111–120 of 187 posts
The workplace is going to a hybrid schedule soon which I am not too pleased about, but I'm going to be considering my commute as working time versus personal time this go around. I'll leave for work at 9am and aim to be home from work by 5pm. This seems more logical than having me front the free time for commuting if its something my employer is demanding of me anyhow. If they would prefer to not pay for commuting ho…
That's one reason for sure, but even if my house was a 10 minute walk from the office, I'd still rather only go in for meetings. At home I have my own private office with a nice view. I have a nice set of speakers and can play any music I like. If I want to go for a walk, I'm in a quiet suburban neighborhood with hiking trails nearby. The kitchen is always stocked with snacks I like plus freshly prepared healthy lunc…
> My commute is less than 30 minutes (one-way) and is a pretty pleasant drive.... it takes an hour out of my day, but it's not the primary reason I don't want to go to the office. Focusing on "reasons why I don't like the office" is missing the point, IMO. A lot of folks are betting on the long-term results of a short-term dislocation, but ignoring why things were as they were before the dislocation. It's sort of lik…
It took a pandemic to get people to realize that the status quo of hopping in their car and sitting in traffic twice a day to get to work and back every day is a hugely frustrating waste of time.
It doesn't have to be this way. We can build more housing near where people work. We can build bike lanes and public transit. It's entirely possible to have small and easy carless commutes to work.
> urban areas where people live closer to work have a higher return-to-office rate
No surprise here. I'll be coming back to work often I expect, but I live a 15 minute bike ride from my office. It'll be a nice change of pace for me to go to the office, and effectively an effortless shift.
We need the political will to change and stop repeating the same failed mistakes of the last 100 years that mires us in car dependency. Stop protecting SFH areas from any and all new housing development. Stop building new highways. Start creating new housing everywhere. Start creating transportation alternatives.
All of my career I prioritized short commutes, which led to living in tiny apartments (as small as 25 sqmt) within a short commute from work. When Covid hit we had just moved to a new 1 bed flat and were paying our highest rent yet, but hey, 15 minutes commute! When it became evident we were in for the long haul we started looking to move again. We ended up moving to a 3 bed house with garden in a tiny village close…
Everyone on HN who loves urban density should read things like this. Quality of life cooped up in a dense urban setting, especially with a family, is awful. There's so much space in the world, we don't need to pack ourselves in tiny urban centers near "tech hubs" at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone on HN who loves urban density should read things like this. Quality of life cooped up in a dense urban setting, especially with a family, is awful. There's so much space in the world, we don't need to pack ourselves in tiny urban centers near "tech hubs" at all.
I grew up with one parent in the burbs and the other in the boonies, and today I live in a city and I'll never go back to anywhere that isn't eminently walkable. I don't value space, I value proximity to lots of people. I'm happy that WFH allows people who value the opposite to vacate the cities that make them miserable in order to free up room for people who crave density.
That's one reason for sure, but even if my house was a 10 minute walk from the office, I'd still rather only go in for meetings. At home I have my own private office with a nice view. I have a nice set of speakers and can play any music I like. If I want to go for a walk, I'm in a quiet suburban neighborhood with hiking trails nearby. The kitchen is always stocked with snacks I like plus freshly prepared healthy lunc…
>There's enough background noise in the open office that I keep headphones on most of the time while I'm at my desk. I still don't get how we as a species went "this is fine". The complete loss of audiovisual privacy is such an immense drain. I'll buy the "being close together works better" argument, but I still can't grasp how that offsets all the distractions in the modern office.
Only in the last few decades, and only a minority of Human population in that period, has there been so much emphasis on "privacy".
That's one reason for sure, but even if my house was a 10 minute walk from the office, I'd still rather only go in for meetings. At home I have my own private office with a nice view. I have a nice set of speakers and can play any music I like. If I want to go for a walk, I'm in a quiet suburban neighborhood with hiking trails nearby. The kitchen is always stocked with snacks I like plus freshly prepared healthy lunc…
> My commute is less than 30 minutes (one-way) and is a pretty pleasant drive.... it takes an hour out of my day, but it's not the primary reason I don't want to go to the office. Focusing on "reasons why I don't like the office" is missing the point, IMO. A lot of folks are betting on the long-term results of a short-term dislocation, but ignoring why things were as they were before the dislocation. It's sort of lik…
The past is not a predictor for the future; if so we would still all be using horses instead of cars.
Big reason that there will likely be a fundamental shift to more remote and hybrid working options is that just there is a mountain of inertia from the Industrial age which carried over to the Information Age.
The pandemic has initiated a great experiment which individual companies would have never tried for risk-avoidance reasons.
That's one reason for sure, but even if my house was a 10 minute walk from the office, I'd still rather only go in for meetings. At home I have my own private office with a nice view. I have a nice set of speakers and can play any music I like. If I want to go for a walk, I'm in a quiet suburban neighborhood with hiking trails nearby. The kitchen is always stocked with snacks I like plus freshly prepared healthy lunc…
>There's enough background noise in the open office that I keep headphones on most of the time while I'm at my desk. I still don't get how we as a species went "this is fine". The complete loss of audiovisual privacy is such an immense drain. I'll buy the "being close together works better" argument, but I still can't grasp how that offsets all the distractions in the modern office.
Throughout history a huge chunk of us as a species did not have audiovisual privacy at work, and a massive percentage of the jobs throughout history never had it and still don't. Its immensely rare for us as a species to have full audiovisual privacy at our workplace, and has been for a long, long time. Do teachers have audiovisual privacy for the majority of their workday? Chefs? Construction jobs? Factory workers? Retail workers? Even back in the day tons of white collar jobs had large spaces with open desks for "computers" (the people, not the machines) or typists or drafters.
Do these scenes of design spaces and other offices seem like quiet places with private offices for each worker?
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/cb/02/98/cb02981dccefb68f67cd...
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/99/d5/b9/99d5b92533e332fbaa5c...
https://i.pinimg.com/474x/8d/c1/45/8dc145b0a90fb4509238aa145...
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/30/17/07/3017075666fb55b875bc...
https://www.officemuseum.com/IMagesWWW/UWA_Dexter_Horton_Nat...
And those are just of "white collar" office workers. Do these look like private spaces?
https://www.tshaonline.org/images/handbook/entries/TT/textil...
https://www.history.com/.image/t_share/MTU3ODc5MDg2NDM0NzU1O...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You need to pay for a gym membership to return to office?
For a lot of people, their companies don't pay for a gym membership or don't have an office gym, and if the gym is part of their lifestyle not working from home means needing a gym membership in the city near the office. The logic is pretty simple, if you are going to be stuck in rush hour commute home for 2 hours or you can walk to a city gym and work out for an hour, then jump into your commute and be home in an ho…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>There's enough background noise in the open office that I keep headphones on most of the time while I'm at my desk. I still don't get how we as a species went "this is fine". The complete loss of audiovisual privacy is such an immense drain. I'll buy the "being close together works better" argument, but I still can't grasp how that offsets all the distractions in the modern office.
Because "we as a species" evolved to work in groups. Humans are not loners. We eat, work, recreate and live in groups. To ship any complex groundbreaking product, you have to collaborate closely with a big group. Only in the last few decades, and only a minority of Human population in that period, has there been so much emphasis on "privacy".
My company shipped several ground breaking projects during COVID enforced WFH where there was not even the possibility of getting together in person.
And now as we've grown we've added teams all over the globe (3 offices in the USA, one in Canada, 2 in Europe and one coming online soon in Australia), so collaboration on a complex project means communicating with teams that are asleep during your working hours.
