I think the hardest thing remote work has to replicate is just random small talk between smart people that can lead to great ideas. This speech from Richard Hamming about Bell Labs sticks in my mind, especially the segment about open vs closed office doors. I'd say remote work is objectively better for pure productivity in terms of getting things done, but you run the risk of limiting innovation I think

https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

>Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.

>random small talk between smart people that can lead to great ideas.

Outside of maybe a very innovative R&D department I don't really see these "brilliant ideas that only smalltalk could achieve" in your typical run of the mill company.

My experience in a siloed company is that the information doesn’t “flow” to me, whether I’m physically present or not. Most of the “small talk” I get is distracting noise from unrelated departments whom I have no business with.

I’ve had no problems chatting and calling with people whom I have actual business with. And here I’ve had the most success with planned meetings and agendas.

My job is not to invent the next big thing.

I was going to say. Academia is relatively dispersed, compared to the few tech hubs around the world. Creative people will be creative wherever they are. And there are plenty of cool open-source projects, from k8s to jupyter, that have been built by dispersed teams.

The academia can handle this, because it focuses on long-term collaborations that may span decades. Your closest coworkers and the topics you work on don't change just because you got a new job and moved to another place. You continue working with the same people on the same topics, and there is an elaborate system of conferences, workshops, guest lectures, research visits, and sabbaticals that keeps the collaborations running.

I'm not sure how much of that is applicable to normal jobs where your employer owns your work.

In normal jobs, innovation and creativity are optimized away, and may even be seen as threats to status quo. There's little incentives as well, as you can get blamed and fired at any time. It usually doesn't go that far, but contracts often say company even owns your work in free time, so everything is set up against the employee to end up the way it does.

Academics heavily leverage in person meetings and conferences to exchange idea. Much of my conference time was spent chatting with colleagues rather than attending paper sessions. We don’t get that in a virtual conference setting.

doesn't have to be ground breaking research, could just be ideas for product iteration or for an employees own side project. Benefits individuals more than the company really

The way this benefits the company is that individuals are happy and create relationships with coworkers making work more enjoyable and making it harder to quit. Companies wants you to feel like a family so you'll stay for a lower salary or so you'll accept more grueling conditions.

Knowing this, from a company perspective, remote can work if individuals have a way to create relationships. In my experience, some people bond over work but most bond by spending time with each other doing friendly activities which are not work related.

An in-person party or a holiday is the best option but some online gaming is a decent substitute in these authoritarian times. Some people swear by virtual coffees rotations that randomly match people but I had a couple of good ones and dozens of cringy/weird. None of them ended up being positive for creating relationships, at best it was useful for knowing who is who.

"Companies wants you to feel like a family"> I strongly recommend everyone to browse through blind once a few weeks to dispel any such notion.

Gaming definitely helps. I've been playing through the Halo campaigns with a couple of my coworkers and it's been great.

I think it can be similar to having your company support slack channel open.. not necessarily subscribed but seeing the issues that customers come to your support staff with… that can provide surprising clarity… maybe product owners should be focused on that sort of thing and maybe this highlights issues with where I am…

At Spriggy we had senior developers enrolled into Intercom chat. This takes agile to a whole another level. I knew with certainty what we had to get done. It was not a jira ticket close but 100s of customers to help. Stressful, yes, but getting real problems solved, double yes.

Do you think that can scale to only half the real problems solved, but zero stress?

I think if you talk to customers with problems you are never going to have zero stress.

> Outside of maybe a very innovative R&D department I don't really see these "brilliant ideas that only smalltalk could achieve" in your typical run of the mill company.

So where are good ideas supposed to emerge from? I've yet to see much of that beyond technical smalltalk.

When I engage in random small talk between smart people that can lead to great ideas, it's usually on Discord.

Are there any public servers on topic you enjoy that you'd recommend?

You're better off browsing what interests you personally. If you come by a great group of people or person, it'll happen by chance, and will be fueled by your personal interests.

> But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on

It seems normal mow to move job every 3 years so that’s not a concern

That’s a very Silicon Valley tech influenced meme.

I don't believe so. It's the only way to get a proper pay increase in corporate America. Internal promotion in most corporations comes with at best a 10% pay increase most of the time and includes increased workload. If I leave my company and go to another I can pretty easily get 15-20% increase and stay in the same basic job I'm currently at. Most companies don't offer any benefits that increase based on loyalty so I don't know why any would expect someone to stay long term.

Outside of startups, most of which fail anyway, I think you’ll find a lot more stay in the 5-10+ year range than you give credit for. Certainly 20+ is unusual these days. I’ve had multiple 10ish year jobs and don’t expect to hit that number.

Moving jobs entails significant risk, which is one reason why offers are high. Maybe you won't get on with your new manager or team-mates. Maybe the codebase is a tech-debt spaghetti nightmare. You can't carry over the reputation and clout you had built up in your old job and you have to prove yourself all over again, and you have less say in how things are done.

Sure the interview process should surface these problems, but applicants can make a "bad hire" as easily as companies, especially as both are showing their best front, and this is more likely if you are enticed by a fatter paycheck.

>Moving jobs entails significant risk.

Yes - but so does not moving jobs. I have several friends who played the big company game, got to a senior level and then got ditched. Their problem? Well - they got shafted and emptied out at peak expense time; mortgage, kids, divorces etc, they got emptied when they were still 15 years short of thier retirement target, and their CV's are mono-corporate.

This made finding work very challenging.

In olden days you could say confidently that if you got to director level in a big company in the UK you were set. There was a job for life at a very nice salary if you wanted it.

Agreed, it's difficult to make the call when to make your move, and staying too long can be harmful. Generally I'd say it's better to move around more earlier in your career when you're figuring out what kind of company environment is more to your liking and what skills to specialize in. But it's easy to get complacent and stick around too long in one place.

In any case, you have to weigh the pros and cons, but jumping ship just for the lure of a fatter paycheck is not necessarily going to make you happier or do your long-term career any favours.

Yes, true. Jumping ship for money is a motivation to mull for sure. Sometimes you can't say no, it's just too significant in terms of finance. Sometimes it's worth considering that the extra $ will change other pressures (perhaps rent on something close to work that will give back 2 hrs a day travel time, perhaps more / better childcare, perhaps pay off short term debt and change the dynamics of your finances). But, yeah, moving for money can screw things up.

My advice (fwiw) is move for growth. Can you identify something that will change your CV for the good about the new gig. If so then the extra money is essentially paying for your next job - you will be able to find something even better (hopefully p>0.??) after, if this one doesn't work out.

This is all correct but the places I've worked at all had the same problems already:

> Maybe you won't get on with your new manager

Manager turnaround (one per year) because they leave or get promoted is pretty common. In fact the better the manager the quicker they seem to move on to some other team or higher up that has more potential for impact.

> or team-mates

Engineers don't have that much influence on hiring decisions. And even then, it sometimes turns out they may need more hand holding than expected or maybe that you don't get along on a personal level. So the risk is here even if you stay at a company.

> Maybe the codebase is a tech-debt spaghetti nightmare.

Let's be honest, it almost always is like that even where one works right now. But I agree it can be worse than what you are dealing with at the moment.

I think the difference is in attitude to address the issue as well. This is indeed really hard to assess ahead of time. In my last job I thought we had a good attitude towards recognizing tech debt for the first few months, then realized it's not the case and all plans to address it soon appeared to be just empty talk.

> You can't carry over the reputation and clout

Yeah, definitely. Unless you have built a public reputation in the industry.

In the general case you will indeed have to build new reputation in the new place. But often that's also an opportunity for those who failed to succeed at that in their current environment. So it's only a risk if you have something to hold on to.

I believe the risks of moving jobs are likely outweighed by the higher pay check and experience to gain in the new place. A few companies even allow you to come back (given available headcount) if you actually are someone with clout and a record of high impact work. So the risk for those folks is likely not that significant.

I think the bottom line is still that folks don't leave "just for the money". There needs to be some promise of the new job providing something you are not getting now. For successful long timers it's often just "got bored with being in the same place".

The risk of not getting experience at some places is also not to be ignored. It's a balance of course but if you have a few 3 year stints at good companies with some tangible output wrt impact to talk about it's usually better than spending 12 years at one place. Eventually you might end up having to move, and then you'll not have as much salary to expect (or the confidence to ask for it) compared to those who played the job change game.

It’s true across most industries in Australia. The old social contract of employment, “work for us your whole career and we’ll look after you your whole career”, disintegrated in the 90s when companies started treating all employees as disposable. Now it’s everyone for themselves and loyalty between employees and employers is a shadow of what it was.

Not really. I see that pattern across the entire software landscape, from big companies down to startups. It's true that there are occasionally people who stay put for 17 years at Microsoft, but those seem to be the exception rather than the norm.

This too is a type of open door. You see more breadth and talk to more people by regularly changing employers. It enables you to move towards problems worth working on.

Most companies are not graciously funded laboratories so to me the argument for "let smart people chat randomly" is moot. Those companies have plenty of creativity-killing processes that make sure people never looked beyond what they have to do today and maybe tomorrow.

Or just the reality that most employees don’t have a big picture creative role.

I suspect most developers don’t really have a meaningful hand in shaping what they work on.

Yes, and that's by design. We are very often constrained from the start.

> I think the hardest thing remote work has to replicate is just random small talk between smart people that can lead to great ideas.

Some of the world's most used and innovative software was crafted by smart people all over the world whose small talk was mediated almost entirely over email, BBS, IRC etc.

This continues to be the case, it's just the mediums have changed slightly, while they're still mostly text-based, there's also the multimedia-based methods thanks to things like ubiquitous video, voice and conference calling.

> Some of the world's most used and innovative software was crafted by smart people all over the world whose small talk was mediated almost entirely over email, BBS, IRC etc.

At what speed though? You're obviously correct that such small talk can and does happen over asynchronous communication protocols. But I would imagine it's far slower than doodling on a napkin with a colleague during break. Businesses are going to desire something faster. So far, nothing has beaten a simple phone call in my (admittedly limited) remote work experience.

> But I would imagine it's far slower than doodling on a napkin with a colleague during break.

I think you overestimate how much relevant these napkin innovation situations are. Talking with some coworker and drawing something over a napkin doesn't mean the idea will be revolutionary at all. Or even useful. It is most of the times, a romantic image that make people feel like the smart innovator they would like to be.

> But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on

This assumes the company will be around in 10 years and that I am still working there.

How can anyone get any relevant work done in that environment?

Maybe if Microsoft would make an MS teams feature that would operate more like discord then that random smalltalk would happen.

Behind this is one of the problems. In a corporate environment you can't choose the best tool for the job at hand, collaboration. MS Teams is probably the worst tool of its class in this area yet it is, evidently, chosen by people in higher positions who make decisions based solely on their opinion and for the sake of complying with corporate standards, once again, not based on evidence, but, by some MS white paper saying it is. That said I am not sure they should be spending time on more functional over getting the very basics, like video chat, working as well as almost every other platform. Just my personal opinion on what complete garbage it is when you have to use it every day of the week.

> MS Teams is probably the worst tool of its class in this area yet it is, evidently, chosen by people in higher positions who make decisions based solely on their opinion and for the sake of complying with corporate standards, once again, not based on evidence, but, by some MS white paper saying it is.

Could you expand more about why you think it's the worst tool in its class for collaboration?

My experiences with it seem to be at variance with this observation.

On the mac, the video and audio randomly do not work. In a team of 20, this means every day someone has to stop the app, restart it and rejoin the call. Doing stand-ups every day, this is a PIA. 2,000 'user-voice' votes, broken for 3 years.

Occasionally it has some bug that makes it use up endless ram.

The cut and paste does not work properly. This one has thousands of 'user-voice' votes and has been broken for over a year. edit: over 1000 people, broken for at least 3 years: https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...

Slack has completely changed the underlying video and voice platform and, for my teams, it has always worked perfectly.

Thanks for providing that insight. It sounds like a platform issue.

I’ve often been curious about the animus towards Teams because I’ve always used Teams on Windows and the experience has been pretty good. I’ve been very productive with it, especially the last little while when I had to use it to coordinate a large distributed team. I haven’t experienced any of the above issues on Windows. In fact on Windows the video codecs and video networks are so good that they rival or exceed Zoom’s in many cases. As well, we have the large enterprise license too (most of us are in E3 or E5 tiers) —- I’m not sure if it makes a difference in terms of QoS but many of the complaints I’ve come across from small business or free users I simply don’t experience on an enterprise Teams license.

I think the biggest issue is that on non Windows platforms, Microsoft does not pay enough attention to make sure there is feature or reliability parity.

I realized this recently switching to macOS. Outlook on the Mac is crippled and simple things that I relied upon on the Windows client simply don’t exist on the Mac client. Even simple features like showing a calendar panel or being able to define more complex mail rules are missing.

For Teams, the code base is ostensibly the same since it’s an Electron app but it sounds like Microsoft’s QA efforts on the Mac are not on par with its efforts in the Windows side.

I say this because if Microsoft wants to, it can do better. Visual Studio Code for instance is excellent on all platforms and keeps getting better. My main desktop is a Linux machine and i’ve switched from trusty gVim which I’ve customized for 20 years to VS Code for dev work because it’s that good.

The copy and paste bugs are supported on all platforms, as you say, likely on account of the common code base. Also, if you have 16 or 32G machines Windows machines you rarely see the performance issues. Working for a large corporate, in fact a very larger MS partner, probably why slack was not a choice, 8G machines are the par.

Oh I have a 32GB RAM machine so that could be factor too.

If even that much thought was given to it. Teams comes with Office, so it is quite possible that alternatives were never really examined.

This is my experience. I've witnessed a company migrate to MS Teams given that it was included in their existing subscription. That alone was enough to kick-off a migration from Slack.

Yes, I agree. Even worse. Other not considered at all, but 'because we use office'. At my last job that was the reason.

Just a list of "all unreads" like slack would resolve most of the grief from teams.

I've tried configuring banner/feed options, but my teams is just a constant stream of notifications shit that I cant seem to tune properly.

> The key thing is here:

> > over the first six months of 2020

This also implies that most of the employees already knew each other and worked together before being forced into remote work.

One of the biggest problems with switching to remote work is that people carry over the in-person relationships they were already comfortable with.

It's the new hires who suffer most, in my experience. When everyone else has months or years of in-person relationship building and a comfortable network of people within the company, it can be hard to break in.

So true. I’ve personally experienced this with starting a new job in January 2020 and subsequently working on 3 teams.

Team 1: 3 engineers of various tenure already on the team. Built good relationship with 2 before pandemic put us in WFH about 6 weeks in. I still talk to both of these engineers on a regular basis, even though we no longer work together.

Team 2: Changed about 8 months in due to a reorg. Working with a different set of people who had all worked in this area together pre-reorg. Very hard to “break in” and ramp up. Things were not going well. Manager, another engineer, and my manager all moved teams.

Team 3: 6 months later. Brand new team with engineers all coming from different parts of the company plus an external new hire. Working well together but we’ve all been remote working together the entire time.

Team 2 was _rough_, and its situation is what most new joiners will face.

As someone who manages people for a living, the problems on Team 2 were entirely your manager’s fault.

That was my take at the time too. I do take some blame for not flagging the situation to my manager or my skip (their manager) earlier, and for not being more aggressive about it. It's so easy to think it must be you when things aren't working out.

I did not escape without a bad review. Somebody had to take the blame when things didn't work out. That was also some textbook bad management: my poor performance was first described in the meeting where the review was delivered. Never once in all the 1-on-1s we'd had. Skip said there was nothing that could be done because all that mattered was that I did not deliver compared to my peers.

My manager moved teams then left the company not too long after as well. I'll never really know what happened, but I assume they got a poor review themselves.

What are specific actions to address these problems the manager could have done?

I imagine a few small group tasks to help the new hire come up to speed on certain things might help. That is, assign the new hire and 1-2 other team members to work on a somewhat small task, something that the team members could easily accomplish in an hour or so, but will take a bit longer because the new hire is also being taught at the same time. Highly encourage them to use group video chat, and not to just have each be hidden behind a screen share. Being able to see the faces of the people talking is important to getting the right nuance of what they are expressing (sometimes that's the difference between something obviously being a good natured joke and an ambiguous and anxiety inducing statement).

Hopefully after a few of these ice breakers, everyone will have a better grasp of each other and more natural communication and relationships might come about.

Seriously. Some of the people in this thread... you need new managers, folks.

Yep. Team 2 was me 6 months ago. Went into the office for 1 week and that almost completely solved the problem.

What I’ve found is that I will work with people I didn’t previously know if there’s some forcing function but the people I randomly reach out to for working on things re mostly people I knew previously. Reaching g out to strangers for help/collaboration with something mostly isn’t very effective in my experience.

Yeah, I'd argue that this hasn't changed during/due to the pandemic.

Gravitating towards people you know happened already even in an in-person setting.

The difference is lack of opportunities outside of core work to engage with others and getting to know them, i.e. there are fewer and less diverse forcing functions. In the past it was getting lunch together a few times, now maybe the only forcing function is your manager assigning you to work or as a mentor, etc. Which is not as effective IMO to build healthy same-level relationships.

I have felt the worst for my Jr Engineers... usually you come out of college and you get sat with a few seniors, and we show you the ropes. We help you through it all, and defend, or attack your positions as we see fit for your learning in enterprise software. Suddenly you don't have someone sitting next to you that you can say does this look right... worse if you ask over IM client, you have no idea that they are heads down in some other totally more important issue. They suffer the worst since without them, we can't have more seniors.

It doesn't need to be so. I started in my actual company 3 years ago, NY based startup and I was based in Europe. The first months we had every day meetings with one of the senior engineers in USA going through the changes we implemented that day, how it worked with the rest of the codebase and systems, how and why this worked and that didn't, etc... It worked perfectly, considering we still work in the company and we are know the seniors. The system we started working on, that was freshly released then, is now smooth and stable. We did it full remote and also with a 6 h difference in time zone, and it worked.

The thing is the time investment may look big because you have to specify a meeting time and reserve a slot of an hour for it. But it is not different from having it spread across the day as the juniors find a problem, interrupt the senior, get the explanation, etc. I worked in both environments: in the office and full remote. And regarding work and knowledge sharing I don't see a big difference. The real difference is changing the way of working and interacting, but once that is done it works equally fine. The rest is a matter of preference related to interacting with people on a daily basis. But for me, that is outside working hours when I go to the gym, join activities like quizzes, sports, etc., with people I don't work with.

Also I want to add that I connect in videocalls with colleagues, when we have not much work for a few hours just to chat about work and out of work things. And we never met in person.

>say what you want about MS Teams, but they improved their product by leaps and bounds over the pandemic, much of which after the first 6 months

Did they? I've been using it at my company for years, since long before the pandemic, and I don't think I've seen any improvements since the first day I started using it until now. Every issue I have with it has gone unchanged. The only change I can think of is when they added support for custom video backgrounds and blur, which is helpful but doesn't really affect the experience of the app itself.

I find it funny how at work I use this giant behemoth's chat app I hate and then when I'm done with work I use this silly app (that used to be) for people who play video games, Discord, which has had a far superior UI/UX to Teams for years and keeps getting better and better. For every issue I have with Teams, the same issue has never been present with Discord. Every time I use Teams I just wish I was using Discord.

And I'm not a Discord shill or something. It's just such a weird contrast. It feels like Discord has been enterprise-ready for years and Teams has never stopped being a toy rip-off. Trying to share anything technical or code-related has always been super seamless for Discord and is still basically a nightmare every time I try to do it with Teams.

Several things come to mind:

* UX for sharing from screen underwent a lot of change but I really like where it is now

* Blur/custom backgrouns/together mode additions. The last one actually did help with a feeling of camaraderie

* Switching into a thread-first model really helped conversation continuity on the teams I worked with

* Various smoothing out of integrations; namely with sharepoint. When you're at MS you're using internal sharepoints for docs and slides, and it's nice having access to everything and having it all feel integrated.

* PPT presentation mode, for me, was way better than using actual PowerPoint to present things in my setup. Not sure if others felt that way, but I did.

Prior to the pandemic, it felt like a more-corporate version of slack with less features that ran crappier. But I went from "I don't like using this" to "this is fine and I can get my work done with it" by the end of 2020.

This is my experience exactly. Teams is also somewhat easy to get lost in once you get a lot of rooms open. Our IT department has decided to use Teams as a ticketing system. My manager decoded to use Teams as a PTO calendar by assigning tasks to yourself. All we really needed was a good chat app for private conversations and small teams... I don't know why companies have such a hard time solving these kinds of issues.

> I don't think I've seen any improvements since the first day I started using it

At some point they hid the new topic/thread input behind a button, and that really improved my life, since people stopped creating new threads when responding to other ones.

The discoverability in teams is horrible though. And something about it makes everyone want to create a new team for every thing.

>At some point they hid the new topic/thread input behind a button, and that really improved my life, since people stopped creating new threads when responding to other ones.

Actually, yes, I remember this now. This was definitely a huge improvement. I was just trying to think of an addition of something good rather than fixing of something bad.

Not to mention kids being at home.

I got so little work done that first few months until daycare opened back up. You can’t do much work with a one year old and a four year old demanding your attention. Focus work was impossible, and speaking in meetings had to be timed for the few moments of quiet.

First half of 20/20 was really hard on a lot of people: the pandemic, civil unrest, political instability. It was a difficult time for sure. Then there is the whole shock of kids at home from school, spouses at home, potentially lost jobs, etc.. That said, I suppose it is intuitive to think that a bunch of people leaving campus life and suddenly working from home would have an adjustment period anyway.

I'm also a little skeptical of the their leap from their dependent variables to "other research suggests less innovation." It's probably a fallacy on my part, but I am also skeptical that a company with what must be billions of dollars invested in high tech campuses is going to find that remote work is just as good as a campus environment.

I have been working fully remote, in remote friendly or fully remote companies for 12 years or so now. It is definitely a different environment and different way of collaborating than working on a campus. I would be interested to see similar research on such companies. I suspect that the results would be replicated, but would be interesting to know for sure.

Related anecdote: I was visiting Microsoft campus in Redmond pretty regularly around 2018/2019. Most of the meetings I attended included many people calling in to their video conferencing system from around campus and sometimes from home. I thought at the time that it seemed like they were on their way to a remote work situation anyway.

I would agree with this. Ancedotally, at least for the first 6 months until the fall of 2020, my team and its management were completely accepting of sub-par WFH setups and attitudes. We couldn't really blame the guy whose two young daughters screamed all day and tromped up and down the stairs next to his desk.

Now it's different - remote hires are expected to have a decent working environment (either at home or elsewhere at their own expense).

Elsewhere at their own expense? Yea that's gonna be a no from me.

"We used to pay for entire buildings to house our employees, but covid made us realize we can pass that cost on to them!"

It kind of depends on the details.

My company has offices that you can go to, but if you want to work remotely then it’s up to you to manage your environment.

The company already has offices. Why would they pay for more just because you don’t want to go to the offices.

There is a one time budget for hardware, such as a second monitor at home, we’ll have to see how that plays out with upgrades in a few years.

Because they don't have to pay for those offices anymore. If the company is allowing for remote work, they can also downsize those offices (subject to lease conditions), saving piles of money. (Commerical space is expensive!) If some of those savings aren't passed onto their employees, those employees will choose to move to a different company that has a more general WFH allowance, probably get a raise in the process, and work with a company that's just generally less obtuse to work at/for.

Once you factor in long contracts, the people who are desperate to go back to the office, and greater space requirements for proper social distancing - they pretty much do need to pay for those existing offices. Hopefully things will re-equilibriate, but I'd guess that will take another 2 years at least.

The cost of outfitting an employee with state-of-the-art equipment for their home office is at most a few months of commuter benefits. It's a comically small price to pay for employee happiness and productivity.

Employers that don't or aren't willing to pony up are going to be losers in the long run. Cheap is cheap.

The equipment is trivial and most tech professionals have it at this point or don’t really care. But you’re not going to get paid to move from your urban studio to an apartment with an office though some companies did pay for coworking spaces when there was no office for employees to commute to pre-pandemic.

Because you are saving pennies but losing dollars of productivity?

To be fair you could put your commuting costs into a piggybank and after a year you would likely have enough for a decent chair and monitor.

It’s always at “your own expense.” Me and my partner who also works full time wound up moving to a two-bedroom unit down the hall. Why would the company pay for this?

I was set up for working from Home. Home schooling 2 preteens is what has killed my productivity.

> say what you want about MS Teams, but they improved their product by leaps and bounds over the pandemic

Yet for some reason they refuse to implement simple improvements with thousands of comments on their feature request site, 2 simple ones that could probably be implemented in a day:

1. Option to disable [read more]

2. Option to make the mute toggle hotkey global so it works when the app is not in focus

And beyond experience and environment for working from home, there was an incredible amount of stress from circumstances outside of work...

cmd+k -> @jdoe -> enter, /zoom -> enter, click “join”

They should do a follow up study on how many people will die from Covid by working in the office. I rather wonder how preventable deaths impact innovation in teams.

From Israel we can see that that death rate per million with 90%+ of adults double vaccinated is ~4 per day. In the US that works out to ~1300 deaths a day. This is the new normal until everyone susceptible dies.

The office doesn't sound so good when it's sold as the place which ensures you can't live past 70 for your line managers convenience.

Just guessing deaths from commuting the average amount would dwarf that number and it never stopped them from wanting you in the office before.

Anecdotally I've seen reports of people getting Covid more than once. So even the assumption that if Delta runs rampant through the unvaccinated population at least we'll gain full herd immunity that way is perhaps not true. Plus you always have people too young to be vaccinated or immunocompromised that will be a reservoir. I'm not an epidemiologist and claim no expertise but it certainly appears we may always have the threat of this virus in the background. Bleh.

Nature is correcting for our artificially enhanced lifespans thanks to modern medicine.

Life, uh, finds a way.