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Half of American workers would rather work from home forever: poll

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Re: Half of American workers would rather work from home forever: poll

#211

Post by raisedbyninjas »

jefftk wrote: post #195

The survey doesn't say how many people they asked, but looking at their chart sliced by age it's a very small sample: looks like ~30 in the 55-64 age group? They also don't say anything about how they found their participants. I'm pretty skeptical that asking these questions to a large representative sample would give similar results.

I'm skeptical of the 19% who can't work from home. BLS says that food prep, transportation, production, healthcare practitioners are the 3rd, 4th, 5th, & 7th most common jobs. This totals 43 million, most of whom probably can't work from home. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm

Edit: Another commenter claims the author sampled workers through Mechanical Turk. WTH.

Re: Half of American workers would rather work from home forever: poll

#212

Post by flatline »

_curious_ wrote: post #198
flatline wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My work is all meetings all the time, now. I’m on the phone most of the day. Little things that used to take 20 minutes now take an hour. I used to enjoy working from home a couple days a week because I got some peace and quiet and knew I could catch back up with people when I returned to the office. I went from loving to hating my job in the last three weeks. I am also constantly distracted by having the kids around…

Jealous of what - that they will soon be out of a job?

Right - it is not a rational response to the situation on my part, and this will be the natural consequence for many I’m afraid. The American workforce in particular will never be the same.

Re: Half of American workers would rather work from home forever: poll

#213

Post by formercoder »

tantalor wrote: post #190
formercoder wrote: post #114

I’m very curious about the sampling methodology here. This is anecdotal, but I am a millennial and precisely zero of my friends prefer working from home. So there must be bias in one of those two samples.

I asked the author: The survey was conducted using mechanical turk for American workers with full-time jobs. We didn't control for age, as you can see in the age breakdown of "are you more productive working from home," so had some age groups more represented than others. The margin of error is 4%. So that raises some red flags, because turkers are WAY more likely to be favorable towards WFH conditions. They already…

Yeah. Massive, massive sampling bias.

Re: Half of American workers would rather work from home forever: poll

#214

Post by _curious_ »

vsareto wrote: post #176
gspr wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re the last parts: I sure hope you're right, but I think we're both a bit jealous and/or afraid that it is we who are ill-suited for a coming WFH future :-/

If you could magically remove commutes or make it automated, I'd still be on-board with working in office. The only good commutes are near empty roads with nice scenery while I enjoy morning coffee and listen to the news. Many people had to get used to long commutes in terrible traffic after all. Hopefully the answer is that we all just gravitate towards companies that prefer one culture over another.

Perhaps the future will be a mix...downsized offices that can accommodate a max % of company-wide employees at once? 50%?

A place where the CEO/csuite/salespeople can have meetings and others can really come and go as needed.

If I recall, WeWork was getting into this market/model whereas they'd sublease space for a smaller number of companies, sometimes even just one enterprise.

Re: Half of American workers would rather work from home forever: poll

#215

Post by hiram112 »

BigJono wrote: post #201
flatline wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My work is all meetings all the time, now. I’m on the phone most of the day. Little things that used to take 20 minutes now take an hour. I used to enjoy working from home a couple days a week because I got some peace and quiet and knew I could catch back up with people when I returned to the office. I went from loving to hating my job in the last three weeks. I am also constantly distracted by having the kids around…

The problem is 100% with the way software is developed these days. Every company trains their staff to be as unproductive as possible with open plan offices, all the productivity is coming from quantity over quality, with every hire and every hour of training reflecting that. Working from home is great if you have autonomy and can build a chunk of software with minimal oversight. But if your dev process revolves sole…

> And devs need to take on more responsibility, broaden their non-technical skillset,

I've been trying to obtain more non-tech skills within various companies for years now, but I get nothing but more JIRA issues. At this point, I've come to the conclusion that the non-technical workers who deal with the business requirements, revenue, customer interaction, etc. do not want the tech folks to have any control over their domain.

What would they be needed for if we could do both the business functions and also write the code they depend on?

Re: Half of American workers would rather work from home forever: poll

#216

Post by _curious_ »

mfer wrote: post #78
gspr wrote: post #29

I wonder if this is related to the long commutes Americans have gotten used to. I'm not in the US, and while I would say I definitely appreciate the flexibility of being able to work from home (or from "not the office") every now and then, and I do like the present drop in meetings, I cannot fathom how people stay sane without a variety of other people around. My productivity has definitely dropped, and it feels like…

I did when I started working from home. I was lucky to have a manager who knew about habits and patterns to fix that. A lot of this isn't about going to work but about our habits and patterns. For example, I have a room I go into and close the door. When I am in there I am working. When I am out of there I'm not. It's like a mental switch. I also use some tricks to keep be from being distracted like a pomodoro timer.…

"habits and patterns to fix that"

Yes. Just as starting a new job/office has its own set of learned behaviors, practices, and norms - so does WFH.

Re: Half of American workers would rather work from home forever: poll

#217

Post by _curious_ »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #142
keiferski wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a matter of "they haven't come around to my opinion yet, but they will." Some people just like working with others, in person, face to face. And some activities are impossible to do from a computer screen, miles away (fashion or product design, for example.)

> It's not a matter of "they haven't come around to my opinion yet, but they will." Exactly right. That's my primary problem with all of these opinion pieces that WFH is the future. Having managed remote/WFH teams for several years, including a lot of WFH veterans, I've seen a lot of the downsides of WFH that aren't immediately apparent in the first few months. It's difficult to convince people that long-term WFH has…

"Ironically, the people who were concerned that WFH might negatively impact their work were more likely to succeed because they made no assumptions and instead put in the effort to make their WFH experience a success."

The more cognizant you are of the downsides/risk in a situation, the more you can mitigate them early and often. Sounds like the latter are pragmatic, self-aware, and successful in adapting.

Re: Half of American workers would rather work from home forever: poll

#218

Post by topkai22 »

_curious_ wrote: post #203
chapium wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Work from home does work better when you have daycare. The isolation of wfh gave me a lot of anxiety (other life problems factored in as well). I think a good balance is 1-2 days/wfh. Wfh degrades into work from coffeeshop. If your meetings aren't productive there's definitely a problem in your org. I suspect meetings are being driven by those without a clear goal and intend to fill a whole hour talking. Just a hunch…

"Long meetings are a symptom of a lack of planning imho." Yes and a sympton of mgmnt/people(s) with too much time on their hands...and excess time manifests differently for some under WFH. They can't command and control as easily under WFH so what do?

In always say it depends on the meeting. I have a lot of meetings that are really working sessions, were we are constantly communicating and co-building. Those can take hours. That being said, there are generally bo more than 5 people on those types of menus

Re: Half of American workers would rather work from home forever: poll

#219

Post by t3rabytes »

veggieburglar wrote: post #206
t3rabytes wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's something we've been looking at recently, actually -- moving somewhere cheaper, but the problem we've found is that there just really aren't any jobs that she's interested in in the area we've been looking at (even outside of her current field, which she wants to leave anyway) -- we're looking at one spot in particular because of my mountain biking hobby and because I've lived there and have a lot of family th…

What spot are you looking at? Asking as a mountain biker. Itching to get out on a road trip once it’s possible.

Brevard, NC. All of my family is from there and lives there and the trails are good, hard to say no to.

Helluva road trip for you from CA tho.

Re: Half of American workers would rather work from home forever: poll

#220

Post by agumonkey »

gspr wrote: post #29

I wonder if this is related to the long commutes Americans have gotten used to. I'm not in the US, and while I would say I definitely appreciate the flexibility of being able to work from home (or from "not the office") every now and then, and I do like the present drop in meetings, I cannot fathom how people stay sane without a variety of other people around. My productivity has definitely dropped, and it feels like…

I'm not from that generation but I wonder if people in the 50s or 60s saw long commute as a proof of progress and something to look for. Meaning better and cheaper cars, more "opportunities", bigger companies and centralized hubs far away, etc etc
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