21–30 of 127 posts
I don't feel isolated, to the contrary; i have more time for loved ones. I can wake up later. No fighting traffic, or cycling through rainy cold weather to be on time at the train station.
I never wanna visit an office again.
Working remotely has a very high cost, but it only gets visible in the long term. Working from home isolates you. There is no way around this. You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office. For the company, people that work remote start drifting away from the company vision and spirit - you get an army of people working individually most of the time,…
As a guy that married with a girl that I did know first on MMOs (11 years of marriage, after 3 years playing Ragnarok Online), and played some others (WoW, WoT) for a while, connected entire day using Teamspeak, I do not feel this a negative point. We can workaround and I made many acquaintances online. Now I have a 5 year child and I turned my bedroom into a office. I just educated her during the last year (before c…
I was advocate for async comms (PROPERLY using Slack, Teams, etc), but not everyone was on the same page.
Stopping my concentration on code architecture, code writing, managing AWS infrastructure to give random consultancy, or meetings with little purpose was a real point of pain for my productivity
Working remotely has a very high cost, but it only gets visible in the long term. Working from home isolates you. There is no way around this. You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office. For the company, people that work remote start drifting away from the company vision and spirit - you get an army of people working individually most of the time,…
I disagree with your assertion:
> You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office.
My own personal experience has been that every 2-3 years I establish a new network of friends. This has all been outside of work and tends to correlate with my personal passion of the time period. By comparison, I have formed considerably fewer work friends.
Of this "churn" (terrible word), 10-20% tend to end up closer friends/friends for life.
On the other hand, I find I have far less in common with most my colleagues. I have found maybe a 1/50 to 1/20 chance of having a meaningful connection with most my colleagues, especially if you set aside professional passions (ie software / startups).
I have worked at everything between megacorp and startup in a garage. I have also worked remotely.
While I like the social aspect of working in an office and building trust and relationships with members outside of my immediate team's interface (eg HR, Finance, Marketing) I also hate working in an office with noise and distractions when I want to focus. I also think commuting is the greatest waste of life there can be.
I personally embrace the optionality remote life brings - I can go abroad for a month or three without needing to take a sabbatical for instance. I can live near a good school without travelling for 2 hours to get to an office.
Tldr YMMV
Working remotely has a very high cost, but it only gets visible in the long term. Working from home isolates you. There is no way around this. You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office. For the company, people that work remote start drifting away from the company vision and spirit - you get an army of people working individually most of the time,…
I understand this is a startup board but I’m all for having founders to work harder in persuading employees that a job is not just a job. (Please record these zoom sessions too - I’m gathering material for the office 2.0)
Working remotely has a very high cost, but it only gets visible in the long term. Working from home isolates you. There is no way around this. You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office. For the company, people that work remote start drifting away from the company vision and spirit - you get an army of people working individually most of the time,…
What works for you, might not work for us.
And what works for us, might not work for you.
Easy.
But later:
> So as we are doing this, we’ve run a series of surveys of employees asking things like, ‘How productive do you feel like you’ve been?’ ‘What can we do to make you more productive?’
So you concluded that your workers are productive, but you want to run a survey to find out how productive are they??? WTF?
Of course that isn't the case for everybody: people with families and especially little children seem to be struggling massively.
But there is a noticeable shift it appears. Recruiters seem to be changing their model considering how many companies are becoming remote first. My mail is over-flooded with job offers from every corner of the earth, all of which contain the word "remote" in them. And I get round 20 of them each day. I would have never thought that such a day would come. The black swan strikes again.
Remote is the new cool word for off-shoring. Companies don’t decide to radically change their work structure just because it seems like a nice idea. If you expect tech companies to keep paying SV salaries after they shift to remote-first, you’re in for a rude surprise.
Working remotely has a very high cost, but it only gets visible in the long term. Working from home isolates you. There is no way around this. You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office. For the company, people that work remote start drifting away from the company vision and spirit - you get an army of people working individually most of the time,…
True, but it's not clear that cost is higher than working in an office over the long term.
In true internet-discussion fashion, there's lots of absolutes people talk about when discussing remote-first, remote-only, and dynamic working. As ever, the answer is "it depends".
Some people will benefit massively, some people will have to sacrifice massively, and most people will live with less extreme and different pros and cons.
> It is important and it has tons of benefits for the team
Depends entirely on the team. I know "it depends" is always a cop-out, but truthfully, any working system is going to depend massively on the work and the team dynamic. Having any of these grandiose statements on how work should be done fall down almost immediately when trying to extrapolate them to more than an individual company (or even beyond a single team in a company).
Working remotely has a very high cost, but it only gets visible in the long term. Working from home isolates you. There is no way around this. You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office. For the company, people that work remote start drifting away from the company vision and spirit - you get an army of people working individually most of the time,…
Eh, there’s enough anecdata to swing this in either direction.
I have not grown up in the US, so I’ve truly started my social network from scratch when I began my professional career almost two decades ago. The people I’ve become friendly at work make poor friends.
Perhaps my definition of “friend” is different than yours, but I expect to have a trust based relationship with a friend. If I’m having trouble at home or trouble with money, I expect my friend to hear me out, offer a shoulder and maybe give me some advice.
I wouldn’t tell such things to anyone I’m “friendly” with at work. Don’t get me wrong: I like these people, but would I want another team’s manager to know that I’m deeply in debt or fighting bitterly with my spouse? I’d think not. This is America: land of dog eat dog. People will use such information against me without hesitation. Corporate politics are real here.
Remember: when a “friendship” begins in a context of making money, it’s most likely no friendship at all. Surely there’s the opportunity for an occasional exception to slip past this rule, but don’t you go around thinking that it happens as a base case.
Lastly, work isn’t the only place where adults interact. I’ve met lots of people through my kid. School and sports teams and other places where my child is involved: there are human adults there too. Those other parents are better than colleagues in many ways. For one thing, you’re not bound to them in a commercial context, so there’s no incentive to play politics. People are more relaxed because it’s more purely a social environment rather than a business one.
And what happened to meetups? Yes, the pandemic has put a damper on those, but they’ll be back eventually.
Edit: PS: Had I not been working remotely, I’d never have found the time to show up to my kid’s sports practice or school committee meetings. Commute and office shenanigans always eat up that time. That’s just life. One door closes and another opens.