I am also a dedicated worker-from-home, and I know plenty of other people who are smarter than me who work by choice from the office every day.
Even confining the discussion to those of us who logistically can do all of our jobs over the network, I've come to think that there is no single policy that can be applied over an organization that won't alienate a significant fraction of your staff. Organizations that don't find ways to accommodate the whole spectrum of, uh, "work-remoteness" are going to be at a serious disadvantage in the years to come.
I don't even need a private office. One of the best environments I've ever worked in was a hybrid office/open model. Basically a bunch of conference rooms where each team got a room, and within the room the desk walls were low. Decorate it however you want, if you agree on style then you can have ambient music, etc. It was pretty great. But then they knocked all the walls down and put in rows of desks because they co…
Post-covid WFH discussions have led to a collective amnesia about this. We also spent buckets of time complaining about offices before it because almost every employer made decision like yours. Most offices were terrible places to work and non-technical managers ignored common sense and science to cram as many people as possible into their existing real estate costs. We'd gone from yearning for personal rooms from ou…
Yes I remember I had an office in a major office building in Amsterdam.. as an intern.
Shortly after the open plan craze started. And now there's the hotdesking nightmare. I feel much less valued and respected every time.
Speaking personally, I felt way too shut-in during my fully remote pandemic time. But I’m also quite glad that the work-week has relaxed such that I can work from home when I want to. Just a couple of thoughts on this part: > being a ‘tech person’ who needs to focus on things in a deep way, and having to share some open plan office space with a hundred other people every day… The two things just don’t mix well. I’ve…
+1 to this. I feel like a lot of the time the "focus time" blocks in their calendar are just because they can't be bothered to deal with meetings or talking to others - basically they just want to do the parts of the job they like (code or whatever) and to fuck with the bits they don't like. "Sorry - can't do that planning/bug triage/training/mentoring/interview session - I am in my focus time"
When you get to the more accomplished/senior levels of impact, it is all about scaling your skills - i.e. using your skills and knowledge to accomplish more than just one person can do on their own by sharing knowledge, helping others etc, leading a team/teams in the right direction and so on.
Locking yourself away so noone can talk to you for hours/days at a time are the hallmarks of a selfish engineer (or at the least a very junior one who doesn't yet realise their place)
My work is 20 minutes away which consists of a 10 minute walk and a 7 minute tram. I also get free lunch at work and since I'm single, it's also the only place where I can talk to people in real life in the weekdays. Furthermore, my gym is also next to my office. So, in my case I will always prefer to work from office until I get married and start a family.
I think by now it should be pretty apparent that people are different, and some prefer working from home, some prefer coming to the office, some prefer open spaces and some prefer personal spaces. Most people are somewhere on a spectrum and like a different ratio of each. Posts like these are about as useful as an article on “Why I like gray socks more than blue socks”. What I would love to see is some data on why so…
It’s not only about personal preferences. Being able to work from city X for a company that has its HQ in city Y within the same country is a game changer. I don’t know who would refuse to such. Note that I’m talking about remote working within the same country.
Here's a reason I never see brought up in discussions like this. For me, it's as important as the others: Being an introvert, I always used to be exhausted at the end of the work week. I liked my coworkers a lot, and I liked spending time around them, but it didn't matter, I'd still feel wrung out at the end of the day. And by the end of the week, each day's exhaustion would have accumulated to the point where I need…
^ this. Thanks for putting this into words, I have always felt the same way and just haven't been able to be aware of it in a way that allowed it to come out verbally.
I always felt like work from home is an extension of slacking in an open office plan. Work means a lot more than sending keystrokes to the computer. There are labor laws, information safety guidelines, tons of things you can't do at home alone by yourself. How can you be sure that your neighbor is not creating something competitive to the product you work on?
Here's a reason I never see brought up in discussions like this. For me, it's as important as the others: Being an introvert, I always used to be exhausted at the end of the work week. I liked my coworkers a lot, and I liked spending time around them, but it didn't matter, I'd still feel wrung out at the end of the day. And by the end of the week, each day's exhaustion would have accumulated to the point where I need…
I find Zoom so much more exhausting that being in the office, I am way more wiped out by my 2023 job than by my 2019 job
Yeah - last job I had was a nightmare of 5-6 hours per day meetings. Not a good fit at all. Current one is much better, better team, maybe 1 meeting 4 days a week at most (who does standup on Friday anyway? Nobody)
One of the (many) parts of the article that annoys me is that they basically push a grand conspiracy theory where apparently nobody running any company anywhere is/was able to actually measure employee productivity in any way, but him, a random person, somehow knows better about worker productivity and what's better for these companies, than all these companies with years of experience managing their workers do.
I feel these discussions always go the same way. Working at an office sucks because of some combination of {long commute, open office plan, team not being there}. I quite like going to the office myself because my situation is the opposite: I bike to work, where I have my own office, and my team likes to come in too. Hating the office is totally justifiable given that my setup isn't common; most people are forced to…
For my company, the worst thing is that we have hot desks, which wouldn't be a problem if there were enough seats if, say, 90%-95% of all staff came in on the same day and had their own seat. However, one of the floors that my company leases out is undergoing renovations and they shifted all those employees to other floors while keeping the same in-office weekly requirements. Way too many times, I've went into the office just to not be able to find a seat. We have a hoteling reservation system, but even if you reserve a seat, if you don't come in by 8:50 or so, someone will have taken it. I've complained to our corporate services team and have never received a response.