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37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

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Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

#341

Post by closeparen »

ev1 wrote: post #332
closeparen wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be happy to socialize only with people who opt in. That’s how it is already, no one forced you to go to the lunch table or tag along for drinks. To the extent that we collaborate on work, though, having to Zoom with you instead of having a normal free-flowing conversation forms an imposition on me. It becomes an extreme imposition when I am also prohibited from having normal free flowing conversations with ot…

I am curious how this does not present an opposite extreme: forcing me to stop my work to have an unnecessary conversation instead of discussing in asynchronous issue tracker makes me have to remember what happened, have to write down whatever I remember, deal with not being able to get my stories done while this is happening, instead of being able to look it up and have it in writing along with other people not avai…

I agree, it is very bad to do things synchronously and in formal meetings that could have been async and offline. That's another reason to resent remote work. Number of meetings, duration of meetings, size of attendee lists, and % of calendar covered in meetings are all way up since the transition to remote. There's a meme on HN that remote means written async communication, but the objective measured reality at my company is the opposite.

Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

#342

Post by dtx1 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #330
dtx1 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd spin this around and cast it as a challenge -- regular, forced interactions with coworkers is minimally sufficient and retards some people from pursuing social activities outside the home. Or,it allows people with social anxiety or depression a room for social interactions with very well defined rules and in an environment where people generally interact positively with you. I like the convenience of WFH too bu…

> I like the convenience of WFH too but I do miss cooking with my colleagues and their families on Wednesdays. Well, to fix that you can go cook with your colleagues and their families on Wednesdays.

not as long as corona is still raging here in germany, no families (or colleagues) at the office

Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

#343

Post by [deleted] »

humanwhosits wrote: post #208
heassler wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going to the office means getting to know the people you work with to a meaningful level (there are other opportunities to do that besides meetings, such as having lunch together or going out for a coffee/walk) in a way that is simply not possible when chatting via google meets. But there’s also the increased exposure to serendipity. Unexpected things occur in the office. Maybe you overhear a conversation that makes…

> Unexpected things occur in the office. Maybe you overhear a conversation The office rumor-mill produced a lot of bad politics in my experience

[deleted]

Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

#344

Post by tick_tock_tick »

coding123 wrote: post #236
hooande wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is a large shift toward gig economy work, then the healthcare industry will shift as well. There's nothing preventing them from offering affordable healthcare to gig employees other than the status quo and their current profit models. Something the size of the insurance industry is going to shift about 5-10 years after the general market. So if you're worried about short term gigification of your job, you mi…

I think it's dangerous when we look at gigification as a "who cares it will work out somehow". Imagine how up-in-arms if they gigified programming. It has already happened in places, but what if they wholesale a price per line of code? This will get a lot of replies but honestly, a codebase that is spaghetti from gigification may be cheaper than non-spaghetti codebase at 100k - 200k/year * number of developers and wo…

People complain about "gigifiation" because of things that has been traditionally tied to employment (health insurance, 401k, etc) not the gig part of it. If someone figured out how to do it I'd assume most programmers would be all over it.

Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

#345

Post by beamatronic »

humanwhosits wrote: post #198
30367286 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'd spin this around and cast it as a challenge -- regular, forced interactions with coworkers is minimally sufficient and retards some people from pursuing social activities outside the home. Absolutely. Additionally, even getting to that set of regular, forced interactions necessarily consumes the limited time those people would have to pursue those social activities outside the home. That is, it's hard to have a…

Hybrid has all the downsides of office work, it's just less hours of it

My objection to office work these days has more to do with thousands of unmasked people all together, spreading viruses.

Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

#346

Post by tick_tock_tick »

kreeben wrote: post #190
lbriner wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are going to have a massive problem with taking on juniors, particularly younger people. Without many people visiting the office, there is a lack of banter, encouragement, confidence building. Imagine you were 16 and your introduction to the world of work was sitting in your own bedroom! Honestly, I don't know how we deal with it unless we create a schedule where there has to be certain people in the office on cer…

"What about the juniors" is not a super convincing argument to me since I've been on-boarding them throughout the pandemic but also prior to that, quite successfully, through the use of basic video linking and sharing of screens. Out team is scattered around the world and that has always been the case. What are some other examples of when WFH doesn't work?

They are pointing out "can" vs "should" sure you can onboard them remotely and try to build team cohesion remotely but it's just worse then in person.

Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

#347

Post by mhh__ »

hooande wrote: post #207
Adraghast wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I assume that some people are just very lonely and need face to face Anecdata from Hacker News suggests this is true. A lot of lonely young men here freely admit their coworkers are the only people they regularly interact with in-person, and remote work takes that away from them.

This doesn't make sense. There are countless opportunities for social interaction. Join a church, a club, a sports league, a gaming discord. I get that there's a lot of friction involved in joining anything, and many 'lonely young men' don't want to put forth that effort. But it's definitely less total effort than forcing people to come to an office for the purpose of social stimulation. Just measured in terms of tim…

Churches and most clubs don't have extremely intelligent people with similar interests i.e. your tribe. When I talk to my friends I am usually at maybe 20% brain "power", when I'm at work I can mention basically anything and someone will have heard of it.

YMMV.

Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

#348

Post by tick_tock_tick »

somehnacct3757 wrote: post #53
foolfoolz wrote: post #12

i know it seems unlikely now but i think we will return to the office. not 100% of the time. not everyone was doing 100% before either. but a lot of people have switched jobs in the remote only era. we have experienced / are experiencing how little we know these new people. how little we feel connected to them. how strange it is to not make new friends at a new job that go beyond the work-friend level. i think most p…

Whether workers want it or not isn't going to be the deciding factor. Nor will it be a mental health issue. Just look at their years of ignoring studies about how open offices are bad for knowledge workers. Rather, it will be purely a financial decision. It comes down to whether employers are going to sign many-year leases for a social hangout spot for their employees. As well as accept liability during future COVID…

> Rather, it will be purely a financial decision.

I agree and think this will be the key. Most will return to the office and the companies that don't will be out-competed forcing them to close or return. Of course this will take years to fully shake out.

Re: 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home

#350

Post by nanochad »

heassler wrote: post #192
mwattsun wrote: post #67

5 of us wrote Microsoft Works for the Macintosh while working at home from 1984 to 1992. Without the internet, we got together as needed to merge code, usually once a month, but sometimes once a week. We talked on the phone. We went to Microsoft once in awhile. It was ideal and worked very well. Maybe it was just our personalities that made it work, but I am astonished that any programmer would rather go into the off…

Going to the office means getting to know the people you work with to a meaningful level (there are other opportunities to do that besides meetings, such as having lunch together or going out for a coffee/walk) in a way that is simply not possible when chatting via google meets. But there’s also the increased exposure to serendipity. Unexpected things occur in the office. Maybe you overhear a conversation that makes…

Translation: we should all be forced to go to work because we are dweebs and don't matter over our other social peers.

There are ways to establish communication to humans other than going into work to use their keyboard and monitor.

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