Long commutes aren't practical when the roads are bad and the fastest mode of personal transportation is a horse.
Not only is it unpaid, it actually costs the employee money. In the worst case you need a car + the insurance, fuel and maintenance costs associated. In the best case you still need to pay for public transportation.
> Nor do people want to spend £10+ a day on food and drinks which they have in their fridge, at home.
Eating out regularly is also hazardous to your health. In my experience and opinion there is no such thing as a healthy dining option. There are varying degrees of poisonous; some options are certainly better than others; but if you're trying to be strict with your diet then forget eating out daily.
Then add the stress of a commute, workplace hazards, risks associated with commuting (I have a ZERO chance of getting killed in a car accident when I'm not travelling in a car), risks associated with communicable diseases and there is a case to be made that working in an office is actually hazardous to your health.
I say this as someone that loves working from home, but before I did so I would get thousands of steps in every day running towards the tube in London and around all the platforms. Dunno, maybe the positive health benefits of the steps are outweighed by how polluted the air in London (and likely even more so the tube) is.
But getting less steps in every day due to WFH is a real problem.
It is! The solution is to walk more and everyone gets to decide how, we're all grown ups.
6-8 weeks later, I wondered why my back hurt so damn much.
I had no idea how much my office’s slow elevators and 5 flights of stairs had been helping, had to manually add that back into my life.
“Come back to the office”
“We’ll be resuming periodic Active Shooter drills”
My home's policy is the active shooter gets shot immediately until they are no longer a threat.
It really is a weird reality we live in. You can't have all of the above and not be subjecting innocent people to violent criminals.
EDIT: In other words, you want dense cities? Then you need exemplary policing (both in terms of respecting citizens and keeping them safe).
You don't want police? Then people need to defend themselves and protect themselves.
You don't want people defending themselves in urban areas? Then you either have to have exemplary policing or less urban areas.
Commuting is also the most dangerous thing the average person does.
My wife only commutes in 4 days a month, and we still have dashcam footage from multiple close calls.
Recently a pickup truck cut someone off and hit their car, then proceeded to flee during rush hour. In traffic doing about 20MPH he swerves though a hair away from my wife at over 60MPH. She asked me to check the footage because the wind force was so strong she wasn't sure he didn't graze her.
Everyone looks at you crazy if you want to do an extreme sport, or even something like dirtbiking, but on my old commute there'd be 2-3 major accidents a week, a death every week or two, and nobody bats an eye. All so I can log into a data centre in North Virginia, that's nowhere near me.
I find it a lot more effective to msg technical questions instead of talking as I can reread a dense statement to help internalize and can also reference it later. WFH is great for learning
Today I pair programmed with a junior engineer across the country, he was in his own 21x9 setup, with his colour scheme, and I was on my laptop at work with my light theme. It was perfect.
Junior: sure.
Slightly easier than traveling half a country!
I work remote and we don't have an office near me, but I'd love to go back. My job is where I spend the majority of my life. I like to get to know the people I work with by socializing over lunch, after work social events, etc. It's how I meet people.
Collaborating remotely also sucks. You miss out on a lot of non-verbal communication vs in person.
It's fine if it's not your jam and all of the above sounds like hell to you - it just means I don't want to work with you.
why? because i like having my own office, with a door that i can close. i like that i have my own setup, specifically designed by me so i can be as comfortable as possible. i love that i can stop work for 30min and just play with my dog or talk to my wife. oh, and i LOVE that i have privacy and i don't have someone looking at what i'm doing for 8h.
I like when it's quiet and private but I also like to come work from an office... Even though it's a basic small shared space and I literally work from my laptop (can't be bothered to hook up the screen etc). I do like not having to do it every day so I am free to come or not but I look forward to it usually. Or I may go out to that area for other reasons and just drop by.
The CEO said that we should just feel grateful that we have an air-conditioned office with snacks to come back to, poo-poo'd the concerns over: a lack of desks, the high noise-levels, the fact that most teams are distributed and so much of the open office is sitting in a remote zoom call talking over one another...
It's an incredibly hard environment to work in, and I was shocked that my company's CEO was so out-of-touch. Of course, he has a private office.
EDIT: Furthermore, I think some execs in tech companies (particularly those who never were engineers) really believe that's how software development happens! Like if you ask your company's CEO how software gets written, he pictures this Wall Street-like trading floor where engineers are yacking at each other, and having standup meetings and flailing about at whiteboards, and that's the sound/busy-ness of engineering being done!
It doesn't stop there. When I'm actually at work, I'm constantly waiting for hours for responses unless I pull in a manager to move things along. While it's true that with today's tech we can collaborate anywhere, that's not what I see happening in practice. I constantly see miscommunication and misunderstandings that normally would take 10 minutes at someone's cube to resolve that end up taking DAYS to resolve.
Edit: oh, it's probably the autism.
Mostly just shocked that this is what the site comes to, but I should have known better.
Yeah, I'm a dick online, it's an outlet. No hard feelings.
problems change, and some problems get worse while others get better. No need to be snide, it's honestly a thing to consider when talking about these situations.
I looked into the employment laws long ago about commutes to and from your home to your workplace. In general, you can't be paid for the commute unless it's to an "unusual" location more than a certain distance from your assigned workplace. It's been a long time since I read up on this subject, so I have no idea where I got the info.
I wonder if WFH will affect these rules - if your originally assigned office was "remote" and now you're forced to go in to a physical location, it could be argued that your employer changed your office location and will have to reimburse you for any commute.
There's nothing barring an employer from paying employees a "commute stipend". I think you probably read about what is taxable/nontaxable. It's probably taxable as income and that's the "can't", which isn't really a "can't" at all; it's more of a "won't because it's taxable".
from my experience, collaboration is nice, after you establish the design. WFH was awful for brainstorming and more than simple design/architecturing processes. That delay in communicating ideas on a virtual whiteboard can be felt.
Most were effectively fools to not realize that before Covid. Now when will they start realizing that out of the 5 days that they work in a week they are working without compensation anywhere from 2 to 4 days effectively for the Govt/corporate/overlords because of taxation at various levels. ( taxesincome/property/sales, inflation etc.)
To summarize the meta problem is the minions, not the corporations. In this day of automation most people should be having a lot of free time and relatively little work, but here were are in the year 2023 working and commuting our asses off.
Employees have realised we are equally as effective working from home and simply do not want to waste 2+ UNPAID hours of every day travelling to a corporate building for the sake of it.
Nor do people want to spend £10+ a day on food and drinks which they have in their fridge, at home.
Then there is also the social pressure of having to go for after work socials at the local boozer/cafe/restaurant, or be seen as the person who never joins the team for social stuff.
There are so many benefits to working from home which reach beyond personal and into society/the environment but very few benefits to going into an office. The one reason which supporters of the original office model tout is ‘collaboration’ but I call BS.
With today’s tech we can literally be collaborating in real-time with people from any corner of the planet from the comfort of our home office. How would that change in office?
Then you have the whole “oh, but, learning” as if it is simply impossible to part with knowledge via any medium other than a coworker’s breath hitting another’s eardrum.