Is this surprising? This entire pandemic has been a parade of seemingly obvious realities being presented as novel and surprising by various gadflies. At least

Is this surprising? This entire pandemic has been a parade of seemingly obvious realities being presented as novel and surprising by various gadflies. At least with regard to working conditions, I think I'm representative of a sizable population of workers, and some realities about WFH struck me as obvious immediately and have continued to be obvious since March. I live in a small, one-bedroom apartment. I don't want to allot space to a dedicated work area. It takes away from my already limited living space. If I had rented this apartment with an eye toward setting up a home office, I might feel differently, but I don't. I was skeptical that office culture would reconfigure itself to become more asynchronous and more supportive of WFH. I think my skepticism has been vindicated. Meetings are longer, more frequent, and less effective. Written documentation, written project planning, and code reviews are still undisciplined and haphazard. Tasks fall through the cracks and hand-offs are an afterthought. Slack continues to be a source of constant distraction. One aspect of WFH that I didn't estimate well is the level of ambient noise in my apartment during the workday, compared to the noise level in an office building. Office buildings I've worked in have some constant level of HVAC hum and background people chatter. My apartment in the suburbs, by comparison, is constantly bathed in noise from lawn care teams (at my complex and adjacent ones, several days each week), rumbling delivery trucks, ice cream trucks, service vehicles (there always seems to be a Roto-Rooter van in the neighborhood), and miscellaneous neighbor activity (an outdoor punching bag, a car idling under my window, a metal zipper banging in the building's clothes dryer). For me and people in situations similar to mine, WFH has offered few improvements over working in an office building, but added many distracting indignities.