15 ms·

The social and economic costs borne by young people without offices

157 points by RickJWagner 6y ago

frompdx 6y ago
This article appears in the October 2020 print edition with the headline “A Cubicle Never Looked So Good.” To be honest, I've never really had a cubicle. Usually just a desk in a bullpin type arrangement. No privacy. Distractions galore. The sound of co-workers flushing the toilets in the restrooms nearby. Nothing to reflect fondly upon in my opinion. If I had wanted or needed a new job, completely changing careers would probably have been easier than getting another gig in my field with the experience I’d accrued at home. No doubt my experience is different doing technical work, but I have never relied on my co-workers to line up my next position. I flip the switch on linkedin to let recruiters know I'm looking and call or email the recruiters I have worked with in the past. Sometimes an employer might ask for a reference. I suppose I do have a short list of those. “Outside of immediate family, people’s co-workers become their most consistent opportunity for social interaction,” Peditto told me. “What happens when you lose that is one of my greater concerns.” My social interactions really do revolve around my family and long time friends. It's not a large group, but I'm not a social butterfly either. I have a hard enough time keeping up with those social interactions. Who knows, maybe I was born for remote work. Overall this feels like yet another hit piece against remote work with a lot of anecdotes and not much else. Here I am arguing against it with my own anecdotes. I really don't understand why these keep cropping up. Are commercial real-estate conglomerates paying for these? Personally, I am happier than I have ever been working remotely. I don't struggle to keep a routine or maintain separation between my work life and my home life. I don't feel starved for social interaction either. I would hate to see the sentiments these articles convey ruin something that has been very positive for myself and my partner (and my dog).
- Mountain_Skies 6y ago
  The social aspect is interesting because the pandemic induced remote work has happened at the same time as many people's non-work socialization has also been taken away. Whenever people start going back to the office, they may try to use socialization there to make up for the socialization that has been taken away from them due to restrictions on public gatherings. I've been doing remote work for three years, so I'm used to not socializing with coworkers in an office context, but the general restrictions on the public as a whole has been a bit rough. I have no desire to go back to working onsite in an office but could be tempted back in if it were the only way to have some level of socialization again. My guess is that offices probably won't become the primary white collar work location again until well after the restrictions on public gatherings have been relaxed so maybe going to the office to regain socialization won't be necessary (knock on wood).
- benrbray 6y ago
  > Overall this feels like yet another hit piece against remote work...I really don't understand why these keep cropping up. Are commercial real-estate conglomerates paying for these? I appreciate the perspective you shared in the rest of your comment, but was this bit really necessary? Just because someone has had a different experience than you doesn't mean that they're a corporate shill paid to manufacture dissent.
  - frompdx 6y ago
    I do think it is necessary. It's one thing to share your experience about remote work as the author does. It's something entirely different to interleave it with with vague concerns of economic hardship for younger people or stunted career growth for women. What is the purpose of this? In my mind I imagine a boardroom full of Don Draper types sipping scotch and smoking cigarettes fretting over the decline in office leasing revenue while Draper spins a brilliant web of fiction. "We'll tell them that it is bad for the careers of women and we'll make them miss the smell of their co-worker's day old spaghetti as it spins on the microwave turntable. We'll even make them long for the awkward interactions in the hallway while they go down a level to the inconveniently placed restroom on the floor below. They'll eat it up." The anti-remote work hit-piece aspect is really my point. To me these articles feel like some kind of thinly veiled attempt to make people believe they missed working in the office. Maybe even make people fear for their futures if they don't work in an office. Maybe this isn't the case and isn't what the author intended, but that is how it reads to me.
    - VLM 6y ago
      This is not quite the "world wide web" we signed up for, but its definitely the one we got, LOL.
    - benmller313 6y ago
      Perhaps its not a web of lies and this situation really is hurting this persons career? I think it's usually a good idea to assume that there isn't a large misinformation campaign going on.
- slavapestov 6y ago
  > My social interactions really do revolve around my family and long time friends. It's not a large group, but I'm not a social butterfly either. I have a hard enough time keeping up with those social interactions. Who knows, maybe I was born for remote work. > Overall this feels like yet another hit piece against remote work with a lot of anecdotes and not much else. I think you've answered your question there. It is an unfortunate aspect of modern society that for many people, work is their only opportunity to socialize with other humans (other than trivial interactions with the cashier at the grocery store, and so on).
- visarga 6y ago
  >I really don't understand why these keep cropping up. But you gave the answer yourself - you're different, other people are unlike you: > Who knows, maybe I was born for remote work. Me too, but my wife suffers from it, she dreams about the day when we're going to return to the office. I'm just starting to miss the office, it's been easier on me.
Mountain_Skies 6y ago
Best advice I can give is to have a dedicated space from which to work. This will probably mean you need more space in your home than you did when you went to an office each day. This might also mean that certain real estate situations are no longer viable or are at least less desirable than they used to be. Having roommate or living in a small crowded space can be detrimental to remote work. Leaving a city center with high cost per sq ft for a less dense residential area might be the trade off you have to make in order for remote work to work for you and your employer long term. For me it meant getting a house and setting aside a specific bedroom to be an office. I do use it for hobby activities but those uses are easily put away at the start of the work day. It's not used as a spare bedroom for visitors. There are also certain security issues that employees and employers are going to need to come to an understanding on now that remote work is getting more common. Some discussions should not be able to be overheard by spouses, roommates, friends, or if your walls are thin enough, neighbors. So far there seems to be very little discussion around the security side of things, likely because everyone knows for most of those suddenly thrust into remote work, there's only a limited amount they can do about it right now.
- GoodJokes 6y ago
  My advice is to have money and buy your way out of it. Cool Cool.
supernova87a 6y ago
WFH has a huge difference in result depending on who you are, when you are (in your career), and where you are in a company (of organization). -- For the budding young developer who can't wait to show ideas to teammates and demonstrate being a go-getter by asking random questions and finding unaddressed issues to innovate on, WFH might be terrible. You're going to schedule time to fortuitously run into the senior person who takes an interest in your idea? -- For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50% due to parenting obligations, WFH might be terrible. -- For the middle manager who can coast along and not need to move greatly in his/her career, WFH might be great. -- For the developer who works by tickets on very concrete things and this is nothing new, WFH might be great. -- For the small company CEO who relies on force of personality and everyone in the same room urgently working to get something done, WFH might be terrible. There's a huge variability in what WFH means, depending on what you want from the situation. For some people, remote working is really not good. And that's aside from the point that, when everyone is remote, you're also competing with the world who is also remote. Jobs and job qualifications (and competition) may change...
- chadash 6y ago
  > And that's aside from the point that, when everyone is remote, you're also competing with the world who is also remote. Yup... once everyone is remote anyway, won't take too long for some manager to decide to offshore work to cheaper countries. Even if that doesn't happen to you, if it happens to enough people elsewhere it'll bring salaries down for everyone.
  - thesizeofa 6y ago
    Just how incompetent are you if you can easily be replaced by a cheap inexperienced worker in india?
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    The D community is all over the world. We're used to that!
  - sJ646U9k6c6gME9 6y ago
quxpar 6y ago
Currently subletting an apartment with an eat-in kitchen and two offices. Incredibly opulent by Brooklyn standards, but it's utterly essential for both me and my partner to have isolated space to work in. The kitchen is a nice bonus, because we can have coffee breaks together.
- barbecue_sauce 6y ago
  No bedrooms?
pelasaco 6y ago
I'm doing home-office since 2013 and I'm doing fine. Have my surf and social life in my routine. Work focused, produce more and spend less time trying to get stuff done. Cook daily is hard but sometimes a joy and a must if you want to leave healthy. I would never come back to a 5 days in the office routine. Never.
- bluntfang 6y ago
  >Cook daily is hard but sometimes a joy and a must if you want to leave healthy. Hit this on the head. Since I've started working remotely, ~1 year before the pandemic, I've really seen my diet improve. I eat clean. Fresh vegetables and grains are much cheaper than food truck/restaurants. I do put in hours though, but I haven't timed it. I usually can pull off cooking during my lunch break or during the 2-3 monthly all staff meetings I have where I don't do any talking. What really baffles me about all of this is how full the fast food drive thrus are when I go about on errands.
  - pelasaco 6y ago
    i eat much more vegetables and and fruits and much less meat than before. Brew your own coffee (BYOC) instead of the enterprise machine and the option to seat outside while reading some paper or thinking about your code is priceless.
- redisman 6y ago
  I've done 5 years, with about a year of half-office-half-home. You readjust and I think it would be really hard to fit in the commute into my day now. With covid I'm sometimes thinking it would be nice to go in for a day but that is probably just a general desire to do something outside of the safe routine.
benrbray 6y ago
As a recent graduate with an overseas job offer who has been left with no choice but to work remotely until Japan re-opens its borders to foreign workers, this really hits home. My student apartment is not equipped for this lifestyle. I do not have a home office in a sprawling estate in the suburbs on several acres of property where I can enjoy the sounds of nature. I live in a small apartment on a busy street surrounded by highways and golf courses who don't let plebs like me wander around inside. When I'm at home, I just feel this anxiety about working that just never subsides. I feel much more relaxed when I'm able to be outside, but the nearest public green space is campus, which I avoid as much as possible now that school is in session. The nearest park is a thirty minute drive, but I have to check the air traffic before leaving due to a nearby airport. At home, work seems to never end, especially with the 13-hour time difference that necessitates 10:30pm meetings twice a week. On one hand, I really enjoy this rare occasion to talk to my co-workers, but on the other hand, I can't shut off my work brain until after the meeting is over. On these days I end up going to sleep at 3 or 4am, adding to the cycle of stress and sleep deprivation. I figured this would last one, maybe two months at the most. But now it's been four months since I started remote work and six months since I accepted the initial offer. There's no word about Japan issuing new work visas any time soon. I want my life to begin.
- downrightmike 6y ago
  You need to track your time and limit all that you put in. I use a spreadsheet that I put the times I start, take lunch, and then it calculates when I need to stop. So if I take a 37 minute lunch, I can set a timer on my phone to go off and remind me. I've also setup a automatic timer to switch on a lamp that starts at roughly an hour before I need to log on and cuts out at lunch. After lunch I turn it back on util I'm off. I only go into work mode with that light on. Simple but effective. Then you have to make other things worth doing, like I'd rather throw a ball for my dog than keep working. Or a hobby that gets you away from the PC, knitting would work and easy to get started.
- VLM 6y ago
  If you're a 30 minute drive away from a park it must be extremely urban and therefore expensive. It might be cheaper to move somewhere suburban or go completely nomadic. You may not get a chance to see the Grand Canyon or other national parks anytime soon if you're moving to Japan, so now might be a very good time. Google searches for mountain view CA apartment rents as an example of hyper dense urban life far from green areas seem to indicate $2K to $6K/month is quite reasonable. Similar google searches for rural Wisconsin cabins indicate a thousand bucks per week will get a cabin on a lake in the woods with a pontoon boat, wet bar, and hot tub. You don't have to worry about your schedule if your closest neighbor is a quarter mile away. Internet might or might not be a problem. The problem with spending a couple months at some New Orleans bed and breakfasts is you'd be close enough to be reminded everything is shut down, and noise level. Might be easier to stick with rural retreats and adventures. The united states lighthouse association website lists rentable lighthouses if you really want to get away from it all. Again, internet via satellite may or may not be a problem. The entire lighthouse on Charity Island in Michigan can be rented for not too much more than a Mountain View apartment. You could do a very small house boat on a lake for $4K to $6K per month off season. There is no shortage of houseboat rentals and lakes and parks to visit. Could try the mississippi river... In all fairness I did spend yesterday in a park shelter at a county park with excellent wireless working away in 70 degree breezes, but there are many days when it rains or its 100 or 0.
mox001 6y ago
“The stubborn human desire to stare at one’s own face” (on Zoom) So others do that too?
slavapestov 6y ago
I think people who are opposed to remote work should be honest about what they really want. They're advocating for all tech jobs to be concentrated in a handful of cities (SF, NYC, Seattle), all of which suffer from a housing shortage.
- snazz 6y ago
  You can dislike WFH while also disliking centralization in a few cities with housing shortages. They’re not mutually exclusive.
- throwaway021331 6y ago
  Being born in SF or in some african village is the biggest predictor of wealth. This makes borders the most impactful form of discrimination. Of course a lot of people in wealthy countries are not so happy with remote work (but offshoring cobalt mining is ok)
- redisman 6y ago
  Remote wasn't that rare in Seattle at least even before covid.
hevelvarik 6y ago
I love everything about WFH save for that I get far less exercise not making my daily MTA
- analog31 6y ago
  I've biked to work every day for more than a decade. When I started WFH, I read a comment online about doing a "fake commute." So, I put myself on a schedule for I go for a long brisk walk every morning before my regular work day.
  - cableshaft 6y ago
    This is a good way to think about it. I should start doing this. I keep meaning to go on morning walks and making excuses on how I can't do it today, but maybe if I think of it as a commute, it'll work.
pritovido 6y ago
As a long term worker from home I feel a sense of victimhood that floods all the article. I understand that most people are working for a company so others tell her what to do after school when they also train you what to do and you are micromanaged all the time. The article portrays that you need your boss to create your social circle for you. People do not see that as the enormous opportunity that it is. For example, before I worked remote I used to spend two hours every day commuting. I risked my life on the road with truck drivers and other carriers that were always late, stressed and dangerous. That also required my own money in gas and car repairs, expensive clothing... Most people at the office were not my friends, they were coworkers, and because I spent so much time there I had no time for seeing my real friends and family. I was also exhausted all the time, because I did not sleep enough. Working remote is amazing for me now(it was tough at first) and it could be for a lot of people is only they learn to grasp the opportunity. Take control of your own life, you will have to go against the training of the school days that is pervasive, school took years of your live. It will take you years to undo this training. Make your own group of friends, lovers. Sleep and eat well. Exercise. Invest on your skills. The article portrays young people as victims, and it is quite the opposite, they are the ones that can adapt and learn and grow. I went to Russia and most old people had a hard time working in a capitalist society because they grew up in a State that did everything for them, so as young people they did not developed the skills to make things on their own. If you actually tried , you were strongly punished. But young people are adaptable. When I was young and started working remotely very few people did, so I had to learn on the go. Today it is much better and easier. Be proactive, refuse being a victim, if you have problems with working remote create a club, a mail list or whatever for other people in your same situation. Learn from people that have made it. But don't be a victim. We will be having covid for at least 5 to 6 months more in the north Hemisphere. You can spend that time doing something about it, learning and improving your skills or just complain all the time. After everything goes back to normal, most people will not do remote work 100%, but odds are they will do 30%, 40, or 50%, and their live will improve as a result if you have gotten the skills.
- brsg 6y ago
  People are "allowed" to be frustrated with the situation, and I think it's a little dismissive to accuse them of having "victimhood". It's perfectly reasonable to miss direct interactions with coworkers, and there's nothing wrong with being friends with your coworkers. Video chats really aren't comparable for most people. It's perfectly reasonable to be frustrated that you're stuck in a crowded apartment with roommates and no office space. The WFH change happened virtually overnight for many people. It's perfectly reasonable to be fearful that a junior contributor's career may stall during this. Most companies' cultures weren't built around this system, so it's pretty rational to expect companies to struggle recognizing junior employees. Obviously people can and will adjust, but criticizing an imperfect system is the only way it will improve - it's not a sign of weakness.
susiecambria 6y ago
I'm working on a distance learning project at the moment. . . analyzing focus group results. We're talking with parents, teachers, and adult/alternative learners. Just finished a parent transcript today. What came through loud and clear is that school from home is wicked hard for all kinds of people and that combining WFH and school from home is even more wicked hard. Parents are struggling with their kids' academic content (pre-calc? algebra?!). Kids are struggling with less structure. Everyone is struggling with limited bandwidth (literally and figuratively) and learning/working styles and the need for socialization are colliding in an unfortunate, constant way. For many, not all. Looking forward to reviewing all the transcripts and compiling the findings. But if parents are any indication, it's gonna be a rough fall. *Edit: Yes, I'm from New England. (wicked)
Jedd 6y ago
Like almost every other behaviour or trait we want to use to characterise (or worse, categorise) humans -- it's a spectrum. There's certainly some people near either extreme -- from those whose mood, productivity, health plummets when away from a social/work environment, to those who could happily go weeks or months with minimal human interaction, and whose productivity soars when they set their own schedules and can control & minimise interactions and interruptions. Apart from a tacit acknowledgement that people are not required to be in an office 5 days a week, I am hopeful that this pandemic will lead more workplaces to embrace and accommodate that spectrum, facilitating environments and conditions that will better suit - well, ideally everyone, but I'll take 'more people than before'.
hombre_fatal 6y ago
WFH has some obvious trade-offs. But I'm not particularly sympathetic to all of them when office work has been the only choice for almost everyone. Some of the downsides of WFH that the article points out, like how our office coworkers incidentally become our social life (and now we don't have them), are also symptoms of larger issues that I don't think work should be tasked to solve. The social isolation of the youth (before Covid) and the dependency on an office for many people to make friends were already pretty depressing parts of our society. But so was having to go to work to do a job that could be done anywhere. Like everyone always talks about wanting to retire so they can finally hang out on the beach year round, but WFH is what lets you do that. It doesn't need to be a distant dream anymore for when you're old. I get that people were suddenly tossed into the deep end of WFH due to Covid instead of given a choice, and that many people aren't cut out for it. But this kind of coverage also goes too far, I think, in a world where we were always forced to go to an office. I was looking for a job last year, and I had to search high and low for a remote job. For example, almost all the job posts on HN want you to come into an office. I was unsuccessful finding remote work in my more traditional search and fortunately found a good remote job through my social circle. Office jobs have a certain stability and, even more important, familiarity. But I think that familiarity can be confused with an assumption that it's the way things should be. For example, I agree that a future where most jobs are WFH will have to consider a solution for helping us find a productive way to work (like giving us a private office in a coworking space or letting us choose a stipend to set up a home office). But also consider how depressing it is to clutch on to office work because it gives you an escape from your children—it's really not a quality of the office work itself that you're after, but somewhat of an incidental upside that can (and should) be replicated in a culture of WFH. What I mean to say is that I see a lot of office-work praise for what's actually incidental advantages of office-work (that should definitely be replicated outside of office-work), and it would be a damn shame if we as a society use those incidental benefits to damn WFH and regress back to the more or less office-work-only society from which we came. I hope we find a good 50/50 middle ground where people have a choice.
- redisman 6y ago
  My problem always was, hanging out with people from work - we always ended up talking about work during the evening. Sometimes cathartic but work also kind of creeps more and more into your free time.
dehrmann 6y ago
Same thing for students. There will be a cohort that's a ~year behind where they should be in most skills. It'll also be interesting to see what happens with students who were under-tested; some will advance when they're not ready, and for things like college admissions, between fewer standardized tests and noisier grades, I'm not sure how colleges that want quality students will maintain their standards.
austincheney 6y ago
For some people writing software is an inherently social experience: contributing to a team, learning from colleagues, exchanging ideas in person. For others software is an experience of research and crafting which requires minimal feedback and no social interaction to grow and experiment. Like everything else in life this comes down to personal needs and expectations. To say working from home results in a lost generation is excessive, almost to absurd. It is beneficial to some people and harmful to others regardless of financial or familial situations. Furthermore that opinion only makes sense in a vacuum, such as for people who do nothing else and are limited to a single job solely focused upon writing software. Once your professional experience has broadened a bit absolutes like this subject become more clear for the limitations that they are.
- scarface74 6y ago
  > For others software is an experience of research and crafting which requires minimal feedback and no social interaction to grow and experiment. If you are young and new in your career, I don’t see how it could not stunt your career or lead to being an “expert beginner” without getting feedback. This definitely happened to me for the first decade of my career. Not working remotely, working either as a sole developer or working with two or three other self taught developers who had been with the company forever.
  - austincheney 6y ago
    > I don’t see how As a self-taught developer I promise you it never stunted my skills, and most probably made me a much stronger developer. I have been a professional developer for 12 years (10 of those as a senior) and during that time I have spent 4 years on military deployments overseas and another 1 year in a military school. As a result of intense self-training away from the corporate world I have learned to become a stronger and more independent developer than most of my peers. When you are writing software on a small netbook traveling around Afghanistan with no internet you have to learn to be self-reliant, portable, efficient, and cheap with system resources. Given the right set of expectations and personality you just figure it out. Based on this perspective its my thought expert beginners are precisely so because they are too reliant on social reinforcement over original decisions.
ponker 6y ago
This pandemic has taught me that I personally detest WFH. I’m glad that going forward there will be more WFH options for those who prefer it, but I am not one of those people.
hkt 6y ago
It's churlish, but I'd honestly rather the rent money spent on commercial office space went to me, and that the space itself was redeveloped into nicer, more spacious homes for the young people without offices.
topkai22 6y ago
The issue brought up by the author are real, but I think many aren't necessarily inherent to remote work but are due to society and norms not having adapted to it yet. I've run a remote team for years and quite explicitly encourage socialization, develop new hires and thier connections, and encourage boundaries (mostly by telling people to stop working at 530p). We have few of the problems that are often claimed to be endemic in remote, because we have actively worked to build a culture that avoids them. Even at a wider, multi-group level, we are able to address issues of innovation and serendipity by creating time and space for them. One of the best tricks is encouraging lots of small presentations on non-work or semi-work topics followed by lots of open ended conversation. People show up by mutual interest outside of their project based work and talk. I run a book club roughly themed to application development and every session I meet new people from across the org and exchange ideas. Some of these contacts have resulted in valuable insights for later projects. Volunteer projects and hackathons can serve a similar purpose. These are just examples and we are hardly perfect, but I if the projections of an massive increase in WFH bear out at all, you'll see culture adapt to it as well- people will get better at socializing on screen, feel more free to ping with questions, and will find these alternate avenues to collaborate. I'm less confident that society outside of work will adapt as well, but I wouldn't be surprised at all to see a long term increase in young people continue to live with extended family or social clubs.

157 points by RickJWagner 6y ago

This article appears in the October 2020 print edition with the headline “A Cubicle Never Looked So Good.” To be honest, I've never really had a cubicle. Usually just a desk in a bullpin type arrangement. No privacy. Distractions galore. The sound of co-workers flushing the toilets in the restrooms nearby. Nothing to reflect fondly upon in my opinion. If I had wanted or needed a new job, completely changing careers would probably have been easier than getting another gig in my field with the experience I’d accrued at home. No doubt my experience is different doing technical work, but I have never relied on my co-workers to line up my next position. I flip the switch on linkedin to let recruiters know I'm looking and call or email the recruiters I have worked with in the past. Sometimes an employer might ask for a reference. I suppose I do have a short list of those. “Outside of immediate family, people’s co-workers become their most consistent opportunity for social interaction,” Peditto told me. “What happens when you lose that is one of my greater concerns.” My social interactions really do revolve around my family and long time friends. It's not a large group, but I'm not a social butterfly either. I have a hard enough time keeping up with those social interactions. Who knows, maybe I was born for remote work. Overall this feels like yet another hit piece against remote work with a lot of anecdotes and not much else. Here I am arguing against it with my own anecdotes. I really don't understand why these keep cropping up. Are commercial real-estate conglomerates paying for these? Personally, I am happier than I have ever been working remotely. I don't struggle to keep a routine or maintain separation between my work life and my home life. I don't feel starved for social interaction either. I would hate to see the sentiments these articles convey ruin something that has been very positive for myself and my partner (and my dog).

Mountain_Skies 6y ago
The social aspect is interesting because the pandemic induced remote work has happened at the same time as many people's non-work socialization has also been taken away. Whenever people start going back to the office, they may try to use socialization there to make up for the socialization that has been taken away from them due to restrictions on public gatherings. I've been doing remote work for three years, so I'm used to not socializing with coworkers in an office context, but the general restrictions on the public as a whole has been a bit rough. I have no desire to go back to working onsite in an office but could be tempted back in if it were the only way to have some level of socialization again. My guess is that offices probably won't become the primary white collar work location again until well after the restrictions on public gatherings have been relaxed so maybe going to the office to regain socialization won't be necessary (knock on wood).
benrbray 6y ago
> Overall this feels like yet another hit piece against remote work...I really don't understand why these keep cropping up. Are commercial real-estate conglomerates paying for these? I appreciate the perspective you shared in the rest of your comment, but was this bit really necessary? Just because someone has had a different experience than you doesn't mean that they're a corporate shill paid to manufacture dissent.
- frompdx 6y ago
  I do think it is necessary. It's one thing to share your experience about remote work as the author does. It's something entirely different to interleave it with with vague concerns of economic hardship for younger people or stunted career growth for women. What is the purpose of this? In my mind I imagine a boardroom full of Don Draper types sipping scotch and smoking cigarettes fretting over the decline in office leasing revenue while Draper spins a brilliant web of fiction. "We'll tell them that it is bad for the careers of women and we'll make them miss the smell of their co-worker's day old spaghetti as it spins on the microwave turntable. We'll even make them long for the awkward interactions in the hallway while they go down a level to the inconveniently placed restroom on the floor below. They'll eat it up." The anti-remote work hit-piece aspect is really my point. To me these articles feel like some kind of thinly veiled attempt to make people believe they missed working in the office. Maybe even make people fear for their futures if they don't work in an office. Maybe this isn't the case and isn't what the author intended, but that is how it reads to me.
  - VLM 6y ago
    This is not quite the "world wide web" we signed up for, but its definitely the one we got, LOL.
  - benmller313 6y ago
    Perhaps its not a web of lies and this situation really is hurting this persons career? I think it's usually a good idea to assume that there isn't a large misinformation campaign going on.
slavapestov 6y ago
> My social interactions really do revolve around my family and long time friends. It's not a large group, but I'm not a social butterfly either. I have a hard enough time keeping up with those social interactions. Who knows, maybe I was born for remote work. > Overall this feels like yet another hit piece against remote work with a lot of anecdotes and not much else. I think you've answered your question there. It is an unfortunate aspect of modern society that for many people, work is their only opportunity to socialize with other humans (other than trivial interactions with the cashier at the grocery store, and so on).
visarga 6y ago
>I really don't understand why these keep cropping up. But you gave the answer yourself - you're different, other people are unlike you: > Who knows, maybe I was born for remote work. Me too, but my wife suffers from it, she dreams about the day when we're going to return to the office. I'm just starting to miss the office, it's been easier on me.

Mountain_Skies 6y ago

Best advice I can give is to have a dedicated space from which to work. This will probably mean you need more space in your home than you did when you went to an office each day. This might also mean that certain real estate situations are no longer viable or are at least less desirable than they used to be. Having roommate or living in a small crowded space can be detrimental to remote work. Leaving a city center with high cost per sq ft for a less dense residential area might be the trade off you have to make in order for remote work to work for you and your employer long term. For me it meant getting a house and setting aside a specific bedroom to be an office. I do use it for hobby activities but those uses are easily put away at the start of the work day. It's not used as a spare bedroom for visitors. There are also certain security issues that employees and employers are going to need to come to an understanding on now that remote work is getting more common. Some discussions should not be able to be overheard by spouses, roommates, friends, or if your walls are thin enough, neighbors. So far there seems to be very little discussion around the security side of things, likely because everyone knows for most of those suddenly thrust into remote work, there's only a limited amount they can do about it right now.

GoodJokes 6y ago
My advice is to have money and buy your way out of it. Cool Cool.

supernova87a 6y ago

WFH has a huge difference in result depending on who you are, when you are (in your career), and where you are in a company (of organization). -- For the budding young developer who can't wait to show ideas to teammates and demonstrate being a go-getter by asking random questions and finding unaddressed issues to innovate on, WFH might be terrible. You're going to schedule time to fortuitously run into the senior person who takes an interest in your idea? -- For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50% due to parenting obligations, WFH might be terrible. -- For the middle manager who can coast along and not need to move greatly in his/her career, WFH might be great. -- For the developer who works by tickets on very concrete things and this is nothing new, WFH might be great. -- For the small company CEO who relies on force of personality and everyone in the same room urgently working to get something done, WFH might be terrible. There's a huge variability in what WFH means, depending on what you want from the situation. For some people, remote working is really not good. And that's aside from the point that, when everyone is remote, you're also competing with the world who is also remote. Jobs and job qualifications (and competition) may change...

chadash 6y ago
> And that's aside from the point that, when everyone is remote, you're also competing with the world who is also remote. Yup... once everyone is remote anyway, won't take too long for some manager to decide to offshore work to cheaper countries. Even if that doesn't happen to you, if it happens to enough people elsewhere it'll bring salaries down for everyone.
- thesizeofa 6y ago
  Just how incompetent are you if you can easily be replaced by a cheap inexperienced worker in india?
- WalterBright 6y ago
  The D community is all over the world. We're used to that!
- sJ646U9k6c6gME9 6y ago

quxpar 6y ago

Currently subletting an apartment with an eat-in kitchen and two offices. Incredibly opulent by Brooklyn standards, but it's utterly essential for both me and my partner to have isolated space to work in. The kitchen is a nice bonus, because we can have coffee breaks together.

barbecue_sauce 6y ago
No bedrooms?

pelasaco 6y ago

I'm doing home-office since 2013 and I'm doing fine. Have my surf and social life in my routine. Work focused, produce more and spend less time trying to get stuff done. Cook daily is hard but sometimes a joy and a must if you want to leave healthy. I would never come back to a 5 days in the office routine. Never.

bluntfang 6y ago
>Cook daily is hard but sometimes a joy and a must if you want to leave healthy. Hit this on the head. Since I've started working remotely, ~1 year before the pandemic, I've really seen my diet improve. I eat clean. Fresh vegetables and grains are much cheaper than food truck/restaurants. I do put in hours though, but I haven't timed it. I usually can pull off cooking during my lunch break or during the 2-3 monthly all staff meetings I have where I don't do any talking. What really baffles me about all of this is how full the fast food drive thrus are when I go about on errands.
- pelasaco 6y ago
  i eat much more vegetables and and fruits and much less meat than before. Brew your own coffee (BYOC) instead of the enterprise machine and the option to seat outside while reading some paper or thinking about your code is priceless.
redisman 6y ago
I've done 5 years, with about a year of half-office-half-home. You readjust and I think it would be really hard to fit in the commute into my day now. With covid I'm sometimes thinking it would be nice to go in for a day but that is probably just a general desire to do something outside of the safe routine.

benrbray 6y ago

As a recent graduate with an overseas job offer who has been left with no choice but to work remotely until Japan re-opens its borders to foreign workers, this really hits home. My student apartment is not equipped for this lifestyle. I do not have a home office in a sprawling estate in the suburbs on several acres of property where I can enjoy the sounds of nature. I live in a small apartment on a busy street surrounded by highways and golf courses who don't let plebs like me wander around inside. When I'm at home, I just feel this anxiety about working that just never subsides. I feel much more relaxed when I'm able to be outside, but the nearest public green space is campus, which I avoid as much as possible now that school is in session. The nearest park is a thirty minute drive, but I have to check the air traffic before leaving due to a nearby airport. At home, work seems to never end, especially with the 13-hour time difference that necessitates 10:30pm meetings twice a week. On one hand, I really enjoy this rare occasion to talk to my co-workers, but on the other hand, I can't shut off my work brain until after the meeting is over. On these days I end up going to sleep at 3 or 4am, adding to the cycle of stress and sleep deprivation. I figured this would last one, maybe two months at the most. But now it's been four months since I started remote work and six months since I accepted the initial offer. There's no word about Japan issuing new work visas any time soon. I want my life to begin.

downrightmike 6y ago
You need to track your time and limit all that you put in. I use a spreadsheet that I put the times I start, take lunch, and then it calculates when I need to stop. So if I take a 37 minute lunch, I can set a timer on my phone to go off and remind me. I've also setup a automatic timer to switch on a lamp that starts at roughly an hour before I need to log on and cuts out at lunch. After lunch I turn it back on util I'm off. I only go into work mode with that light on. Simple but effective. Then you have to make other things worth doing, like I'd rather throw a ball for my dog than keep working. Or a hobby that gets you away from the PC, knitting would work and easy to get started.
VLM 6y ago
If you're a 30 minute drive away from a park it must be extremely urban and therefore expensive. It might be cheaper to move somewhere suburban or go completely nomadic. You may not get a chance to see the Grand Canyon or other national parks anytime soon if you're moving to Japan, so now might be a very good time. Google searches for mountain view CA apartment rents as an example of hyper dense urban life far from green areas seem to indicate $2K to $6K/month is quite reasonable. Similar google searches for rural Wisconsin cabins indicate a thousand bucks per week will get a cabin on a lake in the woods with a pontoon boat, wet bar, and hot tub. You don't have to worry about your schedule if your closest neighbor is a quarter mile away. Internet might or might not be a problem. The problem with spending a couple months at some New Orleans bed and breakfasts is you'd be close enough to be reminded everything is shut down, and noise level. Might be easier to stick with rural retreats and adventures. The united states lighthouse association website lists rentable lighthouses if you really want to get away from it all. Again, internet via satellite may or may not be a problem. The entire lighthouse on Charity Island in Michigan can be rented for not too much more than a Mountain View apartment. You could do a very small house boat on a lake for $4K to $6K per month off season. There is no shortage of houseboat rentals and lakes and parks to visit. Could try the mississippi river... In all fairness I did spend yesterday in a park shelter at a county park with excellent wireless working away in 70 degree breezes, but there are many days when it rains or its 100 or 0.

mox001 6y ago

“The stubborn human desire to stare at one’s own face” (on Zoom) So others do that too?

slavapestov 6y ago

I think people who are opposed to remote work should be honest about what they really want. They're advocating for all tech jobs to be concentrated in a handful of cities (SF, NYC, Seattle), all of which suffer from a housing shortage.

snazz 6y ago
You can dislike WFH while also disliking centralization in a few cities with housing shortages. They’re not mutually exclusive.
throwaway021331 6y ago
Being born in SF or in some african village is the biggest predictor of wealth. This makes borders the most impactful form of discrimination. Of course a lot of people in wealthy countries are not so happy with remote work (but offshoring cobalt mining is ok)
redisman 6y ago
Remote wasn't that rare in Seattle at least even before covid.

hevelvarik 6y ago

I love everything about WFH save for that I get far less exercise not making my daily MTA

analog31 6y ago
I've biked to work every day for more than a decade. When I started WFH, I read a comment online about doing a "fake commute." So, I put myself on a schedule for I go for a long brisk walk every morning before my regular work day.
- cableshaft 6y ago
  This is a good way to think about it. I should start doing this. I keep meaning to go on morning walks and making excuses on how I can't do it today, but maybe if I think of it as a commute, it'll work.

pritovido 6y ago

As a long term worker from home I feel a sense of victimhood that floods all the article. I understand that most people are working for a company so others tell her what to do after school when they also train you what to do and you are micromanaged all the time. The article portrays that you need your boss to create your social circle for you. People do not see that as the enormous opportunity that it is. For example, before I worked remote I used to spend two hours every day commuting. I risked my life on the road with truck drivers and other carriers that were always late, stressed and dangerous. That also required my own money in gas and car repairs, expensive clothing... Most people at the office were not my friends, they were coworkers, and because I spent so much time there I had no time for seeing my real friends and family. I was also exhausted all the time, because I did not sleep enough. Working remote is amazing for me now(it was tough at first) and it could be for a lot of people is only they learn to grasp the opportunity. Take control of your own life, you will have to go against the training of the school days that is pervasive, school took years of your live. It will take you years to undo this training. Make your own group of friends, lovers. Sleep and eat well. Exercise. Invest on your skills. The article portrays young people as victims, and it is quite the opposite, they are the ones that can adapt and learn and grow. I went to Russia and most old people had a hard time working in a capitalist society because they grew up in a State that did everything for them, so as young people they did not developed the skills to make things on their own. If you actually tried , you were strongly punished. But young people are adaptable. When I was young and started working remotely very few people did, so I had to learn on the go. Today it is much better and easier. Be proactive, refuse being a victim, if you have problems with working remote create a club, a mail list or whatever for other people in your same situation. Learn from people that have made it. But don't be a victim. We will be having covid for at least 5 to 6 months more in the north Hemisphere. You can spend that time doing something about it, learning and improving your skills or just complain all the time. After everything goes back to normal, most people will not do remote work 100%, but odds are they will do 30%, 40, or 50%, and their live will improve as a result if you have gotten the skills.

brsg 6y ago
People are "allowed" to be frustrated with the situation, and I think it's a little dismissive to accuse them of having "victimhood". It's perfectly reasonable to miss direct interactions with coworkers, and there's nothing wrong with being friends with your coworkers. Video chats really aren't comparable for most people. It's perfectly reasonable to be frustrated that you're stuck in a crowded apartment with roommates and no office space. The WFH change happened virtually overnight for many people. It's perfectly reasonable to be fearful that a junior contributor's career may stall during this. Most companies' cultures weren't built around this system, so it's pretty rational to expect companies to struggle recognizing junior employees. Obviously people can and will adjust, but criticizing an imperfect system is the only way it will improve - it's not a sign of weakness.

susiecambria 6y ago

I'm working on a distance learning project at the moment. . . analyzing focus group results. We're talking with parents, teachers, and adult/alternative learners. Just finished a parent transcript today. What came through loud and clear is that school from home is wicked hard for all kinds of people and that combining WFH and school from home is even more wicked hard. Parents are struggling with their kids' academic content (pre-calc? algebra?!). Kids are struggling with less structure. Everyone is struggling with limited bandwidth (literally and figuratively) and learning/working styles and the need for socialization are colliding in an unfortunate, constant way. For many, not all. Looking forward to reviewing all the transcripts and compiling the findings. But if parents are any indication, it's gonna be a rough fall. *Edit: Yes, I'm from New England. (wicked)

Jedd 6y ago

Like almost every other behaviour or trait we want to use to characterise (or worse, categorise) humans -- it's a spectrum. There's certainly some people near either extreme -- from those whose mood, productivity, health plummets when away from a social/work environment, to those who could happily go weeks or months with minimal human interaction, and whose productivity soars when they set their own schedules and can control & minimise interactions and interruptions. Apart from a tacit acknowledgement that people are not required to be in an office 5 days a week, I am hopeful that this pandemic will lead more workplaces to embrace and accommodate that spectrum, facilitating environments and conditions that will better suit - well, ideally everyone, but I'll take 'more people than before'.

hombre_fatal 6y ago

WFH has some obvious trade-offs. But I'm not particularly sympathetic to all of them when office work has been the only choice for almost everyone. Some of the downsides of WFH that the article points out, like how our office coworkers incidentally become our social life (and now we don't have them), are also symptoms of larger issues that I don't think work should be tasked to solve. The social isolation of the youth (before Covid) and the dependency on an office for many people to make friends were already pretty depressing parts of our society. But so was having to go to work to do a job that could be done anywhere. Like everyone always talks about wanting to retire so they can finally hang out on the beach year round, but WFH is what lets you do that. It doesn't need to be a distant dream anymore for when you're old. I get that people were suddenly tossed into the deep end of WFH due to Covid instead of given a choice, and that many people aren't cut out for it. But this kind of coverage also goes too far, I think, in a world where we were always forced to go to an office. I was looking for a job last year, and I had to search high and low for a remote job. For example, almost all the job posts on HN want you to come into an office. I was unsuccessful finding remote work in my more traditional search and fortunately found a good remote job through my social circle. Office jobs have a certain stability and, even more important, familiarity. But I think that familiarity can be confused with an assumption that it's the way things should be. For example, I agree that a future where most jobs are WFH will have to consider a solution for helping us find a productive way to work (like giving us a private office in a coworking space or letting us choose a stipend to set up a home office). But also consider how depressing it is to clutch on to office work because it gives you an escape from your children—it's really not a quality of the office work itself that you're after, but somewhat of an incidental upside that can (and should) be replicated in a culture of WFH. What I mean to say is that I see a lot of office-work praise for what's actually incidental advantages of office-work (that should definitely be replicated outside of office-work), and it would be a damn shame if we as a society use those incidental benefits to damn WFH and regress back to the more or less office-work-only society from which we came. I hope we find a good 50/50 middle ground where people have a choice.

redisman 6y ago
My problem always was, hanging out with people from work - we always ended up talking about work during the evening. Sometimes cathartic but work also kind of creeps more and more into your free time.

dehrmann 6y ago

Same thing for students. There will be a cohort that's a ~year behind where they should be in most skills. It'll also be interesting to see what happens with students who were under-tested; some will advance when they're not ready, and for things like college admissions, between fewer standardized tests and noisier grades, I'm not sure how colleges that want quality students will maintain their standards.

austincheney 6y ago

For some people writing software is an inherently social experience: contributing to a team, learning from colleagues, exchanging ideas in person. For others software is an experience of research and crafting which requires minimal feedback and no social interaction to grow and experiment. Like everything else in life this comes down to personal needs and expectations. To say working from home results in a lost generation is excessive, almost to absurd. It is beneficial to some people and harmful to others regardless of financial or familial situations. Furthermore that opinion only makes sense in a vacuum, such as for people who do nothing else and are limited to a single job solely focused upon writing software. Once your professional experience has broadened a bit absolutes like this subject become more clear for the limitations that they are.

scarface74 6y ago
> For others software is an experience of research and crafting which requires minimal feedback and no social interaction to grow and experiment. If you are young and new in your career, I don’t see how it could not stunt your career or lead to being an “expert beginner” without getting feedback. This definitely happened to me for the first decade of my career. Not working remotely, working either as a sole developer or working with two or three other self taught developers who had been with the company forever.
- austincheney 6y ago
  > I don’t see how As a self-taught developer I promise you it never stunted my skills, and most probably made me a much stronger developer. I have been a professional developer for 12 years (10 of those as a senior) and during that time I have spent 4 years on military deployments overseas and another 1 year in a military school. As a result of intense self-training away from the corporate world I have learned to become a stronger and more independent developer than most of my peers. When you are writing software on a small netbook traveling around Afghanistan with no internet you have to learn to be self-reliant, portable, efficient, and cheap with system resources. Given the right set of expectations and personality you just figure it out. Based on this perspective its my thought expert beginners are precisely so because they are too reliant on social reinforcement over original decisions.

ponker 6y ago

This pandemic has taught me that I personally detest WFH. I’m glad that going forward there will be more WFH options for those who prefer it, but I am not one of those people.

hkt 6y ago

It's churlish, but I'd honestly rather the rent money spent on commercial office space went to me, and that the space itself was redeveloped into nicer, more spacious homes for the young people without offices.

topkai22 6y ago

The issue brought up by the author are real, but I think many aren't necessarily inherent to remote work but are due to society and norms not having adapted to it yet. I've run a remote team for years and quite explicitly encourage socialization, develop new hires and thier connections, and encourage boundaries (mostly by telling people to stop working at 530p). We have few of the problems that are often claimed to be endemic in remote, because we have actively worked to build a culture that avoids them. Even at a wider, multi-group level, we are able to address issues of innovation and serendipity by creating time and space for them. One of the best tricks is encouraging lots of small presentations on non-work or semi-work topics followed by lots of open ended conversation. People show up by mutual interest outside of their project based work and talk. I run a book club roughly themed to application development and every session I meet new people from across the org and exchange ideas. Some of these contacts have resulted in valuable insights for later projects. Volunteer projects and hackathons can serve a similar purpose. These are just examples and we are hardly perfect, but I if the projections of an massive increase in WFH bear out at all, you'll see culture adapt to it as well- people will get better at socializing on screen, feel more free to ping with questions, and will find these alternate avenues to collaborate. I'm less confident that society outside of work will adapt as well, but I wouldn't be surprised at all to see a long term increase in young people continue to live with extended family or social clubs.