What I want is not another day sitting in a god forsaken office after sitting in crappy traffic but rather the ability to go have a coffee, grab some lunch or just hang out and "Talk shop" with people regardless of being direct co-workers, friends, peers and whatnot. Those are the kinds of people who called me, messaged me and asked me how I was doing. THe only other former co-workers who keep up with me are ones who quit and found new jobs too - it's like since we're not still suffering we're no longer friends and all too often we see that as fulfilling social interactions without question.
I guess with hindsight I actually see the "office" as anti-social - it creates bad/poor behaviors, people find solace in common suffering and 9 times out of 10 all of my co-workers were actually dicks who only showed up to work to avoid their unhealthy home life and again, with hindsight, I see they tried making me ancillary to their unhealth work life too.
hard to explain it in a small text box, but I guess i just see the office environment as extremely fake, demoralizing and depressing - even though i've had some great memories through it - i'd rather not be captive to sitting in a cubicle chair and actually develop much more rewarding, enriching and valuable experiences that translate to more productivity and creativity in the end.
Often times i don't even get to choose my co-workers and if I did, those teams are often short lived and i think that corporate disruption to things that matter on a human to human level is something we're refusing to challenge/change because "it is the way it is". I get thrown on a new team, and its not new friends, it's now colleagues to suffer with and build empty relationships.
To try and empathize with a lot of the people bemoaning WFH, I believe they are just suffering from quarantines in general. I truly believe many of them would do fine if they could WFH 100%, but be able to go out with friends on weeknights and weekends.
You are absolutely right that the office is a pisspoor substitute for real comraderie, and I wish people would stop conflating the two.
Personally I love working from home. It gives me a lot more flexibility, I have no commute, I have my dog with me, I can cook lunch or prep for dinner, I can do small chores on a break or to clear my head, I can take my dog on a walk, and the list goes on. That said I don't have kids and I have a home office. I was also fortunate to start WFH about 5 months before COVID hit so I was able to go out with friends and what not which totally satisfied my social needs, proving to me that any added stress while working from home now is caused by things other than WFH itself.
When I used to work in an office there were a number of people that were difficult to deal with and/or annoying to put up with. While I didn't go full WFH at that job I did get to the point where I was working 2 days a week from home and those days were glorious. Being able to pick who you are actual friends with (verses being forced in pretending to be nice to some truly toxic people) is so much nicer. I am friends with a handful of people at my new (WFH) company but that's because we both wanted to be friends and went out of our way to build the friendship not because we were forced to work together.
My hope is that people don't "throw the baby out with the bathwater" when this is all over and there is a choice of WFH or going back to the office. That said, it's not be for everyone/every job but one silver lining of this terrible last year has been a number of my staunchly anti-WFH friends talk about how much they have enjoyed it and how they want to continue it at least for part of the week if not fully.
About 11 months a year (~1 month for holidays). Around 160 hours a month. So 1760 hours a year. And about 88k hours over my entire lifetime.
That works out to <<10 full years>> of my lifetime.
If I'm not socializing at work, albeit a bit constrained by the professional environment, something is super wrong. Restricting socialization strictly to weeknights and weekends seems... super radical to me.
I think your math actually suggests our way of life is actually extremely unhealthy with the assumption we should develop social systems at our places of employment that absolutely don't exist for any such activity.
We need those relationships - but the office way of work certainly isn't a healthy way to achieve them. People get fired, laid of, move to new orgs, get moved around, corporate policy is dictated from top down without regard to human experiences but rather bottom dollar value line.
Not saying it can't be done - but again - think back on all your working years - were many of your work relationships meaningful or just convenient? Do they know your family? kids? spouse? significant other? Do they wish you a happy birthday? did they call you during covid to see how your doing?
As with complaints against "working from home", I get the feeling that proponents of work socializing recognize there's a problem, but they have mis-identified the root cause.
Well, we can complain about it, but it's a fact of life. It's almost like complaining that gravity drags us down :-)
Plus, for a lot of people does give them... something to do. A purpose, an activity, a place where they can use their skills and use their intellect.
It's hard to do this alone if everyone else is working. I guess you could try mingling with the rich people and join charities?
But I do try to exercise my empathy and recognize for some endeavors it's is useful to collaborate. I just wish that people wouldn't attribute intrinsic necessity of physically close collaboration where it is not warranted.
My purpose or activity, even after I'm financially independent will be writing software, something I can do without having to be in close contact with people I am working with, and I in fact am much more productive when I'm not.
And honestly, even at 40 hours a week, I still have a lot of time in which I've formed my best social relationships. My coworkers are nice people, I just have shockingly little in common with them outside of work.
I've worked in shared offices for 20+ years and have made a lot of long-term friends through them.
That's an entire mini-lifetime I'd be giving my employer. And I don't think I ever will have to - I can force myself to be remote the rest of my working life. And that mini-lifetime is mine..and that's priceless.
I've had 1 or 2 coworkers out of hundreds I became any level of "friends" with, and the closest of whom I didn't even work directly with. Actually, one of the coworkers I'm friends with, I met in a remote team with us living across the country from each other.
As a business owner, I am not sure you would hire on the same axis. I would personally not hire someone that can only work for 20 hours a week, there is too much to do.
Why would they care if the output was the result of fewer hours? If they wanted to pay me by the hour, they could have negotiated that.
At-will salaried employment cuts both ways :) and in this case, everyone is happy. Anyone wanting more hours out of me is just trying to exploit my labor. I'm already getting paid fair value for what I'm producing.
If you are hiring salaried individuals on the basis on how many hours they put in a week, then you might be focusing on the wrong metrics. There were plenty of people in tech doing 20 hours of work a week, and spending the remaining 20 hours on hacker news.
I bemoan WFH, but not because of work output.
When you're hiring make this known so people can do their own filtering on their end, as well.
I know I get a lot of benefit from not commuting, from being able to make a healthy lunch out of my fridge & from doing laundry when I would have been walking to the coffee shop.
If anything I “work” more remote than I ever did in the office.
Maybe consider contracting instead?
Just because you haven’t made friends doesn’t mean the rest of us haven’t. On top of this, work friendships can just be that. Work friendships. Ones that last as long as you’re at that job, not all of them have to go outside of it. And that’s okay.
Also - it's springtime which means it's review season - the results are in and the entity paying me for my output is very happy with my output!
The option to go as I please (which would probably average one or two days a week) would be excellent, though!
My general thoughts are that there are a few people that got strong armed into returning, but most that are back in the office are happy to be there.
Some people have been really struggling with WFH and just can't make it work well for them, and they understandably want to get back to the office. That's great, and they should do it! But why not also let people who have been thriving under WFH continue to do it?
I have extensive experience managing and working remote and non-remote and I've never seen any benefit to non-remote work. Productivity and creativity are higher with wfh and stress and burnout are way lower.
It took me a few years to realize the effects of loneliness and the lack of social interaction.
But I do have one extra point: if work is fully remote (i.e., every employee is remote) things work much much better than when only part of the team is remote. You need to at least make sure your manager is also fully remote.
Maybe you're just making a joke and I'm not getting it.
Forget the fact that I don't have the space for a whiteboard in my home to begin with...
Very soon we will be adding viewer annotations (ability for remote viewers to add content/comments on your board). As you're facing your laptop during your remote presentation anyway, we've found that this works reasonably well. The augmented reality approach (via smart glasses or synchronized projectors) is also on the map but getting the timing right is much trickier. The UX of it is nothing short of magic but the market for people with glasses or synchronized projectors is fragmented.
As for your last note: you don't need a whiteboard! Flipcharts or electrostatic sheets are cost/space-effective alternatives. Also, you can simply point your camera at your notebook and scribble away. Indeed, many of us do this, it's very natural (though, admittedly, we're still getting some kinks out).
Huh? The reason why offices of big tech companies are closed is SOLELY due to covid.
My first job in an open floor plan (really a trading floor setup), we would literally watch colds and other ailments work their way up and down the rows each winter.
I would be fine in the office in closed space with other people if it make sense for my work, regardless of covid.
If a "really small risk" is 545k people dead in a year in the US, even with all the precautions we have taken, I think we fundamentally disagree on what a really small risk is. There are now more dead from Covid in a year than the entire durations of both World Wars combined and in about a month or so, we can lump in Vietnam in there as well.
And his case, although is very possible, also need further investigation, is it really because the covid?
The number of death is highly inflated, that number include every case remotely related to covid. Also the US population has increased considerably compared back to word war.
Also lockdown can cause death too.
He was 100% fine before covid, then all of a sudden has chronic leg pains directly after which seem very consistent with blood clotting and nerve issues that covid causes?
The excess deaths from all causes was up sharply in 2020, and correlates exactly with the start of the pandemic in 2020. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores (remove the default countries, and just add the US- you will see an exact overlay with covid cases and deaths). How do you justify your claim?
You are being willfully ignorant, though I am glad you clearly haven't had this affect you in any way. I have two close friends that have lost parents to Covid.
so mask only work with influenza ?
>He was 100% fine before covid, then all of a sudden has chronic leg pains directly after which seem very consistent with blood clotting and nerve issues that covid causes?
Could still be coincide with something else. Even if it covid that caused that, still need to how how prevalent this is. I know friends that got covid but recover fully.
>The excess deaths from all causes was up sharply in 2020, and correlates exactly with the start of the pandemic in 2020. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores (remove the default countries, and just add the US- you will see an exact overlay with covid cases and deaths). How do you justify your claim?
The lockdown also corelates with the start of the pandemic, how do u know its not caused by the lockdown ?
In the place that don't implement lockdown, the death chart look similar, how do u know if lockdown work ?
And by the way, death is not the only metric to go by.
Lets say you can reduce death number but in order to do that you increase misery, that would be suck, I certainly don't want that.
>You are being willfully ignorant, though I am glad you clearly haven't had this affect you in any way. I have two close friends that have lost parents to Covid.
I'm not blindly against lockdown, I'm againts lockdown because it doesn't make sense. It caused problem greater than the virus itself.
The lockdown has certainly affect me. I too have friends that suffer from the lockdown.
No claim was ever made that they are 100% effective. Vaccines are not 100% effective either, this does not mean they are ineffective.
> Could still be coincide with something else. Even if it covid that caused that, still need to how how prevalent this is.
Willfully ignorant.
> The lockdown also corelates with the start of the pandemic, how do u know its not caused by the lockdown ?
Because lifting restrictions is directly related to increases in cases, which is then directly correlated to the number of deaths? Willfully ignorant.
> I'm not blindly against lockdown, I'm againts lockdown because it doesn't make sense. It caused problem greater than the virus itself
We might agree that there may be more effective ways to keep people separated than a full blown lockdown, balancing health concerns with people's needs, but at the time, it was the best tool in the toolbox- and outside the US worked well- New Zealand, for example, which is pretty much back to normal these days after a duration much closer to the first time period.
As for your last statement, you are certainly implying that your own inconvenience is far more damaging than the lives of others. You don't want to wear a mask, you won't stay home, you... just want to let the people die and let the chips fall where they may. All the while claiming that lockdowns are ineffective while in your other posts admitting you didn't follow them [1][2]. "The thing doesn't work even though I didn't do it and I am fully aware it requires everyone's compliance to be effective." Sounds like you are ready to run for office as a Republican.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23817123 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24191298
Correlation != Causation. Willfully ignorant.
>We might agree that there may be more effective ways to keep people separated than a full blown lockdown, balancing health concerns with people's needs, but at the time, it was the best tool in the toolbox- and outside the US worked well- New Zealand, for example, which is pretty much back to normal these days after a duration much closer to the first time period.
South dakota, sweeden don't have lockdown and they pretty much normal all these times. Florida has short lockdown, but they realized their mistake and quickly lifted it. They are normal too.
>you are certainly implying that your own inconvenience is far more damaging than the lives of others. '
No, lockdown affect a lot of people, not just me and its just not merely inconvenience.
> just want to let the people die and let the chips fall where they may
No, I never said that. I support reducing/preventing death as much as we possibly can, but trying to do so with causing so much damage that is bigger than the virus itself, I can't support.
> Box Inc said its reopening is still scheduled for September.
That's probably the most reasonable timeline for tech workers. And even then, we'll probably see tepid support for that. Things aren't going to go back to normal in 2021.