141–150 of 468 posts
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Life has always been normal here in Sweden. No lockdowns, mask mandates, restaurants have always been open. And no excess deaths. So don't speak for everyone.
> And no excess deaths. Euromomo shows excess mortality for Sweden for both the spring 2020, and the winter 2020-2021: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps#z-scores-by-country
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Isn't that more an effect of your local social scene being shut down though, and not lack of commuting to an office? If all the local bars/clubs/libraries/whatever you like to do were open, wouldn't that solve the problem?
I always enjoyed the after-work drinking events. Lots of people there that I would never call up and ask "hey want to go to the bar?" but still enjoyed hanging out with. I guess it's not work's job to be your social life, and these after-work events exclude people with families or that don't like alcohol from valuable interactions... but ignoring the global effect, I personally enjoyed them. Now that everyone is remo…
A response I can offer you is this, And it’s loaded with empathy because I def get that people derived real fun from it.
A lot of people attended those after-hour drinks as the semi-mandatory things they are, either for career survival or career acceleration reasons. This was always a large background narrative, and the death of it as of now is a nice thing. I’d take quarterly team dinners and an 30 min zoom with beers any time.
7am-5pm, and the 5-7pm additions to work life on a often weekly basis demands a lot out of people went to them just to manage their career.
What frustrates a lot of people, and generates the tone on HN perhaps, is that this aspect isn’t acknowledged in exchange for “but it was my social life!” Your social life cut into my real non-work social life (or so the comment would go).
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I think you're correct, but one thing that is really missing nowadays, especially with phones and the internet, is active communities that exist in real life outside of work. Stuff like the elks lodge, rotary, bowling leagues, etc are just not as common anymore as I believe they used to be. Certainly there are many things that exist, but in a way societally it seems like they don't have very much cache, even as far a…
This is the other point I wanted to make (but frankly I was too scared that maybe it’s just because I suck at meeting people now that I haven’t socialized like a normal person in a year). It just seems harder to meet people _in general_ than it did even two years ago. Like where is everybody? Does everyone stay home literally all the time now?
I’m gonna go against the HN grain here and, despite having been fully for remote work for the first year or so of the pandemic, come out and say that life has really gotten a lot more repetitive and frankly disappointing since covid and the death of the office. I kind of miss meeting people in the office. I was in the unfortunate position of having moved to a new city for a new tech job where I knew nobody just seven…
I never want to fall into a 5 times a week schedule again, but I miss the background discussions; commute; and energy that is involved in getting ready for work.
I’m gonna go against the HN grain here and, despite having been fully for remote work for the first year or so of the pandemic, come out and say that life has really gotten a lot more repetitive and frankly disappointing since covid and the death of the office. I kind of miss meeting people in the office. I was in the unfortunate position of having moved to a new city for a new tech job where I knew nobody just seven…
I'm not surprised, because not only offices "died", but everything else did too.
Many people used to work remotely before that. But we always could jump out for a lunch with our friends in a restaurant. Or take a break and go to the gym. Or meet in board games cafe after work, go to the cinema, a swimming pool or wine tasting.
Now, corona made it all go away. It was never about the office itself but the whole life as we knew it.
I’m gonna go against the HN grain here and, despite having been fully for remote work for the first year or so of the pandemic, come out and say that life has really gotten a lot more repetitive and frankly disappointing since covid and the death of the office. I kind of miss meeting people in the office. I was in the unfortunate position of having moved to a new city for a new tech job where I knew nobody just seven…
I’m gonna go against the HN grain here and, despite having been fully for remote work for the first year or so of the pandemic, come out and say that life has really gotten a lot more repetitive and frankly disappointing since covid and the death of the office. I kind of miss meeting people in the office. I was in the unfortunate position of having moved to a new city for a new tech job where I knew nobody just seven…
I'm convinced, though, that when the pandemic fades away, we'll see a bifurcation of working styles. The office offers in-person relationships, high-bandwidth communication, and a well-understood management paradigm, at the cost of forcing everybody to live near the office and spend a lot of time commuting. Full-remote offers the ability to live anywhere and no commutes, but shallower relationships and not-very-well understood modes of communication and collaboration. Hybrid offers... not much, as far as I can tell. It's the downsides of in-office and remote. The best you can say about it is that you get to see people in person sometimes and can avoid commuting sometimes. :-/
So we'll see a grand sorting where people that want to be remote find the companies that will let them do that, and the people that want things to go back to normal find the companies that also want that. Then the remote companies spend the next 50 years learning how to really do distributed work, rather than just "like an office, but on Slack and Zoom".
I worked remotely, full time, for several years long before the pandemic. Early enough that anytime I told someone I would have to explain all the minutiae that Yes, I am able to get stuff done at home. No, I don't need to "get dressed for the office anyway" and "Yes, we have many video calls per day just to keep in touch" and so on.
It was fun for a while, but what made it _really_ fun, was meeting colleagues in cafes and the like all over town for regular catchups and stuff like brainstorms.
I was at my peak productivity (of my entire career) when I had the choice to stay at home and maximise my "in the zone" time but also was no further than "tomorrow" from being able to have a meeting with the team.
Granted, there are caveats to this - having a decent, work compatible, space at home. I have invested quite a bit in ergonomic furniture at home, and have dedicated a small room to be my work space.
I also live in the suburbs of a big city, no more than an hour away from the bustle, collab spaces, and coffee shops.
What made me leave was over time the colleagues either moved away or left, to be replaced by people further away, meaning those next-to-impromptu meetings became more and more difficult to have. Eventually I felt like I was missing out on civilisation and threw in the towel for a trendy startup gig in the city again.
Then covid hit and I'm back to full time remote and it's starting to suck again.
My friend runs a company that is remote first in the way described here. They have employees all over the world, but they all get together at some random place on the planet (pre-covid) about once every two months. The employees love it because of all the free trips around the world (and often tie their vacation to the beginning or end of a meeting so they can explore that place on their own) and it's great for the c…
Me doing this (after years of 25%+ travel in a different role) would result in a divorce quite quick.
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I think people like you need a new app, something like Tinder for lunch. I personally have no will to move to a high cost of life area and spend 1+ hour on commune just because my coworkers can’t find friends.
I don't want an app - I like my coworkers and enjoy having lunch with them. It's the other, pleasant part of work : social interactions with people I know. They are also sometimes necessary, ie you will sometimes solve problems more efficiently over lunch/coffee than by email / Skype. Furthermore, not everyone has a 1h+ commute to the office and lives in an expensive area - I know plenty of people with short commutes…