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Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

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Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

#271

Post by cube00 »

ketzo wrote: post #233
Salgat wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the biggest issue is that people are lonely due to the pandemic, and are conflating that with working from home. You can have a strong social life and working from home. For others, unfortunately the only socialization they can get is forced interaction with coworkers at the office.

I can see what you're getting at, and I thought it was the issue for me, but I've come to realize that it's not a loneliness/lack of socialization thing. It's just that I really treasure in-person interactions with the people I am working on something with. I got into software engineering because I like solving problems, but also because I love solving problems with really smart people. Turns out that it feels really…

> being able to stop by someone's desk and shoot the shit or see what they're working on

So long as the other person feels the same way. One of the reasons I enjoy working from home is people can no longer wonder by and shatter my concentration because they're on a break. They can ping me in chat and I'll get to it in my break.

Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

#272

Post by Hamuko »

teirce wrote: post #182
dleslie wrote: post #18

Working from home means I get to see my wife and children for more hours of the day. It also means that I get to choose when I will allow myself to be interrupted, rather than sitting in an open concept office and being _continually_ interrupted. I've been working from home for over six years. I never want to return to the office. I will change careers before I return to a software development office.

> Working from home means I get to see my wife and children for more hours of the day. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a strong correlation between the number of people (partner,family,kids) and how much people enjoy working from home. I live alone in my apartment and going the first year or two of the pandemic seeing people I know once every few weeks drove me mad.

I live alone and I'm still pretty pleased almost two years into not seeing people face-to-face.

Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

#273

Post by skinkestek »

I have found that I usually work better when I am in the office. Getting 5 kids to understand that I am at work is really hard.

I also appreciate the separation of work and home that my commute provides.

Also while I am very much allowed to work from home the customer I work with really live the effect that we older teammates have on younger ones. (The young ones currently in the teqm in my team are brilliantly smart and hardworking, we just share experience so they don't have to learn everything the hard way.)

Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

#274

Post by skinkestek »

JohnBooty wrote: post #250
charcircuit wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing this reduces efficiency. You are potentially blocking someone for half of a day when you might just need to send a simple message back.

Ah, thanks for replying. I edited my post for clarity. I assure you we do not sit around, blocked, waiting for replies. =) The point being, if you need an immediate reply, you're expected to explicitly mention that. Otherwise it's assumed to be async. It's working well IMO.

Do you look at notifications or how do you manage to separate those two?

Where I work people can call me on slack or otherwise of it is urgent (no one has abused it so far).

If I am in hyperfocus, anything in text is assumed asynchronous and won't get looked at until I resurface.

Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

#275

Post by jasonkester »

lamontcg wrote: post #125
techsupporter wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Open concept offices are awful. The only people I've met who seem to like them are people who do sales for a living or the exact kind of coworkers who I would really not like to be in an open office with. I have a really nice office in Seattle. Since I am the second most tenured person on the team, I even have a water view and am right next to the snacks. I haven't seen the inside of this office since May 2020, and…

Don't underestimate the utility of being able to just take a goddamn nap when you've had shit sleep the night before rather than powering through the day trying to appear productive when you're a zombie. Most normal people have bad days when they really shouldn't be at work, its so much easier when you just aren't at work and can deal with the problem (take a nap, take a cold shower afterwards, get in a few hours of…

One of the big upsides of contracting is the days when I’ll down tools at 10am and declare that “I am not smart enough today to accept money in exchange for programming computers”.

I get the occasional day off to go do things that don’t require brain. They only pay for bites of the donut with the jam in them.

It’s a net win for everybody.

Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

#276

Post by Hamuko »

rootusrootus wrote: post #78
idrios wrote: post #68

I would love to see this poll broken up into some kind of demographics of: Are you single/married/married with kids, do you have roommates (and are they also wfh) what industry do you work in, what stage of your career are you in, are you managing people, etc. I thought WFH would be great but it happened too early in my career. I had no savings and too many roommates, and I was not learning nearly as much on the job…

> Are you single/married/married with kids I think I'd have already gone completely insane if I were still a bachelor when this pandemic WFH experiment has been thrust upon me. I go stir crazy when I'm home alone, but I'm not really a social butterfly either. Work was a good compromise.

I'm single and I'm pretty pleased with with WFH. I've noticed that I do my best work when I'm listening to music anyways, so I'm still basically sitting in front of a computer with headphones on - except this time they're not noise-cancelling.

Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

#278

Post by jasonkester »

mdorazio wrote: post #169
abap_rocky wrote: post #69

The pandemic really helped me confirm that I prefer the office. I always sought to establish a clear distinction between my work life and home life and the enforced work from home due to COVID has made the two blur to a point now where I feel like I've lost all rhythm. Now living through a pandemic itself has a way of disrupting the rhythm of life but I feel that the collapsing of space into a singular living and wor…

100% agree on the non-separation of "home" and "work" being terrible. It's easy to say "just don't work after 5/6/whatever" but in practice not having a physical separation between "this is where I work" and "this is where I don't work" makes that mental switch damn near impossible. I've ended up working far more hours since the pandemic started than I did previously, and when I'm "done" working, I'm still thinking a…

This seems like a common issue. Surely by now there must be a software package you could install that forcibly logs you out of work slack, email, etc. at 5pm and doesn’t let you check it again until 8am.

Or am I going to have to start a new SaaS?

Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

#279

Post by hiimshort »

Perhaps a bit different from the usual stories and situations I hear, so I figure I'll share my thoughts.

A few years ago (end of 2018) I ended up with a debilitating combo of anxiety, panic, depression, and stress from being overworked. That year and the following were the most difficult of my life. I had quit my job at the beginning of 2019 because I couldn't even think about work due to the cinstant chest pain. After half a year, I'd improved somewhat but began running out of funds and found another job. Unsurprisingly, my health improvements stagnated again and I continued to deal with chest pain and throat issues.

Then 2020 came. My team went remote and, suddenly, I was able to rest my back, improve my diet, avoid the majority of stressors (aside from pandemic-related ones). I ended up leaving that job for one that was intentionally full-time remote. Working remote has been the best thing to happen to my health in years. I've lost 40 pounds, eat healthier, and have total control to manage my day.

I know others prefer the office, but I don't think I'd ever want to go back regularly.

Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

#280

Post by medwards666 »

Given that I dislike being around people in general the pandemic has been fantastic for me in that it enabled me to work from home, and I've now managed to continue that with my current employment contract which has my permanent place of work listed as home.

Overall, not having to commute to the office (and pay for trains, fuel, lunches, etc) is saving me over £8k/year, and I still have the advantage of being able to go in when needed (such as if there's a social planned for the evening or suchlike).

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