Do companies give a crap about employees spending money on gas? I mean maybe for those that are traveling salesmen or something... but otherwise I don't see how it would bring it back...
WFH is becoming a benefit again
41–50 of 80 posts
Re: WFH is becoming a benefit again
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same. It's been 6 years of "work from home", starting mid-March 2020. It has become very, very old. I would love to find a local startup that embraces hybrid work.
i am guessing you dont have kids. i get extra 2 hrs with my son that wouldnt trade for anything.
Agreed, over the last 6 years I have been able to spend lots of time with my two kids. Would not trade that for anything.
Re: WFH is becoming a benefit again
#43RTO would be much more popular if people were actually coming back to an individual office instead of the cubicle farm
Businesses and commercial real estate did this to themselves. I especially hope commercial real estate enters a death spiral and we stop building offices unless they are absolutely needed and free up some of the land for residential use (and not converting the buildings).
Re: WFH is becoming a benefit again
#44I've never understood having an office when it isn't absolutely required. Why spend money on something you do not actually need? If people can't make remote collaboration work, perhaps they should study how gaming groups achieve this.
> I've never understood having an office when it isn't absolutely required
A number of jurisdictions require some amount of office usage for subsidizes, it's harder for managers to justify not offshoring if everyone is 100% WFH, and some employees just suck (eg. Overemployed, exfiltrating data, quiet quitting).
Re: WFH is becoming a benefit again
#45At least where I live (France but not Paris) all the decently paid jobs in my field all seem to be fully remote. I’d love to go back to partial RTTO but it’s simply not financially viable given the paycut and commute costs.
Re: WFH is becoming a benefit again
#46I was a big WFH proponent, but I found the thing that I hated the most was the commute. Actually being in the office is pretty nice (assuming you work w/ nice people, have good culture, good coffee, nice desk setups, etc).
I've made the switch to biking to work about half the time and it's freaking amazing. I turn 20-30 mins of absolute dead time where I'm spending money, polluting, and using up infrastructure into 50 minutes of getting healthier and having a blast. It's a great trade, especially if you were going to work out anyway... which you should, of course.
I'm effectively spending 25 extra minutes of my day to get a 50 minute workout and save some money, and not pollute, and not contribute to traffic problems, parking congestion, etc. etc.
It's not necessarily easy to make this happen, cycling safely is a whole other can of worms, you kind of need a shower at the office (or take it easier on an ebike), but the benefits are massive if you can do it.
Re: WFH is becoming a benefit again
#47I don't know about you guys, but RTTO was the biggest signal to me that corp america is lost and beyond recovery. The benefits are so obvious, yet here we are.
I have heard a large impetus for the RTO push was to prop up commercial real estate. Permanent WFH would change the value of trillions of dollars of properties and reshape the commercial centers of cities. A lot of people with a lot of money at risk got really scared and decided the easiest thing to do was to go back to the status quo.
>I have heard a large impetus for the RTO push was to prop up commercial real estate. Permanent WFH would change the value of trillions of dollars of properties and reshape the commercial centers of cities.
That makes as much sense as "people buy iPhones because they own Apple shares in their 401k (it's #2 in the S&P 500) and want to pump the stock". At an individual CEO level it doesn't make sense, for similar reasons. The CEO and the company can reap massive savings from not leasing an office, which is presumably also good for their careers and make the board happy. On the other hand the individual benefit that the CEO can get by ever so slightly increasing demand for CRE is negligible.
Re: WFH is becoming a benefit again
#48Been working remotely for a long time now and was beginning to feel that loneliness. So, I started going to a co-working space to be around people again. Two/three days a week I'm in the "office" with my new "coworkers". It's been great to get to socialize and talk to other tech folks who are working on interesting and different things. But I also love that freedom of staying home whenever I want to. IMO, more office…
> Two/three days a week... This is the norm now for the past few years, and is one of the few ways to protect your job from being fully offshored. People keep complaining on HN, but the reality is WFH during COVID proved async works, and if async works then there's no reason not to reduce hiring in MTV and NYC and shift to (eg.) Prague, Warsaw, Tel Aviv, Bangalore, etc. The post above as well is predicated on a 1973…
Actually, there are reasons not to offshore. See near shoring as a trend for evidence. Places in South America are preferred over Europe and Asia for U.S. companies. Beyond that though, local workers are easier to communicate with, culturally compatible, higher skilled, and tend to behave better.
[Edit: source: I led a consulting team of about eighty Brazilians and Ecuadorians]
Re: WFH is becoming a benefit again
#49Been working remotely for a long time now and was beginning to feel that loneliness. So, I started going to a co-working space to be around people again. Two/three days a week I'm in the "office" with my new "coworkers". It's been great to get to socialize and talk to other tech folks who are working on interesting and different things. But I also love that freedom of staying home whenever I want to. IMO, more office…
> Two/three days a week... This is the norm now for the past few years, and is one of the few ways to protect your job from being fully offshored. People keep complaining on HN, but the reality is WFH during COVID proved async works, and if async works then there's no reason not to reduce hiring in MTV and NYC and shift to (eg.) Prague, Warsaw, Tel Aviv, Bangalore, etc. The post above as well is predicated on a 1973…
Yes except for the Tel Aviv part. Hiring in Israel is a huge liability. Brand and war damage.
Re: WFH is becoming a benefit again
#50I have been a consultant for well over a decade now: it's rare that I ever end up meeting clients in person. I have also seen just about every approach to "work from home".
Without an office, entire layers of communication get stripped out. The "ownership" of all those channels by your company only compounds the problem. You're not going to bitch about your boss, your PM, your project in the same way in slack as you might over lunch, with your co workers. Communication becomes burdened with layers of "nice". It is much easier to be brusk and professional in a request to someone you just spent the last hour eating with while you had a conversation about family, life, and what you did on the weekend.
Meanwhile there are entire layers of informal communication that can go on when teams intermingle. The cross pollination between accounting, customer service, design that can happen when you're in the same location simply wont occur when every one is on their own island.
I agree that ONE can be far more productive when stripping away the commute, and having the privacy that comes from NOT being in a crappy open floor plan. But it's a sub optimization problem: optimized parts don't always result in a better over all organism (organization).
Can it work: it sure can. Might it be optimal for you, maybe. But that doesn't mean it is applicable in every case.