91–100 of 371 posts
Get the benefits of working from home (no commuting, no traffic, closeness to family)
Get the benefits from the office: other professionals with whom to share, clear boundaries between work and family.
And even something that neither can provide: networking with people outside of your coworkers. And a healthy walk every day.
At the start of the pandemic, I knew I would miss working with people in person, but thought I would be totally great with WFH. Now, I know that I badly need some amount of in-person time with my coworkers on a weekly basis, or I go crazy. It's a motivational thing for me. I thrive on solving problems for and with other people, and there's an "out of sight, out of mind" effect for me over zoom. It's just harder for m…
Working from home means I get to see my wife and children for more hours of the day. It also means that I get to choose when I will allow myself to be interrupted, rather than sitting in an open concept office and being _continually_ interrupted. I've been working from home for over six years. I never want to return to the office. I will change careers before I return to a software development office.
Open concept offices are awful. As someone who is more vulnerable to interruptions than most, being able to control my work environment is a godsend. Everyone is different, but my ideal work environment is library quiet. No music and certainly no overheard conversations or people constantly walking past. I’ve never worked in an office that was willing to provide such an environment, but I have it at home.
The only people I've met who seem to like them are people who do sales for a living or the exact kind of coworkers who I would really not like to be in an open office with.
I have a really nice office in Seattle. Since I am the second most tenured person on the team, I even have a water view and am right next to the snacks. I haven't seen the inside of this office since May 2020, and probably never will again.
All of my colleagues and I have agreed that we don't see the need to go back and our employer is likely going to sell our admin building (we have several other buildings for actual patient services) and distribute some of the money to those of us who worked in that building as a bonus or as an allowance to buy equipment for home.
I've visited the open offices at friends who work for Microsoft and Google and they're just awful hives of noise. I would rather have my own door and own bathroom.
I mean...what I ACTUALLY like is not having to work for a living, but I'm a wage slave, so that's not an option
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are you pretending to program the full 9-5? I like the office and am currently working in the office but I just... get up and leave whenever I want. Come back whenever I want. No need to pretend to work 9-5.
Here's a story that explains this concept. A programmer goes to his manager, presenting a paper with a lengthy problem for the manager to solve. The manager looks over the paper, thinks for a few minutes, then writes down the answer. The employee then tells the manager "What were you doing for the last 5 minutes? It didn't look like you were working at all". The manager responds saying "I was thinking about the probl…
Working from home means I get to see my wife and children for more hours of the day. It also means that I get to choose when I will allow myself to be interrupted, rather than sitting in an open concept office and being _continually_ interrupted. I've been working from home for over six years. I never want to return to the office. I will change careers before I return to a software development office.
I get way more work done in a lot less time, save time and stress due to the commute, see my family more, and have significantly better mental health due to all those previous points.
I did miss the office a bit earlier in my WFH career when video conferencing wasn’t as common, but these days it’s not an issue at all and you still get face time with your colleagues etc.
Yeah, we are planning proper "meatspace" get togethers, which will help gel the team more. But that's 2-4x a year. I don't think that needs to happen a lot to really reap some social benefits.
For everyone seeking more social interaction; just go find it locally, outside of work.
I guess I'm fully in the camp of work being intense, but time bound. And that's what remote work affords me, though I've learned to draw the lines between my work time and my personal time starkly. Once you get it right, office environments feel like such a drag in comparison.
I have taken less pay in order to keep this going. It's well worth it when you consider the costs of commuting.