I work for another company that is going to do a partial return to office. I will be looking at options for companies that offer full in person office (or 90% in person office) after things settle down. I have worked full remote for a total of 5 years of my career, and I believe working in the office is a competitive advantage.
> I save money by spending less on food, drinks, and electricity.
For those of us who have to commute, it's not exactly the norm to be saving money while commuting.
Commutes are responsible for a 10% drop in hourly wages[1], and the median commute time results in spending 10 full days commuting a year.
The average commuter in one of the largest metro areas in the country will spend over 13 full days commuting a year:
> In the area with the longest average commute (New York-Newark-Jersey City), commuters are spending an average of 13 days, 2 hours, and 26 minutes driving to and from work. That means that 14 vacation days a year are barely covering the time it takes to get to work every day. So in addition to dropping the average wage from $34.71 per hour to $30.15 per hour, in order to get 14 days of hanging with their family on a beach, New York commuters must be willing to spend nearly as much time sitting in a car.
One of many, though; I'm really getting my hackles up with corporations making end users responsible for things like plastic, industrial farming and co2 emissions. Yes they're a part of the equation, but there's much bigger impact to be made if they work from the top down.
Mind you, there are things like that going on (at least in my neck of the woods), with things like subsidies to consumers for going to battery powered cars and installing solar panels, and subsidies to e.g. energy producers for building wind farms out at sea.
> I'm really getting my hackles up with corporations making end users responsible for things like plastic, industrial farming and co2 emissions.
Me too, but GP has an argument along these lines here.
Commute is a big, and often deciding factor, in private car ownership. Get rid of it, and most drivers will lose the major reason for owning a car. Expand the delivery systems for day-to-day stuff like groceries, and another big reason - buying in bulk - goes away. While people living in sparsely populated areas will still need their cars, the dwellers of large cities with serviceable public transport infrastructure might be more inclined to get rid of their cars, and just rent one for an occasional out-of-town errand.
In this way, normalizing work from home creates top-down pressure for reducing the number of private cars in use.
> Once people could work from home, they decided they didn't want to live in a city anymore.
IMO it’s too early to claim that. People left the city during the pandemic because there was no point paying the premium to live in a city when all its amenities are closed. As cities open back up we might see a lot of people return. Anecdotally, I know a bunch of early career folks in their 20s that moved back in with their parents during the pandemic to save cash. That most certainly isn’t their long term plan.
I don’t doubt that a good number of folks won’t return to the city once this is over. But I wonder if that’s just an acceleration of moves they would have already made in the next 5 years or so, rather than something indicative of the death of cities.
I agree. As for most things, the internet narrative exaggerates reality. New York is already quickly coming back to normal -- certainly slower than before, but offices aren't open yet. Once they open, the intangible benefits of being in the office will re-appear, and result in the same cultural forces that have led to cities for ~all of human civilization.
People who are betting against urban life are basically making a bet against human nature based on short-term trends.
Cities are certainly not the norm when looking at "~all of human civilization.". The norm by far is small anarchic-communal villages (150 people or less). Yes, eventually some outliers form, and villages become a large metropolis, with all of the problems and certain pitfalls that entails.
You're forgetting the key bit: It was during a pandemic, and so especially during the first 6-12 months, people didn't feel safe being around others. They also often legally didn't have any space outside they could enjoy. Suburbs bring personal space and the legal right to be in your back yard.
A city is an entirely different experience when its residents are allowed to use parks and can enjoy dining out, walking to a market, strolling to the cinema, etc...
This is such a bizarre comment. Do you think people will just forget how easily it was for their entire lifestyle to become illegal? Do you think those that moved to the suburb will forget the incredible freedom they purchased?
I think the pandemic highlighted a key deficiency of cities which most people will not soon forget.
Yup. In between the waves of lockdowns, cities were actually more pleasant to be in than they normally are - with so many offices closed, there was a lot less people and cars on the streets, meaning less pollution and less noise.
Without the commuter rush, many places were much more pleasant. I'm in a suburban area and it used to be a solid hour of "line 'o cars" on the main street by my house. God forbid you want to go somewhere at 5pm or 8am.
Now it's more congested, but traffic still moves pretty quick. I'm not looking forward to all the commuters going back to the office.
I downsized to one car during the pandemic. The only reason I had two cars was because we were a family of commuters. Now that no one in the house is commuting, there's little point to owning and maintaining multiple cars.
And the one car I do have could potentially last me the rest of my life because I've gone from commuting 12k miles per year (time 2), down to around 3000.
The past year also saw a 50%+ spike in urban violent crime rates, and repeated riots in nearly every major city. Anecdotally most of the professional families I know who fled to the suburbs cited safety as the primary reason.
> there's much bigger impact to be made if they work from the top down
Exactly. Germany banning plastic straws while simultaneously funding a new natural gas pipeline feels very much like they just want it to seem like things are improving.
I'm confused by the second part <<funding a new natural gas pipeline>>. I assume you are talking about Nord Stream 2.
Switching from brown coal to natural gas can reduce carbon footprint by about 50%. This is a good stepping stone to reduce the huge amount of brown coal that Germany uses for power. Also, the reduction in NOx and SOx is huge by switching from brown coal to natural gas. Another big win for public health.
Do I misunderstand your point?
Germany has limited places to harvest wind (North Sea) and limited solar resources. How else can they reduce their carbon footprint? I guess they can build massive solar arrays in Libya and then build the world's largest long-range DC power line to Munich? (No joke: Singapore might do this with Australia.)
I would argue, that when you take a holistic view of the complete environment, including the soils and subsoils where our food largely comes from, the only long term answer you're left with is to de-civilize and go back to hand tools, local living, and animal transport for the rare times it's needed.
Public consciousness seems to lack the ability to prioritize issues.
Disposable plastics are a problem first and foremost because they cause proliferation of microplastics in the biosphere. This is an issue, but it's not an important issue right now. It's likely harmful to biosphere and to us in the long run - but as of today, there's no noticeable harm being done that can be tied to microplastics, which suggests any negative effects are weak.
Climate change, on the other hand, is a civilization-ending threat. We keep burning more fossil fuels, and it's quite likely our grandchildren will get to starve to death. Preventing this should be our absolute top priority. Microplastics can wait.
It's like trying to administer first aid to an accident victim who has a nasty skin cut on their arm, and a leg that got cut off below the knee. Yes, that skin cut is painful and it needs treating to prevent infection, but it can wait - the first priority is to deal with the leg, before the victim bleeds out.
> Public consciousness seems to lack the ability to prioritize issues.
Things that everybody is going to notice first-hand have an outsized impact on public consciousness. When combined with democracy, this has nasty consequences.
For politicians banning plastic straws is a no-brainer: easy to ban, no real impact on anything, and everyone is going to notice it and feel like something is happening. Same for plastic grocery bags and cutlery. Do it and maybe you'll grab some of those Green votes, same play as the Energiewende.
Meanwhile if you make industry even just .1% more efficient the impact is larger by orders of magnitude but nobody is going to notice, first-hand, right now. So it's pointless when you only care about votes. Which is sadly a main feature of democracy.
IMO, if you try to make industry .1% more efficient, they will lobby the hell out of everyone to make sure that doesn't happen, because it affects their profit, and they threaten to withhold their campaign contributions. So instead, politicians do unimportant things like limit plastic straws.
Bottom line is, voters may elect politicians, but companies fund their campaigns.
GP described what's a clear systemic failure inherent in the current implementation of the system. This doesn't mean we have to throw the system away - figuring out how to mitigate this problem would work too.
On this, I don't have any solid ideas. In a way, it's a marketing problem: maybe there's a way to make people more receptive to reality than to feel-good but ultimately meaningless actions?
I sometimes wonder if governments shouldn't have an official propaganda department, with an official website, explaining in layman's terms the reasoning behind various laws being introduced. You'd go to a page for plastic straws ban, and see the government's official word on why it was drafted, what problem it's meant to solve, how it attempts that, and how they track the results.
Of course, everyone would have a field day debunking every single article from a million different angles, but at least it would serve to anchor the discussion. And it would be a place for a smarter politicians/parties to explain why increasing efficiency of some industry by 0.01% is a huge win by the current administration - hopefully leading to more such actions in the future.
There's a thin line between giving clear explanations and patronizing the citizens, but I think governments need to start walking it - as it is, politics is way too complicated for regular people to follow in any meaningful sense, other than repeating soundbites.
Republicanism, lots of little democracies competing against one another for citizens, yet united when it comes to things like national defense. The US was originally designed to be a constitutional republic but a growing federal government has degraded it to more of a simple representative democracy.
I never heard the term "Republicanism". Are there any (real) countries that practice this? Australia's states have lots of divested powers. How do you feel about that balance?
Im not familiar enough with government in Oz to say but the closest example in modern times would be the EU, although they have a heavier hand than I'd recommend. If people in say France were unhappy with their government they can more easily move to Germany then if they were separate nations not in the EU. The key is giving the states enough control that they are distinct from one another while allowing people to move between them. If the federal government takes too much power the states become homogeneous and you lose the ability to vote with your feet like that.
How does the EU handle cases where one member wants to treat something as contraband and other do not? With open borsers for people and trade can one meber state have different laws for banned items or substances?
> With open borsers for people and trade can one meber state have different laws for banned items or substances?
The Netherlands have fairly lax laws on substances and are a EU member. If you take something from the Netherlands into a country that doesn't want that item within their borders you are subject to the local laws. Same thing that would happen if you brought contraband from South America to the US really.
Crowded, rich countries that responsibly burn garbage & waste still have a serious issue with dioxins generated by burning plastics. You can filter some of it, but usually areas around these plants have much higher than normal dioxin levels.
That said, I like the balance in your comment about the known effects of microplastics. At the moment, it is just a hype story. Honestly: No one really knows, but we should continue to seriously monitor and research the issue. I have heard that stretchy clothing (aka "ath-leisure") causes a lot of micro-fibres to be shed during laundry. This is simiar to microplastics, as most ath-leisure is made with synthetic materials that are essentially refined oil (as plastics).
Natural gas is great. It doesn't generate as much pollution as one might think. Other than fully clean energy like hydro and solar, it is one of the best.
it doesn't generate much in terms of particulate emissions (eg it's not dirty like diesel) but it's quite bad in terms of greenhouse effects. the natural gas pipeline network leaks a relatively large amount of the gas that transits it (it's on the order of several percent per year) and because it's such a distributed problem it's not economical for companies to fix it purely on a cost-savings basis. And natural gas (methane) is an extremely potent greenhouse gas - it is #2, behind only carbon dioxide in overall impact on the atmosphere, and something around 100x as potent as CO2 over a 100 year lifespan.
new studies suggest the leak rate is around 2.3%, which is about twice as high as previously predicted - and at 3% you have offset all the benefits compared to coal generation. Again, obviously that's still better in terms of particulate emissions/acid rain, but you wouldn't be doing any less global warming. So it is still significantly bad in terms of greenhouse effect, not nearly the panacea the fossil-fuel industry would like to present it as.
(and conversely - the fact that it's such a distributed problem makes it difficult/expensive to clean up. you can capture CO2 and particulates from a point source - it's expensive and it sucks but you can do it. But you can't stop 2 million miles of pipes from leaking a little bit at every fitting.)
the only saving grace is that methane does oxidize relatively quickly, on the order of tens of years, whereas CO2 is pretty much there forever. but if we're still pumping out more natural gas into the atmosphere 10 years later, that's not really the fix people think it is. Again, it's 100x more potent over a 100 year lifespan than CO2, the "long term" picture isn't all that rosy either.
slight addendum to the above - I should have said "not dirty like fossil-diesel". I'd like to make the point that synthetic diesels like biodiesel are extremely clean in terms of particulates and is in fact one of the more interesting "bio-fuels" (although of course there are always problems with any approach that puts food in direct competition with fuel for feedstocks).
How much of that gas was going to leak anyway? The fields they pipe it from probably don't hold it all in. Any stats on this in Google are buried under reports on the extraction industry, so I can't find anything concrete.
"Anyway" from what reference point? The gas stayed in the ground for millions of years before we poked a bunch of wells into the reservoir. If the wells are shut in correctly, they shouldn't leak appreciably. As the comment above notes, the more pipes you have, the more gas is going to leak.
Unfortunately, in many places you can't produce oil without producing gas, and with so much gas right now, there's not a lot of financial incentive to capture it all. If we reduce the need for oil, we'll reduce gas leak emissions as well.
That's the question. How much makes it to the surface? Oil used to pop up everywhere before humans sucked up all the easy to reach surface sources. There's still a little that comes up from the ocean floor without any human help.
Oil and gas seeps notwithstanding, the vast majority of reservoirs are stable and likely to remain so over human timescales unless we stick wells into them and start piping fluids around on the surface.
Depends where you live and if you have to heat or cool your house to work from home. Homes are much more inefficient to moderate temperature than offices. That may or may not offset the benefit from commuting, and even less so if done on public transport with lower emissions.
That only applies if the home is empty when people are at the office. If my family stays at home while I commute, then there are emissions from commuting, heating the home and heating the office.
Not even then - nobody likes to return to a very cold home after a day at the office. It'll take advances in insulation to become much more widespread before a meaningful amount of people starts shutting off heating when away. That means first tearing down and rebuilding a lot of buildings, because you can't just bolt this kind of insulation tech onto an old construction.
The way to reduce carbon footprint is to put a zero on the price of gasoline, diesel, natural gas and all other forms of carbon-based fuel. A 900% tax should do just fine.
Just nobody is brave enough to do it, because it would be political suicide. Even if you gave the money back to the people in the form of tax breaks and social programmes, it would still be political suicide.
I don’t know - a carbon tax and telling everyone they’re required to come to the office just seems like it’s punishing workers even more. For many people transit it’s not available or odd fossil fueled powered. WFH should be preferred over a carbon tax on commuting - eliminating the consumption altogether is far better than sending tax money to the government and hoping that people change behaviors based on pricing.
It's not just political suicide, it's a game theoretical non-optimal play because any one country doing this only hurts themselves while not actually solving climate change. It only works if you have some large number of the top emitters agree to cap all together.
The food/drink part could be the most of it. A Google employee enjoying free food and drink could save $60/day versus buying prepared food ($10 for breakfast, $20 for lunch, and $30 for dinner). If you drink much coffee or other beverages, that could be another $15/day.
If you weigh this against spending an extra hour or two commuting, then it looks like a lousy bargain. But if you are like many people, and ended up working more hours during the pandemic, [1] then that erases some/all of the gains of not commuting.
> But if you are like many people, and ended up working more hours during the pandemic, [1] then that erases some/all of the gains of not commuting.
Wow. I cut my hours down substantially due to WFH. Pre-COVID I was doing 70+ hrs per week due to commuting into the area during the week and having nothing to do.
Now I put in maybe 40hrs per week, broken up into 1hr chunks here and there and I'm not spending over $1500/month just for a room/expenses in the area where work is.
It's great! I'm not going back to the office, like, ever.
Sometimes working less doesn’t mean producing less, or if it’s less it’s not necessarily linear. They said they used to work more “because they had nothing to do”. The extra hours may not be worth as much as a well rested mind.
I eat well and spend maybe $400 a month on groceries and food.
I’ve heard that Google recruiters attempt to con potential employees into some ridiculous assessment of the “free” food as a compensation benefit with numbers like those that you posited above. I can’t imagine valuing daily meals that highly.
Reading FAANG employees talk about food prices makes me realize the old "It's one banana. What could it cost, $10?" is something that was written based on reality.
At Apple Park lunch at Cafe Macs could easily run $10-15 (without a drink) depending on what station you ordered from. The food there was good but not exactly cheap.
The campus was really too big to leave for lunch unless you arrived at some stupid early hour to park underground below your office. It's a 10-15 minute walk to the south parking garage and then at least a 10 minute drive to the closest places to eat and none of those are cheaper than the cafe.
So unless you're bringing food from home you can pretty easily hit $20 for lunch per day. I doubt Cafe Macs is running a huge profit but the cost for employees is non-trivial.
oh man I miss those 2 o'clock lunch deals (Menu del Dias) which would fill you up for like... 12 euros haha. I remember in Barcelona or Valencia you could go to a really fancy, highly rated restaurant and "splurge" for 20 euros. Miss that place!
Nope. Parking requires badge access and there's no street parking near the campus. Even if some lunch truck set up shop in a nearby parking lot it would still be a 15-20 minute hike to reach it.
When I worked at Google I so rarely paid for food that I began to completely ignore the cost of food when I did pay for it. It just didn’t seem to matter much.
I'm glad others are shocked by that $60/day on food. I would say food takes up the largest percentage of my expenses and $60 is easily 5 days worth of food for two.
The $60 is laughably high, but the value of the perk of $400 a month might also be too low considering part of the appeal is presumably that it all gets looked after for you and you don’t have to prep food or even think about your meals (the value of having all your meals cooked for you isn’t the same as the value of the ingredients).
I read a bunch of comments in this branch, and I think yours nails it. Initially, I saw 60 USD per day and laughed. Thought to myself: "Ok, they will all be overweight in 1 yr -- like junior bankers!" Then, I realised the labour costs are pretty high, so 60 USD per day might be too low. It might be closer to 100 USD in "value" per day for Google to provide all your meals.
If you are eating that every day then you are destroying the beauty of food for yourself. That level of food should be a treat, not your "daily driver"
Pretty common for me, but I've mostly lived in places with a huge variety of fresh ingredients. That "level of food" is actually not that high in places like Barcelona, Lisbon, Sao Paulo, Sydney, SF, LA, Guangzhou, Bangkok, etc. 60USD/day (~1300USD per month) is not that much compared to how much FAANG employees are making. At the end of the day it's a matter of priority. Tons of people spend more than that on alcohol/cigarette/drugs/cars.
I think so. I buy bulk (15-50lb bags) organic grains, legumes, flour, seeds. Makes it more work to calculate per meal but it's pretty cheap. I get a lot of verity but you do have to be creative and it helps if you are fast at cooking.
I like cooking and tend to prep on a Sunday, and then midweek on Wednesday if I'm bored. I live in Austin, TX. I don't usually eat out at all except the occasional outing with friends. Of course I'll splurge on the weekend depending on what's going on. That said I tend to eat the "zone diet" that stuck with me even after I lost a bunch of weight on it. It isn't particularly "hard" to find food to fit that scheme. Of course you have to not mind reheating food :) . I'm a fairly rugged individual and don't really need froufrou food every day https://www.tasteofhome.com/collection/meal-prep-recipes-wee...
The biggest injustice in life is that when you are young, food is just fuel to get through the day. You can eat all of it and you don't care if it's good.
When you get older, you start to understand food, and you are willing to pay more for it, but now you have to count calories.
Can I survive on $10 a day? I did it on $3 a DAY when my parents were on food stamps, but I am not that crazy about going back to the "franks, rice, and ketchup" menu.
And those two people likely don't eat remotely as well as Facebook or Google employees.
Even if you value your labor/time to cook to be worth of zero dollars, when I was at Google my cafe had fresh seafood (a rotation of different types of fish, scallops, shrimps, mussel, crab, etc) and good quality regular meat dish (I particularly liked the skirt steak with guacamole), great vegan/vegetarian options, in-house made desserts including fresh made chocolate truffles every day prepared by the chef.
And that's just lunch, at one cafe, not including breakfast and dinner and options at the other 3 dozens cafes on campus.
If you can recreate all of that for two people with a $60/week budget, then kudos to you. I know I can't.
> those two people likely don't eat remotely as well
You then mention chocolate truffles. Personally if I had my employer providing ridiculous good food for free, I’ll likely live less healthy because I will eat those nice unhealthy things every day.
If I am prepping my own food I have complete control over what I buy and can choose _not_ to buy unhealthy things.
Also in my experience a reason why food prepared by a chef tastes so good: more fat used.
I assume that Google and Facebook canteens (well that’s what they are) are better than the ones offered by companies here in Germany, but I think I would still gain weight.
"And those two people likely don't eat remotely as well as Facebook or Google employees."
That probably depends on your cultural background.
Whenever I was in the US and worked for large tech companies I found the food too fat, too sweet, (interestingly same things like Kellogs are totally different in the US than in Europe), too much artifical flavor, too much cheese, too much toppings, large unhealthy portions.
The water and Cola tasted like Chlorine and were undrinkable - I guess you don't taste it when you grow up with that taste.
I had good food here an there, especially great - and expensive - steaks in NYC and once the best fish tacos in the world on a beach in San Diego, but overall the food wasn't to my liking. I was dissapointed by the food in SF, I had very high hopes from hearing all the good things but it was just average.
Food which I did like more than the food for "those two people" in general was the food in the South of France, in Sardinia, Corsica and Rome, desserts of the Middle East, in Japan and Vietnam - also Copenhagen is so underrated concerning food.
The food for "those two people" tastes natural, has no artifical flavorings and is healthy.
So it probably depends on your cultural background, as I've said.
Zurich has one of Google's largest offices in Europe. I doubt the food is as oily or over-sweetened as Silicon Valley. (And yes, broadly, I agree that US prepared food is mostly over the top on oil/salt/sugar.) It would be nice to hear from Googlers who have visited more than one office and its canteen.
I used to work for Google for few years and I did gain some weight - just like many of my coworkers did. The food was delicious and looked great so I was eating too much overall and did not pay attention to the healthy meat vs vegetables balance.
For the last five years we're cooking most of our meals at home, maybe go out or order food once or twice a month. The food we cook isn't as exotic, nicely looking or sophisticated as the food served at Google, but it is tasty, fresh, healthy and the groceries are pretty cheap. And despite being older, my blood results are better now than when I was leaving Google.
You would be amazed at the quality of fresh food you can buy in the local stores. there's a good chance the potato you're eating for 5 dollar in the restaurant is the same one that's in your cellar which costed 5 cent
> Even if you value your labor/time to cook to be worth of zero dollars
I understand what you're saying, but still cringed at that statement. Eating well and, by extension, cooking is hardly something I would value at $0/hour and I find it mildly insulting that someone would devalue the time I dedicate to preparing meals.
If you don't like cooking and would rather dedicate some of your income to having someone else do it for you, please frame it in that way. It recognizes it is your own decision and comes off as less judgmental of others.
He did come off as a little harsh but he's not entirely wrong depending on how you value your time and priorities. for the record it is perfectly possible to eat healthy without having to spend(waste) time cooking. I steam vegetables, eat fruit, and eat a lot of lean chicken and sardines.
I can definitely relate to him because I hate spending time cooking, I don't like the prep, I don't like the drudge work, and I don't like to have to clean up afterwards. I have a finite lifespan and I don't wanna waste any of it on things that I fundamentally do not enjoy, particularly if it's entirely avoidable.
"As well" is subjective and your presuming those two people want to eat like that. I don't. I enjoy talapia, chicken breast, white rice, and Fiber One on a daily basis. I rotate in broccoli and peas, and enjoy the occasional Honey Bun, chocolate, and bowl of Cocoa Pebbles.
But the best part of the day is the very first fresh ground coffee with real sugar and real cream in the morning. You just can't beat it.
You don't factor the electricity/water for cooking & cleaning and the time spent doing it(calculate it by the hourly rate of a mid-range cook assuming you are there).
It sounds about right to me if you don't like cooking. Note that the cost is for prepared food.
Buying raw ingredients and cooking them yourself is cheaper in terms of explicit dollar costs, but if you don't enjoy cooking then you also need to assign some monetary value for having to do something that you don't like.
I think I would enjoy taking a break and cooking so free food is probably not worth $60 to me personally. It's not crazy to think that my employer gets a benefit of more than $60 through increased productivity by providing me with free food though.
Wow. Thank you to share. How much garbage does this produce just from packaging? I cringe at packaging waste from takeaway. That is my number one reason to avoid it. (To be clear: I don't live in a place that uses remotely "eco-friendly" packaging like pressed recycled light cardboard and balsam[sp?] wood utensils!)
I am a huge proponent of Blue Apron (or a similar service). Have been a customer for 7 years now. It cuts down on grocery waste (do I NEED 1 liter of sherry vinegar to cook one thing?), and you pick up a ton of techniques that may not be chef-advanced but very useful in every-day cooking.
That's just an example. Most of the ingredients that I buy without meal kits usually just go bad, there is no saving money justification there, especially in NYC where groceries are more expensive.
I work for Google and live in Switzerland where food is really expensive so my situation doesn't generalize well.
However, if 1) I cook all my food, and 2) try to have a healthy diet I spend easily the equivalent of 30USD/day. Going to a restaurant sets you back around the same amount per meal.
So, assuming I work 200 days/year going to the office and get free food would save me 6k USD/year (also assuming I cook 100% off my meals). That kind of money would pay for holidays or other stuff.
Finally, my back of the envelope math didn't include the time I spend cooking and all the "premium" stuff I get at the office like fancy drinks and snacks, which I usually don't buy when WFH.
And you live in a country with a really nicely developed public transport infrastructure, so you don't go through the nightmarish car commutes that most USians probably have in mind. When I lived in CH, I did not mind the days I had to commute – it was mostly a relaxed trainride where I could get work done 75% of the time.
I really think a lot of this debate is colored by Americans thinking of the American commute.
On the other side, Europeans tend to think that there is only the US and Europe in the world.
American-style long commutes are the reality in most of Asia, Latin America and the larger African cities.
If anything, Europe is the exception.
Most of Europe has relatively nice public transport. I used to read books while on my way to work. That was 1.5-2 hours per day for my library. My previous office was 30 minutes walking distance from my home. Great way to wake up as opposed to coffee. While I was in the US, they had scarcely any sidewalks. Only in big cities it seemed appropriate to walk to somewhere.
Whenever a pissing contest about grocery prices happens (and don't kid yourself, if a number has been mentioned it's not a question of when but rather an indication that the pissing has begun) you must quote a lower number than the previous person. It doesn't need to be true, it doesn't need to include critical qualifying information like location and tradeoffs, it doesn't even need to be particularly likely -- but it must be lower. So it is written. Here, I'll demonstrate:
I only spend $250 per month on groceries and I cannot imagine the disgusting excess that could possibly lead anyone to waste a single cent more!
Just me. Granted I don't feel the need to save as much as I can in this department. I like quality meat that is not from a factory farm and vegetables. Probably $500 on groceries and $300 on going out to eat.
lol I'm doing a bootstrapped startup. I ate: a can of tuna, peanut butter, greek yogurt, protein powder-based shake, and watermelon yesterday... maybe at a total cost of $3-5??
Consider a significant number of Googlers are upper middle class kids, possibly on the spectrum, who go straight from the ivy league to google’s cafeteria. These made up numbers seem reasonable and accurate to them because they never had to take care of themselves in the real word.
If that's true at all it definitely needs an 'in the US' qualifier - it's surprising to me in the UK, and even more surprising we would be so different in that regard.
>Is the cooked-for-you food free?
It's broadly true in the US as far as I know for on-campus university housing. (Off-campus housing and fraternities/sororities are often different.)
Anything but free. Meal plan requirements vary.
Where I lived undergrad, we had a kitchen for a suite of rooms although I ate out a fair bit. (Many dorms did not have cooking facilities though.) Both places I went for grad school (which were actually both Ivy League) had no cooking facilities of any type.
Wow. That's surprisingly different to the UK - I've never heard of anywhere having no kitchen available. (Other options are of course available, but certainly not required.)
In fact I'd guess it's probably a requirement here - I don't think student halls are treated any differently to any private rented accommodation, it's probably a requirement that there be access to a (possibly shared) kitchen.
It's also quite (and increasingly) common that you're only in halls (or at least only guaranteed a place) in first year, thereafter in private rented accommodation of course you'd expect a kitchen; whereas I gather in the US the vast majority are campus universities, and provide on-campus accomodation throughout all years.
At least in my experience, there is a kitchen area per floor with stove and oven, though nothing more than microwave and hot plate
(and mini fridge) in the actual dorm rooms themselves.
I know Googlers who literally never buy groceries because they eat all of their big meals at the office, grab a bottled smoothie on their way out the door, and get restaurant food on the weekends. It is cheaper to get groceries than to buy prepared food, but there’s a lot of spoilage that happens when you’re only cooking 2 days/week.
Is there any particular component of this that disgusts you?
You could likely do that and end up spending less money than buying food and cooking for yourself. If you don't cook you can free up your time for other revenue generating activities, chores, etc. Total cost of 2x to 4x delivered meals in my area could be $20 to $80. That's ~$320 or 80 less then the $400 number quoted in other places in this thread.
It's pretty rational behavior from the employees side of things.
And, even before Google, when I started living alone I realized I couldn't buy milk anymore because I don't drink enough milk fast enough to not let it spoil. I've switched to soy purely because it lasts months I'm my fridge safely.
protip: the horizon organic (or possibly other ultra-pasteurized) milks last a very long time in the fridge. I only use milk for my daily coffee and I haven't had a single carton go sour on me yet. it's a bit more expensive, but easily worth for people who don't consume milk very fast.
In some countries, ultra-pasteurized milk (and alternatives) is absolutely the norm -- packed in tetrapaks. And I agree: it is freaky how long that stuff lasts in your fridge. As long as you close it tight, and return it to the fridge quickly, two weeks is easy.
I question the accuracy of this. I grew up where going out to dinner was a luxury; we went perhaps once a week, and sometimes that was to a McDonalds or pizza joint, not someplace that charges $30/plate.
I can't even imagine how anyone could think this was true, even in multi-generational upper-middle class urban families.
I don't think you're lying, although I don't think you're correct; I'm just amazed at how different people's baseline contexts are. In your context, that's a reasonable statement, or you wouldn't have said it.
>> And large numbers of people cooking at home is a relatively recent thing
> I can't even imagine how anyone could think this was true, even in multi-generational upper-middle class urban families.
In the context of the sweep of human history of about two million years, people exclusively cooking at home being relatively recent is true [1]. Restaurants are a relatively recent invention [2] [3]. What we conceive of as normal meals is relatively recent [4].
Communal was the predominant cooking setting for many modes of cooking like baking for most of human history. This was because fuel was brutally time and energy-intensive to gather and prepare until our species started to master tool-making to a sufficient level that individual households at the mainstream level could afford the necessary tools. It literally took organizing a community to sustainably run much of what we take for granted in an individual middle class developed world household kitchen today.
Cooking over an open fire is likely the oldest mode [5], and that fire takes a fair amount of effort to sustain solely at the household scale, and the archeological evidence for humans routinely and widely making fire instead of sustaining it continuously suggests routinely and widely making fire is relatively recent (100's thousands instead of millions of years ago) [6], and even then it was common to borrow fire from a neighbor than making it, so arduous it was to make fire or expensive it was to acquire the tools. Our species only really started to relatively routinely cook during the Paleolithic age about 200,000 years ago [7], starting with open fire roasting, then proceeding from there (boiling came after roasting, ironic since boiling water is considered by us as how we start teaching children to cook) [7].
There is a simple experiment you can conduct today to validate this on your own: with nothing but a flint suitable for knapping (which in itself is an accomplishment to de novo achieve), and plain cotton clothing (to give you a head start), work out what it takes to start a fire, sustainably gather fuel, sustainably gather calories and nutrition, and scale it up to a minimum genetic variability group. It is incredibly exhausting, and prone to all kinds of failure modes.
The sheer amount of agonizing, brutal, incremental effort over the millennia it took our ancestors to "just" get to the stage to develop agrarian systems (and there is even debate if even that was a prudent choice [8] [9] [10], though for the record I'm pro-agriculture) is mind-boggling. By comparison, our current state of civilization is just LARP'ing "grinding", and gamers talking about grinding take that to yet an entirely different level. I give our ancestors their due: they were a set of some tough hombres, and we collectively do indeed stand on the shoulders of giants.
Fair enough. Zero trolling: Have you considered just buying a half-pint (~250ml) of milk at the covenience store, instead of (presumably) wasting much more? Just an idea. :)
I have, and it still goes bad. I've done quarts and those still go bad. Pints might work but at that point it's just annoying because I have to head out for milk often. Soy milk works fine for me. I hate the idea of wasting/spoiling food and I've never had soy milk go bad.
That's true! But I wouldn't equate eating expensive food on-campus as overeating/overindulging. The googler I knew best who did this was vegetarian/vegan and very fit. She had access to lots of high quality food that matched her diet, and part of the reason she was vegetarian/vegan was because google's cafeterias made it easy for her.
I should clarify that my wife is vegan, and I‘m flexitarian/vegetarian. Eating at restaurants is often a pain because most dishes contain some kind of animal product. But I don’t see how ease of finding vegan food while eating out is a motivation to go vegan.
For me personally a buffet style place causes me to paradoxically eat less, as I was brought up with a lot of food anxiety so not having to ever worry about “enough” food I end up eating a lot more sparingly.
There’s a big jump that happens when you have no food in the house. No spoilage, no dishes, no pantry to stock. I didn’t even work for a company and this is how I lived immediately pre-covid in Mexico City. I kept the ingredients to make a protein shake, and had one at 11am after the gym every day. Then went out for dinner. That was the distinct downtime. If I wanted a snack, I walked to the corner store and bought one. It was a sweet setup.
I'm not at Google, but while my office was open I didn't stock much breakfast food. The breakfast food at my job was better than I usually bought, so I didn't need to buy it.
> Nobody buys prepared food every day, and the costs of food are negligible for a Google employee.
Of course they do? When I've been crunching, like just putting insane hours in, I've gone weeks without cooking and just ordering in. It costs a fortune, even at Google salary - or in my case, 'SF' salary. Not to mention the cost of living is already absurd due to rent - your salary gets eaten up faster than you might imagine.
Yeah if I made Google wages I would not want to waste an hour or more a day on commuting. Plus, you can easily make food for 10-20 dollars a day so saving by eating the company food will cost you more just by colmuting and losing your time (or potential wages).
I certainly don't worry about what I spend on food and I spend a few dollars a day on breakfast and lunch. Maybe $10-15 typically on dinner (if that). Most people don't have the free breakfast/lunch/dinner some tech employers do. And my utilities might differ a few dollars per day if I'm home or not.
In my experience it is a horseshoe, people that eat out for every meal tend to be either on the high end of the income spectrum and thin or the very low end and obese.
These are broad strokes, but my experience in rural America and in SF bears this out, rich people eat out very often and tend to be fit and the very poor also eat out more than average but tend to be obese. Everyone else is in the middle.
Also depends on the cuisine. Quite a few cuisines take extraordinarily long to cook, and at that point, you're better off just eating out to save time (if you have the money) than deal with those meal-kits that are either not sustainable, or healthy, or often-times, both.
In The Netherlands, the cuisine tends to be really simple, and salad-kits and meal-kits are extremely popular. The fanciest food that people 'cook' is often a soup or pasta, and I'd say it's extremely rare for anyone to make pasta or sauces from scratch.
I think a possible generalization is that each of us optimizes for what's important / possible in our lives and jobs. We never really knew how to impute the economic value of those things in the first place, but simply followed heuristics and cultural habits. And then the pandemic took all of our assumptions, and threw them out the window.
In my case, my family prepares almost all of our own food anyway. And more than a few days of eating prepared food begins to affect my health. But that doesn't mean a worker who lives on prepared food wouldn't value the benefit of free food at work.
$15/day for coffee at home is way too high. You can buy a pound of high-end coffee beans for that price. A good grinder, aeropress and kettle will cost you less than $200. That’ll easy beat the quality of corporate cafe coffee. Even at five cups a day, you’re looking at $4/day.
If someone eats all their meals out, that's not unreasonable. That's about what I'll spend daily when traveling in cities. Of course, that doesn't describe what I do day-to-day at home at all. I'll occasionally grab a pizza but that's about the only takeout/eat out I routinely do when I'm at home.
Not everyone spends that much. If have to guess that most people don't. I'm in the US, and spend less than half that much to feed a family and we don't eat cheap, boxed junk.
I've spent years, working in offices in London and not being thrifty with £, in fact spending too much on overpriced sandwiches, coffees cakes etc... but how on earth do you get to those numbers ??
Right but a Google employee living in SF and commuting to Mountain View will spend 3 hrs/day commuting give or take. Are Google employees worth $20/hr?
It's not just the money, you also save time and effort which in my opinion really accumulates to something significant and distracting in the long run. It's just nice to be able to focus on your work and have someone else worry about food, and not having to take breaks for preparation/cleaning/doing dishes etc.
When Dropbox served food I valued it at 50k, ie: in order fro a company to poach me, given they don't have food, that's 50k they'd have to make up for. While I don't spend anywhere near 4k a month on food, there were a few things to consider:
a) 3 meals prepared for me saves me time and money. I love to cook but I don't have tons of time anymore and I don't have a a good kitchen. If I want to save time via delivery I end up spending tons more, and I don't think I eat as healthy.
b) The food was ridiculous. I've eaten a lot of good food, I've eaten in numerous countries, and Dropbox's food was god tier.
c) Tons of snacks, little treats, etc. Wine as well. Given the incredible quality of the food I wouldn't be surprised to find that I was eating quite a lot in terms of money.
It was such a quality of life win, especially as someone who loves food, to just have insanely good meals every single day. Even if ultimately it probably saved me closer to 1000 a month than 5000.
I guess I just can't comprehend a mindset where 3 meals a day at a company is this huge win. On the occasions when I went into an office with a non-free cafeteria, I didn't even always eat lunch.
ADDED: This subthread to me is such a bizarre look into a certain bubble of SV. [See also apparent disagreements with the statement that spending $60/day in restaurants is somehow abnormal.]
Indeed, as a Midwesterner, I'm fascinated by the sheer logistics of having to bring a sandwich to every computer programmer in San Francisco, every day. It's one of those features of "how cities work" that you never even think about.
Many of the comments here would get you literally laughed at interviewing at 99+% of the companies (including tech ones) in the US. "Give me $50K more if you don't offer three high quality free meals a day."
Definitely not. Meals and snacks are becoming common perks in tech even outside of SF/the US, and people (especially young grads fresh out of college) are beginning to ask for them. I personally keep a look out for it, too, since I eat a lot healthier when compared to ordering food, and save a lot of time compared to cooking it.
Most of the bigger companies have their own cafeterias and kitchens to produce everything in house. They usually contract it out to companies like Bon Appetit who completely manage the logistics and operations.
I feel like I justified my point well. Eating extremely well made food is a major win for me. There's the obvious financial and time savings, but there's also a lot to be said for having a fresh made meal three times a day - and Dropbox always had variety, they pretty much never repeated dishes (other than the standards - burgers, pizza, etc).
I ate some of the best meals I've ever had while working there. After a certain point that matters more to me than an extra N dollars a year.
I did that for a while, but then I was also in midst of a crumbling relationship so it was a way to give each other space.
The dinner is also often relatively early, so you still have quite a lot of time after the commute (granted, if your commute is 1+ hour then it's far from a dream routine).
What I like is having the option, for example I had a late sports club that was close to work, so it was more interesting to grab a quick bite and stay there to go to the club and return home after.
Are all these people spending 10-11 hours a day at work or something? I usually eat breakfast (if I have it) around 8am and dinner some time between 6-7pm. I would never want to be at work that long no matter how good the food was.
Some people simply don't get much value or enjoyment from a good meal at all, in that case it's probably too hard to make them understand. But assuming that you do enjoy dining at a good restaurant once in a while, can you imagine that getting essentially unlimited meal vouchers at good quality restaurants (not cafetarias or fast food joints!) can be quite valuable for a good number of people?
I can see the appeal of this if you're living alone or with some housemates who also live that lifestyle, but I can't see it working if you have a girlfriend or boyfriend unless they also work for a company that caters all their meals too. Otherwise you'd never get a chance to have breakfast or dinner together. That would suck.
I wonder, on some deeply dystopian level, if tech companies do this on purpose to keep their a large proportion of their employees single.
> Commutes are responsible for a 10% drop in hourly wages
Maybe statistically, OK. But if you have a nice commute it may be likely the best part of your day. I have a mostly flat, 40 min bike ride in the woods every day, and it is my "me time" that I cherish and lets me unwind before and after work. Definitely not "lost time".
I don't think a 40 minute bike ride is the kind of commute we're talking about. Most commuters are not doing so by biking through a nice woodland trail. I would love to ride to work, but it would take over twice as long as your commute in a climate that is inhospitably cold for biking for about 6 months of the year and often rains for the rest.
> it is my "me time" that I cherish
You have kids don't you? That seems to be a consistent feature of people I meet who espouse the virtues of going to work.
> You have kids don't you? That seems to be a consistent feature of people I meet who espouse the virtues of going to work.
Yes. But my liking of bike commuting is maybe more related to the fact that it is a positive change from using public transportation, where I felt really miserable (had to take two crowded buses with an indeterminate waiting time in-between).
But you are right that having kids changes one's view to work... often, after an intense weekend, I go back to the lab and say "finally! I can relax and get some work done".
I also spend about 30 min per day cooking for the kids. Would you say that I could "get back" these 30 minutes by hiring a personal cook? Well, maybe, but I really don't live like that. It's a mildly pleasurable activity, even if I'm able to imagine "better ways to spend my time".
Reread that comment. He’s saying you would have the option of doing that 40m bike ride, which you don’t have today. For the majority of people that commute will not be a nice ride through the woods, and they can’t opt out.
Fewer than 1% of Americans commute by bike.[1] For the vast majority of people the end of WFH will not be a relaxing meander of me time through the forest.
That sounds wonderful. Why would you need a commute to do it? Couldn’t you just take a bike ride for the pleasure and let me skip the hour long sardine can frequently delayed train ride often in the snow, sleet, or rain in the process at the end of the day?
Could but probably won't. At least I found that even though I like the bike portion of my commute and had kept it up for the first few months it eventually dwindled away in favor of sleeping in and working longer. Something to be said for the motivation of being required to get somewhere.
$150 extra from 40 hours of AC is insanely high. That's about what I pay total in the middle of summer in Florida for a decent-size SFH. Check the insulation on your house for a leak. Also maybe consider upgrading to a ductless heat pump mini split. That would almost certainly cut your marginal cost to near $30/month.
My electric hits $400+ a month in the summer and it’s just going to get worse when our pool is completed. I live in a new 2500 square foot house in Arizona, our insulation is fine. And we have two pretty nice heat pump/ac units.
Fair enough. But in Arizona, it's not like you're just turn off the AC completely and let the house bake in the 115 noonday heat. Maybe you bump your thermostat from 76 to 90 from 9-3 (gotta give it time to cool back down before you get home). That cuts your power usage in half for six hours of the day, 22 days a month. At most that might save you $120 during the hot summer months.
I’m likely going to get solar panels, but building a pool is an expensive frustrating process, and I didn’t want to take on an additional project at the same time. The pool also has an electric heat pump so as long as the solar panel install is large enough solar panels will cover both needs.
Still need to work out the numbers on the solar panels so I can decide if I should buy them, or lease them.
Where do you get 40h from? Assuming living in a place that has long hot humid summers and cold winters, thereby needing AC for most of the year, that number should be closer to 100~200.
I live quite frugally otherwise (balking at other numbers in this thread) and $150 per month in climate cost increase for the daytimes sounds perfectly normal to me. During the hot summers I spent twice that when living in an apartment in the big city.
Also consider most people rent and have little ability to impact insulation and efficiency in their homes.
> I spend 150$+ per month on AC and heat because of the pandemic. I spent ~30$ in gas a month commuting. I could even walk if my bike didn't work.
Work from home doesn't mean you have to literally work from home. There are plenty of places you can work from, ranging from free like libraries or parks, to paid like coffee shops and co-working spaces. You can get your employer to pay for the latter.
> Once you optimize your job to be close to your home, many of the benefits of wfh disappear.
Those optimizations become liabilities if you get a new job elsewhere.
I'm not a mobile person, I've traveled the world but lived in one city my whole life. I've done the 90 minute commute, I've driven all over. This role I picked especially because of the location. Work fits my life not the other way around.
> Once you optimize your job to be close to your home, many of the benefits of wfh disappear.
Alternative framing: your life has been constrained by your career expectation of working in an office; you've optimised around that and found a local maximum.
Work-from-home doesn't remove that local maximum from you, but it creates an opening to find a higher maximum.
Only if you're an extrovert. As an introvert I love people throwing stuff over the wall to me and I never have to deal with office gossip, politics, or other shenanigans.
My landlord noticed electric bill going up (combined with rent) and a lightbulb moment happened when we realized we've all been at home over the winter and its 220+ hours more of heat and other appliances every month.
Sometimes people say they're making a time trade off for more money, and plan to use that money to buy more time.
While money is fungible, time is not. You can't buy more time with your kids while they're young if they're already grown. You can't buy more time with someone who has passed away. And you can't buy your way out of missed opportunities in your personal life, once they've gone they're gone.
If you use public transport, you can regain that time. In the UK you can get a seat on most rush hour trains, and even standing up on the Tube you can read a book, listen to a podcast, do your email etc. It's also good thinking time.
Driving a car yep you're absolutely right, but if you commute via car a long distance for a considerable amount of time I think you're crazy.
Disagree strongly. I commuted solely via public transit for years, and it isn’t time you’ve regained in a meaningful way. Reading a book on a crowded train is superior to driving, and vastly inferior to reading a book in my hammock before working hours start. I also can’t work out, hang out with my family, or do all kinds of activities when I’m on public transit.
For the record, I’ve commuted via public transit (both bus and train), bike, and foot for long stretches of time. All beat driving, all are much worse than just not commuting at all.
Depends, public transport outside of London is often a complete joke in the UK. I switched to cycling after getting pissed off at a bus that came once every hour and a half, was often 30-40 minutes late and occasionally didn't bother to turn up at all.
Whenever the discussion of commuting comes up, the discussion revolves around worst case scenarios.
We are software engineers! There is no reason for us to put up with a worst case or even an average case commute. If we want to go into the office, it's easy for us to move house or move job.
Its not worth agonizing over a few bucks an hour, especially when going into the office has its own monetary benefits as OP mentioned. It would be a non-issue for most people here to just pay for an Uber back and forth to work, and not have to worry about driving at all.
Live close to work? No! Move further away so you can create more emissions travelling there and have a bigger house to heat/cool. Then complain when politicians don't put your needs over the quality of life of the people who actually live and pay tax on your route. Finally, sleep soundly at night knowing the brake dust you make them breathe comes from a Tesla.
> Whenever the discussion of commuting comes up, the discussion revolves around worst case scenarios.
The median and average commutes are not the worst case scenarios.
> Its not worth agonizing over a few bucks an hour
10% of a software engineer's yearly salary is nothing to balk at. A year or two of that is easily the down payment amount for a modest home, and is more than what many people make in a year.
> It would be a non-issue for most people here to just pay for an Uber back and forth to work, and not have to worry about driving at all.
I just checked Uber, and a one way trip to my last employer is $40 without surge pricing, and to another employer, it would be over $60. Assuming there's about 260 work days per year, that's at least $20k - $31k a year on Uber rides alone.
And it's not just about cost. It's also about time. Based on my last commute, I'd spend about two weeks straight just driving to work and back each year.
You maybe did it for a larger house. Or maybe for cheaper rent/mortgage.
We're not talking here about folks on minimum wage who can only afford to live 2 hours outside of the city they are working in.
The highly paid software engineers on hackernews could absolutely afford to live 5 minutes from the office, 30 minutes from the office, or 2 hours from the office.
They could afford to move to a city with good transit where they can only afford an apartment, or to a city with no transit where they can afford a giant mansion.
Well, for one thing only _one_ of you needs to commute.
Secondly, you can work towards a situation where you don't have that commute, or it's cheap / clean / easy / you don't lose all the time. Spoiler: live on a trainline or buy a bicycle.
Third, I don't believe this is the main reason for commuting. I think it's because people want to live in one place and work in another, which is usually a bad idea - especially for the environment. It irks me when I choose to live reasonably close to work so I don't need to burn fossil fuels to get there, and then people driving their cars to and from some village complain about their commute whilst I have to suffer the air pollution from their vehicles.
I totally get that for some transitional periods a long commute may be required, but I don't know a single person who couldn't make their commute a 20min walk or by public transport if they moved or switched jobs.
> people want to live in one place and work in another, which is usually a bad idea
do you suggest moving every time you change jobs? I suppose that can be done as a single person or a couple, but moving homes every 4-6 years with children who have to change schools, etc is (I'm sorry) an insane proposition.
> Secondly, you can work towards a situation where you don't have that commute, or it's cheap / clean / easy / you don't lose all the time. Spoiler: live on a trainline or buy a bicycle.
Does "commuting" only mean "driving in a privately owned car" where you are based? I'd consider travelling by rail, bus or bicycle to also be commuting.
Depends, often commuting is seen as this long, arduous thing to get to work. When I was going to the office, it was a 15 minute bike ride along canals. Technically a commute, but it doesn't feel like it, and it doesn't take a significant amount of my day. Really, it's a nice small amount of being outside and getting a little exercise and was kinda relaxing, so a net positive.
Which generation doesn't have a choice? I'm a millenial and don't understand if this generalization is at me, genx, boomers or those damn new kids the zoomers. When I bought a house I was able to buy anything that was on sale and fit my budget except for retirement communities with a 55+ age restriction
That's just bulls... People have a live besides work. Kids, family, spouses, hobbies, ... a lot of things have an influence where people can realistically live.
And furthermore, even if everyone was that free-roaming, only-working, highly-paid software developer you seem to consider average, still there wouldn't be enough living space really close to many offices for all employees.
I think their calculations are based on 24 hour days (1 hour roundtrip * 260 days). Vacations and work are based on 8 hour days, however, so in reality it's more like 30 days (6 weeks) of vacation time. And 30 minutes each way is much closer than most of the places I've worked.
> The average commuter in one of the largest metro areas in the country will spend over 13 full days commuting a year:
This might be technically correct. But realistically I'd count only working hours. 200 working days and roughly 2 hr commute for me a day. So it is about 400 hr commute to work/home i.e ~50 work days spent in commute.
That's one reason why I left Seattle. I was commuting 4 days/week, with a 1hr 15min commute in both directions, so I was spending 21.66 days a year in the car. Why so long? Affordable housing, of course.
I took a small pay cut, moved the east coast and now spend 24 minutes a day commuting, which is infinitely better.
> For those of us who have to commute, it's not exactly the norm to be saving money while commuting
This is true. I choose to live within walking distance of my office, and it has vastly improved my life - prior to this job, I commuted 2.5 hours a day, and that was awful.
These choices of course have complex tradeoffs, but you don't have to commute, it is a choice.
I feel like this borders on the kind of insensitive comment that people get when they live paycheck to paycheck. Why don't you just save your money for a month? Why don't you just buy nicer shoes so you don't have to replace them every other month?
I feel like the trade off isn't that complex. Walking to work is a luxury of having a well paying job in the city.
You're not wrong, but you are discussing this in community full of largely well paid professionals. The majority of is have the financial ability to live within walking/cycling distance of the office, even if we choose not to.
> These choices of course have complex tradeoffs, but you don't have to commute, it is a choice.
I have to live near disabled family members so I can help take care of them. It's either work at Walmart, commute or work remotely. I've done the latter for years, but before the pandemic, most non-remote-first employers' attitudes towards remote working was either simply "no", or there was the expectation that you were to spend a year or more working in the office before asking your employer to make a special case for you to work remotely.
I commute at least 2 hours each day I go to the office. If the MTA is running smoothly. I would estimate I spend closer to 20 days commuting each year. Plus $1,800, which pales in comparison to the TVM of hundreds of hours commuting.
I thought I would like commuting as I’d find time to read more, but commuting during rush out to and from work is the absolute worse. I don’t even have space to open a book. And the metros in Paris are every 2 minutes so you couldn’t safely increase this rate. And obviously you couldn’t really make the metros longer (you could first fill a half and then a second half, but come on, let’s be realistic here).
If everyone remote worked half the week, I’d expect the metros to be half as full during rush hours. So it’s be a lot more enjoyable for everyone: space to sit and space to read a book.
I think the best of both worlds would be working at the office on average 2 to 3 days a week (on average; so I’d like to be able to work remotely for a week or two at a time).
This would also allow couples to alternate being home which would be nice for kids. If both parents work late at the office, who takes care of the kids, a nanny ? Expensive and doesn’t help the proximity between parents and their kids. My girlfriends mom stopped working when her kids started calling their nanny « mom ». That means that her career stopped. And that scares my girlfriend.
Finally, remote working would reduce traffic jams and hence help with our whole global warming situation.
So the 5 day at the office work week for everyone is:
- not hygienic (metros more packed == greater chance of spreading the common cold, flu, stomachs etc == more money spend on healthcare == more sick leaves)
- not green (why travel everyday when we do not have to)
- not family friendly (who takes care of the kids when no one’s at home 60 hours a week?)
- wastes everyone’s time (stand still doing nothing in the metro for an hour to work and back).
I’m all for the partial work at the office for the reasons mentioned by the grandparent comment, but go to hell companies that will bring the five days at the office back !!
I work so I can draw a salary to fund my life. That's it. I don't care about constantly climbing a ladder. I don't care about advancing my career for the sake of advancing my career. I just want to enjoy my life, and working for a living is just my means to that end. If I'm making enough to be comfortable, I don't care about chasing a promotion or getting ahead of people. I can't think of a single thing I care about less than having a competitive advantage over other people in the Game of Offices.
Being forced to spend 8 hours a day outside my home makes me actively uncomfortable. I'm autistic, partially faceblind (I used to think I can tell people's faces apart... but then a coworker will shave their head and it turns out I'm completely incapable of recognizing them... turns out I mostly just recognize hair), have difficulty looking people in the eye, and have a litany of sensory issues. Face-to-face interaction gives me zero benefit, and being able to work while wearing a rayon nightgown and rayon pajama pants means I'm actually able to focus on my work instead of focusing on how my clothes feel.
My company has a diversity and inclusion committee—I am on the diversity and inclusion committee—and there has not been a single discussion of how forcing people back to the office is actively harmful to autistic employees who can't benefit from face-to-face interaction and have sensory issues that make offices uncomfortable. It is absolutely hypocritical for companies to say they care about diversity and inclusion while shafting autistic employees like this.
Just had this conversation with my parents today. They asked why is working from home so wonderful?
The number one reason I had was, because everyone can just be them, it's a lot different than in the office.
The job can and should be a lot more inclusive and diverse when you're working in your own space -- home office, cafe, etc. You find what works for you, without having to worry about messing with someone else's flow in the next cubicle or being interrupted in your own flow by someone that always needs to escape their own work. Someone that wants to do something distracting can, without annoying others, everything is on your own terms, even if you have to take care of other family members.
With audio only you're just another human, not to be judged on appearance or malformation or what have you; which opens barriers that are presented in the office all the time, hell, it might even scare your interviewers from giving you the job in the first place! Either people can be cruel or incessantly think you're helpless.
I've noticed over the last year, those colleagues that are more introverted sometimes have a better go of presenting how they think online. When sharing their screens they're able to show more of their presentation skills, a lot more chances to present in a way they've developed overtime. And not more opportunities, it's probably the first opportunity they've had to shine than if it they were in an office; it doesn't happen.
In my opinion, I feel like those that are people-people will always get ahead in an office setting versus those that think a bit differently, look a bit differently, dress or act a bit differently, and this makes it a more level playing field for the latter.
I think this is yet to be determined, but even if you're right, it still promotes a different kind of inequality. Remote work is strongly biased in favor of those with the resources to have a nice, distraction-free office setup at home, and towards those who are already established in their careers.
How can you stay in the office if you don't have after school child care?
If you WFH and have a child >5yo you're likey to be able to spend a few hours working with them at home. You can take a regular break and pick them up from school. With more than one it is more difficult. But in either case, how do you manage to stay in the office without after school childcare?
I'm speaking as a parent who has exactly the same job as my partner. If neither of us were WFH, we would be unable to get by without after school support. With both of us WFH, we can trade pickup and childcare responsibilities. It's way more flexible and completely the opposite of what you're arguing.
This is a weird take. I spend a year almost exclusively raising my son because my wife was studying to be a sub-specialist on another city and she only had a full weekend once a month. The first thing I did once we had a plan, was to negotiate partial home-office, because even if I could have after school child care, I certainly was not for it. Two months in, the partial home office became full home office because even the commute could throw a wrench on my tight schedule.
Based on my experience, raising a kid on your own is difficult, and without home office would have been even worse.
> Not to mention how [wfh] advantages people who can afford after school child care.
What? Surely if anything it's the opposite - if you can't afford it wfh allows you to be at home to 'multi-task', what're you going to do if you're supposed to be in the office?
If your kids are relatively older and self-sufficient, working from home is an advantage because you DON'T need to afford after school child-care.
If you are in an office, and you need to commute, of course you're going to need it.
On the contrary, if you are a single mom, you'd see that remote work is a blessing.
Childcare can still be used with wfh post pandemic. And having a parent at home benefits both children and parents. It’s not a great thing that we’ve ended up in a situation where children are raised by strangers in day-care. I think WFH is great for parenting in general - it may not be the best for worker efficiency and lack of distractions (although that can be argued) but it is good for children and I think most parents would pick their kids over the office.
> I work so I can draw a salary to fund my life. That's it. I don't care about constantly climbing a ladder. I don't care about advancing my career for the sake of advancing my career. I just want to enjoy my life, and working for a living is just my means to that end. If I'm making enough to be comfortable, I don't care about chasing a promotion or getting ahead of people. I can't think of a single thing I care about less than having a competitive advantage over other people in the Game of Offices.
I’ve made the mistake of saying that out loud during pre-pandemic lunch conversations and happy hours and every time people looked at me like I had two heads.
I think it's a perfectly healthy and normal attitude to have, but the thing is that it's only your perspective as the employee, and to avoid being short sighted and irresponsible, you have to also to some extent consider the perspective of the company as well.
I mean, in the extension if nobody cares a single f about being competitive, then maybe your whole company doesn't care about being competitive either, and oopsies some other company cared a bit more and now you don't have any jobs anymore...
As long as you are enjoying yourself it’s fine right? I enjoyed that for a while too, but just developing became boring, so now I’m also trying to play office politics. Not in the sense of some machiavellan scheme, but previously I’d just utterly ignore it.
Office politics can be amusing if you’re able to step away from it a bit and don’t care too much about the rat race. It’s immediately obvious who are the folks genuinely interested in building value and who are drones interpreting what their managers order them to do.
Eventually someone has to do the lowly business of actually implementing the value that those 10x ninja fullstack super senior software architects just created. God bless the drones.
It's a self-inflicted problem. They shouldn't have promoted those 10x ninja superstars out of development and into management roles (and apparently, "principal engineer" and even "senior engineer" is frequently just faux-management - all the responsibilities, none of the authority of a real manager).
I find it ironic that our industry trains up developers until the point they finally become competent at their jobs, and immediately force them to manage new breed of trainees instead of doing the work they're good at.
That’s because diversity and inclusion pretty much means “blacks” and “women” fullstop.
I was recently hiring a developer and my massive media company insisted I ensure my recruiter is giving me diverse candidates. I selected an individual who is apparently Spanish Jewish. Some very rare tribe of Jews from Spain. Was that considered diverse? Nope. Needs to be black.
I fully relate to this. Years ago I worked for a Canadian subsidiary of a US company doing work with the US government. On a (illegal in Canada) US government form I accurately marked down that my "Protected Origin Class". I am 50% African and 50% Asian, as a Moroccan-Jewish, Israeli.
We were audited. The American auditor was flabbergasted by my values on the form. He literally told me that as a (visible, brown) Jew, I couldn't possibly mark those things down. I had to resort to pulling out maps and asking if Morocco was in Africa and Israel was in Asia. He was flummoxed by my refusal to mark down "white" when a) I'm not white, and b) his form offered me the ability to mark down what I am. Pointing out that percentage-wise as Jew, I was less than 0.006% of Canada's population also didn't make me a minority apparently.
That was the last time I ever assumed that minority is supposed to mean anything other than the tokenized narrative of the time.
Huh, so its not only me. My grandparents came from Libya in the late 1950's, but for some reason the very north of Africa doesn't quite qualify for most people as African "enough" for me to be of African descent. Feels like for many people the benchmark is either skin color or not coming from a traditionally Arab country. A similar thing happens to acquaintances of mine of Tunisian or Algerian descent.
I guess the geographical line is somewhere around Mauritania
You're correct. The point is that for NA that common descent is Arab not African. I know that's not completely true but in the context of the crude racial classification system the US uses it is. According to the US government you're white:
>White. A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. It includes people who indicate their race as "White" or report entries such as Irish, German, Italian, Lebanese, Arab, Moroccan, or Caucasian.
Ethnic groups are a distinct concept from racial groups. Ethnicity has more to do with culture and society versus race, which is largely about appearance and, to an extent, geographical provenance.
I feel you. Been in similar situations. Cape Verdean father (black skin tone), and a Jewish (she didn't have a bat mitzvah I didn't have a bar mitzvah, we're not religious) and Irish mother produced me, an ethnically ambiguous person with multiple passing complexions.
Skin tone is olive-tan, get pretty dark in the summer (if I stay out, but usually indoors working on something), eyes are almond shaped. I've had/get people coming up to me on the street asking questions in Spanish often, Tagalog and a few other South East Asian languages not as frequently, Russian, have Hasidic kids coming up asking me if I'm Jewish so they can try and drag me off to their Winnebago of a mitzvah tank. Once had some guy approach me speaking German with a beer in his hand and after realizing I don't speak German said, "Oh sorry, you look German" (whatever that means) and then I warned him of open container and the precinct up the block. Most assume I'm just a white guy who is either Italian or Jewish (might have to do with being from/living in the Northeast US idk).
I don't like talking about my ethnicities because I just don't care, but when it's brought up in the context of someone saying, "black people do this" or "okay white boy", I get offended because to me it's primitive and, excuse my language, retarded. Those things are usually said by those who don't know my ethnic background (not that it should matter), and when I call out the ignorance behind the statements made and that doesn't come across, I explain my ethnic background, which usually results in "what's a cape verdean?" or "what!? You're black too?". And if that doesn't come across, I'll flash a photo of me with my grandmother or father and they stfu.
This is going on a tangent, but to your point, I believe that having marked off african/black and caucasian or "two or more races" on my job applications has positively impacted my response rates in the past, but has also lead to negative results post-interview once seeing me and not believing that I am in fact Cape Verdean. I dont have empirical evidence, but having the technical capabilities and drive required for the jobs, after taking and passing test after test with well known organizations, having interviewers emphasize "inclusion and diversity", and having many interviews that left me feeling "wow that went awesome. Totally got this" (I'm more of a realist. If it sucked, it sucked), only to get a rejection, I've come to the assumption that there's got to be at least some percentage of rejections where the potential employer thought "he's lying... he doesn't look black".
The whole corporate "inclusion/diversity" thing here in the states is a fucking joke. My older brother, who's darker and a little less ethnically ambiguous, has commented on his experiences, which are relatable to a degree, saying he "was always too light for the blacks, and too dark for the whites"
Exactly this! In Germany it is women + openly gay + women wearing headscarfs.
I was recently invited to a candidate selection process with senior managers and HR. There was one guy who was autistic, but talented and good. He was "weird" by normal standards, but scored very well in all interviews and calls.
Long story short, he was considered the "best", but "weird". We hired a less qualified woman wearing a headscarf and the position was then "adjusted" to be more innovation/marketing foused and less hard tech focused.
I tried to convince them to take the autistic dude and also argued with diversity, but was told that "he is just strange and will not fit in" and finally overruled.
I actually had a manager at a company openly say they were having trouble finding an intern as they only wanted a minority. I ended up waiting for months.
Because to be anti-racist you need to implement present discrimination to make up for past discrimination. It’s in their literature and literally a tenant in Kendi’s popular book “How to be an Anti-Racist” that countless diversity councils in corporations suggested their employees read during last years moral panic.
Anti-Racism is a hard concept for me to grasp. When I was growing up we were taught to judge everyone by the content of their character. To me it made sense, why care about what people look like if they are good people. But now that view is considered racist and judging people by what they look like is "back in style" so to speak.
most actions the majority of corps take when it comes to "diversity" are purely performative. Diversity is important and more people should care about it, but what constitutes as "diverse" in the corporate environment is only what looks good on the outside and has a minimal (perceived) impact on the bottom line.
A good example is exactly what is going on now: multinationals all temporarily slapping a rainbow on products to take advantage of a movement (like Raytheon. wtf... https://twitter.com/RaytheonTech)
Not that I agree with those mandates too much, but I can see the logic: A group needs to have a story of oppression in your local community to be considered for that. Diversity is a somewhat misleading word here, the aim is equality for historically disfavored groups.
The aim for it is "equality of outcomes" without merit or actual achievement and that's all. Of course only in certain, sought after, select things. And of course these policies won't stop after we have achieved "equality" if current college admissions and graduation trends are any indication (women represent 60% now, yet nobody says we need to discontinue programs designed to ensure success for them or that we should address the problem of men falling behind - in fact we blame men for it).
It's why Asian's are beginning to wake up to this as they've, as a group, been "too successful" and are seeing ever meritocratic device they've used to lift themselves up dismantled and replaced with lotteries, etc that ensure equal outcomes (even they won't).
>I am on the diversity and inclusion committee—and there has not been a single discussion of how forcing people back to the office is actively harmful to autistic employees...
Do committee members not have the ability to raise issues? I'd have thought that would be why they would want people like you on the committee, so that you can raise and talk about issues like this.
Yo, start that discussion! I’m autistic, and while I can benefit from face to face, I often don’t. I don’t work for your company but I know I’m depending on you to work with and for your colleagues and to help set an example.
> I don't care about constantly climbing a ladder.
I empathize with this but many organizations are, essentially "up or out". You are either seen as growing and rising through the ranks or as awaiting some sort of release.
I hope you are so good at what you do that you could easily find another job, but that is not a given for most people. So they feel compelled to play the games you are dismissing.
I can empathise with your experience, as someone who is either just inside or outside of Asperger's.
If you're on the diversity and inclusion committee and no one is challenging the return to the office, can't you? Or is this purely a reactionary, advisory committee?
I have the same view of work but have the opposite view of being in the office. The small friendships and camaraderie make the work a lot more enjoyable for me.
Hopefully coming out of this there'll be a mix of companies. Some fully remote for people like yourself and some mostly in the office for folk like me.
This. I work because I need the money. Period. I love my craft and I practice it every day on my own terms and as little or as much as I want... but offering my skills to others just happens because I get paid.
aside from the autism reasons (although I definitely empathize as my wife is on the spectrum) you took the words right out of my mouth. I don't care about anything other than funding my lifestyle. Been remote for 5+ years and will never go back. I enjoy my job and I like to socialize with people I work with in person occasionally and play some ping pong, but nothing about working in an office is worth the trade-off.
Oh my god you are so right. It’s somewhat unfathomable that companies were able to see that remote work actually works and yet insist on going back even for people for whom wfh is essential to their well being.
Since starting to work remote I've discovered the power of shutting down the work laptop (not sleeping) at a set time and not looking back. No Slack or work email on the phone.
When I look back on hallway conversations, I can't think of many that really mattered. Actual important decisions are typically not made by IC engineers. Relevant conversations are usually inside team structures and not spontaneous.
> When I look back on hallway conversations, I can't think of many that really mattered. Actual important decisions are typically not made by IC engineers
Not that I’m itching to get back in an office (I’ve been remote most of my career), but this really depends on the environment. I’ve seen some really pivotal changes happen simply because someone happened to yak about it, or overheard such a yak and jumped in.
Usually these changes have been mostly technical in nature and under the purview of the engineers. But sometimes they’ve significantly changed product direction.
Depends on the company. In my case, all transforming ideas I had and were able to later push successfully were a result of hallway/lunch conversations with coworkers from other teams. It gave me ability to see a lot of problems through their eyes, that informed my decisions.
> Since starting to work remote I've discovered the power of shutting down the work laptop (not sleeping) at a set time and not looking back. No Slack or work email on the phone.
What!?!? I don't necessarily agree with OP, but this is the exact opposite of my experience (mostly observing others). One of the main downsides of WFH is the "always on" nature of it.
I usually left my laptop at work, and ignored my phone before (after all I'm not at work). Now you're always set up to work, so there's no reason you can't respond at 8PM. I don't, but many of my colleagues do.
Most of my coworkers, especially the ones that would be leaving early for work life balance reasons, work all hours, and I get randomly pinged at 5:30-8 by people that would just be done for the day. They don't need to commute, so they have less pressure about working at odd times, and want to show managers the advantages of the WFH thing, so it won't go away.
For me, it may look like I work longer hours than before, but I find my work hours less concentrated. I usually try to log on by 9am and will find myself finishing up between 6pm and 8pm depending on the day. But I often step away a number of times throughout the day for various reasons (no kids, but I assume those with kids have even more reasons for taking a few minutes here and there away from work). It also allows me to do something else during low-energy periods rather than trying to force myself to work (I've even rarely tried naps, although it never works well for me).
The effect is that it leads to a "longer" work day, but less concentrated than it would have been in the office. And similar productivity, IMO. I wonder if some of your co-workers you describe may do the same. In some ways, I feel like it's better work-life balance for some people as it's "ok" (in some work cultures) for WFH employees to take the time as they need it. And others are equally fine ensuring their work time is as concentrated as possible because they have other things they would rather do in evenings, etc.
I totally understand and agree, but that's different from being "easy" to do a hard cutoff. Leaving your laptop at work is a hard cutoff. Asking around, people are feeling less barriers between them and their work, and that leads to more of an "always on behavior". I've seen that in my colleagues and people from other companies have reported the same.
The parent you responded to is suggesting that hard-shutdowns at a certain time are a way to help prevent that. Shut it down at a set time and don't turn it back on until later.
You won't be as tempted to just pop in for a few minutes of work here or there to respond to some chats or emails.
How do you get randomly pinged outside working hours? Is Slack on your personal phone? If so, delete it. Keep your work emails closed (and not on your personal phone). Use a separate browser profile for work/personal if you are working on your personal laptop.
I sympathise with people finding it hard to switch off (I was one until I did all of the above) but it's a simple problem to solve and it's absolutely nothing to do with WFH.
> I often do/did paired programming, and over-the-shoulder code reviews. These are easier in person
I’m sure I’m not the only person who has the exact opposite experience with this. I can’t think and get mentally blocked when I have someone peering over my shoulder or I’m staring at their screen. I find this kind of collaboration so much easier if I’m in the comfort of my own desktop setup, sharing the screen over Teams/Skype whatever and communicating verbally over a quality headset.
I think this has to do with seniority. When I was a lot more experienced than my coworker, doing pair programming was insanely fun. Because it felt like solving a puzzle with a friend, or exploring a video game with my sister. Now I'm occasionally pair programming with my manager -- who's like a 1000x me -- pair programming is mentally blocking. It's because my peer thinks so much faster than I do that it feels like I'm watching an action movie on 10x speed except every 3 minutes someone pauses the movie and asks questions.
EDIT: To make myself clear, this is not a criticism of my boss, it's just that pair programming with someone who is a lot more experienced than you is just naturally intimidating.
No. At least in my case it has nothing to do with disparity in experience or speed of thought and everything to do with being in my own physical space.
I’ve been in both positions and know the feeling! Whenever I pair with someone now, I usually try and slow things down in the beginning and ask questions along the way to see if they follow me, even if I think what I’m doing is ‘simple’. No point in pairing if the other persons eyes are glazing over :)
This is great, and also good to encourage with people who are more junior. They might think they’ve explained the thing from their understanding but it’s trivial to omit details in that position too.
I’m by no means junior but I’m new on a team, and I’ve had to remember over and over that the giant blob of the state of everything is unfamiliar to me, familiar to my team, and when I elide details I’m not saving anyone any time because I’m not sure whether those details are relevant or even if they might reveal where I’m off track.
I get this a lot as well. Just as soon as you are about to say something, or start typing. Just as the idea is coalescing in your mind, as you are walking down the path of understanding.
From over your shoulder: "Then do this thing cos of this this and this" - yes thank you I know. Eventually I feel downcast and just stop thinking for myself, I'm just a typer at that point.
I find this very interesting, because I'm in a similar boat, pretty senior, but not the top of the ladder. But for me some of my favorite pair programming sessions are with people who are operating on another level. It really gets the brain juices going.
You’re not the only one, and contrary to sibling commenter’s experience it hasn’t had anything to do with seniority for me.
Caveat: I’m ADHD/ASD. I find it hard to focus on multiple
sensory subjects at once. Pairing in an office means I’m focused on the screen; the human’s body language; the human’s verbal communication; interaction around concepts, design, mechanical stuff like what actually gets read/written/executed; a second screen because sometimes it’s more effective to computer for a second than engage all of that. Remote pairing condenses a lot of that.
Pair programming is way faster with screen share & multiplr monitors. One of you has the dominant screen with "the task" and you can both discuss it whilst doing indirect things on your own monitors, and throwing them to the share when they are relevant.
Over the shoulder pairing has a lot of "do this", "search that". Shared has a lot more of "can you work out x whilst I check y" and "this is the result of y, I'm interpreting that as z. Should we do a?".
Try VS Code &/or Visual Studio Live Share or a similar feature on another editor.
In my opinion it's a much better programming experience than having your laptop and sitting next to someone so that you can each look over at each other's screen.
Also by mid afternoon you might not want to sit physically that close to someone.
if you use an ide that supports it, then having an independent cursor, pointer and screen marker is infinitely better than sitting awkwardly aside and pointing finger. That and having your own IDE and browser to perform code search or testing in parallel.
I'd use vscode live share even in the office, which begs the question what even is the role of the office in facilitating pair programming
This is what most of the newcomers to WFH don't understand:
There is a big different between WFH for a few months where EVERYONE else is also WFH ... and WFH for YEARS where some, or most, of the others are in office.
The latter is years upon years of feeling disconnected, left out, and sidelined. The vast majority of companies even if they allow remote are not remote first. Remote first involves actual structural and procedural changes.
Lastly, WFH for years can result in a serious mental health decline. If you think you're doing fine after 1 year, come see me after 5. You'll realize by the end of it just how important water cooler conversation is for your BRAIN. You'll recognize just how bad it can be to see (as a function of your time alive) MOSTLY just your home. It does a number on you.
> Lastly, WFH for years can result in a serious mental health decline. If you think you're doing fine after 1 year, come see me after 5. You'll realize by the end of it just how important water cooler conversation is for your BRAIN. You'll recognize just how bad it can be to see (as a function of your time alive) MOSTLY just your home. It does a number on you.
This is just down to nothing more then poor discipline and lazily wanting an office to fill the gap for you. I have been working from home for 9 years now, 5 days a week. You know how I solve the issue, I go outside. I go and run. I take my dogs out for a walk. I also meet with friends to eat / drink coffee. I look after myself. The time I save commuting means I can do things like cook myself a proper lunch, go and have a nap if I did not sleep great the night before. I have much more freedom to balance my life. I agree though, if I sit at my desk all day inside and then stop work to go and sit on the couch and watch Netflix, sure it's going to be detrimental to my mental health.
Surely if they have crippling social anxiety, being stuck in an office all day with others where they are expected to socialise no matter how bad their anxiety might be playing up on any given day, is far worse?
Also the only social part I referenced was coffee with close friends. I think drinking a coffee with an understanding friend(s) is much easier then being around 20+ colleagues for 8 hours straight.
Depends on the person. I am generally fine in a "being stuck in the office all day" situation, but get anxiety trying to setup plans for social interactions, even with really close friends. Even just coffee. Also, 1 on 1 situations tend to cause me more anxiety that groups/crowds.
Point being, everyone is different in this regard.
I cannot speak to what is easier or not. I was simply pointing out that you were laying down a blanket assertion that it was lazy and undisciplined, and that might not be universally appreciated.
Just because someone has extreme social anxiety doesn't mean they permanently refuse to take action. Sometimes they succeed in actively overcoming it and are capable of forming connections. Being in an environment where you can passively observe the character of others does tend to make it easier to approach them on the days when you're feeling up to it. A person might choose to work in an office because they understand this benefit of consistent forced exposure.
I’m on year five and I LOVE it - I never want to go back to an office, sure, maybe it’s better for the company but you know what’s better for me? WFH. I have more time for myself and to see family and friends, I co work with friends, and instead of commuting j make meals and I work with my cats all day long.
Maybe you like the office more and can’t make wfh work, not everyone can! But don’t assume everyone else is like you
I always thought I would be a sure-fit for permanent WFH, but your comment absolutely nails it. My biggest problem is that a large proportion of interactions with remote work is formal, in a sense. No casual chat, no social “grease”. If you started a remote-only job in a pandemic, it is so easy to become disconnected, and disincentivized with colleagues that only exist in 2D asking for PR reviews. Really did a number on me.
Maybe that’s a touch too specific. But Igor me, it’s a lot easier to strike up a rapport on a walk to get coffee than scheduling a 30 min quarantini, a word I have grown to detest
Ah. While my company does have a semi-daily "30 minute meetup" on "random topic of the day", that's not how I chat socially with coworkers. We have a few channels that are just "shoot the shit" channels. I us those to discuss random topics. And there's several private channels for the occasional need to rant. Overall, not all that different from the water cooler.
> WFH for years can result in a serious mental health decline. If you think you're doing fine after 1 year, come see me after 5. You'll realize by the end of it just how important water cooler conversation is for your BRAIN
I've worked from home 100%, worked from an office 100%, and worked a combination. Overall, I think the combination is best. However, having put in somewhere on the order of 15 years fully remote, it has not caused any problems for me. I chat with people via IM, including both purely social and problem solving discussions. I've been on teams where everyone was remote and ones where I was the only remote, and in areas in between.
Overall, working remotely is good for some people and not for others; much like every other arrange. It takes skill and effort to get good at, just as in person social interactions do. Some companies make it easier than others.
It's a complicated topic, and I really don't think it's possible to say "it's good" or "it's bad", only "it depends".
4 years in, no issues. Probably better than ever. Not everyone is an extrovert, talking daily over audio to several people is fine for me. Sometimes we'll meet up for particularly hard problems to brain storm but otherwise, I'm good behind a screen. I think extroverts think everyone needs that face time, but no, we really don't. I'm fine with seeing my friends and family, my co-workers just aren't that special to me.
Depends on your character, stage of your life and priorities. It looks way different when you’re young, outgoing single person. Vs when you’re older, with a family (and tons of obligations) and introverted. Work is then often a place where you socialize and take a break from all the other stuff happening in your life.
Sure, but work is still a significant portion of ones waking hours. Personally, I wouldn't want to work in a place where I can't or don't enjoy socializing with co-workers. I hope, what comes out of this pandemic is, that there is going to be higher diversity in work modalities one can make part of a job seeking decision.
> Surely there are other reasons to leave your home than work and other people to socialize with in person than co-workers.
I wouldn't be surprised if people who don't have local family or established friends in the area and live in cities where talking to strangers is considered threatening behavior tend to socialize primarily, if not exclusively, with co-workers.
Well it appears to have done a number on you but myself and many others really enjoy it and would never go back to an office. Not sure I’d assume my own experience should speak for everyone else’s. But I run a remote first team and have worked remote for decades, with great success and no mental issues.
hi. Been completely remote for 5+ years. My mental is better than ever.
> You'll realize by the end of it just how important water cooler conversation is for your BRAIN
I would much rather use all the saved time NOT going to an office and instead spend it with people I care about more having more interesting conversations in a more comfortable environment.
> The latter is years upon years of feeling disconnected, left out, and sidelined.
I empathize with some of the isolation that WFH can bring, but I also strongly disagree that it is an inevitability. WFH gives you more freedom with your time and doesn't force you into social interaction by default which, depending on the person, can be a good or a bad thing.
I think it just highlights the importance of CONCIOUSLY choosing our social interactions which might take more effort but I think results in higher satisfaction. You could look at it like junk food vs. nutritious food. One is convenient, leaves you wanting more, and is probably not as healthy if that's all you take in. The other fills you up more, sometimes takes a bit more work, and ends up being more sustainable long term.
This is really subjective. I dislike water cooler talk. I dislike overhearing conversations. I dislike people interrupting me with something that could have been a message.
This year WFH have been a significant mental health improvement. I am more social outside of work and I am more productive during work.
This is exactly my experience. I am the only one in my team working in another city and this is just ridiculous how many times I am feeling exactly these feelings (disconnected, left out, and sidelined).
I am dealing with an insane amount of issues that would have never happened if everyone was in the same office.
It really depends on the culture of the company and the team, and it appears that mine has not managed to change enough (whatever they claim).
Yeah, fully agree. I worked at a fully remote company and it self-selects for the kind of person who enjoys being alone. It completely sucks as we are social creatures who enjoy the extra physical connection/camaraderie that is impossible to achieve with remote work.
You are speaking about your personal experience. You never wanted to work remotely, you never prepared for it and as a result it has been a traumatic experience for you.
On the other hand there is people out there, like me, that have been improving and refining remote working skills from decades.
When I traveled to former Soviet Republics it shocked me how helpless old people felt doing the most basic things. As young people they were trained to delegate everything on the State. The State did a very bad job almost at everything but there was no alternative, so they never developed the skills .
When they were old,it is difficult to learn anything new and they had not the necessary skills to survive on their own and were nostalgic about communism.
That made me realize that most schools and Universities and jobs just train you to obey orders and do not leave space for resourcefulness and independence.
it's about having the option isn't it, you should not be forced into either way. Going to the office 1 per month for that buzz is fine by me. Some people needs more. No one size fits all.
> * I had a stronger work/life separation. I rarely turned on my work laptop at home.
This is imho the worst part of WFH. Some people come to work at 6:00 and go home at 14:00, some come at 10:00 and leave at 18:00, and some even later. If you're in an office, the latecomer can just check the early birds office, "oh, you're here, can we ..." / "he's not here anymore, this will wait 'till tomorrow". With WFH it's constant emails and work calls, and for a lot of people it's hard to separate work/home, turn the work phone off (especially in small companies, where before the plague, if someone called you in the afternoon, it usually meant something horrible has happened).
The second thing i'd miss is all the non-work activities that happen at work, from random chatter, to lunch, practical jokes, etc. Also when dealing with clients, the after-meeting-beer usually solved a lot of problems with a lot of one-on-one chats, and informal talks about rwhat the issues are,... this is hard to do on zoom/teams/..., especially if there is a higher-up present, and the engineers are afraid to honestly say what's bothering them during day-to-day work.
I guess I wasn't clear, I work on the east coast of the US but having EU employees means people are used to some of their coworkers not being available all the time.
I worked on a project for a big Korean company that required me to work onsite with a team in Dusseldorf. I happened to be there over Easter weekend and the project was behind. I inquired as to when we would meet up to keep working, and they told me the office would be closed, so naturally I asked what coffee shop/cafe/space or whatever we'd work at instead.
The team there was shocked and maybe offended even, and I was informed it was verboten to work any of the next 3 days.
Differences in work cultures globally are staggering.
Kinda interesting how “going the extra mile” in the US is viewed as ineptitude in either planning or execution in Germany. Also how the phrase “this is unacceptable” is used very differently in the same places.
I can't speak to Germany, but in some places it's not legal to have you work over public holidays as the company would have to pay you extra plus giving you leave to make up for it. If they don't want to do that, you aren't allowed to work.
Everywhere I've lived and worked (only two countries, tbf), the idea of working on a holiday weekend is just ... not considered, outside of being on call and getting paid extra for it or similar.
Would you be equally shocked if this was Thanksgiving in the US or Chinese New Year in China?
In my experience it really depends on the individual, team, and company just how strict people are with not working unscheduled overtime on national holidays to crunch a release or not.
But assuming that it will happen, that's a first for me.
I’d say that’s a company culture thing, not a German thing. I lived and worked in Austria and my teams in Austria and Germany were both willing to work extra and on holidays when needed.
That's definitely uncommon in Europe to work on weekends/holidays/vacation. It's quite frowned upon, and for good reason IMO. Work life balance is important, and there's other stuff to do in life than work.
The unfortunate part of this is that once people start responding to e-mails at 12AM, suddenly everybody is expected to respond at 12AM. It's a race to the bottom when separation from work and home life isn't really mandated.
I've faced this first hand as I switch from one company to another. In my previous place, we enforced a hard limit on when we could be expected to respond, and nobody ever messaged me on slack/ sent me an e-mail after that. At my new place, people are constantly e-mailing and messaging into the small hours of the night. It's tiring to watch.
The expected part is very much a culture thing that doesn't have to happen. My coworkers work all kinds of weird schedules, so there really is no basis to assume that someone will respond at a specific time if you haven't scheduled that with them, and it works just fine. I guess in a place where only a few people deviate that might be trickier to establish.
There are German companies where the email server doesn’t deliver Emails until the next morning. This obviously works best if all are in one time zone, but it’d be amazing if one could set: working from X to Y and emails just stop arriving after Y.
- I hate being distracted by hallway conversations. They're just a way to avoid work for most people.
* I often do/did paired programming, and over-the-shoulder code reviews. These are easier in person
- They are easier to do online imo. There's no need to sit next to each other.
* Having a workforce socially close improves productivity because everyone wants to step up for each other.
- My team has gotten closer to each other during the pandemic than ever before. I think your point is highly subjective.
* Being seen by my fellow employees helps keep me from becoming distracted.
- Sounds like you need to work on that. If you need other people to monitor you to make sure you're doing work...
* Working at the office helps prevent home life from being distracting during work hours.
- Again, probably something you need to work on.
* I save money by spending less on food, drinks, and electricity.
- I think most people spend the same on food and drinks, since companies do not provide it for them. Maybe they even spend less, since they have more time to cook at home. Electricity is negligible for me at least. It's way less than I spend on commuting.
* I enjoy the routine.
- I find it insane.
* I had a stronger work/life separation. I rarely turned on my work laptop at home.
- I'll give you that. But for me personally this has not been a problem at all.
Re: work/life separation, I think a shed at the bottom of the garden is all the separation I need. The fact that I can do some coding, take a short walk to the park, do some gardening, interact with my wife far outweigh wasting my life in an office
The only point that I agree from OP is about stronger work/life separation which I need to work on. My work days drag a bit more while working from home. In the beginning, I was even working during night which I never did when I was working in the office since I left my laptop at work. This was also because I am single and everything was under lockdown. So I didn't know what to do with my time.
WFH has been much better for our lives and I am not looking forward to going back. These are how WFH has benefited us:
The wife: Does chores / cooking and baking while she is just a participant in a meeting. Go for a run before picking up the kid from daycare
Myself: I can drop the kid off at daycare, do chores around the house, do HIIT workout multiple times during the week. Try body hacking like intermittent fasting / prolonged fasting
We take naps to recharge if we are tired. We also go enjoy nature & hike practically every week which is naturally therapeutic.
This is maybe the first relatable comment I’ve come across in here — work kills, the stress of having to be there on time, eating fast food because you don’t have time to cook, no time to exercise because you’re driving an hour a day, all the other things in your life piling up because all you seem to do is drive back and forth to work… I mean people aren’t even getting vaccinated because they’re worried about being able to show up to work the next day.
It’s a dream for a lot of people to just wake up, get a cup of coffee and sit down at their computer, to not have to get out of bed in the middle of the night, plan bowel movements like a military campaign and run around like a maniac all day every day.
>I save money by spending less on food, drinks, and electricity.
Compared to commuting (car+gas) and time-to-commute opportunity costs (to use for personal house tasks, side projects, self health)? I seriously doubt it.
I'm obviously an outlier, but I live an 8 minute (peaceful) bike ride from work. I hate commuting, so I optimized for that for this job, and working from home last year was absolutely a net negative for me. Distracting kids, poor work-life balance, more expensive (AC, food, water, etc).
I think the lesson here is, some companies can be remote-first, some companies can be in-person, and different employees will prefer different environments based on what's going on in their lives and the choices they make.
It should not be the case that one "tribe" should try to impose their preference on the other, which was the case pre-COVID (e.g. almost everyone was forced to be in-person), and I suspect fear of a return to that status quo is what is driving a lot of these discussions.
I don't understand how so many people in this thread are saying they spend more on food while working from home. How is this possible? Does it vary by country? In Australia at least it is orders of magnitude less expensive to prepare food at home purchased from a supermarket than it is to buy food whilst out an about.
Or are these people working for companies that provide food or something. I just don't get it.
> I don't understand how so many people in this thread are saying they spend more on food while working from home. How is this possible?
It's simple. I work at Google, but this answer works for many other companies as well. Prior to COVID I would eat an average of 13 meals per week (and snacks) at the office. Now that I'm eating all of those at home, my grocery bills have shot up.
Not just grocery but also water, electric, gas, and home wear and tear. A lot of aspects of office work I’d previously considered table stakes or perks I now understand are compensation with detectable dollar value.
Also, I’m busy working, so I don’t actually have time to cook my lunch, so it’s either eating something frozen, which is unhealthy and gets old, or get delivery, so that $30 for a meal.
Also, my commute is a fifteen minute walk, because I absolutely optimized for not having to drive anywhere. The only benefit to wfh was seeing my kid more often, but that had its own caveats because it is hugely distracting. So, it’s cheaper and more productive for me to be in the office.
The only reason I’d want to work from home was if I wasn’t actually working, and my bet is many people see it as exactly that.
In my case, and this is admittedly unusual, I drank Huel consistently at work. I then eat a traditional meal (or two ) in the evening. Since WFH I only really have Huel in the morning since the oven is just there and I have cravings. I've also generally eat more due to eating my feelings but that is pandemic specific. I've also spent a lot on coffee shops just to get out the flat.
> Or are these people working for companies that provide food or something.
It's this. Companies started offering food to keep their employees in the office longer. That people here are saying they prefer eating at work due to the cost shows it worked.
For me, going back to the office means going back to eating microwaved leftovers, or spending $15-20 a day on lunch out.
Totaling up gas and mileage and food and tolls, commuting to the office is going to cost me on the order of $500-1000 a month that I'm not spending now. Just the extra time that I'd need to spend getting ready to go to work and then commuting works out to an entire extra work week of time over the course of a month.
On the other hand, where I live the marginal cost of an extra bedroom (to put a home office in) for a city apartment is about $1000 a month. In some higher cost of living cities it will be more.
It’s be cheaper out in the suburbs, but even then it might be another few hundred a month.
I’m surprised that people are talking about things like electricity costs when real estate costs are so much higher.
Absolutely for employees, the biggest (I'd probably argue only real economic downside) is more space if the company is urban and they really want to stay urban. Arguments around electricity are ludicrous and food only applies to a very limited set of companies.
For dinner, the set times provide natural day boundaries with a strong incentive to wrap up by a certain time. During lunch, it may be saving some time that people wouldn't work by doing away with the need to get to and wait for a restaurant (if the company wouldn't provide any cafeteria at all; every place where I worked had one, usually paid and lunch-only though).
I believe that companies provide food because it's a relatively cheap perk providing a lot of value that simply cannot be replicated.
If I have to make my own food, I have to grocery shop, cook, and do dishes, all of this done inefficiently at small scale and out of my own time. At a buffet-style cafeteria, you just walk in, grab food, eat, drop off your dishes, done. The real value isn't the free food. It's the convenience that comes with it.
At the same time, it doesn't cost the company that much. Raw ingredients aren't that expensive, and neither is running a cafeteria if everything is prepared at scale.
Even if you ignore the cost, restaurants (including buffet style ones) can't replicate that convenience: They aren't at a place where you are anyways, and payment adds extra friction. A la carte restaurants are right out because of the wait. And even if the food actually did make people stay longer - I bet that time is made up by not having to do chores to feed yourself.
Hunger is a strong incentive to wrap up. Serving dinner an hour after most people would leave otherwise is an incentive to stay an hour longer. And some people eat dinner and go back to their desks.
>> I live an 8 minute (peaceful) bike ride from work
Well that's where you live now. Average worker changes jobs 12 times in a career. Is your plan to just move 12 times (and pay the costs associated with that)? Or work at the same job for much longer (and pay the costs associated with that)?
One of the benefits of living in a large metro area is the amount of job opportunities, but it you put an 8 minute circle around your residence and only look for jobs within that, that negates those benefits.
If you live in a dense area, it’s not hard to switch jobs, keep a similar commute, and not move. I’ve had 4 jobs over the past 14 years, moved once, and never had a bicycle commute longer than 25 minutes.
If you're going to bring averages into it, the average 18 year old has ~9 moves remaining in their life, meaning that they'd only move an extra 3 times.
I don’t think you’re an outlier. I think online comment sections in general attract people whose preferred communication and socialization style is digital. That’s why at times HN comment sections feel like everyone unanimously agrees that in-person work universally bad.
It’s great that we have more remote work opportunity post COVID, but it was never realistic to expect every company or even most company to abandon in-office work and all of the benefits that come with it. Maintaining a remote team is significantly more management and communication overhead than simply having people in one place.
> Maintaining a remote team is significantly more management and communication overhead than simply having people in one place.
You mean it actually requires management. Office work is easy to manage with butts in seats. I had someone ask me once, if we were remote, how would we know people are working. I asked, how do we know they are working now?
Communication overhead with in person only appears lower. I've been a part of many meetings where people talk in circles, think they make a decision and then a week or 2 later wonder what was talked about. Of course, you might be unique and have a dedicated person who takes copious notes every meeting and sends them around afterwards. Remote pushes written communication as the first step, which I have found to be much better to build ideas from.
One thing that does not work is a company trying to do both. If anyone is remote, then the company needs to be remote first.
No, I mean it requires more management. It’s not about butts in seats, it’s about communicating and keeping people on the same page.
Anecdotally, when shifting to remote work we often saw managers struggle with a tendency to micromanage and check in too frequently with remote employees. I know “butts in seats” is a common trope but in practice it was easier for people to get away with doing nothing at the office because managers assumed that in office meant they were working.
Communication overhead is absolutely higher in remote companies. It sounds more like you were describing a broken company culture that you managed to distance yourself from by going remote, but the culture is still broken.
A team that communicates properly in person will have more overhead to communicate remotely.
> Maintaining a remote team is significantly more management and communication overhead than simply having people in one place.
I’ve managed both types of teams and haven’t found this to be the case at all. In fact, quite the opposite. Asynchronous communication as the norm is a lot less demanding on ICs and managers. In person meetings are rarely an effective use of time or energy.
The issue is that most people who want to be in office want to be in-person. The location is secondary to the fact that you’re with your coworkers in person.
If coworker A prefer digital communication, and coworker B prefers in person communication, then there is no way A and B can both be happy. A can stay at home, and B can go to office, but B is now far from home (commuting) but still over zoom. The only way to not waste people’s time is for All remote, or for A to completely not get their way and get dragged in person.
Why does everyone here just assume that everyone’s commute is as bad as theirs? There are many people in the current working generation that avoided the soul-sucking suburban commute from the start.
Our CISO made a deal with us that we'd wear collared shirts when we need to be on a video call but are free to wear whatever we want otherwise. I keep a polo shirt with the company logo in the closet of my home office for those occasions. Works well. Sometimes I wait until lunch to shower but if I have a video call in the morning, I'll be sure to shower so my hair looks presentable.
> There are many people in the current working generation that avoided the soul-sucking suburban commute from the start.
Very few of those people have kids. Unless you're making L8 comp, raising a few kids within bicycle commute the major tech campuses is financially unobtainable. The cost of a backyard, good schools, and safe streets is astronomical in tier one urban cores.
Is tier one only Silicon Valley? There are plenty of people raising kids with short commutes in the Seattle area; you don’t even need a FANG salary. And Seattle’s still on the high end; people can also live in places like Austin, Portland, Boulder, etc.
And that’s all just in the US. It’s even more obtainable in other countries with better urban planning.
Out of curiosity, have you looked at the housing market in Seattle since the post-pandemic real estate boom? I did a quick smoke test with the following family/commute friendly criteria:
* 2000 square foot house
* 7500 square foot lot for backyard
* 7/10 or higher GreatSchools
* Built after 1980 (older houses have much higher lead content which is terrible for young children)
* 3 bedrooms/2 bathrooms
* 30 minute commute to Amazon or Microsoft HQ
I couldn't find a single home under a million. Central Austin is pretty similar, and Boulder is even worse. Portland's slightly more affordable, but homicides in Portland have also quintupled from last year, so families aren't exactly running there.[1]
By comparison I can find a house meeting those criteria in Gainesville, FL for under $400k. That's why remote is such a better deal than commuting for people with families.
Someone looking for a 2,000 square foot house with a 7,500 lot is not someone who's prioritizing an accessible location or short commute. The median house in Seattle is 1,460 ft², the median lot is 3,893 ft², and the median home age is 53 years. What you're describing is an actual mansion in any populous city; of course you're going to pay mansion prices.
I lived in Seattle for a long time and know plenty of large families living in comfortable homes close to work on regular non-FANG salaries. They don't live in estates, but they don't need to. The people who do want that either need to be rich or drive an hour; there are a lot of those people too. And I'm sure the ones who drove an hour are thrilled with work-from-home.
The amount that people go on about how WFH is saving them from their commute... Really goes to show how badly so many cities are designed that these sort of massive commutes are an ordeal required by so many
It'd be nice if an outcome of this pandemic is a political change toward ending absurd commutes by building cities better, but doesn't really seem like people are putting two and two together
I bought a house 5 minutes from my office but I still prefer work from home. I get to spend all day with my wife where I’m most comfortable.
I think some see work as a vacation from home and others see home as a vacation from work. If employees are spoiled with many benefits in the office like gourmet lunches, famous speakers, entertainment, and free massages, It makes sense to prefer working at work when your office is a luxury spa - but most offices are not like that at all.
Not everyone spends a significant amount of time commuting by personal car to the office. I see a lot of angst about hypothetically long 1-2hr commutes when the average commute in major tech cities is ~30 mins, and of course you can always control it by living closer to the office. Sure, not everyone is willing to make sacrifices for commute, which is one reason why it can be a competitive advantage.
This seems to be why senior executives are so out of touch on the issue. "I don't see what the big deal about commuting to the office is. Just buy a $12 million house in the middle of Palo Alto"
There's the rub. The salaries look huge but they don't take into account the mental cost of commuting or the negative externality placed on people whose environments are rearranged to accommodate people from outside that region. Of course, the salaries are the reason it's so expensive (fueled by the few who choose to live that close) but that indicates that the housing surrounding the HQs won't accommodate a workforce with a reasonable commute.
This isn't just some unimportant whining. It's the source of a large chunk of your carbon footprint. And electric or autonomous cars won't make that go away.
I agree with most of the parent comments. Commuting costs can be reduced, I biked to work when possible, and it was not possible when my kids were at school, which will be the same once things settle down. So it was the same cost with or without remote work.
I will always prefer WFH for a critically important reason no one else seems willing to mention. I get to use my own bathroom. Sitting in a stall next to someone noisy is my daily hell. The worst is if the seat is still warm. I think may have actually avoided using a public restroom for 15 straight months.
My last place had these obnoxious stalls where the bottom is cut off, as someone with bathroom anxiety those things were a nightmare. Funnily enough the HQ building 5 minutes away had proper room-like stalls, I actually used to go there just to use the toilet sometimes.
* I spend a lot more on gas than on the electricity delta
* I spend a lot more on food and drinks when I am in the office than at home; in the office I buy, at home is all home cooked. The food at home is also a lot healthier.
* the team I manage is spread in 2 other offices in different countries, nobody is in my country, so going to the office achieves nothing
* the extended team I work in, also spread even more, only one person in the same office as me. We already talk too much, more is not better
* spending 1-3 hours a day commuting (varies a lot if I ride the bike or drive the car, time of day and if it rains) never helped anyone
* I am not distracted by home life, I am too busy for that
* I am one of those very few people things are escalated to when the fan gets bent, so there is no much separation anyway
But I recognize there are some benefits of being in the office, even if overall for me it is not a net positive.
1) Home is not without distractions, but I think the office had more; it mostly came down to ambient noise and people always moving around in my field of view. Being alone I can focus more. Everybody is different. If you find the office better for focus (for you) I don't debate that.
2) I hate over-the-shoulder code reviews. I don't want me and my coworker's faces to be kissing distance while we both squint at a 14" laptop. I'll take a Zoom call screen sharing on my 34" ultrawide any day.
I absolutely think being there in person is a competitive advantage, especially in the ladder-climbing aspect. We don't work in a purely egalitarian system. There is a game, and you can play it or not play it, but all other things equal you'll get more monetary rewards if you play it.
And my non-Machiavellian viewpoint on it is that I like my coworkers and I think seeing them and conversing with them in person few times a week is good for my mental health. I get more face to face social interaction when I work at least part of the week in the office.
Mentoring junior folks is a really big one that really needs in-person attention. It disappoints me that everybody is ignoring this.
Sure, work-from-home is nice for senior folks like me who have lots of influence and have nurtured their career over several decades. We can allocate resources and people listen to us by virtue of position.
For junior folks, work from home is terrible for their career. Nothing substitutes for standing in front of a whiteboard and talking things out. You need social contacts to spread out in order to be safe when your company goes to shit. And, you probably share a house with multiple other folks and don't have much budget to buy things.
So few people focus on junior employees! The junior employees on my team who onboard did in 2019 vs 2020 are much more than 1 year apart in terms of output and performance.
I think it's more dependent on your WFH practices. My current employer is fully remote (but always has been) and I think the junior engineers generally get up to speed with the senior engineers quickly.
Also I find modern tools easily make up for not being in close proximity.
Best of all as an engineering lead, I am not restricted to hiring in the small pool of engineers who can travel to the physical location of an office. I can hire talent world wide
> I had a stronger work/life separation. I rarely turned on my work laptop at home.
To be fair, that's a matter of personal discipline. There is nothing to stop you closing your laptop at 5pm and leaving it until the next day to open it again.
> > I had a stronger work/life separation. I rarely turned on my work laptop at home.
> To be fair, that's a personal disciple issue.
That's true, and in my case I have absolutely no issue with not working at random hours, even though I use the same exact computer for both work and personal projects. I work from 8 AM to 6 PM, with a break from 12 to 2. Absent an emergency, at 6:01 I'm done for the day and unreachable.
But in other domains, I've found that having to enforce this discipline can take an emotional / energy toll. In my case, I have this issue with food. I've found that if I have snacks and / or other easy to eat, calorie-laden food around the house I will absolutely have a terrible time trying to control myself and not eat them all. Even though I'm not actually hungry, I keep thinking about them and keep feeling like I need to eat them. This absolutely has an effect on my ability to focus, and the only way to have that go away is to eat. I'm not a smoker, but I suppose it's a similar kind of itch.
But by not buying them at all and not having them in the house, it's much, much easier for me. I don't actually miss them when I don't have them and never think about them. Every once in a while I may think about having an ice-cream or something, but I don't crave it to the point of going to the store and buying it (even though the round trip is like 10 minutes, and I'm a fairly active person). Just eating an apple or whatever makes the craving go away. But if the ice cream was there, 9/10 times I would have eaten that instead of the apple. And "just a scoop" is never just a scoop.
So I completely sympathize with people who've found that having this clear separation between work and home makes a difference for them. Having to catch a train / avoid sitting in a car during a commute / picking up the kids from school / whatever can really put an end to the possible tendency of "just five more minutes, and I'm done".
But there's also the fact, as others have said, that there are other ways to not work from home than going to an office. While I love working from my own house, what I hate the most with the office is the commute, and it's not even that bad by local standards. But advocating for a remote culture would allow people to combine these advantages (having both a separation and no / short commute). Of course, the social aspect of the office some people talk about wouldn't be completely solved.
Any "competitive advantage" gained by these points will be more than wiped out by the extreme difficulty companies will have attracting talent if they don't offer remote flexibility. All of the data I've seen so far is pretty clear that yours is a minority opinion among tech workers.
My enjoyment of remote work has varied heavily based on the company culture, the type of work, and even my own evolving life circumstances.
Having gone back and forth between in-office and WFH and between IC and manager in both circumstances, I have no doubts that in-office work is more productive than WFH.
The only exceptions are when the office environment is truly terrible. WFH is more productive than being in an office full of constant distractions, or an office with broken HVAC in 90-degree heat, or an office with a bully executive who enjoyed yelling at people. In those circumstances, WFH was simply a partial band-aid over a company that didn’t care enough about employees to treat them right. Eventually the interrupters learn how to ping you on Slack 20 times a day or the office bully realizes that they can terrorize people remotely at 9PM. WFH didn’t solve any problems, it just buffered them with distance. The real solution was to switch to a company that cared.
That’s not to say that WFH can’t work. It can be made to work, but we need to be honest that it adds overhead and inefficiencies that must be compensated for. Given a choice between in-office and full remote, the same team will be more efficient in-person.
Candidly, I suspect many employees feel the same way. However, it’s becoming taboo to question the superiority or WFH in online discussions because the WFH fans are very defensive about their preference.
Very valid points. I went full remote 3 years ago and I really like it so far. Before had 25 min commute no traffic. I actually sometimes miss the time to just think by yourself. I took the wfh job because of the money and experience not for WFH. I think the key thing has been the entire company is remote all over the world. I think the hybrid model is just not going to work well. Either go all out WFH or not.
> The only exceptions are when the office environment is truly terrible.
Given that the trend is to open floor plans with limited personal space, I suspect that "truly terrible" is a fair--if not flat out generous--description of a lot of office space.
For game dev my gut is that WFH doesn't work unless maybe you're on the library team and so need no collaboration. Game devs have artists, game designers, and programmers working together, passing the controllers back and forth, asking for comments on what's on the screen, etc....
Maybe there's some teams out there that are doing WFH well but every person I know on game dev has commented on how productivity is way down since WFH.
If it's good for you, that's fine. But most of your ideas here are dead wrong. Things like "oh yeah real innovation happens because of hallways conversations" come from pervasive myth, not actual reality. Oh BTW pair programming is much easier over a shared screen, remotely, than it is trying to squish people in front of a single monitor.
The innovation argument is particularly frustrating. By far the most innovation in computing this century has occurred in open source software, which by its nature is completely distributed. People who work on the Linux kernel or Postgres or Rust would be pretty shocked to learn that whatever they’re doing must not be innovative since they’re not hanging out in the hallway.
As a postgres dev, I do feel that the lack of in-person conferences over the last 1 1/2 years caused a perceptible slowdown in some areas. But I also can't stand working full in an office most of the time.
The quality and insight of the discussions at conference is usually way higher than at the office. Conferences allow specialists to come together around topics covered only by a few people in the company. Also, they allow you to look outside the box, how other approach similar problems or technologies. At work, I usually already know it most from the regular communication.
I think this will ultimately lead to a bifurcation of workplaces into remote-first and office-first (a divide which already existed, but was probably 5% vs 95% pre-pandemic), and this diversity will be a good thing.
Some company cultures are better adapted to remote working, while others stand to benefit more from in-person, and the same thing can be said for individuals. People who thrive more in one than the other will gravitate toward companies whose remote/office emphasis matches their preference, and recruiters will start considering it, too.
I don't think free food at work is particularly common outside of big silicone valley companies. Free espresso coffee (of middling quality) is pretty ubiquitous where I am though.
Here in Australia, every company I have worked at (non-FAANG) as a Software Engineer has had a kitchen, stocked with food under a "Grab what you want, when you want it" policy.
Is it really that uncommon in the US outside of FAANG companies?
As someone who works for a global firm that has been back to the office since October I 100% agree.
We have a policy where you are free to work from home if you like given that there are no COVID cases in the city I live in however we have seen large influxes of staff returning to the office.
For me, its exactly the reasons you've called out.
At the end of the day there is no one size fits all for everyone, the same way that working in an office doesn't work for anyone. However I do believe that people should be given the option.
It's funny, all of the things you mention are things I would cite as perks of working remotely at my current org. I guess it depends on how you implement remote work. For example we typically have multiple departments running one or more "open calls" all day that anyone can wander into and hear what's going on. Engineering in particular makes heavy use of this, especially those who like pair programming.
Do people join the open calls just for specific reasons? Or do they join all day? An open call is a half decent alternative during forced WFH but it’s not the same. Random hallway conversations are just that: random. An open call wouldn’t be the same unless everyone was in the call all day.
There's a Teams channel that people chat in all day long. I've had to mute it, because otherwise it's just binging and bonging and flashing popups in my face constantly.
If people want something, they can send an email. Those aren't ephemeral.
People who like to do that sit in it all day. If there are multiple conversations going on they will split into the 2nd and 3rd channels. Some people like to hear the breathing and typing of their colleagues all day, some do not.
To answer your question more specifically, they can be truly random conversations. The other day I talked for two hours with someone about neural networks (not related to our work) while coding.
> I believe working in the office is a competitive advantage
Competitive advantage for whom? The company?
It's gonna be hard to overcome to employee advantage of having a potentially absurd effective-hourly-rate when you combine a high salary with extremely low actual hours that only remote work can provide.
You can go from 40-60 hours (factoring in overhead like commute) to 15-20 and 2-3x your hourly rate. That's a huge efficiency gain.
> I had a stronger work/life separation. I rarely turned on my work laptop at home.
This is single biggest reason I want to go back to office.
In fact it already has started to feel weird that my home is my work place as well.
Even if my work place remains fully remote I’ll find some other place to work from but never some place as shitty as WeWork. Maybe I will rent a cheaper smaller place nearby if I don’t find a sane coworking space.
Have you tried setting boundaries and being disciplined about it?
I've had to tell people - I won't reply after 5, and no meetings then. People still tried to setup 530, even 730pm meetings all the time (not even during crunch time). Instant decline lol
We don't make enough time for our own lives. Hell, it's hard enough to find time to actually make an enjoy a dinner.
> * I save money by spending less on food, drinks, and electricity.
Weirdly for me the food and drink is the opposite. Maybe if you're lucky enough to have an office that provides full lunch meals for you but I haven't experienced that yet.
I really enjoyed work lunches but it usually meant 4/5 days a week was going out with colleagues to local restaurants and paying restaurant food prices.
At home I can make a sandwich with stuff from my fridge without the allure of "well everyone else is going out for sushi don't you want to join?"
* I save money by spending less on food, drinks, and electricity.
I've been enjoying not having to spend £4k/year on a rail season ticket. It looks like in the UK the new part-time season tickets are aimed at people commuting 2 days a week, whereas tech companies seem to be converging on 3.
I would probably agree with you but one thing that offset all the benefits of going into an office, for me, was having a really long commute. I tried to get things done during the commute but it really didn't work well. Being stuck on a schedule so I could use public transportation also wasn't beneficial for me.
I think this is the only point in your list that is actually fundamental, the rest can be remediated by relatively simple lifestyle changes. If you like pair programming, then there is an almost certain probability that you'll prefer the office over remote. There is literally nothing one can do remote to replace the kind of in person interaction that pairing or over the shoulder reviews give you.
I personally paired full time for a few years and I hate it with the heat of a thousand sons. Between pair programming and getting a low paid service job, I'd take the latter. The fact that WFH lets me cut out at-work social interactions that cause me severe distress is a benefit I will never give up.
It’s all fine that these things work for you, but they probably don’t work for at least half your coworkers. I would not expect software development to ever return to 100% in-office. Those days were already starting to end pre-pandemic, and staying home for a year just accelerated the trend. A hot topic in the HR space right now is how you make working remote not a competitive disadvantage because it actually is a better working arrangement for a lot of people who have been historically marginalized.
Working in the office is not a competitive advantage when your leaders are working remotely. Which is what’s often happening — I find it’s actually easier to catch up with my peers virtually since I don’t have to waste time walking to another building and standing in line for coffee. Since they’re at home too and not stuck in meetings all day, they’re answering IMs and turning what used to be a 30 minute ordeal you had to go through in order to get their attention into 5 IMs back and forth.
Just try to imagine being on the other side of this: if you wanted to work in the office and people arbitrarily said “nah”. Because that’s what I think is going to happen at a lot of companies, and it’s what many of us who prefer remote work have dealt with our whole careers. There are too many positives for companies around office leases to not have a significant portion of your workforce remote: I think the improvement in financial performance of remote companies will force the hand of even the reluctant ones.
The push for working from home is just two other things that have become taboo to debate and is manifesting through the work from home "movement", which is the loss of private offices, and the debate about reducing hours of work.
And if people are allowed to work from home, they have an alternative that fills the loss of the private office, and they can also take upon themselves to shorten their working hours to something more "reasonable".
There are other factors (why waste fuel/accident risk on commutes, easier to cook healthy lunches, et cetera), but those are the biggest ones for sure. It would be nice if we could have the hours debate out loud and for real.
I've been self employed and mostly working from home since 2006 and yet I'm with you that "working in the office is a competitive advantage." Not for me because I'm self employed, but I believe it is for people working in companies with other people in the office close to the eyes and ears of their managers.
I saw it happen 25+ years ago when working from home wasn't a thing. I worked for a consulting company. We had about half of our workforce working at customer premises. Not low fee body rental but projects that had to be run there. Well, the people getting advances in pay and career were mostly the people working in the headquarter. Managers of successful remote teams got career advances, some key remote developer got them too (customers wanted them) but most of them were forgotten wheels of the company machine.
But I'm in no competition with colleagues so working from home is great. I won't go back unless I'll ever start starving.
> I often do/did paired programming, and over-the-shoulder code reviews. These are easier in person
I work 100% remote and recently have been mentoring a recent CS graduate and doing pair programming with him. Let me describe how we do it and then I'd like to hear how you think things are better in person.
We start a Slack voice call, these work reliably. Some coworkers told me the longest Slack call they have maintained was over 12 hours long, with people coming and going throughout the conversation.
After starting the voice call, I share my screen. I show him what I'm working on in IntelliJ and we talk about it. Then I use a new IntelliJ feature called code-with-me and send him a link, he clicks on it and and he is then able to edit any file in my IDE on his IDE on his computer. I'm still sharing my screen, but he might not look at it, after all, he can see and edit any part of the code on his own computer now. He can share his screen at any time if needed with 2 clicks.
I direct the conversation, but look for tasks I can pair off. There's a service I need an interface too, so I ask him to work on it. He starts reading documentation about it on his own computer with multiple large monitors. He then begins writing an interface to the service. I flip tabs over to the source file he's working on and can see where his cursor is and what he's typing in real time. I give advice, I just type out what I mean instead of trying to describe what I want him to do in the code with verbal words. This is all like Google Docs, we can bring in even more people and have 5 or 6 cursors all over the project just working independently. Everyone at their own desk where they're fully productive.
This is a real story. He finished the interface to the service, and it worked well. I still don't know all the details of what he wrote, I never had to be distracted by it, but his code has worked so far, so my trust was well placed. The whole experience was so smooth. We could sync up and talk about a single bit of code and then return to our own work, the context switching took literally seconds. I'd just say, "hey, look at this", he'd click a tab in his editor and then see what I was doing, we chat about it for 30 seconds, then he makes a 2nd click and is back to his own work. We pair programmed like this for about 3 hours. Sometimes we'd go 15 minutes without saying anything, but we were working towards the same goal, and interruptions to talk about the goal weren't distracting. I could never endure watching over someones shoulder for 3 hours.
We were maintaining a call / audio channel the entire time, I even muttered some things under my breath (just thinking out loud) and he was able to hear. I think it's the only time I've been happy and productive with pair programming.
I haven’t updated it in a bit, but I did a breakdown of how much money I saved working remotely for the last 2 years in December. Taking into consideration gas, insurance, food, time, clothes, etc saved almost $5k and 500 hours of personal time a year. I do miss the office a bit, but I’ll never go back.
> I save money by spending less on food, drinks, and electricity.
I agree with a lot of your points, but not this one. Even if I were to take my lunch to work, I would still end up spending some money on coffee or snacks (because I can't always predict exactly what I will want to eat or drink during the day), and if I'm in a rush in the morning at home (e.g. slept in), I can just make lunch when I end up having the time, versus having to buy lunch in the office if I left without time to prepare some food to take.
The electricity point stands I suppose, but it's hard to quantify the difference, for me, as I moved only a few weeks before the pandemic, so don't have any pre-pandemic, work from the office data to compare with.
The £150 odd I save each month on travel costs likely more than makes up for any extra spending on leccy
> I save money by spending less on food, drinks, and electricity.
That is more on you being a good steward of your money than anything else. Our development team eats out at restaurants nearly every day when we were at the office. Code together, dine together. Bad boys for life.
They're mostly just talking about their own experience, but it starts off with sweeping generalizations and doesn't address that other individuals might be different. Its the argumentation equivalent of a lie by omission.
I really like my current company and will be of the first in the office at least 3-4 times per week. I agree with your points, but also understand that it doesn't fit everyone's life.
My social interaction has pretty much always been online since a kid and most of my long term friendships and social interaction came from in-person work. I miss the people who genuinely made my day better on a consistent basis at work, and I get almost none of that remote. Being single through COVID has been hell.
I also have zero work/life separation. I enjoy the routine, the excercise, less distractions than being at home. I feel like I could absorb more and know a lot more of what was going on.
1.Interesting, the vast majority of these are not work related for me. Maybe one a year is in some way useful
2. I would contest that with sufficient quality screen share this simply so marginal it's dismissable
3. This makes several assumptions about personality and socialising and isn't always the case. Forcing people to see each other does not create social closeness. Sustaining good friendships over instant message is very much the norm. I think occasional in person meetings or, more deliberate collaborative effort if fully remote can create this just fine.
4. Distractions in the office, drive bys, noise of neighbours and even digital distraction vs a small degree of self discipline (using one monitor, phone on dnd can help too) ... I dont buy this at all.
5. See above - if you have children then that is understandable, however I would wager that correct work/play time separation is whats needed here.
6. I can claim some of my electricity cost as work expenses and the food on my commute and at work is incredibly overpriced. I typically prepare food at home. Being at home more i'm now not restricted to whatever carries well in a tupperware.
7. Arguing that a routine needs to be made for you instead of creating your own isnt a valid reason. Self discipline.
8. Discipline and routine also addresses the last point, but I will concede its easier to manage.
To outline the competitive advantage FOR working at home. In addition to the above I gain:
Custom desk, my high quality office chair vastly superior to corporate stock, custom office space, custom lighting temperature and air flow.
Control of noise levels
Total control of distractions
I save 4 hours a day lost to transport being forced to listen to podcasts and have more meaningful work and play time as a result.
I save substantial money on transport
No social guidelines, I can have what I want on the radio/TV if I wish.
I can wear more comfortable clothes and save money on laundering work clothes
I can exercise more freely and easily
I can work in line with the ebb and flow of my conciousness and not when someone else demands it - and am subatantially more productive.
My deliveries no longer go missing
My home is tidier
I dont have to use a disgusting corporate bathroom
People should realize that wfh is highly dependant on self-discipline. Some ppl have it, some dont. (Actually only very small % of ppl have high self-discipline).
Due to this all corporations will and are going to try to “control” ppl simply because most of them cannot control themselves.
You talk like its not a learned skill. Outsourcing your self discipline to a company if you do anything remotely related to tech should mean developing it is a top priority. Impulsivity is to a large degree a dimension of Extraversion, also.
If you can't afford to live in London - pretty normal.
No one mentions the constant delays, no air-con train and tubes.. changing stations walking the rest of the way.
My commute without delays and everything is on time is about 1hour and 25 mins.. with delays.. you can see how this easily can get close to 2 hours.. delays no transport in the UK.. are almost daily.. it's the only thing they do consistently.
"Let's be 100% honest: you did not spend 4 hours a day commuting pre-WFH. You just didn't." - This comment tells me you're either lucky enough not to have to commute in a big city.. or are rich enough to live in the city you work in.
2 hours both ways is below average for me. I gave a conservative estimate. At my previous job it was an hour and a half. Pretty normal here in the UK if you dont live in London.
40-60 minutes each way for me, occasionally worse. One colleague did have 2+ hours each way (train via London) and so he was permitted to come into the office once per week, even pre-covid.
Interestingly a lot of what you list is the reason while Agile advocates having the team all sit together in office. It makes communication much quicker and easier, and just simply overhearing others helps spread information very efficiently.
I'm glad you found what works for you. I think it's interesting how much preferences can differ from person to person.
For me, working from home for the past 3 years has been completely life altering.
Work is nothing more than a distraction away from what I really want to be doing with my life. Working from home lets me optimize for all the right things like being here with my kids all the time, going to the playground at lunches, making them breakfasts and lunches, and seeing them at 5:01pm. I love that I can take breaks with them rather than talk about nonsense at the water cooler.
I'd much rather not focus on optimizing for work...
I feel the same. Aside from the interpersonal benefits, the perks of the office are real monetary value. A lot of us don’t have terrible commutes and these benefits outweigh the cost of commute time.
1. The daily routine and commute helps reset your brain and get you in/out of "work mode"
2. You don't have to cannibalize your home desk to make way for your work PC, or set up a second desk for work PC
3. No deciding what to get for lunch, it's whatever is closest or catered, no wanting a coffee and finding that you need to run to the store
4. If your team isn't meeting your sprint goals, someone can look at you and verify that you are working, so they won't automatically assume that the problem is with you
> The daily routine and commute helps reset your brain and get you in/out of "work mode"
This paints a rosy picture of the daily commute which is simply not true [1]. Furthermore, the argument that going into the office gets you in and out of "work mode" doesn't stand up either. With instant communication channels like email, Slack, et al and a lack of labor regulations regarding after-hour work communications (at least in the US), we were never able to be out of "work mode" pre-pandemic either.
Perhaps I've been lucky to work at places where work did truly end at 5pm, about 90% of workdays (of course if the servers are on fire, or a customer can't log in, that necessitates after-hours work, but once it's done, it's done).
It's a work culture thing, and instant communication channels don't necessarily lead to everyone being on-call 24/7. I'm sure that existed pre-internet also ("Boss called, I need to go back into the office and finish some paperwork...")
Yeah and also to mention the elephant in the room: people work much more when they are stuck in a room with others, and have eyes on them. And they work way less if they are at home and nobody is watching. This is just the truth, regardless of how little it applies to myself, of course!
I'm also annoyed by the amount of housework/cooking/preparation/cleaning I have to do when I'm at home all day, when half of that happens in the office/resturant otherwise.
I disagree there- I mean I work way more hours when I wfh than when I am in the office because I can tolerate it because I don't have a family at home who I am far from. I come down and see the wife when I get coffee and that is my "hallway" conversation and my dog is always next to me, and I never worry about her getting lonely. If anything, having to walk the dog helps pull me away from the computer when I otherwise would not.
I am not sure how cleaning changes at all, and doing laundry, which used to be very difficult to fit in, is so much easier. I can understand why food prep would be more onerous to most, but I enjoy cooking and if I don't really want to I live in a city, I have plenty of options all around me.
But you are basing this on your personal experience. I work remote out of state from my company (and did so pre-pandemic.) I would often travel and stay at the office for decent periods of time. During those periods way less work was accomplished for me, because I was socializing more with co-workers, took more snack/water breaks, spent more time at lunch. While WFH I will still go out to local coffee shops to work out of if I am lacking focus for the day.
Some people actually do work better in a distraction free environment, but it seems you don't believe that. I should mention, my company has an open-office floorplan, so the amount of daily interruptions was quite incredible...
I've worked with people who have made it a fine art to appear busy, to hold earnest conversations in hallways, to comment in IM frequently, yet do 10% of the work of the good performers. And we all knew who the good performers were.
Managing employees in an office doesn't depend on having butts in the seat, or "eyes on them." It depends on understanding what needs to be done, communicating/delegating, and then getting out of the way.
I love my job, and I love working from home. I have been doing it for years.
Working on a fully remote team is not the same as working on fully co-located team. Some will say it's worse but for me its better. One thing is for certain - it is different. Some things are easier and some things are harder. It's just a different point in the design space of possible ways to work.
Sounds like you need an environment with better collaboration tools and people who know how to communicate.
I was getting a slew of emails related to a project and after a bit of coaching I got most of these updates to go into a teams channel, where we can call out the interested part @user, and keep things in an easier to view format when we need to catch up.
Working remotely will never be as good for communication IMO. You can set up weekly one-on-ones over your favorite videoconference platform, but there's just so much you can't see being physically separated from your coworkers.
At my previous job, I would bond with my teammates over lunch talking about random things, bouncing ideas, and I feel like we really were a team. We trusted each other. At my new, 100% remote job, sometimes my colleagues are just tuned out, and I have no idea why. I can ask them over our weekly videochat, but it's just not the same. We don't have the same level of trust. I can't read their body language. We can't just have a random 5 minute chat over coffee. Brainstorming online has also proven to be really ineffective. It works really well over lunch, with no stress and no expectations, but planning a brainstorming meeting really can't offer that.
IMO remote work is very weird and dehumanizing. You might feel differently. I know it works for some people, but I really feel like the cohesion in my team is nowhere near as good. Yet I feel like if we were in the same office in person we'd be doing much better.
My ideal balance is 4 days of in-person work and one remote day per week, with flexible working hours.
I've always viewed work as means to an end, and that end is getting paid to take care of my family. I've made some good friends, but I've also been forced to tolerate some people I would rather not be around.
I also find that communicating through multiple remote channels is freeing. People aren't reading my body language to misinterpret what I'm saying. Requests and plans are more concrete and documented. People have to be more thoughtful about what they are asking for.
> I've always viewed work as means to an end, and that end is getting paid to take care of my family
For most of us, it's also something we're being forced to do for 40-50 hours a week. We spend the best, more productive hours of the prime years of our lives working. So it might as well be something engaging.
People we would rather not be around, I agree. I unfortunately have to deal with some of these online as well though. Ideally this is something that can be discussed with one's manager so that we are no longer forced to work with said people.
I agree, I've worked remote for a little over a year now, and I definitely prefer working in on office. The main benefit for me is the hallway conversations, real-life meetings, sketching things out on whiteboard, and work/life separation. I do not see myself ever working in a fully remote environment.
<plugarino> https://sharetheboard.com -- It doesn't solve all of the problems you've listed but it does help with remote white boarding! Try it and share feedback, please!
You have some strong anecdotes there but I'd like to see some stats from this previous year and see if there was actually a drop, an increase, or relatively neutral change in productivity/sanity amongst those who worked from home.
> I believe working in the office is a competitive advantage.
For the company, probably; not for me. All the bullet point you mentioned: none of them applies to me. It’s interesting to see different points of view, though.
People put up with small NYC (and I'm assuming SF) apartments because there is so much going on in the city you'll hardly be there. If you wanted to get the most bang for your buck out of rent you'd move to Dayton Ohio or some other place where the cost of living is ultra low (for the USA).
"The reason other people should do a 2hr+ commute each day is because I function best in an adult kindergarten"
No self-respecting person would never publicly (and proudly no less) say they:
- Need supervision
- Require frequent interactions / reassurance from colleges
- struggle to maintain their personal lives
- Cant form their own routines
There is mounting pressure to stop WFH and its coming entirely from those at risk of WFH, namely those who need the office as a place to be seen.
I would expect more of that competitive advantage, too! Most people don't want to give up Working from home[1] and/or are only interested in "working" to collect a paycheck[2]. If the future because of in-office work mostly consists of ambitious people like yourself, opposed to the latter, then I'm actually more interested in joining. Thanks for the perspective.
[2] Also: "no skin in the game" / the misguided local optimization where personal responsibility is minimized at the expense of the group / intentionally stagnating instead of growing in one's career position.
> In 1882 Cox left Paris and moved to New York where he continued to paint. He also began to do many illustrations, mostly to pay the bills. Kenyon became well established as a magazine illustrator. His illustrations reached a much wider audience than did his paintings.
> Cox also began to write art criticisms (unsigned) for the New York Evening Post. This and other writing jobs took Kenyon's time away from painting but also helped him make a living.
I learned new skills and experienced personal and professional growth through the different projects I worked on and situations i found myself in.
I made friends and together we did an amazing job, made happy customers, and helped build a business, which gave me great personal pride and satisfaction.
The pay cheque showed me the work i was doing was valuable
To the customer, yes and bought me a house etc, but I can’t imagine being at a job that I also didn’t enjoy and see some purpose in, some utility that I was bringing to the world.
Some here are being honest, so I'll be brutally honest: Covid has upset the master-slave relationship, and they're realizing they're giving up too much control. Yes, even the supposedly forward-thinking, progressive tech world.
It's so much easier to ignore the BS of "company culture," "a new family" and other such nonsense when working remote. Plenty of people here have outright stated they work as a way to fund their lives and they couldn't care less about "the mission," "changing the world" and other similar lies. When WFH you only need to put on a show (and sometimes pants!) when on a video call, then you can relax and get your work done and shut out the BS.
Bingo. People who lead companies are not wired like the rest of us. It's not some bullshit about mission or impact. Executives are there for power. Power is the sweat under a subordinate's arms when you address them. Power is having control over the bodies of others when you tell them where to be, how long to be there, where to sit and how to dress. Power is having roomfuls of people in rapt attention to you. Power is giving orders and making decisions, then watching them be physically carried out. Power is getting sex from your subordinates. Power is seeing the people who have subordinated themselves to you and their daily performance of that subordination.
Even if moon robots could do all our work for us, some people would find a way to make the rest of us submit. Nothing can replace physical proximity. Without it, you feel like a loser in your bathrobe instead of master of your universe.
Don't believe the bullshit about WFH and automation fueled idle. It's counter to human nature. We organize our workplaces, education system and society not for maximum efficiency but to satisfy the primate hierarchical social instinct.
I have worked in tech a while, including knowing a number of executives (prior and post them being executives), and I don't know a single one who is 'in it for the power' and feeling good because they can tell employees where to sit and how to dress (or getting sex from subordinates!).
They're in it because they love making big impacts, having authority to make _big_ decisions, not watching people sit down in chairs.
Maybe I'm just lucky, but I am worried about where you work. What you are describing is not normal.
I don't think what you are describing is a normal work environment. I have experienced something similar though - and it sounds like you work with sociopaths.
If that's the case, the classic advice is to disengage and find another job as soon as possible. Staying will not be healthy for your mind. Good luck.
I'm out of there now and working with a much better team. Unfortunately positions of power magneticly attract sociopaths, so it's not an uncommon situation, especially as the companies get larger. I've found the best measure of an organization's empathy is the owner or CEO themselves.
I agree. And as an introvert, working from home has actually made work more fun. I never liked sitting in a room with other people, nor did I like going out for lunch with my colleagues or having to do small talk face to face. I hated having to walk up to colleagues that I didn't know, just to ask them a few questions.
All these things are completely gone when working from home. I can focus on my work, get the job done and have my personal life back. Once I finish work at 6 (often earlier these days), I got the entire evening to myself. I already managed to go to the gym during lunch time, or did some groceries during the day.
What do you think an extrovert might say? They might miss the face to face interaction, the spontaneous discussions that may happen over lunch, or the gathering between colleagues that might happen over a weekend.
I respect that those may not appeal to you, and they don't have to, but some people find work in-person more fun. If that's not you, there are plenty of forever-remote companies to get a job at.
I agree. Those looking to force everyone back into the office want to prove their worth in front of everyone else.
I hate the idea of how some companies try and position the company as your second family. “No I’m here to do what I do to find my life outside of here.”
I know a number of execs at various tech companies and honestly this talk does not reflect my reality or experiences whatsoever.
Execs generally optimize for impact and success, and while their paths may not always be correct, I don' really know a single one who primarily wants to prove their worth in front of everyone else.
Yeah, for sure it's impossible that people have different opinions without being indoctrinated, simply impossible.
This way of thinking is why people who disagree cannot even talk anymore. If someone says they believe something, don't jump to conclusions that they are manipulated or indoctrinated, there are plenty of things that are simply _difference of opinion_, but somehow that thought seems pretty wild today, for some reason.
This is so woke, presuming you know better than others around you. You should become a politician, so that you can force your enlightened beliefs on others.
I never thought I'd handle WFH well. When job-hunting, I'd always ignore fully remote jobs. It sounded totally depressing and demotivating to sit at home and interact with my coworkers virtually. I also always valued the office perks.
During the first few months, it felt like WFH stripped out all the non-work aspects of my job. At Google those perks were substantial, and it put the work itself in full focus.
But you know what? I like it now. I'm able to put in more focused work between 9 and 6 because I can take real breaks. There's less BS intruding on my life. In the office, your breaks feel more limited to 1) walking to grab a snack in the kitchen, 2) scrolling through something at your desk, or 3) going all the way outside to take a walk. 2/3 of these make you look like a slacker when you do them too much, so I always ended up doing a lot of "pretending to work" breaks to refresh my mind. That said, nobody ever had a problem with my performance.
Now I can pop out and walk around the block in 10 minutes, or wander into my back yard. I can do manual chores and intersperse them with knowledge work to give myself a break. I also don't have to commute for 2 hours each day. This means I have more time and willpower and actually get more done. I actually measure every minute of focused work, which is how I know.
I use a set of shell scripts that record when I start and stop work in a text file. The hard part is developing the habit. When I get up, switch to something non-work, or even start to daydream I stop it. Sometimes I still forget to start or stop it, so then I have to try to figure out when I started or stopped working from browser, command line, or undo history.
Lately I have been using the pomodoro method on top of this, which is probably easier to get started with since it's fewer large blocks of time.
There's also some stuff in there for various other schemes like daily goals, some notion of "debt" etc... that I used at various times to manage my motivation and pacing. I've found it works best to just plan a number of pomodoros for each task, map out my day in half hour slots, and decide when I will do them.
I use LibreOffice Calc. Ctrl+Shift+; (or Ctrl+:) inputs a time (or Ctrl+; just a date).
On each row, I have a start and end time of a work "session" or "pomodoro". Do a subtraction: end - start = duration (in days). I aim each day to be 4 hours, but sometimes I over or under-work, so I also have a running sum across days, subtracting 4h for each workday (so I should keep it near zero).
I also use ActivityWatch - https://activitywatch.net/ -, but more as a backup in case I forget to record. I don't trust it too much, because, say, time in the Slack window could be work or just chat.
I am brutally honest and only bill what I consider "real" work. That is out of appreciation for my boss, who is trusting as well as receptive, and contributes back to open-source projects we use.
What I find really disconcerting is that the senior leaders in the tech industry have been talking for years about increasing gender inclusivity. Yet very few major tech companies seem to be wholeheartedly embracing full remote, despite it being by far the most effective way to encourage more women to join the industry.
Research shows that women are 50% more likely to prefer full remote than men[1]. For better or worse, much more of the burden of childcare falls on mothers in our society.[2] Women are also much more likely to sacrifice their own careers to relocate for a spouse's career.[3] Along similar lines, that tends to mean women prefer careers with geographic flexibility.[4]
Tech companies have spent the past decade sprouting platitudes about creating a more welcoming workplace for women. Now they actually have a real opportunity to make a difference. Transitioning to a remote first model would massively improve gender inclusivity. Yet, despite widespread employee satisfaction with remote, senior management in most places seem to be pushing back as hard as possible.
"Gender inclusivity" at tech companies is really a completely different axis than "motherhood or fatherhood friendly". "Parent" is not a protected class (at least, not on Twitter), and it's really not the goal of any FAANG company to encourage their workers to have families. It requires much harder tradeoffs than being "gender diverse".
It also seems really self-defeating. Talent attrition is a major problem at any company, and people with kids are way more likely to stick around in their nice comfy jobs, regardless of their gender.
Yeah, this is why all the major SV companies give decent paternity/maternity even where not required by law. It's a really cheap way of getting your experienced/older employees to stick around.
Having left my FAANG a few years back, the only benefit that I actually miss is the paternity (even though I never had it when I was there).
I think one way to look at the inability/unwillingness for FAANG companies to have any reasonable parental leave policy, is that it's the kind of thing that needs to be regulated by (federal) law.
Looking from Norway, it's rediculus to see companies not managing to give a year of parental leave, or something simple like on-campus child care.
I mean, a year of employer-paid leave is frankly ridiculous. There needs to be federal support for that kind of benefit.
It's not really the parental leave policies (which are often generous). It's the environment around WFH policies and setting up viable career paths for part-time work which is lacking. Ex, if a woman wants to work 20 hours a week instead of being a full-time worker with small children, none of the FAANGs to my knowledge offer a career path that looks like that.
Many states make familial status a protected class in employment, and the FMLA also makes discriminating based on certain family-based factors illegal.
I do think expecting every employee to sit in an office for 8 hours a day every day is almost certainly unnecessary. That said, I also think it's unfair and disingenuous to suggest that there's absolutely no value whatsoever to colocation. It's possible that we can replicate much of the physical interaction's value through fully remote work, but my experience is that we're not there yet.
It really depends on the work you're doing. And even for a single employee, it can change from one month to the next. But highly collaborative work can benefit from spontaneous interactions, more ambiguous work can benefit from live whiteboarding sessions, and more generally, teams can develop greater cohesion and stronger relationships through shared experience. Not every person needs this, and certainly not all the time, but to suggest that it's unimaginable that anyone could ever derive greater value (or that a collective organization could ever derive greater value) from in-person work is disappointing.
Remote work has its place. In-person work has its place. Neither is the solution 100% of the time.
Totally, and I think that's ok! I'm not intending to suggest that there is one true way. In fact, I think the very point I'm getting at is that there is not one true way. Different situations work better for different people in different roles, and even for the same person in the same role, the ideal situation may change from one quarter to the next.
Where I take issue is with people suggesting that it would be insane to ever ask anyone to come to an office again, for the same reason I think it would be insane to tell people that working from home is a waste of time/not productive/etc. To this end, a hybrid work environment may not be any better, since it forces an individual person to balance both (I.e. your extroverts are still expected to be home 2x/week, and your introverts are still expected to be at the office 3x/week)
The challenge for leaders of companies that are trying to navigate this (and one of the reasons that people will probably always be dissatisfied with the outcome) is that there is no perfect solution. You go full remote, you'll have people who miss the office (and almost certainly some intangibles will be lost). You go full in-office, and you'll have some less productive people who spend way too much time commuting and pay too much in rent. You go hybrid, and you still have people paying too much in rent, and now they also have to commute sometimes, and the people who want to be in the office aren't for 2 days/week, etc. Adding insult to injury, if you allow individual people to make their own decisions (some remote, some in-office) you'll have imbalances in career progressions, where people who have more facetime will be more likely to receive promotions and raises than their less visible, fully-remote counterparts.
It's a challenging topic, and it's not clear to me there is a solution that is "fair," insofar as fairness is even a thing we can measure here.
> The more I read these conversations it becomes clear your position depends on where you are in the introvert / extrovert scale.
In which direction?
As a strongly introverted person myself, I would expect that working from home would be easier for extroverts than introverts during normal times. Extroverts make friends more easily wherever they go, while introverts rely more on structured interactions such as work in their social life. Take the office away, and the introvert who has recently relocated may not know anyone in the area.
> Because of the already sunk cost into office space?
Surely this must be a big part of it, but I haven't seen any good discussions about the topic. Workers are being massively inconvenienced and the environment is being put under unnecessary stress to prop up the value of now-redundant real estate.
Recently I read an essay pointing out that what we call “environment” is our de facto biosphere. It is not surrounding us, it literally keeps us alive, permeating is with every breath and every bite of food.
Seeing yourself produce more doesn't imply the net impact is positive. Because working from home (using 2020-era tools) greatly reduces social presence [1], which may be undermining team work, creative thinking, etc.
I'm a 100% remote work maximalist, I think in the long run physical offices for creative work will be non-existent. However, the fact is that the tools we have today are about 5-10 years behind where they need to be to be able to replace the social presence benefits of physical co-presence.
There is a lot of stuff you can do better in person especially with the secrecy behind everything like in apples case. For Grunt work you are totally right.
A wild guess: execs supplement their income by having stakes in food/rent businesses around the HQ offices. If employees don't come, those businesses will lose customers and the execs will suffer. I mean, if you were such an exec and knew the corp is about to build a large office somewhere, wouldn't you buy 40-60% stakes in key businesses there while they are cheap? And wouldn't you cry wolf if the new office never opened beyond 10% capacity? I've seen a few strange apartment complexes built in odd places and charging brazen rent that doesn't make sense unless the owners knew something years ahead.
Bold of you to claim that Cupertino would ever let someone build rental housing near the Apple HQ.
(The current city planning commissioner has actually said that Apple employees shouldn’t be allowed to live there because they are all single men and will hire prostitutes.)
Definitely not difficult to vote a new member into a board as a passive member with that logic. I never thought of that before honestly but it makes perfect sense.
There’s something hyper draconian about a billionaire CEO demanding everyone return to the office so he can see their faces.
Apple execs have enriched themselves by capturing way more profit than regular employees (Apple engineering pay is average/low average).
This is overstepping. Not only will any company that insists on a return to the office lose employees, they’re also loudly signaling their disdain and it’s going to have long term repercussions company and industry wide.
I maybe in the minority in this comments section but I genuinely enjoy working from office. I enjoy the social aspects. And commute never bothered me, albeit max commute for me was 45 mins (in the bay area). The only downside that I always felt was parking situation. Lot of my friends feel the same about office work.
I believe going forward there will be companies (and employees) in 2 camps -- remote first and hybrid/full in-office. And both types of companies will thrive. There are some people who enjoy going to office. And there are some people who enjoy working from home. And these people self select themselves for their respective jobs. And that choice is a good thing
> I maybe in the minority in this comments section but I genuinely enjoy working from office.
In my experience, plenty of people enjoy working from the office. Many of us enjoy a mix of in-office and WFH.
The comments sections on these articles tend to receive a lot of projection from people who simply hate their jobs and view WFH as a partial antidote to that.
That, and a lot of comments from people who have absurdly long commute times. In the past I've had good success with mixed WFH/in-office schedules and very flexible schedules to allow people to reduce their overall commute burden. For those who can't or won't relocate closer to the office, full remote companies are always an option. For everyone else, I suspect we'll see a trend toward returning to office for the sheer efficiency and communication improvements.
> The comments sections on these articles tend to receive a lot of projection from people who simply hate their jobs and view WFH as a partial antidote to that.
I resent the implication that I like WFH because I hate my job. I love my job, I'm good at it and I'm a bit of a workaholic by most standards (but wouldn't if I didn't genuinely love it). However, over my career, I found that I'm much more productive when working from home and this is not only for solo work but also for team work.
I believe that remote work works better for a certain type of people, I am good at making friends both in and out of work but I find too many extended social interactions from being in the same place to be draining and that they sap my productivity so I'm pretty much the text book definition of an introvert. That doesn't stop me as a manager from doing one on ones, interacting with my employees and calling or using slack but it does mean that sometimes when I have work where I need to concentrate, it's helpful to be at home. I have noticed in the past though that it takes a certain type of person to work well from home especially for long periods of time.
For context, I work in a remote first company, we were remote before the pandemic and before that I worked as a consultant so I've been remote for the last 10 years.
If a person says "a lot of people like X because they hate Y" they are not saying that if someone likes X it implies Y. When I catch myself inverting conditional probabilities into a frame that makes me feel attacked it usually means that I've got some other thing going on that has nothing to do with what the person said.
You are right, if one reads it very charitably but in my experience "a lot of people like X because they hate Y" is very often used as a writing device to make a point and denigrate X. In this case, no, it doesn't say that all people who work from home hate their jobs but it says that the probably of people working from home hating their jobs is higher without proof to further their argument. I've seen a lot of that on both sides of the fence in the WFH.
So, when Wework's CEO says that people who work from home are the least engaged, when I read in this thread that people who don't want to work from home must not like their family (paraphrasing), I take it to mean for what it is, an insult in order to push one's favoured view and I dislike this.
> The comments sections on these articles tend to receive a lot of projection from people who simply hate their jobs and view WFH as a partial antidote to that.
I would actually argue that this is backwards; I really like what I do for work, but I've found that the worst part of my job is dealing with office politics, constantly being interrupted, and (like you said) the commute/time commitment associated with being in the office.
At this point, it's an affront to be told that I can no longer do laundry during the day, finish chores in 10 minute periods between work, or spend the day with my family and/or in my private office in pajamas. Especially when it's just because a C-level somewhere in the branches of my company is feeling lonely and/or bored.
To say my love for remote work is a reflection of my job satisfaction is outright unfair; Life is simply better when I'm not subjected daily to the dreadful routine of going into the office.
That's a pretty unfair characterization of people who prefer to work remotely.
However, your last point about letting remote employees stay remote and letting people who prefer office-work to come into the office, I optimistically agree with. It works when everyone knows how to work with remote employees, and that the option is exactly that: an option. This last year and a half I hope has been helpful in getting everyone up to speed on that. It requires a cultural dedication, and assuming people have learned something from this remote experience, they'll carry that knowledge and flexibility with them going forward.
Mixed WFH/office should be 100% voluntary or it isn't truly mixed.
If I can't decide, with zero notice to my employer, to spend a month living and working on the other side of the country, it's not mixed. Anything that requires I live in driving distance of my company's office is not mixed.
Mixed means the office is there if anyone wants to come in and work from the office, but if someone wants to spend every month living in a different state (or even a different country, but I understand there are tax issues with that) they can do that too.
Alternately, I would accept something like the way oil rigs work, where instead of "you work X days a week at the office", it's "you work X months of the year at the office". I might be able to tolerate working from the office 3 months out of every year in the office if I can spend the other 9 months as a digital nomad.
(one thing this pandemic made me want to do is to not take travel for granted... I want to see, if not the world, at least the rest of this country before I die, and I'll be damned if my employer gets in the way of that)
If you have a job where you have to deal with physical things (servers, printers, etc) then you have to be in the office at least some of the time. Somebody working on software may never need to be in the office. The person who works in software may be able to voluntarily choose to work from home or in the office but the other person may not be able to choose. This is still a mixed office in my view.
I bet there's also more than a few people who work at places where work surges up to or beyond a full day but other days there's not much to do. If they're not empowered to actually treat their salaried job as a salaried job working from home is a great way to side step that issue.
People who love to work in the office often lack social skills to find friends outside of work and it is their substitute.
What I mean that everyone is different.
45 minutes means an hour and a half of your life every day that you don't get paid for and have to just throw away. (not only that but spending it doing one of the more dangerous things you can do in the US: driving.)
That combined with the ridiculous housing costs in the bay area makes me wonder why anyone (especially more numerate people) would tolerate not working remotely.
> makes me wonder why anyone (especially more numerate people) would tolerate not working remotely
Honest question: are there a substantial number of remote companies paying bay area FAANG salaries? You put in any decent time at these places and your total comp is at least $300-500k/yr.
You'd have to move somewhere really cheap for the math to work out in favor of that remote gig if you're leaving $100-300k on the table. Being in a place without state income tax moves the needle quite a bit, but you're still likely to come out behind.
Can you get a nice house in a good neighborhood near the office on $300k/year in the Bay Area these days? A lot of people in the Bay Area make a lot less.
There are just so many markets in the US where you’ll find a much nicer house in a better neighborhood for a fraction of the cost. If you already own a house in the Bay Area, you’re set. But otherwise, the paycheck begins to look a bit like an illusion.
My question was about FAANG-level salaries specifically though. You're probably not going to be able to buy a house near the office on that salary, no. But renting is still a viable option.
To provide an anecdote: my wife and I moved to the Bay Area from Kansas City and housing as a portion of after-tax income increased from 16% to 24% renting a smaller single-family house with the same bedroom count (significantly smaller yard though), but my income is over 3x higher out here. I might not be building equity by owning a home, but I have invested most of the additional income and am way ahead of my salaried homeowning friends in the midwest on net worth. Plus we get to spend most of our weekends in the mountains.
tl;dr: It really depends on your income, lifestyle, and priorities whether it adds up in the end.
I’m mid-career, work at FANG, and that is close to my salary. Perhaps my situation isn’t the norm because I moved into FANG from a very specialized job and got downleveled. But the point is that even within FANG, not everyone is pulling in $400k+.
The 3x income seems meaningless if I’m reading correctly. You ended up with 2x for a smaller house and yard, which to be fair is a reasonable tradeoff.
> That combined with the ridiculous housing costs in the bay area makes me wonder why anyone (especially more numerate people) would tolerate not working remotely.
Maybe some people genuinely like living in the bay area. It is a beautiful place.
> 45 minutes means an hour and a half of your life every day that you don't get paid for and have to just throw away. (not only that but spending it doing one of the more dangerous things you can do in the US: driving.)
I've never found commuting to be "thrown away", but I've never commuted by car. I can read, listen to a podcast, or just people watch on the train. Or when biking/walking to work, I get some exercise. Seems to me the problem isn't commuting, but car commuting.
I used to enjoy a mix of going to the office and working from home. It doesn't have to be one or the other. It's nice to feel respected and trusted to make the decision myself, and if someone asked me to be somewhere I usually woukd; but being forced just doesn't work (for me).
> I maybe in the minority in this comments section but I genuinely enjoy working from office.
I'm going to respond tongue-in-cheek: I also like working from office -- when it's empty or barely occupied, and I can control my whole environment and decide myself when to interrupt my work.
Getting away from a tight apartment, disturbing the routine a bit is nice.
There is always some selection bias in this regard when reading the hacker news comments. If you spend time talking to people online, you’re probably a lot less interested in the social aspect of work.
Let's see how it goes for them. I'd bet it's going to be a disaster. That time I was asked to appear in the office of my employer after years of home office, that catapulted me into a burnout after just a few weeks.
See, working from home allows you to be comfortable with yourself and your body. You organize yourself to do as much work as you deem useful to meet your goals. It allows you to take a ten minute nap or just to let yourself go for a few minutes. I had months filled with focused work. Something I'm only able to achieve in solitude.
Going back to the office after having adjusted your work to excel from home, is a nightmare.
Suddenly you're subjected to the office's furniture, its space, foreign people, the (shitty) food, noise, a commute. You don't have privacy. You'll have to use your will muscle to stay focused and to appear working. Working from an office is putting in effort to be present. WFH is not.
I work freelance and my results are better in a space where I'm in control of. To me WFH is more economically sound.
"Cook wrapped up the memo by saying that he's looking forward to seeing employee faces. "I know I'm not alone in missing the hum of activity, the energy, creativity and collaboration of our in-person meetings and the sense of community we've all built," he wrote."
CEO's all spout the same nonsense. The majority of people work because they need to earn money. They're not working to make a new 'family' or change the world or be around 'creative people'. It's generally the leadership teams at companies that think it's great to be in the office but that's because they've sacrificed a lot to get where they are and they care deeply about their job and the company. The majority of people just want to earn some money and do it as easily as possible. I think companies not offering full remote work options will see a lot of employee turnover and will have to change their policy very quickly.
There are also plenty of people who like their coworkers and enjoy spending time with them each day. I don't think everybody finds work to be an unfulfilling drain on their leisure time
> There are also plenty of people who like their coworkers and enjoy spending time with them each day.
Not saying you are wrong, but
The vast majority of people first get jobs to earn money THEN meet the coworkers AND having no other option besides interacting with coworkers during work hours, will try to get along
I think that line of thinking will be quickly replaced. Better culture, free food, people, environment, etc. all mattered when employees were expected to spend 8 hours a day at work (and often longer). If more companies allow working from home, then that trumps a lot of the other perks because employees can make their own perks such as more flexible hours, shorter/no commute, living where they want to instead of being forced to live close to the office, etc.
Assuming you mean Google and Facebook et al for "ad companies" then I guess it's the very high compensation and nice work environment as well as the chance to work on super cool tech with really smart people if you're lucky or sufficiently motivated?
Of course most folks there probably work on super uncool tech with very average people, but those are also getting paid a whole lot of money and can enjoy the nice work environment, etc.
Morality, even if it were universal, is not a prime motivator in career choices for most people.
Yes, I very much enjoy my co-workers. Several nights a week I find myself lying in bed and notice I'm grinning while thinking about some jokes or fun we've had together. We all work 100% remote.
Right?! My company was mostly remote pre-pandemic, and we've gotten more remote friendly during the last year. We share memes, conversation, movie reviews, etc. all over Slack/Zoom/Signal/etc. I'll just get random weird texts from one of my co-workers.
It helps that a lot of us have worked together through multiple companies, but even the ones that haven't... I've honestly never met my manager in person just due to timing issues and the pandemic. Literally all of our interaction has been online and we have a really good relationship.
As long as I have the choice, I will never go back to an office on a regular basis. WFH works for me.
We have channels on slack for non work stuff and we post memes, news, etc. We also have DM groups and just chat. We’ve got more people on the meme channels outside of the team. It’s a nice group. I even play games with some on my switch.
I’ve only been to the company 3 times split between 2 locations.
I’m looking to change teams soon. So advancement opportunities are there. Never met in person the manager, so it’s not that.
Based on my experience, I believe it depends on the company, team culture and the people. By team culture I mean more how the team is run. Some are run very competitive others more collaborative.
Off topic, but how does switching jobs along with your coworkers work? Do you guys all switch around the same time or is it more of a coincidence? Was it luck that you all passed the interview or was it more of a package deal where your current company wanted to hire you all together (ie, all or nothing)?
The way it happened at my company was that there was a layoff so a few people from the department were laid off at the same time, and one guy who used to be CTO (there was a merger) left and formed a new company and shortly hired those people.
Then what started happening over the next couple of years is they'd reach out to other people in our department one or two at a time and offer them jobs, like one would put in notice this month, then a couple months later another, then a few months later a couple more, etc.
I think currently they have about 12-15 employees at that company that all used to work in my department. They have more former employees than this department does at this point.
They reached out to me as well, but at the time they were looking for someone with less experience (I would have had to take a pay cut and a lower job title), otherwise they might have gotten me also. According to a former coworker who works there it's definitely a lot more laid back of a job.
I should note they didn't get everyone who left here. I know a couple of the more ambitious people in the department met with them but decided against it, probably due to not offering enough, and left for another opportunity later.
Yes, because I'm not a sociopath. :P I'm well aware some people like to work from home.
If you are one of those people you can keep working from home. All I'm asking is for the respect that I am not one of those people - and for my employer to please give me the option to go in. Thanks.
> I don't think everybody finds work to be an unfulfilling drain on their leisure time
Well said. WFH doesn't fix a bad job or a draining company culture. If your job is miserable and you can't stand your coworkers then you need to find another job, remote or not.
I have fantastic colleagues and I'd still rather work remote. My commute easily gets up to 10 hours / week on a miserable public transit system. I prefer to spend that extra 10 hours with my family, friends, and neighbors, or on household chores, or hobbies, or just relaxing. I certainly understand that some people prefer the buzz of the office and I support people working in the environment that best suits their needs and personalities.
That said, having worked with an effective team in a hybrid environment (even before the pandemic) the idea of companies forcing people back into the office mostly reads as a lack of trust in the people they've hired. To me, that indicates a different set of problems.
I’m also seeing a lot of sunk cost thinking on the part of management, and have seen a few cringe worthy “remember how great the office was?” stuff from execs.
I think when you’re a C level, the size and appeal of the office gets melded into your ego, and you can’t get the same boost from people working from home.
You can use a 15 minute break to be with family if you WFH. You can't use a 15 minute break to be with your family and complete a >15 minute round trip.
If you believe being in the office is required, fine, but if that's your criteria for what a "very high dedication" employee is then you'll need to pay more remuneration(or offer other perks) than a business that requires the same skill set and dedication without requiring the employees to be in the office.
If you work from home, you can spend all that time you would have spent commuting finding friends instead. Go to bars, find common hobbies/interests, join a rock climbing gym..
Not everyone who prefers to WFH finds "work to be an unfulfilling drain on their leisure time", they just prefer to WFH for a myriad of reasons. (I like spending more time with my child, oof).
If you aren't a middle manager and the employee is productive, then honestly why do you have an opinion?
Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to.
A few Americans, but very few, still have extended families. The Navahos. The Kennedys.
But most of us, if we get married nowadays, are just one more person for the other person. The groom gets one more pal, but it’s a woman. The woman gets one more person to talk to about everything, but it’s a man.
When a couple has an argument, they may think it’s about money or power or sex, or how to raise the kids, or whatever. What they’re really saying to each other, though, without realizing it, is this:
“You are not enough people!”
Preferring to spend time with friends and family is normal. It doesn't mean someone's coworkers are so toxic that regular interaction with them is an ordeal.
That very sentence has already suggested that your coworkers are not your friends (or else they'd be in the group of "friends and family" that you enjoy spending time with).
I think the very point of GP is that there are many people who do, in fact, develop friendships with their coworkers.
Why do they have to be? It is strange that there is some unspoken stipulation that they NEED to be to have a good working relationship. I can talk to my co-workers about why webpack sucks without wanting to cook with them.
I've certainly made many friends through work, but in my experience a for-profit workplace is an artificial environment with a lot of distorting incentives that make it more challenging to establish genuine friendship.
Fair enough. I believe there's some truth to this. I do think it's hard to separate between genuine friendships and transactional relationships that happen to be symbiotic while you're working together (but will rapidly deteriorate when you don't).
Sometimes I do wonder how much of this is the fault of skewed incentives of the workplace, versus just a paradox of human interaction. We think we're developing friendships by spending a lot of time with people, without realizing that time spent is of a transactional nature rather than furthering some connection. I spend a lot of time with coworkers, therefore a feel close to them. However, when asked, I realize I know almost nothing about them below the surface.
In any case, I can appreciate that forming friendships at work can be more challenging. But I do believe many people (including myself) have done this, and when it works it can be incredibly powerful and make work much more enjoyable.
If you want to hang out or work with your friends, nobody is stopping you. Maybe you should make mutual friends that don't need management to force them to be with you
To be clear, I'm not saying that employers should force employees to work in an office so they can spend time with their friends.
I'm simply saying that those people who have developed friendships with the people they work with likely don't view "going to work" as a painful, soul-sucking task they have to perform simply to achieve a paycheck.
It is, in fact, possible to simultaneously realize that you're in a transactional business relationship with an employer who is compensating you for services, and that those around you are also in that same relationship, and to use that as a common ground upon which a friendship can be built that makes the transactional relationship less painful.
I also believe there are some people who do, genuinely, enjoy the work they do. The general point I'm trying to make throughout this thread is that it'd be great if folks realized that there is a diversity to opinions about work much in the same way as there is diversity to every other thing in life and it's simply not a binary choice between "work is wonderful and I want to spend my life at the office" and "work is awful and I can't stand commuting, sharing space with coworkers, paying egregious rent, etc." As with most things in life, the reality is most people live somewhere in the middle of that gradient. Acknowledging that is helpful if we want to make progress towards optimal, inclusive solutions.
Considering that we spend most of our day doing this "work" thing, I find it much more tolerable to view my coworkers as close friends and my career as an opportunity.
This is especially easy in such a privileged sector as tech where pay is excellent, office life is compelling, and work is challenging and exciting.
I don't know how people survive day-to-day with a perspective like yours. I get that people can get fulfillment outside of work, but its actually possible to enjoy both.
"Work is just a pay cheque culture" is just as toxic as "hustle culture".
Have you ever been fired from your family? For some that analogy has happened, but for most people it's an exception, but for a job it's a much more real possibility. I'm a mercenary at my job. No allegiance but to my interests, because the leadership and shareholders have the same perspective
I’ve worked in a military setting where brotherhood was real, but the only employer that pushed family (I found it to be cultish at the beginning) turned into a greedy soul sucking hell hole.
Some of my best work memories are from the military doing crap work with great people. Everyone just ate the shit sandwich together. Sometimes I miss it but then I remember how awful those sandwiches were. We had a pretty bad “event” at my current employer and as much as I didn’t sleep and eat I look back on it fondly. Something about shared misery builds rose colored memories
That feels... unrealistic. Apple pays well, and the folks who work there are likely able to find another job like... tomorrow. I doubt there are many financially desperate, mentally unstable people working there.
That said, I suppose it could occur at some other type of job. But pinning that on the CEOs is really unfair. People had a job presumably where they went into an office. The companies decided, or were forced to decide, that people could work from home to ride this thing out. Now that anyone who wants a vaccine is vaccinated in most places, it's not 'evil' to ask people to come back.
Apple doesn't actually pay well compared to competitors, I think most people are taking a haircut on their salaries in order to work there, because of the brand, the corporate culture etc.
> Now that anyone who wants a vaccine is vaccinated in most places, it's not 'evil' to ask people to come back.
Just because it's not 'evil' doesn't mean it's not stupid. If someone isn't performing, separation probably makes sense.
But it shouldn't be because they've woken up and realized that being in an office all day is a soul sucking exercise that they'd rather avoid.
I firmly believe this will all level out with people deciding to do what is best for them, because too many people have had the opportunity to realize how much better life is without a commute and physical restraints around where they do their work.
I feel like we're talking past each other. In other words, you're refuting points I wasn't making, in context.
It might be stupid, or a bad idea, sure. I'm not a pro office person.
But the reply was in the context to a comment that more or less asserts CEOs have blood on their hands because of all the workplace shootings that will occur. Because they're asking people to come back to the office...let that sink in.
And because we're talking about Apple and AR15s, and workplace shootings for that matter, I think it's pretty clearly aimed at America. In most places in the US, any adult who wants a vaccine could have already gotten one.
Apologies if I missed your actual point. The parent post you're referencing was evidently gone by the time I replied, so I was responding on face value, not contextually.
CEOs and leadership teams would not mind remote work I believe, at least not as a general rule, given there are benefits to the bottom line, e.g. real estate, other expenses, productivity arguably. What I think is the key concern for leadership teams, is that remote work does not allow for an environment to train the next generation of workers. Most of the experienced people do just fine remotely, but imagine wfh exclusively as a grad. That said, even that concern might be from the perspective of an "old" generation, given young people can probably navigate online collaboration more effectively and therefore adapt to learn the job with less face to face guidance.
What is the benefit of mentoring or guiding less experienced workers through new tasks in person as opposed to remotely with voice calls and screen sharing / live multi-user document editing / similar real time collaboration tools?
I've generally found remote work a better model as all people involved can edit the same document / diagram / model / code at the same time collaboratively, or at least have a better view of a screen than what is projected at low quality on a wall or displayed on a single monitor that isn't large enough for people to read at a distance. Whiteboards are OK for toy problems but are a hindrance for anything complex.
My recent experience (I've started two different contracts since the pandemic started) is that companies are at lot worse at on-boarding when everyone is remote than when everyone is in the office.
Maybe it's just that we all need to get new habits and adapt to this new medium, and it's only n=2, but so far my intuition is that on-boarding is harder when your colleagues with the relevant experience aren't one office away. Asking questions on Slack just isn't the same.
I don’t disagree and that is largely the consideration behind my closing statement. Nevertheless, keep in mind this makes assumptions on technical acuity of both mentors and mentees and the fact is there is a generational gap between them that might reflect on their ability to use these tools for mentoring relationships. I don’t claim having an answer, but I have been exposed to such discussions at high levels and I have seen people being concerned about this.
I haven’t had a job do any sort of training in… 20+ years. But then I’ve had some odd luck/experiences at every job I’ve had, except my first one. That first job was when I was 14 and was mowing yards with my neighbor who was a grad student.
Your comment might make sense in a completely different context, but this is Apple! Everyone there could be making more money for less stress somewhere else, but they’re at Apple since they believe in or appreciate something else about the company, whether that’s the vision, the colleagues, the hard problems, etc. Apple is probably the number one company where your comment is not true.
As a former Apple employee, I disagree that Apple is that different- YMMV depending on the group of course, but there are people who are overworked and underpaid drinking the kool-aid, and there are plenty of people underworking who wouldn't be able to get a similar job at a big company. I do agree that they tend to compensate you in brand value/equity instead of top of market salaries though :D
I will grant you the less stress but Apple opened a new site near one of my company's offices and we have lost quite a few people over the last year to them. Everyone has said they are offering a substantial raise and huge amount of stock.
True but my point was more than you will find every CEO that forces people to come back make a similar statement.
Also - Apple is a large company. Not everybody there is working on the next big thing. I'm sure there are plenty of people doing their job at Apple for money alone like anywhere else.
I wonder if some part of this is the ego trip of seeing your workers in your building working for you. As an executive, that's got to be more fulfilling than looking at some OKR slides and an employee roster. I don't believe this is the only motivator but it's surely somewhere in the mix.
How about the fact that executives are regular people, who (1) have their human emotions, including possibly a natural desire to have in-person interaction with the people they work with, and (2) listen to other employees, some of which are in the pro-office camp (as seen in this HN thread)?
Executives ain't some mystical species. They are regular people in a position of power.
Not sure how that contradicts what I've said. I, as a regular person, understand the thrill of walking around a place I own. I enjoy playing SimCity-style games and seeing everything running in the city I built, but I don't get the same result looking at the stats screen. If I were in such a position of power, this would be a perk of return-to-office that would apply to me more than to my subordinates.
I don’t know, I work at a technology company and I am excited to go to work every day (because we are inventing the future). The research teams are fun, and the vision is exciting.
I also am fortunate to have a strong work-life balance and try to only work 40 hours a week.
I honestly think they feel like they are like any other employees and hardly remember on day to day basis that nobody else around them shares the same incentive to work.
Sure, they know it, but also I think it’s pretty human to take your everyday life for granted. After all, it’s the foundation of political disagreement.
They just live in a totally different world than us. They don’t struggle making ends meet each month. They don’t have a soul crushing commute. They don’t worry about child care or whether their kids are getting a proper education. They are surrounded by thousands of people utterly dependent on them for their lifestyles, and who will never tell them No. They REALLY think that the general employees care about the “hum of activity, the energy, creativity and collaboration” just because in the exec’s world he actually does.
> The majority of people just want to earn some money and do it as easily as possible.
That's true, and I don't blame anyone for that. However, I don't think one should expect to enjoy all of the benefits of an extremely high performing company (i.e., RSUs of great value, high pay, prestige, etc.) if they approach work in this way.
It sounds very entitled to say "I'm just here for the paycheck" but expect all of the benefits of working at a highly productive company with none of the commitments.
I philosophically agree with your comment, but honestly my income over the past 20 years hasn't really followed what you're saying in any meaningful way. I've had places I didn't work very hard that paid me a ton, and places I worked like crazy and made little. In my experience, the factor that matters far more than anything else is the prevailing economy and, really, the stock market.
I work my job for the paycheck, which includes those RSUs of great value. It’s a fine job, but if I didn’t need the money, I would quit. What kind of commitments should I be making and why?
In this particular case, by commitments I mean fully commit to in-person collaboration. This doesn't mean sitting and working at your office desk instead of your home desk, it means actually making an effort to collaborate with other people. Sometimes in a spontaneous way, sometimes in a planned way.
Collaboration is done better in person. I believe anyone who disagrees with that is actually only disagreeing for selfish reasons (i.e., they want to continue WFH), or they go through mental gymnastics to justify it in their head.
That word "collaboration" is used to cover everything from pair-programming to reviewing someone else's proposal. Some things are better done in person, some things are better done at arms length. Moreover people assume that things like "hallways conversations" or "overhearing" are an unmitigated good when in reality they can be incredibly distracting and disruptive. So again this boils down to a cost benefit analysis, and the balance of evidence is that employers have made offices, especially open offices, so distracting that it is almost impossible to do focused work. Then they add to that people constantly scrolling on slack, and praise "communication" as if this is something in deficit rather than extreme, often toxic, surplus.
One can imagine a completely different office setup where developers work behind closed doors, there are two days in the week when no one is allowed to hold a meeting, people's times arent being wasted with a constant stream of broadcast messages, and in that environment removing the chance hallway encounter or in-person meeting might be a net harm. But I would say that in the current environment the vast majority of workplaces would see an overall bump in productivity if they reduced the amount of communication and increased the amount of focused work. That managers can't understand this is part of the reason why they create these huge open offices and spend $$ on broadcast communications mediums.
> Collaboration is done better in person. I believe anyone who disagrees with that is actually only disagreeing for selfish reasons (i.e., they want to continue WFH), or they go through mental gymnastics to justify it in their head.
Please consider that your experience is not always representative of everybody else's experience. Just because someone doesn't feel the same way as you doesn't mean they're lying to themself or others.
I collaborate with people remotely. But even if we take it as a given that in-office is better for everyone, it comes with the tradeoff of having to live in the Bay.
>However, I don't think one should expect to enjoy all of the benefits of an extremely high performing company (i.e., RSUs of great value, high pay, prestige, etc.) if they approach work in this way.
Why shouldn't I expected all the benefits (RSU/base pay/free food if that's included)? It was all agreed upon when I started the job.
I promise to you that there's a job out there that would change your mind. It might be impossible to get it for a number of practical reasons, but please know that those jobs do exist. I am only sharing this to encourage you to look around.
>>The majority of people just want to earn some money and do it as easily as possible.
The second part is the key. I think if you are a hard ware design shop, you need a certain amount of equipment in house to be productive.
While being remote might be something web development folks prefer. I can imagine there are many teams which are inconvenienced.
Even for software folks if you are dealing with something like datacenter ops, or other kinds of work that require some on the ground presence remote work is more of a problem than feasibility.
For a lot of people its easy to work from offices than home.
> The majority of people work because they need to earn money
That might be the reason they work at all, but that's not why you work for Apple, or a similar company.
And I don't even think "people work because they need to earn money" is completely true, in the sense that most people, definitely people with relatively advanced jobs like at Apple, would prefer working to not working, even if someone gave them free money every month. People enjoy the intellectual challenge, the structure, the community etc.
I’m convinced the majority of members of a previous team were secretly rich and could retire at any point if they so choose. Great team but there was a touch of “we are going to work on what we think is important, what are you going to do, fire me?”
It had a really healthy team culture (largely due to the efforts of a few individuals) and I quite enjoyed going to work for that reason. Hated the commute.
Don’t know if it’s your situation, but I also saw that in an extremely poorly managed company. A chunk of the non management team had gained huge power (and money, I believe) because they were the only ones that were able to understand how the core product did works. The management were useless and nobody ever encouraged knowledge sharing.
A lot of people complained about the under market salaries but those technical guys never complained or even speak about it.
It's not necessarily nonsense. In particular, "creativity". People can spark ideas in other people. I suspect that it happens more often in-person than on a group video chat. I would find it perfectly reasonable that Tim Cook thinks that, too - genuinely thinks it, not just spouting nonsense.
Now, that's "it's better for the company" rather than "it's better for you". But when that happens, it can feel pretty good. So in that sense, it can be better for employees too.
Whenever an exec waxes poetically about the “hum of activity, the energy, creativity and collaboration,” I can’t help but believe what he’s really enamored with is the physical act of surveying his fiefdom, watching and hearing all his serfs shuffling to and fro acting busy and looking like they are doing things. That’s what these guys get a rise out of. The vast number of soldiers under their command and behold! There the army is in all its glory!
This is also why open offices are so popular with the exec class but nobody else. Cubicles and offices hide all those glorious bodies shuffling about visibly doing work.
In my company we are now in some unofficial hybrid approach where everyone works where they want or where they need to. It works really well. There is enough people at the office for it to be a sufficient socializing place, and enough people who WFH to « force » the remote way of work.
It went naturally, we never were a remote first company before pandemic but working from home for personal reasons never felt like an issue.
Nothing changed officially except that if WFH was socially an exception before, a lot of employees liked it to become their default, others don’t.
So since nobody cares where others works, this new organization came organically.
Our CEO is personally against remote as a standard, but there was never an official communication and since management is decently decentralized and managers just don’t care where you are, they know our job is to be done.
Interesting, however I think any data gathered during the pandemic is not too useful. WFH is very abnormal currently for most. My current WFH productivity is certainly lower than when I WFH pre-pandemic.
If I was making decisions about the future of a company I would allow totally flexibility for at least 6 months post-pandemic so I could gather more accurate data. Trying to make people decide what they want (remote/office/mix) now is going to lead to decisions that people end up changing a little down the line.
Interesting. Given it was just a couple of months was there any element of getting adjusted to the new arrangements/developing better remote processes that could have contributed?
Curious to see how many quit over this. A lot in the tech industry (myself included) seem completely done with not working from home, especially when there is no excuse for working in-person. Tech offices for pure-software projects have also become morally indefensible from the perspective of resource consumption and climate change.
That said it's true that Apple does do some R&D that requires an in-person presence, but the number of people doing that stuff is tiny, and the vast majority of it is done entirely in software anyway.
Why is FANG trying to go back to the office? Because they all recently paid for multi-billion dollar headquarters. In the new remote economy these are useless plots of real estate, and they either haven't accepted this yet, or need to save face.
That’s a very cynical take. Morally indefensible? That’s an incredible hyperbole. People may quit sure but CEOs are responsible for getting value to share holders and many honestly do believe that in office or hybrid model works toward that goal. If it was only about office space they could write that off and be done with it.
How can you justify a ton of pollution, a ton of emotional and actual energy lost to commuting, millions (or billions) of dollars in real estate fees, only to reduce productivity because most studies are showing a productivity increase when working from home? There is a point where it becomes morally indefensible, and we're well past it.
My prediction: Talk is cheap and all the bellyaching will amount to maybe a temporary increase in attrition for a quarter (2x perhaps?) but negligible long term.
Here's my own prediction from going through this 5 years ago and being out of the office for awhile then going back on-site. It felt like going back and sitting in a high school classroom after I had already graduated. I had always been inside the rat maze and was suddenly outside it for the first time. My eyes were permanently opened to just how unnecessary to our jobs being physically present was and how much less I was getting done and how much more stress I had performing my work rather than doing my work.
There was no going back for me. I quit after 3 months on-site and found a remote job. I predict I will not be alone.
Commuting means an immediate 14% pay cut in time alone (ignoring CoL due to required proximity and vehicle maintenance, so it's really closer to 20%.) There are real economic forcings on the worker side against required office presence.
I feel like remote will be a powerful recruitment perk in the coming months. “We can pay you exactly what you’re making at $MEATSPACE, but we can give you full time remote.”
The costs for the company making the offer have already been realized over the past year. There’s high demand for that from candidates, and those companies can keep facilities overhead down while staffing up.
Once the talent poaching begins in earnest, that’s when I bet that we’ll see some of this get walked back.
In 2018/2019 discussions about open offices vs private spaces were all the rage. Bean counters (C*Os) were fast to position open offices as great promoters of interactions and teamwork.
Fast forward 2 years and thankfully that conversation has moved to WFH vs office work.
this was never about bean counting. it was about power. if you can put the drones in an open space while you have your own luxurious office that’s power. if you can force the drones back in office so that you can watch them and create synergies that’s power!
I already have a resignation letter written, a stash of cash set aside and earlier this year re-activated my freelancing Ltd. In the event they won't budge on my demand for 100% remote forever, I'll quit. My only compromise would be a 30% salary increase for the time wasted on commuting, or 1 on site day per month. Everything else I'm not available. Even if my next job won't be fully remote either I will at least get that 30% raise for time wasted commuting that is simply unobtainable within even 10 years in my current position (typical case of great starting salary but next to no raises if you stay).
When I was around the Bay, I felt like part of the implicit social contract was trading a luxurious office environment for meager, overpriced housing. A long-term WFH arrangement was never sustainable.
In my spacious but reasonable Midwestern house it's been amazing working from home (I'll keep drawing that Bay Area salary as long as possible!)
I was once called into HR for smoking outdoors on a balcony that no one ever told me was no smoking. No signs. I found the ritual humiliating and belittling. Then they had an issue for going to group therapy at the end of the day because management decided to get pizza and make everyone work late. I hated corporate culture with a passion. It definitely screwed up my creativity and productivity. If you like going into the office go, but let people like me work at home please. I like to write code, not fit into your idea of a new family.
This rings true. The fact that people enjoy corporate offices and make friends there beggars belief. I always though that's where people with personality disorders ended up. Sociopathic (and usually incompetent) management, petty office politics of the lowest order and a focus on anything but the actual work meant that the only way I could tolerate it was a few months at a time, and as a contractor. Then they at least mostly left you out of it.
I'm sure every place is different, and there are happy offices with cool people (I had no such luck), but unless you're cut out for this particular flavor of social pathology, it's living hell.
The people who enjoy the camaraderie of the office, signing birthday cards, gossiping by the water cooler and talking about their 10K run for charity never struck me as the smartest people. It always struck me as a ridiculous waste of time.
The entire thing feels like such a charade to me. Cute birthday cards and asking about each other's weekends. All signaling and no real human empathy. The moment someone needs actual support they are kicked to the curb. Not our problem! The person who sat in the cube with my Partner for years committed suicide. Poof, it was like he never worked there. Have facilities clean out the desk. This is not your family.
They encouraged us to dress up for Halloween. A coworker came in with a cowboy costume including a toy gun. HR sent him home for bringing a gun to work. It was one of those you used to be able to buy at the 5 and dime. It might even have been his toy gun when he was a kid. It was absurd. As soon as it was time to do layoffs, they let him go. The family friendly atmosphere evaporates quickly when it's time to do layoffs. Your description of what happens after a suicide sounds about like I would expect.
I managed a Black woman. She was being harassed by an executive. I tried to intervene. It got worse. It was racist. I saw it with my own eyes. My boss saw it with his own eyes. She went to HR. I supported her. My boss supported her. I was fired. My boss was fired. No one stood up for us. Everyone cut contact with us.
Imagine your real family was like a corporate family. You're at a family gathering and your grandfather calls you aside and tells you, "we're sorry, we're going to have to let you go. We don't think you're a good fit for our family. It's just not working out."
SV companies and their investors have been actively working to suppress remote work for as long as I can remember. So this move makes sense in theory.
I’ll be curious to see how much turnover this causes. I can’t name a single person I know that ever wants to go back to an office.
I see many comments here waxing about the virtues of forced commute and force colocated work, but it seems more like a cope for personal issues. If you’re relying on your work for friends, social interaction, preventing yourself from distractions, etc. then it sounds like you have personal issues. Issues unrelated to remote work.
I have good friends, but I don't have family.
About six months into the pandemic I started having severe panic attacks.
Since we've been back in the office part time, my mental health has improved dramatically.
Point being that working with good people can be a healthy part of a social life, and saying the people who rely on that have personal issues seems... well, privileged.
There is value in having a team working closely with each other, and enjoying that doesn't mean you're broken.
COVID forced the experiment of full time remote office work on corporations without managers having any influence over how long it would be implemented.
So now we know the result of that experiment - just look at the S&P500 / Dow market caps. An over-simplification, I know, but hey, that's price of the stock is the CEO's score card.
Corporate middle management and CEOs no longer have any excuse for maintaining the amount of office space that they do, so they're now resorting to empty, superficial reasoning. Case in point:
> "Cook wrapped up the memo by saying that he's looking forward to seeing employee faces. "I know I'm not alone in missing the hum of activity, the energy, creativity and collaboration of our in-person meetings and the sense of community we've all built," he wrote."
The CEO needs to be an extraverted person, the role requires that type of personality, especially for a high profile corporation like Apple. Therefore, CEO needs to twist his brain into mental gymnastics in order to justify the 10 year lease s/he signed just 2 years ago ( or in the case of Apple, the capital expense of Apple's big, round HQ building).
"Synergy! Cross pollination of ideation! Innovation! Business jargon! MBA buzzwords!" - so says every American CEO.
yawn
Personally, I did enjoy office time pre COVID, but the commute nowadays (I have to take public transportation bc I live in NYC) is not something I look forward to. I also know I have been more productive.
So we all have to suffer a little more so that the CEOs and middle managers feelings feel better, but at least remote work will be more common than ever before.
I've been a mostly remote employee (at a company that is mostly not remote) for about 7 years now, so the shift to 100% remote had minimal impact on me, but had immense impact on most of the teams I work with.
I think there will be a bit of a pendulum swing as things open up and then a normalization somewhere in the middle.
I'm an introvert, and a "Highly Sensitive Person" and I find remote work to be really helpful for me. But as a product manager, the shift to 100% remote, especially by folks who are not accustomed to it, wreaked havoc on some of the planning/design/brainstorming work we generally do in person between each release.
I'm very happy that there's some return to normalcy. I hope the pendulum doesn't swing too far, and I hope that companies focus on working onsite when it makes sense instead of just because.
But I do think you're right about CEOs, manager types and some extroverts - some will look for any reason they can to go "back to normal".
Why "brainstorming" has to be in person? On Slack or other service is much more inclusive as it include voices of people who are not great at getting themselves heard in a live setting but they have great ideas. Plus everything is traceable.
Not all brainstorming has to be in person. Many things can and should happen asynchronously (even if we're all in the office). But not all forms of collaborative work are equal.
I addressed your question (why does this have to be in person) in another HN thread [0] a number of months back and I'm copying that comment here. The rest of that thread (parent and children) explore this in more depth.
> I'm talking about conversations that might take all day, or days. Breaking down enormous problems. Deep collaborative work.
Can you do this in a virtual room? Yes. Will you achieve the same outcome? Early results (in my case) seem to indicate the answer is "no".
> I want the ability to pace around the room at times. Look my collaborators in the eye. Pick up on non-verbal cues that are often impossible to see remotely. Step away as a group to share a much needed lunch break.
> And when passionate people are involved, and many viewpoints are present, the ability to all argue/debate a topic vigorously - even show frustration at the right moments - and then all share a beer at the end of the day, is critical. Having that same vigorous debate on Zoom and then dropping off to our individual lives doesn't leave room for reconnecting with each other as humans - something that is critical for maintaining relationships.
> Not every project requires this kind of interaction. But for things that do, the remote format just doesn't work well for everyone.
> "I know I'm not alone in missing the hum of activity, the energy, creativity and collaboration of our in-person meetings and the sense of community we've all built"
Easy to say when you're not commuting an hour to and from work five days a week. I would bet Tim isn't too far from the Apple HQ. I say this as someone who does not like working from home but does live very close to the office.
This helps you be more cautious and careful (e.g. I'm saving your life here). Companies may get complain and let people work from home. It's a win for me and for you.
Apple employees: when Tim Cook is around, just fake a cough politely.
From reports, even if you catch it, the vaccine will attenuate the virus enough so that it's unlikely that you'll have a sufficient viral load to spread it to others.
School, and the socialization that occurs there, is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Work is generally just work, it's not like your personal development suffers if you skip it.
Some people have a gene that makes broccoli much more bitter than it is to other people. Some people find 8 hours in the office harder to take than others. I agree with your point that sometimes we have to teach children to do things that are not fun in the short term for long term gain but not everyone has the same requirements.
There are plenty of people who have found remote work much more productive and others who are really wishing they could be back in the office. I hope that employers take the pandemic as an opportunity to learn about different working styles and create more flexible working arrangements that can accommodate all types of people.
I totally agree. I'm someone who struggled at first but has since found it really good, and I think would ultimately choose the very sort of 2/3 scheme being discussed by these large companies— in office for meetings and team bonding, home for focus and flexibility.
But my parent comment was specifically with respect to the business about part of school being the socialization stuff, and if it's relevant whether or not your kids "want" that.
The reason you used to think Brussels sprouts were bitter and then “got over it” is they actually were bitter and since then they’ve been improved to taste better.
If it’s their room why would they be forced to maintain it to another person’s preferences?
My comment was about this mythical socializing that kids presumably needs so much.
Not all of them do.
School as an institution exists to free up housewives to participate in the workforce and maximize employers’ profit while preparing cheap workforce by giving a minimal education to the kids. Any benefits for the children are secondary - let’s not buy in too much into the PR.
The proof is in the pudding. Covid death rates were identical to California. I don't care about signaling, I care about results. Scientific research has consistently confirmed that school age children are responsible for a de minims fraction of Covid transmission.[1]
jfc. comparing yourself to CA? really? compare yourself with places that managed covid properly (even within the US)
also, you point at Iceland. Do you understand that the people there don’t have the generic diversity you normally have in other places? How would you feel if the parent of another kid at your school died of covid as a result of your little one passing it around?
Children should not be in in-person school until either the vaccine is widely available to children as young as 5 or SARS-CoV-2 is completely eradicated worldwide.
Since this will take a long time, the government can kill two birds with one stone by bulldozing every school in the country and building 130-story skyscrapers full of affordable housing on their sites, solving both the school question and the housing problem at the same time.
Minuscule (if we just take it at face value) is not the same as none. If a kid dies then there is a risk. Plus it depends on what I consider to be high risk. If a kid dies from preventable causes then for me that’s high risk environment.
Kids also spread the disease even we ignore the risk for them. So that means that it’s an increase of the risk for everyone else. Kids also interact with their grandparents in a lot of cultures quite frequently which is the highest risk group.
Mask decrease the probability of spreading or contracting COVID.
Masks are critical for dampening the potential for spread. The goal is not entirely to mitigate risk for the kid themselves, but of spread to their household that leads to increased likelihood of deaths.
At this point, for those households, all I have to say to them is get vaccinated or STFU.
San Francisco sits at 60% fully vaccinated with most of the Bay Area in the same range; only Solano County lags very far behind at 39% fully vaccinated.
If between now and September, we can’t get society vaccinated to the point that kids can attend school 5 days a week without a mask, then we either need to do some full on Union busting or it’s time to start leaving the unvaccinated behind and let them take their lives into their own hands. Will that suck for those that for some reason can’t? Yes, but we can’t keep society in a holding pattern for them forever.
The risks are lower, not miniscule. Some are also vulnerable to MIS-C. Masks do not stop covid for adults either, should adults stop wearing masks? (No.) Children are also potentially infectious.
I would argue that your children will learn non-verbal communication even better with masks on. It encourages alternative methods of conversing and challenges you to be a better listener and more attentive student. Honestly I don't know why we didn't do this in elementary school just for the hell of it!
What we now call "school" has barely existed for centuries, let alone millennia. Pretty sure kids were much better socialized prior to our current state of primary education.
That’s how websites like this one came about actually: “ backwards traditionalist”. Also the internet, ICE, industrial revolution, etc. We just kept doing what worked for millennia.
> learning non verbal communication is very important
You're right. There's absolutely no way kids could learn non-verbal communication if they had to wear a mask for several hours a day. It's not like literally everyone in Japan and China has been wearing face masks for 20 years.
I work in Japan. Before 2019 It wasn't even figuratively everyone, and it wasn't all the time. Wearing masks was done for many reasons sure, the most common reasons being:
-If you genuinely felt sick.
-If you wanted to avoid wearing makeup.
-If you wanted to conserve moisture/heat for your face.
-If you had some kind of social aversion.
Most of my Japanese coworkers take their masks off at their desks these days. People don't like wearing masks all day, even when it was already part of the local culture they grew up in.
I don't know how masks will affect non verbal communication. I imagine the next generation will come out of this having adapted more to detect expressions in the eyes and shifts in the corners of the face. For children with severe ASD I would expect it to seriously impede their growth in interpreting facial expressions.
you're totally right, let's just never trust any vaccine or medical developments due to anomalous chance of failure. in accordance to this, i pledge to never leave my home until i leave this barren earth.
The vaccine does not completely prevent you from getting infected or from being able to infect others. It drastically reduces the chance, especially of the more dangerous symptoms affecting the lungs, but it doesn't grant complete immunity.
Besides, measures like masks also affect many other diseases; this recent winter they were effective enough to reduce influenza-related deaths by over 95% compared to the year before.
“Drastically reducing the chances” is all you need, because everyone else has also gotten vaccinated and there isn’t a supply of bats dropping fresh virus on you to constantly challenge it.
The COVID vaccines really are so good there’s not much reason to take extra precautions as long as you’ve gotten one. Variants don’t even matter since it’s not the flu.
Are you sure you aren't being facetious and pretending like you have not heard any mention of the numerous studies that show vaccinated people do not spread the virus in any significant percentage and how herd immunity works?
No, I haven't seen any of those studies and I have very little personal motivation to do so as I live in NZ and the only place I care to travel to is Australia - so no need to pretend or be facetious at all.
In fact, my first actual exposure to wearing a mask was less than 3 weeks ago when I traveled to Sydney. TBH, I don't know what the big fuss is about.
There is basically no community spread of measles currently due to good herd immunity (via widespread vaccination). When there are outbreaks it is usually very serious and stuff gets closed and people isolated.
"Routine childhood immunization: 2 doses of any measles-containing (MMR or MMRV) vaccine. The first dose of measles-containing vaccine should be administered at 12 to 15 months of age and the second dose at 18 months of age or any time thereafter, but no later than around school entry."
No, it’s free in the US too. There are clusters of families in communities that reject vaccines however, so there are a bunch of schools with insufficient proportions of vaccinated kids. A ripe breeding ground to create a vaccine resistant strain of measles or mumps or whatever.
Vaccine resistant measles does not appear to be possible using standard gain-of-function methods on the vaccine strain, mumps I have no clue. People's vaccines wearing off (or not working in the first place) and them not noticing due to herd immunity would be a much bigger problem, I think.
To be honest I'd rather live in the world where people have an overabundance of care for each other rather than the world where people disregard the well-being of others entirely.
Of course it's not binary, and it shouldn't be binary... but comments like this are hellbent on making it that way. I understand why you feel this way, but the hyperbole doesn't help anyone.
I wish people would not flag comments like this. I don't agree with the commenter at all, but killing their comment doesn't help us have a conversation about their concerns. It's critical that we resolve these conflicts and not do what we (as a society) have been doing for years, where we treat people like an "other" and shun them because we don't want to deal with them.
I was among the first who wore a mask in my area (before it was mandatory) and I recognize the benefit of masks as one of the interventions with the best cost-benefit tradeoff.
Nevertheless, I 100% agree with that post, and think "religion" is the most accurate word to describe the situation, especially in the US.
Calling something religion can start a shouting match or an echo chamber. Rarely a conversation. It doesn't matter if it's accurate.
"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."[1]
I can see where you're coming from but to be forced to be inaccurate in order to placate people for whom the accuracy may be upsetting is a hallmark of the current state of affairs in our culture and it's hugely not beneficial to anyone.
A new religion with ever shifting rules. What was dogma one day can be blasphemy the next. Older religions were subject to change but usually slowly over generations, giving everyone time to adapt to the new revelation. But this secular religion changes constantly and woe to those who aren't current on the latest changes.
Secular religion is an oxymoron. Sure, the secular world is slowly being taken over by "new" belief systems, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. Hell, religion isn't necessarily a bad thing. But anything drastically new is taken as a threat, and it would seem that one aspect of the modern "culture war" phenomena is the perceived threat of these new belief systems encroaching on old belief systems.
I think the sense is which the GP is using secular is to roughly mean atheistic faith. The new movements we see with a religious characteristic are not based on a deity but otherwise have all of the hallmarks or a religious system (clergy, faith, heretics, threat of damnation, etc).
I actually think atheistic faith is pretty scary: its sortof a psychopathic version of theism, where instead of a supreme being that generally has a conscious and can be reasoned with (within the religious mythology), atheistic faith presents itself as some kind of objective fact, with no central leader or responsible parties.
> all of the hallmarks or a religious system (clergy, faith, heretics, threat of damnation, etc)
which is a very Western/Abrahamic view of religion.
Belief is always scary to the Observer, and comforting to the Believer. the more sure the Believer is, the more scared the Observer gets, because they perceive more threat. theist and atheist Believers are more alike than they are different.
You're not entirely wrong. There are plenty of people for or against wearing masks regardless of what the science says, almost cultish. We had it before the pandemic and we have it now even with highly effective vaccines. It happens on the extreme right but it also happens on the extreme left.
I personally can't wait until the two weeks after my final vaccine shot ends so I can stop wearing a mask and not care anymore. I had a heck of an immune response so I'm pretty hopeful I'm in the now immune category.
It’s been a religion from day 1. PCR tests being run at too high of a cycle count was a conspiracy theory until it wasn’t. Hospitals being incentivized to mark any possible patients as COVID cases for extra government money was a conspiracy theory until it wasn’t. Mandatory vaccination with a drug that hasn’t even gotten FDA approval was a theory and yet I see people call for it. People I had had great chats with about the problems in the pharma industry, problems of government overreach.
I was one of the most scientifically literate people in my friend group and now I’m an outcast because I don’t always “trust the science”.
And just 2 years ago we were seeing all manner of stories on HN about experiment reproducibility, the issues with the peer review system, etc.
I have been completely demoralized by the past year.
We all have, dude. But just like it's not completely rational to inject everyone in the world with a brand new drug that's been rushed to market, it's equally irrational not to try every possible thing we can to stem a once-in-a-century global pandemic killing millions of people and trashing economies.
> I was one of the most scientifically literate people in my friend group and now I’m an outcast because I don’t always “trust the science”.
Unless you're an expert in a field, you are not scientifically literate in that field.
Being able to read a couple conclusions isn't scientific literacy. It's the same slapdash stuff that conspiracy theorists do. Find a couple publicized studies. Read the conclusions. Repeat as though you're an expert.
Even in your comment, the majority of your points are political, because I suspect you're not actually scientifically literate.
>Unless you're an expert in a field, you are not scientifically literate in that field.
Really? There's nothing in between expert level and being able to judge if data was shoehorned or was a natural fit? Only an expert in a specific field can determine if logical flaws exist? If there's possibly hidden variables impacting readings, or incomplete models?
Has the scientific world become that black and white? You're either an expert or your opinion is not worthy of discussion?
I'm glad that of the many things I want to rant about, one I chose was the PCR cycles. Because the creator of that technology, Kary Mulis, specifically warned about it's misuse in that manner. Now for anyone just wandering into this mess going to search him for the first time - be warned, he did hold a very controversial opinion about another disease. But I don't think anyone could appeal to a higher authority on PCR testing at its core.
>Even in your comment, the majority of your points are political, because I suspect you're not actually scientifically literate.
> Really? There's nothing in between expert level and being able to judge if data was shoehorned or was a natural fit? Only an expert in a specific field can determine if logical flaws exist? If there's possibly hidden variables impacting readings, or incomplete models?
Generally, yes. If you don't work in the field, I doubt you can even read a single paper, let alone identify errors.
> Has the scientific world become that black and white? You're either an expert or your opinion is not worthy of discussion?
That's always been the case. But yes, if you are not an expert or knowledgable about a topic, your opinion generally does not mean anything. I know this is hard for people to hear.
> I'm glad that of the many things I want to rant about, one I chose was the PCR cycles. Because the creator of that technology, Kary Mulis, specifically warned about it's misuse in that manner. Now for anyone just wandering into this mess going to search him for the first time - be warned, he did hold a very controversial opinion about another disease. But I don't think anyone could appeal to a higher authority on PCR testing at its core.
Kary Mulis can have an opinion. You not just being an expert is repeating something you don't understand.
> Generally, yes. If you don't work in the field, I doubt you can even read a single paper, let alone identify errors.
I doubt you have enough knowledge about sciences and the process of learning in general to discuss this matter, let alone to make bold claims on other people's ability to reason about findings of various papers.
> That's always been the case. But yes, if you are not an expert or knowledgable about a topic, your opinion generally does not mean anything. I know this is hard for people to hear.
It's fun to watch how quickly you switched from the original "unless you're an expert in a field" to "if you are not an expert or knowledgable about a topic", and yet you are stil unable to admit that you said a silly thing in the first place.
Also, what you are saying has never been the case in scientific circles. It's been the case in the circles around them, among the people with less intelligence yet unjustified ambition: "expert" is the same phony concept as "prestige" - a token of a social climber who is seeking a stamp of committee approval, and who couldn't care less about the actual knowledge in the field and the pursuit of truth.
> I doubt you have enough knowledge about sciences and the process of learning in general to discuss this matter, let alone to make bold claims on other people's ability to reason about findings of various papers.
That's fine. You can have your opinions on whatever you want. I still don't think you can read papers from most fields :shrug:.
> It's fun to watch how quickly you switched from the original "unless you're an expert in a field" to "if you are not an expert or knowledgable about a topic", and yet you are stil unable to admit that you said a silly thing in the first place.
I don't choose my words that carefully, so this isn't the point you think it is. I said knowledgable as some wiggle room. Don't read too much into it.
> Also, what you are saying has never been the case in scientific circles. It's been the case in the circles around them, among the people with less intelegence yet unjustified ambition: "expert" is the same phony concept as "prestige" - a token of a social climber who is seeking a stamp of committee approval, and who couldn't care less about the actual knowledge in the field and the pursuit of truth.
This is an insecurity you have with yourself, creating some weird definition of expert. Like I said, people hate to hear that their opinions don't matter.
> That's fine. You can have your opinions on whatever you want. I still don't think you can read papers from most fields :shrug:.
That wasn't an argument in your original comment. You specifically said that people were not scientifically literate unless they were "experts".
> I don't choose my words that carefully, so this isn't the point you think it is.
One day you will discover that before you are able to make a point you need to learn to choose your words carefully first. Words, like science, have an exact meaning too.
> I said knowledgable as some wiggle room. Don't read too much into it.
Don't worry, I'm not taking you seriously yet, at least not until you define what precisely does "expert" mean. Nevertheless, it's fun to see how far you are willing to go with your comments without admitting your mistake.
> This is an insecurity you have with yourself, creating some weird definition of expert. Like I said, people hate to hear that their opinions don't matter.
Which insecurity? Please be specific about your words here too.
And let's finally check your premises. What's your definition of an "expert"?
> One day you will discover that before you are able to make a point you need to learn to choose your words carefully first. Words, like science, have an exact meaning too.
One day you will discover that comments on HN don't matter. Also words do not have exact meanings. I suspect you're not an expert in linguistics, are you? ;).
I mean it's kinda funny that you got one of the basic tenants of lingustics wrong, in trying to argue that non-experts opinions matter, lol.
> And let's finally check your premises. What's your definition of an "expert"?
I don't find debating definitions to be interesting. It's just an arbitrary line, and you'll argue with whatever line I pick.
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter. You can fool yourself on social media. It fits in line with the anti-intellectualism of half the country, that think they can read a single study and then cock off about it.
"Google announced that 20 percent of its workforce would be able to work from home permanently"
Google gets a lot of PR cred for this but its not the case at all.
They "estimated" that 20% of workers would be remote at their management chains discretion. Ie pretty much the same policy they've always had (you can be remote if you get permission, but you'll be the odd one out).
3 days in is just a trick, if you need to commute the majority of the week why not commute the other two days (vs moving somewhere further out with a better WFH setup).
I wonder how a VC would feel if a startup said “we have some ideas but our real innovation comes from people just randomly running into each other in the hallway. Will you invest?”
> I wonder how a VC would feel if a startup said “we have some ideas but our real innovation comes from people just randomly running into each other in the hallway. Will you invest?”
I'm sure they would not invest in you because you didn't understand the arguments of office vs remote work. They'd probably think you were kinda dumb if your entire knowledge of human interaction was reduced down to "randomly running into each other in the hallway".
“Hallway conversations” were literally the first point the GP made and the person you’re responding to correctly refuted that. They’re an anti-pattern, and if your company is benefiting from them, then they’ve failed in process, vision and culture. A successful company would not rely on such a thing.
I think the title would be more accurately written as "Apple requires staff to return to office..." rather than "Apple asks staff to return to office...."
The latter seems subtly disingenuous to me. Yes, they are asking, but it's not a request an average Apple employee is likely to be able to refuse.
It may just be some weird quirk of mine, but I notice things like this.
I've joined the company during the height of the pandemic. Hat to relocate. Then I've rented a very nice apartment just the other side of the street from the company building.
Then the company moved to a presumably cheaper building which is on the other side of the city. And you guess it... because COVID and remote work.
I've talked to my relevant managers (the ones that actually mange stuff I do) and they don't care if I work from home. I hope non productive (HR etc) doesn't try to impose some "return to normal" bullshit. I've been stacking reputation through productivity like crazy to be able to resist it in case it happens.
I brought my dog with me. Large dogs shouldn't be left alone for more than a few hours.
Pre-covid, I was in a similar situation. My wife and I chose our house because it was close to downtown, where both our offices were.
Just prior to Covid, they decide the rent's too high there and say they're moving to an area that's supposedly central for everyone, but is a lot worse for me. (And for everyone, honestly. Traffic there was horrendous.)
Then Covid came and they dropped the plans to move, and simply closed the office.
They haven't yet decided what's happening post-Covid, but I'm worried they'll pick an awful area.
I actually do somewhat prefer working from the office... I just don't want that nasty commute. (And for me, that's anything over 15 minutes or with any amount of uncertainty.)
It's very unfortunate that the WFH experiment didn't turn out to be a 100% winner. We had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do all office work from home for the rest of our lives, and it certainly feels like that most companies didn't love it. There are obviously some exceptions, but what matters is what 90% of them will do - and right now it looks like that they will be asking for on-site presence somewhere in the range of 3-5 days. There's a massive difference between 100% WFH and 20-40% WFH: you cannot live wherever you want. I am really bummed that we as a collective society didn't come out of this thinking that 100% is the way to go.
I think the cat is out of the bag with WFH, and it will evolve toward what works for workers and what management can tolerate. As usual a lot will depend on how indispensable you are.
In many cases, this is a power imbalance - the one paying you your salary makes the choices, so your choice is accept or leave.
Most people will accept it, so it's no problem to let a few rebellious apples out. But in software engineering, where there's a ton of job opportunities, the imbalance is smaller - many people can choose to leave and go work somewhere else. A company can't survive if all its employees leave, so they must make room for negotiations.
Therefore I expect that some WFH opportunities will stay - some companies will be happy to poach talented leavers.
> It's very unfortunate that the WFH experiment didn't turn out to be a 100% winner.
This "experiment" wasn't one unless you expect the pandemic to rage forever (in which case, going back into the office is very risky!).
As other comments have said, a smart company will allow employees pandemic-like freedoms to work from their home or office as they desire, and let this experiment you mention actually work out.
"once-in-a-lifetime opportunity" that sounds too optimistic I wouldn't bet against a COVID variant emerging that requires us to do this all over again.
"my fear is the biggest cost in the long run is all the single young men come in five days a week, and college-educated women with a 6-year-old and an 8-year-old come in two days a week, and six to seven years down the road there’s a huge difference in promotion rates and you have a diversity crisis"
This will be very true. WFH at a non-remote company means you are a pure resource. You need to be committed to the mercenary mindset that you are there to crank on deliverables so that the office drones can preen and posture. The upside is you get the skip the posturing and surf for lunch.
I suspect that many employers that are requiring their employees to return to the office for a few days a week are doing it to ease their transitions into a full return to the office.
From what I've seen from friends and family, some employees were told that after the pandemic, they were only going to return to the office when it was necessary for them to be there, then it was one day mandatory at the office, and now it's 3 or 4 days.
The outcome that I think most people will find themselves living with is employers going back to business as usual, and maybe some higher level employees will get to work from home a bit more often than they were able to before.
And up until April 2020, they were removing walls as fast as they could in that place to make room for more bodies. I don't think under utilization is a risk.
I can see why Apple did this. Based on data from internal surveys I know from big tech companies, there has been a split between three cohorts; remote, some days in office and all days in office.
The some/all days cohort in office is the one that is the majority in almost all big tech companies.
So, tech companies have to retain their offices. If they are paying for those spaces, do they not allow the employees who work from home to come office at all? That can reduce cost for them, but a lot of remote employees wish to have the option of being in office on few days they chose as per their wish, that means you need to reserve space for them. There was recently an article which said one of the big tech companies saved $1 billion in office costs(this was despite paying for office space). https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-28/google-is...
Also, if the teams are hybrid (remote/office) with some members of team being remote and some in office. There is extra burden for the team to accomodate the remote members for things like impromptu discussions as a group.
Personally, I like the option of being in office 2-3 days in a week most. Not having the burden of meals and having some bonding with folks in the company is something I like, it has been hard having that as a remote employee.
I think Apple should allow this call to be taken by individual teams though.
What’s odd is the already distributed teams are effectively remote from different regions. So they need to drive into an office so they can jump on zoom?
I think for such teams it doesn't make much sense to force them into office. A new joiner in such a team should be allowed to indicate his preference for remote/office, which should be asked again in a year.
I’d rather just go in five days, although I definitely prefer completely remote forever.
For me, it’s about context switching and having a work/non-work routine. Having to wake up at different times, do meals differently, schedule childcare differently through the week is actually harder than just doing the same thing all five days.
I think this is what they're banking on. They're _requiring_ 3 days but are hoping you'll realize it's easier to just give in and come to the office all 5 days.
When office shutdowns started happening, everyone waited for the big tech companies to make the call and copied them, just like how everyone followed Google's leetcode and hire model for all SWEs in SV.
I believe Google made the 3 days in office call starting Sept first and places started following suit.
FWIW, Google afterwards opened up the possibility of full-remote work (saying they expect ~20% of the workforce to do that iirc), but individual PAs will need to come up with actual guidelines which are due in a couple of weeks.
> While 20 percent of its 140,000 employees will be fully remote
Also, further down
> While Google says the majority of its employees will work from the office around three days a week, it also says it’ll make it easier for employees to switch between offices or to work fully remotely.
Meanwhile, the subtitle of OPs is:
> Employees can work remotely for up to two weeks a year
And there's nothing about full time remote. So they seem quite different.
or welcome to the UK/London trap... 650 usd / month for daily commute to work (45-60min train+tube) because you are not 20 and want to have more than a shoebox shared shit within the city limits or have family. Add to that ridiculous food prices and fully criminal housing market both rent or buy(keep dreaming)..WFH is a super solid relief...yes I miss hallway chat the most.. and quicker to help people but still no comparison to the commute shitshow. I told many times to upper management that operative offices do not need to be in central London.... maybe now something will shift. To be honest nothing needs to be even in the UK... place is becoming a larger Singapore, finance and corps, rest is services for slaves with no hope of building a normal life, 1 to 1-3 times is the healthy ratio between yearly wage and property, here is like 1:12-14 ... complete criminal (they will have to lie to tell you that can finish paying it) and classist (only rich fucks or upper middle class kids with mommy and daddy bank can ever buy anything) if you ask me.
Another person living in the UK, I agree wholeheartedly; nice insights about Singapore and classism. I live in Manchester and take remote contracts with London clients from time to time. Getting paid London salaries outside of London is one way to live comfortably in this country. There are a few larger companies that truly believe in remote work, Utility Warehouse is one of them. I don't understand how people put up with London or the horrible commute.
I used to work at Millbank Tower when in London. Which is next UK's Intelligence HQ (MI5) and close to a ton of cool places like Buckingham Palace and London Eye.
At first I was rejoiced for working near all these interesting places. But London quickly reminded me of the cost. $600/mo commute plus almost two hours a day on train/metro (which is even more expensive if you value your time).
This doesn't surprise me, I assume Apple has a lot of contractors/H1B's. It would make sense they want them at the shiny new HQ they built to keep a closer eye on them. Be a shame if no one was using the campus after they spent all that money. Tim Cook is Apple, his whole life is defined by that Company, he expects it to be the only thing in his employees lives too. There are shareholders to satisfy that would demand no less from the employees....back to work slaves....
It's a gross generalization on my part, but during the height of covid most of the bay area was dead. Only the union city/fremont/milpitas area seemed to have much real activity. And most of it was of asian/east asian descent. I'm wondering if companies were lording H1/visa status over people and requiring they be in person.
I wonder as more companies start to push more people to get back into the office, more people will want to keep working from home, those companies that offer full remote work will be able to pay less and get better employees?
I guess the question is, are you willing to work from home and get paid less than if you're forced to go back in an office? I took a pay cut 8 years ago to work from home, so my answer is YES and after working from home it's HELL YES this was totally worth it.
Outside of a handful of startups, I've been partially to fully remote my entire career (goes back awhile) much of that international. I don't need hallway conversations. I need to work with the tools that I have to build trust and relationships. I could give two shits if someone 2-3 levels above me wants to see my face now and then - so long as they know who I am, what impact I have had, and that's backed up by colleagues.
The funny thing with Covid was many companies that were "in office required" and allowed remove because of covid - had employees (including management) gloating about how they wouldn't go back to X, etc. One such company happens to be based in the PNW. Once HR issued the memo - people back in a hybrid model - the bravado shut up really quickly.
My current role requires I know people across regions, across time zones, and work along side them effectively for both parties. That is something I've done my whole career.
My role was primarily remote before covid and that won't be changing. The travel, the interactions, bonding will return. Is an office needed for that? No. Structured face time is.
I wasn't sure if I had my phone/email purchased by recruiters or something. I get cold calls and emails every week now. I ask them where they got my info, but no one's clear.
When one of the more progressive tech CEOs are pushing a 3 day return-to-the-office I suspect the remaining 90% (much less progressive) will go with 1 or none days work-from-home for the vast majority or workers.
On-the-other-hand... many CFOs are probably eager to significantly reduce office floor space, so it should be interesting to see how this plays out.
It's funny how people who like remote worker expect everyone to commit to their lifestyle, like it's a religion. Some people will work better in the office others will work better at home. Not everyone is the same ... why haven't we figured this out yet
I think it is wise they are specifying specific days.
My org has been endeavoring to make a hybrid model work with the notion that if a partial workforces is only ever on site we have more space both to social distance and for other reasons.
But there are proving to be some really distinct problems. Primarily that hybrid meetings actually suck a lot more than all-remote or all-in-person. The minute the critical mass shifts to in-person there are all kinds of random one-one interactions that the remote attendees can't be aware of. And on the other end, it becomes impossible to share space with others if you are constantly in video calls.
My personal order of preference is now all-remote, then all-on-site, then hybrid a long way behind.
I remember someone trying to justify college over self-educating (quality varying all the way from coursera to Wikipedia to YouTube to Facebook): you just don’t learn the same way anywhere else. Being with your peers, having your ideas cross examined in real-time and having direct and personal feedback is invaluable.
I think the same applies to wfh. Yes it is fun, yes I like that I avoid commute, but I’ve also become a shell of what I used to be (remember I wasn’t the most social guy in the first place).
I am looking forward to going back to office and enjoying the hum of work around me.
Funny. I felt the exact same about college classes as wfh. 90% of the time, classes were unnecessary, and I could do the readings and exercises on my own to learn the material better. Everyone also said office hours were so great, but I always found them a waste. On the flip side, no professors know my name, and I can't remember them either. In contrast, my wife went to a popular liberal arts schools, has several professors she still keeps in touch with, used her classes to make connections, and generally had a totally different experience. I think people are just different.
Many classes seem to derive 0 benefit from being in person. The help you can get online for a subject like statistics is light years beyond the classroom. If you can self motivate, both individual education and remote work can be your superpowers.
What’s interesting is that this is NOT a hybrid model, as Google has done[1]. As i understand this _everyone_ is in an office Mon, Tue, Thu. This is a better situation IMO then some people always being remote and others being in person.
Wouldn't most people rather work 3 consecutive days? Then you have 5 consecutive days of not having to be in the office. Wouldn't that give people a ton more option to see family and friends and whatever else?
I suspect that's entirely the point. By not giving people 2 consecutive days, it requires you to still remain close to the campus and prevents you from doing anything interesting like travel for half the week.
I enjoy working at home just as much as the next person. I think many would agree that interaction in a school environment is important for people when learning. My point is that many forget that new employees, especially young people starting their career need interaction in order to learn and grow in their field. My employer is asking us to come in at least two days a week, which seems like a nice balance. In my field of architecture, nothing beats human interaction when designing and helping others in building and construction.
Good news! I hope other companies (including mine) open up soon. Two people living in a 1-bedroom apt whose living room is an office, dining area, gym, and living room is cramped.
Recruiters on LinkedIn already picked up on this and predictions of this. Last few weeks they've all been emphasizing "fully remote but SV pay-scales". I'd expect many resignations given this Mon+Wed+Thu selection that clearly says "we need your asses in our chairs, and damn the data that says otherwise"
One major point I noticed everyone was not commenting on was the psychological side as seen through management's eyes.
I've been both sides of the table, so to speak, and can understand the perverse motivations that sometimes come into it. Some people in management actually love being in management because of the hierarchy that comes with having subordinates in one area, and a manager desk that overlooks them. The same desire drives such managers to have all-department meetings which serve little purpose. From their perspective, it reinforces their superior status over the individual contributors. When such managers have remote staff they don't get the same validation. They desire people to come in to get their personal validation with everyone sitting around them. At this point there is some post-rationalisation. The various factual benefits of having people in the office are offered. But they are not the true motivators for this kind of manager.
Obviously not all managers are such ego or status driven as this description. But it is not a caricature at all. I have regularly seen this perspective and attitude amongst managers. It is just easier to spot and understand when you are at C-level and have management or senior staff reporting to you.
I believe this is the true explanation for why there has historically been reluctance to offer a remote-first culture in work environments. Of course, with COVID, public health issues have adjusted the power balance here. When COVID is not such a public health matter in a locality, the return to normal now means return but for 3 days. Why 3? I think it is enough days for management to still feel that they are the boss on enough days of the week. Down to 2 days, managers would not feel boss-like.
Lastly I don't want to malign the true managers and leaders we have. Those that want to achieve great results, and circumstantially need to be a manager, just to realise the journey with team contributors are the best type of manager, in my view.
Our company did a survey and 85% of people said they wanted to work=from-home. I think pandemic has shown and also forced people to learn to work from home. I honestly don't understand the need to go to office. I don't understand the benefit for the company at all.
I used to do this. 2 days at office and 3 at home after mostly working in office. It really brought into stark contrast how very little I could get done when coming in to work.
I would show up exhausted after a long commute and look for a desk. Then I had to setup and it was weird being in a different place every time. (They took my cubicle and put in Hot Desks.) The noise was distracting. (Open plan) It smelled like a Jack in the Box from the cafeteria and getting lunch took a lot of time. In person meetings ate up a lot of the time I would normally spend multi-tasking.
I did like the socializing when I could get it. But the office magic seemed hardly there anymore. I didn't have a real place. A traveler just waiting to get home.
Of all the tech giants, I understand Apple's insistence on returning to the office the most due to their secrecy, even from other departments. IIRC I've heard tales of people being blindfolded before being taken to skunkworks engineering projects.
If companies find it works best for them to have people in the office, I understand that. But as someone who has been working fully remote since 2010, I would personally never commit to a job that didn't give me at least 3 months of working vacation per year (minimum) where I can work from wherever I want. I hope it becomes the norm for companies that aren't fully remote to explicitly offer working vacation between 3-11 months per year as a standard benefit. Most of the companies I've worked with are fully remote, but have an office available for those who want to work there, and do an all hands on-site once or twice a year for two to four weeks.
Remote works kills many communication channels and opportunities. It can be a good thing but not as permanent state of affairs. 2-3 days in office is probably something where you can get good balance.
If you have a team of people assigned to you, you need to care about them, not just organize the work. It's near impossible to see when someone's is getting stressed, until something breaks. It's extremely hard to integrate newcomers.
People have trivial things that hold them back, but they don't know how to communicate those issues or may not even know about them. Just observing and interacting with them will clear them up quickly.
WFH needs to be mandated whenever possible. We have an existential climate crisis caused in part by constantly driving cars to and from work. This is more important than office productivity, and oddly, nobody is talking about it.
Not at all a brave or innovative move. These companies are already globally distributed. They have remote sites. And now they have a year of fully remote work under their belt where it has been proven that remote can work. Forcing people into concentrated residential and economic centers instead of giving them the freedom to work from anywhere seems not just backwards (foregoing a way to keep employees happy) but draconian. I wonder how much of this is out of a misplaced sense of control over employees and how much is just them trying to salvage the value of physical offices they are so heavily invested in.
I may go back to the office soon. Currently it is optional for anyone who wants to, but I know only one person who volunteered so far, so I've thought it would be lonely.
What changed my mind? The cable company, which appeared to give me a really good deal on switching my cellular service to them, jacked up my internet rate by $15 and notified me they will increase it by $10 more soon.
I only have cable internet because I needed the bandwidth for remotely attending meetings, so I feel like they are trying to extort me. An unlimited cellular plan with some other provider may be cheaper now.
By not letting folks have two work from home days in a row or on Fri/Mon, Apple is pretty much saying that you can’t really work from your remote home. This is going to keep folks close to Cupertino instead of letting folks work from Sacramento, Tahoe, Beach and it means couch surfing close to the office for the other 3 days. Bummer as it means less time w/family & pets for a lot of folks that moved out of the Bay area.
Commute is not that bad - in moderation. For me, commute is about getting out of the house, moving around, waking up, and getting in the zone. But it gets old after 30 minutes.
My previous job was door to door for me in 20-25 minutes. I could hop on the Q train on the Upper East Side in NYC and be at Union Square that quickly. Did I do it? Almost never. I took a walk through Central Park before hopping on a train in Midtown, and I loved it.
Really looking forward to this blowing up in Apple's and other companies' faces...potentially some ADA lawsuits as well. The door has been opened and there's no going back and tech workers know their worth more so than minimum wage workers, and those companies are already whining and bitching about how people "don't want to work anymore because of unemployment" etc. Popcorn time :)
There's a lot of speculation and talk about motivations. Isn't Apple primarily a hardware company? Maybe someone who works there can set me straight, but it seems logical for Apple to need at least some of its workers in an office. They cant be shipping prototype phones, laptops etc.. all over the world and then expect nothing to leak? Or even effectively develop it?
Perfectly reasonable given the office space and campus perks to stuff all the time wasting meetings into the 3 days of lowered productivity meatspace time, and crunch real work out on Wed/Fri.
I’m hoping my organization does the same hybrid setup.
I’ve spent enough time and money on my home office setup that it gives a shiny new office building a run for its money.
Having to come in on Wednesdays and Fridays means you can't even divide up your week into two blocks. If it was Monday/Friday WFH then you'd be at home for 4 days (Fri-Mon) and then in for 3 days (Tue-Thur).
That would open up some interesting options for work/life balance that aren't there when you have to switch work locations multiple times a week.
I think a hybrid approach is good inasmuch as it gives HR less to complain about. WFH has so far proven to work and the whole theory that people must be visibly managed to keep working or just be productive and profitable has been proven false. It's time to let go of the dogmatic approach to how work is done (whether it's wholly WFH or on-site).
There’s a lot of great points being made by others, but for me, it boils down to just one.
Privacy.
Offices have no privacy. If my brain is stalling out, there’s nowhere to go to take a 15-30 minute uninterrupted, shameless nap. Bowel movements are subject to crappy, public stalls with big cracks in the doors.
It’s just not worth it. I get way more work done at home, and I’m far more comfortable.
Speaking of BMs, WFH has me spoiled in that I get to use the bidet I installed at home every time. Once you’re used to using a bidet, anything less feels like living in the dark ages.
It appears that everyone mentions commute as a massive energy/time sink that erases many potential benefits of working in office. Every other claimed benefit of WFH is all very subjective and you will either enjoy it or not enjoy it.
But so many of us actually stay very close to our work places. Commute is either 15 mins one way or sometimes even lesser.
Speaking with the point of general economy, it probably makes more sense to reopen office spaces as part of consumer business runs due to office goers. An example would be coffee/breakfast sales post work from home and in-office. This could help revive this part of economy which mostly runs in the background.
still more people will probably be working from home on a permanent basis; he says 'Most employees will be asked to return' not 'all employees...' Also google is saying that '20 percent are expected to work from home permanently' https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/6/22422518/google-hybrid-wor...
(trying to read between the lines)
A different question is if those working from home will have a greater chance of being shoved out with the next review cycle, but that's another story.
Their turnover is about to spike if it hasn't already. People have seen the future now, and I'm sure they don't want to go back to the noisy and collaboration-killing open office
Don't think so. It is very difficult to walk away from RSU grants and I'm sure Apple is a great place to work at. Most people I know have already told their managers how they plan to work moving forward irrespective of company announcements on return to office mandates.
With the current infections rate in CA and even less in SC county, you have to be really bury your head in the sand to pretend this is not going to happen.
Makes me think of David Graeber's book Bullshit Jobs. In it he notes that people in power try to get as many underlings as possible whether it's useful for the company or not. I wonder if management has felt "out of control" and less "powerful" now that people are working from home.
I’m personally looking forward to returning to the office. I think after this is over I’m going to find a smaller startup to work at or a smaller company.
Working remote makes me feel like a robot and I miss being around other people and finding Our mission together.
Been working from home for the last 20 years. Make money either off my own products or design and develop products for clients. I prefer to think and create alone. I value before anything else ability to choose what work to do. I am fine having meetings every once in a while but rubbing shoulder all day long in the office is not for me. I have friends I do not work with and I prefer it this way. I also enjoy being not having some out of their mind HR telling me how to behave, being forced to "team building" events and whatever other crap they come up with.
I do understand that some jobs are impossible without being in the office / factory / whatever. I am thankful that I was able to avoid those.
I don't work for Apple anymore (and only worked for the corporate side for a short period), but this does not surprise me. They've never been a company very accepting of remote work.
My current company strongly encouraged WFH during the pandemic and happily is currently set to maintain it as an equivalent choice even after full vaccination. I would seriously consider switching companies otherwise - there are benefits to being in an office, but I can't think of any that outweigh 1h+ commute per day :-/
We’ve been back in the office since September 2020 with masks. We are now a mask free workplace as of two days ago if you are vaccinated. Any delay to return to normalcy at this point is absurd.
This might be the worst possible schedule. Mandatory Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays? Terrible.
Neither fish nor fowl. Shit, or get off the pot. But deliberately constructing the schedule to make actually getting to work remote impractical is mendacious at best.
The deliberate choice of Thursday over Wednesday is quite a strong indicator that even part-time remote is not an option, so you can't even just commute into the city for work and live a ways away during the rest of the time.
I'm remote anyway but if I were to need to commute into my city office (as opposed to the nearer suburban office) two days a week, I'd probably just spring for a hotel room one night per week. I'm a 90 to 120 minute commute and that's tolerable maybe one day per week and the occasional two but not much more.
The world has been remote for 15 months, that’s the new anchor. Lots of employers going fully remote who wouldn’t have before, raising the tide for everyone.
No full remote, start looking for your next gig in one of the best job markets in decades. Likely you’ll get a pay bump as well, as the labor market is tight.
* Overhearing hallway conversations (and joining them) helps spawn invocation.
* I often do/did paired programming, and over-the-shoulder code reviews. These are easier in person
* Having a workforce socially close improves productivity because everyone wants to step up for each other.
* Being seen by my fellow employees helps keep me from becoming distracted.
* Working at the office helps prevent home life from being distracting during work hours.
There are some personal benefits I enjoy from being in the office.
* I save money by spending less on food, drinks, and electricity.
* I enjoy the routine.
* I had a stronger work/life separation. I rarely turned on my work laptop at home.