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All I'm hearing from friends is that WFH is way worse than it was hyped up to be and that it's so much worse not being able to work with your coworkers in perso

All I'm hearing from friends is that WFH is way worse than it was hyped up to be and that it's so much worse not being able to work with your coworkers in person and to have separation of your home and work for mental health. Everyone is different and WFH is not a panacea.

gdubs 7y ago
For the experiment to be fair we should spend three months unable to leave our offices, and have everyone bring their kids, and be responsible for janitorial, barista, and cafe services.
- vikramkr 7y ago
  Yeah if wfh was given a fair shake I think we'd see a lot more acceptance. But the end result of the current situation would not be so optimistic I think. I dont know if it's as good for wfh as people hope.
theli0nheart 7y ago
I'm surprised it needs to be said, but WFH during a pandemic is not equivalent to WFH during normal life.
- skrebbel 7y ago
  > I'm surprised it needs to be said, Are you really, though?
- thawaway1837 7y ago
  Well, in my case WFH during the pandemic has been far better than otherwise because now everyone is on an equal footing. Everyone is WFH so I’m not missing random side conversations or getting ignored altogether. And it’s still pretty terrible. There are advantages, but at least for me my productivity is miles higher in an office environment.
  - vikramkr 7y ago
    For companies that haven't built remote cultures with employees that enjoy face to face work, productivity just won't be higher at home. If you're just chugging away at assignments sure, you'll be more productive. But there are a lot of types of jobs where that just doesn't work. Setting aside the obvious areas like biotech and hardtech where you need equipment, any highly innovative/team driven work will be better in person. You don't just work when you're at your desk. Thanks are the types of jobs where you're having discussions with your coworkers over lunch that spark some idea or the like. And anything where that constant access to face to face communication would help is being hurt. Of course not all companies are like that, but not all companies are the opposite either. We've got a diversity in our workforce and companies that just can't fit a single style of work.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Pandemic WFH is a total disaster. As much as it becomes equal footing, the floor has fallen off. WFH works when you can actually work from home - not when every possible place where you could stash your kids is closed. WFH also doesn't work if forced suddenly on people who, before the pandemic, haven't given it even a single thought. This event is going to taint WFH for years to come.
    - SuoDuanDao 7y ago
      My experience has been more that it's shown itself to be highly polarising. There are also a lot of people who knew they wanted to work from home and just didn't have the option, I think this will be a lively debate in the years ahead. From a pollution perspective though, the preferable choice is fairly obvious.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        I agree, and for what it's worth, I've been working from home for almost three years now. But my productivity has tanked recently because of yet another factor: the COVID-19 situation is cognitively taxing. Initially I had to micromanage my parents, grandparents and in-laws, to ensure they're safe and have enough emergency supplies; then it took me three weeks to stop spending half of the day following COVID-19 news. From what I hear, this is a very common situation with everyone now, so whatever productivity drop happened in companies attempting WFH now, I'm betting most of it doesn't have anything to do with WFH.
- vikramkr 7y ago
  The poster I'm replying to is suggesting that this will be an experience to convince people to work from home haha. Either, this is a valid experience and everyone hates it. Or, this isn't true work from home and nobody's actually learned anything.
  - danielbln 7y ago
    It's a spectrum, and I assume it will shift a bit towards acceptance as we go on in this pandemic as people find arrangements that work. You have to have processes in place, personally as well as professionally, to make WFH work well, and a lot of people who are thrown into this brave new WFH world have neither.
    - vikramkr 7y ago
      At least do my social circle, acceptance of work from home just keeps dwindling. this is seen as a sacrifice to fight the virus, like rationing during wartime, something you would never do voluntarily after because of how miserable be experience is. This is a small sample but you at least can't assumed from here that the shift would be towards acceptance in general. I'm sure some people absolutely will shift towards acceptance, but society really isn't built for work from home there's a lot of types of jobs that really benefit from in person interaction, a lot of those employees are not enjoying this at all.
- arendtio 7y ago
  Actually, a friend of mine is doing research about how different it is. Here you can participate: https://aopsy.biwi.uni-due.de/covid19 https://aopsy.biwi.uni-due.de/covid19
- rustybelt 7y ago
  I have two restless kids at home who would normally be in school right now, and I'm still feeling more productive at home.
atomi 7y ago
You adjust and you adapt. We've been doing that for all of human history.
swiley 7y ago
As a junior software engineer at a new job: I think the only reason I’ve been productive at all during this is because I have some experience working remotely. A lot of people aren’t taking it seriously and don’t realize how important discipline and separating everything is. I’m glad I’m at a company that had good plans in place for something like this but I feel like these two things put me in a tiny minority. The good news is: everyone has learned a lot and if they want to do it again it might be easier.
- vikramkr 7y ago
  I still see it like war rationing though. sure, people will know how to do it better next time, but I dont know if people want to do that again voluntarily
  - ntsplnkv2 7y ago
    One big factor is the lockdown in many places. Working from home when I can go to the gym at lunch, the doctors office at 9, pick up X and Y hour, etc, is a lot different than what we're dealing with now - which is: "you're WFH but can't do anything else."
leetcrew 7y ago
if nothing else, it gives you as an individual the chance to prove you can be just as productive from home.
chapium 7y ago
That was my experience, I posted a while back about it. Things don't work so great when a remote person is attached to a mostly local team. If a majority of the team is remote and a skeleton crew is local it tends to work better. At least those are the two scenarios I've been in first hand.
Arnt 7y ago
True. I have a feeling, though, that after this, many people will be less willing to travel for meetings. Video conferences may be poor compared to walking to a conference room in the same building, but they may also compare favourably to travelling by airplane to a similar conference room in a similar faceless building in a different city. And many, many people are getting VC practice now.
gedy 7y ago
My observation is there's two major groups: people with kids who are now trying to work and watch children at same time. Childless young people for whom work is a big part of their social interactions. The "work" part of face to face interactions is a minority of most everyone's days, even in the best of cases.
misc7183 7y ago
It doesn't have to be all or nothing though. A lot of companies that weren't willing to even consider the option are embracing or at least begrudgingly allowing WFH during the pandemic, even if that leads to only a 5 or 10% increase in WFH over the long term it's a net gain.
- vikramkr 7y ago
  I think it might actually lead to losses. As in, companies that would have considered building in remote work capabilities in another timeline will now be discouraged to by employees who think coronavirus when hey think work from home, leading to slower adoption overall
bamboozled 7y ago
There is a large difference been "trying to export your regular office culture to fit the working from home experience" and working for a properly distributed team / company with a culture setup for doing so. You need to give this stuff time and probably re-establish a lot of your companies culture to fit remote work, or yeah, you will probably have a pretty crap experience. Edit: Add link to a good and very recent podcast on this topic by Sam Harris and Matt Mullenweg: https://samharris.org/podcasts/194-new-future-work/ https://samharris.org/podcasts/194-new-future-work/
- vikramkr 7y ago
  And I think everyone is getting the crap experience, which wouldn't endear them to wanting to give wfh a go again in the future. For better or for worse (mainly for worse), this is what people will think if they they think of work from home
  - bamboozled 7y ago
    Yes, I guess to add to that, it’s probably really not for everyone as well. The same could be said about office life.
    - vikramkr 7y ago
      And unfortunately even the people that wfh would be good for are getting a very bad impression of it as their first taste
- SuoDuanDao 7y ago
  All the introverted folks at my office are enjoying it - it's the people who used to interrupt us while we're trying to work that are suffering.
endorphone 7y ago
As happens in every single WFH discussion, it turns from someone saying "look, more people can WFH" to the strawman that this means that everyone must work from home and that WFH is being presented as an incredible panacea with all upsides. Not everyone should work from home. A lot of people don't like it. A lot of people need the in face connections. Working from home has lots of downsides that have been covered on here and everywhere many, many hundreds/thousands of times. But a lot of people don't need to go into an office, at least not every working hour of every day. A lot of positions don't. A lot of people thrive fully working from home, some working part time from home and other times in the office, or a cafe, or whatever. But how these discussions always go is the no-work-from-home crowd effectively saying that no one should work from home because they personally don't enjoy it.
- _ph_ 7y ago
  WFH doesn't have to be all or nothing. One can WFH 2-3 days/week and for the other days be in the office. So there is still plenty of opportunity for interaction, but on the other days, one can enjoy the benefits of WFH. I have a lot of colleagues, who do have long commutes, so for them, every single day of WFH has quite a benefit.
  - tzs 7y ago
    If you can work from home the majority of time, and if you can arrange it so that those times you work in the office can be on a slightly shifted schedule so that you aren't traveling during rush hour, you might also be able to live quite a bit farther from the office which could greatly cut your housing costs. For example, if you could do a 4 day home 1 day at the office schedule and were willing to do a 90 minute commute each way on your office day, that would be enough to let you work in downtown San Francisco and live in Modesto. There you can have a 3 bedroom 2 bath 1400 sq ft house on a 7000 sq ft lot with a two car garage for $300-500k. Many in that price range will even have a pool.
freehunter 7y ago
As a conflicting anecdote, I’m a consultant working for a large vendor and all of my clients are now suddenly WFH and the only people who don’t like it are the managers. All the engineers I’ve talked to have said they’re way more productive without side conversations and walk-ups constantly. I can say my work schedule has gotten a lot busier without even taking on new projects or clients, my clients just seem to have a lot more time to work than they did before.
icedchai 7y ago
I find WFH "depressing" because I like to get out of the house. The separation is more important for some than others.
- loco5niner 7y ago
  Did someone lock your front door? Joking aside. Man, I go one like 3 walks a day with my wife during the day now. It's great.
Brajeshwar 7y ago
Right now, people went WFH without preparation and the first thing people (with no experience working remotely) is to replicate their office style. Almost everyone I talked to, talked about meeting/video calls throughout the day. So, my question to them, "So, when do you work?" Video Calls / Meetings should be the last resort. Working remotely (WFH) is not bringing the office work at home, it is an entirely different experience and should be approached thus. Besides the many other advice floating around, some cores ones that works are; - Communicate, communicate, over-communicate, mostly via email or other long-form writing). - If you do the above (writing), it helps in the key element of working remotely - asynchronous. The day you can work asynchronous with your team, is the day you won in working remotely. If you write, then you can also share it anytime, to anyone.
- marmada 7y ago
  I think there's a social element of office work that can't really be replaced with WFH.
  - CodeCube 7y ago
    It can be replaced by local co-working spaces (or even coffee shops with the right community) ... very few reasons anyone on this earth should be traveling dozens and dozens of miles, for hours on end every single day, just to co-locate with people, when they live next to thousands
- danmaz74 7y ago
  For many jobs, meetings are a fundamental part of working.
  - CodeCube 7y ago
    Maybe they shouldn't be ... there's literally no reason for this when there are plenty of other collaboration methods that work just fine asynchronously. Yes, I understand that many of those jobs are just that way because that's the way they are, and people are used to it, and it's a core part of the way they work. But eventually, someone's gonna come along that's going to dare to do it differently, and they're gonna put them out of business
empath75 7y ago
How much of that is just generally disliking change, though? People’s homes aren’t organized around work now, but prior to the industrial era, they were, and people complained about working in factories and offices.
werber 7y ago
I live alone in one the harder hit parts of the US and normally enjoy “WFH”, but for me that usually means coffee shops, parks, beaches. Its the being stuck in an apartment, not interacting with anyone except on video calls. This whole situation has made me really reconsider my priorities, and made me wish I’d settled down younger.
kpennell 7y ago
Agreed. I think this will make many people realize how much they DON'T like wfh
loco5niner 7y ago
WFH is a panacea for all my open office woes.

gdubs 7y ago

For the experiment to be fair we should spend three months unable to leave our offices, and have everyone bring their kids, and be responsible for janitorial, barista, and cafe services.

vikramkr 7y ago
Yeah if wfh was given a fair shake I think we'd see a lot more acceptance. But the end result of the current situation would not be so optimistic I think. I dont know if it's as good for wfh as people hope.

theli0nheart 7y ago

I'm surprised it needs to be said, but WFH during a pandemic is not equivalent to WFH during normal life.

skrebbel 7y ago
> I'm surprised it needs to be said, Are you really, though?
thawaway1837 7y ago
Well, in my case WFH during the pandemic has been far better than otherwise because now everyone is on an equal footing. Everyone is WFH so I’m not missing random side conversations or getting ignored altogether. And it’s still pretty terrible. There are advantages, but at least for me my productivity is miles higher in an office environment.
- vikramkr 7y ago
  For companies that haven't built remote cultures with employees that enjoy face to face work, productivity just won't be higher at home. If you're just chugging away at assignments sure, you'll be more productive. But there are a lot of types of jobs where that just doesn't work. Setting aside the obvious areas like biotech and hardtech where you need equipment, any highly innovative/team driven work will be better in person. You don't just work when you're at your desk. Thanks are the types of jobs where you're having discussions with your coworkers over lunch that spark some idea or the like. And anything where that constant access to face to face communication would help is being hurt. Of course not all companies are like that, but not all companies are the opposite either. We've got a diversity in our workforce and companies that just can't fit a single style of work.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Pandemic WFH is a total disaster. As much as it becomes equal footing, the floor has fallen off. WFH works when you can actually work from home - not when every possible place where you could stash your kids is closed. WFH also doesn't work if forced suddenly on people who, before the pandemic, haven't given it even a single thought. This event is going to taint WFH for years to come.
  - SuoDuanDao 7y ago
    My experience has been more that it's shown itself to be highly polarising. There are also a lot of people who knew they wanted to work from home and just didn't have the option, I think this will be a lively debate in the years ahead. From a pollution perspective though, the preferable choice is fairly obvious.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      I agree, and for what it's worth, I've been working from home for almost three years now. But my productivity has tanked recently because of yet another factor: the COVID-19 situation is cognitively taxing. Initially I had to micromanage my parents, grandparents and in-laws, to ensure they're safe and have enough emergency supplies; then it took me three weeks to stop spending half of the day following COVID-19 news. From what I hear, this is a very common situation with everyone now, so whatever productivity drop happened in companies attempting WFH now, I'm betting most of it doesn't have anything to do with WFH.
vikramkr 7y ago
The poster I'm replying to is suggesting that this will be an experience to convince people to work from home haha. Either, this is a valid experience and everyone hates it. Or, this isn't true work from home and nobody's actually learned anything.
- danielbln 7y ago
  It's a spectrum, and I assume it will shift a bit towards acceptance as we go on in this pandemic as people find arrangements that work. You have to have processes in place, personally as well as professionally, to make WFH work well, and a lot of people who are thrown into this brave new WFH world have neither.
  - vikramkr 7y ago
    At least do my social circle, acceptance of work from home just keeps dwindling. this is seen as a sacrifice to fight the virus, like rationing during wartime, something you would never do voluntarily after because of how miserable be experience is. This is a small sample but you at least can't assumed from here that the shift would be towards acceptance in general. I'm sure some people absolutely will shift towards acceptance, but society really isn't built for work from home there's a lot of types of jobs that really benefit from in person interaction, a lot of those employees are not enjoying this at all.
arendtio 7y ago
Actually, a friend of mine is doing research about how different it is. Here you can participate: https://aopsy.biwi.uni-due.de/covid19 https://aopsy.biwi.uni-due.de/covid19
rustybelt 7y ago
I have two restless kids at home who would normally be in school right now, and I'm still feeling more productive at home.

atomi 7y ago

You adjust and you adapt. We've been doing that for all of human history.

swiley 7y ago

As a junior software engineer at a new job: I think the only reason I’ve been productive at all during this is because I have some experience working remotely. A lot of people aren’t taking it seriously and don’t realize how important discipline and separating everything is. I’m glad I’m at a company that had good plans in place for something like this but I feel like these two things put me in a tiny minority. The good news is: everyone has learned a lot and if they want to do it again it might be easier.

vikramkr 7y ago
I still see it like war rationing though. sure, people will know how to do it better next time, but I dont know if people want to do that again voluntarily
- ntsplnkv2 7y ago
  One big factor is the lockdown in many places. Working from home when I can go to the gym at lunch, the doctors office at 9, pick up X and Y hour, etc, is a lot different than what we're dealing with now - which is: "you're WFH but can't do anything else."

leetcrew 7y ago

if nothing else, it gives you as an individual the chance to prove you can be just as productive from home.

chapium 7y ago

That was my experience, I posted a while back about it. Things don't work so great when a remote person is attached to a mostly local team. If a majority of the team is remote and a skeleton crew is local it tends to work better. At least those are the two scenarios I've been in first hand.

Arnt 7y ago

True. I have a feeling, though, that after this, many people will be less willing to travel for meetings. Video conferences may be poor compared to walking to a conference room in the same building, but they may also compare favourably to travelling by airplane to a similar conference room in a similar faceless building in a different city. And many, many people are getting VC practice now.

gedy 7y ago

My observation is there's two major groups: people with kids who are now trying to work and watch children at same time. Childless young people for whom work is a big part of their social interactions. The "work" part of face to face interactions is a minority of most everyone's days, even in the best of cases.

misc7183 7y ago

It doesn't have to be all or nothing though. A lot of companies that weren't willing to even consider the option are embracing or at least begrudgingly allowing WFH during the pandemic, even if that leads to only a 5 or 10% increase in WFH over the long term it's a net gain.

vikramkr 7y ago
I think it might actually lead to losses. As in, companies that would have considered building in remote work capabilities in another timeline will now be discouraged to by employees who think coronavirus when hey think work from home, leading to slower adoption overall

bamboozled 7y ago

There is a large difference been "trying to export your regular office culture to fit the working from home experience" and working for a properly distributed team / company with a culture setup for doing so. You need to give this stuff time and probably re-establish a lot of your companies culture to fit remote work, or yeah, you will probably have a pretty crap experience. Edit: Add link to a good and very recent podcast on this topic by Sam Harris and Matt Mullenweg: https://samharris.org/podcasts/194-new-future-work/ https://samharris.org/podcasts/194-new-future-work/

vikramkr 7y ago
And I think everyone is getting the crap experience, which wouldn't endear them to wanting to give wfh a go again in the future. For better or for worse (mainly for worse), this is what people will think if they they think of work from home
- bamboozled 7y ago
  Yes, I guess to add to that, it’s probably really not for everyone as well. The same could be said about office life.
  - vikramkr 7y ago
    And unfortunately even the people that wfh would be good for are getting a very bad impression of it as their first taste
SuoDuanDao 7y ago
All the introverted folks at my office are enjoying it - it's the people who used to interrupt us while we're trying to work that are suffering.

endorphone 7y ago

As happens in every single WFH discussion, it turns from someone saying "look, more people can WFH" to the strawman that this means that everyone must work from home and that WFH is being presented as an incredible panacea with all upsides. Not everyone should work from home. A lot of people don't like it. A lot of people need the in face connections. Working from home has lots of downsides that have been covered on here and everywhere many, many hundreds/thousands of times. But a lot of people don't need to go into an office, at least not every working hour of every day. A lot of positions don't. A lot of people thrive fully working from home, some working part time from home and other times in the office, or a cafe, or whatever. But how these discussions always go is the no-work-from-home crowd effectively saying that no one should work from home because they personally don't enjoy it.

_ph_ 7y ago
WFH doesn't have to be all or nothing. One can WFH 2-3 days/week and for the other days be in the office. So there is still plenty of opportunity for interaction, but on the other days, one can enjoy the benefits of WFH. I have a lot of colleagues, who do have long commutes, so for them, every single day of WFH has quite a benefit.
- tzs 7y ago
  If you can work from home the majority of time, and if you can arrange it so that those times you work in the office can be on a slightly shifted schedule so that you aren't traveling during rush hour, you might also be able to live quite a bit farther from the office which could greatly cut your housing costs. For example, if you could do a 4 day home 1 day at the office schedule and were willing to do a 90 minute commute each way on your office day, that would be enough to let you work in downtown San Francisco and live in Modesto. There you can have a 3 bedroom 2 bath 1400 sq ft house on a 7000 sq ft lot with a two car garage for $300-500k. Many in that price range will even have a pool.

freehunter 7y ago

As a conflicting anecdote, I’m a consultant working for a large vendor and all of my clients are now suddenly WFH and the only people who don’t like it are the managers. All the engineers I’ve talked to have said they’re way more productive without side conversations and walk-ups constantly. I can say my work schedule has gotten a lot busier without even taking on new projects or clients, my clients just seem to have a lot more time to work than they did before.

icedchai 7y ago

I find WFH "depressing" because I like to get out of the house. The separation is more important for some than others.

loco5niner 7y ago
Did someone lock your front door? Joking aside. Man, I go one like 3 walks a day with my wife during the day now. It's great.

Brajeshwar 7y ago

Right now, people went WFH without preparation and the first thing people (with no experience working remotely) is to replicate their office style. Almost everyone I talked to, talked about meeting/video calls throughout the day. So, my question to them, "So, when do you work?" Video Calls / Meetings should be the last resort. Working remotely (WFH) is not bringing the office work at home, it is an entirely different experience and should be approached thus. Besides the many other advice floating around, some cores ones that works are; - Communicate, communicate, over-communicate, mostly via email or other long-form writing). - If you do the above (writing), it helps in the key element of working remotely - asynchronous. The day you can work asynchronous with your team, is the day you won in working remotely. If you write, then you can also share it anytime, to anyone.

marmada 7y ago
I think there's a social element of office work that can't really be replaced with WFH.
- CodeCube 7y ago
  It can be replaced by local co-working spaces (or even coffee shops with the right community) ... very few reasons anyone on this earth should be traveling dozens and dozens of miles, for hours on end every single day, just to co-locate with people, when they live next to thousands
danmaz74 7y ago
For many jobs, meetings are a fundamental part of working.
- CodeCube 7y ago
  Maybe they shouldn't be ... there's literally no reason for this when there are plenty of other collaboration methods that work just fine asynchronously. Yes, I understand that many of those jobs are just that way because that's the way they are, and people are used to it, and it's a core part of the way they work. But eventually, someone's gonna come along that's going to dare to do it differently, and they're gonna put them out of business

empath75 7y ago

How much of that is just generally disliking change, though? People’s homes aren’t organized around work now, but prior to the industrial era, they were, and people complained about working in factories and offices.

werber 7y ago

I live alone in one the harder hit parts of the US and normally enjoy “WFH”, but for me that usually means coffee shops, parks, beaches. Its the being stuck in an apartment, not interacting with anyone except on video calls. This whole situation has made me really reconsider my priorities, and made me wish I’d settled down younger.

kpennell 7y ago

Agreed. I think this will make many people realize how much they DON'T like wfh

loco5niner 7y ago

WFH is a panacea for all my open office woes.