact same issue when it stopped existing. I'm still struggling with it and we've been living this way for over a year now.
This is off-topic, but to me as a European, it's fascinating to read that you consider an 800sqft studio to be somewhat limiting. I'm pretty sure most couples in European cities live in apartments smaller than that. Back when I was in university, I lived in a ~200sqft studio. Granted, I'm really happy that I didn't have to lock down or WFH from there.
It's limiting if you're indoors during the first half of a pandemic all the time, and work from there for another 8 months. A year and 2 months to be exact. Maybe in a normal time (like when you physically went to a university). Now - prison.
I am not sure where you live, but I would expect that WHF allows those under 30 a similar financial relief to those above. For you to be forced to live in an 800 sqft place working in tech, I would assume you live in one of the larger metropolitan areas. WFH should allow you to move further away and capture more space for your dollar, even if you don't end up owning the property like those over 30 might.
At the start of the pandemic I lived in a house full of people working at tech startups in Oakland. So I understand having no space as I worked/lived from my tiny room. But, I was able to leave the bay area, as were my roommates and now we all have our own places (some rent some own) because the same rent in Oakland was able to afford private spaces in other parts of CA.
So I empathize with your position. I recommend trying to move out of the locale that only allows you to afford an 800 sqft studio. Even the shittiest tech jobs in the Bay would allow for you to have your own 2 bedroom apt in other parts of CA. This is how you take advantage of the WFH opportunity as a younger person.
You may have misunderstood me, I could definitely afford a bigger space. I didn't/don't want one. I purposely chose my 800 sqft studio because I hadn't signed up to be entombed in it.
I was never home by choice in the before times and I don't want to change that. I want to go back to getting home at 10pm sleeping after work, socializing, going to meetups or whatever and then leaving at 8:30am the next day. The extra space would be wasted in that case. Plus saving 35%+ of my paycheck was/is great.
I only spent time in my apartment later at night and sometimes on the weekends.
Moving away from the city won't help me there. I imagine it'd actually be worse.
I am confused then. You want to go into an office so that you can stay living in a small apartment? The position was that the WFH situation helped those that had their own space. But you're saying that not having your own space is a choice.
It would seem that this issue is more around the pandemic itself and less around WFH. Once things open up your home would only be a place where you work and sleep, and you'll be able to spend most of your time away from your apartment. And if you expanded the size of your apartment to a 1 bed instead of a studio, you could theoretically reduce this issue by having an isolated work space that you don't share with your recreational activities.
I don't want WFH to become permanent for everyone, I want it to be a choice. A lot of people around this forum seem overly about WFH and it being permanent which often means it becomes a thing everyone has to deal with. I'd prefer it being a well balanced choice or go back to how it was.
So yes, if things return to how they were before you're right my issues will be resolved.
Thats fair. I am all for the hybrid situation where there is an office people can use while also supporting the remote workforce. IDK if it's economical but I think the choice helps ensure everyone has the opportunity to the work environment they work best in.
Right now I'm working in my backyard on a nice day, listening to the birds chirp instead of keyboard clacking. One of the MASSIVE downsides of working in an office that I rarely hear mentioned is that you have to be inside during prime sunlight hours for basically all of the summer except weekends and when you're on vacation. We're all cooped up in a shed like factory farmed animals.
Sounds like the office has become a substitute for social interaction everywhere else in life. That may not be a bad thing for you, but it is a negative in the sense that it forces everyone to make it a part of their social lives. If you are looking for making new friends, a sense of belonging, sports and games, drinking buddies, meeting potential dates, and group lunches, you can in theory find outlets for all of those things outside of work.
But everyone working in an office means that if you aren't interested in those things, (you already have friends, a family, hobby groups, etc), you are forced to spend time away from them to participate in the in-office culture. It seems extremely backwards to me.
Its like if people who make church their social group, which is very common, required people who aren't interested in church to attend to enable their social lives.
I don't know how or why a large number of us have made work a substitute for our social lives, but it has been a major problem for the rest of us who haven't.
I feel like this mindset is actually responsible for a lot of modern-day unhappiness. Why are 1st world countries
somehow more lonely?
Something I've noticed while talking to my older relatives outside of the US is that their social life often are the people that they meet in their (first) job in the location they ended up staying in. It feels straightforward that
the people that you spend 8+ hours a day with are going
to be the people that you feel like you know and can trust.
It seems like some odd modern/corporate idea that work is just for work. Imagine if we had the same mindset for school, and tried to make things "productive" by eliminating all breaks and the assumption that students should get to know each other during class/free time.
I think we need to accept the idea that work is really going to be much of your social life when you move, work friends are not your best buds, and only later on can you have a social life that doesn't deeply involve people at work.
Look up "third place", it's a really fascinating concept which I've been obsessed with for a long time and I really want to solve it, at least for me. I feel my long-term sanity depends on it.
The gist is people used to have at least three social circles they'd hang out daily: family, work, friends outside of work. Note that I don't mean "participate in activities" with any of them, just be among these people, even without any goal.
We've lost the third place. It's only family, work and hanging out with friends sometimes, usually to _do_ something. I've noticed this big disconnect looking at older people in Southern Europe which spend their afternoon at a bar playing cards, or in the recent ages men hanging out in clubs and women in sewing/book/gossip clubs or when I visited family in central Africa where it's common to just hang out in the porch after dinner and chat with passers-by and just be there and _socialise_, without any goal in particular. I had the luck of experiencing something like that for a few years and it was incredibly nourishing and I miss it dearly.
Until we restore this third place, and find a way to make it work in the modern world, the loneliness and unhappiness epidemic can only grow, is my opinion.
I don't take issue with people making friends with people they work with. I do the same. I take issue when society or individuals make work their sole social outlet. On the contrary, I think people who make work their social outlet are more likely to be lonely. What happens when your coworkers leave? Or you get a new job? Or you are fired?
Having multiple outlets for socializing, and making work a smaller, secondary one, makes for a much more resilient social life in my opinion. Which is obviously a major part of why some have found the last year of remote work hellish, and others, just fine, or even quite freeing.
This feels like a heavy-handed response to me. Socializing in the office doesn't need to be a substitute, but can be one many missing pieces in a well-rounded social life. Many of the ways people found a social life outside of work are either still not available or not the same. I used to love working from the coffee shop down my block. There were often around 50 people working in there at any given time of day, but the chairs and tables are still stacked against the wall, and people come inside only to get their coffee and go back home. Even finding conversation in a crowded bar can seem more difficult as people are still keep physical distance from people they do not know.
That's because grabbing coffee from a cafe isn't an activity focused on actually socializing. Work forces you to do so because You can't seriously expect to get coffee, sit down and work on a laptop and expect to meet people. Socializing requires some amount of effort, and means going to a place or activity where you can actually meet someone.
* Volunteer as part of a local organization
* Find a meetup based on a personal interest (foreign language, programming, art, gaming)
* Join an athletic group (biking, running, hiking, martial arts)
* Go to an activity sponsored by your library (my library has everything from workshops on things like gardening and meditation, to a maker-space, to a Hamilton-sing along choir. Lots of libraries have activities like this).
* Find an open source project to contribute to
* Religious (or even slightly spiritual)? Find a local church you enjoy
You are definitely right about the cafe/bar/club being a terrible place for meeting people. But there's lots of places in most communities where you can still socialize that aren't work.
I guess it's just more efficient to try and make friends with people that you already have to hang out with 40 hours a week. People are lazy and making friends as an adult is difficult
That's fine, except it goes back to the original point that you are essentially forcing a culture of in-person work unnecessarily on everyone, because a portion of people are either too lazy or otherwise incapable of socializing with anyone outside of work.
Wow. You get a lot more out of the office than I do. I hate small talk and at work it feels like a distraction. I am friendly with coworkers but I'm not actually friends with many/any. I have tried to decouple my sense of belonging from work as much as possible since that is very unhealthy because its not a situation I control (if I get laid off is my belonging gone?)
Company sports are great but those can be replaced by sports with friends. Dating at work is... Well I'll leave that alone. And food I cook is better than any office food I've ever had. That being said I havnt worked in a FANG office that has a chef.
A lot of us don't miss any of that. I can do all that on my own time and have been for several years now. I'm not going back in until I've exhausted every possibility.
Just bear in mind when you say "a lot of us", it's a small minority of the general workforce. For the majority of the workforce, working from home is a.) not even an option, b.) torn 50/50, with your sales and client success type folk, typically customer facing and person interacting jobs overwhelmingly favoring a return to the office, and us mangly, dirty coding bots overwhelmingly favoring continuing to WFH.
I am squarely in the WFH is great if it's possible camp, but perspective is necessary here. Pushing / demanding that the entire work arrangement norms for the majority of the workforce change for a vocal minority is exactly what gives people with cushy desk jobs their (deserved in this case) bad names.
That is astounding. When asked to decide, my place went 100% software engineers committing to WFH, and well over two-thirds of every other group as well.
Team admin is tag-teaming a physical presence at the office, the big boss likes to come in, there's one person in sales who likes to come in, and the guy who assembles the hardware has to come in on a number of days. I think that's about it.
Almost the entire company chose to go remote, and we're never going back. The big boss indicated towards the end of last year that we're giving up the lease on one of the two office spaces.
At least one person has already moved hundreds of miles to Yorkshire where he's simply having a better life. That's what it is. It's the opportunity for a better life, just waiting to be grasped.
I do have sympathy for people who have discovered that their social well-being depended on physical interaction with people in the office; I would hazard that the solution to that is not to go back to the office. There are better ways to get that. There is a better life to be had.
It could be that you had a really bad office culture that no one wanted to go back to. It wouldn’t be surprising then that everyone was like, “yeah, let’s not.”
We do have a lot of people who are married and have children; for them, it is absolutely zero contest. Being at home and having that flexibility makes home and family life so much better in every way for them. Even things like having breakfast every day with the kids. For a lot of these people, there is no office culture good enough to make up for it. For these people, every office culture is bad; they just didn't notice until now. One chap moved back to Yorkshire where his family is from and where he grew up, and his out-of-office culture is now so much better. Again, for him, no office culture could compare. No office culture could make up for losing that.
Had a guy go back home to Spain. Two back to France. They're just all so much happier being around family and friends in the parts of the world where they feel most comfortable.
I don't have children and I'm not married, but even I agree with them the a job and an office is not something I'd choose to do if I didn't have to; not having to physically transport myself and sacrifice large parts of what actually matters on the altar of employment makes a big difference.
Hyperbolising for making a point, I suspect that for people who are married and have school-age children, any office culture is bad in that it sucks up time and attention from the things that really matter [0].
Maybe it's about what matters to the individual. If the job and the office is the most important thing in someone's life, then I can see that they'd want the office back. And genuinely, good for them, hope they enjoy it just as much as I hope the people above enjoy spending time with their kids and family.
[0] Yes, I know, recharge the batteries away from the kids, maybe I hate my family, etc etc. There are always exceptions.
You can do all of those things outside of work. There are meetup groups, local sports leagues, etc. There is no reason it has to happen at the office.
Also this is just my opinion, but I find it odd when people's social groups are... just people from their job. There is so much more to life than just people who work in the same company or industry as oneself.
I agree. It only improves work-life balance if you've made work and your life one and the same. For the rest of us, the "balance" tips heavily towards work and away from life when in-office is required.
I'd agree – there are real advantages in maintaining a friends group outside of work: you spend far less time griping about your day to day, and the connections you make are far more stable.
Get a beer once a month with coworkers, sure, but relying on work to be a primary social outlet always seems risky.
Yep, it’s more meaningful for someone to go out of their way to meet up with you (when there’s only friendship to gain). Also prevents mixing personal life with work.
My first job out of school, moved to a new city. For three year my only friends were coworkers. We socialized (drank) couple times a week and almost every damn conversation was work related, mostly complaining. I left that place because I "hated" it so much. I wonder how much those conversations contributed to it.
I associate with my friends and a few groups I frequent. I've never felt the compunction to do this at work or with work people for the most part.
- Making friends with old employees who I didn't know, and connecting with new employees.
Too true; there is this. I've a small handful of people whom I met at work and would call friends. But I usually try to maintain work as work - having friends tied up at a workplace can make for some really bad times when you leave or something happens. I think it's like a work-conditional friend.
- Work Life separation (balance).
If you can master working on work stuff during the day, once you log out of $workchat and vpn, you're off. Set a schedule when you do everyday and work on being predictable.
- Sense of belonging.. team outing, weekday after hours beer.
To me, "hanging out with the team" is definitely work. It has to be work-appropriate talk, on and on. That's enforced team-building activities. My sense of belonging is the paycheck I receive. I will seek elsewhere, not tied down by a job, to get a sense of belonging.
- Intra company sports and games, and then teaming up with office colleagues to play inter company tournaments.
Again, for me, this seems to unhealthily attach a jobs' modus operandi to your own. In reality, unless you're the owner, you are as expendable as any other machine or cog. And I try not to intertwine work relationships with friends. Only rarely do those actually cross.
- (Not me but others) Meeting potential dates
Yipes.
- Office facilities for breakfast, lunch.
My counter is that I have health issues that restrict my diet. At home, I can control exactly what I eat. At work, is what is provided. Its usually good, but sometimes I don't have anything. I would much rather have control of what I eat, by being in my kitchen cooking with my own foodstuffs.
Can (s)he work in office and get all the perks, while you with remotely and receive none of those perks, at the same company?
Sure. This "hybrid" model has been working for a lot of companies, small and large, pre-covid.
On place I worked with 100-120 people in the office saw 5 marriages. A big part of that was they employed a lot of single 20-somethings, but that's a lot of couples who met at work.
I agree with you and that's why I'll join a co-working space when I feel I'm missing these things. (I've worked remotely before the pandemic) You can get the same thing from a lot of co-working spaces.
I still prefer working form home, because I can pack my bag and go back home anytime I want.
Soon, I'll likely go back to a co-working space because right now, I miss those things as well.
I had the same thought as you re: co-working spaces, but I am frequently on audio and video calls throughout the day and need an office. Co-working space dedicated offices are expensive as hell if your employer isn't paying for them. I haven't really seen a reduction in prices due to the pandemic, either. Has anyone found a good solution?
I just miss being able to meet, pair, collaborate and mentor lag free with the full presence of in person communication. I find zoom really exhausting.
Yeah, all of that stuff is WAY worse over screensharing/calls.
Being able to turn your head over to a coworker and say "hey take a look at this" and they take a few steps over to see your monitor is much less of a hassle than ringing their computer for a video call and screensharing which may be better or worse depending on either of your internet connections.
Not to mention depending on your monitor sizes it might not even work properly. i.e. if you're using a larger monitor where everything is rendered smaller so more can fit on screen, it will probably be too small for them to see on their laptop. And in the case of ultrawide monitors, just give up the idea of screensharing on that entirely. At least if you use Teams where you can't share a portion of your screen. -- only the entire thing, or a single window which has problems of its own. Oh and Teams doesn't even let you draw on the other person's screen so they can't point to things!
I find myself feeling vaguely offended by this response.
These are needs that all previous generations fulfilled through their community, or by meeting strangers. But I have the feeling that (some subset of) current generations find that proposition unacceptably risky. And I guess the offense comes from the idea that we should all be inconvenienced for their sake, and also from how the idea "I can only make friends in a safe space" is presented here and just expected to be believed.
I mean we're in the middle of a pandemic right now, but with my WFH life currently I leave my house once a week to pick up groceries. (Where I pop the trunk and they put them in)
I feel like it's really easy for people to not get out of a comfort zone and meet people just /randomly/ on the road or at the Grocery store. Especially to the point of being friends.
Sadly our community has died, church attendance is massively down in most of the world. Which killed that social circle, clubs seem to not really exist anymore. Basically we're down to meetup.com, work, and bars.
Why are you appealing to the past when the fully remote but post industrial 9-5 day schedules is the new thing? My parents and grandparents have either work friends or old college friends.
As someone who's now been in the workforce for decades: presence in an office is mostly a waste of time and money. In my experience, those who demand "facetime" do so because
- it's part of a political power/control game
- "this is the way we've always done it"
- they buy into the myth that "magic" happens in hallways conversations and nowhere else
There are plenty of large companies (and god knows how many startups and SMBs) who have recognized what a colossal waste it is to maintain permanent offices and mandatory facetime. It's time for the rest to stop pretending it's 1980.
Give me a private office with a door that closes and pay me enough to live a 5 minute walk from the office without compromises to other aspects of my lifestyle, and I might consider coming back to the office. Until then, I'll see you on Zoom.
Anecdotally, the dichotomy I'm observing at my company is young/single/apartment-dweller people want to get back to the office because they don't have enough space at home to make it a nice experience. Many I know in this category are also eager to get back to screwing around at the water cooler. Meanwhile, the older, family-oriented people who own or rent a home in the suburbs want to WFH forever because that social dynamic isn't worth the hassle of the trek in for them.
Unrelated, but why would someone rent a house in the suburbs? Renting an apartment as a young person seems logical as you save for a down payment. Is it mainly people who can't afford a house or is there something else driving it?
Rent vs buy is a complicated question, but I'm sure there are those who would prefer to keep their money invested rather than tie it up in the downpayment on a home. Especially if they think they might only be in that location for a few years. I'm thinking of military families who move every few years, or perhaps someone who is an academic and has to be nomadic in following fellowship and professorship opportunities.
When reading on all these work-from-home discussions, it seems pretty clear that the commute is the main factor. If I had to commute to my office by car or (crowded) public transport for an hour or more, I would hate going there.
I am lucky to have a 25 minutes commute by bicycle, so I don't mind that, and prefer the office amenities: a work space provided for me, clear separation from working and living space etc.
Of course, there are other advantages in working from home such as more flexibility in terms of working and break hours. However, my impression remains that commute times and conditions outweigh all other (subjective) preferences for most people when arguing for or against working from home.
It seems to me that the pandemic and the practice of massively working at home has mostly raised this question: how had we accepted for such a long time that so many people go through a commute nightmare every single day of their work life?
How can we establish working standards that require neither turning homes into offices nor going back to the commuting nightmare from "old normal"?
I work literally 10 minutes from my house. I would rather work from home. It's 5 traffic lights to the office. I can drive, waste fuel, clothes, time, insurance, tires, etc. Or I can work from home and do exactly the same shit I do in a box only from the comfort from my own home. And if I need to come in I'm 10 minutes away. Yet here I am, back in the office, and flex time is going away soon.
This is the other differentiator - quality of the office. Some people seem to not have an office that is anything other than a bunch of desks put near each other.
Even if you had a nice office, you might get looked at funny if you showed up every single day in your pajamas or some stained gym shorts (like I do now from home). Another big benefit is I can double time stuff. If someone is hosting a meeting and I'm merely in attendance rather than have to present something myself, I usually eat food, do laundry, garden, showering, or workout with the zoom meeting open. I'm still listening, I'm just actually doing something productive and useful to my life instead of sitting silently watching a power point in a dark room fighting the urge to fall asleep.
That also makes me wonder if Europe also has a ton of the workforce wanting to stay remote too? They have density and public transportation, while most of America is an abject disaster in that regard.
I would definitely quit a job that required a 2 hour commute. That doesn't mean I want to work from home, it means I want to work somewhere a sane distance away.
If you’re averaging 15mph, you may as well ride a bike and just get the exercise in. You’ll be very fit and well off doing 2 hours of cardio multiple times a week. I knew guys at some of my jobs who did these commutes - they were ecstatic about it. Favorite part of their day.
Even that resulted in an hour each way for me pre-pandemic. Then you also need to factor in the exhaustion that comes with using Bart, especially in the evening.
I moved from London to Oakland several years ago. In London I would take a bus to work and then walk for 5 minutes to the office. Taking Bart is just not pleasant - the cars are packed, so you stand super close to other sweaty people for 45 min or so. I guess it's comparable to taking Underground during rush hour - same thing.
Man, that sucks. I didn't realise Bart was so sparse. Are there any plans to expand it, or add something like a subway? They must have the tax revenue. It seems absurd that they'd drive everyone toward increasing traffic given how wealthy the area is.
It's worth reading a bit about the history of BART. The Bay Area's NIMBY roots run deep. Initial plans would have included lines in the peninsula, with eventual connections all the way around the bay. Santa Clara County never joined, and that started a cascade of other counties dropping out which financially crippled the project and left only the scaled-back system in place today.
My 15 mile commute has reached 45 minutes and withing the next couple years it will be 60 minutes. American cities have given up on public transportaion and infrastructrure and are crumbling under the weight of capitalism.
It’s capitalism’s fault that public transit isn’t popular? What?
Car companies may have dismantled some streetcar systems years ago, yes. However, we continue to build car focused communities largely because people want to live in big lots in suburbia. Density that can support transit is just not popular in the US.
In my org of maybe 10-20k, the last time they did a commute survey, a few years before covid, the average commute was 40 minutes each way. So not 2 hours but 1.3 hours. This was the mean, not median so 2 hours of commuting is not a rare outlier in my experience.
This article [0] claims the national average is 26 minutes total, so I guess my org just has a rough time.
Employers don't put many jobs there. Even in NYC, very transit oriented, is do crowded and expensive that commutes are long, and often too crowded ("straphanging") and with transfers that don't let you get that time back for book/podcast.
Oh I'm in full agreement, this is one of the many reasons I left la.
Once I went to car free I got rid of about 25,000 in credit card debt in 6 months or so. Much of why so many Americans are so desperately poor has to do with car ownership. While it's possible to get Uncle Jimmy's Old Jeep running, most people just finance something. Once you make your car payment your insurance and gas, that's easily a third of your income. Compared to a $100 a month bus pass
Not in the US there isn't. And the ones there are are:
1. Expensive
2. Not particularly family friendly
So if you are a high earner with roommates or a partner and no children, you have options. For the remaining 90% of the workforce, it isn't particularly feasible.
Same. I used to be impressed by cities like NYC, and then I moved to Japan for a few years and I realized that I'm not sure there is a city in the US that makes the top 5, or possibly top 10, best cities in the world. At least not in terms of livability.
People have over an hour commutes riding transit in nyc too. You only luck out if you manage to secure a job and an apartment along the same transit line, and that's rarely easy or cheap. Especially if you suddenly get a new job.
I think it depends on the age range of who you survey. When I was younger, a small apartment sufficed and I couldn't imagine a long commute. As I had children and started to prioritize 1. space (individual rooms for children) and 2. good school districts, something had to give -- you either pay exorbitant prices in the city for space+private school or you go to the suburbs.
Probably an outlier but I've had a 90 minute commute through some combination of car and transit in the past and an hour or so (so 2 hours per day) is very common, especially if you're commuting into a city from suburbs/exurbs.
It's very uncommon in the US. It less uncommon in Silicon Valley...which is disproportionately represented on HN.
To be fair it's also a problem in some cities outside SV though (Austin, Atlanta, Seattle) but the overwhelming majority of Americans don't face this issue. Even Americans working in tech.
Again, the overwhelming majority of Americans don't face this issue to the degree being discussed here (1+ hour commutes)
It's pretty uncommon except in some select areas like the Bay Area and california cities. I would not do a 2 hour one way drive to work and most people I know wouldn't, at least not for a long period of time.
That's reasonable, but the issue here clearly isn't the workplace; its the commute. They're sometimes, maybe even usually, intertwined. But we can't make sweeping decisions based on a subset of people who both (1) have long commutes, which (2) they hate. Tons of people have short commutes, and tons of people have long commutes which they actually quite enjoy, as it may be the only hour(s) during their workdays where they can remain totally disconnected from both work and home life.
Years ago, I commuted by walking 10 minutes. I loved that; get outside, stretch your legs, put some music on, if I forgot something at home it was just a jaunt away. Today, I commute about an hour each way by car. I love it too. It forces me to wake up early, which is something I enjoy but have problems doing naturally, creates a ton of time for podcasts, I've got my car right at the office if I need to run anywhere during lunch (versus, previously, it being 10-15 minutes away), and there's a delicious doughnut shop on the way in so I can sometimes stop and grab a morning snack for the team (or just me).
Maybe two hours each way is too long. But, you're also strawmanning. The average commute in the US is 27 minutes [1] (in 2019).
Commute length is a huge factor. But I also think commute type matters. When I lived in Chicago, my commute was a 1 hour train ride. I rather enjoyed it, I used that time to read and play video games.
Your statement raises an interesting point. The "savings" in remote work really aren't there, when you take into account the need for people to have dedicated space in their homes.
When companies start pressuring people to return to the office, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a wave of quitting to switch to another company that’s more remote friendly. That will be limited by the actual number of remote jobs, so the early movers will get an advantage. I think you’ll end up with a decent number of people who answer surveys that they’ll quit before having to go back to the office, but realize there are no comparable remote jobs available.
Interestingly enough, my employer has gone the opposite way - they're "shutting down" (that is, chose not to renew the lease for) our office in this city, and had all of us sign new WFH contracts. Same for the office in another part of Europe.
Some of us were 100% OK with that, and some were really not - since the job wasn't expected to be a WFH job, not everyone has a good location to work from, or reliable internet, etc., etc - those people have been able to work from the office at various points over the last year as the pandemic ebbed and flowed. As a consequence, my employer has walked the office closure back a little - we're still all full-time remote, but there will be a smaller office available for e.g., project kickoffs, or people who want to get out of their house for a bit.
Early movers will snatch up the currently open remote positions. If remote really becomes the standard then companies who want to remain competitive will have no choice but to adapt and adjust policies.
This presupposes that the wave of quitting has no significant impact on the employer side. I'd imagine that many companies who push office-first too hard will find themselves short staffed in a very tight labor market. The likely response of many will be to panic and convert to remote-first to avoid hemorrhaging workers.
While working from home is fantastic for many, there are some real issues coming up due to WFH:
- From my observations, people with commitments (family, partners, pets .. etc.) prefer to work from home while single people prefer to go to the office. This will create a noticeable gap between the two groups.
- While working from home can be productive for med to senior-level employees, I suppose it will be a nightmare for juniors and interns. They will have no one around to mentor them or at least to ask for immediate advice. When working from home (as pointed by others), we tend to get into deep focus on avoiding distractions from messaging tools.
To clarify, when I start hiring, the work will be fully remote, but I just wanted to list observations from different perspectives.
1. Not going to get much advice if the mid and senior-level employees have all left.
2. "They will have no one around to mentor them or at least to ask for immediate advice." This is a meme most loudly heard in Cathy Merrill's disastrous Op Ed and has no basis in fact. When I sat in an office, a junior sat opposite me behind screen. When they wanted help, they could stand up and ask for help. Now, when they want help, they ping me on slack, and we start a screen share / voice / video chat. I have my own computer, I can find the necessary information using my setup and my tools, and guide them to a solution more quickly.
"Think of the children^H^H^H interns" is propaganda and we should push back on that nonsense whenever it is expressed.
Broadly speaking I think the future for tech at least will be junior people work in person, going to a tech hub and going into the office to learn the ropes/best practices. Basically offices will become somewhat like graduate schools for these employees, and they can bear the brunt of cost of living issues in some of the more expensive regions living like grad students. Managers will also be in office to facilitate coordination.
Once the engineers become senior and start families they will go remote.
I think the second one is a massive issue. In an in-person world, mentoring and role-modeling happen all the time. Junior employees see what their seniors are doing, even when the seniors do not plan on being seen.
In the remote work world, junior employees can only see their seniors at defined events. Lots of mentoring needs to move to explicit mentoring relationships, and people have to move from "showing the right behaviors" to "explaining the right behaviors". And that assumes the mentee/mentor even know what behaviors they need to focus on! In person, you just get to see everything.
> From my observations, people with commitments (family, partners, pets .. etc.) prefer to work from home while single people prefer to go to the office.
I also have seen the opposite.
Some folks with family want to work from office, so that kids can play loud without interrupting and when coming home it's clearly family time.
And I living alone like the flexibility. Got a new partner? - I work from their place. Want to visit some friends/family in a different town? I work from there. Want to hang out with some friends? I work from their office.
I'm full remote and mentored a recent CS graduate this last month. I put in the effort to send him a slack message at least once a day (I didn't say it was a lot of effort). And we do a mix of working together on tasks and working separately.
When we do work together we use a new code-with-me feature of IntelliJ and I'll lead the development but when I need a utility function or something I ask him to write it and he goes off and writes it separate from my current coding.
This is a legitimate help, not a burden. He wrote an interface to another service for me, and I never had to be distracted by it. I had a concern about something but he said he had read the documentation and that the way he wrote the code was correct. I trusted him, he turned out to be right.
In the editor this is like having 2 or 3 cursors moving around in the project editing things independently, Google Docs style. I flip tabs to check in on him periodically. If I want to show him something I just place my cursor and type, in contrast to telling him what to type with words which was never very effective in the office. This is a form of pair programming that is actually productive and enjoyable, imagine that!
If he were sitting 5 feet from me I would want to collaborate the same way. Two screens, keyboards, one codebase, casual voice communication. We have all this.
Facebook has started approving remote work but only for E5's and higher. I think that will limit the usefulness of having the more junior folks in the office but I guess it makes sense.
Mentoring is also possible when doing remote work, Why do you need to be in front of the person to do mentoring?
In our company all new joinees (during covid) were paired with existing employees and we were able to onnboard and get them contributing in a short amount of time. The new joinees included both recent graduates and experience people.
Single people can have plenty of commitments that don't include a spouse or pets. It is much harder to accomplish most tasks as an individual vs a team. The case you present seems to be closer to those who are codependent vs those who are committed
This is what I don't get. Why do juniors need someone around to mentor them? That's just promotes lazy behaviour. I had countless times when junior asked me for help with something where all they needed to do was to just type same question to Google or search through documentation.
- Asking for help means laziness. There is a high chance that this is the first job for juniors or interns. They need someone to tell them how to find the answer. What is obvious for you is not for others.
- Everyone is working on something that can be Googled. Which is not the case. Even for tech, there will be some specific tasks that are related to the project, domain, company that can not be Googled.
- Documentation? really? If you're fortunate to work in a company that has proper documentation for every single task and are always up to date then not many people share this experience.
You’re on camera, so you still have to look a certain way.
You only have an opportunity to break up your schedule if your employer allows it. WFH doesn’t just magically make work asynchronous.
Commuting is true but varies a lot on individual. (My commutes are trivial and I found them to be too short sometimes!)
You cannot log out before a certain time on WFH.
You cannot log in after a certain time on WFH.
Varies on office. We opened windows where I worked...
We changed the room temp but usually it was comfortable enough for all of us. But sure been there.
The list doesn’t really go on forever. You’re describing different types of working cultures, not working at the office vs remotely.
Working from home this last year has not changed one bit of the work culture we had when we were in office for where I’ve worked. Async and all that shit is not a thing. We’ve logged more hours than ever before and had to be online for an ever expanding set of core hours that kept going from 9-5 to 9-6 to 9-7 etc etc as the year progressed.
Our company requires you to use a company issued computer to access the VPN. I love that. When my day is over, I log off, shut the laptop down, and get on with life. If I get a message on my phone I jump on (if needed) but otherwise work is over.
Cool - my company doesn't really care what you wear, tbh. Look at us - different experiences.
I never said you couldn't do development on a local machine.
A lot of your arguments stem from a different work culture and aren't particular to WFH. You want async work? Argue for that. WFH isn't async. You want to wear whatever you want? Fine - argue for that. WFH doesn't mean you are never seen or heard.
You're arguing for things that aren't part of WFH or remote work. They're entirely separate, part of a entire work culture, and I've seen both in-office and remote to prove such.
>- You cannot leave before a specified time.
>- You cannot arrive after a specified time.
this is what gets me. i already finished my stuff for the day, i want to go home to do something -- nope, can't. you have to stay until you clock in 8h.
need to arrive later? sucks to be you, you have to clock 8h no matter what, so now you are staying at the office until late hours.
WFH means i can just finish work and relax. if anyone needs me, they can ping me on slack, send me an email, or even call me.
I’ve worked for a few remote places, including one which was remote-first before it was cool, and I don’t think the schedule flexibility part rings true
Everyone was expected to be available 9-5ish for potential collaboration/questions purposes, and you had to inform the team if you’re gonna be afk for anything longer than 30minsish
Some teams even had a norm of leaving a “signing off for the day” note and a “getting lunch” note
If there are remote companies out there who truly let you be flexible with your schedule, I’d love to know about them
Different work places are different. At mine, all of those are wrong, except "You cannot change the room temperature". Fortunately, it's already good at mine.
Also, I guess technically I have to "look a certain way", like have clothes on. But I'm going to look that way anyway.
Employees are quitting because pay & benefits aren't good enough to deal with the alternatives otherwise. Maybe you can justify it when you're able to save time and money on your commute, day care, etc., and staying as safe from a global pandemic as possible.
I'm not a fan of this framing by Bloomberg. It's not that the workers are quitting, it's that employers are failing to attract/retain workers.
I wonder if the mood will eventually swing the other way, with companies preferring remote working arrangements, and then people will recall the quaint oddity of employees demanding the change.
Living in a high cost of living city, with a high salary, has its advantages - many goods have the same price point nationally, holidays cost the same regardless, and any raise or bonus calculated as a percentage of your base salary will be more generous in absolute terms. The housing market will be brutal but if you plan to relocate eventually, you'll be way ahead.
I think soon companies will begin exploiting teleworkers as there’s lots of cost savings there. Already most people in my org have bought their own monitors, desks, chairs, etc.
Instead of allowing it, companies can start requiring it and save quite a bit not just on office space, but supplies, equipment, etc.
I’m hoping smart companies get on the ball with equipment allowances.
Also, I think it will finally get us to a “green” office place as COVID finally stopped the oldsters around me printing copies of everything. So the sheet amount of paper saved is quite nice.
> Also, I think it will finally get us to a “green” office place as COVID finally stopped the oldsters around me printing copies of everything. So the sheet amount of paper saved is quite nice.
I kid you not, my company recently had us print something out, scan it, and send it in. From home. I had to run out and buy ink. I wonder how many of coworkers had to run out to buy printers.
Yeah I don't have a printer at home, last time I had to do something like that, I wrote the required stuff on a paper, took a picture with my phone, used PAINT.NET to put it on their document at the right place and messed the colors/contrast a bit to look scanned.
I had a few ask for this. I’ve been able to “print out, sign, scan” by just using a digital signature using Preview and then printing as a new PDF. And that worked. I’ve even been asked to help other people with how to print and scan from home.
The article talks a lot about executives' desire to "maintain company culture". Can someone unpack that for me?
I was already fuzzy on the concept of "company culture". But if executives are worried about it at the same level as "productivity" or "profitability", I'm definitely missing something.
They want to build that familial model where you live and die for your teammates and wfh hampers that because you aren't forced to trauma bond with a bunch of strangers. Facebook/Google learned early on that building campuses that look and act like colleges increased worker retention and productivity because they built their whole lives around the company. Shopping, Doctors, Recreation all happened on campus. All your new friends were made on campus after they forced relocation.
> That's because commuting to all those errands is a waste of time.
Only in the eyes of the employer. People have always taken time out of their day for things like buying food, cooking for yourself, exercising, etc. Those things aren't burdens when your employer isn't demanding complete control over your life. And they are only "perks" in a culture where they do.
Meh - I much prefer having those things done for me or made simpler. I’ve got exceptional work/life balance compared to my peers (I rarely work more than 40 hours/week and usually work 30-35) in SV. But I still would like my workplace to make things easier.
I go to the grocery store quite often and find it just a huge waste of time. We get things delivered more often but I’m not a meal planner type so it doesn’t work well. Commuting for 10-15 minutes each way to get to nearest Whole Foods is a PITA. Having someone plan meals for me is a huge timesaver at every step. Same with exercise. Great if the equipment is right there, pound some weights just before eating lunch or play a game of basketball, etc. don’t need to manage a membership, coordinate with friends over fifty messages, etc.
Totally could do those things outside of work but they take more time. Gotta go to the gym from my house or work. Gotta go to a specific park and hope there’s a pickup game that I can jump into. Etc.
I am a manager and do have a concern for company culture. Culture is how the teams work together - socially, professionally. It's harder to maintain culture remotely. It switches from something that "just happens" with a bit of care to something that has to be actively fostered.
It's easy do dehumanize a voice on the phone. Many people don't want to even use cameras for video calls. How much empathy do you have for a voice on the phone versus a human being you interact with in person on a daily basis?
I think the benefits of remote work far outweigh the work that needs to be done to maintain culture remotely, but it is a new challenge that doesn't have a lot of good understanding around how to make it work.
> I am a manager and do have a concern for company culture. Culture is how the teams work together - socially, professionally. It's harder to maintain culture remotely.
The main aspects of firm culture that make difference in a day to day life are minimizing company politics, avoiding blame-game, honest interaction and manager's support. In my experience, it is the manager who contributes the most towards either improving these or screwing them up. None of these things require you to be physically present in office. Rest of stuff like events, group lunches etc are nice to have but not having them won't impact you as much as a political and toxic work environment would.
> How much empathy do you have for a voice on the phone versus a human being you interact with in person on a daily basis?
Since when basic human decency became incumbent upon seeing someone in flesh in front of you? Are you saying that people can't behave professionally unless they are not physically in office? How do fully remote companies work?
> Many people don't want to even use cameras for video calls.
For the same reason people hate meetings - resolutions to that are also the same that apply to face-to-face meetings.
> I think the benefits of remote work far outweigh the work that needs to be done to maintain culture remotely, but it is a new challenge that doesn't have a lot of good understanding around how to make it work.
Agreed on that - a good starting point would be not use culture as a justification to force people to be in office.
> How much empathy do you have for a voice on the phone versus a human being you interact with in person on a daily basis?
Judging by the toxic office culture at some traditional (non-WFH) companies, lack of empathy has little to do with only hearing "a voice on the phone" vs interacting with "in person".
"Company culture" does not arise from physical presence. I've been at this for a long time, and have worked for all types of companies: mandated office presence, flexible WFH, and fully remote. All had company cultures, and the worst were the ones that forced people into an office. Being together in an office does not do anything productive. It does not create camaraderie or a culture, and the mythical hallways conversations that you hear about do not actually happen.
> it is a new challenge that doesn't have a lot of good understanding around how to make it work.
It's been going on for decades now. Time to catch up. Good WFH culture is matter of effective management. Skills required:
- good communication (knowing how to use the tools we have, like IM, video, and yes, even email)
- being responsive (this is a habit that must be cultivated in many cases)
- focus on goals and achievements instead of distractions like seeing someone in a hallway and assuming that if they seem to be working, they must be working
> Your exaggeration and dismissal is perfect evidence of your inability to empathize with the struggles of people you haven't met in real life.
Calm down, you're overreacting. A single sentence is hardly "perfect evidence of inability to empathize" with others. Talk about "exaggeration"...
I somewhat agree with lupire: If someone only has empathy with their coworkers – who they're interacting with daily – if they can physically see them, then that's saying something.
I would think that if anyone is overreacting it's the person who thinks people who struggle to identify with remote workers are sociopaths. I haven't made any black and white statements or used absolute terms such as "no empathy". I know people in general struggle with nuance, but come on - I'm making it easy here.
> I don't want to work with sociopaths who can't be kind to a voice on the phone.
Sociopaths are an outliers and rare.
But most people empathize less with people they have not met in person (prof: the internet, even before social media).
Add deadlines and stress to that, and you have otherwise normal people behaving worse than they would otherwise. Source: me, working with remote teams for past 20 years.
Like the person above said, you (or someone) have to
be actively on the lookout for such issues, or things can get get bad really fast (I am talking days and weeks not months).
In MBA speak, company culture is a euphemism for median tenure / employee churn rate.
Remote work lowers switching costs for employees, and makes it harder to distribute and monitor the consumption of corporate “sweeteners”.
It tilts favor in the direction of companies that are actually fulfilling to work for, and not merely “sticky” (in the high fructose corn syrup way). I think executives are right to be worried, to the extent they fall in the latter camp.
As to why they’re worried about it: if you have high churn, it means your training costs and hiring costs are much higher. And this directly impacts profitability and productivity, which like you say is what they “actually” care about.
The culture of all companies is a hierarchy of power and control. Any time the status quo changes those who gain the most from it like JP Morgan will fight against it for no other reason than the status quo being good for them.
Company culture is just a way of saying we want to control you out of work and we want you to like it.
If you've worked at a few different companies, you'll notice how different they are in so many things. Communications, privacy, leadership, expectations, formality, processes.
A lot is embedded in that, some execs give it a 'very high' importance.
"Company culture" has always been an elusive thing for me. The more you try to be specific about it, the more the generalist corp-speak terms shimmer, flutter and dissolve into nothing. The only places where there was some "culture" (in my experience) were some of the tiny startups I worked at. Nobody talked it up, it just existed.
So my rule of thumb for that is, if they're talking about Corporate Culture, it means there is none.
I too am not sure what these buzzword means. To me, however, it looks company culture bullshit is controlling my time instead of work. So this way they can keep me feeling guilty if I take break, go to doctor's appointment, or myriad little bit of things when there is no work/meeting pending. If it were just about work that'd be done well within reasonable and agreed upon timelines.
The hilarious thing about office for me was most meeting including daily morning meetings still happen over webex. So nothing of that in-place collaboration crap.
We even had those staged bullshit videos with management where they tried to show how they were in office during pandemic. Basically if they can manage to work from office with their executive compensation then anyone with 1/10th or 1/100th of salary should be able to do that.
To me, as a eng manager in bigger company, seeing massive WFH while also hiring many new engineers over the last year, cultural concerns are around (note: this is not my balanced view on WFH, but rather replying specifically to cultural impact):
- establishing true role models and context, i.e. when 2 colleagues call each other to talk about design challenges, what everyone else sees is the final outcome and not the thought process. New hires in particular miss this, as this is how they learn to think for themselves, and see who in the group is good for what type of discussions (ie someone is more looking to happy path, or edge cases, or testability or performance or operational readiness, etc). Yes, this in theory could be motivated by forcing always group discussions, but that's not how ad-hoc discussions usually happens naturally
- Also from the previous example, outcome is not enough to judge who contributed how really (perhaps somebody had specific concerns around long term scale, tech dept, but was not captured in the outcome, which would manager know to appreciate, or someone may have rather aggressive tone in 1-1 deep tech discussions without realizing it, which you don't get a chance to hear). This has ripple effect on everything from everyday 1-1s and practical help/mentoring to ultimately performance evaluation. (Cultural values are ultimately about who do you promote, fire, and to some extent hire)
- Having a hallway discussions and lunches/coffee breaks with people from a wider group, is to me crucial for getting context, anything from sparking new ideas, connecting the dots to hearing lessons learned on other people's work. With WFH you culturally need to be much more explicit on what and why do you want to talk about which missed the point. At the same time as newer, younger folks are coming to an office and go to lunch together, they start creating their own subculture and the whole experience of new company looks like bigger, much more prolonged internship work. They don't get to hear war stories, or context around why is company doing X and Y.
- It's much harder to meet and know new people in peer teams, there is never time for explicit 1-1s with them, and meetings are always strict to agenda. Giving peer feedback is more focused on aspects that could be easily seen or measured (through email, code, meeting contributions) which could be good but also bad if not careful.
These are some examples that can degrade culture if missed for too long, so they definitely require more explicit actions from everyone.
Company culture - the hierarchical structure, languages, values, and histories that allow a company to control and organize hundreds or thousands of people. Without culture, people will think and act as independent agents or contractors.
Culture is the cumulative result of many small preferences and demeanors. It’s easier for people to transmit and adopt those when they are physically proximate.
Thanks, that definition fits how people seem to use the term.
Still, I'm curious as to why maintaining current culture is seen as important. Is there a loss of productivity / profitability associated with the non-transmission of culture?
If you think your current culture gives you a productivity advantage, and the way you’ve cultivated that culture is very in-person, wouldn’t you worry about losing it?
As much as it can be corporate BS, I do think there are companies that have a culture that gives them an edge over the competition.
I worked at one place where the culture was very much about treating everyone as valuable contributors regardless of level, and pretty much every Friday you could chat with the CEO (and most of the VPs) over beers if you felt like it. As a junior it made a huge difference in how much mental energy I put into innovating and helping others succeed. Just as an example, I could see that kind of thing being hard to maintain in a remote context with thousands of employees.
Yes; if the attitudes and habits common in the business are effective ones, then losing them may cause some harm. For example, a software company might have seen a benefit from junior developers watching how senior developers get help when they’re stuck, and observed a connection between that lower defect rate, more highly rated features, etc., and they might be noticing their juniors have had more trouble raising their hand during COVID. That’s just one example of how a company might perceive cultural transmission and its potential link to success.
Commute time is one of the biggest factors on your quality of life. Increasing your commute time has been to shown to:
- decrease your number of friends
- increase your likelihood of divorce
- increase your over all mortality
And then with kids the reality is you have this 3-4 hour window when you can see them each day. Not to mention the struggles for shared and single parenting.
The curtain has been pulled back and it's going to be a lot harder to justify the kind of rigidity that existed before the pandemic.
I moved from the NYC area (NYC job) to Michigan for cheaper cost of living. I told my employer I either continue 100% remotely or I will find another job. I am grateful my employer let me stay on. I presented it nicely, but it was an ultimatum.
My approach was to express (honestly) that I wanted to stay with the company, but the opportunity of living in a state closer to my friends and with a calmer pace of life was too much to pass up. In my case I bought a house for $150k and will be paying much lower property taxes than I did in NJ.
This move and 100% remote has been a major win across all dimensions for me.
I left a job right before the pandemic because the office was terrible and they gave all the older employees WFH but then stopped giving WFH out right when I was due for it. They told me they just couldn't do it anymore, no reason given.
Then, after quitting, covid occurred and they went fully remote.
Effectively we all got a raise by being sent home. I know some companies have exploded during the quarantine, but not everyone has been so lucky.
For myself it's the last big raise I've gotten in some time, and I expect I'm far from the only person for whom that's true. Going back to work for these people is going to reduce their effective salary back to what it was 15 months ago.
Aside from the debate of WFH / work at the office, culture, water cooler etc.
Environmentalist should up in arms about return to the office. 2 hour commutes are terrible for the environment. 2 hours of an idling car not moving at it's true potential. (I understand that when the car is idling or stuck in slow traffic it is burning the most fossil fuels.) I'm not saying that WFH is going to solve our environmental problems, but taking a few cars off the morning commute surely can't hurt.
It also takes money away from big oil and our criminal frenemy, MBS in.
I was a strong proponent of WFH for years. I fought tooth and nail for more flexible policies at my previous employers. After having done it now for over a year full-time, I'm done. I don't want to WFH full-time anymore. Part of it is that I'm at a different point in my life: I have kids now so having some physical separation between home and work is almost required. the other reason is that its so hard to integrate with a company when you're fully remote. I've never felt more like a cog in the machine than this last year.
Ultimately, some companies will move to completely remote work. Most will go back to at least a hybrid in-person model. For the latter, I suspect that most WFH employees will eventually go back to the office once they realize that they're second class employees and that they're effectively frozen out of the traditional career progression model by being remote.
> Ultimately, some companies will move to completely remote work. Most will go back to at least a hybrid in-person model. For the latter, I suspect that most WFH employees will eventually go back to the office once they realize that they're second class employees and that they're effectively frozen out of the traditional career progression model by being remote.
I disagree. This is a problem if the majority of workers are in the office full time and only a small group are remote. If the office is entirely WFH or hybrid, then everyone is a remote worker. Also, the traditional career model has been changing drastically even before the pandemic. These days workers need to move horizontally, across companies, to achieve any kind of progression in their careers. The vertical move up the corporate ladder is becoming a relic. Mind you, I'm not saying that is good or bad, just commenting on the current situation.
I worked from home prior to the pandemic, then joined a company right at the start. I’m a “remote vet” having been doing this for five years, so I’ve been doing my best to help folks adapt (because it does take adaptation).
Ironically, today is our first day where the office here in LA is generally open, so I’m driving in at some point for the celebrations. Because I’m going in, I’m going to miss my son’s nighttime routine (which I’ve missed maybe 7 times in his 18 months).
The life choice of being able to be there for the development of my son is one that many fathers here in LA do not get to make. The commute alone would be coming 100% out of my time with him.
And, with that, I’ve gotta jet. Time to go run around and then go on our hour walk around the neighborhood. Remote may not be the best for everyone, but it’s certainly a wonderful addition to my life.
All the more the power to employees who have the fortitude to stand up against demeaning, demanding, power hungry bosses. They might think hustling is good, but does it actually produce anything of value?
Without productive staff, businesses can either change and thrive or resist change and become Dinos-R-Us Inc.
Office work never acknowledged how much labor was being done at home by unpaid workers — usually moms.
Now we’ve had a couple generations of women in the workforce en masse, partners who have stepped up household responsibilities, longer commutes, and more being asked of all workers.
The only time to get household crap done has been late after hours and the weekend, aka “leisure time.”
It hasn’t been tenable for a while and now the pandemic showed us another way. This is an improvement.
Offices mostly facilitate interruption, but also collaboration on a good day. So much of that can be done virtually.
Half-day whiteboard sessions are great IRL, no reason why they can’t be scheduled a day in advance, or later in the day and give people time to get to a common area to do so.
The office had its issues and the pandemic is forcing a reckoning of them. Great!
I love the fact that with WFH I can blend work and life together very seamlessly.
I can work for several hours then put in laundry. Or take a nap. Or collect my parcel. I can sleep until it is work time. I can do work at 11PM as that is when there are the fewest distractions.
I still don't like the polarization of this issue "either everyone has to allow full time WFH or I quit!".
I prefer working at the office given the choice, it allows me to see some of my co-workers and helps me with balance. I get distracted at home. Also things that happen organically at the office like lunch together and happy hours are nice to have.
At the same time, I have a VERY short commute compared to most, I can imagine I would feel differently if I lived 30 minutes+ away from the office.
My company has announced we will do "3 days minimum" in the office once things are "normal", this made a lot of people upset in our company with good reason. I think we should be more flexible, but I still appreciate the option.
I feel like the pandemic has given rise to a winners vs losers mentality with respect to WFH. For the longest time, people who prefer to work in office were the winners, and now it's the people who prefer WFH. In reality everybody is different and wants different things out of the work aspect of their life. I have been in an awful place mentally due to WFH; I can't stand not separating work from life, I'm more social than the average dev so I enjoy being around people, I get easily distracted at home, etc. I don't know why compromise is not more common in online spaces. Reads like 90% of introverts running a victory lap.
How is it polarization? I want to work from home full time, my employer stops allowing it, so I find a new job. Especially in the software industry where there's an unlimited number of remote/wfh jobs there's no point in needlessly compromising for your employer's sake.
1. While some employees legitimately like the office, the push to return there is coming from executives. The motivation is pretty clearly control.
2. For the first time ever, work style is favoring introverts. Their feelings were never taken into consideration, yet through the accident of the pandemic, intovert friendly work is now the norm.
3. Cost of living is through the roof near traditional office space.
Because the stakes are so high, the change so recent and the pushback so authoritarian, people are “fighting” to retain WFH. It also feels like a winnable battle for the first time ever.
If you are IT-literate it's OK. People stress if they are not IT-literate, a failed router or no Internet is very stressful for people who have no clue how it works.
I've never worked from home until recently and now I find it very isolating. I feel like a device a tool not a person who has coworker friends I only interact via emojis towards usernames. There's no flow to the day it's quite compartmentalized.
Sure the commute short which is great but my small home has lost a good part of space what was formerly not an office. I like the separation of work from home even if it involves a commute. It's great sometimes but not all the time.
The environmental benefits are massive. For all the press the climate gets you'd think we'd hear this angle more. Perhaps even incentives for employers.
This is very place-dependent. In california where everybody is driving to work, you're probably right. But in many European cities where people would take public transport to work, and instead are heating entire homes all day instead of heating one office for hundreds of staff, the environmental effect of WFH is probably negative.
Another advantage on wfh I see is that there is a less impact from the "visuals".. for example what you are wearing, what is your body language, how much attention others pay you during a meeting and all that nuance that could distract.. now in wfh, when you talk to someone over zoom, your whole attention is on the voice and contents, so the visual distractions has become less... I also see junior engineers who were getting intimidated in the meeting are able to verbally contribute more... Though both the things I mentioned have their own downsides..
I think its kinda a disadvantage to lose body language. You could have a presentation and have no clue how well anyone understood anything, since everyone's camera is off. During a normal talk you can see when their eyes glaze over and you lose the room.
I don't see a hybrid model working well at all. The scenarios that have been thrown around at my company are like these:
1. Everyone comes back to the office (extremely unpopular)
2. Everyone continues to WFH (gives management the hives)
3. Some teams WFH full-time, while others go BTTO).
4. A hybrid schedule where you come into the office once a week, and WFH the remainder.
I don't see how these can work. BTTO is going to cause huge issues, the cat is out of the bag. And if some teams get to WFH, but others don't then that will cause turmoil as well.
A hybrid schedule seems to be the worst option actually. Say that everyone has to come in on Mondays for team meetings. Then Tue-Friday, the office is a ghost town. If you're required to come in one day a week (but you can choose), then the odds are the most of the office will be empty, and that's a waste of company resources in having an office sized for pre-COVID times.
If a hybrid BTTO plan is for F2F with mgmt, then it'll need to be mandatory, on the same day. Otherwise my poor manager has to be in the office 5 days a week. Eventually, mgmt will just require everyone to come BTTO.
Changes like what COVID caused aren't bells you can unring. It's like having women work in factories during WW2. Sure when the troops return home, things seem to go back to "normal", but that's just delaying the change. Remote work is here to stay, and the companies that embrace it will have a leg up. All the friction that we experienced in the las year will diminish over time with faster/better Internet, with workflows and communication tools that are better suited to WFH.
Lots of people both live and work in small towns or cities. As someone who lived in a city of about 100k population, my commute to anywhere in the city was no more than twenty minutes on a bad day, usually fifteen.
Lots of people both live and work from within big cities reasonably close to their job. For those people, their commute is likely less than 30 minutes.
For people who are outside of big cities and have to commute in, or live in one city and commute to another, they will have longer than 30 minute commutes, almost certainly. That applies to most people who live in the suburbs.
Also note this quote from your article: "Speeds over the five or six years that Uber and others have been in existence have dropped from a very slow 6.5 mph to 4.7 mph," Schwartz says about New York City.
4.7 miles per hour. So that suggests that if your home is as close as 5 miles away from the city, it could take you an hour just to drive into the city during rush hour.
This idea that voice/video ostensibly reduces empathy may not be all bad. It's easier to set personal boundaries when the poorly equipped project or engineering manager on the other side of a voice or video bridge can't escalate with implied threats or histrionics. Cajoling and haranguing people to work for its own sake is not management, and the tech sets a boundary on a lot of that behavior.
I'd argue the human contact in offices is rarely used to foster healthy long term relationships, and the improved mental health of remote employees appears to have a productivity benefit. Think of the anti-patterns that people use in offices because it works for them, and how those anti-patterns don't work anymore and they must find better tools.
I can see how it's hard for superfluous managers who must compete to extract value from the same set of resources, but for a well aligned organization, remote is a potential renaissance.
Personally, I'm the opposite. I have considered quitting as my company has been talking about remote work, but none of my team seem interested, so I'm sticking around for now. If a few people in my team went remote (or mostly remote), I'd probably quit.
What I find really disconcerting is that the senior leaders in the tech industry have been talking for years about increasing gender inclusivity. Yet very few major tech companies seem to be wholeheartedly embracing full remote, despite it being by far the most effective way to encourage more women to join the industry.
Research shows that women are 50% more likely to prefer full remote than men[1]. For better or worse, much more of the burden of childcare falls on mothers in our society.[2] Women are also much more likely to sacrifice their own careers to relocate for a spouse's career.[3] Along similar lines, that tends to mean women prefer careers with geographic flexibility.[4]
Tech companies have spent the past decade sprouting platitudes about creating a more welcoming workplace for women. Now they actually have a real opportunity to make a difference. Transitioning to a remote first model would massively improve gender inclusivity. Yet, despite widespread employee satisfaction with remote, senior management in most places seem to be pushing back as hard as possible on outdated (and often sexist) notions that "people who hustle show up to the office".
I worked in mostly from home as a contractor (my own company) for Ford, IBM, and Silicon Graphics in the early 90's using a 9600 bps modem(!), then co-founded a web company in '98 and worked from home for 7 years, then retired early. We used 128K bps ISDN connections in the early years, and it was fine. Got a ton of stuff done from home. So anyone who thinks it can't work now, with the kinds of Internet speeds available, just doesn't want it to work.
I never understood how people could handle long commutes, plus all the wasted time and money for work clothes, to sit in front of a computer in a building instead of home.
For me, remote work gives personal options. My wife got a job in a small Southern college town. It'll be great for her career, but there are zero, zero tech jobs there. Remote lets me grow my career while she grows hers.
It's a shame global pandemy had to happen for companies to realize that employeee don't have to be at a particular place at a particular time to do a good job. Never say never, but I never want to go back to office job :)
Yeah, I'm never going back and if they want me to go back I will quit too. This is the new normal and productivity has shown that there is zero necessity for people to come to an office. It's all perfectly viable to WFH.
- stress free working if I actually want to get stuff done
- no open office or any obnoxious sounds just me in my room and I can make whatever sounds I want
- don't have to pretend to work hard, just get stufff done and don't be a slacker and I can literally be productive 1/2 days and relax/be async 2/3 days because I can focus very well. No complaints whatsoever from stakeholders or the business.
- not being hyper alert of how I look or what I wear, just my top needs to look presentable when in an meeting with camera on and can wear sweatpants and no shoes or whatever is comfortable without dress code
- can fix the temperature to the exact degree I want it
- no social interactions whatsoever. no "get togethers", Friday drinks with people I don't like, barely any casual conversation just straight to the point business and that's it
- no morning talk or "how was your weekend" NPC tier conversations for the sake of conversing just a daily stand-up (we actually sit) hyper-focused on work and that's it
- eat whenever i want whatever i want no more sandwiches in a box or overpriced canteen food, bake french eggs for lunch or make a soup. Fitness during a break. Take a walk whilst being in a "meeting"
- no commute whatsoever, can practically roll out of bed into my chair if i wanted to
- not ONE colleague seen at the coffee machine or when getting water no SMALL TALK OR STARING of colleagues begging for me to say hi and them to ramble about their kids or whatever uninspiring thing they did in the weekend. I have friends and colleagues. I don't want to socialize with these colleagues, I wouldn't even think about small talking with them in a bar why force it in an office?
And best of all no SJW office politics whatsoever. All of that seem to have disappeared with WFH. Just get stuff done, get paid and that's it. I'm never going back to the or any office.
There's a trivial fix to all these problems: declare time spent commuting as billable work time. I'm amazed how this is not reality already, but the pandemic time should have made this obvious now.
My employer trusts me to work from home, that's good.
If they suddenly announced I had to come in because some disconnected management chain doesn't trust me to do the thing, or wants to make the policy because some managers can't handle it, or other employees can't handle it. That changes the relationship entirely, I'm just a widget, I'm way more likely to move on.
It also impacts my family and that changes the dynamic as well.
The employer might see it as a rudimentary policy, but to me it is a lot more.
I’ve been working outside on my deck the past few weeks and it’s been glorious. It’s a little cooler sometimes than I’d like but it’s not frigid (I live in Connecticut).
For me WFH is not the key but rather having the freedom and flexibility. I've been going to the office for the last few months, about 2-3 times a week. It's been great. First, I bike or walk to the office, so my commute is part of my weekly exercise. The office is empty, so I have all the freedom that I want. I can come and leave whenever I want. The benefit of the office is pretty significant for me - I'm not stuck at home all day, it's quiet unlike my home (my wife is WFH and my kids are sometimes around) so I can concentrate better, etc. I still like WFH at least twice a week, since I like mixing things up and it fits my schedule better on days that I have other activities during the day or early evening.
Now, obviously my current situation is not going to last. Sooner or later others will come back to the office and it's not going to be that quiet anymore, my boss might be around, etc. However, I actually look forward to that. Going out for lunch with co-workers etc. I'm still planning to keep things as they are now. Coming and leaving whenever I want, mixing it between WFH and from the office. Meetings are going to continue to be fully remote anyway, since we have people all over the world. I see the office as a place people can come to have a quiet time, enjoy the office perks, and socialize. Different than what the office used to be pre-covid (at least at some places). Since we have a large office with many areas to connect your laptop and work, I'm not even planning to sit together with my team.
The one thing I'm not looking forward to is rush hour. I'm really enjoying my commute these days, much more than pre-covid. I hope that things will never go back to pre-covid levels. (most likely given that WFH has become much more common)
Corporations have missed that we employees are actually customers. We trade services in exchange for cash. We can easily take our business elsewhere.
It's no surprise that the business leaders focus on "culture". "Oh, they have to be here four days per week or we don't have culture". Not effectiveness. Not satisfaction. "Culture". And by "culture" they mean "kissing ass" and maintaining their lordships feudal demesne.
They make noises about "bums in seats" being necessary for productivity, yet they either don't have measures in place to measure productivity, or conveniently forget them, since the data shows that productivity is the same or better when an employee is allowed to choose where to work.
Then there was that article about how junior employees wont be able to learn from senior employees, which is arse. If anything it's easier to work together remotely. Bonus, nobody putting their hands on a junior as they lean in "to get a better look at your work". But in any case, junior employees aren't going to learn from senior employees if the senior employees arent there.
What are these employers offering as a concession?
I'd do 4 day weeks in the office; I'd definitely do 3 days in the office and one at home and I'd take a 10% pay cut to be allowed it with basically no difference to my productivity.
If you're offering nothing and simultaneously aren't able to give clear reasons why working remotely isn't a valid option I don't see what you can expect other than people quitting.
It's a hypothetical scenario with two options that conceivably could be seen as a fair trade-off by the employer.
I'd take less money because I dont really care about how productive I am on aggregate, I just care about how much time I have where I am completely free to not be productive.
I think the example I gave is a touch extreme though; 5% deduction for alternating 4 day weeks remote and in the office.
Did anyone else notice that they quote hate speech from this worker who won't return to the office? I have to wonder why we have a quote in there ridiculing someone because of their age. Would it have been okay if she had said that this person she worked for was stupid because of their race or gender? Why is it okay that the person she works for is stupid because of his age?
I spent three years working from home in the pre-pandemic era, at GitHub - the king of remote culture at the time - and I was desperate to have an office again.
I can code fine at home (better, actually, with more privacy to focus), but I can’t do the meta-stuff nearly as well. It’s the soft-skills that suffer.
I think my pandemic-era company failed (we got acquired but, it was a failing-up situation) because we lost the ability to have course-correcting conversations outside of formal meetings. Which is to say: we just weren’t as smart, as a group. We should have done a daring pivot, but there was no way to discuss it (zoom+figma “brainstorming” sessions were completely useless)
I think my ideal would be to have somewhere that we met in person semi-regularly, maybe optionally, like a study hall environment, where we could pair or whiteboard or just chat.
I don’t want to go back to being crammed into an open-office with too many people, that is just awful for coding. and Slack is like being in an open-office 24 hours a day; I hope my next gig doesn’t use it.
I think that overtime some middle-ground will be achieved. Maybe some people companies won't allow full remote work, but will create satellite offices in smaller towns where people would be able to walk or even bike to work. (yes, I know, this is true in big cities like NYC, but then the cost of living is astounding).
I hope things continue to change. Pre pandemic I feel all my labor was rewarded on the results and not effort. I felt that for myself too. Long commutes and messy house and difficult family relationships. I think a lot of people are finally seeing the relative effort sometimes far out-weights the results/cost.
Amazing news! This has the potential to kill the hideous "you have to be in one of five cities to have a career" insanity that has been a major factor in decimating the middle class. It's created a dichotomy of "no jobs, unaffordable housing, pick one."
I stopped working at the office in 2006. Since 2018 I've been working at stakeholder's location, which can be the prospect, customer, partner or event.
The key aspect I miss the most from my office days is networking, or the capacity to build and maintain a consistent network of contacts. Maybe because I'm latin working in Latin America. We are high touch by definition. But I really feel that remote work damaged my capacity to keep my network of contacts. Now I see myself with the mission to find a new job, and I'm not sure my current network will be enough help.
That's basically what I did 12 years ago: the benefits of working from home were too appealing, so I quit my job, started my own company, and have worked from home ever since (the only exception was a post-acquisition stretch where I had to go in occasionally, but after I paid my dues I quit and started another company).
It might not be for everyone, but I absolutely love it. Of all the benefits, the biggest is time - it's a precious resource, and for me at least, working in an office wastes way too much of it (commute, tons of meetings, etc.).
I used to like the office. It was fun. My friends were there. I got help when I needed it. We talked about things informally. My desktop PC and Internet was top-notch, and I didn’t have a laptop or mobile. They had a great gym. I worked at work, and did other things at home.
Now I haul my laptop from home to my cubicle to fight over the phone booths for endless remote meetings. I don’t work with and have never spoken to my neighbors. My work goes home with me.
Working from home isn’t better, but the office is worse.
The answer, like most things in life, is in the middle. That's why the "hybrid model" has been talked about recently as the world opens up.
Reading lots of comments here and it's clear there are two camps. Which is great. There will be a big realignment of people switching jobs to go remote and moving to cities to get to work with a cool in person team.
But there's also the middle of the road hybrid model where you can still be remote but there will be offsites every month or every quarter.
That's not really a hybrid from what I've read. A hybrid is where you work one or more days in the office every week. Your hybrid is much more appealing than the former to me.
I’m dreading my commute to Seattle once offices reopen. Over the last year and a half there have been a crazy number of new homes and apartments built all along the two-lane highway that comprises most of my route.
Everything is workable now because people are still at home but as soon as the offices reopen it will be atrocious. This is especially true once the weather turns shitty - snow can easily make a 1.5 hour commute take 3.5 hours even excluding the new homes.
We build 2 buildings for each person - 1 to live in and other to work in. And then we build roads between them and parking spaces near them. And then we pay these people to use all that infrastructure and waste their precious time doing it, instead of just using their computer and internet connection (which they already use anyway) for 1 more thing.
It's so inefficient it boggles my mind we're still doing it.
For me, the main benefit is I can choose where I live.
There is not many developer positions available outside of big cities, with WFH I get to choose both where and for which company I work. Living in a big city was a bad experience for me, I would quit my job immediately if I were asked to give up WFH.
Commute time, expense and risks are other benefits but others are talking about it already.
I'm going to start my own startup with a friend. We've been planning this for a long while. We will work together in a small office, but I'm not sure how We can build a team fully remote, with no experience. I'm all for flexibility etc. but when things are not in an order, just starting remote feels very heavy and risky for me. Any pointers would be appreciated.
This seems like the perfect case for differentiation. There's a lot of arguing over the merits of working remotely vs. working in person as if one is universally better.
Just have some companies work entirely remotely, and some work entirely in person, and have employees choose their employer based on that just like how they choose their employer based on headquarters location etc. now.
Employers need to compensate us for the extra wear and tear on our homes, our office furniture/accommodations, and prorated utilities consumed on company time. In return, companies can afford massive savings from a reduced physical footprint and smaller commercial real estate leasing + massive facilities upkeep and utilities cost savings.
Depends on what you want, I wanted to go beyond just from home, I wanted forever remote with good location flexibility. And after the old employer could not or would not accept the location part, I simply quit.
I have found a forever remote in a FAANG and it is the best decision I have made in a long time.
There are certain jobs that are very easy to outsource yet companies pay a premium to hire locals. I feel quitting instead of going back to the office will backfire for many. I'm not necessarily talking about tech jobs, which led the way in WFH positions even before the pandemic.
Forcing someone to be at an office is like saying "Hey can you work an extra two hours everyday for free?" Time spent commuting is work. Getting dressed for work is work.
If you want to keep people working in the office you need to pay more. At least 2 hours per day more.
and please note Quitting != Leaving the work force.
The market is strong right now for developers. Easy to find another job that has a remote option.
I bet most of that people that quit, quit because they had already secured an offer with remote work option.
...there’s also the notion that some bosses, particularly those of a generation less familiar to remote work, are eager to regain tight control of their minions.
“They feel like we’re not working if they can’t see us,” she said. “It’s a boomer power-play.”
I'm not an "OK Boomer" kinda person but this is spot on. However, I would add that it applies to the Boomer generation and older. I worked at a company a few years ago that was started by a man who was in his late 80's at the time. A good man, I should add, but he was all about "butts in seats" (he is also a former Marine).
He didn't understand technology at all and was constantly at loggerheads with my boss about where her people were. She never could get across to him that just because he didn't see us didn't mean we weren't working. We took the department from barely breaking even to being the most profitable in the company in nine months, so, obviously we were doing something when our butts were in different seats.
COVID accelerated remote working but I suspect it won't become fully embraced until the Boomer generation of managers and company leadership retire.
For knowledge workers, Work From Home should be the assumed starting point, with offices provided for those who would rather not or can't, rather than the reverse.
For service providers and retail folks, obviously this is not as much of an option.
The only thing that nags me about homeoffice is that I was mostly working with people that I met in the office before. I do not know yet how interactions will work with people I only know remotely (pun intended).
At my company it feels like it’s about 50/50. I expect this to be company and individual specific. Half my team will quit if they don’t get access to in office amenities and socialization.
Wondering what is the corporate next step. Work from office can be enforced in a number of ways : lower pay for WFH comes to mind. I'm sure we'll see some devious schemes.
Unable to read the article due to paywall but how can employees be quitting in such numbers to be noted by Bloomberg? Don't they have families to feed, finances to take care of, worries of future, worries of career and such? How exactly are so many people managing to just quit their jobs?
It's been awhile since I've taken stats, but people semi-frequently overestimate the necessary sample size needed for even a 99% confidence level.
Depends on the standard deviation for sure, but some quick napkin math suggests that a sample size of ~700 people is more than enough to draw inferences about the entire western hemisphere at a 99% confidence level.
For a single question survey, 1,000 is a more than sufficiently large survey. Standards are typically for 300+ given random sampling.
Reasons for enlarging samples have less to do with accuracy than with resolution. If you plan on looking at specific cross-tabulations or sub-populations, you need a sufficient sample size (typically n>30 for large-sample statistics) to draw inferences.
Error decreases with the square root of sample size. To halve error you must square the sample. A 1,000-element sample has half the error of a 31-element sample. To halve error again would require a 1,000,000 element sample.
"Would consider" is a fair catch, though here the question is how that compares against previous measures / trend.
Clickbait yes, but it's more than that. It's a momentum/filler piece. NPR's Marketplace ran a short segment on this last week (although I can't find the link), now Bloomberg, coming up MSNBC and CNN(?).
People have savings. It’s not worth making your life miserable over the safety net of your current job, especially when there’s so many remote options out there.
They pass interviews and accept full remote jobs. I've seen it happen. Some people moved to smaller cities at the start of the pandemic, so they have literally zero incentive to come back; they are even taking pay cuts if needed.
The subtext to the work-from-home trend is commercial real estate, both office and retail, which is an immense investment asset class.
I've seen very little dismissal of the trend that cannot be traced to commercial real estate, banking, or investment interests. Interestingly enough, all sectors which can themselves utilise remote office or work-from-home arrangements.
Bloomberg are first and foremost an investment information service.
No debt but a residence mixed with a 3-6 month emergency fund gives a lot of freedom. I know that’s not that case for many, but the emergency fund is my safety net and if I need, that’s how I would manage to do it. I’d also try to line up a job prior to my departure.
I'm fortunate that I worked from home by default anyway, so all I've lost over the pandemic is the chance for occasional trips to the office for a catch-up with (also generally remote) colleagues.
Reading the comments here, I worry how much the WFH newcomers will have their goals of continuing dashed by the crab mentality of those who want to go back to an office.
I'll let someone else reap the 15% extra productivity or w/e office working adds. Knock yourselves out.
For me there's no turning back. The cat is out of the barn and the horse out of the bag. That ship has sailed and it hit the iceberg. The fat lady sang her swan song.
I've been WFH since '07, only occasionally returning to the office for short periods of time. There is absolutely no pressure on me to return to an office.
I was surprised that the first question was: "Will I have to be vaccinated or show proof thereof?"
Why is that? I thought there was very little hesitation. Was it the sample the author chose?
Working from home has been nice, but I have enjoyed the freedom of flexible working. I am not surprised by the overwhelming amount of people who never want to return to the office again. As someone who was often in charge of organizing team and social events pre-pandemic, I have been aware of the amount of people who think of social time as an unwanted obligation vs fun. Still, not everything about working from home is better. Here are a few thoughts of my own:
- My commute is only 15 minutes. Despite environmental impact, which I can appreciate, I enjoy my 15 min in the car - drinking coffee, thinking about my day. I wouldn't call it meditation, but it's close. If your commute is 2 hours a day, good riddance. You probably should have been considered a remote worker all along.
- I truly enjoy interacting with my coworkers. I am a single, mid-30s guy who likes to socialize. It's a nice break and gives me reason to get up from my desk. There are lots of studies on how short breaks impact productivity and mental wellness. I was acutely aware of my declining social skills as I worked from home. I became easily agitated and curt with people. If you consider all forms of casual communication as "small talk", consider that you might be more about the effort you're willing to put into people vs. how innately boring everyone else is.
- Scheduling online meetings and Zoom calls IS a pain in the ass. Everything revolves around a calendar of 30min blocks. 5min convo? 30 minutes. I also can't help but get the feeling that many of my coworkers are not actually engaged on calls. If you're colleagues are honest, you have most likely heard them say at least once "sorry can you repeat that. I was distracted". Many issues simply don't get addressed because it's not an appropriate text chat, but it doesn't seem big enough to put on someones calendar.
- I am arguably less productive at the office, but my days feel shorter.
- I never really wanted my home to be a working environment. This is probably my biggest issue with working from home. My office is an office. My living room is an office. My kitchen table is an office. It feels really nice to come home and have it feel like a home. Not to mention the privilege of even having space for a real office vs having to work from my bedroom like many people do.
- There are introverts and extroverts, but being anti-social is not a positive thing. If you believe in mental health, this is not an argument. There ARE plenty of ways to be social online, but many people are bad at it. The ability to be a passive aggressive asshole seems to increase when you know the only way for someone to talk to you about it is over text.
- I worry about the impact remote work has on employee appreciation/value. Workers seem more like a commodity. I think this is easier for someone to understand if they have ever worked on a team with distributed contractors. This isn't
Rent is often the second largest cost after salaries for most businesses. I think it's more likely that work from home businesses will offer more money to offset the cost of working from home, also because they have the money to do that.
I think the biggest challenge from in office businesses will be brain drain why commute to a shitty office when I can get paid more to not do that.
Give your employees laptops to work from home. Install monitoring software on the laptops, you could even spy on them with the webcam etc.
You don't need to pay for an office just because you want to power trip on spying on people. Over covid Microsoft have added a bunch of spyware into office365 for companies to spy on their employees.
> lower wages, massive outsourcing and the obsolescence of cities
I don't really know why #3 is said like a bad thing, but I wonder about the other two. If this is clearly and advantage that is sure to happen, why hasn't it? There's still time zone issues and cultural bridges to gap, so I don't know how far one can really go before it becomes a lot of effort to be productive. And speaking as a Canadian who makes what appears to be a university grad-level wage in the states, I wouldn't mind it at all if that forced the more local wage to be a little higher to compete.
Are people so hopelessly dense that they don't realise an office economy means lower net wages, massive outsourcing and the obsolescence of local communities?
If society accepts global warming is happening and climate change is a threat, commuting is going to be severely limited in the future. If we don't kill the commute, we're going to kill suburbs(and we may do that either way).
Once you accept AGW, you have to commit to seriously reducing energy expenditures until the planet is 100% renewable and we've maxed out our carbon capture mechanisms. Commuting takes energy. Even in an urban environment.
Arguments about the positives and negatives of WFH, which have been discussed in many popular threads on HN ad nauseum, are really secondary. Incentives to reduce energy usage will eliminate commutes and reshape society. Covid helped kickstart the transformation but it would have happened eventually anyway.
You might combine the two, with "WFH" in shared workspaces in suburban environments, that would seem to be the "all of the above" option if it becomes popular and there is sufficient shared workspace availability.
To play devil's advocate for a moment, is it possible people are becoming spoiled or too coddled by work?
I've always been of the presumption that market forces will align workers with jobs, but it's clear in places where there is little to no choice (i.e. the small towns Amazon puts their warehouses) theory doesn't exactly work out in reality.
That's led me to change my thinking a bit, but I'm having trouble getting over the notion that it's a job, and if you want a job, you work, if you don't want to work at a particular place, you go work somewhere else. I bristle at the notion that employees should, could, or can bend a company to their preference.
It just seems we've gone from free lunch and massages to employees dictating business decisions. I'm not sure if that shift in power is wise.
They aren't actually dictating anything though. Employers are still in charge of their policies. These employees are just stating their terms and leaving if their terms aren't met. Companies can then choose their response. They can hire other workers who are willing to work in an office or they can cave to worker demands or some other compromise can be made.
This is free society functioning how it's supposed to: free agents negotiating their terms and coming to mutually beneficial arrangements.
I can wake up later since I don't have a commute. I don't lose two hours a day due to the commute.
I can wear as comfortable clothing as I desire. I can delay my shower until after my daily workout (Which I can do since my workout equipment is at home).
I can control my environment so there are as many or as few distractions as i like. I can put on videos or audio that might not be considered work appropriate. I can use speakers since no one is around me to hear the sound.
The number and magnitude of inconveniences we subject ourselves to by heading to an office every day has been fully revealed. I will do all I can to work from home for the rest of my life.