[HN Gopher] Why do so many people want us back in the office?
___________________________________________________________________
Why do so many people want us back in the office?
Author : ingve
Score : 189 points
Date : 2020-09-12 13:32 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (paulitaylor.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (paulitaylor.com)
| xyst wrote:
| Why do people continue to push this myth?
|
| " Kirsty Allsopp led the anti-remote work charge on Twitter,
| suggesting that if your job can be done from home, it can be done
| from anywhere in the world. Who would have thought that a couple
| of months of working in shorts and a T-Shirt has made us more
| susceptible to being replaced by less expensive folk in India,
| Myanmar and China?"
|
| It doesn't matter if they are American or live halfway across the
| world. If you want amazing talent, you are going to have to pay
| them well. Talented people are usually well aware of the salary
| differences between American vs local companies of their region.
|
| The people that tend to take the low offer are usually not in the
| best position to do the best work compared to their counterpart.
|
| I have met and worked with amazing talent from all across the
| world. At the same time I have also worked with people that
| should have never been in the business and were the root cause of
| project delays caused by buggy features and constant rework.
| Whether they are American or not, the people in the latter group
| tended to be in a group that was not happy largely due to their
| pay. In the cases I probed for more information, I discovered
| amongst the contracting companies that placed bids, the company
| took the lowest bid that was offered. No fucking surprise that
| 8-12 months later that the project is behind by at least half a
| year.
|
| Moral of the story companies need to pay well - regardless of the
| location of the person - in order to get a quality product that
| is pushed to the masses in time and remain competitive.
| [deleted]
| faster wrote:
| When I was building back end software, I could and did work from
| anywhere. I enjoyed working in the same space with my team, but
| not all day and not every day. And it wasn't necessary except
| maybe once or twice per quarter.
|
| Now I work on firmware, and I have about $6000 of test equipment
| that is required to do my job, as well as multiple fragile
| circuit boards, some that I'm afraid to touch because some of the
| rework wires might break. I am working at home, but I guarantee
| that I'm not as productive as I would be in an office with access
| to the EEs and MEs and the people who built the firmware for the
| previous version of the product. Yes, I can schedule a call or
| ask questions on Slack, but so much is passed to new team members
| by osmosis or exposure or context, whatever you want to call that
| side effect of colocation.
|
| > The best thing you can do in any period of change is to bet on
| neither black or white.
|
| I agree, in some cases. There are still some cases where the best
| bet IS almost entirely black, or almost entirely white.
| danbolt wrote:
| I've noticed the a similar thing working with game console
| devkits. I can get most of my work done remotely, but due to
| the streaming/latency required it feels slower. I feel like for
| certain performance-sensitive tasks I'd need a special day in
| front of the hardware to test things.
| dijit wrote:
| For sure this is true, my girlfriend is QC at a major game
| company and watching her work from home is _painful_. Though
| Citrix is better than Parsec, and both are far better than
| Remote Desktop (in a huge way).
|
| I have been pushing for Stadia as a primary testing platform,
| but the backend is quite painful to use (please don't hurt me
| google, I know I signed an anti-disparagement agreement, but
| your backend is really inflexible).
|
| But I think this is the 'old way of working', we're so
| fearful of losing devkits (and the software on them) that we
| keep them in the office, but that's not realistically much
| safer really.
|
| As a sidenote though: it's quite fun to see the game working
| on a tiny little MacBook.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Sounds like something blizzard would do.
| m0zg wrote:
| You could do what we did in some distributed teams at Google:
| just have a permanent "call" going with everyone normally
| muted. When someone would like to receive attention, they
| unmute and speak. It's not as good as walking up to someone's
| desk, but it's not as bad as having to schedule a call in
| advance.
| VectorLock wrote:
| That sounds worse in all possible ways than just having a
| messenger service like Slack but I suppose different teams
| work in different ways.
| dkdk8283 wrote:
| This sounds miserable. What did you do for periods of deep
| work?
| m0zg wrote:
| People used it very sparingly. It's not at all different
| from working in an open plan office. If anything it's
| better, as you can drop off from the call if you don't want
| to be disturbed. No such luxury in the office. And of
| course this only works with Google's usual "family sized"
| teams of 5-7 people.
| edoceo wrote:
| My team has a similar tool. So, everyone is in the room,
| muted and no-volume. So, if someone needs my attention they
| can send a bell but when my audio is off its only a visual
| bell, so it won't interrupt the deep work. And one can
| always exit the channel if needed - which is shown in
| status, so folks know your DND or not available.
|
| But, one can monitor the channel so it behaves like a water
| cooler too. And up-scales to video and screen share super
| fast. (Faster than other tools) It's really quite flexible.
|
| We've been using this pattern for about 60 months. We all
| (6 humans) seem to like it OK.
| maest wrote:
| Is this an in-house tool?
| m-ee wrote:
| With hardware there's really no substitute for having a
| stocked lab and good technician in the building. A broken
| blue wire or fried chip could mean me losing an hour to a day
| of productivity depending on whether I have parts on hand and
| how difficult the rework is. In the office it could be fixed
| before I had time to grab coffee.
| m0zg wrote:
| As an EE I know what you're talking about. But office won't
| be an option until November 4th. /s
| roenxi wrote:
| There is a certain mindset - turns up all the time in economic
| discussions too - where if a change is made and doesn't lead to a
| metric-observable consequence in 6 months then that is the end of
| the discussion.
|
| Working from home is crippling for forming new social
| connections. Promotions are done based, primarily, on social
| connections. Hiring too. There is very strong pressure for
| ambitious people who know how the world works to get back into
| the office.
|
| And the social aspect of a supervisor understanding what their
| reports are doing is also easy to underestimate. Offices will be
| back as soon as it is practicable.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _Working from home is crippling for forming new social
| connections._
|
| This is really strange to me as someone who has worked remotely
| for the past several years, because I've made more social
| connections outside of work than I ever did while working.
|
| > _And the social aspect of a supervisor understanding what
| their reports are doing is also easy to underestimate. Offices
| will be back as soon as it is practicable._
|
| Sounds like offices will be back as soon as possible for
| workplaces where supervisors feel compelled to micromanage.
| Nursie wrote:
| Perhaps we'll see a lot of those 'ambitious' people who talk a
| good game get overlooked in favour of those who actually
| deliver?
|
| Supervisors can understand what their reports are.doing without
| physical presence.
|
| I don't think "the office" will become a thing of the past, but
| I will welcome it being downgraded as the be-all and end-all
| for work that is not location sensitive.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| As someone who is ambitious, I hope the lockdown continues.
| Fewer pieces on the board makes everything easier.
| watwut wrote:
| I think that you are exactly right. But it is also something
| that people dont want to admit out loud. Many people need to
| believe that promotions and hirings are fair. Admitting it is
| often not, or that it is actually semi fair only had other
| implications and hurts motivation.
| system2 wrote:
| Remote work does not work for people who switch from office to
| home. It is not in their blood. Most office employees need
| constant management. If the employee can get away with watching
| netflix and do minimum from home, they will do it. I've observed
| many employees getting super slow or unreachable almost instantly
| after they start working from home. Most bosses don't like it and
| they get fired. In most cases nothing was related to covid in my
| opinion because obviously the employee performance dropped
| dramatically.
|
| Work from home won't work for many companies. Period.
| outside1234 wrote:
| I think what this is taught me is that we need both.
|
| It is too much to be in the office all of the time because
| sometimes "life" happens or you need the ability to have some
| silence and concentrate.
|
| It is too much to be remote all of the time because software is a
| team sport and to function optimally, we need to have great human
| relationships and communication, and those are better done face
| to face.
|
| We need to find the "happy midpoint" between these two extremes
| as a working culture.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| It's gonna be a shift from mostly office to a lot more hybrid
| office-remote. Most can't just go fully remote.
| pcbro141 wrote:
| Question: What month do you think you'll be back in the office,
| if you had to guess?
| jefflombardjr wrote:
| I wish people didn't see it as a binary option. "The office" vs
| "Remote". And no I'm not talking about suggesting alternatives
| like "work from home". I'm talking more about let's look at it
| through the lens of "employer control" and "individual
| empowerment".
|
| The article points to some statistics about the benefits of
| remote work. But I think those benefits are more derived from
| enabling individuals to decide what is best for them and their
| company. Alot of what is described in "Bullshit Jobs" was
| reversed overnight, and we're seeing the benefits of that.
| Location has nothing to do with it.
| mikece wrote:
| Who is demanding this? My company is openly talking about "office
| optional" when normalcy returns with "office days" being the
| exception rather than the norm.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| UK politicians and business landlords are banging the "back to
| the office, proles!" drum pretty hard right now. Thankfully
| people are mostly ignoring them.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| If it was only the UK...
| agrippanux wrote:
| My company was a few months away from an office move when Covid
| hit. Most leadership was fiercely anti-wfh. Fast forward to
| today, and the new office buildout has been converted into a
| "hotel" model with no permanent desks and the expectation is
| when it's safe, you will have option to do come in a few days a
| week.
| bigwavedave wrote:
| If my work ever went to a "no permanent desks" rule, they'd
| never see me in the office again. Not knowing where I'll be
| sitting and what noise/neighbor issues I'll have to work
| around is like adding insult to the injury of having to
| commute and forego all the benefits I get spoiled by with
| wfh.
| sktguha wrote:
| Mind sharing your company name ? , just curious
| heavyset_go wrote:
| The people that I know who work managerial and director roles
| in healthcare and pharmaceuticals are discussing this, also.
| Apparently productivity is through the roof with work from
| home.
| danielrhodes wrote:
| Outside of the pandemic, I think a company doing remote/WFH
| carries with it some implications people don't seem to talk about
| - namely that your physical workspace and equipment used is
| capital, and the company is not compensating employees for the
| use of that capital. If a company does not need to maintain
| office space, that is a huge expense they don't have to pay for -
| but an employee is paying for it.
|
| Right now you can see this in the real estate markets - people
| are moving out of their smaller city apartments into bigger
| places, partially I'm sure, because maintaining an office at home
| requires extra space. But that cost is on the employee not the
| employer.
| tima11234 wrote:
| Remote work at tech companies isn't something completely new,
| it just wasn't the norm. The good companies compensate
| employees for internet and hardware.
| dvtrn wrote:
| I wonder if anyone has done a survey about the specifics of
| company support during WFH.
|
| "Does your company allow you to expense a portion or all of
| your internet?" Type inquiries. I'm often uploading and
| downloading large assets to our and our client systems, would
| be happy to fill out an allowable expense report if the
| company would pick up even a third of my Internet bill
| (course I have a feeling such a thing will never happen)
|
| Anyone know? Curious to read the results if such a thing
| exists.
| sjy wrote:
| Companies don't compensate employees for the cost of their
| commute either. I don't see the big deal here; the marginal
| cost of working from home is often pretty close to zero.
| mmcnl wrote:
| They do actually. Maybe not where you live, but where I live
| it's normal (and expected) that employers compensate for
| commute.
| ergocoder wrote:
| IMO, this is one of the least concerning things with WFH.
|
| It's just another trade off. That isn't hard for many people
| who prefer working from home.
| nickalaso wrote:
| I live in a studio apartment with high rent, with a half mile
| walk from my office. I did this on purpose so I wouldn't have to
| commute. Now I am spending high rent for a small space. My
| company keeps stating that we will have to return to the office
| in some unknown "near future", otherwise I would plan on going
| full WFH and relocating to a larger home somewhere cheaper and
| more rural. But I'm stuck.
|
| I also miss my dedicated workspace, and I miss being able to
| separate work and home life easily by going no contact after 5PM
| without management thinking that means I am a bad employee.
|
| But most of all, I miss being able to let my bosses "micromanage"
| me in a way that didn't disrupt me. "Office Politics" has changed
| at my company in a way that is taking up a lot more of my
| productive time than it used to, and I hate it.
|
| Before the Great WFH of 2020, my boss would walk by my cubicle or
| speak to me in person regularly. Short conversations, didn't ever
| bother me, and allowed me to focus on work. Made him feel busy
| and made him feel I was busy. Ultimately I was able to spend less
| time "appearing busy" and more on actually getting work done.
|
| Since management at my company doesn't know how to actually track
| real work output, they have always used proxies like "how long
| does this person stay at the office?", "Are they still in their
| cubicle when I am leaving?", "When I walk by their cubicle do
| they have their IDE open doing 'coding stuff'" etc. etc.
|
| I've always been decently performant at code production. So all I
| had to do was stay on my coding tasks for a few hours each day,
| have an IDE always open on at least one of my monitors and wait
| til exactly 5:01 PM every day before I left as that was when my
| boss went home. I ended up getting stuff done quick, got to avoid
| most meetings, and could screw around the rest of the day if I
| wanted. Personal projects, internet surfing, etc.
|
| Great reviews from management. I would prefer an actual
| meritocratic standard based on actual work done, but that really
| has never been the case at any of the companies I have ever
| worked at so far in my career as a software engineer, so I'm used
| to it at this point.
|
| But now that we are all WFH, they really don't seem to know what
| to do. They don't know how much work anyone is, or isn't doing,
| instead daily standups have changed from 10 minute short succinct
| updates to "how aggressively and for how long can you
| technobabble bullshit about your coding tasks you did yesterday"
| turning these stand ups into at least an hour or more, and now I
| have to also technobabble bullshit or management will think I'm
| slacking.
|
| Even more so than before, they now seem to think pointless emails
| and multi-hour zoom meetings are the true marker of productivity.
| I hate this. I don't want to have to spend hours per day making
| up bullshit technobabble emails and sitting in on multi-hour long
| zoom meetings talking about unrelated boring bullshit. I just
| want to be able to focus on getting my coding tasks done for the
| day. Some of the lowest performers on my team love it though,
| because they are great at meetings, scheduling meetings, and
| making themselves feel important with pointless technical
| presentations during these meetings. Not to mention we are
| expected to have our webcams on at all times during these
| meetings, so I can't even "pretend" to be present while I go make
| myself tea or something.
|
| The barrier to entry for meetings has lowered. Before, scheduling
| a meeting in the office room down the hall and giving a
| presentation on why we all should add "bureaucratic coding
| standard addition xyz" was both too scary and too much work. Now,
| its "why not, management will think I am showing leadership
| skills!".
|
| Thanks guys, I love more poorly managed bureaucracy. Test driven
| development might be good if someone actually managed it and
| maintained standard during code reviews, but now everyone just
| creates shitty unit tests to meet the 70% code coverage
| requirement we are told to meet because the literal lowest
| performer on my team scheduled multi hour meetings with
| management on why we should all follow tde and convinced them it
| was a good idea.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| I wonder how people build meaningful professional relationships
| fully remote? I'm honestly asking as I'm new to it, and I've
| found the relationships with colleagues is what ensures and leads
| to future success.
| ilaksh wrote:
| I think it's a lot more complicated than just "from home" or "in
| the office". There are a lot of different home situations, many
| different types of commutes, and then there is the specific
| software and hardware you use for communication and how you
| configure it.
|
| For example, take something like presence. The boss wants to know
| if you are working. With software, there are ways to track that
| if it's really necessary. For a manager that doesn't trust the
| employees, activity tracking software gives about the even more
| information than being there, because you can actually see
| screenshots.
|
| That is what UpWork does. It's quite invasive, and most people
| would not tolerate it if they felt they had the choice, but I
| bring it up as an example of how the software configuration makes
| as much difference as the physical location. And in fact tens
| (hundreds?) of thousands of people on UpWork have tolerated it.
| So it's a real thing, even though it's abhorrent.
|
| The more sane way is having some way to see your reports' work
| output on a regular basis. And there is no reason that needs to
| be minute-to-minute or even day-to-day if there is a level of
| trust.
|
| But presence is not just useful in a physical setting for
| monitoring employees. It also allows for things like spontaneous
| communication or types of communication not possible or difficult
| on a computer screen. Here I think again, the actual software
| available and the configuration can make a huge difference.
|
| For example, if you truly feel that water-cooler meetings are
| critical, you can build that into your at-home software setup and
| just make it mandatory. There are a lot of ways you could do
| that. It could literally be chat rooms named "water-cooler1" and
| "water-cooler2" and then you put some piece of required
| information like an expense code in there so people have to
| enter.
|
| Or there are various types of software with virtual spaces, such
| as top-down maps where you see the location of your co-workers
| and can even hear their conversations if your avatar is close by.
| There are also 3d world's, both with a screen interface and a
| virtual reality interface.
|
| I think especially as VR and AR headsets get more comfortable and
| usable over the next few years, that is really going to be able
| to compete with physical presence. For example, they are starting
| to track eye movements. That's going to make it possible to
| actually communicate using your eyes in VR.
|
| Point being that there is a big spectrum in types or level of
| presence that is about the type of software and hardware
| configuration (and culture/rules) as much as it is about actual
| physical location.
| garden_hermit wrote:
| I love remote work--some of the time. I also love offices--some
| of the time. I fear that in ditching offices completely, we might
| lose out on some society-level benefits, like knowledge
| spillovers. Specifically, remote-work (to me) makes it more
| difficult to learn from others, to hear about what else is
| happening in the organization, to discuss interesting new ideas
| that could potentially be spun into new products or companies. A
| team can also more easily and quickly learn to collaborate while
| in-person.
|
| This doesn't even touch on all the economic spillovers of having
| people in the same area, such as restaurants and other services
| catering to the concentration of office workers (as mentioned by
| the author), but also things like specialized lawyers,
| financiers, and other professional services that concentrate
| around Silicon Valley and other agglomerative clusters.
|
| Ultimately, I hope we can come to a compromise, something like
| 50/50 remote/office, with smaller offices that cater more towards
| the explicitly social functions of the organization.
| rangoon626 wrote:
| I went from an environment of blaring led lights, friends repeats
| playing on the tv all day that I had to muffle with headphones
| because people could stand to work "in a library" and commuting
| 30+ min each way in stressful crawling traffic, to sleeping in an
| hour longer, natural lighting and a quiet environment with better
| hardware than what the office has.
|
| This has made me insanely productive and I don't know if I have
| ever had such a great streak before. Going back to the office
| ruins all of that.
|
| So I say, boo-hoo to the real estate investors.
| zwischenzug wrote:
| Interesting piece. I wrote a similar one recently about the
| effects of an office exodus on central London property. So far
| some of my predictions have come to pass, eg paradoxical mini
| property boom outside London
|
| https://zwischenzugs.com/2020/07/25/the-halving-of-the-centr...
| FpUser wrote:
| Sounds like a cry of a many managers who suddenly feel that their
| precious skin (some of them do nothing really useful) is in
| jeopardy.
| timwaagh wrote:
| I dont think the conclusion is super useful. So i Will give you a
| better one. So far little indicates this is more than an
| emergency.
| hordeallergy wrote:
| I have no interest in being in the office. The commute is horrid
| and a waste of time. The socialising is insignificant. The water
| cooler never has more than one visitor at a time, so the idea of
| it being an idea exchange is myth. Everyone communicates via chat
| in office, with headphones on. Being able to separate work and
| private life is a matter of self discipline, the other matters
| are not. The only thing I want is for coffee shops to return to
| normal.
| rangoon626 wrote:
| If you primarily rely on socializing and interacting with other
| people AT WORK and around a water cooler of all things, you
| need some hobbies and activities.
|
| People used to have an actual connection to the community they
| lived in but it seems like there's now a massive collective
| laziness to seek it out.
| tima11234 wrote:
| Agreed. I think the people that are pointing out social
| aspects just haven't bothered to talk to people outside of
| their work. I lived in several different apartments in SF for
| many years, I didn't know a single neighbor, ever. Most
| people couldn't be bothered to say hello.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _The commute is horrid and a waste of time._
|
| Not only is it a waste of time, it in an unnecessary danger.
| Tens of thousands of people are killed in their commutes, and
| many more are injured in accidents to, from or during work.
| supernova87a wrote:
| I've mentioned this before, but WFH has a huge difference in
| result depending on who you are, when you are (in your career),
| and where you are in a company (or organization). _For some
| people_ , going back to the office has benefits.
|
| -- For the budding young developer who can't wait to show ideas
| to teammates and demonstrate being a go-getter by asking random
| questions and finding unaddressed issues to innovate on, WFH
| might be terrible. You're going to schedule time to fortuitously
| run into the senior person who takes an interest in your idea?
|
| -- For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by
| 50% and stress has gone up by 50% due to parenting obligations,
| WFH might be terrible.
|
| -- For the middle manager who can coast along and not need to
| move greatly in his/her career, WFH might be great.
|
| -- For the developer who works by tickets on very concrete things
| and this is nothing new, WFH might be great.
|
| -- For the small company CEO who relies on force of personality
| and everyone in the same room urgently working to get something
| done, WFH might be terrible.
|
| There's a huge variability in what WFH means, depending on what
| you want from the situation.
|
| For some people, remote working is really not good.
|
| And also count your other hidden factors -- when everyone is
| remote, you're also competing with the world who is also remote.
| Jobs and job qualifications (and competition) may change. You
| might still have a job if people have to go back in person...
|
| This is not just "those evil exploitative bosses want to get us
| back in offices". It's not that simple, as with anything.
| xyst wrote:
| Darwinian fitness was never solely about "braun" but the
| ability to adapt. If these people cannot adapt, then maybe they
| weren't the right people to hire for the job.
|
| The hidden factors you mention are based upon conjecture. You
| are right remote work proves that you can hire anybody in the
| world. However, that doesn't mean companies should pay a person
| that lives in another country a lower wage than the American
| counterpart.
|
| The platitude of "you get what you pay for" really shines in
| this discussion. I have witnessed amazing talent from all
| across the globe that produced excellent results for the team
| and company. At the same time, I have also seen dog shit work
| produced by Americans and abroad. In the latter group, I
| noticed the individual was paid much lower than expected or in
| a bid for contracting companies the company took the lowest bid
| offered.
|
| I have seen numerous projects fall significantly behind
| schedule due to buggy features or just constant re-work of
| terribly implemented features because someone at the project
| management level thought they could convince poorly paid people
| to push out quality work.
| Nursie wrote:
| For the consultant developer working on green-field prototypes
| in a small team, it's also been amazing.
|
| I've always been competing with developers all around the world
| - it's not like outsourcing is new.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| _For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by
| 50% and stress has gone up by 50% due to parenting obligations,
| WFH might be terrible._
|
| But it's worth bearing in mind that this in particular is an
| almost completely orthogonal issue.
| sjy wrote:
| What does this mean?
| tima11234 wrote:
| WFH during a pandemic is not the same as WFH during normal
| times. A lot of people conflate the two.
| spiritplumber wrote:
| Control.
| danjac wrote:
| That, and the fact that many politicians, media barons and
| other wealthy individuals stand to lose a lot of money on their
| commercial property investments, and so have their flying
| monkeys working overtime to persuade the rest of us to risk
| life and health for no good reason.
| Valgrim wrote:
| At my work, almost everybody got to work from home since the
| beginning of the pandemic. I was one of the few who had to stay
| behind, due to the nature of my job. Here's what I have observed:
|
| - The office is much quieter, and it's easier to concentrate.++
|
| - People working from home are harder to reach. I can wait 6
| hours before I get an answer to a question I would otherwise get
| answered within 5 minutes.
|
| - Those who stay behind become the Go-For guys for all other
| departments. Marketing needs something sent to a client by mail
| ASAP? Just ask the only guy left to gogetit! It's tiresome,
| especially if the other department is a mess.
|
| -People are really bad at describing things. In casual chatting,
| the amount of non-language communication, like pointing things,
| is staggering.
|
| - The more time people spend time away from work, the more they
| seem to get out of touch with the physical nature of what they
| do. For example, if you want something transported somewhere, you
| need to tell me from where, to where, when, how big it is and
| ideally a reference number or a contact. No, we can't modify the
| order if the truck left four hours ago...
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| I don't care about "us" going back to the office but I definitely
| want to go back to the office and I am far from alone in this.
| refurb wrote:
| Yup. My 10,000 company in the Bay Area did an employee poll and
| it was overwhelming "I'd like the opportunity to work from the
| office again".
|
| Keep in mind it wasn't "I want to be there 8 hours a day,
| Monday through Friday". But they definitely wanted the option
| to work from an office for part of the work week, at a minimum.
|
| This doesn't surprise me in the least.
| balfirevic wrote:
| > I'd like the opportunity to work from the office again
|
| Is that a useful answer? Of course people would like that
| opportunity, even if they never used it - it's pure bonus.
|
| More useful question would be "how many times a week (or how
| many hours) do you plan to work from the office given the
| opportunity to work from both home and the office?"
| refurb wrote:
| It is useful because the company was trying to gauge how
| many wanted to work from home permanently and wouldn't care
| if they never had an office to go to.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| I feel more distracted at home and miss the social interactions
| with coworkers. Video conferences are tiresome.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| Yes, one day someone is going to do a "this is your brain on
| Zoom" study and it will finally explain what many of us have
| been feeling.
| walshemj wrote:
| Especially if you have a regular culprit who has crappy audio
| and keeps harshing the mic that gets tiring very quickly.
| arcticbull wrote:
| I miss the ad-hoc conversations with coworkers that lead to
| cool product innovation. I also miss being able to mentor
| junior engineers in person, and receiving in-person
| mentorship from my seniors.
|
| I personally believe that we're all running on the trajectory
| and direction we scoped before the shut-down, and as we move
| into H1 planning next year, things are going to get much
| slower and more complicated.
| jefflombardjr wrote:
| But do you really need that from a company? I get that from
| coworking spaces. And if anything I'd argue it's more
| innovative.
|
| Instead of a bunch of programmers spouting group think, I
| get to interact with writers, artists, indie game devs,
| etc. Way more innovative than any programmer group I've
| been in.
| arcticbull wrote:
| I prefer that when I'm working on my own projects, but at
| BigCo, I can't really do that :)
| s0rce wrote:
| I couldn't really talk to random people at a coworking
| space unless they signed NDAs, which would be hard to
| enforce. Lots of IP and other secrets. Do people really
| discuss their work with strangers at coworking spaces?
| I've never worked in one so thats interesting/surprising.
| Maybe some more generic programming challenges could be
| discussed vs product/research specifics.
| pm90 wrote:
| Well these folks will probably not have much context on
| what you are doing though. Offices are nice because
| people working in them have some shared reality, vision
| and goals. I know that the service or tool I build or use
| is built or used by another team for a specific purpose.
| A lot of the innovations I've seen happening are because
| humans with this shared reality try to solve one others
| problems, or at least talk about it. Many times, others
| will also actually help out if someone is stuck on
| something.
|
| We need something to simulate this kind of shared reality
| somehow. Video conferences don't do that. I'm sure there
| will be some innovation that might, I'm betting on cheap,
| high quality AR headsets. Right now it feels like in
| 2007... internet on cellphones was a thing but an iPhone
| with touchscreens had to be invented for something
| revolutionary to happen...
| Nursie wrote:
| I'm the opposite. Without having to hear the two women
| sitting two rows back talking loudly about whatever the hell
| it is, or be interrupted 8 times a day by people in unrelated
| areas asking inane questions that are already documented on
| confluence...
|
| Working from home has been amazing for my concentration
| levels.
| ckdarby wrote:
| Can you discuss why you want to go back to the office?
| jeltz wrote:
| Not OP, but many reasons. I miss socializing with colleagues,
| I also like sitting in a room surrounded by other people also
| working and finally my office has better ergonomics.
| BillinghamJ wrote:
| Not the OP, but in my case it's just down to socialising with
| the friends I work with, and pair programming.
|
| The latter can be done remotely but definitely isn't anywhere
| near as smooth or natural I find.
| derwiki wrote:
| Agree on the latter, but VSCode Live Share has made it
| passable!
| ketzu wrote:
| Number one reason for me is the separation of work and
| private life. It's so much easier to keep work from creeping
| into my private life when it happens in a totally different
| place.
|
| I also miss the social interactions, discussion with
| colleagues is much easier in person. Lastly, I hope it will
| reduce the amount of video conferences that crept up
| considerably.
|
| edit: Not OP obviously.
|
| edit2: Note: Just to make sure, I know this is personal
| preference and I am perfectly happy with other people being
| super happy and productive at home!
| jefflombardjr wrote:
| That's a great reason. You like to set boundaries between
| work and private life.
|
| But I'm not convinced a corporate office is the only, let
| alone, best option. Have you considered alternatives?
| ketzu wrote:
| No I haven't considered alternatives between a corporate
| office and a home office. Could you list some? I am fairy
| uncreative about these things, unfortunately :/
| balfirevic wrote:
| Coworking space or a small private office that's separate
| from your house/aparment.
| ketzu wrote:
| Thank you for the ideas, I'll have something to think
| about now
| rwmj wrote:
| I've worked at home for 20 years, more or less, and I have
| a separate space (garden office), $300 conference camera
| and mic, huge screen, and the best internet connection
| possible. When this is your life you arrange things
| differently, and I've no doubt that others who make the
| change to working from home will make similar adjustments
| over time.
| ketzu wrote:
| I could work with it if I was forced to do it, which I
| was for a few months. If I had to do it for an even
| longer period, a separate room would probably be
| necessary. But having a "black space" room is not exactly
| something I want in my private space either. (Not to
| think about my work most likely not willing to pay rent
| for that room :D )
|
| I know this is a personal preference, but for me,
| physical distance makes my work more productive and my
| private time more relaxing.
| randycupertino wrote:
| > $300 conference camera and mic, huge screen
|
| Can you recommend your camera, mic and screen setup? And
| what brand/model they are? TY!
| ghaff wrote:
| Not the parent, but I use a Logitech 920s webcam. I
| _could_ use one of my high-end cameras--I even have an
| older model Fujifilm I don 't use any longer--with an
| HDMI to USB converter but I decided it wasn't worth the
| trouble and it's harder to make work in physical space
| anyway.
|
| I use a Blue Snowball mic but any decent USB mic will
| work. I have a dedicated office and I haven't found using
| a headset makes it better though YMMV. I'd just as soon
| not wear a headset unless necessary.
|
| Computer is just a 27" iMac with a 2nd monitor. (Though I
| actually usually work with video on my main screen and do
| any work with shared docs etc. on a MacBook.)
|
| Also have an Elgato keylight to get the lighting a bit
| more even.
|
| ADDED: Probably at least as important is that you're not
| backlit by a window and you have the camera at maybe a
| bit above eye level. I've also done a bit of "set
| decorating" of my background.
| porker wrote:
| Which camera and mic are you using?
| Nursie wrote:
| At 5.30 I reboot my workstation from linux into windows.
| Separation complete :)
| andi999 wrote:
| AM or PM?
| ketzu wrote:
| I am glad this works for you! Maybe it's because I can't
| switch my mind so easily, I prefer a physical distance (I
| don't think a separate room would be enough for me
| either).
| watwut wrote:
| What worked for me best during lockdown was strong
| ritualized schedule (which is completely at odds with my
| normal personality).
|
| What used to be going to work in the morning became
| exercise. Then, when it was end of day, we went outside.
| I have kids which made it making more sense. But you can
| go outside for walk or read book outside etc. The point
| is that you leave room and do something that causes
| mental switch.
| Nursie wrote:
| To be fair I've been working 60% remote for a few years
| now, so moving to 100% wasn't a huge strain for me. It's
| actually something I've wanted for a while.
|
| I've had time to get my head around the separation you
| talk about, I guess. Also helps that I'm on a small team
| and we all slack something like "Signing off now, catch
| you tomorrow" at around 5.30. Puts an end on the day.
| pwinnski wrote:
| If you don't have a separate room, it's hard to see how
| much difference it can make. I've worked from home since
| 2008 with a one-year break immediately before COVID-19,
| and I'm glad to be back, but the separate room was
| essential for me.
| nonbirithm wrote:
| Not the OP. In my case:
|
| - I get far too distracted by my apartment. The things I hung
| up on my wall to give myself a sense of personality are the
| things that I will be distracted by if I have my work laptop
| open.
|
| - I want a clear separation between being at work and being
| at home. Otherwise I will make excuses that because I happen
| to be at home I can do X or Y without consequence. At home I
| have my personal computer and television within walking
| distance at all times. By being in the office I deliberately
| prevent myself from having those options.
|
| - My job requires me to use a specific model of laptop for
| remote work. The laptop itself is not an ideal environment
| for getting things done. It is a Lenovo-era ThinkPad with the
| chiclet keys and they are awful to type on. I have other
| hardware in my room to plug in, but on top of that I have to
| RDP to my machine in order to access corpnet things, and the
| latency is plainly awful. It takes several minutes to just
| launch it and render the entire desktop completely, control
| key combinations will frequently not register because of the
| latency, I'm unable to use my laptop's microphone half the
| time over RDP, and there are frequent disconnections. And if
| I'm working at home, all of these annoyances will just pile
| on top of each other and make me lose motivation to do work
| entirely.
|
| - On top of that my access credentials expired while I was
| taking shelter early on, so to use my work laptop from home
| at that point I had no choice but to go to the office to get
| them unblocked. I went in and immediately wondered why I
| hadn't been working from there in months. It was night and
| day.
|
| I got certified to go into the office as "essential staff,"
| because for me being in the office is what determines if I am
| productive at all or not. In fact the amount of work that
| ended up piling up because I was unable to work effectively
| anymore caused an anxiety episode that I had to take off a
| few months for. It truly felt like I had been pushed into a
| corner. Thankfully my team was understanding, it being a
| devastating pandemic and all.
| WWLink wrote:
| Half of your problem sounds like infrastructure issues and
| possibly not having a good workspace setup. I am super
| lucky and have fiber internet at home and we have an
| awesome VPN at work, so I can get <10ms ping to almost
| everything lol. I keep my work computer plugged into a
| desktop setup (mouse/keyboard/monitors) so I don't have to
| deal with that.
| munchbunny wrote:
| I'm not the parent poster, but I agree with their preference.
| It's psychological. I focus better with a clear delineation
| of work in a work setting and personal life in a home
| setting. Even the physical transition of the commute helps me
| switch over. This is something that has eroded in the last
| six months even though I've tried to substitute it with
| practices like an "office" room.
|
| Additionally, I am definitely a person who prefers in person
| meetings and conversations. It's not that I can't do remote
| conversations - I've even managed remote employees for years
| - but I value water cooler conversations as a place for
| spontaneous idea generation or just relationship building,
| which is just harder remotely. You have to go out of your way
| to send ideas into the ether, without the physical signs that
| someone might be receptive to random, possibly stupid
| musings, or non-sequiter stuff about personal life.
|
| Count me among the people who are fine with others choosing
| to stay remote, but once it's feasible and safe to go into
| the office I would want to do it.
| garrickvanburen wrote:
| I get the want for distinct physical spaces to change
| contexts, though considering we're 20+ years into a world
| of employer issued laptop and mobile phones, making the
| delineation between work and non-work is very much up to
| each of us as individuals. This is as a small as not
| checking work email outside of work hours and as large as
| finding a space that you yourself work best in even if that
| means not home or your employer's office.
| gravitas wrote:
| The issue is while you're on the clock; I don't take
| those longer breaks to get a coffee, it's right behind
| me. I take shorter lunches, it's right there behind me.
| (etc.) People who are not tenured remote employees are
| still struggling to find a healthy life balance as
| they've spent 20 years working in an office.
|
| My company (~10k, global, mix of hourly and salaried) has
| multiple times sent out pandemic guidance asking people
| to take more time off and stop working so much, they see
| the extra hours in their time tracking tooling upstream
| (and it's not a financial play, they're targeting the
| salaried).
| sbuk wrote:
| The office I work in is open plan, which I would imagine is
| the case for the significant proportion of individual that
| do their work in an office. There are constant interuptions
| and it's way too loud. In order to focus, I have to shut
| off the background noise with headphones, and even they
| don't deter most people from interupting my flow. As my
| customer base is wide spread, I'm in vidoe calls anyway.
| This means that it really doesn't matter where I work. I do
| miss some of my collegues, I do miss some of the
| interactions and technical discussions that go on, as much
| as a little bit of the banter. Slack/Teams can be very
| impersonal and nuance is totally lost with text based
| media. With that said, I'm definately more productive at
| home. I can definately get more done and I definately do
| not miss the commute. I see much more of my kids and my
| wife, which to me at least, is the most important thing.
| Work-life harmony seems to me to be easier to atain if the
| choice of working from home is available.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Not OP but I will throw in my 2 cents...
|
| 1. Work/life separation. Even with a separate computer,
| getting it shut away and Slack gone is easier said than done.
| Now everyone knows you're probably around somewhere and will
| read their e-mail or see their Slack message, even early in
| the morning or later in the afternoon.
|
| 1b. I work better in a dedicated environment. My home office
| has all kinda of other distractions. Homework from my OMSCS
| classes beckons to be done, personal projects, not to mention
| kids. The psychological difference of being in a dedicated
| workspace is significant.
|
| 2. Social connections. There are many people I was friendly
| with but only at the office. Now I only interact with people
| on my own team or in closely related teams when we are
| working on some project that overlaps. My 'work world' has
| shrunk dramatically.
|
| 3. Zoom. Just make it stop. My company has dedicated Thursday
| to be 'no meeting day' but it hasn't really stuck yet. I'm
| brought onto way more calls now than I ever was when we were
| in the office. It feels like Zoom has become the substitute
| for the random communications we used to have, except instead
| of taking 5-10 minutes everyone schedules 30-60 minutes at a
| time. And they always find a way to use up every minute plus
| 2 or 3 after the end time.
|
| I don't actually want to go back full time. I am thinking
| seriously of selling my Model 3 because having a 60K
| depreciating asset in the garage that only gets driven a
| couple hundred miles a month is not the best use of my money.
| But when the office opens back up eventually, I do think I'll
| try to spend at least one day a week there. Maybe two.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| re: 3, it is completely acceptable to require a plan before
| joining a zoom meeting. If you put something on my calendar
| without telling me, it gets declined.
|
| I've been told "You have no instinct of self preservation
| at this job" but being stuck in meetings and not being able
| to get things done is not what I was hired to do. Tuesdays
| and Mondays I concede to meeting hell because those are
| regular team meetings but your little attempt at showing
| the marketing department is still doing work by scheduling
| meetings is not that fun :(
| barrucadu wrote:
| > Even with a separate computer, getting it shut away and
| Slack gone is easier said than done. Now everyone knows
| you're probably around somewhere and will read their e-mail
| or see their Slack message, even early in the morning or
| later in the afternoon.
|
| But... why? Just don't look at work messages outside of
| work hours. Is that so hard?
| canofbars wrote:
| Exactly. This line has always puzzled me. My work laptop
| is the only one with IM/Email on it. When I close the lid
| at the end of the day people can email me all they want,
| I won't see it.
| nemetroid wrote:
| > Social connections. There are many people I was friendly
| with but only at the office. Now I only interact with
| people on my own team or in closely related teams when we
| are working on some project that overlaps. My 'work world'
| has shrunk dramatically.
|
| I echo this sentiment. As a junior engineer in a large
| office, being able to keep track of other projects, who is
| working on what, what's coming up in a different business
| area, etc., has been very important for career development.
| Working from home, I've been "siloed" into my own team to a
| much larger extent.
| gjs278 wrote:
| they are simply normie trash. just program the code and call
| it a day or night.
| ecf wrote:
| It seems lately that most accounts arguing in favor of going
| back into office immediately are throwaways.
|
| I wonder why that is
| kop316 wrote:
| I'll toss my account into one of those being in favor if
| offices. Feel free to check the account creation an karma.
|
| Different people have different preferences.
| dang wrote:
| The site guidelines ask you not to post insinuations like
| this. Would you mind reviewing them?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| (Please stick to text here too.)
| [deleted]
| BillinghamJ wrote:
| Totally off topic, but I've never seen an emoji on HN before
| - maybe the restrictions on Unicode characters have been
| lifted?
|
| Edit: weirdly it seems to just be that specific emoji, others
| don't work
| [deleted]
| ecf wrote:
| What are you viewing it on?
|
| I submitted my comment using Hack (iOS) but the emoji is
| coming though for me as the black box as well.
| snazz wrote:
| Yeah, this seems strange. I've seen the black heart symbol
| before (not an actual emoji), but never a real emoji. Does
| it work for me too?
| [deleted]
| jdminhbg wrote:
| Four year old account, 3k karma, despite the name.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Probably because lurkers have a topic they're finally
| passionate about. Also, doesn't this site have a rule about
| assuming the best intentions from posters?
| soneil wrote:
| I'm with you on that one. I actually want to go back to the
| office.
|
| I don't have a dedicated workspace at home, and I'm definitely
| feeling it. The line between working from home, and living at
| work, is getting very blurry. Our living room has become an
| office, our kitchen has become the other office. The bedroom is
| now the only space sacrosanct.
|
| It's not so much that I miss the office, but I certainly miss
| "going to work" and "leaving work". That's very difficult to
| replicate in the space I have - here I am on a lazy saturday
| afternoon, and "work" is the sleeping thinkpad just to the left
| of me.
|
| Obviously if this persists, I'm going to need to look into a
| larger living space. Either going from a 1 bedroom to 3, or
| somewhere large enough to have a separate dining room we can
| repurpose (and "young-couple flat with an actual dining room
| instead of a table floating in the middle of an open-plan room"
| seems to be quite rare.)
|
| So whenever I hear talk of how much our employers could save by
| not needing anywhere near as much property - in the back of my
| head I'm starting to realise it's just shifting that property
| cost from them to me.
| starky wrote:
| This is the big thing for me. I already pay more than is
| reasonable for a 550 sq.ft. apartment which obviously doesn't
| have a separate office. To get a 2 bedroom place I would have
| to double my rent to get a place that is even close to where
| my current apartment is.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| We need some kind of open, easily auditable telemetric suite
| which people can use to monitor resource usage on their home
| (electric, HVAC, compute, network) and bill their employers. Then
| let's see how much the corporates REALLY want work from home.
| dpcan wrote:
| I've worked from home for 17 years, but I love to go work other
| places like coffee shops, libraries, etc. I would LOVE to not be
| at home again.
|
| I can technically go to these other places and work again, just
| like I used to, because the area I live in believes this is all a
| hoax, but I'm just not comfortable, and I don't want to wear a
| mask all day, and people just aren't the same right now - so I'm
| a little nervous about being around strangers all day and want to
| avoid uncomfortable or awkward situations.
| Finnucane wrote:
| Yeah, I worked from home for a few years as a a freelancer.
| That was a very different experience from wfh due to pandemic
| lockdown. Before I could still see people when I wanted or
| needed to, go to the cafe or the library, buy lunch at the
| deli, etc. I didn't have an office but other kinds of normal
| interactions were still an option.
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| Every once in a while some blogger posts an idillic picture of a
| guy with his laptop working on a sandy beach under a palm tree.
|
| Once you start thinking about it:
|
| - it's hot there. There's no AC on a beach.
|
| - wifi in the beach is mostly likely poor
|
| - sand is a nasty substance which gets everywhere, including your
| laptop
|
| - the nearest coffee machine may be a couple of miles away
|
| and so on.
|
| I'd rather work in an office.
| redm wrote:
| I'm not banging any drums but I was excited to get back to an
| office. I think it's similar to the saying "Dress for Success",
| in that, when I'm in the office, I focus on work and get more
| done. Everything around me is work related and focused, there are
| no distractions, and I really get stuff done.
|
| My situation may be a bit unique, in that I work in an office
| alone (we are a remote work team, but I still keep an office),
| and my commute is very short. Still, I've always found it hard
| working at home and being as productive as at an office.
| giantDinosaur wrote:
| That's more than a 'bit' unique, that's very uncommon. Nice
| situation though.
| mynameishere wrote:
| Yeah, he might as well be rolling from his bedroom to his
| guest bedroom where he keeps his laptop.
|
| ...
|
| In any case, if anyone else here has worked in a nice office
| setup (4 walls + door, no uptight manager, no long commute,
| and no army boot camp style communal bathrooms) then you'll
| know that the main problem with working from an office is
| those particulars. WFH is nice simply because _everybody 's_
| house is nicer than a trash office build-out.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| Same here. I am remote, but, up until the shutdown, I worked
| out of a coworking space.
|
| Some things have improved. For example, my office-based
| colleagues' videoconferencing etiquette has improved
| dramatically. Nowhere near as many people doing things like
| leaving their camera off and blatantly working on other things
| instead of paying attention to the meeting.
|
| But my own sense of wellbeing has suffered, all the same. I
| find it much easier to maintain work-life boundaries when work
| happens somewhere else.
| ahupp wrote:
| I worked remote for 3 years. It was great at first (10ft commute,
| woo!), but I wouldn't choose to do it long-term. All those
| relationships I'd made with co-workers slowly withered as the
| team changed, and by the end we just didn't work as cohesively
| together. It wasn't a failure per se, we still shipped software,
| it was just clearly a lot less effective (both for me career-
| wise, and for the team as a whole). So I would strongly prefer a
| job that's in-person at least a few days every week.
|
| Some caveats: this was before video conferencing, slack or FB
| Workplace so maybe things are better now. And, it might be
| different when everyone is remote so YMMV.
| draw_down wrote:
| Commercial real estate prices.
| kepler1 wrote:
| I mean, if you simplify this to its most fundamental level, the
| article is about not wanting to work (not just the office part).
| Or it's about not wanting to do the _unpleasant_ aspects of work.
| And citing some random studies to support his position.
|
| But jobs / companies are mechanisms for getting people to do
| things _they wouldn 't feel like normally doing_, because they
| get paid to do it. That's the definition of work!
|
| Of course no one wants to go back to work when they've been
| allowed not to for a while.
|
| The author lists all the things he hates about being in the
| office. Namely the things that are work. He wants some fairy tale
| home environment where no one bothers him, there are no
| deadlines, and he gets to work on only the things he wants. For
| high pay and 0 stress.
|
| If anyone has been able to find that in life, god bless you and
| treasure what you have. If the author was not getting paid right
| now, you best believe he'd have a different attitude.
|
| Eventually people will have to go back to work. This "work from
| home lala land" imaginary utopia is not going to be possible
| forever.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Beside what others have mentioned.
|
| CEOs do most of their time: meetings & talking to people. This is
| their job, they don't do Powerpoint, coding or anything else
| beside talking and meetings. Both is more draining if you do this
| 10h a day remotely. To my coachees there is a big push amongst
| CEOs to get people back in the office, they haven't defined their
| remote role yet.
| danjac wrote:
| I detect a hint of worry: if the company does just fine with
| minimal input from the CEO, how do they justify their outsized
| salary and benefits?
| langitbiru wrote:
| I suspect remote management will be taught in business school.
| This remote stuff is already common thing for software engineers
| (open source projects) but it's very new for people outside
| software engineering. So I can empathize with them.
| 01100011 wrote:
| I would be in favor of a number of working arrangements, ranging
| from working in a Bay Area office full-time(least favorite) to
| working from home most-time in an area that provides me with the
| chance to buy a home and have a reasonable commute to a satellite
| office.
|
| I am absolutely, 100% against full-time WFH in an expensive, low-
| quality(no sound/thermal insulation) Bay Area apartment without a
| dedicated workspace.
|
| > if your job can be done from home, it can be done from anywhere
| in the world
|
| I will call anyone's bluff who says this. Do it. Good luck. If
| you haven't successfully done this already, there is a reason and
| you know it.
|
| One final point is that anyone looking to judge my WFH
| productivity better take into account the endless procession of
| major disasters taking place outside my window. WFH in a pandemic
| with looting and massive wildfires is not the same as WFH in a
| 'normal' year.
| maneesh wrote:
| >> if your job can be done from home, it can be done from
| anywhere in the world
|
| > I will call anyone's bluff who says this. Do it. Good luck.
| If you haven't successfully done this already, there is a
| reason and you know it.
|
| Welp, I'm the CEO of a smart wearable device company
| (https://pavlok.com). We were based in Boston because everyone
| told me, and I believed you HAD to be in one place to build a
| startup, and DEFINITELY for a hardware startup.
|
| Then when I finally closed the Boston office and moved to
| Medellin, Colombia. Then budapest. Then Berlin. Then Bali. Then
| Mexico.
|
| All while doing the same for the team -- remote first, work
| anywhere.
|
| Only then did we begin to explode in productivity and success.
|
| I don't think it's true for EVERY job (tough to do janitorial
| cleanup from another country). But it is possible for a lot lot
| lot lot more than you think.
| aspaceman wrote:
| I can't even with this comment.
|
| Not everyone has the resources to make a working place
| anywhere viable. You seem to have the resources to make a
| hotel in Budapest or whatever work. Talking so causally about
| international travel already puts you beyond most Americans'
| income.
|
| So yeah it is very, very easy for folks with a job like
| yours, and with the resources you're afforded, to work
| anywhere. The issue isn't proximity to resources, but the
| ability to complete work.
| woodson wrote:
| Staying at AirBnBs in the listed cities and working from
| there is quite likely cheaper than renting office space in
| Boston (probably even including airfare). So it's not about
| "resources" as in money, it's about being able to be
| productive working from all these places, especially when
| taking into account the time zone difference to other
| members of the team.
| maigret wrote:
| Yes, and... I'd be curious to see which digital nomads
| follow the local taxes regulations. It's easy to get in
| trouble with working abroad.
| tingol wrote:
| Don't be daft, an average US salary will get you an above
| average life almost anywhere else in the world.
| maneesh wrote:
| I moved out of Boston because we were spending money too
| quickly. I dropped non-personnel expenses by 80% by doing
| so....
| sunshinekitty wrote:
| It seems to be implied with the closing of their Boston
| office that the whole staff is remote, not just this
| person.
| grogenaut wrote:
| also that they had already built a strong team
| tikhonj wrote:
| Why does working remote-first require _more_ resources from
| the worker? You don 't have a commute and you have the
| _flexibility_ to choose where to work. In this scenario,
| nobody is forcing you to travel anywhere--a sharp contrast
| to non-remote jobs where you have to relocate if you don 't
| already live in the right, usually expensive, place!
| tehlike wrote:
| Snacking, food, cleaning, equipment etc.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| How do you know the success explosion wasn't about to happen
| regardless?
| 01100011 wrote:
| Sorry I was unclear. What I was trying to say is that if you
| haven't offshored your team already(i.e. moved part of your
| engineering operations to E. Europe, Asia, etc.), then you
| have a good reason for doing so. Offshoring engineering has
| been going on for decades at this point. Anyone threatening
| that working from home means your job is a target for
| offshoring(to someone else, not you in that location) is full
| of beans. It's an empty threat.
|
| I have no doubt that I could personally move to another
| country and do my job. I seriously considered it as a way to
| escape unfair alimony payments, and still might.
| gerdesj wrote:
| My company (IT consultancy) is based in the SW of England. One
| of my employees is Polish and now lives in Poland. Mid 2019 he
| decided to return to Poland from here (got married, child born,
| look after ailing parents etc!) and we came to an agreement.
|
| He gets paid UK rates for a UK job and lives in Poland as a
| sub-contractor. He may do other stuff there as well but I don't
| care - I get my pound of flesh 8) Poland is an hour ahead of
| the UK so he generally gets to run the 0800 start which works
| nicely.
|
| Now this is not the new normal bollocks. It works for us and
| him. I can't ask him to go to Cardiff and roll out a few dozen
| new laptops but in general it doesn't matter that he is in a
| town in Poland that I can't possibly pronounce the name of,
| instead of Yeovil, when fixing a snag in Sherborne or Hull.
|
| I and my company are very lucky that we can still function
| effectively, regardless of location. I as MD am now much more
| disposed towards home working. We were already pretty flexible
| but now I am far keener on even more flexibility. There are
| loads of silly and not so silly things to work out eg "I did x
| but n doesn't seem to be pulling their weight" etc. We need to
| invent mechanisms to deal with this. We already do a weekly get
| together on Teams but that is not good enough.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| It's an interesting question.
|
| First it's wrong to assume there cannot exist multiple sets of
| laws in the same physical place, which reduces to effectively
| the economics of offshoring. Amazon delivery contractors deploy
| undocumented workers or people with unlicensed driving skills,
| paying them $7/hr and charging Amazon $15/hr. It's economically
| positive for sure. The drivers live here. Is it really the same
| country or the same laws?
|
| It's also wrong to assume people have tried or will document
| the consequences of their try. Apple already earns more than
| $1m per retail employee. The gulf between Apple and BestBuy's
| revenue per employee is much bigger than the savings due to
| offshoring anywhere in the world. I personally don't think it's
| obvious why Apple Retail stores are so successful, it is
| multifactorial and very difficult to reproduce, so even basic
| service jobs may never be worth trying to offshore (whatever
| that means) if there's absolutely no way it could really
| matter. Another way of looking at it is that retail store
| bankruptcies occurring today were inevitable, the economics of
| what they were doing never made sense, so even if offshoring
| could save them money they were still doomed. This is a much
| harder conversation to have about IBM or Accenture, who have
| made offshoring a consistent economic positive for someone, we
| just can't be sure it is for their clients or for them.
| However, it seems pretty obvious that a robot (or an
| abstraction thereof, like an automated warehouse) can do a lot
| of what retail workers do.
|
| So I still think it's all about the mechanics of the job, and
| it's definitely a signal if you can WFH.
| [deleted]
| Izkata wrote:
| > > if your job can be done from home, it can be done from
| anywhere in the world
|
| > I will call anyone's bluff who says this. Do it. Good luck.
| If you haven't successfully done this already, there is a
| reason and you know it.
|
| I can give an example here: Back in March/April, we were told
| that if we wanted to "WFH" in another state, we had to get
| approval first due to laws around payments and taxes. Some
| states were pre-approved because of remote workers we already
| employed, but most had to be looked into and it wasn't a
| guarantee they'd be approved.
| ConcernedCoder wrote:
| Yeah, I don't know about working from "anywhere in the
| world"... I'm sure there's places without good internet, etc...
| that would make that difficult or impossible.
|
| I can say one thing about it after being 100% WFH for 2+ years
| now, I can set my alarm clock, to wake me up exactly 1 hour
| before my morning video conference "standup" meeting, and still
| have time to wash-up, make coffee, watch the markets open, be
| properly awake and caffinated to participate in the meeting,
| etc...
|
| Previously, depending on the total commute time, I would need
| to set that same alarm perhaps 2 hours or more in advance...
| the stress of the commute aside, I was getting less sleep on
| average, and in my line of work ( programming ) sleep is
| valuable to me, it helps me think better than when tired.
|
| I feel more rested, healthier, happier, less stressed, and I
| know my productivity has INCREASED over the alternative in-
| office scenarios...
| gerdesj wrote:
| I'm an MD of a very small firm in the UK and I have had my
| mindset changed by events. A huge social experiment on
| homeworking has been done (and ongoing) and results are in.
|
| I will make my commuters into remote workers by default
| unless they either want to come in or have to. One of my guys
| is Polish in Poland and can do whatever the hell he wants!
| Most of my staff are a bit stressed over SARS-COV-2, as am I
| but we will crack on.
|
| I'm glad to hear you are thriving. You are one of the folks
| keeping your economy going (wherever that is) - take some
| pride in that.
| secondcoming wrote:
| > I will call anyone's bluff who says this. Do it. Good luck.
| If you haven't successfully done this already, there is a
| reason and you know it.
|
| It's fine. They can force the expensive employee to teach the
| new cheap person everything they need to know in the few weeks
| before departure!
|
| /s
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| LOL, yeah, sure.
| hazemotes wrote:
| My coworker seems to be fighting for us to go back because he's
| sick of spending all day at home with his wife.
| mch82 wrote:
| This is, sadly, common. I've heard a handful of people say they
| go to work to get away from their family situation.
| Infinitesimus wrote:
| Understandable. A lot of family relationships are under a lot
| of strain right now and enjoying 8hours a day with someone
| doesn't mean you'll enjoy spending 24/7 with them.
|
| Hopefully, offices open up as an option for people who want
| separation for various reasons.
| [deleted]
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Mid level managers and their empire building ... found we
| function better without them and they are not required.
| jt2190 wrote:
| > The key phrase here is: managed and supported appropriately.
| Certainly managers need to reinvent themselves as mentors to this
| style of working and then - forgive me - get the hell out of the
| way.
|
| I think that this may be the key thing that the pandemic has
| accelerated: A re-evaluation of what kind of management is
| appropriate for modern work, and whether that management can be
| performed by the self, another person, another company, or
| perhaps even by a tool.
|
| Managing work, in an idealized sense, is wasteful because it's
| not actually production. Of course, in the real world we need all
| sorts of management of our work, from well informed decisions by
| individuals all the way up to strategic alignment of whole
| organizations. But how we actually get that management done, and
| done effectively, feels like it's taking center stage now that
| our old routines have been up-ended.
|
| Edit: Note that an individual's preference work at home, for or
| against, is in a sense a vote for a certain kind of management.
| As the article points out, work at home can be interrupted with
| Zoom And Slack just like it was in the office with in-person
| meetings and office chatter, so the at home/at office debate kind
| of masks the real issue: We all want better management. Now we
| just need to invent it.
| irrational wrote:
| My company just finished building an additional 3 million sq feet
| of office space on our main campus. I imagine they are anxious to
| get us back onto campus to justify that capital expanse.
| mhh__ wrote:
| It's the economy, stupid!
|
| (Is the quiet part some are not saying out loud)
| saos wrote:
| Yeah I'd like to go back but 2 days a week. Any more and it's
| over kill really. 3 other days can be used for deep work at home.
| I'm tech guy working in marketing...these type of people love to
| appear at your desk every so often in the office. Now with Slack
| I can just not sign in or set my status as away and reply when I
| want. It's asynchronous communication and really good for "me".
|
| And truth is. Everyone is different. I can respect the person
| that prefers office environment. What we will see is greater
| flexibility and just less office space in the future.
|
| The real winner outs of all this will be local communities and
| businesses.
| x87678r wrote:
| Is that everyone the same 2 days a week? Because its a problem
| if everyone chooses different days you still can't get those
| interactions.
| saos wrote:
| Yes my whole team will decide the two days to come in and
| meet.
| rainyMammoth wrote:
| please no. That's the worst trade off: I still need to pay
| extra rent to manage my home office and live in commute
| distance of my HCOL office.
| yourapostasy wrote:
| 1. Real estate interests are extremely wealthy and powerful in
| nearly all nations, and in every OECD nation. Commercial real
| estate especially so. Take a look at the wealthiest individuals
| in a nation, and a big chunk of them are connected to real
| estate. It is realistic instead of cynical to expect these
| interests to hammer for a return to _status quo ante_ ,
| regardless of the actual benefits to those who must follow such
| diktats.
|
| 2. In the US at least in my experience and from observing my
| clients' organizations, after two decades of relentless
| offshoring, for high-wage roles we're nearly scraping the bottom
| third percentile of the talent barrel globally for available
| replacements for on-shore talent, without accreting significant
| technical, organizational, support, maintenance, goodwill, and
| other types of intangible debt that CxO's increasingly recognize
| as burdensome friction to rapid innovation. Gains to be had
| offshoring are measured in inches and not yards now, with lots of
| attention-to-detail work to achieve it; the gains exist, but are
| just as hard to accomplish anywhere in the world, domestic or
| offshore. Just recently here on HN we were discussing
| management/promotion engineering/demotion, with a significant
| sidebar conversation on hybrid tech lead roles; there aren't that
| many people wired for that kind of balanced hybrid, and throw
| that on top of the complexities we normally deal with, and it is
| no wonder it is hard to recruit no matter where you look in the
| world.
|
| 3. Lots of "I need that separation" reports are very familiar to
| those who have been doing remote work for a decade or more. It
| takes anywhere from a year to multiple years to work out
| accommodations and find your groove when remote working. Finding
| that separation is part of it. Some people never adjust to it,
| and that's okay.
|
| 4. We have plausibly reached beyond the observer effect-type
| improvements in productivity [1] from the remote work change in
| habits, so this mass social experiment shows there is something
| substantive to remote work compared to traditional office work.
|
| 5. We have not yet reached critical mass on the time everyone has
| been working from home to internalize the effects of their new
| normal. Remote workers who have successfully made the switch have
| reported this takes between 6-18 months typically. This takes
| different forms in people. For some an intense loneliness sets
| in, others depression, others are happier, others find more
| energy. This is the Remote Work Great Filter.
|
| 6. We flipped the switch and paused a system that has taken
| literally _centuries_ of refinement upon office work, and started
| a remote equivalent under emergency conditions from scratch in
| many instances with (from initial indications) no productivity
| hit, and some even claiming a small productivity increase. What
| kinds of productivity increases lie behind further remote work
| refinement?
|
| 7. A "grey system" of hybridized remote and on-prem office
| presence can unlock interesting benefits. As expensive as offices
| are, the pandemic response shows that they aren't so unbearably
| expensive that companies would wholesale leap at the slightest
| opportunity to unload them. This might change with the depression
| barreling down upon us, but for now, there is the opportunity
| (and perhaps even requirement) to use long-term commercial lease
| agreements (or even more long-term capex real estate purchases)
| to double or triple the amount of space in company offices. A
| soft turn away from the open office plan.
|
| 8. As flawed as the response was in the US, a lesson I drew from
| it is the qualitative change in information infrastructure since
| only a couple decades ago enabled private entities everywhere
| (not just the US) to rapidly route around many kinds of damage in
| many, adaptive, different ways. Very rapid, Net-based,
| decentralized, decoupled decision-making like depicted in some
| futurist visions is already here in a proto-form.
|
| A lot of the response depends upon organizational culture and
| individual psychosocial makeup. I agree with the author, a hybrid
| grey response seems the most realistic. Remote work has the
| potential out of this experience to go from a marginal recruiting
| tool to an integral part of capex and opex plans.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
| marsdepinski wrote:
| Control.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Easy. Lots of people are skating, doing little.
| BillinghamJ wrote:
| From a government/economy perspective, office workers do
| contribute a lot to local businesses when they pop out for lunch,
| coffee, etc. While furlough schemes are gradually wrapping up (eg
| in the UK), reducing redundancies does depend on some level of
| normalcy in people's day to day spending.
| Nursie wrote:
| But why try to support that, instead of allow the economy to
| adapt?
|
| I spent PS180 per week on transport before this, and another
| PS50+ on coffee and meals.
|
| At the end of the year I will have saved enough to get my
| bathroom refitted, benefitting local tradespeople. I also go
| out and buy coffee and food locally more often.
|
| The spending won't be lost, it'll change. And if we're lucky
| it'll change in a way that spreads the money out beyond London.
|
| The real sector that's f*cked is commercial property.
| BillinghamJ wrote:
| I think that viewpoint definitely does have some validity,
| but in this case I think rests quite heavily on the idea that
| post-covid will closely resemble the current way people do
| things.
|
| Clearly there will be some significant change, but I'm sure
| it will be a balance between what we had and how things are
| now.
|
| Once that happens, we don't really want to have lots of
| businesses to have gone bankrupt. At least not the ones we
| will still want when things have reached that balance.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Encouraging people to commute just so the coffee joint near
| the office can survive is economically and ethically
| disproportional. Commuting is, for most people and at least
| for a large part of the commute, a waste of time.
| dathinab wrote:
| Lie he said/quoted the in-between part of meetings and office
| work is missing and I think it's essential.
|
| IMHO Trying to emulate office work procedures with video
| conferences isn't helpful.
|
| A move to out-of-office work should go hand in hand with a move
| to more async leadership and (technical) communication.
|
| > what we gain in work-life balance
|
| Might be nothing or even massive negative depending on the
| combination of your (home) environment and personality.
|
| Remote work has the uncanny side effect to make it harder for
| people which have certain kind of problems, like abusive parterns
| or a otherwise "broken" home, addiction, depression or some other
| mental problems.
|
| Sure at the same time it can _enable_ some people with mental
| problems to work, through often under the condition that their
| problems are already handled well.
| mcphilip wrote:
| I think ideally it should be up to the employee to return when
| they feel safe.
|
| That being said, I look forward to going back to the office.
| It'll be nice to see people again --- few people bother to turn
| on their video on zoom anymore for anything other than one-on-
| ones, myself included, and that is starting to feel alienating to
| me. I don't think it's wise having a policy that you must have
| video enabled, though, it's nice being able to sprawl out on the
| couch and get comfortable for a particularly long, boring
| meeting.
|
| Edit: to address the actual contents of the article, I think
| below is a better read that doesn't reduce people's concerns
| about remote working to wanting to save sandwhich shops:
|
| https://marker.medium.com/remote-work-is-killing-the-hidden-...
| leetcrew wrote:
| > I think ideally it should be up to the employee to return
| when they feel safe.
|
| agree, but not as an explicit company policy. what I mean is,
| if the company officially says something like "the office is
| open, but you don't have to come back until you feel safe",
| this can put pressure on employees to agree that they feel
| safe. if you're one of the last people to return, maybe you
| start feeling pressure to give some sort of concrete reason
| why. I think it would result in a lot of people returning when
| they don't actually feel safe.
|
| imo there are three reasonable positions: a) office is closed,
| only essential staff allowed on premises; b) office is open,
| but physical attendance is strictly optional (without any
| caveats about "feeling safe"); or c) office is open and you
| have to come back.
|
| edit to address the article you linked: I do feel for those
| people who do office support work and suddenly have no
| customers. but doesn't it suggest that a lot of that work
| wasn't really necessary in the first place? I just can't see
| how it can be a net harm for remote workers to cook themselves
| hot lunches every day (or just spend less for a similar cold
| cut sandwich).
| balfirevic wrote:
| > I just can't see how it can be a net harm for remote
| workers to cook themselves hot lunches every day
|
| How is it not net harm to have to do a chore that you didn't
| have to do before?
| maxerickson wrote:
| Anyone that didn't have free, onsite lunch had the chore
| 'provide self with lunch'.
|
| I'm pretty sure that free onsite lunch is rather
| exceptional. People that don't like to cook can still buy
| lunch or whatever.
| leetcrew wrote:
| when I went to the office, my choices were
| leftovers/sandwich from home or takeout. I still have the
| option of takeout, but I choose it much less often now that
| I have the option to cook something.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > I don't think it's wise having a policy that you must have
| video enabled
|
| In my anecdotal experience it is good to strongly encourage
| video use. Well before the pandemic, I noticed that our
| colleagues in Hyderabad were _far more_ involved and engaged
| when we made it nearly a requirement that everyone on the call
| turned on video. Especially once you 've visited in person at
| least once so you have a little bit of a personal connection,
| video can help preserve some of that. Disembodied voices on
| zoom calls are the worst thing ever.
| derwiki wrote:
| Interesting. For whatever reason my team keeps video on for all
| meeting unless there are bandwidth issues. But I agree now that
| it would be far worse if folks didn't show their face
| regularly.
| maxerickson wrote:
| I don't have a webcam on my work setup, no one uses video, it
| hasn't bothered me at all.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Same here, I have my own desktop, camera is unplugged and I
| put it on only for skype with parents. Company didn't give
| us laptops, so has 0 lever to ask for anything. Most folks
| on our conf call system (webex) use audio only.
|
| I made tons of other, more useful things (meals, real work,
| babysitting etc.) during those dull calls that are not
| really about me (or they cover me for 1 minute in 30-60
| minutes). It would be really tiring to keep looking engaged
| while I couldn't care less about the topic (self pressure
| is a bitch), 3-6x per day.
| 7ewis wrote:
| I usually have to commute for 3 hours a day. I have to be up
| early and get home late, stuck on a crowded train normally
| standing up for most of the journey.
|
| I was never previously a big fan of working from home, I enjoy
| the social interaction at the office. Having coffee breaks with
| people, going out for lunch etc. But now I'm used to WFH I love
| the fact that I can wake up at 9AM and I'm 'at work'. I finish at
| 5:30PM and I'm already home. Yes I do miss the interaction with
| people, but I have met some people outside work, and regularly
| have Slack convos (or social ones while gaming for example) with
| those people.
|
| I feel lucky that I've been at my company for a relatively long
| time, so have 'work friends' who I continue talking to. I now
| don't talk to the 'acquaintances' or new starters for example,
| which I guess is sad - but being selfish, makes it feel like I
| have even more time to do my own things. But on the other hand,
| probably isn't so good for the newer members of staff and doesn't
| help company morale.
|
| I am still fairly young and have seen some people mention
| work/life balance. That doesn't bother me too much either as my
| company is flexible and I know if I do a few extra hours one
| evening I can do a few less hours another day etc. and wouldn't
| have to tell or ask anyone to do that.
|
| Until reading this post I hadn't really thought about it too
| much, but guess I am just lucky that it works for me. If I was
| older and had kids/family, or didn't have an office to work from
| at home I can see how it would be more of a struggle. I do want
| to go back to work at some point, but I don't know how often I'd
| want to be there. I don't know if I can handle the long commutes
| week in week out now.
| x87678r wrote:
| My commute is 20 minutes on an uncrowded ferry, and my home
| office is a tiny desk in my daughter's bedroom while she works on
| the other side on school stuff.
|
| My colleague has a massive house with a pool tennis court and so
| much space he has literally 3 never-used bedrooms. His wife looks
| after kids who are at school most of the day again. His commute
| is 2 hours each way.
|
| People are talking home vs office people are coming from very
| different comparisons.
| detaro wrote:
| In some places there clearly is a push towards "back to the
| office" for everyone. Which is quite different from "you can
| come back to the office if that works better for you". E.g. our
| offices are pretty empty (and thus safer to be in), but
| available to those that want them, whereas I see customers
| where there is clear pressure to be in the office if at all
| possible.
| s0rce wrote:
| Exactly, I have a 1 bdrm apartment (in law) that I share with
| my wife. We alternate working at a desk in the living area, at
| the dining table or a folding table set up in the bedroom. I
| used to commute 20min by bike in the SF East Bay. I very
| infrequently go in when I need to do something in the lab
| (biotech company, not everything can be done remotely).
|
| When I found this place I never intended for it to for it to be
| full time wfh space for 2 people.
|
| If I knew I'd only go to the office once a month I could live
| in Minden, NV or something.
| gordaco wrote:
| Yeah, I agree. I miss my old routine too. I even have a
| dedicated office of sorts, and working from home is comfortable
| and convenient to me. But... I miss the commute. The bus I used
| to take wasn't particularly uncrowded, but I always managed to
| get a seat (thanks to having a particularly early schedule) and
| I used to take the opportunity to read (since each trip took
| about 40-45 minutes, that's about 1h30m of reading a day), and
| from time to time I would just put my book down and look at the
| window, which I always found relaxing even if it's the very
| same trip everyday. These trips, especially the one in the
| morning, were about the most quiet moments of my day (although
| headphones are a necessity, for sure). Reading at home is just
| not the same, after so many years of having that schedule.
|
| On the other hand, I don't particularly miss the office. Sure,
| it's nice to have breakfast with my workmates from time to
| time, but I can live without it.
| maest wrote:
| I'm being facetious but also maybe not: why don't you take a
| 40min bus trip around the neighbourhood and return home
| before you start your WFH schedule?
| xur17 wrote:
| Or just take a short walk.
| rytis wrote:
| Just another data point, but I absolutely don't miss my
| 2.5hrs round trip commute. I spend on average 1 hr more
| working, and run the other hour. And still get an extra
| 30mins family time. Win-win-win situation. No, I don't miss
| going to the office.
| kbenson wrote:
| I think that's why people go to cafe to read. There's a
| certain ambiance they've come to expect and appreciate. Maybe
| what you really need (when it's feasible) is a cafe, or even
| just a bus with an hourly route you can sit in for a while to
| get out and appreciate that feeling?
| godelski wrote:
| I think a big part is just being somewhere different. Most
| days I spend at my desk but some days are more about
| researching and I go sit outside with my laptop (stopped
| because fires). I'd happily go to a coffee shop if it
| weren't for the pandemic. It is nice to just have a new
| scenery and change things up a little.
|
| I should also mention I don't mind commutes that are: walk
| to bart, read, get off bart, walk to work, work, reverse. I
| DO mind commutes that are: drive for an hour, sit in
| traffic, avoid that asshole trying to cut into my lane, and
| listen to podcasts. (I like podcasts, it is the driving
| part that is frustrating) It is substantially more
| stressful.
| tima11234 wrote:
| People need to adapt. Just because you can't seem to figure
| out how to read a book now or listen to pod casts because you
| only did those things when forced to commute, isn't a good
| argument against WFH.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| When I'm home my family wants to talk, watch TV or do so
| many other things not conducive to deep focus. On the train
| I can put on some music, and generally only be interrupted
| about once per hour.
|
| And it's not like there's really any places to get deep
| focus anymore. The parks and plazas are filled with air
| pollution, cafes are takeout only and libraries are closed.
| maigret wrote:
| I wouldn't think the commuting air is much better than in
| a park. Outside beats inside in most scenarios, doesn't
| it?
| s0rce wrote:
| I didn't read their post as an argument against WFH, just
| that they happened to like their routine. I happened to
| bike to work, about 10mi per day. I rarely get on my bike
| now, sure I could, but I liked the routine and it really
| helped me get exercise. Like the OP I'm not saying everyone
| should do that, just that it worked for me. If I had to
| commute 2hr in traffic by car I would absolutely prefer
| WFH.
| maigret wrote:
| Sometimes I do a "fake commute" by foot, walking around
| 15 min outside from my kitchen to my home office. The
| days I don't want, I just walk into the home office.
| Sometimes I take this walk at the lunch break, or after
| work. I can accomplish errands sometimes.
|
| So it is all about habits and freedom. Turns out freedom
| is not that easy to manage. Artists and self employed
| people have to be able to manage such things themselves
| (think writing an album at home), and it's interesting to
| see that many people are struggling with that.
| Shivetya wrote:
| I think the biggest mistake people not used to WFH make is
| they drop too much of their routine. Of course I am not
| talking about the commute but I refer to simple events from
| taking a shower each morning to dressing for work. All
| these rituals are important and should only be discarded
| where its not viable.
|
| I even make sure to my favorite fast food breakfast once a
| week and coffee twice a week. Fortunately for me that is
| but a ten minute drive one way to the closest place to fill
| that requirement but it fulfills the ritual.
|
| One item to remember to add in to that time and money
| savings of your commute, you safety and security has gone
| up as well
| strawberrypuree wrote:
| This is an uncharitable, mean spirited take on the comment
| you're responding to and you should feel bad for having
| submitted it. Please take a moment to draw upon empathy
| before posting in the future.
| airstrike wrote:
| This is incorrectly being downvoted. The parent
| absolutely has a point, given GP's choice of words ("you
| can't seem to figure out how to read a book now...")
| Balero wrote:
| Could you not get on a bus anyway? or sit in a park?
| neutronicus wrote:
| The locale is not important.
|
| The important thing is that it's time that is _literally
| impossible_ to re-allocate to either housework or work-
| work.
|
| Any makeshift substitute won't have that property, and
| you'll be pressured to skip it in order to do more
| housework or more work-work.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Commute time is a big thing here.
|
| People who have a 2 hour (one way) commute from hell from their
| massive house are super happy about this situation (shocking, I
| know).
|
| People who live in a small studio apartment 10 minutes from the
| office see it differently.
|
| What I expect this to result in is employers increasingly
| forcing people to WFH (either outright, or by making the
| offices horribly unattractive through hot-desking, increased
| density, etc.), pushing the cost of an office onto employees.
|
| Even if a company "generously" gives you a $1000 allowance,
| that barely covers what high quality office furniture would
| cost, and in exchange, you pay a lot of tiny things that don't
| seem to be worth mentioning individually but add up to a
| massive cost when you take them all together over years:
|
| - the real estate
|
| - HVAC
|
| - utilities (increased water usage, electricity for the office
| equipment & HVAC)
|
| - maintenance for all of that (money and time)
|
| - cleaning (if your employer asked you to come in unpaid after
| hours to vacuum the office and scrub the office toilets,
| everyone would consider them crazy, and yet this is effectively
| what will happen with WFH)
|
| Not to speak of all the amenities and perks employers often
| provide, like cafeterias (often subsidized or even free). And
| not only will you end up paying the businesses' business
| expenses, you'll often do so (at least in part) with your post-
| tax money, i.e. depending on your tax rate, each dollar spent
| may be equivalent to e.g. $1.6 in lost income.
| VectorLock wrote:
| I think both big house 2 hours away and small studio 10
| minutes away would both be happy about WFH. This means small
| studio 10 minutes away can move out of his small studio that
| he lives in only because its 10 minutes away.
|
| EDIT: Not to say that studio 10 minutes from work might enjoy
| other aspects of his living situation but if his main
| constraint of "must be 10 minutes from work" is lifted, that
| gives him much more flexibility.
| ghaff wrote:
| The implicit assumption is that small studio 10 minutes
| away _wants_ to work in a city center and therefore
| "making" them move to bigger digs somewhere further out is
| a downgrade. Which may or may not be true.
| ghaff wrote:
| Really, there are only 2 costs that matter.
|
| On the one side you have the commute--both in time and money.
|
| On the other side is whether the place you'd be living in
| otherwise is suitable for long-term WFH or if you have to
| spend more money for another bedroom or whatever.
|
| So, if you already have a dedicated office in an exurban
| house (as I do), not commuting--which I rarely did anyway--is
| a cost savings. As someone who has mostly worked remotely for
| years, all the other stuff is pretty trivial even given the
| occasional significant purchase (I had to replace my very old
| office chair).
|
| I already have to clean my house and/or have it done. And the
| delta in utilities, etc. is trivial.
|
| ADDED: Companies sometimes have covered co-working spaces.
| Though I suspect this will become less common.
| Aeolun wrote:
| But I do _not_ have an extra office in a dedicated bedroom.
| I live in central Tokyo.
|
| The delta in house price for 'extra bedroom' in the place I
| live is around $250,000.
|
| There is just no way my company is going to even consider
| reimbursing me for that.
| jstanley wrote:
| But if you're WFH, you don't need to live in central
| Tokyo, you can live anywhere. You'd probably _save_ money
| by gaining an extra bedroom and moving out of central
| Tokyo, no?
| dathinab wrote:
| Anywhere where you:
|
| - Have reasonable fast internet.
|
| - (Affordable) Hospitals/Police/Firewatch in reasonable
| distance
|
| - Are not to far away from the companies office as you
| likely still have to go to the office from time to time.
| ghaff wrote:
| That was my point. If you live in a central part of a
| major city because it's convenient for work and you want
| to live there, having to WFH indefinitely is probably
| going to be costly compared to being able to easily go
| into an office (unless your company will pay for a co-
| working space). You're right that they won't pay for a
| larger apartment.
| Retric wrote:
| Those minor costs can still add up. Depending on your setup
| and location you could easily be spending 30+c/h on
| electricity when working from home. Extra cooling,
| lighting, possibly multiple PC's etc. At ~2,000 hours a
| year you're talking an extra ~600$/per year after tax.
|
| On the other hand it's also much cheaper to cook at home.
|
| PS: My preference is to live close enough to walk to the
| office, but that doesn't really scale well.
| oarsinsync wrote:
| $600pa in increased costs. How much money saved from not
| commuting? How much do you value the time you get back
| from not commuting?
|
| EDIT: the above may make it sound like I'm ok with
| companies externalising their office costs onto their
| employees. I'm not. It's just not a battle worth fighting
| right now. I'm still net-winning, and ultimately grateful
| to still be employed. Time changes all things. What's
| acceptable today will not be tomorrow.
| AndrewUnmuted wrote:
| A couple years ago, I had to move bare metal servers to
| my home to continue my job working at a VR technology
| startup, who had just decided to forgo their offices.
|
| I took on an extra $150-$200 in power expenses per month,
| and it was absolutely treacherous trying to get
| reimbursed for this. The company never considered the
| costs they were funneling into the employees - apparently
| - until people started to complain.
|
| I fear most people were put into similar situations -
| perhaps not fiscally, but in a procedural sense - during
| this most recent mass WFH migration.
| AniseAbyss wrote:
| Yeah I live in a country that literally worships
| efficiency and cost cutting. Fancy offices have been
| extinct for a long time. Thanks to technology people can
| work anywhere and they're expected to.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| > I took on an extra $150-$200 in power expenses per
| month, and it was absolutely treacherous trying to get
| reimbursed for this
|
| Well, fuck that... if it's company hardware and there's
| no reimbursement, power gets cut to that rack at 5PM
| local time.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Just wire it into a light switch. If the switch gets
| flipped... shame.
|
| "I don't know what to do. I guess if you wanted to send
| an electrician out to install a new circuit with its own
| meter, things might be more reliable."
| ghaff wrote:
| That would double my power expenses per month. Who knows
| if my circuits would even handle it. ADDED: My internet
| would also not be reliable enough for servers that other
| people were depending on.
|
| That's a big difference from my laptop being plugged in
| at home for 8 hours a day rather than in an office.
| viraptor wrote:
| Savings also add up, so everyone's balance will land
| somewhere different depending on their lifestyle. Commute
| has a cost, buying lunch has a cost, less sleep has a
| cost, wearing shoes more often has a cost, etc...
|
| (I expect another one of the "surprising industry
| suffering from covid" articles at some point about lack
| of footwear sales)
| ghaff wrote:
| Based on not traveling, a $50/month delta between me not
| being in the house at all vs. being there full-time is
| actually about right. But then I don't live with someone.
| But simply not being in the house for 10 hours a day
| doesn't affect things much. Admittedly I use AC
| minimally.
|
| That said, I'd be happy to concede that working at home
| costs me $1K/yr. in costs I wouldn't have were I to go
| into an office every day. But that has costs like
| commuting (for most people) too.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I don't think utilities are expensive enough to compare
| to the explicit costs of commuting by car (fuel, wear and
| tear, insurance) and the implicit costs of commuting
| (increased morbidity/mortality risk from driving,
| opportunity cost of time needed to be allocated to
| commuting).
|
| Especially if the house isn't completely empty when
| you're at work.
| ck425 wrote:
| Again this heavily depends on your situation.
|
| I live a 20 min walk from my office. I have PS0 commuting
| costs.
|
| On the other hand I live in an old city with little new
| built housing. My flat is over 100 years old with massive
| ceilings, electric heating and no way to way to improve
| the insulation. Heating it just in the evenings for 5
| hours costs about PS50 a month, heating it while I work
| will likely cost PS70-100 extra in top.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Not to mention the infrastructure / tax costs! New
| interstate lanes to sate population growth don't build
| themselves.
|
| The more regular commuters we can take off the road, the
| better.
| dathinab wrote:
| There is also a social and mental cost.
|
| For example for some one where anxiety acts in a way which
| hinders him to proper handle thinks like making food or
| cleaning having a clean office with a Mensa giving out
| reasonable good food for a reasonable price is a _massive_
| difference. It can make the difference between overcoming
| it and complexity succumbing to it to a degree where you at
| some point end up homeless on the streets....
|
| Sure just one example. But you can make many such examples.
| Often less extreme.
|
| But however I look at it it always boils down to people
| being good of (housing, mental health, social net and high
| sallery (==more affordable office equipment)) profiting
| from it but people which are not (small dark apartment,
| mental health problems, abusive partners, social isolation,
| not much money) paying the price for it. And sure in the
| praxis you will find anything in-between.
|
| > allready have a dedicated office in an exurban house
|
| In my experience (Germany/Berlin) this normally only
| applies for people which earn above average and even then
| it not so common for people only earning slightly above
| average. The best/most common thing you find with people
| earning slightly above average is a room which is intended
| for children but they either don't yet have any or they
| already moved out so it was turned into a office room.
|
| Also most office at home room I have seen where just
| suitable for one person, so if both partner need to do home
| offices it gets space-wise tight.
| Nursie wrote:
| The real estate is not a cost if you have an office setup at
| home anyway. As a computer programmer, why would I not?
| Cleaning and maintenance of that office is just part of what
| I do.
|
| Almost any commute is going to outweigh those factors.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| > His wife looks after kids who are at school most of the day
| again
|
| This is the real story.
|
| Suppose you're a company that pays someone a really handsome
| salary. It's a man. Do you want him in the office, where he is
| guaranteed to spend 0 hours taking care of kids, or at home,
| where it's not guaranteed?
|
| Don't pin this on the wife. Do you think she'd rather he drive
| 2 hours a day and not take care of the kids, and get paid
| $400k/yr, or nothing, because whatever he's doing is actually
| very competitive and there will always someone else gunning for
| that job, so this obsequious rehash of the "well just work part
| time" idea that exclusively programmers engage in does not
| apply? So there is no actual option, part time take care of the
| kids?
| Aeolun wrote:
| > Do you want him in the office, where he is guaranteed to
| spend 0 hours taking care of kids, or at home, where it's not
| guaranteed?
|
| I want him wherever he feels he's more productive. If that
| means he plays around with his kids 2 hours a day then more
| power to him.
| tomp wrote:
| So? Ideally nobody would _force_ you to stay at home, just like
| nobody would _force_ your colleague to go to the office.
| Different people have different preferences, why not (try to)
| satisfy them all?
| canofbars wrote:
| This is not ideal. Ideal is everyone at home or everyone in
| the office. Half half leads to people being left out.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| I was forced to WFH, same as most of my colleagues. Most who
| keep going to work don't really have much choice (apart from
| resigning for which ain't the best time now). What are you
| talking about?
| de_Selby wrote:
| > Ideally
|
| You missed a key word in the parent post.
|
| _Ideally_ people wouldn't be forced into multiple hour long
| commutes either, but that has been the reality for many
| before this year.
| lordCarbonFiber wrote:
| Comparing being "forced" to commute hours (in a house
| that you chose to live in when you took the job) is a bit
| disingenuous to being actually forced by a pandemic to
| _not_ go into an office.
|
| Im happy for all the people that can live happily hours
| outside of urban areas but the insistence that remote
| work is uniformly better for all people is just so
| exhausting. I for one, will be glad when it ends and will
| continue to prioritize companies that keep most of their
| work force in office; bringing work into my living space
| has been terrible for my mental health (anecdotally this
| sentiment has been shared among other single young people
| i know in the city).
| josephg wrote:
| One of the problems of remote work is that it's kind of an
| all or nothing thing for your team. If some people are in the
| office and some people work from home, inevitably (in my
| experience) a lot of small decisions get made in the office
| without consulting the remote workers. And that creates a
| divide - the people in the office end up with more power and
| authority than the remote folks.
|
| Some teams fight this with some strict rules - eg insisting
| conversations between people sitting next to each other
| happen over slack. But I think it will usually work better in
| the long run if either everyone is in the office or basically
| everyone is remote.
| derefr wrote:
| I feel like most people who want to go back to working in an
| office, don't really need _an office_ per se -- in the sense of
| needing to rent out a unit or floor of a building for their
| company to work out of.
|
| Most of the advantages that individual knowledge-workers attain
| from an office -- work-life separation, and meeting rooms in
| which to come together with others for a scheduled semi-private
| conversation -- already have a relevant institution that will
| provide those to almost anyone on Earth, free of charge: the
| public library. Everyone[1] sitting at the tables in a public
| library is being productive. And almost all modern libraries have
| bookable meeting rooms as a _free_ service!
|
| [1] If your library is full of noisy people, find a different
| one. This mostly only happens to the one library per city nearest
| to the projects. I suggest a public library near a college; or,
| for that matter, a University library, if it's public-access.
|
| Yes, there's also coffee shops, but those only solve work-life
| separation. Most coffee shops don't offer bookable spaces for
| private meetings. I guess you could combine coffee shops with
| booths at restaurants, but that gets expensive quickly. Libraries
| are free! And, unlike the coffee shop where sitting there all day
| with your laptop will _annoy_ the employees, being productive all
| day in a library is _the point_ , and you have every right to ask
| the library employees to shush anyone _interfering_ with your
| productivity, because productivity is what they want the library
| environment to foster.
|
| ------------
|
| Who doesn't think libraries are a valid substitute for offices?
|
| * Sales people and call-center workers, obviously. Anyone who
| needs to make phone calls all day. But these people were never
| really suited to ordinary office space, either. They need sound-
| proofed rooms/booths, really. You can build those anywhere --
| podcasters and journalists are currently building these at home.
| You really do need a _separate_ space for this, though, and that
| might not be tenable in a small bachelor apartment. I have a
| feeling we might see the rise of specialty coworking spaces
| consisting of floors of small, rentable recording-booth rooms.
| (Some fancier public libraries have these too -- again, for
| free.)
|
| * Managers. Specifically, _middle_ -managers. In-person, off-the-
| record conversations are how you "build your team", i.e. how you
| build loyalty to yourself and ensure that your team-members are
| working for _you_ , rather than for _the company_ , such that you
| can later take credit for their achievements and they won't call
| you out for it. This role is dying, and most of the visible
| backlash is likely coming from here. It's like the death throes
| of aristocracy when centralized government rises to replace it.
| Good riddance, I say. (Team-allocated executive assistants can
| perform the project-management tasks of a manager just as well,
| without also becoming feudal lords. _These_ don 't mind remote
| work at all, because they're fine with everything they say
| happening on-the-record on Slack/email/etc.)
| marcinzm wrote:
| >Who doesn't think libraries are a valid substitute for
| offices?
|
| Anyone who enjoys having a personalized ergonomic workspace
| that fits their needs. Working on a laptop 8 hours a day is
| going to be terrible for your body long term.
|
| >without also becoming feudal lords.
|
| You really underestimate what people given power, implicit or
| explicit, can do with it. Once you're able to tell people what
| work they should do, you have a lot of power to wield as you
| wish.
| derefr wrote:
| > Working on a laptop 8 hours a day is going to be terrible
| for your body long term.
|
| Libraries have computer workstations with proper ergonomics.
| Bring your laptop and a long HDMI cable. Push the
| workstation's keyboard and mouse back. Plug your laptop into
| the monitor with the HDMI cable, then set the laptop down
| where the workstation's keyboard was. Switch the input on the
| monitor to your laptop. (Ignore the laptop's screen; don't
| try to use it as a secondary display. It's too low; you'll
| hurt your neck.)
|
| Since you're not _unplugging_ anything from the workstation,
| you won't even have to ask permission from the library IT
| staff first to do this. It's just like using a USB stick.
|
| Alternately, bring one of those HDMI "compute sticks" and
| your own Bluetooth keyboard and mouse paired to it. You won't
| get the same level of compute power that you'd get from your
| laptop, but you _will_ get slightly better input ergonomics.
| Fine if your work is cloud-based.
|
| Alternately, sign up for (or get your company to sign up for)
| a cloud Desktop-as-a-Service service, e.g. Amazon WorkSpaces.
| Then VNC/RDP into your workstation from any old library
| computer. Even the 10-year-old Dells with Celerons are
| powerful enough to support VNC streaming; and, given that
| you're at a public library, relying on the wired Internet
| means you avoid the bottleneck of the single overloaded wi-fi
| AP everyone else is contending over.
|
| Certainly, these workstations aren't _personalized_ ; but
| they won't kill your back/neck.
|
| > Once you're able to tell people what work they should do,
| you have a lot of power to wield as you wish.
|
| The simple difference between a manager and an executive
| assistant is that the manager hires the team, but the team
| hires the executive assistant.
|
| It's the same as the difference between monarchy and
| democracy: subjects live at the sufferance of their monarch,
| but a president commands at the sufferance of their people.
| If you can fire your boss, they're not really your boss.
| marcinzm wrote:
| >but the team hires the executive assistant.
|
| Some manager up the hierarchy hires the executive
| assistant, the team simply has input into the process. I
| suspect the input into the firing will quickly go down to 0
| if the person who actually has firing power likes the EA.
| If the team has direct firing power then you're going to
| get some lovely politics going on between everyone like
| giving choice work to half the team all the time to keep
| them on your side.
|
| >but a president commands at the sufferance of their
| people.
|
| Technically, they only need 50% of the people at best.
|
| edit: And since the EA isn't actually accountable for
| productivity (how can they be, they can't fire the
| "unproductive" team members after all) they can play even
| more political games since they're less in the line of fire
| for backlash.
| derefr wrote:
| > Some manager up the hierarchy hires the executive
| assistant.
|
| My post assumed team autonomy, where each team has an
| entirely separate hiring pipeline. Think "startup that's
| recently been acquired by a big company, but hasn't yet
| been absorbed into it." I think Amazon's AWS service
| teams are also like this. Tiny little independent
| business units.
|
| But really, you don't _need_ that; you could still have a
| mostly-hierarchical organizational structure, but just
| take hiring /firing away from the managers at every
| level. with _no_ managers making hiring decisions at any
| level. You'd give all hiring /firing power, instead, to
| teams; or rather, to each team's hiring subcommittee
| (which would be a temporary thing, elected anew from the
| team members each time hiring/firing must be done.)
|
| You can still have traditional managers in such an org,
| but their main purpose at that point (if the EA duties
| are being played by an actual EA) would be to serve as
| the contact point for a team -- the "API" that the rest
| of the org uses to access the team members and their
| labor. So, essentially, a talent agent.
|
| > edit: And since the EA isn't actually accountable for
| productivity
|
| Sure they are. Just because something may fail for
| reasons entirely out of your control, doesn't mean you're
| not _usually, partially_ in control. A wilderness guide
| can still be held accountable for the safety of those in
| their charge, even if sometimes there's just suddenly an
| angry lion.
|
| The point of the EA--like the point of an effective
| manager--would be to (attempt to) be a multiplier for the
| team's aggregate productivity, usually by subtly enabling
| knowledge-sharing and communication, while deflecting
| outward pressure.
|
| As such, a measure of the EA's effectiveness, is the same
| as a measure the team's aggregate productivity, against a
| pre-existing baseline measurement of the team's aggregate
| productivity with no EA/manager.
|
| I would guess that it's very likely that the average
| EA/manager has neutral or negative impact on aggregate
| team productivity. Which makes sense; an EA/manager needs
| to have (much) higher coordination skills than the
| average human being, in order for their inserting-
| themselves into coordination problems to be worth the
| overhead it introduces.
|
| > Technically, they only need 50% of the people at best.
|
| If you like -- and this works especially well when done
| remotely -- you can set up your EA/manager as a (team-
| specific, unlimited-scope) helpdesk, where team members
| "file tickets" with the EA to do things for them; and
| where the EA/manager can also file tickets themselves "on
| behalf of" someone, when they notice something going
| subtly wrong and are trying to help without being
| explicitly asked to do so.
|
| Probably you could do this in a streamlined, ChatOps way,
| where any new team-workspace message thread with the
| EA/manager is automatically a new ticket.
|
| Then, you can throw industry-standard IT-helpdesk ticket-
| resolution performance metrics at the tickets the
| EA/manager is creating+resolving.
|
| This won't tell you anything about aggregate
| productivity, but it _will_ tell you -- in a very
| legible, statistical way -- whether the EA /manager is
| preferentially solving problems for only a subset of team
| members. (Don't hook anything automated up to that fact;
| you need manual review, because it might be the team
| member that's giving the EA stupid asks that they're
| rightfully ignoring.)
| scott_w wrote:
| > it seems some people really are suggesting that businesses >
| should alter their workplace strategies in order to save...> >
| sandwich shops. > > OK, I'm exaggerating for effect.
|
| If only! Richard Tice (major political funder) had spent a lot of
| time on Twitter claiming remote work is directly responsible for
| Pret closing stores!
| gedy wrote:
| Because there are a surprising number of employees and managers
| who don't produce customer-usable value, and are less important
| when all the value is being produced from "home" or elsewhere.
| aphextron wrote:
| The most fascinating thing about this crisis is how it has laid
| bare the importance of flexible, forward thinking leadership at
| every level, in every form of organization. Entities that
| have/will successfully adapt to the new reality we live in are
| the ones who have given up on the notion of a "return to normal".
| There will never be a "normal" again. The COVID-19 outbreak was
| an epochal event. Whether you embrace that and seize the new
| opportunities it has opened up, or determinedly force your
| outmoded mindset onto a world that no longer exists will
| determine who are the winners and losers out of all of this.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| Some people definitely enjoy working in an office; for others,
| it's a necessity given limited space or facilities at home. I
| totally understand individuals' desire to get back, and equally
| the desire of others to continue working at home. Certainly as a
| hardware company it's been important for us to be able to take
| turns in the office occasionally.
|
| But the effect the article has noted is really prevalent and
| weird. Seeing the actual UK government banging on about how
| essential it is for everybody to get "back to the office", being
| very explicitly anti-remote-working, and using their usual
| propaganda channels to spread that message is a strange choice at
| the moment. It's hard to find a convincing explanation for.
| marcinzm wrote:
| >It's hard to find a convincing explanation for.
|
| Cynically, the leadership of top companies wants workers back
| in the office (for whatever reason) and the current government
| is in their pocket.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Looking at it from South East England, this shows what a huge
| business commuting is. Probably millions of people commute into
| London every day. Train fares (which are expensive), taxi fares,
| coffee shops, takeaway food, pubs, restaurants. Since lockdown
| people who have been working from home have found that they
| suddenly have plenty of cash on hand for a reason. Commuting is
| big business and that's why some are lobbying for commuting to
| resume ASAP.
| weeksie wrote:
| The long term shakeout of this will be that everybody realizes
| that yes, we need offices. They are spaces literally built for
| working. The required footprint will be smaller, people won't
| need to be in the office for absolutely everything, the demand
| for square footage of commercial real estate will decrease a bit
| --good news for cities who don't build b/c they can convert
| excess commercial inventory to residential.
|
| But we have also found a vast increase in productivity that we
| probably won't see in the numbers until we can separate it out
| from all the other crazy shit that's been happening. The
| efficiencies gained in _every_ white collar business being forced
| to make remote work to _some_ degree are significant, and I think
| as of yet underrated.
|
| So no we're not all going to be sipping cocktails on the beach
| (though more of us might) but we will be better off. Big
| exogenous shocks tend to find hidden productivities, even if the
| shock part really sucks.
| cntrpt9293 wrote:
| Sounds like you're arguing for WeWork not offices as usual.
|
| We don't need corporate offices full of cubes and butts and
| chairs.
|
| We need co-working spaces sometimes.
|
| Personally, my employer of 92 is doing fine remote. So, you
| know, anecdata and all that
|
| There's that personality though that needs a group to help them
| decide on the color of a button, and how thick a drop shadow
| should be.
|
| Let's hope those folks are able to power through making such
| difficult decisions alone, without free lattes followed by yoga
| class to ease the chemically induced anxiety, and over thought
| fear of making the wrong palette choice.
|
| My goodness, tech millennials might have to move on from
| college life! For shame.
| weeksie wrote:
| No. I'm saying many (most) firms will still require offices.
| The shape of the office will change as firms realize which
| business functions work best in the office and which are best
| remote. This will take many years to shake out because not
| every firm will correctly identify these functions.
| walshemj wrote:
| Yes back to individual offices
| Nursie wrote:
| I think we'll find that not every company does need an office,
| or the expense of an office.
|
| IMHO now is probably a good time to invest in meeting-place
| providers like Regus.
| voisin wrote:
| Regus' parent company just filed for creditor protection.
| Nursie wrote:
| Oh, shame, perhaps my thoughts on this are a little
| premature...
| mattlondon wrote:
| I am not so sure productivity has definitely improved.
|
| I agree there was a good head of steam where people were able
| to quietly and independently work through their "list" of stuff
| they wanted to do for ages but never had the chance to etc, or
| whatever had previously been planned out.
|
| Now months later I feel like things are starting to grind a bit
| and productivity is starting to wane because the "pipe" is
| starting to dry up. Those ad hoc conversations that lead to a
| new feature, bumping into someone in the corridor who mentions
| some big issue they're having, meeting and talking to end
| users, the offsites to work out the strategy for next quarter,
| day-long workshops with UX and management and users and post-it
| notes galore where we thrash out ideas and concepts are a
| distant memory. Instead we have stilted video calls where
| people sit on mute 95% of the time and there simply is not as
| much collaboration as there was before.
|
| Sure stuff still happens, but it feels like to me that the
| "spark" from people who usually generate ideas and set the
| agenda/work items is reduced significantly - if not entirely
| gone - and people are just going through the motions somewhat
| mechanically and "doing the best they can given the
| circumstances" etc.
| weeksie wrote:
| I'm talking about macro level gains. When your small local
| accountant figures out how to manage work from home a few
| days per week that creates small, cumulative gains over the
| whole of the economy. Hard to quantify right now, especially
| because of all the noise going on. i.e. GDP is currently
| getting slaughtered for reasons other than lack of productive
| business practices. I do think that it's harder to notice
| from the vantage of tech since it is probably the most
| remote-ready industry. Talking to finance bros I get a very
| strong sense that people are getting a lot more done in some
| regards and suffering in others. When offices come back,
| they'll divide up the tasks appropriate to the milieu and
| gain some incremental productivity as a result.
|
| Similarly distance education sucks. It's sucked forever
| buuuuut, with whole countries attempting to manage distance
| education at the same time across all educational
| institutions, I am very optimistic that we will find some new
| techniques that will have huge returns but it will take a
| while for those techniques to gain dominance.
|
| I could be totally wrong about this, but we'll find out for
| sure in the next few years.
| mattlondon wrote:
| > When your small local accountant figures out how to
| manage work from home a few days per week that creates
| small, cumulative gains
|
| But what are those gains you get from working from home?
| The only "real" one I can think of is no commute ... but
| that removes productivity from the businesses now failing
| and going bankrupt because they have no/reduced customers.
|
| Plus the commute is not just dead time, at least for me I
| usually triage my inbox before I arrive at the office. Now
| I just waste time and have an extra bowl of cereal it read
| the internet for half an hour instead of doing anything
| useful.
| Nursie wrote:
| "The commute" is a massive societal inefficiency. How
| many hours, how much time (and how much CO2) is just
| wasted?
|
| Those businesses may fail, but the money will go
| somewhere else, somewhere else that doesn't involve me
| wasting four hours a day.
|
| I occasionaly worked on my commute, but most of the time
| was wasted, and now I'm free to use the time how I want.
| leetcrew wrote:
| for me the no commute is huge. I went from putting more
| than 200 miles a week on my car to barely doing that in a
| month (and a lot of that is just driving for pleasure). I
| used to spend $120-150 a month on gas; now I don't even
| visit a gas station every month. I'm also cooking lunch
| at home instead of going out several times a week for
| mediocre takeout. saves me a good chunk of change and I'm
| eating healthier _and_ tastier food.
|
| > Plus the commute is not just dead time, at least for me
| I usually triage my inbox before I arrive at the office.
| Now I just waste time and have an extra bowl of cereal it
| read the internet for half an hour instead of doing
| anything useful.
|
| this one is kinda on you. you get to decide what to do
| with the extra time. I wake up a little later now to stay
| up talking and playing video games with my friends that
| live further west. not very productive, but I value
| having a slightly more relaxed work week.
| ghaff wrote:
| > I'm also cooking lunch at home instead of going out
| several times a week for mediocre takeout. saves me a
| good chunk of change and I'm eating healthier and tastier
| food.
|
| I watched a McKinsey presentation last week which, among
| other things, went into what ways of doing things forced
| by the pandemic did they want to carry forwards and what
| they didn't want to carry forward.
|
| A couple of things that people most plan to carry forward
| were increased home cooking and online grocery delivery.
| weeksie wrote:
| You've identified it. We're talking about productivity
| gains, so that accountant gets as much done as they did
| before, minus the commute time. At a bare minimum, that's
| doing 8 hours of work in 8 hours, versus 8 hours of work
| in 10 hours, or whatever your commute is. People who
| drive (most people) cannot usually perform economic
| activity during their commute. Better yet, maybe that
| accountant figures that they really work for 4-6 hours of
| the day and the rest is kind of wasted on chitchat or
| looking busy. The autonomy to quietly get work done in
| less time will grant that worker even more hours in the
| day.
|
| There may be GDP effects that counterbalance this. Less
| money spent on gas or at small businesses near the
| employer. However, as suburbs have more at-home workers,
| more lunch spots will pop up nearby so I doubt the GDP
| effects are big. Sure, some might spend their
| productivity gains enjoying an extra bowl of cereal, but
| there's nothing wrong with that.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| I think the economy and productivity and everything else
| that makes economy and work tick are way more complex
| than your simplification to no commute = massive gains
| for economy, companies and happy new future for everybody
| is coming.
|
| I see it in abundance in every single discussion here and
| elsewhere - people who hate commute but for whatever
| bad/stupid reason ended up far far away and were wasting
| hours every day on it suddenly have extra time and its
| great. These people keep praising current state as the
| best invention since fire. Most companies aren't
| organized around that last time I checked.
|
| Maybe its a very US thing and true there on really
| massive scale. But here in Europe its not like that, not
| that much at least. Most folks commute 20-50 minutes.
| That is for 2nd biggest city in the country, smaller are
| more effective.
|
| There are massive issues right now. Physical fitness is
| rapidly declining. People are going less out, less sun
| exposure. Amount of mental issues is understandably
| shooting through the roof (saw some firures about 5x
| increase in some cases). Economy is going down the
| toilet, some parts of it will crash very hard, possibly
| unrecoverably in current generation. These are effects
| that will be around for very long time even if we have
| 100% cure for covid tomorrow for 1 cent per dose.
|
| Plus what parent wrote is absolutely, 100% true - I see
| people tired from constant conf calls and full remote.
| Mailboxes are exploding, it becomes hard to track emails
| even few weeks old. Brainstormings are mostly gone,
| people became more robot-like. Whatever you gain from not
| commuting from that middle of nowhere you live in means
| nothing compared to all this. For companies and for
| economies.
| balfirevic wrote:
| > There are massive issues right now. Physical fitness is
| rapidly declining. People are going less out, less sun
| exposure. Amount of mental issues is understandably
| shooting through the roof (saw some firures about 5x
| increase in some cases). Economy is going down the
| toilet, some parts of it will crash very hard, possibly
| unrecoverably in current generation. These are effects
| that will be around for very long time even if we have
| 100% cure for covid tomorrow for 1 cent per dose.
|
| It'll be really hard to discuss remote work productively
| if you keep conflating it with COVID-induced issues.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Future generations should be gaining an incalculable
| amount from the reduced fuel consumption resulting from
| the reduced travel and related consumption.
| weeksie wrote:
| Try to give a generous reading, we're speaking in short
| paragraphs on the internet. My argument was that a
| shortened commute is a real productivity increase. That's
| one of any number of hypotheticals that depend on
| industry by industry specifics.
|
| If you'll read the thread all the way through, you'll
| notice that I'm a big fan of offices. I think the issues
| you and mattlondon raise are real--fitness, mental
| health, etc.--but those are temporary issues since people
| will eventually start going back to the office.
|
| We will gain because through this experience, many firms
| will discover efficiencies from remote work and be able
| to apply them in a judicious way when things are back to
| normal.
| alexbanks wrote:
| I think it's more that the ability to work remotely has been
| unlocked for pretty much every business that operates online
| (which, as I type it, sounds kind of crazy that it didn't
| already work that way).
|
| At the very least, for the most part, businesses won't forget
| that possibility, even if they don't rely on it heavily post-
| pandemic. We've removed a significant blocker, that doesn't
| necessarily mean that we've reinvented the office dynamic or
| anything like that, but we've at least opened up a new
| channel for some businesses that didn't have it before, which
| IMO is objective improvement.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _Now months later I feel like things are starting to grind a
| bit and productivity is starting to wane because the "pipe"
| is starting to dry up._
|
| My employer mandated a return to the office about 2 weeks
| ago. Productivity has declined compared to when we were all
| WFH for 6 months and I have the stats - pull requests, builds
| pushed to prod, tickets opened, all are down.
| cmwelsh wrote:
| Is it possible that folks substituted their commute for
| extra work hours? There's really not much to do, socially,
| when everything is locked down. Some people might take it
| as a chance to be a workaholic (with the possible burnout
| not in mind). In the office, I am pressured by folks
| walking by into leaving "on time" (they don't realize I
| often start later than them).
| jonfromsf wrote:
| Some people I have talked to are seeing this in their
| workplaces. They are having to tell the engineers not to
| work too hard so they don't burn out. Seeing 2+ hours a
| day of extra work.
| egsmi wrote:
| This whole thing is so multifaceted I think it's hard to
| draw any conclusions from it. In CA, we have COVID and
| fires so I'm essentially a prisoner in my house. If you
| locked me in my office, my productivity might go up too.
| But now that's school is on and my kids are locked in here
| too. Productivity goes down. All in all, it's a bumpy ride.
| mmcnl wrote:
| Is this a problem though? Is business suffering? Are
| there metrics on that?
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| Yes, but some middle manager gets to claim his paycheck due
| to having more meetings in the office now.
| watwut wrote:
| The same here. In addition, I see social problems accumulate
| slowly and the team seems to be failing apart. Interpersonal
| issues are nit solved until they boil in the home office, in
| person people were more eager to speak up about issues faster
| and more often.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Needing offices doesn't mean needing them centralized
| neccessarily. It depends on domain as usual for how close it
| actually has to be. A doctor's office? Yeah. But if you have
| accounting siloed off anyway why not just go full remote? They
| aren't needed there.
| closeparen wrote:
| We need spaces built for working. Contemporary open offices are
| built for talking.
| ghaff wrote:
| If anything, I'd expect offices more built around sometimes
| meeting and collaborating--not butts in seats all day. I can
| imagine hot-desking plus a lot of enclaves and meeting rooms.
| alexbanks wrote:
| > The long term shakeout of this will be that everybody
| realizes that yes, we need offices.
|
| You said this, and then wrote the rest of your post about the
| opposite? Why do you think we'll need offices?
| weeksie wrote:
| Remote work is massively inefficient for some things, even if
| it is much more efficient for others. Smart firms will do the
| efficient thing in the most efficient place and see gains
| across the board as a result.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Because I know we're not going to get SnackNation forever.
| walshemj wrote:
| I am not sure I think covid will for force a rethink of the
| cramped open plan hot desking trend of the last - so you might
| have less desks in the same footage
| rogerkirkness wrote:
| Weird proxy for "normal"
| S_A_P wrote:
| I'm all for choice. I would probably do part time in the office
| but I've been living my best life remotely working. My
| productivity is way up. No driving 2-3 hours a day. Helping my
| kids with school cooking. Been great.
| rubyfan wrote:
| The expectation from the fortune 500 company I work at is we will
| eventually go back to normal. Though we are slowly starting to
| come around to COVID as being potentially a multi-year situation.
| We've got a small number of people in management roles that will
| return a few days a week in office soon. I'm personally a bit
| worried this will create an expectation or disadvantage for
| others not in office. In my observation there is a political
| commonality to the management returning to office in our company
| that may be a driver for them.
| dhimes wrote:
| The best answer I've heard of is a company opening up the
| offices but mandating that all meetings are over
| videoconference anyway. Need to get out of the house? There's
| an office for you. But you don't have an inherent in-person
| advantage in a meeting.
| rubyfan wrote:
| That seems like a good policy
| yoz-y wrote:
| How many meeting rooms would you need to do that? This would
| work if most people were in individual or very small offices
| but that's rarely the case.
| pwinnski wrote:
| From one perspective, it's frustrating to see employers happily
| taking advantage of employees' real estate and internet
| connections for free, but since I _have_ the spare room already,
| and I 'm not commuting, I'll take it.
| tayo42 wrote:
| What would be nice is either a stipend to account for a bigger
| place with a spare room and connections, or to work out of a
| shared work space things. Like give me an extra couple hundred
| a year to get a place with an extra bedroom
| surfmike wrote:
| Data point: Most of my single co-workers, most of whom have
| roommates, would like to return to working in an office. They
| miss the social aspect of work, and for some of them it's hard to
| work from home.
| gchokov wrote:
| Because you are not independent, cannot work without
| micromanagment and supervision, and can't do anything by
| yourself. Because can I call you for 2 minutes is all you ask for
| 20 times a day. That's why.
| spottybanana wrote:
| What about the simplest explanation - shareholders believe that
| when people meet in office face-to-face it generates more value.
|
| If WFH produces superior result, it should mean that companies
| endorsing WFH should be better investments and make more profit.
|
| It is also possible that other factors matter way more, and
| therefore it is not the thing to focus on.
| dschuetz wrote:
| It's about control. Many managers like to micromanage everything
| and everybody very much, but that does not work very well
| remotely. They want to make sure, or at least to be able to make
| sure, that their workers, well, work. Many are afraid to loose
| that kind of control, because that's the only thing they can do
| best.
| derwiki wrote:
| Is this restricted to first line managers? Or do second line
| managers micromanager first, directors second, etc. Thankfully
| have managed to avoid this sort of manager so no first hand
| experience.
| dschuetz wrote:
| I think, the second level management is the unluckiest of
| them all. It's impossible to micromanage several lower level
| managers at the same time. Whoever tries, fails or burns out.
| closeparen wrote:
| Second line and above already needed systems like JIRA to
| micromanage.
| jefflombardjr wrote:
| Yeah if anything this pandemic made that abundantly clear.
| Those in favor of control ran out of any scapegoats. The remote
| work debate was never about location.
| dschuetz wrote:
| Ironically, working remotely actually made many office
| workers more productive, but I cannot recall where I've read
| that. Maybe lack of management interruptions is not as bad as
| they say.
| jefflombardjr wrote:
| It's mentioned in the linked article!
| mnd999 wrote:
| It completely depends on your home situation. If you have a quiet
| home office with fast broadband then why not work from home.
|
| If however you and your partner are squeezed round a small table
| in a studio flat with no air con fighting over crappy WiFi the
| office makes a lot of sense.
|
| The author finally comes to this point at the end of the article.
| It's not all back to the office or the death of the office, it's
| somewhere in between. Unfortunately that's not a good headline.
| Nursie wrote:
| My question to those stuck two to a studio - are you doing that
| in a large, expensive city?
|
| Would you not be happier able to be completely unchained from
| an office location, and able to choose to live anywhere? Then
| you could likely have a bigger place too.
| sjy wrote:
| Yes, but I'm not about to give up my lease and start shopping
| around for rural real estate during the pandemic. Most of the
| upside of living in the city is gone for now, but I expect
| those advantages to come back next year.
| jeltz wrote:
| No. I love living in the city. I like the restaurants, shops,
| bars, etc. I also like having people around, especially
| during the summers.
| Nursie wrote:
| That's fair enough, but the choice then is on you.
| cinquemb wrote:
| The thing is, you can get all of what they say they want
| in any large city in the world much cheaper than large
| cities in the US if one does their research... my 3br
| apartment with a home office in Jakarta is still cheaper
| than the 1B in in any city in US, or in my personal
| experience, compared to the 3br apt I split with two
| other grown men in Boston 5 years ago when I first
| started working remotely (and way nicer and more
| amenities too).
|
| And now, way more companies open to hiring remote
| workers!
| sharker8 wrote:
| > Cynically I might suggest the real subtext here is about
| propping up commercial property investment portfolios.
|
| Great article. I recommend taking out the word "cynically". That
| is what this is about.
| onion2k wrote:
| Plenty of people want to get back to the office because it's
| pragmatically better for some of us, but _the media stories_
| about returning to offices are being driven by people who own
| commercial real estate. The narrative is being driven by money,
| as always.
| SergeAx wrote:
| 1. WFH is not for everyone. There are people with kids and no
| dedicated workplace at home. There are people with low motivation
| and self-control, and office routine just helps them to keep up.
|
| 2. You can't mix WFH with work in office. It's either one or the
| other. If you have a single employee working remotely - you
| should transform all the processes to WFH-style.
|
| 3. WFH shifts most of the burden onto management. Managers should
| put 120-150% of effort in planning, communication, documentation
| and checking. I never saw a single manager who likes WFH. And the
| management are the ones who decides.
| danans wrote:
| > 2. You can't mix WFH with work in office. It's either one or
| the other. If you have a single employee working remotely - you
| should transform all the processes to WFH-style.
|
| You don't provide the line of thinking behind this statement.
| Why do you think this is the case?
|
| Also, even taking your statement at face value, you can still
| have a setup where there are fewer days in the office and more
| days working from home for every employee. Basically, have
| flexible in-office hours, whether that means only certain days,
| or certain parts of certain days.
|
| This sort of flexibility could be of great benefit to the
| employee who has kids, or is just tired of sitting in traffic
| or crowded trains 5 days a week. As a bonus, it could reduce
| crowding on transit lines during peak hours.
| rlt wrote:
| I've worked at companies where this was done right and wrong.
|
| From my experience, if most employees are in an office and
| only a minority are remote, the remote employees are at a big
| disadvantage, unless the company (or remote employees)
| actively work to make sure they're included in as much as
| possible.
|
| If it's in the company's culture to have lots of ad-hoc in-
| person conversations where remote employees are unlikely to
| be included, they're going to have a bad time. If those
| conversations mostly happen in chat or scheduled meetings
| with video chat, then it might work.
|
| I think it's probably better to just have whole teams be
| entirely (or at least majority) remote, or entirely onsite.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > single employee working remotelyl
|
| I can't disagree with any of your points, but for the past
| decade, I've mostly worked for huge corporations with multiple
| offices in multiple cities, and have only rarely worked with
| anybody I'm in the same building (or even the same city) as,
| including my boss. Until this year, they've demanded I
| physically drive to the office anyway, but there's never been
| any reason; I've been on zoom calls all day anyway.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > WFH shifts most of the burden onto management. Managers
| should put 120-150% of effort in planning, communication,
| documentation and checking.
|
| I don't understand the connection between the first and second
| statements. Can you clarify? How does WFH put more burden on
| management?
| golemiprague wrote:
| I have been working for years in a company that mixed WFH and
| office, it depends how you do it. In our case we meet at the
| office periodically to catch up but not every day not everybody
| and not in every location. The schedule is built according to
| teams, their specific work needs and time constraints. It
| require some level of trust but from my experience comparing to
| office only or wfh only places I worked for, the combined
| approach is the best. We are mostly people with families so a
| bit more responsible and appreciative of having time at home
| but also wanting to escape home from time to time if you know
| what i mean. So it works perfect.
| DenisM wrote:
| > I never saw a single manager who likes WFH
|
| I do. But you've never seen me, so there is truth to your
| words.
|
| The employees are quite productive, I hate commuting, and Zoom
| works remarkably well to stay connected. Not as well as it
| could be, but it's finally "over the hill".
|
| Two things worry me:
|
| - The long-term isolation is detrimental to mental health, so
| we might be on borrowed time right now.
|
| - Onboarding new employees might become more difficult absent
| ongoing visual contact.
| torvald wrote:
| > You can't mix WFH with work in office.
|
| While I agree, I think there is room for organizations to at
| least be remote friendly. I'd love to work for an organization
| that allowed for WFH in the middle of build cycles/sprints and
| keeping a more strict at-office policy during planing phases of
| projects.
| nottorp wrote:
| There are about three problems with the current forced WFH
| situation:
|
| 1. People simply aren't used to it yet. The self discipline part,
| knowing when to work... and when to stop too.
|
| 2. You do need some sort of dedicated space. I've been working
| from home just fine for 20 years but I have a separate room for
| that.
|
| 3. Especially in tech, management may not have the knowledge to
| judge productivity. Measuring time the chair is filled in the
| office is much easier than evaluating a developer's work based on
| just what they do.
| noir_lord wrote:
| I don't have a dedicated office but I do have a dedicated space
| in the living room (which is large).
|
| At home I have a fast 8C/16T desktop with two 4K screens and a
| comfortable chair, awesome sound setup.
|
| Vs a 1.5hr commute and the inevitable MacBook it's a good trade
| imo.
|
| When we buy a house I'm converting the garage into a proper
| office/motorcycle workshop though just because I'll have the
| space.
| ingvul wrote:
| Well put. It took me around a month to get into the WFH mood
| (point 1). I have a dedicated room and I don't see (at least
| for me) WFH feasible without one (point 2). Regarding point 3:
| unfortunately, I cannot control that.
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