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Half of American workers would rather work from home forever: poll

• jpxw 6y ago
  I have a feeling this will change over the coming months.
  • jsjddbbwj 6y ago
    Exactly the same thing would happen if you asked people if they'd rather be on vacation forever. Yes, but after a few months, they'd be begging to get back to work.
• nerdbaggy 6y ago
  The 25-34 age range had the most “Yes” I want to work from home. I wonder if experience made the later years want to not work from home, or what caused that.
  • carlmr 6y ago
    Maybe having kids at home and a wife you don't want to see.
  • nck4222 6y ago
    Children probably. Don't get me wrong, I love being home and spending time with the family more, it's really the best part of this experience for me. But there's no way I'd be able to be as productive as expected under normal circumstances. I'm lucky if I get 4 hours in.
    • deepGem 6y ago
      2 kids at home. I am dying to get into my office and work. The interruptions are just insane. I don't think I'll be a lot more productive in the office but I sure as hell will be a lot less stressed. Also my office is very quiet with almost zero interruptions.
    • t3rabytes 6y ago
      The current situation isn't ideal. Everyone at my employer has working from home since the beginning (20 years ago, I'm at year 4 here) and it's been great, but my coworkers who all-of-a-sudden have kids at home during their workday who would normally be at school have seen a drop in their productivity.
    • willvarfar 6y ago
      Presumably if you continue to work from home after the crisis, then your children return to school...?
      • nck4222 6y ago
        Not in my case, no. They're not school aged, and are at home during the day. Elementary schools where I am run roughly 9-3 as well, except on Thursdays when they run 9-2. Maybe I could make it work, but I would still prefer to have an office to go to most days.
    • SauciestGNU 6y ago
      I have to say that I'm lucky if I get 4 productive hours in on any day, and most colleagues and peers I have talked to say something similar. That makes me want to ask here as a sort of informal poll, how many hours of the working day would you all say you normally spend working?
    • bart_spoon 6y ago
      But surely actually working from home wouldn't involve taking care of your children all day. When you actually go to work, your children are presumably not sitting at home unattended all day, correct? You either have a spouse who can take care of them, they are in school, or they are in daycare. So working from home shouldn't be any different, and the only reason it is now is because all of those things are closed due to the pandemic.
      • nck4222 6y ago
        I don't mean this to be rude, but it doesn't sound like you have much experience working at home with children around. I don't think you should be so quick to assume you know the solution to a problem/situation you have no insight in to. Maybe what you're describing would work for some people. But to so confidently say it's a blanket solution for everyone and is not actually a problem, is frankly laughable.
        • bart_spoon 6y ago
          I have been working from home with 2 children under 5 for 6 weeks now. So you are the one being quick to assume something that you have no insight to. > Maybe what you're describing would work for some people. But to so confidently say it's a blanket solution for everyone and is not actually a problem, is frankly laughable. Please explain to me in what situation what I described wouldn't apply? When people work in an office, they have to have some form of childcare. Daycare, school, or a caretaker/spouse at home. Obviously those are not available right now in the pandemic, but if we are assessing the viability of WFH typically, then why wouldn't they work just as well as they do when traveling to an office? What is laughable about that line of thinking?
  • bovermyer 6y ago
    The sample size is smaller, but the older age ranges actually have a higher percentage of wanting to work from home permanently.
  • the_duke 6y ago
    Check again. The ratio is much stronger pro work-from-home in the 45-64 age ranges. But my initial guess would be that the older survey participants were more IT affine, but it's hard to judge with the sparse details.
  • marcus0x62 6y ago
    My anecdotal experience: fewer of them have children. When you have small kids, it is harder to work from home and be productive. I’ve had coworkers who only came to our shared office to get away from the distraction of working at home. Some stats on % of women without children by age range: https://www.statista.com/statistics/241535/percentage-of-childless-women-in-the-us-by-age/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/241535/percentage-of-chi...
  • fendy3002 6y ago
    My take is the old are having children and / or wife. Usually they are asked to do chores and cannot perform. Additionally, 25-34 age range tend to play with internet and games, as opposed to the older ones who go outside more.
  • tom_mellior 6y ago
    > The 25-34 age range had the most “Yes” I want to work from home. Did they? The only question I see broken down by age range is not about wanting to work from home, but "are you more productive working from home?".
• Ygg2 6y ago
  Who are these people? I've been working from home and I've noticed a steep dip in my productivity.
  • andarleen 6y ago
    My productivity and standard of living are far far higher than when i was onsite.
  • BiteCode_dev 6y ago
    Yes, but most people don't like their job, and don't want to be productive in it. On HN, we have a lot of passionate people, but as soon as I go into the corporate world or the administrations, the feedback people give changes a lot.
  • lotsofpulp 6y ago
    People who stretch their budget to live in the best school district they can afford, which usually comes at the cost of spending their life in a car (or train or bus) commuting as far as possible.
    • prepend 6y ago
      I think those people are more likely to want to work from home given their long commutes.
      • lotsofpulp 6y ago
        Yes and that probably describes most suburbanites of all major US cities. Who wouldn’t want to gain an hour+ of their day they spend traveling.
  • dx87 6y ago
    A dip in productivity is a problem for your boss, not for you. Anecdotally, I'm much more productive at home because I can take breaks whenever I want instead of getting burned out after working for 3-4 hours at an office, but knowing that I still have to stay there for 4 more hours.
• therealvayne 6y ago
  Don’t people miss social interaction? I don’t understand how these articles are written. As a single man living on my own, this lockdown has made it pretty lonely.
  • andarleen 6y ago
    Time for a lifestyle change I suppose.
    • CydeWeys 6y ago
      Or time to not make the lifestyle change to work from home. It's not for everyone. Definitely not for me either.
    • cjrp 6y ago
      I have friends and hobbies outside of work, but I still miss my "work friends". If you're going to be somewhere for ~8 hours a day, I find it's nice to have some company.
      • gspr 6y ago
        Yeah, and while one's "work friends" may not be the perfect kind of friends (otherwise they tend to migrate to being "regular friends", no?), they have on important property to me: they're around during work and they punctuate work with social/human interactions. Sometimes those interactions are annoying and disrupting, but my god I'm realizing how incredibly important they are.
      • andarleen 6y ago
        A partner, kids, a family, those might last longer than work friends who will likely move on from the friendship once they change jobs. I used to be in a similar situation (living in an expensive city, my only friends were work friends, and home was a lonely miserable place). Started doing remote work, earning the same amount of money, own a pretty decent mansion, and have permanent friends and people around me. Isolation or not it doesnt really bother me. The notion that for a decent career one should sacrifice everything is a trap. While we slave away in large corps, earning money, our employers pretty much already do what i said i am. One can still be a great engineer or whatever without a shallow life.
• andarleen 6y ago
  Sadly many tech workers can barely afford more than shared accommodation or tiny apartments. Wondering that is the half that would rather waste away in crammed offices, long commute hours and lack of privacy from flatmates.
  • PLenz 6y ago
    Because they're living in expensive places. If you don't need to live where you work you can find cheaper places to live.
    • andarleen 6y ago
      They are - but what is the benefit of being poor in an expensive place?
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • js8 6y ago
    If companies wouldn't have to afford expensive offices, there would be more affordable space available for residential. Provided there are suitable rent regulations.
• deevolution 6y ago
  I absolutely won't be going back to the office, even if it costs me my job.
  • Joe-Z 6y ago
    I decided to look for a new job after our management only very reluctantly let us all work from home (it was very obvious they just don‘t trust their employees to still do their job when not on site). My productivity has gone up due to no more walk-ups distracting me with questions whenever they like and I don‘t have to waste an hour in the subway every day. My next job will for sure be remote, or at least for a company with strong remote support.
• jve 6y ago
  > Half of all Americans want to continue working from home following the coronavirus That is a VERY rough (actually false) sentance, considering they have only surveyed ~500 Americans out of 205'950'000+ population at working age. > We surveyed over 500 Americans...
  • dx034 6y ago
    IF done right, 500 can be representative. Although considering the number of jobs out there combined with age groups and gender, I guess you'd need a few thousand carefully selected participants to get valid results.
    • mountainboot 6y ago
      No need to carefully select participants. If you do random sampling with a large enough sample, the proportion of all subcategories should reflect the population at large.
  • CydeWeys 6y ago
    You should look up polling theory. You don't need to talk to every member of a population, only a representative sample.
    • keiferski 6y ago
      Therein lies the rub. Determining a representative sample is far more complex than most pollsters would like to admit.
    • eru 6y ago
      The simplest way I found to explain that the representative sample size is independent of population is via coin flips and dice: We can flip a coin an infinite number of times. But to get a good handle on whether it's biased or not, we only need to sample a very finite number of flips.
    • jve 6y ago
      My point was that sample size is too small. According to Standard Occupational Classification [https://www.bls.gov/soc/ https://www.bls.gov/soc/] there are 459 broad occupations. Multiply that by age group and you still haven't tossed a coin even a single time for every combination of occupation/age group.
• Tade0 6y ago
  No wonder given that the daily commute is both mentally and physically taxing for most. I've been working remotely since 2015 and have already decided to settle in a perhaps less attractive, but definitely cheaper neighbourhood so that I could have some office space in the house. In the long run it's probably going to cost as much as the sum total of fuel and vehicles used over the years, but the main benefit is not having to go over this stressful routine of negotiating my place in a stream of cars.
  • Taek 6y ago
    Make sure you account for the value of time saved. Time is precious and there's never enough, if I can find a way to add 40 more minutes to my day I'm going to value that immensely.
    • toomuchtodo 6y ago
      Don't use it for additional time spent working uncompensated! Your commute wasn't paid for (typically), so don't give that time away to someone else for free now that you're saving it.
      • eru 6y ago
        Depends a bit on how you are accounting. Your employer doesn't directly pay for you to go to school, but most people would still see that work eventually pays for education. Commuting is similar. But I agree with the gist: if you figure out how to be more productive, eg by doing some task faster or by eliminating your commute, there's no moral obligation to hand over all the gains to someone else.
      • dagmx 6y ago
        Personally, having a long bay area commute, i now use that time instead to sleep in AND go for longer walks with my dog, that we’d usually reserve for the weekends
    • 2ion 6y ago
      In my case, the current situation adds 10 hours to my personal time. Thinking hard about moving to a remote-only position next. Sadly, moving closer to the workplace is out of the question because no force on earth will bring me to live in a densely built up city ever again; I reject urbanization for myself. I'd rather enjoy a green, quiet countryside.
• shortoncash 6y ago
  I worked at home for 9 years and then I had kids. (They are great kids but they make working at home hard.) That was enough for me to not want to work at home anymore. I then got a new job, and then covid-19 hit and I am working at home again. Argh!
  • dustingetz 6y ago
    We can structure our choice of house around kids, e.g. an attached office with separate entrance. An office complex with facilities and maintenance costs on the order of $600/mo per desk, which is about what a city commute costs.
• yodsanklai 6y ago
  I was working from home before the virus. The difference for me now is that my other colleagues work from home too. The quality of our meetings has improved, and I feel that I'm on a more even playing field now (in term of evaluation for instance). It's great. I'm also collaborating more closely with some colleagues with whom I had little interaction before. That being said, working from home is not for everyone. Not everybody has a good working environment. Some people get distracted, feel lonely, or are unable to maintain good work/life balance. It really has pros and cons. What I hope at least is that it will be less taboo in the future and more employers will be open to that option.
  • js8 6y ago
    > That being said, working from home is not for everyone. Actually, even work (in any particular set of circumstances) is not for everyone. And still, people do manage. For example, open offices are not for everyone. Yet they do happen. Imagine, if at your future employer, you could simply decide whether you want to WfH or not. And they would plan the office accordingly. They would rent less space. Why not give people the freedom?
  • usrusr 6y ago
    > or are unable to maintain good work/life balance Happens to me in an absurdly trivial way: pre-antiviral-WFH I was taking my main meal of the day as lunch at the office, now it's dinner at home. After lunch it was easy for office life (and caffeine) to get me back to speed. But evening side projects don't stand a chance against the digestion passivity of a full dinner. A full lunch at home isn't possible for me because at that time of the day I'm just not hungry enough unless the food is prepared for me.
• willvarfar 6y ago
  I'm anticipating that most HNers prompted to comment here will be those thinking this unlikely or wrong or whatever. Every time something positive about remote working is on HN, only those opposing it seem to comment... So, anyway, here's my vote in favour of remote working! I've worked from home for the last 10 years straight, and two years in the decade before that. Working from home has always been best for me. Historically, colleagues have always been amazed I get anything done, and wondered about how teams can possibly function etc etc. Lots of people have been skeptical. And now so many of my colleagues are working from home, and all the awful destruction hasn't happened, and in fact many people are saying they've never been more productive... Yay to remote working, long may it continue!
  • PragmaticPulp 6y ago
    > I'm anticipating that most HNers prompted to comment here will be those thinking this unlikely or wrong or whatever. On the contrary, this seems like the most honest take on the topic of remote work preferences. The headline says that 50% of Americans prefer working from home. That suggests that 50% prefer working from the office or aren't sure yet. In other words: Some people like to work from home. Some people don't. That's the point that many of us have been trying to make all along. When quarantining started, a lot of the WFH advocates came out of the woodwork and declared an early victory for WFH. There was an influx of hot takes that office spaces would be closed forever once people saw the benefits of WFH. They all ignored half of the population who really does not benefit from working from home.
    • Galaco 6y ago
      > The headline says that 50% of Americans prefer working from home. That suggests that 50% prefer working from the office. If you even glance at the article that's just not true. The remaining vote is split between 'Prefers the Office' and 'Unsure'. If you were to split the 'Unsure' based on the current ratio of 'Prefers Home':'Prefers the office' between the 2, you're looking at closer to 42% 'prefer the office'.
      • 6y ago
• gspr 6y ago
  I wonder if this is related to the long commutes Americans have gotten used to. I'm not in the US, and while I would say I definitely appreciate the flexibility of being able to work from home (or from "not the office") every now and then, and I do like the present drop in meetings, I cannot fathom how people stay sane without a variety of other people around. My productivity has definitely dropped, and it feels like my brain never really fully turns "on". It feels a lot like those times in university I decided to study for exams from home instead of going to campus. I can't explain it, but 9 out of 10 times it just feels bad, like the way your brain feels if you've spent the day watching TV or something (when, in fact, I haven't). This doesn't even begin to consider the social punctuations of work that are essential to my psychological well-being. Does anyone feel the same? I'm a little bit worried that I just have a personality type that isn't well-suited for the remote work culture that is likely to become more prevalent after this crisis is over. I'm in my early thirties, but I've felt this way for as long as I can remember, independently of whether I was in a relationship, whether I was working or studying, etc.
  • lawlorino 6y ago
    I feel the same. I've found that having a dedicated work environment can help, e.g. a separate office room with a proper desk, chair and monitor, although realistically that's not possible for a lot of people including myself currently.
    • gspr 6y ago
      I currently don't have that, but I did in the past, and it sadly didn't help for me. It seems to be people related: I've noticed the same tends to happen in the office if others are not around (if, say, I swap a holiday for a work day or something and am alone when I go in).
      • Loughla 6y ago
        I have a staff member that sounds similar to you. It's not that she's unaccountable for her own actions, she just has a hard time 'turning on' her work brain without some kind of incentive or external motivator. I worked with her to come up with regular (weekly) check-ins, monthly goals, and changed the annual review process to include those items. I would never have that amount of micromanagement for anyone, except her, because it's what she wanted/needed for productivity. Maybe look into that with your direct supervisor? It helped her immensely. She has an external motivator that she needs. For me, it helped, because measuring remote worker productivity is hard as hell, unless you have sales, you make something, or you decide to measure by number of lines of code or some other arbitrary measure. It was a god-send in a very 'grey' work area.
• hprotagonist 6y ago
  I don’t necessarily want to WFH permanently, but i do treasure the large reduction in my commute that happened in 2010 for me. I would be hard pressed to go back to the days where i was losing almost 3 hours a day in a car.
• HenryBemis 6y ago
  For many/most people working from home is something new that is "forced" on them. I have been working from home (or on the road/'wherever I may roam')(wander)(wander) 80-90% of my time and I really enjoy it. For people who just started WFH they may combine WFH with virus, kids screaming, lockdown, isolation, etc. Circumstances are not BAU right now, for 99.9% of us. Once this blows over, and the infrastructure remains in place, and business start making their typical revenue, it will be interesting to run the same survey and compare it with 12 months ago. sorry for the Metallica reference, I couldn't help myself.
  • Guillaume86 6y ago
    Yes I'm in the same situation and I was thinking the same thing reading the negative comments. It's important to not conflate the work from home aspect with the lockdown aspect.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• AtlasBarfed 6y ago
  Well it probably means we don't actually do much useful work in America. Cube farms in America are like adult day care that doubles as a basic income mechanism. Although of course MY work is very important and useful to civilization...
• rb808 6y ago
  I heard on WFH opinions there are two groups of people, one that think this will usher in a new age of productive freedom working from home never having to commute again, and the group with kids.
  • rb808 6y ago
    I should add our juniors are getting screwed. Usually we spend a lot of time training and coaching, now at home they're mostly ignored. I think our intern class is going to get cancelled too.
    • falcolas 6y ago
      FWIW, this is going do depend highly upon the individual companies. Our own is continuing to bring in and work with interns, even though it does cost a bit more in terms of a FT individual’s time.
    • mcv 6y ago
      We currently hire our babysitter for 3 days a week to do stuff with the kids while we work and make money. It works out very well for everybody.
    • tfigment 6y ago
      My company cancelled its intern program this year. I actually did hire one but I was very proactive in making it happen and barely got it done before shelter-in-place kicked in. It's really challenging for both sides compared to last year due to lack of in person but it's working.
  • falcolas 6y ago
    Having your kids with you is a transitory thing, when school starts back up the problem will decline sharply. It’s worth remembering that these are not your standard work from home conditions - you’re being kept in due to an emergency, and trying to also get some work done.
    • grovellogic 6y ago
• flurdy 6y ago
  The office, is the holiday home for parents with young kids. They might represent the other half...
• lordnacho 6y ago
  People used to all work from home. If you read a bit of economic history, it seems that working in an office or a factory is a rather recent invention, only a few hundred years old. Prior to that there was something called the "putting-out" system, where you'd sew some clothes or whatever and put it outside for someone to collect. And they'd leave you some raw materials. I'm also of the WFH persuasion, but I'm unsure whether it's great for people who are starting their career. For experienced people, they already know what the business is about, they are more likely to have kids and need a longer commute from the suburbs. For people on their first job there's a lot of informal learning that happens in the workplace. You run into more people randomly at a traditional office, and you learn more about what exactly your role is. What would probably make sense is for businesses to get more relaxed about whether you actually come into the office. If there's no meetings or requirements to get immediate feedback on a given day, why make people sit on a train for an hour?
  • jamil7 6y ago
    > Prior to that there was something called the "putting-out" system, where you'd sew some clothes or whatever and put it outside for someone to collect. Something similar to this exists in rural Germany, at least in Brandenburg, mostly for fresh or preserved produce where you leave a donation in return.
• drewg123 6y ago
  I've worked from home since 2001, except for a brief 2 year stint at Google. I think I'm far more productive at home because I have: - An office, with a door I can close This was going to be a big list, but I actually think that just about sums it up. The cube environment at Google was utterly intolerable, and made it hard to concentrate. It didn't help that the guys in another group next to us had a game where they flew rc drones around for fun, or the folks on the other side of my group that were always discussing food, or the loud door to a lab behind my desk that was constantly slamming, etc, or just the constant stream of people walking by my cube. At home I have a door that I can close. I can think. So I get a lot more done. I'm not saying all office environments were terrible. Before 2001, I worked doing research at a University and I had a fantastic office with a door. I think I was just as productive there as I was at home. Because, again, distractions were minimal.
  • MivLives 6y ago
    What I wouldn't give for a cube. To my left and right in our open office are engineers who are normally quiet. The row in front of are all business strategy people. They never stop talking. They're on the phone, they're having meetings, they're casually chatting. There's nothing at all to block the sound or the sight of them grouping up in 2s and 6s at each others desk. One even has a rare sight in the office, a desktop phone.
    • drewg123 6y ago
      The "cube" I had was a mega-cube with 6 people. Our group was spread among 2 adjacent mega cubes, so the divider was eventually removed, making a 12-person cube. I had an end spot, and I had a portable whiteboard shoved between me and my neighbor to separate us, and I built a wall of empty Hint bottles around my desk to isolate me from the aisle. That removed a lot of visual distractions, but it was still quite noisy. Speaking of this, one guy in a building across the street basically built himself a hut out of cardboard boxes glued together. It was amazing.
      • MivLives 6y ago
• tilolebo 6y ago
  Let's note that distributed companies almost always clearly make the distinction between "remote work" and "work from home". Some of them are openly "against" work from home.
  • mcv 6y ago
    As a freelancer, especially in between on-site projects, I made a habit of getting a workplace outside the home, explicitly to avoid all the distractions of the home. For a while, I rented a desk at an office, but I've also worked in the lobby of a work-friendly hotel, I've tried working in the library (but their wifi sucks) and various other places. Anything but home.
• beepboopbeep 6y ago
  Personally, I can definitely do away with my commute (while it's short, it's still a twice a day anxiety event) I think there is something to be said about the autonomy we're given while at home. No pretend needed when your interactions with coworkers are purely work-event driven and not social for the sake of "team building" or "Culture". Give me a paycheck to do work, beyond that transaction I shouldn't owe any more of my mind and body to a job.
• kevinherron 6y ago
  I've been joking with my coworkers that I'm never coming back to the office when this is over... I'm sorta serious but not sure I'd be allowed to. We were already allowed 2 days per week of remote working but 5 seems like a stretch. FWIW I have a dedicated office at home and no kids. Commute is not a factor - I live ~7 miles from the office, it takes 10-15 minutes to get there or get home. There's also an alternative ~7 mile route that is almost entirely bike path I can ride to work on.
  • lexicality 6y ago
    Time to start questioning why that rule is in place? If you're that close to the office then you can easily argue that you can drive in for important meetings and such.
• dathinab 6y ago
  Honestly remote working to save commute time is awesome. But there are a lot of problems with it too for e.g. mentally unstable people or situations where people can't setup a proper work environment at home (as it's to small for it). So while I like remote work a lot I think it's best "in general" to only have it just part of the week. Honestly best is still to not work remote but have a way to work of 10-15min walking or similar (e.g. cycling, reliable public transmute). Enough time to clearly separate work from home and think a bit. Naturally this is very unlikely to happen. But worst is if cities are seperated in "residential" and "office" areas as this will make transmute times spike. Having a nice intermixing it much much better. Sure it doesn't guarantee short travel times (or else you would need to potentially move every time you change the job). But it allows them.
• mkl 6y ago
  Wow, using the same colours but swapping the meanings is seriously misleading! In the circle graphs, red is No, but in the bar graph red is Yes.
• jdhn 6y ago
  I've been working from home for the past month, and honestly I'm tired of it. Perhaps I'm just more outgoing than I thought, but this whole forced WFH episode is really proving to me the importance of face to face communication.
• baron_harkonnen 6y ago
  I suspect this is going to have a pretty profound impact on the commercial real estate world. Aside from workers wanting to WFH, anecdotally I know of a few now cash-strapped start-ups that are very seriously considering breaking their leases and having much more of the work force WFH. If you live in a city right now, just peer out at all of those sky scrapers. A huge amount of that is currently empty office space that costs a fortune. For many companies the idea that this space was truly optional was absurd, but right now companies everywhere are seeing that they have to be able to do 100% remote to survive. Within a month an office space has gone from essential to being more and more of a luxury, way more expensive per employee than a automatic espresso machine. I suspect a small but non-trivial number of companies will break their leases in the coming months. But far more companies will emerge from this crisis no longer believing that every employee needs a desk in an office.
  • smileysteve 6y ago
    > Within a month an office space has gone from essential to being more and more of a luxury More like a liability. Any company with office space is currently paying rent with no utilization.
• PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  TL;DR: A job search website (Zippia) surveyed 500 people about their work from home preferences during the Coronavirus-related quarantining period. No mention of the study methodology. Given that this was performed by an online job search website, it's not clear that they invested effort into collecting unbiased samples. Visitors looking for new jobs on a somewhat obscure online job search site aren't exactly an unbiased sample. Regardless, I think the important takeaway is that work from home preferences vary. Not everyone enjoys working in an office. Not everyone enjoys working from home. And not everyone has made up their mind on the topic yet. They also asked whether or not people thought they were more productive working from home. 44% said yes. When asked if people thought their companies would move to permanent WFH after this, 17% said yes.
• keiferski 6y ago
  As someone else mentioned, the real culprit here is probably long commutes. Personally, I've worked remotely for 5+ years and don't like staying at home all day. The perfect setup for me is a small office that I can walk to in 5-10 minutes, preferably with a gym and coffeeshop en route. I get out of the house, interact with people, and have a designated work space, without having to sit in a car or a crowded subway train for an hour+ each day.
• twodave 6y ago
  In the last 15 years, I've worked as a developer: - on site for a non-tech company - on site for 2-3 small tech companies (10-100 employees) between 20 and 60 minutes away (depending on traffic) - fully remote for a tech company 5 hours drive away (with on-site visits 2-3 times per year) - a blend of on-site and remote at my own discretion for a tech company 20-45 minutes away - fully remote as a contractor with occasional (monthly-ish) on-site visits What I have learned through the years is that my needs change with the growth of my family and the dynamics of my work. I have by far enjoyed working the remote/on-site blend because it allows me the freedom to make a mature decision about my own work needs each day. What we especially as thought workers ought to be advocating for as an industry is the freedom to CHOOSE where we work each day, not a fully-remote mandate or an on-site mandate. To me, this is a compromise among many concerns, such as infrastructure costs, accountability, collaboration, a quiet work environment, and generally the ability to break up the monotony of doing the same thing every day.
• yters 6y ago
  Working from home is the norm. Most of civilization has been farm based.
• deevolution 6y ago
  I think alot of people will want to go back because they've now associated working remotely with being in an isolated jail cell. Also I'm sure couples and people with kids are ready to jump out their windows. I wont be going back to the office for a number of reasons, however, and I think everyone should boycott the office as well. Weather you want to work in the office or not should ultimately be the employees choice. 1. Commuting pollutes. 2. Commuting is lost time. Almost a month of lost time every year. 3. Office spaces are expensive. Without them, companies would have lots of extra cash. Ideally that extra cash goes to wages or hiring. 4. VR workplaces can be and will be a sufficient substitute. You can get about the same quality of social interaction + more in VR as you can in meat space. Its a different experience and until you try it you aren't really entitled to an opinion. 5. You can go to the gym whenever you want (assuming businesses open up again). I'm sure there are other benefits that I'm missing.
  • warkdarrior 6y ago
    > Ideally that extra cash goes to wages or hiring. That is adorable!
    • formercoder 6y ago
      Basic corporate finance should be required in high school. People need to understand their employers’ motivations.
  • shric 6y ago
    Not everyone has all these downsides when working in an office. 1. I walk to work. 2. It's a 25 minute walk each way. I don't consider it lost time, Agree with 3 and 4. 5. I can and do go to the gym whenever I want. Typically at 2 or 3pm to avoid the lunch crowd.
    • bart_spoon 6y ago
      I don't have data, but I would feel pretty confident that the vast majority of Americans don't share your experience. The number of people who can walk to work within 25 minutes is likely miniscule, and therefore requires some amount of time in traffic, often substantial. And virtually every other point follows from that fact.
• cik 6y ago
  I've been working from home a minimum of one day a week for 10 years, frequently 2 days a week - and for rare bursts of a month, the whole deal. The reality is that environment more than makes up for all of it. At home, I completely control my work environment. Sure, there are elements to communication you have to change - amongst other things, but working from home is fantastic if you WORK from home. I find those days at home are significantly more effective - and the clients, partners, and employees I've worked with have always agreed. There's also a lot to be said for face-to-face time though.
• mhinton 6y ago
  I have been working remotely for 6 years and I mostly love it. My wife has been working from home for about a month now and she is not a fan. Lots of people just like working in person with others.
• formercoder 6y ago
  I’m very curious about the sampling methodology here. This is anecdotal, but I am a millennial and precisely zero of my friends prefer working from home. So there must be bias in one of those two samples.
  • tantalor 6y ago
    I asked the author: The survey was conducted using mechanical turk for American workers with full-time jobs. We didn't control for age, as you can see in the age breakdown of "are you more productive working from home," so had some age groups more represented than others. The margin of error is 4%. So that raises some red flags, because turkers are WAY more likely to be favorable towards WFH conditions. They already do that!
    • formercoder 6y ago
      Yeah. Massive, massive sampling bias.
• NoSalt 6y ago
  I do like working from home, but I will admit that my hygiene has suffered. I don't shower daily and that bothers me. Obviously not enough to actually do anything about it.
• AmazingTurtle 6y ago
  I stopped reading when I hit "baby boomers"
• Arubis 6y ago
  This article (like most discussion of these work styles) conflates remote work and work-from-home. I feel it would _greatly_ help clarify discussion to keep in mind that these aren’t the same thing: the latter (WFH) is _mostly_ a subset of the former (work from a location of your choice), and of the two, “remote” is _much more enabling._ WFH is okay. It beats an office. But it blurs the lines between work and not-work life further than they already are unless you’re highly skilled in setting boundaries, and if you have kids or other dependents it’s a fresh challenge to stay focused every day. Working remotely, in non-pandemic times, opens up real possibilities. The young and the restless can try the nomadic worker thing; that looks like it’s be fun for a while. Coworking (in the small community sense, not WeWork) gets you the separation of work and home on your own terms and can be a fabulous balance for the extroverts (and also introverts) among us. And WFH gets rolled in there as well. At present moment, as the world suddenly is all doing this at once, while confined at home—of course these concepts will be conflated. But let’s be deliberate to ensure we aren’t setting ourselves up for a world where managers get suspicious of you for leaving the house during work hours. That sounds worse than the situation we started with.
• mark_l_watson 6y ago
  I think that I have relevant experience to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of working from home. In 1998 my wife and I moved from California to the mountains in Central Arizona. Until 2016, I almost exclusively worked remotely and sometimes I took long periods off work to write books and enjoy nature hikes. For about a decade I only accepted about 20% of offers to provide service. Working remotely got old. In 2016 I worked on a project at Google so we lived in Mountain View for a while. I really enjoyed the change of working in an office (and the food was good). After we returned home, I accepted a gig to work for an AI company in Singapore and after that worked onsite managing a deep learning team at Capital One (an excellent company to work for, BTW). We are back home now, and I am retired except for writing and working on a commercial software product (in Common Lisp) in the semantic web/linked data space. Frankly, as much as I love my day to day life, to be honest I really miss working in a team with face to face brainstorming, etc.
  • hestipod 6y ago
    This can be heavy and I need to talk about it but feel it runs people off, but I had a recent suicide attempt resulting from years of chronic pain and increasing isolation. I am not getting enough help or support. The relevance is how you mentioned you miss face to face and as I sit here alone trying to recover I see how terrible an effect the increasing isolation has had on me. But I live rural with no support network and no options. Looking back it's why I was far better mentally in a city. People need people...even the introverts. I don't fit in politically locally, cannot find support online. Even healthy and wealthy people get down when all alone.
• deleted 6y ago
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• icedchai 6y ago
  I find constant "WFH" isolating and a bit depressing. I prefer to work out of a coffee shop, but obviously that is not possible these days.
• ebg13 6y ago
  I'd rather not work forever regardless of the location.
• krisroadruck 6y ago
  Whenever I read these WFH HN threads and see all the comments about people who "just can't do it" I'm always curious if it's truly that they can't enjoy working from home, or that they are doing it wrong. Have worked from home for the better part of 10 years off and on and some things that make all the difference: Have a dedicated office. Yeah you aren't going to be as productive on your kitchen table or your couch on a laptop as you would be in a quiet dedicated room with a desk, multiple monitors and clear delineation between work and play time. Get the kids/dog/whatever distraction dealt with. You don't have kids at your office, why would you think your productivity wouldn't take a hit if you have them around at home while you are trying to work? Not now obviously because Covid, but under normal circumstances, send them to day care or whatever arrangement you gotta make to have quite during your business hours. Figure out your coms! If your team/company isn't built around remote work, obviously there are going to be issues. You have to have a strategy for communication that's designed for remote. Both to keep you from feeling like an island or second class citizen and also because remote communication requires a totally different regiment than the random water cooler check in. If you are doing all of these things and remote work still isn't your cup of tea I'd love to hear about it. If you aren't doing most or all of these things, It's probably not remote work that is the problem, it's how you are treating it.
• papito 6y ago
  I once took three months off work when I had a pretty sweet severance deal. Let me tell you, going back to the office from 10AM to 6:30PM was HELL. It ruined worked for me. I realized that there was, you know - life. It's the sort of epiphany you get after you retire ("oh crap, I worked too much and now my healthy years are gone"), except this time a lot of people will realize it when they are still young.
• dec0dedab0de 6y ago
  Many people are blaming the commute, but I've been working from home for almost 6 years, and I actually miss the commute. Especially the bus, but the train was nice too when I had to switch. It was a nice buffer of being able to read or think quietly to myself. The start and end of my day were absolute. Whatever I didn't get done would have to wait, and I wouldn't start until I got there. Along with the social interactions, and having more choices for lunch in my immediate area, the commute is in my top 3 things I miss about working in an office. What I don't miss is waking up early and getting ready, picking out clothes, combing my hair, and all that nonsense every single morning. I even had 8 of the same exact outfit when I worked in an office, and it was still such a drain.
  • chuck3201 6y ago
    You could still get on a bus or train every morning and afternoon? You just need to make the journey a loop so you arrive back at your house each time!
  • bart_spoon 6y ago
    I think the difference is that for you, many of those same things can be accomplished by choice. You can still have an absolute start and end to your workday, you just have to be proactive about it. You can still take the same amount of time to read or think to yourself. Perhaps the requirement of a commute makes doing those things easier, but its entirely possible to do the same thing by simply being more mindful about it. For those who hate their commute, being forced into the office every day doesn't offer the same latitude for adjustments to their personal lives. And many of those things you enjoyed are only possible via public transportation. Given the woeful state of public transportation in much of the US, many commuting are doing so in cars, which don't afford the same opportunities for peaceful self-reflection and unwinding.
• mendelmaleh 6y ago
  The other half would rather not work at all.
• thrownaway954 6y ago
  THE BIGGEST thing i HATE about office work is the shoulder surfing. i go insane with rage when some idiot is standing behind me while i'm trying to figure something out, i feel under the gun and i start to make mistakes. i have huge anxiety issues and that doesn't make it an easier. not to mention the fact that if i wanted your damn input, i would ask for it. since working from home, my anger and anxiety level are at a lifetime low. i don't have bleeding ulcers and i actually get a 4 mile walk in in the morning since i'm not rushed to fight traffic. my life is so serene now. I hope this lasts forever.
• duxup 6y ago
  I worked from home 3 of 5 days a week. I loved it. Now with my wife and kids home ... working form home is horrible. COVID-19 has ruined work from home for me ;) I want some alternate bandwagon "work from home sucks" articles.
• maceurt 6y ago
  I think it is easy to say this in the first few months of working at home, but after an extended period of time it can be unbearable to spend so much time in the same place. Cabin fever is very real, and human beings are social animals who want to be around people.
  • chadlavi 6y ago
    Yeah, but after the pandemic is over, if you're still working from home you can go out to restaurants and bars in your free time and hang out with friends, unlike today where your office and your social space and your restaurant and your bar are all your living room.
• mabbo 6y ago
  I'm going to strike a very different reaction to most here: I miss my office! The office is where I work. Home is where I don't work. I have a 30-40 minute subway ride between the two for changing gears. Home-no-work. Office-yes-work. Sudoku and Kindle in between. It's a pattern I hadn't realized I'd so strongly driven into my mind. The first two weeks of this pandemic? I accomplished nothing. I sat down and tried to work at my desk (I even have a dock and a KVM switch so I could use my dual-monitors, keyboard, and mouse) and I did almost nothing for two weeks. I just could not change gears. It was agony. I finally was able to get working again by moving from my desk to a chair beside it, with just my laptop. I have no pattern for this place- it's a chair usually covered in stuff I need to put somewhere so I have no really deep patterns for what I do when I sit here (is my own self-psycho-analysis). I'm still not as productive as before, but at least I'm getting some things done. Even then, I miss running into people in the kitchen that I haven't talked to in a while. I miss grabbing lunch with friends from other departments. I miss that first 15 minutes of the day where we're all waiting for the caffeine to kick in, asking what the weekend plans are. The social aspects keep me sane. And right now I'm trying to train new guys. One guy, we started him during the lockdown by just mailing him a laptop with instructions for how to get on the VPN. Training people remotely is hard. Even mostly-remote companies often start new people in the office for a week or two, then send them back home. There's video calls and screen sharing- it's not the same. I find it very difficult. I have many criticisms of modern offices, but I still want mine back.
• smartDevel 6y ago
  WFH for almost 2 years 50-60%. Due to corona now 100% for almost 2 months. Used my car 3 or 4 times the last 2 months instead i often walked or used my bicycle, before i used the car at least 5-6 times a week. So WFH can definitely help to save the planet from global warming
• ianai 6y ago
  Anytime a poll or election comes back 50/50 you seriously have to critique and justify whether any actual signal was uncovered. A yes/no question being answered 50/50 on the face of it tells you nothing. It’s good she breaks stuff down here, but that’s all ex-post rationalization - keep that in mind.
• ff317 6y ago
  I've been working from home (in full time positions for a couple of tech companies) for the past ~12-13 years now. During that time I've done both purely-technical work and managerial work (managing other remoties). I'm excited about the work-from-home revolution that's going on here, and I think it will benefit society and some level of work-from-home will stick for the long term, for many people. However, it's not for everyone. Some people just don't like the remote work lifestyle at all. It's also not for every kind of job or office. I think we'll see a lot of hybrid arrangements in the post-covid world. Some offices might institute work-from-home only for tuesdays and thursdays. Or just have everyone come into the office on Mondays and cram all the important in-person meetings into that day. Or in some situations it will be an at-will flexibility (come in for specific meetings when it makes sense, or come use the office like you would a co-working space when your home life is a little crazier because the kids are out of school for the summer and/or there's a contractor remodeling the kitchen, etc). I think most seemingly-virtualizable businesses that had offices before will still have offices for the foreseeable few years, but by implementing various hybrid policies they could see their average headcount onsite per day shrink significantly over time. For many the office will become optional and/or a part-time thing. One way they could react to this is to downsize their commercial real estate the next time contracts are up. Another way they could handle it would be to remodel the space they've got, trading out cube-farm areas for more private offices and private conference rooms that can be reserved ahead, which will draw some employees back for more hours on-site, until they find a balancing point. The deeper transition for managers is getting away from the control-freak model of tracking "hours worked", and starting to focus instead on the "things done". The reason you hired your employee is not to punch a clock and stare at a wall for a fixed number of hours; you hired them to accomplish goals, and you're actually going to have to focus directly on measuring true work rather than time in a post-office-hours world. Once you break free of the chains of time-tracking, all kinds of efficiencies that benefit both the employer and the employee are unlocked through remote and flexible work arrangements.
• deleted 6y ago
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• AndrewKemendo 6y ago
  As someone who has done remote working more or less exclusively for 6 years, the current state of affairs for most homes does not reflect the reality of what "Work From Home" looks like in normal, non-emergency times. You can't competently work from home full time and also manage children. Even for people without children, they are dealing with co-workers who are juggling a new normal, have not set up dedicated work spaces, are fumbling to learn how to use zoom/meet/hangout etc... I say all this to point out that, even in non-ideal conditions with little to no preparation or planning, most people would still rather work from home. Work from home should be the STANDARD, not the exception, for white collar work.
• deleted 6y ago
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• mpalmer 6y ago
  This survey is ...bad. - Seventy-nine percent of workers can work from home at least some of the time? Maybe the ones your survey reached, but I'm pretty sure I've read the real fraction is under 30%. - "Do you think your employer will make working remote permanent?" is a bad question because it's easy to interpret it multiple ways.
• jefftk 6y ago
  The survey doesn't say how many people they asked, but looking at their chart sliced by age it's a very small sample: looks like ~30 in the 55-64 age group? They also don't say anything about how they found their participants. I'm pretty skeptical that asking these questions to a large representative sample would give similar results.
  • raisedbyninjas 6y ago
    I'm skeptical of the 19% who can't work from home. BLS says that food prep, transportation, production, healthcare practitioners are the 3rd, 4th, 5th, & 7th most common jobs. This totals 43 million, most of whom probably can't work from home. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm Edit: Another commenter claims the author sampled workers through Mechanical Turk. WTH.
• AzzieElbab 6y ago
  It is nice to have a choice
• rootusrootus 6y ago
  I have found that working from home is great, right now. During normal times, though, I could not really handle doing it for more than a couple days a week. I suspect the reason is that my wife and kids are at home right now. So I can close the door and they will leave me alone, but I still have a sense of them being around. So I am comfortable. But during normal times, the kids would be at school all day and my wife would be at her office. So then the house would be empty except for me, and then I get a little stir crazy after a couple days. We will find out eventually, when offices reopen. I am secretly hoping that I will be able to continue working from home while maintaining my sanity.
• Mountain_Skies 6y ago
  I've been remote for two years and don't want to go back to the daily commute. I've been happy to sacrifice one room in my home to be an office in exchange for not running the traffic gauntlet each day. The one thing I still prefer in person is whiteboarding. We have good collaboration tools but none of them yet match the efficiency of people in a room together working on a common whiteboard. There are digital whiteboards that might fill this niche but currently they're too expensive to distribute to entire teams. Maybe over time this will change.
• shadowpawn 6y ago
  My last two roles had management expect you to be in the office because they had spent a lot of money on the rent/furnishing even though 50% of the companies roles could be done remote. Now Ill admit it is easier to walk over to someone's desk to ask a question then the endless are you free email/phone call tags before all this COVID-19
• mslack616 6y ago
  Not sure if generalizing something like this based on a survey from "over 500 Americans" is correct, but anyway. I believe that most millennials will definitely feel more comfortable working from home permanently (I'm one of those) however there are a lot of other factors to take into account, as mentioned in other comments it can depend if you're more introvert rather than extrovert, do you have the appropriate workspace, tools?, commute time. It can be incredibly tough if not stressing to be working on a rather small place without a desk, a proper computer/laptop, kids/toddlers hanging around you, random noise coming from outside, etc. I think the point is clear. IMHO it really depends on the resources and environment that each individual is able to have.
• oblib 6y ago
  It was in the `70s that I first heard the concept "Telecommuting". I knew right off I would have to learn a skill set that allowed me to do that and started exploring the options. It took me until the late-1990s to get there, but that's when I started working from home full time. Right now I have my office in the basement of our house. It's quiet, and spacious, and cluttered with the stuff I tinker with. For me, the "shelter in place" thing we're going through hasn't really changed much at all in my routine. I prefer being alone in a quiet space when coding and have spent most of my days doing that for the past 20 years. Since I could choose anywhere to do it, I chose the Ozark Mountains. I packed up and left Malibu and haven't regretted it for even a moment. I've hardly spent any time at all sitting in traffic since I got here. Before then it was common to spend a couple hours sitting in traffic getting to and from work. And often the same on days off going somewhere to have fun. But it's not for everyone. My wife is way too social to spend much time alone. Right now she's on the phone or facebook almost all day chatting with friends and family, or watching TV. I have all kinds of stuff to do aside from coding. We've got a big yard and a few acres of forested land with a menagerie of "critters", a barn, and a big veggie garden. All of them wanting my attention. I spend most all my time at home working on something. Shoot, I have to remember to drive my car now and then to keep the battery charged. Most of my friends in LA could never live here. My wife struggles with it. She was raised Lake Forest, Il and loves whooping it up "Downtown". For me, all of Los Angeles felt pretty much like a "Downtown". Malibu Canyon St. Park in the Spring is actually a lot like the Ozarks, and I did love it there. But I hated sitting in traffic. I felt like I was wasting my life doing that.
• rurban 6y ago
  Understandably so. I'm working remote for 7 years now, and before also for over 10 years. I'm at least 10x more productive. No interruptions is the biggest cause. And only asynchron communication, in written form. Also I do much longer hours, because it's much more fun, and I can take a siesta nap when I need it. I'm an extrovert btw.
• RickJWagner 6y ago
  I've been working from home for 9 1/2 years, and I really like it. It suits me-- I'm more of a quiet, research-type worker. But some of my friends are more 'cubicle hoppers' / social butterflies. I really don't think those folks would do well with it in the long term.