I don’t hate working in an office. I hate working in an “open plan” office where someone is always interrupting my work.
If companies want to lure employees back into the office, they should give them offices of their own.
37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home
141–150 of 410 posts
Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home
#1425 of us wrote Microsoft Works for the Macintosh while working at home from 1984 to 1992. Without the internet, we got together as needed to merge code, usually once a month, but sometimes once a week. We talked on the phone. We went to Microsoft once in awhile. It was ideal and worked very well. Maybe it was just our personalities that made it work, but I am astonished that any programmer would rather go into the off…
Nothing anyone says in these comments should invalidate your own personal experiences and successes with your working arrangements. But I have to admit I'm surprised to hear you say that you are "astonished" that any programmer would prefer to work differently. 2 things that I've learned from reading NH over the years: tech/programmer people are often very opinionated, and also have widely different opinions on just…
In this case, tech/programmer people have differing opinions about returning to the office. But the managers or at least the management have only have a single blanket policy for all. A compromise like 2-3 days in the office is one such policy.
Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home
#143The coding used by this survey is a joke. If 40% of an occupation says they work outdoors that's below 50% so it's bucketed into the work from home category on that criterion. I think if even 20% of a job is saying they work outdoors that's pretty strong evidence you're missing some information about what the other 80% are doing in their job that prevents it from being a work from home job. The net result of their se…
Couldn’t the job still be performed at home with the occasional on site? I’m thinking of a construction PM. The job could mainly be done at home other then when needed to meet GC on site. Seems like there is still WFH no?
> I’m thinking of a construction PM. The job could mainly be done at home other then when needed to meet GC on site.
I’m sure all the blue collar construction workers would totally respect the PM even more than they do now if they didn’t show up on site…
There is an awful lot of privilege going on behind the scenes in these WFH debates.
Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home
#1445 of us wrote Microsoft Works for the Macintosh while working at home from 1984 to 1992. Without the internet, we got together as needed to merge code, usually once a month, but sometimes once a week. We talked on the phone. We went to Microsoft once in awhile. It was ideal and worked very well. Maybe it was just our personalities that made it work, but I am astonished that any programmer would rather go into the off…
Didn't Microsoft give everyone their own dedicated office in those days? I thought I read/heard somewhere that is what spawned development of Outlook/Exchange. I agree about the distractions, it's extremely bad with the open office model and hard to get anything done for me. I would much prefer cubicles or dedicated offices.
This was true in the late 80's early 90's when we used to go up to Redmond from California to pow wow, but I heard that's not true anymore. Also, if any Microsofties are reading this, how would I got about getting the source code of Works for the Mac? It was about 200,000 lines of 68000 asm code that I'm thinking of trying to get to run in the browser. I may make a formal request to Microsoft if I get more motivated about it. I lost my copy along the way.
Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same. Seems not too long before people started really hating offices, offices started being designed to make you hate them. Open offices, no walls, 'island concept' which sounds all fun and tropical until you learn it just means you no longer even have your own desk. If companies want people back in offices, make them enticing. Have perks! Imagine everyone getting their own room, with a nice desk and maybe small couc…
I agree with everything you said but how is "free daycare" something small? Daycare costs thousands of dollars and the regulations and licensure are (rightfully) a very high bar. I would see free daycare as a huge perk and I don't even have kids.
You get economies of scale with larger companies. The regulations are usually 1 worker per x kids, if I recall and not much more than that. It's not that strict at all. Of course if you had daycare at your company you could have a large room or a wing with a playroom and all that. It's pennies on the dollar to retain good talent, if you actually want to force people back in the office.
Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home
#146Has the title editorializing rule been dropped? I see even more posts with changed titles when the original isn't particularly misleading.
Since this is the most descriptive line out of the highlights section, I personally enjoy that this is the content chosen instead of the "clickbaity" page title which would be "How many jobs can be done at home?".
Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home
#147Now think about the economic savings in the areas of energy and capital depreciation on cars. The overall economic efficiency boost from this could be unbelievably huge, not to mention the environmental benefits of less routine commuting. I wouldn't be surprised if this approves economic efficiency by trillions of dollars.
It will take some time work through, but there will also be cost savings on office spaces for companies.
Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home
#148But then the jig is up, no? I thought that was an amazing moment when recently the NYC mayor asked CEOs to "help get workers back to the office". It's not about the work, it's not about the city, it's about making sure real estate doesn't crash and those campaign contributions can keep coming.
Maybe the mayor also cares about local businesses that get their income from city workers as well as the transport networks which need all the money they can get. Maybe they care about the tourist buzz from a busy city or the saftey in numbers. You don't always have to assume the worst of someone just because they are powerful.
Don’t forget the suburban sprawl this sort of stuff will cause. Eating further and further into our natural habitats building giant houses for wealthy, privileged tech workers.
Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home
#1495 of us wrote Microsoft Works for the Macintosh while working at home from 1984 to 1992. Without the internet, we got together as needed to merge code, usually once a month, but sometimes once a week. We talked on the phone. We went to Microsoft once in awhile. It was ideal and worked very well. Maybe it was just our personalities that made it work, but I am astonished that any programmer would rather go into the off…
This is fascinating to me! How did you manage to merge code in the 80s? What tools were available? Did you have three-way merge tools or did you do it more manually? Or rather did you talk frequently and ensure that you weren't stepping in each other's files? How did you make changes to shared APIs?
Macintosh Programmers Workshop had some tools but we mostly did it by hand so we tended to work on different parts of the program. If that was a problem our manager who owned the company would do a road trip to collect the new code that another person needed (we all lived in the Bay Area.) He had a big financial incentive to do so. Or we would get together, but that was not optimal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer%27s_Works...
Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not trying to be sarcastic. I genuinely asking. Why? I'm not a fan of the office because: 1. I don't like the commute 2. I have an office in my house, but at the "office"; I would be sharing some kind of space. 3. now that covid is less of an issue I plan on going to lunch more with freinds.
1. I like my commute. If my commute changed I would feel differently. Regardless, I feel employees should get paid for their commutes. 2. I don't have an office in my house. Even if I had the space I don't think I would want to use it for work. However, since coronavirus happened I have had way more space in my office than I did before, and I refuse to be sandwiched between two other engineers in an open office floor…
> Regardless, I feel employees should get paid for their commutes.
This opens up way too many cans of worms - some of which (I feel) are very unfair.
(Morning shift)
I worked at SGI doing tech support on the "East" team. The teams were split up by timezone (we were all in Mountain View - where the Google campus is now). My shift started at 5am (no traffic at all) and I lived about 10 minutes away at that time of day.
One of my coworkers lived in Gilroy, and was on the west team (a 9-5 working hours) and would sometimes have a commute of an hour and a half each way if traffic was bad.
So, the guy in Gilroy should be getting paid an extra $100 to $150/day for living further away from me and not working the morning shift?
Or how about the sf2g types ( https://sf2g.com )?
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I can find other examples of this through my professional career. I had a co-worker who lived in Minneapolis driving to Eau Claire, WI each day. One bad snow storm, it took him 3 hours to get in that morning.
I currently have a coworker who lives in northern Wisconsin and the office is in southern Wisconsin. He's been very happy with WFH. But he had quite a commute (he likes driving).
This furthermore complicates the question of overtime. If you've got a 90m commute each way, does that mean you should only be working for 5h/day to avoid overtime? If I take the scenic route, do I get paid more?
The "ok, here's the consequences of paying for the commute" that I would see is that for companies that need people in the office (e.g. nurses), they would then have the constraint "you must live within 15 minutes from the office and public transportation is not acceptable as that may cause additional delays."
While I recognize the "this is time lost", the "lets compensate for this time spent" is a mess and would cause more problems and discontent than the lost time discontent currently has.