331–340 of 830 posts
For me, WFH is all about saving 2-3 hours per day by not having to commute. Additional benefits include access to better food during the day and fewer interactions with assholes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now throw in the fact that the workers may also have family (spouse + a little kid) living with them and present inside the house during the working hours. Suddenly, the idea to have a physically distinct place dedicated (almost) exclusively to work sounds very attractive and very sensible. Of course, one could have a dedicated "study"/"office" room with a lock and sound proofing but that costs.
Now throw in minimum 0.5h + 0.5h commute or more realistically at least 1.5h total commuting time and suddenly you leave for work before your kids wake up and arrive back home 2-3h before they go to sleep. Who do you want to spend more time during the day, your coworker Bill the senior Java guy or your child Charlie, who has just learned to walk but you were not there to see their first steps? I mean, Bill's a great…
Minimum half hour commute? Definitely not a minimum. I've had a by bicycle, 5 minutes by car, and my kid's daycare is on the way.
Minimum commute is more like 5 minutes. Sure, maybe average commute is a good bit higher, but then say average not minimum.
Other than that my office experiences are nothing like this. Place feels designed mostly for social control with its open plan offices and daily status meetings. it feels pretty oppressive. It's not fun and I'd rather stay home. What you get instead is people, even those in leading positions, claiming to be sick when they're not. I believe that's appealing and demoralising behavior btw, but it's what happens.
Maybe if people were better than they are then it wouldn't be such a big issue.
With all due respect, this is mostly my problem with the "work-from-office" (WFO for ease) crowd. Generally, the stance of the WFH crowd is that each individual should get a choice of what makes that individual happy. Very few, if any, of the WFH crowd want mandatated WFH, it would make no sense. But then the WFO crowd often says no, I don't care what makes you happy, because you being in makes me happy. That doesn't…
WFO isn't necessarily about personal preference. People who want everyone to WFO believe that WFO produces better outcomes for the company. That is different than someone who desires to work from an office or remotely out of personal preference. For instance, I may prefer to WFH because it makes my life more convenient, but I can also accept that WFO produces better outcomes for the company. Personally, I haven't see…
With all due respect, this is mostly my problem with the "work-from-office" (WFO for ease) crowd. Generally, the stance of the WFH crowd is that each individual should get a choice of what makes that individual happy. Very few, if any, of the WFH crowd want mandatated WFH, it would make no sense. But then the WFO crowd often says no, I don't care what makes you happy, because you being in makes me happy. That doesn't…
Not sure I agree - the hybrid model where some are in office and some on video is unfair to the remote folks. Watching coworkers whiteboard from a zoom call makes it much harder to collaborate as the remote employee. It’s also harder to get a turn to speak when you are a face on the camera vs in the room. For these reasons I’ve insisted that in hybrid meetings, everyone dials in individually and whiteboards on a virt…
How is this at all a good thing?
It's basically saying: "I've got a limitation because of my choice of working environment, therefore to make life "fair" — which it isn't at all ironically — I'm going to impose my limitation artificially on the rest of the group."
Because I can't play with that toy, no one else can.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disclaimer: I support fully remote work and will likely never be returning to office in my lifetime if I can help it. Here I play devil's advocate. Even though it is a hypothetical world you've constructed, you still framed it from the perspective of this world. I can do the same thing you did with a different bias. Imagine a world where everyone is socially isolated, forced to work 8 hours a day from their living sp…
Do you get breaks to play pingpong and catered food at your offices? I've never worked anywhere that actually paid for food, honestly, and while a few places have had pingpong tables it's hard to justify leaving my desk to go use them when there's tasks I could be getting done. A minor point, but I've always wondered if you're ever actually allowed to use the nice benefits like that, or if they're just something star…
I know it comes out to less than 10K per year, but I don't care I don't feel like an elite engineer until I get the damn free food!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It just seems like those people should work at different companies. Having a mix of people who prefer WFO and WFH seems like the worst of both worlds. (WFO people don't get the atmosphere that they desire, WFH people are second-class citizens for collaborative activites, WFH seniors have reduced ability to mentor their juniors, WFH people still need to live a commutable distance from the office).
> WFH seniors have reduced ability to mentor their juniors Why is that? I find screen-share mentoring on dev stuff that more fruitful I stuck to that even when forced back into office. Less covid, less other awkward closeness, better for ears and eyes :) (Admitted, only non-computer-work mentoring is different).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The closest work-related argument I've heard is that some people work better when they're free of distractions at the office. That takes us back to companies being collaborative human endeavors. One may feel they work better in isolation, but part of ones job is to interact with others, even if that's not fun. Have you worked in an open office or cubical farm? My hearing the sales guys isn't 'collaboration', it's d…
So without hopefully coming off too flippant, noise canceling headphones can solve all of that, they did for me in an open office space at least.
This sounds like hell to me and a way to keep someone at the office longer so work becomes more ingrained in their day to day life. I don't want work and my life so connected that I'm going to dinner with co workers.
Discussing issues? Lets do that over a video call. Works really well.
Want to socialize? Thats what my friends are for. Guess what? Since many of us work from home we can actually walk to the local coffee shop or lunch place and talk about something other than work.
Want to get dinner? I'll go with my wife and because I don't have to commute home I might able be able to get a table before 8pm.
Everything you are describing sounds like it could be solved with having friends instead of only co workers.
EXCEPT for the hiring cheaper labor in x country. But that has already been happening. It will always happen. Sometimes more, sometimes less. There are massive dev and qa outsourcing teams located across the globe. Why doesnt everyone do it? Well there are a ton of reasons but if its been happening since the 90s its incredibly unlikely that in y or yy years it become exclusively the norm.
- the USA's failure to provide even a single city that's pleasant to live in and travel around without a car
- tech company insistence on open office layouts that are not conducive to deep work
The first one sounds like a commute problem... but it manifests in more ways than you think. When you have to travel around in a car, everything is expensive. Parking is a pain. There's a certain amount of effort required to hop in a car, leave the parking garage for work, find a parking space near a lunch spot, etc. It's a huge financial burden in maintenance and feeding with gasoline or electricity. The economics of cars also impact how much space cities can devote to housing, how dense we can make downtowns, etc -- which has knock-on effects on housing prices and rent.
Open offices make me never want to come into the office because I can't concentrate. They're always the wrong temperature. I can't personalize my desk or my space into something that best suits me. I can't leave stuff out on my desk, or even in unlocked drawers overnight because apparently the janitor might steal Kafka secrets and sell them to competitors.
I actually like the idea of walking or biking to an office (with an actual office for me) where I can collaborate with coworkers in person. But modern society and tech companies have externalized so many costs -- car ownership, commuting time, comfort, rent -- onto workers that I'd rather just work from home. The last city I lived in had massive car theft and crime problems at night; it's not like I'd "hang out" with my coworkers for dinner downtown even if we all showed up.