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37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

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Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

#351

Post by saltharp »

30367286 wrote: post #162
ethbr0 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd spin this around and cast it as a challenge -- regular, forced interactions with coworkers is minimally sufficient and retards some people from pursuing social activities outside the home. There are already a number of options in even the smallest town. I expect that will increase as more people move to WFH and seek social outlets. And at the end of the day "interacting with coworkers in the break room" is a pret…

>I'd spin this around and cast it as a challenge -- regular, forced interactions with coworkers is minimally sufficient and retards some people from pursuing social activities outside the home. Absolutely. Additionally, even getting to that set of regular, forced interactions necessarily consumes the limited time those people would have to pursue those social activities outside the home. That is, it's hard to have a…

> That is, it's hard to have a strong social life when you commute, at best, 5 hours a week. And that's if you're lucky.

"At best"? The average commute in the US is 27.6 minutes, according to the Census Bureau. My commute is a 10 minute bike ride. Luck had nothing to do with it, just a different set of priorities in life.

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-...

Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

#352

Post by cableshaft »

samstave wrote: post #167
stevenhubertron wrote: post #63

I don’t hate working in an office. I hate working in an “open plan” office where someone is always interrupting my work.

its funny, when working at Intel, one of the things people bitched about was the cubicles. (1998) I hate open offices, but having worked in all formats, open offices are bad for mental health. When working on MPK West for FB, they built an open office to house 3,000 employees with only 5 offices (with escape hatches) for the c-suite.

Cubicles suck compared to private offices, but they're miles better than open offices.

Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

#353

Post by bsder »

mwattsun wrote: post #67

5 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…

> I can safely say I never wrote any good code while working in an office. There are too many distractions.

1) Not every office is Silicon Valley Open Office Garbage

I personally think this is the biggest issue.

We never threw in with the "open office" bullshit. Offices have doors. We don't have that many cubicles, and they're generally for contractors/consultants/etc. Every time we started having cubicles, it was time to move to a bigger office.

People hate commute traffic--that's sadly unavoidable in the US. But they didn't seem to hate our office (I could, of course, simply be blind like so many stupid managers).

2) Not every job is solely writing code.

I need a lab. My juniors need a lab. They don't need to be there every day, but they do need it regularly. Expecting them to set this up in their apartment is unreasonable.

3) Junior engineers need mentoring

Maybe the fact that software does this quite so terribly is hiding this need.

There is a lot of friction between simply mentioning something to a staff engineer after lunch and setting up a specific zoom call. There is also something about the staff engineer overhearing something "minor" that junior engineers are struggling with, correlating that multiple of them are having similar issues and setting up something to fix a process or educate people.

4) Lack of face to face time increases conflicts

This is anecdata. However, people who don't actually meet face to face regularly don't cut each other the same slack that those who meet regularly do. I don't know why. Although, we could probably paper over this by having regular lunches.

I like working from home. But I also liked working at the office. They are two different modes that serve two different purposes.

I will, however, agree that 9 to 5, 5 days a week in the office is dumb. At the very least, significantly condensing the number of "common hours" and letting people commute on off times needs to increase. This was happening, but very slowly. Covid accelerated this.

Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

#354

Post by Terretta »

saltharp wrote: post #351
30367286 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'd spin this around and cast it as a challenge -- regular, forced interactions with coworkers is minimally sufficient and retards some people from pursuing social activities outside the home. Absolutely. Additionally, even getting to that set of regular, forced interactions necessarily consumes the limited time those people would have to pursue those social activities outside the home. That is, it's hard to have a…

> That is, it's hard to have a strong social life when you commute, at best, 5 hours a week. And that's if you're lucky. "At best"? The average commute in the US is 27.6 minutes, according to the Census Bureau. My commute is a 10 minute bike ride. Luck had nothing to do with it, just a different set of priorities in life. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-...

> 27.6 minutes

Something’s wrong with this stat. Almost nobody can get from chair at home to chair at work in that time.

My present office is 1.6 miles of which ~1 mile is Interstate, yet it’s at best 22 minutes house door to office door (not chair to chair) if I hit traffic lights, as low as 14 minutes if all greens. Google Maps and Apple Maps say it’s 6 - 8 minutes in off hours. Once car is on street, only greens, and before turning into parking, maybe that’s right.

This suggests two things: (a) maybe they mean time in vehicle in motion not chair-to-chair, (b) maybe they are computing address to address absent traffic.

I’m also suspicious of the word “average”. For instance, I can picture bi-modal commute times: a set that are 0 minutes (like Amazon support answering calls from ‘virtual call center’ at home), and a set that are long tail, as alluded to in this quote:

> The average American is traveling 26 minutes to their jobs — the longest commute time since the Census started tracking it in 1980, up 20 percent. Commutes longer than 45 minutes are up 12 percent in that time span, and 90-minute one-way commutes are 64 percent more common than in 1990.

With 90 minute one way commutes going on, maybe the average data is asking people who are in denial.

But the simplest explanation is also in that quote: travel time. It’s certainly not start stopwatch, get ready to commute, get to your transit, wait for your transit (e.g. warm up car or wait for bus), get in motion, travel, stop, dispense with transit (park car, lock bike), get from your transit to workplace, get situated, stop stopwatch.

// I’ve prioritized “least traffic lights” and ideally “walkability” since university. From 2017 to 2021 I paid a massive premium to be able to get chair-to-chair (including both elevator waits) in ~8 minutes on foot w/ no transit in midtown Manhattan. Commute times matter to me, I use tools to heatmap them when choosing work and residences, so just not buying average possibility of 26 mins.

    ------ BEGIN_EDIT ------
Yes, it was just travel time.

I found the US Census source, it’s a question Census said was asking people for ‘travel time’ and respondents probably in optimistic denial:

Question on Travel Time to Work from the American Community Survey 2019

Q.35: How many minutes did it usually take this person to get from home to work LAST WEEK?

The Census writeup includes distributions:

https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

Yes, it’s a touch bi-modal, with a valley in the 5 minute period that’s also the “average”. No, bicycle isn’t helping much, only shaves 6 mins on ‘average’. Ten percent are in the car over an hour.

Insofar as their data is travel time not total time chair-to-chair (time between being able to be doing something else at each end), and it’s self surveyed not measured, I buy it.

    ------  END_EDIT  ------

Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

#355

Post by samstave »

cableshaft wrote: post #352
samstave wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its funny, when working at Intel, one of the things people bitched about was the cubicles. (1998) I hate open offices, but having worked in all formats, open offices are bad for mental health. When working on MPK West for FB, they built an open office to house 3,000 employees with only 5 offices (with escape hatches) for the c-suite.

Cubicles suck compared to private offices, but they're miles better than open offices.

I used to share an office with another engineer, and one thing that we both preferred was t keep the lights off in our office (we had a window office and the ambient light was beneficial.

Lighting is SUPER important, and when youre in an pen office layout you have no control over your lighting.

For this reason alone, one should hate open office layouts.

Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

#356

Post by glouwbug »

unemphysbro wrote: post #264
mwattsun wrote: post #67

5 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…

what was the merge code process like?

git merge --strategy ours

Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

#357

Post by Riverheart »

ethbr0 wrote: post #121
Adraghast wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I assume that some people are just very lonely and need face to face Anecdata from Hacker News suggests this is true. A lot of lonely young men here freely admit their coworkers are the only people they regularly interact with in-person, and remote work takes that away from them.

I'd spin this around and cast it as a challenge -- regular, forced interactions with coworkers is minimally sufficient and retards some people from pursuing social activities outside the home. There are already a number of options in even the smallest town. I expect that will increase as more people move to WFH and seek social outlets. And at the end of the day "interacting with coworkers in the break room" is a pret…

There are reasons people don't pursue activities outside of work because they only require a minimal amount of interaction with people or they don't have time for socialization outside of work. Conversations with clubmembers won't be appreciably more meaningful than conversations with coworkers.

A benefit is that your social circle exists independent of your job status but you've got to do it on your own time.

Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

#358

Post by stjohnswarts »

Adraghast wrote: post #100
mwattsun wrote: post #67

5 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…

> I assume that some people are just very lonely and need face to face Anecdata from Hacker News suggests this is true. A lot of lonely young men here freely admit their coworkers are the only people they regularly interact with in-person, and remote work takes that away from them.

It isn't my responsibility to help "lonely young men" meet people. Just go to a bar/meetup/church and start talking. That's an individual's responsibility to socialize.

Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

#359

Post by ethbr0 »

vgel wrote: post #279
rebeccaskinner wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are viewing remote work through the particular circumstance of the pandemic. Remote work before covid was very different, and I expect in time we'll get back to a lot of that. I worked remotely before the pandemic, and most days I still have ample opportunities to meet and talk to people. Most weeks I'd attend a meetup (I'm in a small city in the midwest and we still had plenty of events to cater to most any nich…

Thanks for these comments -- this one and your reply to vkou. I started working out of college during the pandemic, and my current gig is remote-native, so I've been kind of dooming about remote work. This is some great advice for how to get past that + a good reminder that COVID is still affecting things -- I've been going with my partner to a board game group and swing classes, but the activation energy is definite…

> started working out of college during the pandemic

* Caveat: remote-only, during the pandemic, right out of college would probably be the worst of all possible worlds

Most of the things that people like about WFH are contingent on being in a later stage of your career (college + 5 years?). Having a place with multiple rooms. Having something of a physical social network. Having self-confidence in your abilities, based on prior performance. Knowing how to navigate office politics.

Plus, most of the things you would be doing at that stage were interrupted: bars, clubs, etc.

Which is to say, you're absolutely right, and I agree with your perspective. But it does get better. But I'm sure that's cold comfort.

A more articulate, and less rageful version of my original post would probably have been "I believe we Americans are (and were!) doing badly at creating opportunities for adult friendships and socialization, and I would rather we aspire to improve things vs going back to the way they were."

Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

#360

Post by infamouscow »

BKirkpatrick wrote: post #340
hooande wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't make sense. There are countless opportunities for social interaction. Join a church, a club, a sports league, a gaming discord. I get that there's a lot of friction involved in joining anything, and many 'lonely young men' don't want to put forth that effort. But it's definitely less total effort than forcing people to come to an office for the purpose of social stimulation. Just measured in terms of tim…

sorry for the shameless plug but, checkout frenemy.live

I will. Thank you.
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