Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

As someone on the more extroverted side, I see office work as an easy source of meaningful social stimulation / bonding (well, assuming I like my coworkers) with little personal setup required on my end. Although the in-person component can be a distraction, I mostly saw it as a source of energy and creativity. I met some of my best friends at work.

I've been working from home for about 2 years, a legacy consequence of a few acquisitions. Despite its perks, I don't think that I would've stayed with it past the first year if not for 1) a local set of friends that I could still take breaks / lunches with 2) going to the corporate office once a month for about a week which allowed me to form a nice social network in the mothership city.

But covid-19 stopped both, and I'm stuck with this ennui that's been hard to shake.

> Just want to point out that there's no rational basis for this argument

The argument is that people in lower cost-of-living areas are willing to work for less, a public company's main motivation is profit, and companies lower their profit by paying employees more than is required to hire and retain them.

My counterpoint: From day #1 I always hated office jobs. I hated that management cared so much what time we showed up at the office (they'd all pretend to not care, but then use it against you). I hated being locked there until 5:30pm or whatever was the "appropriate" time to leave even if I'd finished my work by 3pm and no longer had the mental energy to be productive (I remember one time during my first job getting a lot of work done all morning/afternoon, and leaving at 3pm. A couple hours later I get a text asking where I was, and I said I left, and they're like "you just left? lol you're not supposed to do that". I'm think wtf? So I can sit there for 2 hours with some code on my screen doing nothing and that's fine, but I'm not allowed to leave after a 4-5 hour focused coding session? Nobody's really productive after ~4 hours of deep focus anyways).

I hated daily standups, where every morning we have to justify our existence and repeat what's already on the Jira board to some product manager who for whatever reason isn't obliged to give us their status update. I hated all the other numerous pointless agile meetings - backlog refinement, backlog grooming (once got accused of not appearing attentive enough in meetings). I hate open offices, where you have no privacy, have to listen to other peoples' conversations, and constantly feel like you're being watched and paranoid that somebody might catch a glance at your monitor the second you took a 5 minute break from work. I hate having to be surrounded by boring co-workers with no personality all day, in offices where most people eat alone at their desks in front of their computer screens (I never understood this, are people actually working when they eat in front of their computer monitors? You're sitting there for 8 hours and you're so busy you can't take 30 minutes to eat your lunch without being glued to the screen?)

I've been working remotely since last year and I am significantly happier. 98% of that "office bullsh!t" vanished overnight. No commuting. No daily standups. Less pointless meetings (it's like remote workers don't need meetings to bullsh!t meetings to rationalize being stuck in an office for 8 hours). I've traveled the world. At ~$200k/yr I make less than I would in SF, but it's a very comfortable living practically anywhere else in the world since my expenses are a fraction what they were before, and I don't need to be locked in to a lease. When it's 2pm and I'm not feeling productive, I just close my laptop and do something else (instead of trying to figure out how to blow the next 3 hours at the office). When I need to go to the grocery store or gym, I go. If I want to spend a month in Hawaii, I do it.

Remote work certainly has its challenges - you need to be disciplined, have a comfortable workspace ideally separate from your home so you're not stuck in the same place all day (I like coffee shops), do other activities that get you outside the harm (a little more difficult now with COVID), you can't just walk over to someone's desk so people need to be available (not necessarily on a second's notice, but within some acceptable range such that time isn't wasted being blocked), and you have to know when to turn off and go offline. You can't rely on co-workers for your social life anymore, though I don't think I ever had more than 2-3 real friends at any office job in terms of anyone I still keep in contact with.

So it's funny to me seeing occasional comments on remote work posts talking about how much they like working in an office. Personally offices have always been the bane of my existence, and there are few thoughts more repulsing then being trapped in some office for 8 hours/day. To be fair I once worked out of the office of a company I was working remotely for and really enjoyed it because it was a tiny startup with cool people who didn't care when or what time I showed up since I had been hired on purely remote terms and was only at the office voluntarily. So the problem is not the office itself, but the idea of being locked inside for designated hours, and the other bullsh!t management practices generally prevalent in office jobs especially at bigger companies.

And by "Forever", Twitter means that it will require employees to upload their brains into cyborg host bodies and dispose of their human bodies.

So you'll make 4.5x a local salary instead of 5x.