I'm introverted but very glad I have the option of working from the office and being among fellow staff, we also have a lunchtime exercise club once a week. It's much better for my mental health.

In fact, I've added two days working outside of home instead of one because of the benefits. I think 3 days home/2 days office is the sweet spot.

I get that, and a lot of people like to be social with other people. But just because 10% (made up number) like it, there's no reason to force it on the rest of the workforce (not that you are).

I encourage people who are remote but want human contact to rent a desk once a week at a co-working space.

For me personally, I want to do my work as efficiently as possible, in as little time as possible, and then have my social time, which has very little in common with my work and/or colleagues.

I might be an exception, but I get up very, very early and work almost right away, and I don't want to be on a roll and then have to pack up, get in the car at a terrible traffic time where (some) people are driving like animals, hunt for parking and then find a desk. That's a huge _tax_ on my productivity.

But I don't expect or demand that the rest of the world do this.

As a side comment, I would agree with you though, that 2 in the office is better than one. But I also had a very effective pattern around 10 years ago, where I spent 2 days in the office per month, and that worked really well for me (though those days were far, far less productive than my at home work days).

Now, if the world adopted a 32 hour, 4-day work week I would probably be ok with the office 1 day a week.

We've been slowly creeping back toward being fully RTO, and my mental health has been in what I can only describe as "steep decline". I don't know if I pin it all on RTO, but it sure isn't helping the situation. I love my job, but hate the in-office requirements - I'm a systems admin.

Sorry to hear that. Being a sysadmin, I guess you're mainly interacting with systems rather than people and need to focus. They should exempt you from RTO except for the odd "all hands" meeting days.

I'm a software engineer in a Product Engineering team and it's about 75% hands-on engineering, 25% Slack/Teams interaction and alignments between people. I find being in the office helps to make connections with other staff in other teams (eg. bumping into people while making coffee in staff kitchen etc). I think thats important from a career perspective.

Vote with your feet.

https://hiring.cafe

(no affiliation)

Having the option of working from the office is a good thing. It's only being unnecessarily forced to do so that's bad.

What's your commute like? There are many aspects to the RTO vs. WFH debate, but having to waste away 1-3 hours a day on the road, coupled with the energy use in the OP, really cancels out the mental health aspects of being in office. It even detracts from the amount of work done.

The London office commute is 30 minutes train and 25 minutes walk. I really like that balance as it gives me sunlight, exercise and fresh air.

I work from a library on the other day, thats a 30 minute drive. I tend to leave before 0700 when the roads are peaceful. My car is pretty fuel efficient, i try to hypermile it and get ~50mpg.

Imagine how much more sunshine you could enjoy working in the evening and enjoying the outdoors during the day - good thing they've got the exercise club.

The keywords that you are not saying are "is a sweet spot FOR YOU"

If it is a sweet spot for you fine, I am happy you found it. But DO NOT FORCE all of US who have different sweet spots to meet you at yours.

I don't think GP was forcing anyone to do anything.

Thanks pal, I was not forcing anyone... but I guess my wording made it sound "this applies to everyone!".

I put my comment out there to trigger just this kind of discussion.

I'm not saying you're doing this, but I can't tell you how many complaints I've read where people who want to work in office get there, are bummed out about the fact that their colleagues all work from home, and go whinging to management who are looking for any excuse to bring people back into office.

That tends to generate resistance

Says that guys that FORCED all of America into car dependency

So you hate waffles?

The hubris of our generation damning our species into a global warming catastrophe just because we want to stand around the water cooler and have lunchtime exercise club for these last few decades at our apogee.

There are many cities around the world where most employees use public transports.

Zero days in office is the sweet spot. Get rid of all physical infrastructure. Its mind boggling that we are building a completely unnecessary second space for work and then build transportation infrastructure to move between two spaces all, compel people to drive back and forth, deal with traffic congestion and waste 2 hours/day, buy cars, pay for insurance, deal with accidents, use up precious mind space in driving through horrible traffic. If people have mental health issues, it doesn't mean that we need to build a second space for them. There are other ways to deal with mental health issues.

True, and then think of all the real estate that gets opened up for third spaces

Even 3 days in office, 2 days home feels significantly better because that's the point at which one is spending less days out of the week in the office

While this is true and many people echo this, I also think this is partially caused by an over-reliance on work.

Ideally, we should not be put in a situation where we have to get necessary social health through our jobs. It should be through our hobbies, our passions, our friends, and our family. The people and things we choose to spend time with.

I'm not judging you either, because this is also the case for me. But, I think, if I was WFH, I would have a lot more free time. I could dedicate that to social interactions. Most people don't, but they could.

My sweet spot is the same. I like being at the office (because I like my colleagues), but with almost an hour commute each way, going every day is very draining. I'm glad my employer is giving us pretty much total flexibility.

ultimately people want choice. not forced ways of working. not sure why companies don't get this.

and if you're talking to somebody who doesn't care about climate change just substitute "climate change" with "traffic"

In my experience, everybody cares about climate change. A lot of people just don't like the idea of caring about climate change.

But ya, probably best to just call it "traffic" then, and they might be more receptive.

Yeah, I've always seen it as a hot potato issue. I think a lot of people who don't play ball on dealing with climate change aren't deniers, they just want the next guy to have to do the work. It's very, very hard to sell to anyone, "this is going to be incredibly costly and painful for you and you won't enjoy any of the benefits. Your grandkids might."

I think we saw during covid that we most certainly can see the benefits in our lifetime if we took it more seriously.

Agreed. I care enough about it to sell my car, stop buying stuff I don't need, give up most meat, and live in a small energy efficient house.

However I do know people who really do not care. They may say they care but their actions and voting record show that in fact they don't care (or don't want to make it a real priority). But those same people get very upset when they're stuck in traffic

Absolutely not. There are tens of millions of Americans who have jumped full speed onto the "It's not even happening" train, let alone the "It's actually a good thing because plants" or "It's not our fault" or "We can't fix it so we shouldn't try" or "It's too expensive to fix and I can't do long term math" trains.

And this is a massive reversion too. In the mid 2000s republicans were openly advocating that we needed to do something about climate change and that it was a serious problem and then we opened the cash floodgates to American federal politics and would you look at that, oil companies have a lot of cash.

Keep in mind that the real cost of transitioning is very likely to be less than what we spent on the stupid oil wars of the 2000s. We can literally afford it now, let alone if we hadn't burned all that cash bombing the desert because of oil politics.

Oil companies themselves are fine to be "Energy" companies and invest in Solar and other renewables. They will be profitable just fine. Our country is tearing itself apart over a lie to ensure they remain more profitable.

In the mid-2000s there might've been individual Republicans concerned about climate change, but it was the Bush administration who opposed the Kyoto Protocol and pushed for adaptation to climate change on the basis of protecting the economy.

In 2008 McCain openly talked about greenhouse gas cap and trade. I think the driving force behind it was fear of peak oil. Secure your energy supply. With fracking supply concerns went away.

Except driving in the U.S. following the pandemic was significantly higher than driving before the pandemic even though WFH was much higher.

This claim might be true but it’s simply not showing up in the data which suggests that even if true, the effect is probably minor.

but then again, vehicle miles travelled per-capita has been mostly increasing in the US since as far back as 1975. There could be a lot of confounding factors. Like astronomical housing prices in urban areas forcing people live very far away and incur more VMT at a faster rate than WFH decreases VMT. I'm no expert here, I'm just spitballing.

Because people didn't go back to taking transit

I think the bigger point was that pandemic traffic immediately showed effects. Smog cleared up in Los Angeles in less than a month.

But no, it won't ever be that level without major infrastructure change. Not all jobs can be wfh. We can get close by a major public transportation overhaul, but that will take decades (even without the inevitable pushback).

WFH doesn't actually stop driving. They don't commute, but they do run errands and other stuff during the day. This can actually result in more traffic during high peak periods since it can cause congestion build up to start earlier

WFH was great to begin with, but as somebody living alone, the isolation starts to have an effect after a while when you're 'working alone' too

And for many people WFH has other problems - if you're a dual-WFH couple in a small home, lack of home office space is a very real problem. (Although if WFH was a permanent thing, many people could choose less expensive places to live, and have more space)

Still, anything to eliminate a miserable and environmentally wasteful commute.

> And for many people WFH has other problems - if you're a dual-WFH couple in a small home, lack of home office space is a very real problem. (Although if WFH was a permanent thing, many people could choose less expensive places to live, and have more space)

Sure I get meetings you need to go to separate rooms, but how is the rest is different from a regular open office? Oh no, my co-working space has the person I like to spend time with?

Meetings aren't infrequent for many jobs. As well, small homes may not have the desired desk space for multiple full-time offices.

Sounds like whoever is scheduling meetings need to adapt to a new asynchronous environment whereas many meetings isn't necessary.

I'm not saying everyone must be WFH or that everyone must have a home office. I'm just having hard time imagining how two people cannot WFH in a 1-bedroom apartment. Unless both of them work in a call center.

> Sounds like whoever is scheduling meetings need to adapt to a new asynchronous environment whereas many meetings isn't necessary.

I agree, and a lot of my 'participation' in these meetings these days is read the papers, write my opinion, attach it to the documents and tell people I'm not attending.

That said we're 5 years in to this thing and people haven't adapted.

Usually best not to sleep with the people in your workplace?

I would love to have a coworking-space-on-every-block (or in every building) where all the WFHers can go to be around other people (just not the coworkers)

A place where We all work. Call it a WeWork maybe.

HN people always try to do this cute rhetorical gesture where you take a thing and say "hmm nice idea what if we called it <thing that already exists>", but they like this joke so much they get baited into doing it in dumb ways like this one.

A coworking space in every building != a WeWork. There's a big difference between these! You could implement the former by opening a million WeWorks but that doesn't sound good at all; residential apartment buildings already have common areas, free to residents, they would simply have to be reimagined slightly.

Everyone is paying for wework to do what their branch library can probably do for them.

Only issue is that my libraries close 5pm on weekends and 7pm on weekdays. Nothing for night owls.

If there would be enough demand to pay for it, it would stay open longer.

Libraries aren't paid for that demand though

They could be!

Here's a line from my local library's site:

> Our auditoriums are provided as a public service for use by individuals, institutions, groups, organizations, and corporations for a small fee, when not being used for library-affiliated or sponsored activities.

The libraries in my city get paid by membership. That's not exactly visits, but a correlated proxy.

Also if it would become really crowded they would probably think of prolonging opening hours.

Yeah, I was spoiled by my college town. Libraries open until 2AM, a 24 hour space for students. Even a few cafes downtown open 24 hours a day. Suburb life is mostly fine, but that's one thing I miss most.

Gotta travel 20 miles to downtown for anything resembling night life.

And maybe we can pool them a bit by profession, because they often need the same tools and can help each other. Any maybe they can even work on some of the same projects, so we can remove meetings.

I don't see how that's necessary at all. All the arguments that WFH might be a good idea in the first place would still hold.

I agree, 2 days a week in office is optimal. If they could coordinate which days to reduce traffic then... holy cow dream world.

> is well loved by everyone who participates

You don't speak for me :)

I hate it.

Wfh is debatable, but what's not to love about 4 day work weeks? 8t gives you even more time to work on your own stuff if you still want to work.

I was only replying to the part about WFH. Four day weeks would be great.

> is well loved by everyone who participates (except management).

So? The only people who matter are shareholders and their proxies (management). To everyone else: you don't matter as much as you think you do, quit being selfish and be happy you get anything at all. The world doesn't revolve around you.

Being against WFH because 'think of the shareholders' is certainly a take.

The world might not revolve around me, but thankfully, I do get a vote in who I chose to work for, and I chose an employer that lets me work remote.

I sure don't nowadays. My industry is in free fall.

Don't forget about holders of commercial real estate debt and the owners of commercial real estate and restaurants who depend on foot traffic!

I know it's a meme on HN to say everyone likes WFH, but I (and many but not ICs around me) thrive more in person.

I am 100% more effective in person where I can dev and my desk and bounce ideas off if team mates around me verbally. This can be recreated in a remote environment by having things like a team Discord that folks sit on, but it can feel forced at times (just like communiting to the office I suppose).

My take might be heavily skewed though. I am in games and our environment is highly collaborative.

I hate WFH, personally. My company is actually closing the office I work out of due to lack of use, so I'm in the opposite scenario from "forced-RTO", I'm being moved to "forced-WFH." It's the right call objectively, the office is genuinely very empty, but I'm a bit annoyed about it. I'm actually going to be paying to rent a desk out of a coworking facility so I don't have to WFH. If this situation sucks, there's a real chance I'll be changing jobs later this year because of this.

I pretty much dislike WFH and for many of the reasons you mention and more, so took a local in-office job last year after being at home since COVID. I was excited to return to a more social environment until I found that "the office" itself was itself entirely problematic. Cheapass flatpack desks all rammed in together. No noise or sound proofing, giant sweatshop room. Sub-par monitors and equipment generally. Grumpy coworkers complaining constantly about the very conversations (both on-topic and off-topic/non-work) that I came in to have a chance to experience again.

And half the staff was just WFH anyways, or remote, so the collaboration opportunities... diminished.

I even saw this happening at Google before I left there, which had formerly been a ... luxury office. Packing people in like sardines, forcing people to "reserve" desks. Bad parking and/or transit situations.

I get it when employers face financial or real estate crunches. But in the last 10-15 years (I've been working for 30) -- even pre-COVID -- I feel like some switch went off in tech industry leadership brains that is just outright disrespectful. Paying high salaries to engineers and then providing them with uncomfortable accommodations. Makes little sense to me.

I'm back to WFH and the isolation that comes with it. In part because the office environment was actually not what I was hoping for. Because the industry ruined it.

> No noise or sound proofing, giant sweatshop room

My kingdom for an office with a ceiling, lmao. The exposed ductwork cheap-ass offices are so awful.

As an old guy who used to make fun of them for their sterility when I was young...

I'd just like cubicles back.

If you genuinely "thrive" more in person then go live next to your office. No point sitting in a 30-60 minute commute. America/UK took the brunt of the cost transitioning towards knowledge work, but kept the costs of manufacturing (shipping people around). Even if it's slightly more productive, the cost is externalized on the workers making them poorer and sickly.

>Oh no you don't understand I need a compress decompress cycle I TRIVE when I burn as much gas as possible

Sadly, your job (especially in the games industry) is a lot more mobile that your living dwellings. I had a housing situation and took the commute over trying to move.

Apartments near my workplace cost twice as much as where I live and commute from. The office is in a concrete jungle, my apartment is in a charming neighborhood famous for high end restaurants. My friends live nearby. My landlord is the super chill old dude down the hall. Public schools where I live are as good as private schools where I work.

People's emotionally driven myopia on this topic never fails to impress me. "No point" in making such a ridiculously weak argument.

>"I know it's a meme on HN to say everyone likes WFH"

I work from home for the last 25 years (I am an independent vendor, design and develop business critical products for medium size businesses). I have no desire to socialize with employees of my clients and when I am in a mood I have real fiends to spend time with.

Can't imagine wasting my time in corporate cubicles or open concept offices

> where I can dev and my desk and bounce ideas off if team mates around me verbally.

Can't you fucking do your homework beforehand, think your idea thoroughly, and then have at least a small written paragraphs about it before interrupting your colleagues.

Really, I am not a co-processor in a bus for you to dispatch a job to me and raise an interrupt line whenever the fuck you fancy doing it.

> Can't you fucking do your homework beforehand, think your idea thoroughly, and then have at least a small written paragraphs about it before interrupting your colleagues.

They never said they didn't.

> Really, I am not a co-processor in a bus for you to dispatch a job to me and raise an interrupt line whenever the fuck you fancy doing it.

I am! I'm perfectly capable of managing my own time and shoeing others away if needed. Please bother me! That's why I have a cell phone and a salary.

Almost certainly relevant: I work in manufacturing.

Damn. Glad I don’t work with anyone like you

>at least a small written paragraphs about it before interrupting your colleagues.

Game design is messy and some things can only really be talked through.

Also, nothing here implies that GP doesn't think through their thoughts before bouncing off ideas.

I'm in games as well. I'm pretty mixed on it. For my experience

- first job, fully onsite. More traditional cubicle space

- second job, on-site until COVID came around. Literally a WeWork building as a sattellite office to HQ in San Fransico.

- third job, "0-100%" on site. There was an office and I could come into it never or all the time. More of an open office setup.

I will say it's nice to not need to spend 5 days commuting, and I really don't think we need to do that much collaboration to be productive. If you're local, I think a suggestion of 2-3 days in office would do wonders, reserved for "brainstorming" days or cross team syncs. for job 3, that was pretty much my schedule; typically come in TWTh, unless I was feeling sick (this was still the tail end of COVID).

But some camaraderie was nice. The games scene was really friendly for the most part (in my experience. I have heard second hand stories and don't want to discount those). There were community events, tribal wisdom you'd hear over water-cooler talk, impromptu group lunches, and seasonal parties. It was nice, being around other passionate people who had similar interests to you. I definitely miss that most.

Productivity-wise, I'm not sure I noticed much difference. I had enough space to setup a dedicated office room, so that's definitely one privilege I had. But I had on-off days in office and remote. Maybe my most productive days were in office, but that was usually over guidance from a lead.

I don't think everyone needs to be on-site per se. But I do see some situations where on-site is beneficial to have, at least in partial capacity.

1. Juniors definitely need some on-site guidance (and by that extension, leads need to be available those days). I really cannot imagine those early mentoring being as effective over a screen. There's so much "body language" style of knowledge gained that doesn't come up in zoom meetings (and while proposed, I really hate the idea of an "always on" chat-room)

2. brainstorming, architecturing , and conceptualizing felt much better in person. So some periods may need more in-office time than others where it's focused on development (which feels to have minimal impact, given the nature of "head down" work).

3. Office space might be a consideration depending on your living space. If you are in a small apartment with little desk space, I can see that having a huge impact to productivity.

I love WFH but how is it a win climate change solution for anyone outside of the USA? If my office building WFH, instead of heating a building we need to heat 500 people homes all day. And most of the people commute by public transport.

Vast majority of people are not touching their thermostat much at all when going to the office.

But these are stupid made up arguments. WFH or not both the homes with no one in them and the offices with no tenants are getting heated still to keep the pipes from bursting.

>stupid made up arguments

All arguments are made up.

>getting heated still to keep the pipes from bursting

If I work from home my home must be kept at 19°. If I go to the office, my house can go down to 14-16° no problem.

How is their commute relevant? If they are WFH, theres less people needing to commute. Thats less fuel or more efficient fuel economy for public transport to use

Yes but we are offsetting their lack of commute (being public transport, a small impact anyway) with having to heat many more houses.

Most energy goes into making up for the temperature delta. If you turn the heating down, the delta at either evening or morning goes up.

Note, some people even think that would take even more energy in total per day, but that's not correct because a cooler house doesn't emit as much energy as a warmer one.

I would hazard a guess that (x houses @ minimal heating + x amount of petrol burned during a commute + emissions from heating an office) > whatever amount of emissions x houses would generate going from minimal heating to comfortable heating.

So 500 people leave for office and turn off the heating at their homes, even if there are other people (kids, elderly) or animals (cats, dogs, birds) living there?

Kids are at school during office hours, I'm not sure about pets but they I don't think they care whether the house is 23° or 16° considering most of them go outside without any issue.

It's bad for the EcOnOmY, less wear and tear in cars, less jobs for mechanics, less gas consumed, less lunch bought in fast food chain, &c.

The entire system is designed around making the numbers go up, not down

In the end cars are just a means to an end. People want to minimize their transportation spending.

People bought bigger houses or renovated. They upgraded their PCs and were more likely to subscribe to broadband and less likely to cancel. Empty office buildings are ever so slowly being converted to housing. Professional clothing purchases dipped and then rebounded.

Yep. The broken window fallacy and the tragedy of the commons*, darkening the future of basically every vertebrate on the planet.

* A solved problem, btw.

We may never know which sector of the economy you are in to believe WFH is a good idea unless you explicitly state it but given this is HN, I'm just going to make a lazy assumption for software dev or engineering. WFH sounds great in theory only if _everyone_ participates in it but is hardly the case in reality.

For example: If you can sustainably and reliably source your daily necessities like having the ability to cook or maintain a decent home environment that support it, kudos. Thought the covid lockdowns showed us how fragile that system can be especially for those _essential people_ to be physically around to feed you or keep your shit running.

As a side note: how do you feel about being snookered by your local government's policy under the pretext that _essential work_ just gives your employers the ability to maintain the same minimum wage labor cycle just so you can feel giddy about how good this idea is?

> costs nothing

1. for other businesses and jobs though, people staying at home costs a lot. one can call it a polarizing option.

2. these kind of jobs are likely prime candidates for AI already.

> is well loved by everyone who participates (except management)

Most of management hates it too. I manage a team where everyone is remote, yet I have to go to the office few days a week to sit on zoom, why? And up a level, my manager has an even longer commute and probably hates it more than I do.

This stuff is pushed down by HR, most of management hates it.