> Now, I am fully aware that there's a low of people for whom the horror of commute doesn't make up for the gains of socializing and others that just abhor having to talk to real-life people. Then there are people who work mainly to get paid and do not care to invest themselves beyond what is necessary.
Are remarkably condescending.
Folks opting for a better work-life balance, who might not like to commute, or who prefer to socialize in other settings, "do not care to invest themselves"?
Maybe it's not the OP's opinions that are controversial, but rather the implicit judgment that comes along with it.
Then there are people who work mainly to get paid and do not care to invest themselves beyond what is necessary.
(I added the italics for emphasis.)
And what does that have to do with preferring to work from home?
It's almost comical the implication that those same people, pre-COVID, weren't going to the office and phoning it in.
IMO the two topics--being... I dunno... not ambitious, and working from home--are entirely orthogonal concepts. And the implication that people who advocate for wfh options are more likely to "not care to invest themselves" is, charitably, misguided.
If anything, wfh makes it possible for more people to achieve their professional goals since the labour market has opened up significantly for folks in other geographies, or who might have restrictions in their personal life (e.g. being a caregiver, having disability, etc) that make commuting a significant barrier.
> What exactly is wrong with that, or why do you think the OP implies there is something wrong with that?
Because the OP goes on to say:
I always saw tech as the field where a disproportionally large amount of people truly love what they do. Mostly, because it takes so much grit and persistence to get good at it that most people wouldn't succeed unless they see something in it beyond putting food on the table.
It's clear they view "grit" and "persistence" as virtues, and "not [caring] to invest themselves beyond what is necessary" as a vice.
Frankly, this smells pretty strongly of hustle culture, and I've had more than enough of that.
And again, I wouldn't want to force anyone to come to the office. I am merely asking for other people's opinions.
I ask because, right here, you're tying "[caring] about the fun and meaning [of your work hours]" to working in an office. And I honestly just don't see the connection.
Can you say more about that?
My question goes more in the direction of: For me personally, the communal and social aspect of occasionally sitting in the same room with the team I'm building software with has always given me a lot. And I have experienced recently that loads of people will not even take a 20 minute commute once a week to have some few meetings face-to-face because they apparently don't even see the slightest addition in value from that. I can't really wrap my head around it (because I obviously have an orthogonal viewpoint here) and was trying to get more insight into this way of thinking.
Look, I'm a pretty extroverted, social guy, and as a senior manager, the vast majority of the problems I need to solve involve high bandwidth, 1:1 communication because the problems I solve are people problems first and foremost.
So obviously, for me, in my role, face-to-face interactions have a ton of value!
But I absolutely recognize that a lot of other roles are not the same.
When I look back at my days as a developer, I spent a lot of time in the same room with people! And 80% of that time, our headphones were on and we were banging away coding while interacting digitally. Sure, we'd often pop those headphones off to have those high-bandwidth problem solving conversations, but the vast majority of time those conversations were 1:1 discussions, and could have easily been had over virtual meeting tools like Zoom or Teams.
That's the reality for a lot of individual contributors.
Just because you can't wrap your head around that, doesn't mean that experience is invalid.
Wasn't it saying that such people likely prefer WFH, (and not the converse) ?
> It's almost comical the implication that
I don't think that implication is in the original text.
I saw each those descriptors separately, able to appeal to those they resonated with. And honestly, the characterization of "working to get paid and not investing beyond what is necessary" is not a deprecation of me, my attitude, or the balance I've struck.
I can understand if that specific sentiment does not resonate with you, but for me, I've come to feel accepting and happy with the ideas that: my work is purely in exchange for money, it is not my identity, and that once I've put my part in, I want to use my time and energy towards the other things that make me happy.
I'm not saying I don't get great joy and satisfaction out of my hard work and coworker relationships, I really do. For me, that comes with: "This is my task, and when I've satisfied it, that's all I'm interested in doing". However what really brought peace to my mind was incorporating: "And that's OK." into my outlook. "I do not care to invest myself beyond that" is not a characterization I feel the need to be ashamed of. Perhaps it's hubris on my part, but I'm proud of the push back that I feel entitled to give, and I'm proud to say "this is the limit of my investment in work".
I've just noticed that if you turn your back for a second, then out come the wolves.
Less coffee pot talk the better as far as I am concerned. I have my friends and life outside of work, and I like to keep them separate. As the saying goes, "you don't shit where you eat."
Im no social butterfly, and understand initial boundaries are important, however stone walling everyone at work makes for a miserable work place for your colleagues, and for yourself (due to all interactions being ultimately pointless beyond strictly business).
I'm not perfect, and it's not like I haven't ever broken my own rule, but I think I have been burned all but one time. I've seen how good of "friends" coworkers are when things like promotions, salary increases, etc. are on the line.
Like the group of philosophers, Wu-tang Clan, once said, "protect ya neck, kid"
Maybe some people truly are but I suspect most people who think their coworkers are friends are pretending like that friendship wont go away rapidly when one of them no longer works for the company.
So much of OPs post is trying to get from coworkers what many get from friends.
That's bizarre to me to have an explicit attitude of not befriending colleagues. It's never been something I've specifically sought out, it's always organically come to be -- but it's not something I would actively work against. I don't understand the benefit to that mindset.
Less coffee pot talk means work sucks. It means you don't learn about other roles in your organization. It means not breaking down communication barriers between people and departments. It means people know less about each other and each other's work. It means less empathy and sympathy around common struggles.
Nowhere is anyone saying "your only friends must be work friends". But if you are unable or uninterested in establishing any connection with the people around whom you work day in and day out, IMO, that's abnormal.
??????
His entire question was basically, "Am I looking at this situation differently than most people?".
We couldn't really answer his question without knowing his true feelings.
And BART (a different rail system) is even more expensive.
That’s not negligible: that’s almost three hours of work for me to cover the cost (pre-tax). And I’m fairly well paid. Most engineers aren’t paid half as well. It’s a much bigger hit for them.
The time value is of course then on top, but the parent accounted for that separately.
In Boston, if you don't have a car you almost certainly wouldn't be taking commuter rail with fairly few exceptions.
Likewise, work-from-office people get something out of that experience that is more valuable to them than 2 more hours per day of free time. It varies from person to person.
> work mainly to get paid and do not care to invest themselves beyond what is necessary
Dude, I am heavily invested into my work, but that doesn't mean I need to care for your social deficits - it can, but these should be mostly orthogonal things.
Social investment is what I realized I really need to decrease at work, lol I still do it too much even virtually ( what is possible ). Too long I have stuck to bad jobs because of colleagues and bonding.. much better to get this into a more "professional relationship", because you know, while your employer tries to meme the "friendly colleague" he never actually gives a shit.. so turns out better for me to make real friendships outside of work ( yeah, even with colleagues) and use my commute time for other social things - but stop "soft-socializing" with colleagues in office for nothing in the end !)
Where's the analysis of the job to see if it can really be performed ideally remotely.
Also, "hard" is a straw man. As a boss I want output not effort and part of being near coworkers is to avoid getting stuck and wasting resources.
> where is the connection between investing yourself into your job and going in to the office
If I was your coworker or boss and I showed you that connection for the job in question would you admit it and come in?
Where's the analysis that says it can't? If you want my ass in the office, shouldn't the burden of proof be on you?
If you need convincing to return the the office you were hired to work in then you probably aren't the type of employee a boss would want to retain.
If you're a "manager", morale issues on the team are your issues. This is basic, obvious stuff; if the manager isn't comfortable thinking about these things, maybe they should leave their job?
Again, if you don't like the way an employee works, you can order them to change it. If they don't, you can fire them. But you seem to be under the impression that "I'm the boss" is some kind of rational or moral argument and that employees need to feel a certain way about following your orders and realize that you were right all along. "I'm not threatening, I'm just convincing you with the argument that I'm the boss".
If being told to do things that the company is paying you to do is triggering your morale issues then you probably aren't going to work out at all. If all you wanted was a few dollars more you'd have already asked that in a far simpler way.
When I get a coffee I don't check which one the barista wants to make, I assume they're willing to make anything on the menu because a job is a package deal.
> that employees need to feel a certain way about following your orders and realize that you were right all along
No, and in fact my point is that as your hypothetical boss I and the managers would have decided if we think WFH is working. Given that we already decided I'm not opening it up to you to debate and honestly I wouldn't believe you were arguing openly because you've got a huge motive to stay home and comfy.
The point of an office is to assemble a critical mass and if I'm trying to get everyone in and you aren't willing, you're basically deprecating yourself. As much as I may like you I'm not going to retain you because now I want a different style of work done than you want to do.
> you seem to be under the impression that "I'm the boss" is some kind of rational or moral argument
You're stuck on this idea like you have a right to have things discussed with you and to make everyone hold until you're happy that the situation centers you and you've been well heard. That's silly. You're like a landscaper and if I sell the house with the yard I'm letting you go.
It's not about disrespecting you because it's not about respecting you because it's not about you.
So, this is a basic labour rights question: How much say does the employee have in the way the business functions?
Your attitude seems to be "if you don't like management's decisions, you never should've worked there in the first place". It's clear your view is that management runs the business, the workers work, and they should not, and do not, have any meaningful say in the way the business functions.
And if you want to run your company that way, hey, that's your call.
But that's not the only way to run a business. Hell, this attitude is why labour unions were invented.
And given industry-wide labour shortages, I suspect you'll find that labour is a lot more empowered, and many people will opt to flee for another workplace where they have a greater say.
Again, your choice. But with that choice comes consequences.
As an aside, this comment:
> You're being paid so you can't claim to be outraged at being told to work.
Is a pretty strong indication that I'd never ever want to work for you.
Study after study shows that monetary compensation is not, in and of itself, motivating. There are myriad factors that lead someone to stay or leave a workplace, and "being paid" is just one, and not always a particularly big one.
Nope. Unions aren't to force bosses to hire a type of labor they don't need. I've got relatives who worked in dangerous jobs that needed unions and this sort of emotional grievance nonsense is literally insulting.
As I said, if I get rid of the house I'll get rid of the landscapers. You're trying to use a union to force me to pay you for unneeded work. If we decide we need an office then we need an office workers. No hate on you but you're saying you choose not to do that role.
Do I need to enter into collective bargaining with the Starbucks staff to convince them my desire for a latte is reasonable? Do they have "enough say" to make me drink an espresso instead?
> How much say does the employee have in the way the business functions?
As much as they have a financial stake in the business. Zero by default. I'll ask you if I want to know what you think but you have no "say" as in the ability to make demands. I pay for your knowledge and therefore advice, it's not your right to make me follow it.
> Study after study shows that monetary compensation is not, in and of itself, motivating.
Sure, and study after study shows that people who need external motivation are indistinguishable from potatoes. I don't expect money to motivate you directly, I expect you to connect the motivation from your life goals to your paycheck to the Monday mornings.
> And given industry-wide labour shortages, I suspect you'll find that labour is a lot more empowered, and many people will opt to flee for another workplace where they have a greater say.
You see, this is why I wouldn't have asked you in the first place because you think that explaining basic economics to me will suddenly convince me to make your cushy work-at-home time a human right. Trust me from my time as a boss and more recently merely as a hiring reviewer, the desire to "have a greater say" has never left the lips of a single productive employee.
If you want to "have a say" then join a poetry circle. I want you to have as much, and only as much, influence as you have sense. It's not about empowering you, it's about using you to make both of us a living.
> Is a pretty strong indication that I'd never ever want to work for you.
Oh no. Employee who refuses to do what is needed is unwilling to take my money.
I suspect there are two big difference between OP and many of the readers here.
At least for sure, Berlin vs most major US cities is night and day different in terms of commute and enjoyment opportunity. Berlin is a fun city full of things to do, places to eat, and clubs. Plus it's all accessible without a car.
Meanwhile, in the US, it's usually a very different story. Doing something after work often involves a much greater time cost, thereby reducing the likelihood that someone will partake of the opportunity. So office work is more likely just office work with no after-work fun.
Just like most people in the US have no clue what life is like in the big EU cities, most Europeans have no idea how different US life is. I've lived both, and I can say without question that it's easier to have a fun office+after-office experience in a city like Amsterdam or Berlin (or London probably) than Denver, Dallas, or most other big US cities.
OP likely doesn't factor this in and comes to the naive conclusion that it must mean we don't like talking to people.
But boy do I absolutely hate my commute, to the point that it shadows whatever positives there are when working from the office. I live and work in Paris (proper), a "big EU city with plenty of things to do". My commute is less than one hour each way by public transit (and I'm lucky enough that my line is rarely affected by random incidents or strikes). But boy do I hate it with a passion.
It's time that is basically wasted. Yes, I read a bit, but it's much worse than if I took the time to read sitting in my sofa. I also get a bit of exercise, but again, it's much worse than if I went for a stroll at a more convenient time. It's a block of time that is fairly fixed during the day and which is tiring without getting much of anything in return.
When I was commuting in the Bay Area, I'd walk half a mile to the local BART station (a walk I rather enjoyed), then I'd spend the next 90 minutes on a bus or train until I arrived at work. If I got to BART after 6am, I'd stand on the train for the first 60 minutes. Then I'd reverse the whole thing on the way home, although I typically got on the train early enough that I could sit the whole ride home. All of that, because that is what I could afford to do. The funny thing is, if I was paid at my hourly equivalent for all of that time spent commuting, I could afford to live closer to the office.
I don't know that I like working from home per se, but I definitely hated that I spent 1-3 hours a day, every day, traveling, when I could be doing something I wanted to do. My ability to have hobbies, or spend meaningful time with my family, is basically blunted by the fact that I can't afford to house my family close to where I work. Its better now that I'm out of the Bay Area, but it's still a problem, and will be a problem, for the foreseeable future.
There were attempts to "distribute" this, but as far as I can tell, they didn't really work out as expected.
I still think that this distribution is the best approach, though, instead of building 200-story buildings around the office towers. And this distribution can take multiple forms, one of which is remote working.
I do feel some nostalgia for the in-office days but mostly for the times I was alone, like driving through an industrial zone at 5 A.M and seeing the bright red lights of a biochemical plant, the smell of car exhaust for some reason, seeing someone sitting at their desk by the single lit window of an office tower, getting to work first and getting to turn on the lights and get the coffee ready in a completely empty and silent building among many completely empty and silent buildings.
This gives me visions of Need For Speed: Porsche Unleashed in the industrial zone.
Looking back at my younger self (who regularly drove 190+ kph to work on the freeway), I relish this idea.
But is there more to it? The night-time high speed driving, the office-before-others situation... is that not some unique sense of freedom or power? \
For me there is definitely magic in being a capable human in isolation with power to live and excel, especially when I know there will be other humans appearing later. Even at home remotely, there is a sense of power being in control of myself, my coffee-making, my news reading, and then optionally my meeting attendance...
This all raises an interesting point. I wonder if attitudes towards WFH can be predicated by zoning / city density. Even before COVID was a thing, Japan's reputation for instance is for the expectation of going out drinking with the boss after work.
I would add nature as an opposite factor to city density. A lot of magical places exist, but they don't usually have offices and jobs. Remote work enables one to experience them.
Many years ago I had been remote working for a couple of years and then realized that I didn't have to continue living in Dallas with 100+ degree summers and air quality warnings several days each month. I moved to a ski resort area in the Colorado mountains. Even without the time flexibility that I had (which enabled me to snowski on weekdays when the slopes were empty... fresh powder all mine!), the summers were bliss with dozens of mountainbike trails of all degrees of difficulty. Needless to say my physical fitness became the best of my life, without effort (it was "play"!)
That was probably my favorite place to live (and work) in the world, even counting beaches in Phuket, Thailand. The nature options were beyond what most people can imagine. The only reason I left was lack of available remote work when my job ended in 2011. So I moved to Amsterdam for a job and got to experience the oppsite but also awesome lifestyle.
I would suggest remote workers take advantage of their freedom and spend some time in different places. My ski resort location was planned just as a month, but I stayed three years because it was so great. Such a thing just wouldn't have been possible had I been working in an office. One can always go back to a company with an office after exploring the alternatives.
Therein lies the problem. I have struggled with this, as I've seen places I "discovered" and loved become unlovable because too many others discovered. I know it's selfish of me to want it for myself, pristine, and not want to be overrun with others like me.
Despite this, the world is really large. For example, there are magical places in northern Thailand (minus the snowskiing) where one could setup shop and have spectacular nature, relative seclusion, but still good access to low cost food, housing, healthcare, etc.
What I dislike intensely is when the youtube-influencer crowd shows up. I feel embarrassed to see other westerners trotting around, talking loudly while holding up a camera, and acting as if they are kings on holiday. I know I exaggerate a bit, but I still worry at the impression it gives to local people. I like to be welcomed and appreciated, not viewed as an exploiter.
All that beside the point, I do think that travel benefits everyone. Some measure of care must be taken to "tread lightly", but it can be done, and on budget. And who knows... whether Ecuador or Mexico or Thailand or even rural France (no jab, just light humor to the amphibians :P... it's very lovely there), there are sights and experiences to be discovered and even new human connections to be made.
If I were to commute to our city office it's something like 3 hours round trip daily. Even being able to go 95% of the way by train, that's exhausting. (I did it for 18 months half-time with another company. It was not sustainable.) However, I could also--if I chose--live within walking distance and certainly easy public transit distance of our office. I choose not to do so because I like my semi-rural house.
But if I did live a short walk away from our office I would go in semi-regularly. And can certainly understand someone who lives and works in a city wanting to go into an office--especially given they probably live in a relatively small apartment.
>than Denver, Dallas, or most other big US cities.
Dallas yes. Denver has a pretty nice downtown. Boston, Manhattan, even San Francisco. It's a matter of where the office is and where you choose to live.
Yeah, I can very much sympathize with people... some of my ex-colleagues in fact... who lived in small apartments (and even shared apartments with others) during the COVID forced work from home times. Oh and people with kids, especially small ones...
A lot of people in nice cities intentionally choose cheaper apartments at the expense of space because they expect they won't be home all the time. Suddenly being trapped in your small space could be like a prison sentence.
> Berlin is a fun city full of things to do, places to eat, and clubs.
And I already have my friends outside of work to go do these things, or to go to the bar, or check out the restaurant.
> we don't like talking to people.
No, more likely it's just that I don´t want to hang out with you.
Let me explain. Berlin might be a place of diversity, but it's not really heterogeneous. The majority of people that came here for "the tech scene" are hardly interested in integrating. It's been almost 10 years since I moved here and I'm yet to find a company where there is a strong push to get people to speak German or even be involved in any aspect of the local culture.
Everyone will work together and will have no problem sharing the environment when needed, but very few people will actually feel like they want to hang out with their co-workers if they have other people in their circle. What happens at the end of the day is that most people just end up getting close to those who have some degree of affinity. British people will hang out with most British people. The same for Southern Europeans, Eastern Europeans, etc...
Your post did say, "others that just abhor having to talk to real-life people". Not me, but others did take that to suggest that many of us were antisocial or incapable of social interaction. I don't take offense because I will easily admit to not being interested in talking to most people. Granted that doesn't mean I don't care about their wellbeing; it just means I don't want to spend my time on conversation which I think offers little to either party for the time and effort.
I didn't comment on whether you want people to come back to the office or not. Some want it desperately, and some (like me) will pass up every job opportunity that has any measurable in-office requirement.
Don't feel alone though -- you are not the only person wanting to come back into the office. About 1/3 of my colleges at my previous gig this year were asking for this. 1/3 of us were thinking, "wtf, hell no, we don't want to come in". And 1/3 were not publicly commenting :). In my experience during the COVID times, it did seem that the people most interested in returning to the office were younger. The older folks were openly joyous of being able to work from home.
Random aside, but it's fascinating to me that, when we ran a survey at our company, we had literally the exact same results.
I'm kinda jealous of sociologists and economists, because there's some fascinating research papers that will come out of all of this.
What absolutely does not work is when one of them is home pregnant and the other one is playing games with his buddies most nights at the gamedev shop they work for :). That is why I left a AAA game company. Had I been single, I would still be there. It was nerd paradise.
Socialization and social life are important to people, but "we need to return to offices for our social lives" rings hollow as a message precisely because some people here that as either the message "you must have a social life with your coworkers [for the good of the company]" or the desperate "I don't have a social life outside of work [please send help!]".
Those jobs certainly have a fun "club" aspect when hanging around the firehouse waiting for disaster to strike; and that aspect is gone when everyone's working from home doing whatever.
And then are people who are fully invested, but also aware that a lot of time in office is spend on ... other people trying to get socialization. Cause they don't build relationships outside of work, but still need to talk to people, so they drag meetings and discussions forever.
And that is not being invested more, but it is awful common. WFH greatly minimizes that. In return you get spend more time with actual friends/family.
How are you supposed to "build relationships outside of work" in that environment?
I get that your opinion of this is that it's degenerate, and this may be true - but have some sympathy for folks whose regular, non covid experience even when they can walk to all the urban amenities is "I can't make friends because I would have to break into a group, which means an activity that isn't focused on transactional gain, which isn't allowed in the city due to a combination of taxes, rental prices, and most of the city preferring to drink alone and out voting me"
What have you tried so far?
Do the things you enjoy: run, bike, ski, live music, drinking, church - whatever floats your boat. Other people do them too. Meet them. Be friends.
Actual community does not requires a business. Building relationships does not require business either.
I did not said it is degenerate. But it is dishonest when what I described is framed as somehow being more performing, because of spending more time in workplace slowing down effectivity of it. Also, It is possible to create relationships in workplace and then keep those as you move to other workplaces - assuming people are willing to socialize outside of workplace. It is possible for communities to form around blocks, parks or hobbies.
That seems like a barb, but the fact is that it's quite difficult to maintain community organizations without a central business or religious organization. However, profit maximization and digital first precludes physical community, where you have the people you have. Everyone can opt out and play WoW instead.
And also, no I am not much fun of evangelicals nor conservative Catholics for that matter. Too much authoritarian control, too much hate and too much of paranoia. (And yes, I grew up in christian environment).
> people for whom the horror of commute doesn't make up for the gains of socializing and others that just abhor having to talk to real-life people. Then there are people who work mainly to get paid and do not care to invest themselves beyond what is necessary.
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-03/disabled-...
Maybe the worst part about WFH is the increased tendency to cherry pick a line of text and derail the main topic. All because feelings of being judged personally, in this case by a sub-optimal word choice. It's almost like we are being forced to debate semantics instead of substance with attitudes like that.
This was a stand-alone comment, separated from the comment about those that don't like to commute or socialize. I don't think they were implying that one means the other. That's how I read it anyway.
BTW as someone that works to get paid and does not care about investing myself beyond what is necessary, I wasn't offended by that remark and I don't think OP meant it in an offensive way. To me it comes off as accepting it as a valid reason for not wanting to come in.
Can someone shed some light on this? I'm in the office for at least 40 hours a week. Then each day I get home, cook dinner, clean, bathe, workout sometimes. I don't even have kids or a long commute.
If I'm not socializing at work, when am I doing it? Two days a week? That is bleeeeaak.
Even with 4 hours of chores a day, that's still 4 hours to do whatever you want. Doesn't mean you spend them all that day, or all of them socializing. Maybe you use mondays to study, tuesdays you spend more time cleaning so wednesdays you can go out do something.
Also consider that if you strictly socialise in a work context, most of those relationships will grow distant relatively quickly when you or they leave for another company, which means it's harder to build long lasting friendships. Those can be really handy at times of transition in your life, which is where work friends usually fail first.
If you're able to do better than that, then you are in an uncommon bracket.
To be fair, I personally am on an uncommon bracket where I usually socialise over the internet, people who make games tend to like playing them too, and there is no commute.
That said, you're still framing it as a work thing. Your peers can do whatever they want, but the rest of the world still exists. Unless you're saying everyone within 20min of your commute path also follow this routine pattern, but then I would expect you to be on an uncommon bracket.
There are countless activities you can partake that involve interacting with other people and give you opportunity to create friends.
Leave work at 5 (hopefully!). Gym/exercise for an hour, commute for 30min, dinner for an hour. That's already 7:30pm. Add in chores or errands or distractions or whatever and 8pm comes quick.
Like yeah, I could start doing microwave dinners or not exercising or replace all my food with Huel like someone actually suggested in the comments here. Or move right next to the office or leave work early. But my god I'm not going to hyper optimize my life in order to maybe see people late on a weekday.
My whole point in this entire thread is that I socialize during work. At lunch, during breaks, between meetings, etc. Time I would have not been working anyway (because I'm not a robot). This is what people have been doing forever just fine.
That's still 6 hours left. It's pretty easy to find some socialization time in there unless you're taking 4 hour long showers.
This isn't just theoretical, _clearly_ many people socialize in the evenings.
Doing the hard math and saying I have 6 hours is just theoretical. _Many_ people may socialize in the evenings, but I'd be surprised _most_ do.
It might not come for free, but you can make it happen if you actually want it to happen.
Replace all food at home with Huel. No more cooking, no more cleaning, no more shopping (no more driving to stores), no more wondering if you can go out for dinner or if food will spoil.
Make sure all your clothes can be washed together (either all tones of grey, or all colours). Make sure all your socks are the same. Do washing once a week on a weekend.
Move closer to your office to eliminate commute. You don't cook anymore, so can get a place without a good kitchen for cheap.
Suddenly you have infinite time. For what it's worth, I would socialize with people from work (and ex-coworkers) after work. 5pm, off to the pub or a restaurant. Then walk home since I'd live near the office which would be near the pub/restaurant (since we are going after work).
Oh dear, you've already lost me.
You may have 6 hours of time left, but that doesn't mean you have 6 hours of energy reserves left to socialize or otherwise. (Clearly many people spend their evenings in low effort activities like watching TV on weeknights, too.)
True story: a new employee moved to sf. In my office, we had a standing weekly drinks night at the local. Everyone was invited (NB: and not required to drink in any way.) I mentioned it to this person. He/she doesn't drink. Cool, do yourself.
And then, dude wanted us to switch to boba. Nope, ain't happening. And actually had a tantrum w/ managers involved over us not wanting to cater to his hangups about alcohol.
I even mentioned it on here and had HN commenters pissy that I -- a grown ass adult -- didn't feel responsible for rearranging my limited outside-of-work social time to suit someone else just because he happened to work with me.
Another possibility is that, although the English is excellent, there are probably implicit cultural values and ideas that are unfamiliar to me.
(Incidentally, though I don't think it's the case here, I've also sometimes seen tone like that slip in when someone is astroturfing, or writing a persuasive piece around misrepresenting their real position, but is not good at it. It's a bit like Fellow Kids.)
I live in a major metro area close to the city center. I worked in a hybrid WFH environment prior to March of 2020 when COVID-19 started freaking people here out. I've now been fully remote 100% for a number of years, and I work with a firm based in another distant US state (with no local office). Do I miss friendly banter with some previous coworkers whom I liked on a personal level? Yes. Do I miss it enough to want to go back to an arrangement where I was expected to be in-office 2-3 days a week. Absolutely not.
For me the benefits in productivity and convenience while working from home outweigh the camaraderie or team lunches or whatever. I still lunch with some of my former coworkers semi-regularly. We pick a place fairly central and those who can show up do. Does this mean that I'm a socially inept miscreant? I think not. It just means that I prefer working in an environment that is maximally comfortable and of my own choosing.
To drive my point home allow me to make a statement: I will never again accept any position that requires me in the office full-time or really any more than a single day per week at most. I just do not have to. I don't tend to target working for <impressive-brand-name-company>, so I have plenty of choices to work with lesser-known companies whom are (very) happy to find someone competent to help them build out their tech stacks. I've found that those lesser-known companies are much less likely to push hardball WFO tactics. If they do...then I simply start answering my unsolicited emails. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Good luck to you, OP. I hope you find happiness out there.
There’s also WFH but within the same country, WFH globally across all timezones, etc etc etc.
As such, I personally consider it more of a company culture thing rather than WFO vs WFH. Where does the company fit in these philosophies.
There’s definitely no such thing as the WFO’er that wants to force their preferences upon others any more than there are WFH’ers doing the same thing.
> There’s definitely no such thing as the WFO’er that wants to force their preferences upon others any more than there are WFH’ers doing the same thing.
I can only go anecdotally on this but that certainly hasn't been my experience. I assume there are some WFH'ers who want to force their preference, but I've never seen any of them. However, I've encounter it many times from the reverse. I am pro-WFH, which might explain why, but again all I can go off is personal experience here.
I personally wouldn't want to force everyone to WFH, but I'll never willingly repeat that experience either.
I think we're at an odd almost feverish inflection point right now. I say this typing on my (giant) home monitor.
Given that the WFH crowd has no expectation of collaborating in person with anyone and 90% of the WFO argument is predicated on other people being there with you, I don't see how this statement could be possible. WFO absolutely want other folks in the office, whereas I don't see WFH feeling the same outside of some kind of safety in numbers (e.g. they won't force me to come into the office if a lot of my coworkers are also at home)
How is this at all a good thing?
It's basically saying: "I've got a limitation because of my choice of working environment, therefore to make life "fair" — which it isn't at all ironically — I'm going to impose my limitation artificially on the rest of the group."
Because I can't play with that toy, no one else can.
As a remote employee I will always try to gravitate towards companies that accommodate me best, but I’m not opposed to the idea that some companies want to be in-person and don’t want to deal with remote. I just chose not to work for those companies.
You think WFH is every individuals choice in this new world. It isn’t.
The last place I worked had 25,000 people on its main campus. Three gyms, three coffee shops, four cafeterias and more square footage than the pentagon.
When every person chooses, in a fit of glee, to WFH all the time, that community dies. Maybe in a generation, the world will adapt, but I look back on the mid 2010s as what will possibly have been the best part of my lifelong career due to the energy, the learning, the comraderie, and the amenities of my tech job.
WFH is a group decision. Don’t think it’s morally superior to choose WFH.
I’m like OP, I see many benefits in terms of living flexibility and people caring for dependents. But it will have profound negative consequences on professional development and social development for workers going forward.
I interviewed at a place like this, with all the in-site amenities. They were particularly proud of offering breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day to the staff. As I finished my last round of interviews, it became obvious that they offered this because they expected everyone to be there for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day.
I did not accept the offer, and I have no regrets.
In the end, they will fire you if their numbers don't align in your favor, but hey, they fed you.
But I wouldn’t be where I am today without wfo early in my career.
It would be nice to come up with some new ways of handling this. Maybe the more senior folks who want to be in the office lead a team of juniors, who can then choose to wfh over time, as they decide how much benefit it gives them.
Yeh thats reasonable enough. I do miss the social aspects of working in an office, I just don't miss the logistics of it like the commute, or the cost, the social pressures or the lack of freedom. As you say work is a third of our life, it seems reasonable that people wouldn't want it to be any more consuming.
> You think WFH is every individuals choice in this new world. It isn’t.
You say this and then don't really expand on it further. Do you mean its not a choice for those not in IT? Of course we all know this, thats the point, if you can do your job from home it should be a choice thats open to you. Its not for everyone, thats the problem.
> WFH is a group decision. Don’t think it’s morally superior to choose WFH.
1. No its not. Its an individual decision. It affects a wider group, as does any individual decision, as is the decision to force working in an office.
2. Nobody said its morally superior, other than that it seems to me morally superior not to force decisions on people because it makes you personally happy.
As for the arguments on community, that community mainly seems to be involved with shops and land mass. I'm not sure I'd call that a community, at least one thats not corporate controlled or impossible to replicate remotely.
And I do think some are saying WFH is morally superior in that they think WFO is something "forced" on introverts. My point is that WFH is something "forced" on extroverts. Introverts' decision to WFH affects an office advocate as much as an extrovert's decision to have everyone work from office affects a WFH advocate.
Ah, apologies, that makes much more sense, though it is of course an individuals choice as to whether you will work somewhere that allows WFH or not (all factors considered, of course).
> As someone else stated, I think the end result will be different companies choosing how they want to have their workforce operate, and workers deciding whether to work for a WFH or WFO company.
This seems to be a fair solution, though I don't think we're there yet. If a big tech company decided to declare itself as entirely WHX, you'd get a wave of people resigning (because it doesn't match their preference, so they're going somewhere that does), which would restart the whole fight over it, which is why a lot of companies are still in this middle ground of not doing anything yet. But after that initial wave you'd hope it'd get a lot more smooth, and it'd just be treated as any other job preference thing.
> I do think some are saying WFH is morally superior
I haven't seen this myself, but as another commenter pointed out there are of course bound to be a load of subcultures on both sides. I'm sure there are some that say WFO is morally superior. But I don't think the majority of either group are saying that.
The same is true for parenting as well. In 1970, almost 35% of the population was kids. Today, it’s closer to 20%, and in many states and cities less than that. There has been a resulting collapse in the infrastructure supporting parents. Parenting is just a lot better and easier if everyone around you, especially in your cohort, also has kids. I think the only way around this is pluralism. If you want to have a lot of kids and be around people who have a lot of kids, go to Utah and let Utahans maintain the social norms that encourage everyone to have kids. If you don’t want that, move to New York.
Same thing applies to WFH. I don’t think letting people choose at a granular level is optimal. Instead, organizations should probably decide whether they want to be an office-first or remote-first organization. And then people can self select into the organization that fits their needs.
So if you drive, you “leave from the office” (i.e. calc the distance from there), or drive to the airport, and getting from home to the airport is on you.
Curious to hear if this is different for others.
Many articles on this when you Google, but here’s one from a CPA https://www.bpbcpa.com/the-rules-employers-must-know-for-rei...
When you are doing "real" work from home (in bureaucrat-German: "Telearbeit"), your regular workplace is at your home. You need a separate, lockable room, the room needs to be inspected by the employer's safety advisor and data protection officer, equipment such as chair and desk as well the room and electricity are paid by the employer. Safety and health regulations apply in your home same as for the company office, e.g. lighting has to have appropriate brightness, no storing dangerous chemicals like toilet cleaner in the bathroom, etc. Since your office is at home, public holidays (which are location-dependent in Germany), taxes and regulations of your home apply to you. If you travel to the office, it is reimbursed as regular business travel ("Dienstgang"). Any other business travel is reimbursed as having started from your actual starting location (e.g. your girlfriend's) or your home, whichever is cheaper for the employer. But since all this is incredibly onerous and expensive, nobody does "Telearbeit".
The alternative, which everyone uses, is "mobile work" (bureaucrat-German: "mobiles Arbeiten"). That was actually intended as a regulation for e.g. salesmen traveling from customer to customer, only sometimes working from the office. Here, your regular workplace is in the office, meaning that traveling between your home and the office is never reimbursed. Rules, holidays, etc. apply as if you were in the office, even if you are working from somewhere else, e.g. a customer's or your home. Since things are thought to be "mobile" and "random", workplace safety regulations do apply but do not need to be inspected. The employee is responsible for observing them at their current work location (i.e. usually not at all caring about all that crap). If you do "mobile work" from your home, you pay for your own chair, desk and power.
When HR writes emails about WFH and you do pay attention, you will notice that they are carefully avoiding the term "Telearbeit" and maybe even "home office" and phrase everything in terms of "mobile work" (which is optionally 100% from your home) ;)
"Working from the office is more productive."
"Great do you offer higher rates to offset the costs and share some of that additional productivity?"
"Not really. We offer the market average of all jobs, wfh and wfo. We can't really afford more, renting office space is expensive."
"Would you lease a car for me, count commute time towards the workday and refund my gas and toll costs?"
"No! That wouldn't be cost effective!"
It may be that WFO does make the business a bit more, but it's actually less than the employees cost to get into the office each day. In my experience most employers would happily load their employees with thousands in costs to make a couple extra hundred bucks themselves.
The WFH crowd are unhappy if they don't get a choice in where they work. The WFO crowd are unhappy if others DO get a choice of where they work.
Or to put it another way, one side are unhappy if they're forced to do something they don't want to, the other is unhappy if the first are not forced to do something they don't want to do.
No. The points of view are not equal and opposite.
Some people who advocate WFO do so because they just want to work in an office (for various reaons) and they don't care how many co-workers do the same. But others want other people to also be present in the office _to create the environment that they desire_. People who advocate WFH have similarly varied motivations, but none of their motivations require other people to change their behaviour.
Of course it does. Some people who WFH will want things like no mixed meetings - either everyone is in the same room, or everyone is entering the meeting from their own computer - there's an example in this very thread. And even if you don't go that far, there are various smaller ways everyone must adapt their behavior to properly support hybrid work modes, just like WFO-only or WFH-only.
Why is that?
I find screen-share mentoring on dev stuff that more fruitful I stuck to that even when forced back into office. Less covid, less other awkward closeness, better for ears and eyes :) (Admitted, only non-computer-work mentoring is different).
I believe it's because coworkers rarely talk about non work stuff when they are WFH. Maybe it's just my company, but when we were in office I felt everyone on the team had some sort of relationship with each other because we'd eat lunch or talk about sports, or even the weather. Now we pretty much only talk about work stuff, which ends up meaning we silo more and collaborate less.
I partially disagree. Such hybrid situations often end up being office-first, meaning that WFH folks have a harder time i.e. participating in meetings.
That said, if the company is remote-first but also has offices, then that is optimal, should make everybody comfortable, and allows everybody to pick their choice.
> That said, if the company is remote-first but also has offices, then that is optimal, should make everybody comfortable, and allows everybody to pick their choice.
Those who want WFO are really asking for consistent in person work and collaboration. If you're going to an office, and there's few people there, and every meeting is a video call, and your team's work style is async then you are not getting an office experience- you are doing remote work from somewhere that isn't your house.
I just see the only satisfying outcome here being one in which there are some remote orgs and some office based orgs, and they largely don't mix. Structured hybrid models also make sense, but only if they are quite formalized (eg: in office M-W).
Personally, I haven't seen many good arguments that WFH produces superior work outcomes. Companies are collaborative human endeavors. Most WFH arguments I hear are related to personal fulfillment: more time with kids, less time commuting, more time for hobbies, etc. Those are all great things, but have little to do with productivity. The closest work-related argument I've heard is that some people work better when they're free of distractions at the office. That takes us back to companies being collaborative human endeavors. One may feel they work better in isolation, but part of ones job is to interact with others, even if that's not fun.
I don't want this to sound judgemental. There is no requirement that people organize their life around what's best for the company they work for. It's totally fine to enjoy working from home. But I don't see the argument that WFH is better than WFO for most companies, even if it's often better for the individual employees at those companies.
I think we'll get more conclusive data when WFH is and is not appropriate. One data point is the BLS released quarterly productivity numbers last month. Productivity is down 4.1% [0]. That's pretty massive.
Have you worked in an open office or cubical farm? My hearing the sales guys isn't 'collaboration', it's distraction. Hearing my coworkers at the much-lauded ping pong table having a great time while I'm trying to get work done isn't collaboration either. Collaboration is often code for 'meetings'. As evidenced by my outlook calendar, those haven't stopped. I find that people who make this argument are those who either spend the majority of their day 'collaborating' or those who have offices they can escape to when they need to think.
> One data point is the BLS released quarterly productivity numbers last month. Productivity is down 4.1% [0]. That's pretty massive.
Mass WFH started in 2020 - I don't think you can link a Q2 2022 productivity decrease to WFH, considering the previous quarter will have had even more WFH. In fact, it's easier to link it to the return to the office.
Edit: Hell, we can even see that non-farm business sector productivity INCREASED in both 2020 and 2021.
> Mass WFH started in 2020 - I don't think you can link a Q2 2022 productivity decrease to WFH, considering the previous quarter will have had even more WFH. In fact, it's easier to link it to the return to the office.
I would honestly be impressed if a initial WFH productivity decline wasn't found. A lot of people were not prepared for WFH. They didn't have the home to accommodate it. I expect some decline for anyone who was not prepared.
I purposefully bought a home with 2 extra bedrooms just for offices because i've always enjoyed a dedicated office setup. So it's quite natural for me to WFH. However this is clearly a luxury and not what many people have. Closing the door to distractions is huge, to me at least.
At home i can usually address the issue more quickly (quick nap, a walk, an extended break, etc - often fully detatching from work) and end up back to actually working far more quickly. For me these blockers would often just stall the whole day in office.
Tbh i wish office work was more similar in that regard. They expect everyone to work like robots, but in doing so they ignore the human element of overcoming all our quirks. We have no roads to get back to productivity in most offices, and in doing so my belief is that it ends up a net negative. People learn how to appear to work, while not working.
Though i mostly say this in the context of creative work (development).
This right here - when I didn't want to work I still didn't work, but I hid it in ways that ended up meaning it too me longer to get to a place I COULD be productive. I couldn't just disappear and recharge for a half hour.
Having said that, if you are in an environment where interactions not related to your personal responsibility is mostly negative interaction, then it is understandable that work from home is better. So, in short, I would like to say that, if a company has a healthy interaction between different departments, then work from office is better for the company without much loss of time to the employees. However, in other cases, employees might prefer work from home.
This of course can change from employee to employee. Some employees might prefer work from office because they have positive interactions with rest of office colleagues and other will prefer work from home.
*EDIT*: I should have led with this. In my office, we have 2 people per office room. So, we have enough privacy if needed.
That wasn't my experience working in the office. Unless you were a manager or PM (someone whose job it was to facilitate cross-team communications), most people tended to just have lunch and coffee with either their own team or their personal friends. All of my experience has been at companies with over 1k employees though, I imagine at a smaller shop there's a bit more closeness.
That. The one medium-sized (several hundred employees) open-floor office I've worked in, I left in a matter of months in part because it was intensely stressful and difficult to actually do work. Loud, motion everywhere, people walking behind me constantly. Even the goddamn floor (so, also my monitor) shook when people walked on it, which was never not happening because there were so many people.
Go fucking figure, the managers had offices. And, HR got their own walled-off room just for them. Gee, I wonder why. Maybe because the experience for everyone else was basically hell and they knew it.
I could see good offices experiencing a decline in productivity with WFH, but I'm not sure that's the kind of office most people work in, and the bad kind would almost have to be more productive with WFH.
This is a key point. I know I'm less productive working from home than I was in person, but my office was sane. I can easily believe that WFH is as or more productive than open plan abominations.
My personal preferences be damned, I add way more value to the company from my quiet, comfortable home office.
I would be 100% fine with work from office if I got a private room with a door. I'm even OK with sharing it with 1-2 other people. But I have not been able to find anyone who will offer me that, only open office chaos -- bad for me, bad for the company.
Well before COVID and the WFH swing, I left a job that I loved because of f-ing nerf guns. Because it just went crazy. People started with the 1 shot at a time guns. But then someone else bought one that would shoot 10 in a second. Someone figured out how to make a magazine that held 30. And so on and so forth. So when I got hit with 1 or 2 darts a day, sure. But when I was caught in a crossfire of 100s of darts, I just got sick of it.
Where are your measurements? Most of the replies here are level-headed discussions, with statistics or points.
This reply is mainly about your disdain for WFO, nothing more.
Personally, I enjoy working in an office, as there is a very, very clear separation between my work and private lives. Yes, having a commute can suck most of the time, but hitting the store on my way home or going to the PO Box to get the mail makes it so that when I get home, I'm home, and done for the day.
https://www.apollotechnical.com/working-from-home-productivi...
https://resources.owllabs.com/hubfs/SORW/SORW_2021/owl-labs_...
> Several studies over the past few months show productivity while working remotely from home is better than working in an office setting. On average, those who work from home spend 10 minutes less a day being unproductive, work one more day a week, and are 47% more productive.
> A study by Standford of 16,000 workers over 9 months found that working from home increase productivity by 13%.
They link to the study, but it 404s. I believe this is the study [0] and it focuses on a single call-center. It's not a broad survey of 16,000 workers.
[0]: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers...
This feels like Wikipedia-lawyer disingenuous citation dueling. Nothing in this thread (or wider discussion writ large) is truly data driven in any scientific sense. Everyone is arguing their subjective view here, the only question is your self-awareness about it.
Here is another misleading claim from that link:
> Working Remotely Can Increase Productivity up to 77%
But they then clarify that "77% of those who work remotely at least a few times per month show increased productivity." Productivity increasing by 77% is not the same as 77% of people experiencing any productivity gain. Also, they link to a source for this claim, but the link takes you to a blog spam page titled "43 Productivity Tools That Will Make Your Life Much Easier." There is no mention of the claim on this page.
Where I am, the WFHers have ruined a lot of morale and contributed to around half the team leaving.
And was it really them, or managements treatment of the issues?
We've got a "flexible" tues-thurs in the office, but pretty much on any given day there's maybe 50% in the office, max, unless there's a particular event or reason.
And it's fine. Every meeting is 50% of people on zoom, but who those people are varies day to to, there's no lines drawn... and lots of the managers are just as likely to be wfh as the rest of us so...?
We did invest in some fairly decent zoom set-ups in our meeting rooms, and even some stuff in my open ad hoc areas, and we've all got good enough equipment and headphones, we do very very little of the "can you hear me" song and dance.
We work. We laugh and joke around. We do it on zoom and we do it in the office.
So..I'm seeing it work, not perfectly but not noticeably worse either.. what broke in your environment?
Why should you want _arguments_ about a question for which there has been actual research? "Superior work outcomes" is a fuzzy thing to measure, but when units of work are clearly countable and it's agreed what constitutes "done", there are multiple studies that have found that WFH employees were more productive (i.e. did more in the same period of time), and since the pandemic there have been multiple findings that WFH employees were putting in more work hours (i.e. previously dead commute time became productive). Admittedly, the kinds of work that support this kind of clear measurement are generally not product design and development, but more like handling inbound customer calls, and for employees with some experience. The gold standard I'm thinking of here is Bloom et al from I think 2013 which did an actual random controlled trial. In that call center case, literally handling more calls per hour was attributed mostly to having a quieter environment, but workers did also work longer.
I think the main challenges aren't around "superior work outcomes" at the individual level, but stuff like training junior team members through interactions with their more senior colleagues. This is harder to measure, often isn't someone's "main" responsibility, and so individuals who appear to be succeeding at their own work can be less impactful on these secondary and indirect benefits.
All of which is to say, I think the personal fulfillment vs company benefit framing can be a misleading one. _which_ company benefits are most important? Does everyone in the company agree on that prioritization? Have you tried actually _measuring_ those, rather than just seeking "arguments"?
Also:
> WFO produces better outcomes for the company.
What's backing that up?
Also: WFO is more expensive than WFH. WFO could be 10% better but it doesn't matter because it takes 20% more effort. Personally as someone with a chronic illness I'm not even going to entertain WFO unless it pays at least 100% better, and probably not even then.
I think I understand where you're coming from, but I strongly disagree with the implication that WFO means collaboration/interaction and WFH doesn't. WFO makes the cost of interaction so low that it tends to get abused. YMMV, but I've been WFH almost entirely for the past decade and one of the key benefits is that gets things closer to the sweet spot in the right amount of interaction, and the collaboration is of higher quality. *
WFH vs WFO has so many facets and tradeoffs, but for software companies at least, I'd be extremely skeptical that WFO produces better outcomes for the company on average.
--
* I don't fully know all the reasons for this, but I suspect it's because remote interaction encourages proficiency in a richer set of collaboration tools, and so we learn to naturally flow from tool to tool based on what is the best fit - chat for spitballing, email for thoughtful protracted debate, a Google doc for hammering out proposals and requirements, etc. In nearly every case there's automatically a searchable history created. In WFO, it's typical to lean way too heavily on face-to-face, which is extremely costly in the moment, it doesn't encourage putting much thought/preparation into the communication, and it also lacks any sort of history keeping (unless done manually), so information is lost or, worse, the face-to-face collaboration is then followed up with using the same tools to attempt to recreate what was discussed/decided (so redundant effort).
Mid-sized and large companies _frequently_ have projects that involve people that would previously have been in different offices. In my last in-office job, it was already the norm that most meetings of importance were a Zoom call between at least two conference rooms anyways. We _already_ had to be able to form working relationships with people we didn't see in person regularly or almost ever, brainstorm and whiteboard over zoom, slack to ask someone a question, etc etc. There were long periods when I would go to my office and the immediate team I worked with would be entirely in other cities, and so all my collaboration was remote. In that context, insisting that people zoom from the office in their metro area isn't about actual productivity -- it's theater. It's putting on the performance of showing up, not because it helps you work better, but because being seen daily in passing by the SVP you report up to might be marginally better for your career.
With WFH (or more pointedly, work from a room I have sole control over), collaboration has one less hurdle. Before, I needed Zoom + a conference room at each participating office. Now I just need Zoom. Ad-hoc huddles no longer need to start with searching for empty rooms. Scheduled meetings don't start late because the prior meeting in that room ran slightly long, and conversations which go longer than scheduled are no longer interrupted by needing to vacate one room and find a different one.
Even if everyone were to get pulled into their nearest local office tomorrow. And the majority probably do have a relatively nearby local office; I know relatively few people who moved remotely during the pandemic. I would basically never be in a meeting where everyone (or even most people) were sitting together in one room.
And to add to your point, if half the people are more are going to be on Zoom anyway, I'd rather the people who could be in a conference room together just called in individually. A number of teams I work with have that as a rule.
Access to talent. Dramatically increased access to talent. Exponentially increased. You can get anybody across the whole world if you like, or at the very least anybody within a reasonable time difference.
This cannot possibly be overstated as an impact on your business. Talent is actually fairly evenly distributed across the world, but you only had access to a tiny slice of it before.
The issue here is that most management I've run into has a seriously hard time managing, recruiting, retaining, or honestly even identifying talent. Most of the time people just punt and say "Well they got hired at a FAANG, or somebody else promoted them, or they went to a school with a basketball team I've heard of, so how bad could they be" or something on those lines. So they're missing out on all these great people that were previously outside their narrow slice of who could reasonably drive in.
And managing a remote team is a big pain in the ass, no question about it.
So it's harder with a meaningful upside. Managers that can turn the corner will win, the rest are gonna get left behind. It's even more stark in tech, because organizations that can make that adjustment are going to poach a ton of talent from managers that can't get it together. WFH is very very very popular in tech. (I'm not really a WFH fan aside from family concerns, but family concerns are probably the biggest driver in my working decisions, so that's that. WFH is a big deal if you've got kids, and the best, most skilled workers you can get often are dealing with kids and a family. Folks with decent emotional intelligence, work experience, good energy, these people are textbook quality workers, but are usually married with a family.)
We're actually building a virtual office to make having these quick chats easier (gloo.chat). If you would want to try it out, or even just provide some feedback, that would be amazing given we just got started. Totally shameless plug.
...
> Personally, I haven't seen many good arguments that WFH produces superior work outcomes.
And personally I haven't seen many good arguments that WFO produces superior work outcomes, and yet you seem to state it as fact.
I suspect WFH and WFO produce roughly equivalent work outcomes. That said, I hope we can both agree we're both to some extent guessing based on our own personal experiences (in my case I'm a VP at a dev shop and we've done more in the past year than we've done in the last five after landing a major deal; productivity is clearly not a problem for us).
But offering WFH as part of a flexible work policy:
1. Enables access to a larger labour market, meaning more high-quality candidates,
2. Creates a fairer labour market by removing barriers to entry (e.g. childcare),
3. Provides an additional benefit that helps attract and retain top talent, and
4. Ultimately improves the lives of individual workers since it provides more options to achieve work/life balance.
Honestly, in the end, I personally don't care if WFH actually maximizes "productivity" because I think chasing productivity has led to an extraordinarily toxic work culture.
i will say that crunch from home is a lot easier to optimize and ultimately sustain than crunch-in-office.
IME, far from being a barrier to productivity, WFH can make it harder to maintain a good work-life balance if you're not careful.
For example, it's a lot easier for my colleagues in other timezones to justify pulling me into a 6am meeting if they know I can just roll out of bed to take the call. And I personally know people who've put in a lot more overtime because it's just so easy to keep on coding when you don't have a commute to bookend your day.
Stir in this latent perception that people who work from home are lazy, and I could see WFH being more toxic for people who aren't careful or work for a company with a broken culture.
> Personally, I haven't seen many good arguments that WFH produces superior work outcomes. Companies are collaborative human endeavors. Most WFH arguments I hear are related to personal fulfillment: more time with kids, less time commuting, more time for hobbies, etc. Those are all great things, but have little to do with productivity.
I don't see any rigorous argument that WFO is more productive in your analysis either though, just that you suspect it's the case. It seems a bit of a stretch to me to assume that WFO is more likely to be productive merely because it's claimed on that side of the debate; if anything, making that claim without hard data makes it more dubious to me compared to the side not making any claims that require data without providing it. We don't even know for sure if either WFO or WFH even is more productive in a significant way, let alone which one it is!
Tangentially, there's also an implicit sentiment here that the needs of the company trump the needs of the employee when they're at odds, and I don't think that's universally the case. The reason minimum wage and workplace safety regulations are a good idea is orthogonal to productivity; they're good ideas because they are important enough for workers that we're willing to deal with the consequences they might have on productivity. Even if I accepted the premise that WFH is a net negative for companies (which I don't accept as a premise, although I don't have my mind 100% made up one way or another), I still think the question of whether it's important enough for workers despite this is unsettled.
> The closest work-related argument I've heard is that some people work better when they're free of distractions at the office. That takes us back to companies being collaborative human endeavors. One may feel they work better in isolation, but part of ones job is to interact with others, even if that's not fun.
This just feels like motivated reasoning to me. Here's how I read it "I've NEVER SEEN an argument for why WFH is better... Well, some people did say they're more focused and productive when working from home, but they're probably just doing a poor job of communication so that outweighs any of their perceived productivity gains." How can we falsify this rebuttal? I certainly have enough data to show that I've had much greater and more consistent engagement with my work since transitioning to work from home, and I have plenty of 1:1s and meetings with the rest of my team to stay connected and work through problems. Our team has shipped successful products entirely working from home. But that argument runs up against a brick wall if you're predisposed to assume that whatever job I'm doing at home, I'd be more effective in the office.
Personally I haven't seen much evidence for the proposition that WFO produces better outcomes. Most of the arguments seem to be from first principles, like the communication argument you're making or the argument that companies would have already gone WFH if it were better for the bottom line.
The problem with the work outcomes conversation is that our industry has 1) no reliable way of measuring work output and thus 2) no reliable way of measuring productivity. This is why despite decades of research we have no good way to estimate when projects will be done, for example. Each organization is unique. Each project is unique. Comparing across them is questionable. That means conversations that are ostensibly about what makes a business productive are really just a dressed up proxy for our own values.
This is a cultural dynamic nobody had strong opinions about five years ago which everyone is religious about today. Opinions are diverse. Fortunately, so are workplaces.
There are plenty of dimensions on which corporate culture and policy vary. This is merely one which went from unimportance to supreme importance for a large fraction of the population in a short amount of time. That outpaced that which individuals and groups take to figure out what they want, message it and then reconfigure. (One option is heterogeneity. But as you mention, that isn’t for everyone.)
If you want to work in an office you can do that it’s your choice. Many people also have young kids and two working parents making the WFH flexibility ideal. Lots of reasons for WFH exist but they don’t matter. If you do your job and the company is happy why do we even need to have this discussion?
Don’t be upset when you have trouble finding talent unless you are paying out amazing salaries though.
This to me just gets into people trying to control other people. You have your preferences and thats fine but forcing it on others always causes problems.
If you start your job search with this requirement in mind though i don’t think people should have issues. I look for my jobs based on being listed as fully remote and the rest of the company being largely remote as well. As long as you aren’t at a company trying to force everyone back in the office I think its all good.
I do know my last company of size 1000+ has been trying to force people back slowly. 50% of my team left and now that they are pushing harder i am having people reach out to me every week about openings.
I really hate zoom meetings. Unfortunately if everyone just does whatever they want, then even the in-person meetings get dragged onto zoom because there’s at least a few people who are remote and need to dial in. Early on as we returned to office we even wound up taking a lot of meetings in the office over zoom from our individual desks because there was so little point getting into a room together with so many others online.
“Everyone do whatever you want” as a WFH/WFO policy is kinda like “everyone do whatever you want” as a “no peeing in the swimming pool” policy.
> Generally, the stance of the WFH crowd is that each individual should get a choice of what makes that individual happy.
It’s pointless weighing my hate of zoom against your hate of commuting or general WFO, but it’s definitely not the case that WFH crowd just wants everyone to be happy while the WFO crowd wants to strong-arm everyone. On the contrary, as my preference is for hybrid flexibility it often seems like the most vocal WFH proponents would like to strong-arm every business to be full-WFH.
I kinda like my company the way it is—and that won’t work for everyone, but maybe it doesn’t have to, right? The full WFH folks can look for companies that do that; the WFO folks can look for that; and the hybrid folks can look for that. And everyone is free to compromise based on the other aspects of the job.
Kind of, but I dont really think the analogy works because if you flip it around its just as bad. "Everyone has to swim in the piss pool because I want to piss in the pool, but also want people to swim with". That doesn't sound agreeable either. "Nobodies allowed to piss in the pool" sounds good, but then circling back to it being an analogy, there needs to be a common consensus on which one is the piss-pool and which one is the clean pool, and there clearly isn't one.
> On the contrary, as my preference is for hybrid flexibility it often seems like the most vocal WFH proponents would like to strong-arm every business to be full-WFH
Depends on your definition of hybrid. To some it means you have some days in the office, some days from home, and for a lot of WFH folks (myself included), this is just as bad as WFO. If you mean people are kicking off because your allowed to work from an office but don't have to, I'll admit thats bad but its not something I've ever seen myself. I can't see the logic to it.
> The full WFH folks can look for companies that do that; the WFO folks can look for that; and the hybrid folks can look for that
Seems absolutely fair to me, though obviously for that to work, if people leave/don't take a job because it doesn't match their WHX preference, that shouldn't be an issue.
(I actually find that there has probably been more of a reset than many people expected.)
I think that a lot of people who dislike WFH are missing the sense of community more than are actually missing talking with someone face to face with a cup of coffee in their hand. Not always the case, but I think those are two separate audiences that get clumped together in these conversations.
I just don't really think that works. Maybe I've simply used the wrong tools, but I'm skeptical.
Some day I imagine we'll all have perfect VR headsets (or brain implants) and location and distance will be an illusion. But we're not there yet.
This cuts both ways: It's okay to prefer working from the office—but you should find a team that also prefers working in the office, so people who prefer home have that option too.
Right now we're in the shaking-out stage where each team is deciding what kind of team it will be. Both sides of the debate justifiably want their preference to win out. In the end, we'll see people leaving the teams that won't accommodate their preferred working style, and that's okay! No one should assume a priori that their team will land on their side of the fence, and it's not on your teammates to leave and go find a [WFO/WFH] job if you're the odd one out.
Something often missing from these discussions is that at many large companies, A lot of people are scattered around the country/world so, even if they are in an office, a lot of meetings are going to be by Zoom anyway. And frankly, if some people are going to be remote, it's good policy that people generally dial in individually if it's an interactive meeting.
So this isn't necessarily a WFH/WFO thing. Decades before there was a Zoom, at least half the meetings I was in had lots of people on a conference call.
This realization actually caused my last company to full 180 on their WFO policy to "Fuck it work wherever you want in the world, including in one of our offices. Just give us two weeks heads up if you move so we can sort out the taxes."
But that's exactly what the parent posts have issues with. The false claim that the WFH people are letting everyone do what they want while the WFO's are not letting everyone do what they want.
Because the WFH people are forcing the WFO people into zoom meetings. Having to dial in individually because you say that's "good policy" takes away the thing that WFO people want: To not sit in zoom meetings all day.
Example: my old team
Half in Boston and half in Barcelona. Standups were joined by people at both offices and were done with Zoom in 2 conference rooms because even though everyone was WFO, we still need to do video conferencing. Unless you want to restrict teams to being in the same office.
Personally, I find working in an office to be borderline unbearable unless I'm participating in making all the noise that's being generated around me.
And yes, you're coming as agressive, sorry.
What I find annoying is all the reluctance to return to office, especially where companies are trying to compromise and only require a few days a week. If there was no COVID, people would be working in office as they've always done.
You were hired with the expectation of coming in the office. Either re-negotiate or quit.
I don't know about your org, but I had a conversation with my manager, and all my reports had a conversation with me about it. This worked it's way up the org chart until the CEO understood what the new reality was.
If my aunt had a dick, she'd be my uncle. This is a useless counterfactual because what happened has changed the dynamic. We can't base anything on a counterfactual.
Thusly anecdotally armed, I can tell you that for cases towards the center of the bell curve, employees working in the office is better for the company and arguably better for the employee long-term. More shared vision, more opportunities for cross-pollination, more quick problem solving. All the usual arguments. It worked in my case, but productivity plummeted for the next guy who tried it, and we had to let him go.
It worked in my case because this was before the time when every kid expected to be able to work from home, and so I was terrified on a daily basis that out of sight would become out of mind. In the early days I made a point of traveling to HQ one week of every four, to meet the new folks and maintain relationships. I strove to overachieve so I didn't become redundant. Even so, by the end of the decade, with the growth of the company I was noticeably detached from the centers of power and the office culture, serving a role not much different from a contractor.
Not this specific post, which is reasonable and well-thought-out, but many rants I've heard by WFH proponents come across as myopic and naive. Yes, it can succeed sometimes, for some combinations of office culture and individual. Just based on my own experience, more often it doesn't.
> Generally, the stance of the WFH crowd is that each individual should get a choice of what makes that individual happy.
Salaried employment in this business (at least in the US) is a contract between you and somebody who wants to give you a lot of money, with some expectations in return. The person offering the money has the right to set the terms of that contract, and you have the right to reject that contract and work somewhere else. I view this as the actual "choice of what makes that individual happy."
Finally, let's not forget that people working in group settings is what got us here. It gave us the airplane, modern medical care, and the internet. New is sometimes better, but sometimes it's not.
When I talk to people about going back to the office so many are unreasonably strident that they never will, to the point it seems like a social anxiety instead of a time/productivity choice. They often say things which are obviously wrong such as "there's no difference in productivity" when that is clearly dependent on person, task, and team. Or maybe it's that they've retreated into depression during Covid and this is unconscious coping.
Anyways, teams are teams and if someone doesn't want to be part of one there are other classes of work where you produce alone and those are more appropriate to people who cannot or will not go to the office. The extreme WFH people should evaluate their positions and see if they're in their optimal role or if they're now blocking others and change their career to give them their preferences. (The rabid WHO people are also an issue from their side of course.)
I don't want that to come across as aggressive or anything, that just the way I see it, and I think thats why its sometimes met badly. If what makes you happy is a condition in which someone else is unhappy, that person is unlikely to react well.