That's really interesting. My feelings are exactly the opposite. Chats with coworkers are a "/zoom meeting" command away. Everyone's name shows up on the screen so I don't awkwardly forget them. My desk setup is exactly how I like it. I can listen to whatever music I want to all day. I can do chores to get away from the screen for a few minutes. No lines at the bathroom.

I don't think I could ever work at a non-fully-remote company again. There are challenges, and you have to force yourself to socialize at all, but it's working for me. I always enjoyed working in the office (was never really bothered by noise, I can focus through it), but remote is much better. The time that you get back by not commuting and the ability to start work without being "fully ready" is great. (I have an incremental morning routine now, rather than rushing to shower, eat, caffeinate before sitting bored on a train for a half hour.)

Yeah it’s a lot more convenient, but the parent was talking about their passion for the field. I think most people would agree on convenience.

It probably depends on what makes you passionate about a field. Some people value the conferences and getting to discuss fun topics.

Others like myself want to disappear into a dark room and code for hours on end.

I mean, that's cool, but somewhere, at some stage, people must get together to help you decide what to work on?

I understand your comment and see the sense in it, but it made me wonder about decomposing the clauses to see what it means if it gets broken apart (excusing myself for over analyzing what is a simple statement)

>somewhere, at some stage

Well - why not on a video conference? And what stage(s) really require this? Most folks know what they are supposed to do / need to do to make things work - those that don't are in need of supervision / mentoring.

>people must get together to help you decide what to work on?

I misread this initially as "decide what you should work on" but I still think that there's not enough emphasis on the "we" part - in that really I see these decisions as being about co-ordination and helping everyone else out as much as anything else.

Because:

Others like myself want to disappear into a dark room and code for hours on end.

Is the antithesis of working out business requirements / design etc so you have something to code?

I find the coding part of my job is about 5-10% of the actual job, mostly, it's working out what needs to be done, how I might go about it, and how to manage complexity.

It's rare that can be all done without input from others. I don't think I'd get very far if I just coded in a dark room for hours on end.

It's the old adage "you can go faster alone but you go further together"

We hear about how people are now working much faster due to remote. Which is not surprising. But it's not really clear if that will yield to things going much further.

A lot of it probably depends on how your team is structured. I have a product manager for working out what is to be done and managing complexity.

The technical side of what needs to be done is something I solve alone. The business side is just told to me.

Oh certainly, but that is not the part of the job I value. If that is relegated to a board instead of a sprint planning meeting, I am perfectly happy.

Others enjoy that part the most and treat the individual work as merely a necessary task.

My case is pretty much the opposite.

Remote work has given me almost two more hours of life a day (that I'd otherwise spend commuting), it made me realize how sleep deprived I used to be, and substantially improved my health - through home cooking, being less stuck to the chair, and having more time for sports.

Additionally, it has greatly improved my career, since the advent of somewhat commonplace remote work means that I have access to jobs in areas where the pay is substantially better (up to 3x my current salary). If I end up quitting it will be either to capitalize on those new opportunities or to set in stone my ability to work remotely.

> Remote work has given me almost two more hours of life a day (that I'd otherwise spend commuting)

I get this sentiment, but I want to stress to people who feel this way that long commutes are not a problem with our work culture, they are a problem with our car culture.

Instead of retreating to our homes in the suburbs, people should be demanding more compact cities with expansive public transportation. Instead of losing our "second place", let's fight to get our "third place" back!

Public transit and compact cities is not the awesome solution people make it to be. (I live in Europe)

Usually the commute time is longer because of trips to the station + waiting for the vehicle to come. Even worse people typically all go to work at the same time and rush hours form. No breathing room. Usually never being able to sit. It is horrible always and even more so during pandemics. Having exclusive seats at the vehicle and preordained vehicles vetted by the company. That works but only large companies can afford this. Also public transit only works in large cities.

Compact cities with houses are good. The cities in Netherlands are a really good way to model every society in the world. Everything in your neighbourhood just a 5 minute bike ride away. Everything else should be done remotely if possible.

Agreed. I live in Hong Kong which has arguably some of the best public transport in the world - which is great until you are out of a service area of the MTR, then it's undersized packed busses mixed with convoluted bus routes - which even without the heavy road traffic leave you feeling exhausted.

Doing the same commute by car has been a significant quality of life improvement - not least because I have a few square feet to myself while I'm in transit!

I used to travel with public transport to work. More than happy to not do it for 2 hours a day.

I don't know why 2 hours of public transport is better than 2 hours of commute by car? It's still time wasted.

Personally I would prefer 2 hours on a train to 2 hours by car, since I can read or reply to emails without focusing on the road.

But the idea of density is that everything is closer together, so transit time is less, and you have more modes of transportation available to you, reducing congestion. In the United States, most people don't have the option of a short commute or to live within walking/biking distance of work even if they wanted to.

The grass is always greener on the other side. It is quite difficult to read or reply to emails when you literally have to squeeze your body in a subway train.

I moved to Tokyo after vowing never to live in car-dependent hell again. I can say with certainty that the grass is greener on this side, at least when it comes to transportation!

Having control of a car is much better than the hell that is being a public transportation prisoner.

Cities with public transit still have roads, if that's what you prefer. More people on trains means less people on the roads, which is better for everyone. I think people should have free choice over what mode of transport they use, but in America right now the only option is: car.

At my work the people who moved far away to own a bigger house enjoy WFH - they have more space to isolate themselves during the working day, and a long commute they can skip.

I have a short cycle into work which is one of the highlights of my day and hate WFH.

It's probably easier to arrange remote work than to wait for our cities to be rebuilt.

Wouldn't public transit still take up quite a bit of time if you don't live near your office?

For one, everything would be closer together, which helps reduce transit time. Advocates of density and public transit also usually advocate for mixed-use zoning, which would make it much easier to live near within walking or biking distance of where you work. So with good city planning, you could drastically reduce the time spent commuting.

Even with a commute, riding a bus or train is much less stressful than commuting by car. You can read a book, reply to emails, etc..

This is probably another symptom of differing psychologies and preferences, but “density” and “everything closer together” sounds like a description of hell.

I’ve been to NYC, SF, Seattle… all that closeness (I called it cramped and stifling) was not something I would want to experience long term.

There is something in between NYC and an American-style suburb. I encourage you to take a look at Not Just Bikes [1,2]:

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKIVX968PQ

Like the Seattle area, or the SF bay? Those aren't any better, frankly. Too many people packed into small spaces. Even the precisely manicured green spaces get packed full of people, ironically looking to escape.

Seattle / SF are both still very car-centric and have pretty bad public transit. Unfortunately I don't know of any places in the United States that are representative of what I'm talking about, outside some small pockets which don't span more than a few blocks. Largely due to zoning restrictions.

Not Just Bikes has some good video of places in the Netherlands and elsewhere that come close to meeting the ideal. Take a look too at maps of small/medium towns in Germany or Japan compared to USA.

Cable cars, trams, busses, trains, taxis – if SF and Seattle have poor public transit, I've never seen a place which does then. And I say this as someone who lived in and extensively used said public transit in both cities.

Let's hypothesize about a utopian city where a person's housing is, at a maximum, a quarter hour walk/bike from their job at Apple. The moment that person switches jobs to Google, however, they have to choose between moving or losing every benefit the utopian city layout has provided. Worse, their new commute would be explicitly working against the design of this hypothetical city.

Workforces should not be (and are not with suburbs) tightly integrated into where they work. This is something important to consider. You can't have the same density of employers that you have today if you're also packing in the other services (residential, markets, drug stores, laundrymats, etc).

I actually live in Europe, so cars aren't my problem, as I already use public transportation. My commute is caused by the stupidly high rents in any area close to the center of my city - which hopefully is another problem that can be partially solved by remote work, since it could ease the demand and lower the prices a bit when fewer big earners need to live crammed in the same area.

More compact cities mean less living space.

Not necessarily. Urban/suburban spaces today are dominated by parking lots and four-to-six-lane roads. Eliminating those would make cities more compact without sacrificing size. With everything closer together, you wouldn't need the parking spaces in the first place!

Of course, I also don't think it would be a bad thing to stop building McMansions. Many consider Tokyo to be an extreme example of density, but even there it is quite common to find 80-160sqm detached houses. At half of Tokyo's density, people wouldn't even need to give up their yards.

People still commute an hour or more (using a lot of public transport) in large-ish European cities because there simply isn't enough housing in the cities (and through some kind of bacterial growth law, there will never be enough in the city) and what is there is of course extremely expensive. Naturally many people live in suburbian-ish things.

This.

I live and work in Paris proper, which is a very dense city. Transit sucks, my commute is around 45 minutes each way. Bonus points for when I have to take it in rush hour, with people pressed together and no air conditioning. Extra bonus points for the habitual breakdowns, meaning even more people per train.

Also, high density with "historic city" means very small apartments and very high prices. I really don't know how much better this is compared to US-style suburbia. Oh, we don't have clean air either, all the highways and city roads are congested, too.

This is just poor planning, no? I never said it's not possible to design cities badly. Look to Tokyo for an example of density and transit working really well.

True, but I think that more importantly it shows that it's not "easy", since cities that work well seem to be in the minority.

Plus, I'd say European cities, in particular, aren't really "designed", seeing how they have to contend with historic centers they can't touch, etc.

But I think that, more importantly, we should try to avoid having to be all in the same spot if it's not necessary.

Yes, there are some advantages to scale, and some things are easier / cheaper to do when you have 1M people in the same space as opposed to spread far and wide. But this also produces other issues, such as stressed people because of all the noise (not just cars, but neighbors, etc.)

I want to stress that cities are the problem.

Instead of being forced to trek into cities, people should be demanding to be able to work from any other place.

> Remote work has given me almost two more hours of life a day (that I'd otherwise spend commuting)

Only that I now spend most of that extra time for more work & I'm behind 1.5 years on all my podcasts

Those podcasts must not have been all that interesting to begin with if you're not listening to them on your own time.

This is pretty much my take when people tell me how much better commuting is on the bus or train. "You can read a book or listen to podcasts"

Come on, I don't do those things in my free time, I'd much prefer more free time from working remotely than fake "free time" on the bus.

Personally, I use the time for a little more sleep.

Recently I changed job, now my commute is 15 minutes, 10 kilometers. At work I don't have to cook for lunch, I have great air conditioning and above all I don't work from the basement, like I did at home during lockdowns.

In Australia we had been barely touched by Covid until recently. My work generally involves a lot of rural road travel and talking to farmers and I really do miss that. Can't say I miss the air travel too much, it's the random stuff that happens when you are on the road that I miss more than anything. Listening to truckies on the UHF, blasting music or just motoring with purpose, listening to the FM Radio with a schedule to keep and sometimes not knowing exactly where you will be sleeping is damn fun sometimes. Talking to random people in pubs in small towns, sometimes digging through their cast offs in op-shops. Sleeping in a swag in the tray of my ute if I had to or nothing else was available. Small town, rural Australia is always an adventure.

Now - at home in a make-shift lab and coding. I still talk to people but Zoom just isn't the same. Supply chain issues are giving me headaches and relying on transport and post to get my gear out to people is frustrating and time consuming in a way that throwing it in the ute and driving isn't.

I had high hopes we would basically be back to normal this year but Delta has killed that for the moment.

Yep. Gotta agree with herodoturtle. That first paragraph gave me a better insight into small town, rural Australia than anything I've seen on TV.

Also...

> Sleeping in a swag in the tray of my ute

Loved that. It''s so good it could be a line in a song. Nice writing!

That first paragraph was so much to read.

You write beautifully.

Thankyou!

That first line was meant to be "so much *fun* to read"

Gosh what a terrible omission! Glad I added in that second line.

I felt the same way, I was tired of it all for months, burned out working 14-18 hour days trying to keep up with demand as traffic on the site I work for grew 200% from Covid19 lock downs (people had more time to spend online).

I was in lockdown and just worked, stayed home, slept a bit and worked out, probably lived a prison lifestyle.

I've moved out of the city and have taken up some more outdoor hobbies which has been good, but more importantly, I just stepped back, now working 4-8 hours a day max.

I saved some cash and I've decided that if I lose my job for taking it easy, then so be it. Funnily enough, I seem to be more productive now.

My experience is the exact opposite. Having to be around people all day has been slowly draining the will to live from my soul for years. I dread the return to ‘normal’.

Another thing that I hear a lot is people complaining about a lack of work/life balance due to work from home and again here I feel the exact opposite. It has always felt really strange to me to confine work and the rest of my life into separate blocks of time and space. Going to an office, and spending an 8 hour block of time just on work, then going home and spending another 8 hour block on personal things before sleeping seems really unnatural and unhealthy to me.

With WfH I can blur the lines between them. When I’m stuck on something work related, I can just do some mindless chore around the house and that usually ets my mind unstuck. There is nothing more stressful than sitting at my desk in the office while beings stuck with nothing to do to take my mind off it for a while other than browsing the internet.

It just feels more natural and way less stressful to me to naturally flow from work to personal stuff and back.

Yes, it was so amazing to just get to restructure my life as I saw fit to achieve what I needed to do.

That and just being able to do things in parallel was extremely valuable. Laundry could be run during the day. Same with the dishwasher. I could be around at 1 to put ribs in the oven for dinner. No more having to schlep down to the post office for missed deliveries.

It was quite fun while it lasted as I prefer to be able to blend everything I need to do into a single list.

> There is nothing more stressful than sitting at my desk in the office while beings stuck with nothing to do to take my mind off it for a while other than browsing the internet.

Go for a walk? Talk to another colleague about the problem or present them with a related theoretical?

Same with me dude, I'm getting burnt out just waking up, sleeping, and playing in the same place again and again. Used to have a lot of fun with other people in the office too

That’s not healthy, can attest. You need a space dedicated for work and you need to get outside once in a while. If it’s all mixed up it can go really wrong over time. I hope I’m not overstepping, this is heartfelt advice from someone who did it wrong for too long.

Yeah the thing is my work desk is in front of my bed lol, including my pc for gaming and other stuff. SO it's pretty bad after a while

I had a similar setup and got sleeping problems, anxiety and worse after a while. Also started to eat there. It all mixes up and you slowly lose structure, motivation and confidence. If you have any opportunity to bring in structure into this, preferably through separated spaces, and most importantly through routine/schedule, start now!

Find yourself a co-working space somewhere in town. I live in a rather small town, but even here I found a place with about 20 other people. I started 2 weeks ago. I did more than the previous 6 months. I just cannot work at home.

I'm the same. I don't think people realise how much of motivation is socially derived from your peers who you like and respect.

I think that is a very self defeating attitude by someone who didn't even bother to try and improve their situation.

You don't have to be the sad lonely remote worker if that bothers you so much. Remote work has definitely HUGE advantages allowing people to find a much healthier work life balance and has undeniably a net positive effect in comparison to what we had before, but I agree, 100% remote and never stepping out of your house again and meeting other people is NOT healthy at all. Good news is, nobody forces you to live like this though. I have signed up for a co-working space where I live. WeWork offices are littered around the world. It costs only $199 or something like this to get a flexi hot desk where you can go to any WeWork in your country. I go into a co-working space at least once or twice a week. I sit next to other people who also work and we chat, socialise, we still play ping pong during our breaks and we stroll out to a pub afterwards. Most co-working spaces even organise weekly/monthly social events which makes it even easier to connect with other people.

If you feel isolated because of remote work, then it's not because of remote work, it's because of your own choice to not help yourself. It's like a child crying that their trousers are wet after repeatedly pissing themselves instead of going to the bathroom.

Good for you, but I don't think it's fair to pass judgment on someone's situation without knowing the whole picture.

No, it's tiring to see increasingly more people just overcomplicate some of life's simplest things.

If a person misses social contact then there is a really really simple solution to that. Unless the OP is currently in prison they should get off their arse and step outside their home and just start meeting people and talk to people if that is what they want. It worked like this hundred of thousand of years ago and it still works the same way today.

Most people have a super hard time socializing in arbitrary locations.

That's why places where people freely socialize sell massive amounts of alcohol, alcohol reduces inhibitions and I imagine the stress level of interacting with someone for the first time.

Most life partners come from (frequently forced) proximity, same for best friends: kindergarten, school, university, workplace, etc.

Pontificating about what people should do doesn't help with what people have actually been doing for hundreds of thousands of years.

I can't work in a co-working space since the projects I work on mean no-one outside of my company can see my screen.

Ha. All I said was that the current way of working killed my passion for working in enterprise IT. Not sure why the character assassination.

As it happens, I spent most of the year on the beach with zero regrets whatsoever.

Enjoy your WeWork.

That's 3 passions in one post. Are you a manager or HR? Or both? And does that correlate with wanting to be live and in person?

We are never going back to normal. I don't know how to make people understand that. It seems they keep believing that if they just go along and do what they are told, things will be normal again.

You will see more variants of covid, more restrictions. If you go along with vaccinating and wearing health passes, you will be left alone for now. But you will have to continue to accept whatever they say. You no longer have any right to say no.

Seems like we're on 8kun now...

I was never on 8kun or any similar sites, but honestly, I have similar thoughts and doubts as the post you were responding to had.

I'm not saying we never go back to normal, but I have my doubts about when that happens, and I am afraid it will take much much longer than expected.

It was "flatten the curve, and stay at home for a month". It was more than a year ago.

Then, it was "only if we had vaccine, things could go back to normal". Then we had vaccines, so we were told to take the vaccine, and once we have a reasonable ratio of vaccinated people, things will get better. In developed countries, basically everyone who wanted, could get a vaccine by now.

In the news we already hear about the bad outcomes with vaccinations and the variants, and there is also already chatter regarding the third "refresh" dose.

The writing is on the wall. This thing will take a long while.

> once we have a reasonable ratio of vaccinated people, things will get better. In developed countries, basically everyone who wanted, could get a vaccine by now.

A lot of the problem is that "reasonable ratio" and "everyone who wanted" are not the same number. The number I think of for reasonable ratio is 4 out of 5. Vaccination stalled well before that.

Yes, that is true. But it is one more reason why we are not getting back to normal any time soon (in my opinion).

It will get only more difficult, in the early phases of the vaccine rollout, with patience and improved logistics, the ratio of vaccinated people improved rapidly. But what can they do next? Now comes the "stick", they will introduce more and more hurdles for the unvaccinated, but that takes time, causes resistance, and it will not increase the numbers fast enough.

All the while the variants are coming, and the existing vaccines do not show the same protection against the new variants, so there is a chance that the cycle will just continue with new variants, and new vaccines, new variants...

Yep, the response is driven by bureaucrats passing around PowerPoints. They all have excellent job security.

Then what's the "correct" response from a non-bureaucrat?

Good luck not having the "stick" be what opens more eyes to previous and current scams the politicians play.

You do know that this will end, right? The Black Plague ended and they didn't even have antibiotics back then (heck, they didn't even have proper handwashing back then :-) ).

Yes, there will probably be some changes compared to life before Covid, but by and large normal activities such socializing, in developed countries, will be back to regular levels once we've vaccinated enough people. Which should be by mid-2022 at the latest.

Of course, if people refuse to be vaccinated, they're only prolonging this hell. Can't have both personal freedom and lack of personal responsibility, democracy doesn't work like that.

People yelling about what others need to do are prolonging this hell.

Gently telling others what they need to do doesn't seem to be working, either.

I'm convinced that a certain percentage of the population just doesn't give a crap about others. Hard to say the exact percentage, but something over 10% feels like a safe bet.

people who refuse to vaccinate and mask up when appropriate are who are prolonging this hell