Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 371 posts

Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

#211

Post by JohnBooty »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #137
dleslie wrote: post #18

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.

> 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. This is extremely situational. When I was in a larger house and had no kids, WFH was an easy way to avoid interruptions. Moving to a smaller house (more expensive city) and having kids flipped the situation around. Avoiding interruptions at home was extrem…

    Once Slack becomes the default I’m pinged from 
    every angle all day long.
I recently began work on a team that has a brief "culture FAQ" regarding things like Slack messaging norms and expectations. We have an agreement that @'ing/DM'ing is expected to be asynchronous unless you explicitly let the recipient know otherwise - "hey, the server's down" or "hey, I'm blocked on this" etc.

(above paragraph edited for clarity)

It's been awesome. Very respectful environment. People @ you but you are not expected to stop what you're doing.

By the same token, I can @ others without fear that I'm causing them an undue interuption, because asynchronous messaging is the norm.

Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

#212

Post by paulcole »

Dobrila wrote: post #139
paulcole wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I was in the office I would not want to talk to anybody unless we had some prearranged meeting on a specific topic. This is the sort of honesty I’d love to hear when interviewing candidates.

And if a candidate said that, how would that influence your hiring decision?

I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader — a hiring Rorschach if you will.

Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

#213

Post by bckr »

McNutty wrote: post #197
donatj wrote: post #150

We went to temporary work from home at the beginning of the pandemic. Well it's been 2 years now. I have hated every minute of it. I used to have a 15 minute commute which was a nice bit of time to get my thoughts in order. Now I roll out of bed when my alarm goes off and do daily stand-up on zoom in my home office literally 5 minutes later. My brain is literally still asleep. I miss people, I miss spontaneous intera…

>Now I roll out of bed when my alarm goes off and do daily stand-up on zoom in my home office literally 5 minutes later. My brain is literally still asleep. You can fix this yourself, incredibly easily. Personally I have never changed my alarm clock based on if I'm WFH. My wife is happy to pop in her headphones if I ask her to while I'm working. I keep scheduled breaks. If I decide in the morning that the dirty dishe…

It's interesting to see how the pro-WFH folks largely seem to sneer at pro-office folks' complaints, regarding them as trivial. I'm not seeing the other way around in this or other recent threads.

Of course, this may be partially explained by the structural pressure against WFH, which has left its proponents on the defensive. But it strikes me as anti-compassionate.

Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

#214

Post by wruza »

This has one flaw, it doesn’t ask if WFH preference is pre-2020 or post-. Two years is sometimes too little feel all side effects. Also it highly depends on which office. If you work at typically loud open space office, it’s one thing, if you have a room of 3 coworkers, that’s completely different. I’m afraid that this poll is partially of “does my office suck” type.

Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

#215

Post by bckr »

euske wrote: post #164

A university teacher. I work from the office for now but without student. I understand the appeal of online classes but man do I miss in-person teaching. In an online class, there's virtually no reaction from students (as most students here prefer to turn the camera off) and I feel like I'm a YouTuber who's constantly talking to an empty camera.

Thanks for sharing a different perspective! I liked not communiting to University but the lack of socialization with fellow students and professors was a drag.

Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

#216

Post by shruubi »

I prefer working from the office, not because of the social aspect but because I find that I just can't bring myself to be nearly as productive at home as opposed to in the office.

What I really miss was the period in time where I could work in the office and everyone else was working from home. The quiet of no-one else around, the productiveness of not being at home and the commute for that period of time between work/home where I can have some time just to myself.

Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

#217

Post by spurgu »

pc86 wrote: post #72
spurgu wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a motivational thing for me. I've always loved working from home (and was doing it for almost a year before the pandemic started), I'm quite self-driven, but I do recognize that it can be difficult to get back into the groove once you've been out of it for a while - meeting colleagues in person would help with that aspect. Ideally, if my colleagues weren't some 3000 km away, I wouldn't mind going to the office…

It's hard to find places that have anything in the middle. It's either fully remote, they may or may not even have an office anymore, and they act like you're crazy if you suggest having some sort of standing office space available without special reservations or advance notice. Or on the flip side, they want you in the office 3, 4 days a week, 8-5 or whatever, basically pre-COVID requirements. I agree I think the be…

> I agree I think the best of both worlds would be some sort of schedule, maybe ~1-ish day a week on average.

Yeah this would be fine/nice as well.

If nothing else there's at least been a strong step towards the potential of WFH with all of this, even though it hasn't lead to ideal outcomes.

Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

#218

Post by eyelidlessness »

I prefer working from home and have most of my career, but have found some aspects of broader remote work adoption really challenging because it’s a lot noisier at home. My poll vote is easy but I wanted to register this more complex experience as well.

Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

#219

Post by JohnBooty »

lamontcg wrote: post #125
techsupporter wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Open concept offices are awful. 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…

Don't underestimate the utility of being able to just take a goddamn nap when you've had shit sleep the night before rather than powering through the day trying to appear productive when you're a zombie. Most normal people have bad days when they really shouldn't be at work, its so much easier when you just aren't at work and can deal with the problem (take a nap, take a cold shower afterwards, get in a few hours of…

Yeah. God. The ability to take an afternoon nap if you need it... there's no way to even put a monetary value on it.

Can walk, get some exercise/sunshine, nap, even have a quickie with your partner or look at porn, etc. No matter how awesome one's office is, those things are generally not options.

Post reply on HN