171–180 of 200 posts
I expect employers should offer an additional allowance for extra space to work in at home or (post lockdown) coffee shop/coworking space fees.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Optimizing your lifelong estate purchase for a style of life that won't always be there seems crazy to me. Why?! Because you get to buy a cheaper estate -- is that the main reason? But you will not always work 9-5. You actually get to retire one day. Also there are the occasional long vacations when everybody is at home. Etc. The elephant in the room: if you can't tolerate your partner in the same flat/house for long…
> But you will not always work 9-5. You actually get to retire one day. I think most people around my age in Europe (in their thirties) started working around 25, at the latest, and will work until they're at least 65. Probably later, since in many countries the retirement age is starting to be indexed with life expectancy. It's quite realistic that by the time I retire I will have worked 50+ years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People with friends and family can't gauge how bad of a toll this has taken on lonely single guys like me. For most of them WFH been a Godsend. I really wish this ends or at least there remains enough places which require working from the office.
It's a mixed blessing. On the one hand, you're always with your family. On the other hand, you're always with your family . Fact of life is, many relationships have trouble finding balance between "me time" and "us time". Going to work is, for many, a way to catch a break from their home - with perfect plausible deniability, since it's socially approved and demanded externally. Some people don't need it. I had a co-w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is all of that loneliness from WFH or can some be attributed to National lockdowns and limits on social interaction outside your household? In a post Covid world, WFH could involve coworking spaces and cafes. I expect that industry will grow massively over the coming years as we migrate into a more distributed working style. It’s a new way of doing things things and it’s going to take time to adapt and replace the so…
I think the co-working space could grow in some really interesting ways. However, in traditional companies the budget for office space tends to be out of the control of normal employees. People will have to choose between the official office or paying out of pocket. I am not sure how many people will want to do that. Giving employees more choice could save lots of money. But only if managers are prepared to lose some…
i read a lot of studies about how productivity increases when working from home. so i decided to superficially calculate this after a year of working from home for all of my very diverse clientele (fortune 500, small agencies, etc). i felt that a lot less work was being done, but i didn’t know how much. or why. since i’m a coder at heart i looked at tickets/features and commits. something easy to measure. what i foun…
Ultimately, the only metric that matters is company value and that has gone through the roof for virtually every company out there in spite of the pandemic. Unfortunately, that seems largely due to central bank action, not because their products have gotten any better, so that confounds any attempt to reduce the causes of value changes to anything you can easily measure at the individual employee level.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is all of that loneliness from WFH or can some be attributed to National lockdowns and limits on social interaction outside your household? In a post Covid world, WFH could involve coworking spaces and cafes. I expect that industry will grow massively over the coming years as we migrate into a more distributed working style. It’s a new way of doing things things and it’s going to take time to adapt and replace the so…
Exactly. I “worked from home” for several years before covid, but I never worked exclusively at home until covid. I’d usually spend a few hours of a few days a week at a coffee shop, library or park, and not being able to do that during covid has definitely made remote work feel more isolating.
Yet the subsequent lockdowns have been enough even for me to nudge me into what feels like (very) mild depression. Low-level enough that it's a nuisance rather than a problem, and I'm confident it will just go by itself once I am able to spend more time doing other things, but nevertheless it's a noticeable deterioration in mood and happiness level.
I can't imagine what it must be like for people with stronger social needs... It's also the main thing that keeps me from getting judgemental about people skirting lockdown restrictions.
But nothing truly freed me like the ability to work from bed. The possibility of a bad flareup or injury always haunted me because in the past it has meant possibly months of missed time while I go on disability or even having to change jobs. Now it means nothing. I mean, something because I'll be in more pain and miserable, but I can at least keep working.
Flexibility sounds good but what I have seen over the last year is that all boundaries in terms of when and where work begins and ends are being eroded. This started accidentally but it is now being actively exploited on an unprecedented scale.
Setting boundaries is your job , not your job’s job. Almost everyone I know works normal hours or less even during WFH. To be perfectly clear, this is true regardless of WFH. Your work will never set boundaries for you as they benefit from you working harder and longer.
The point I would make is that the WFH experience is very different for different groups. Like everything about the Pandemic it has had totally inequitable impacts on different people.
I'm in tech and I've had no issue, but many people I know are not and I've seen how it works out. Not everyone can just move to another job. Perhaps most people can't.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a mixed blessing. On the one hand, you're always with your family. On the other hand, you're always with your family . Fact of life is, many relationships have trouble finding balance between "me time" and "us time". Going to work is, for many, a way to catch a break from their home - with perfect plausible deniability, since it's socially approved and demanded externally. Some people don't need it. I had a co-w…
Optimizing your lifelong estate purchase for a style of life that won't always be there seems crazy to me. Why?! Because you get to buy a cheaper estate -- is that the main reason? But you will not always work 9-5. You actually get to retire one day. Also there are the occasional long vacations when everybody is at home. Etc. The elephant in the room: if you can't tolerate your partner in the same flat/house for long…
Simple answer: You aren't locked into a home for life, so you buy a home for the life you want now. My parents are on the verge of retiring, so they bought a beach condo and plan to sell off their suburban home.
My wife and I are looking at smaller city homes, but definitely do not plan to retire in it, we're looking at maybe a 5-10 year timespan of ownership.
> Because you get to buy a cheaper estate -- is that the main reason? But you will not always work 9-5.
The extra time spent commuting from a distant house are real costs paid every day. The potential of owning a home that you can retire in is a hypothetical payoff many many years in the future.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While there‘s truth to that, it doesn‘t bring home my own issue with WFH: It might be okay to much better for individual contributors, but it‘s harsh for me as a manager. Zoom (fatigue) meetings all day, staring at the screen instead of real people and any form of "managing by walking around" and watercooler chats are gone. This might not make a difference if my job was a corporate mess and sucked before already, but…
To ask the pointed question, How do the employees you manage feel about the change? Because for me the concept of managers 'just walking around' gives me that itchy feeling on the back of my neck. And at the end of the day if the employees who write code/produce output are doing that efficiently that is the goal right.
With remote teams what I've done as a workaround with some teams have been to enforce a short 1-on-1 weekly, and tell people if we don't have anything to talk about, then we make it brief. It prevents team members who are reticent about taking your time from having issues build up because they feel it's too small or too personal to schedule a meeting about when they have a time slot they know you'll schedule regardless. For some it was almost always a 5 minute annoyance of me asking if there were any issues, them saying they had nothing to talk about, and for us to leave it at that. But it acted as a safety valve, and every now and again something absolutely critical would get brought up in those calls.
And many times when they had "nothing" to talk about, I'd ask them followup questions about small stuff like e.g. how they got on with specific people, or how a certain project was going, and suddenly it turned out they had plenty of things to talk about.
In teams where you know everyone will speak up, you can dial back both the actual and "virtual" walking of the room, knowing they'll come and tell you, but "walking the room" effectively acts as a way of lowering the barrier to bring up an issue, because they're not "bothering you".