431–440 of 830 posts
You sound like exactly the co-workers I want to get away from. Leave me alone, I'm working and thinking. WFH might not be fore you.That's fine. It is for me. Leave me out of your glorious vision.
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WFO isn't necessarily about personal preference. People who want everyone to WFO believe that WFO produces better outcomes for the company. That is different than someone who desires to work from an office or remotely out of personal preference. For instance, I may prefer to WFH because it makes my life more convenient, but I can also accept that WFO produces better outcomes for the company. Personally, I haven't see…
> I haven't seen many good arguments that WFH produces superior work outcomes. Why should you want _arguments_ about a question for which there has been actual research? "Superior work outcomes" is a fuzzy thing to measure, but when units of work are clearly countable and it's agreed what constitutes "done", there are multiple studies that have found that WFH employees were more productive (i.e. did more in the same…
Also:
> WFO produces better outcomes for the company.
What's backing that up?
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Hot take this is the right line of thought. Restructure society so we work less, not so that we can work more.
But doesn’t this drive home OP’s point further? For people who work in service jobs - healthcare, schools, shopping, and restaurants/cafes, for example - how would you approach working less? People want to go out and eat and places are already struggling to hire. Parents want in person learning for their young kids.
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Is that just from commuting? For me the cost is 50-100€ per month depending on the cost of the public transport ticket, and that I can deduct from taxes anyway. Plus a couple of extra lunches I would buy with WFO. So basically negligible.
Do you value your time at $0?
> I always saw tech as the field where a disproportionally large amount of people truly love what they do. You do confuse "loving what they do" with "being at the office" and "socializing during slack time". I do love my job but I do hate socializing with people, which is definitely not my job. That is why I'm working in IT, I don't have to socialize beyond the bare minimum to be successful. I think IT attracts intro…
Honestly, I feel this is a bit of a black-and-white view that grossly oversimplifies things. And I am downright insulted by the last sentence to be frank. Blaming shitty management on extroverted techies. Are you sure about that?
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Boston/Cambridge and NYC come to mind as cities where one can avoid having a car. Are there others that save sufficient public transport, housing and support buildings that should be considered. In Canada, Montreal fits that description. I’ve not lived in or talked to enough people from Toronto or Vancouver to know how liveable they are on foot. Open offices are a plague. Any company using them is interested in reduc…
Also open offices are the norm in many places -- so any company wanting a non-open office has to face going counter culture alone; apart from having to figure out logistics involved in setting up cubicles and offices. Some of us don't even know what non-open office looks like. Closest I have seen is the rooms of high ranking execs, doctors and professors lol.
So my personal preference is (1) WFO for a Bay Area company in a non-Bay Area office to combine good comp and good quality of life, (2) WFH remotely, (3) WFO in the Bay Area, and lastly (4) WFH in the Bay Area.
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Every time I’ve traveled for work, they do not expense the portion where you leave from your home. It’s up to you to get to work. So if you drive, you “leave from the office” (i.e. calc the distance from there), or drive to the airport, and getting from home to the airport is on you. Curious to hear if this is different for others.
This sort of reveals the problem I have with this calculus. "Working from the office is more productive." "Great do you offer higher rates to offset the costs and share some of that additional productivity?" "Not really. We offer the market average of all jobs, wfh and wfo. We can't really afford more, renting office space is expensive." "Would you lease a car for me, count commute time towards the workday and refund…
To me at the end of the day people are optimizing for time and money. If we make offices more convenient and cheaper than working from home people will pick that option. But right now if you move to a cheap city and work from home that is the cheapest option with least commute by far. i hear a lot of chatter from vcs who think startups that work in person have an advantage, but in big companies maybe the calculus is different.
In the end remote work is here to stay, but companies will make the best business decision in the end whether that means seeing better results by paying people more to stay in office or getting outcompeted by companies that hire globally and remotely.
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I worked out that for me, even accounting for energy bills and such, working from home full time would be equivalent to a 15% pay rise. And on top of that, I'd have 2 hours of extra free time every day. I can't understand the kind of person who wouldn't want that.
Is that just from commuting? For me the cost is 50-100€ per month depending on the cost of the public transport ticket, and that I can deduct from taxes anyway. Plus a couple of extra lunches I would buy with WFO. So basically negligible.
And BART (a different rail system) is even more expensive.
That’s not negligible: that’s almost three hours of work for me to cover the cost (pre-tax). And I’m fairly well paid. Most engineers aren’t paid half as well. It’s a much bigger hit for them.