9 ms·

This is a complicated problem with different perspectives that no doubt will get muddled at some point. I'm confident at least the following is true: Some peo

This is a complicated problem with different perspectives that no doubt will get muddled at some point. I'm confident at least the following is true: Some people have long commutes and wfh is great Others have small, expensive apartments they paid for shorter commutes and it's suffocating 40-50 hours a week Some people live in palaces and offices are a step down in comfort Some people are happy with the online interactions Some people are dissatisfied with the online interactions and prefer to talk to humans and not text strings from humans they can't see or hear Some people want to work from home some of the time, and go to the office some of the time, and they've wanted that before the apocalypse occurred (puts hand up) Cities are nervous that business districts are devastated since no one buys coffee, lunches or walks home and steps into a shoe store or tailor, or to a bar for drinks with colleagues. But like much else in our present world, things are presented in black and white, emotive ways.

iancmceachern 6y ago
And further complicated by the fact the the same person may want different things at different stages in their life. Ive evolved, like many in my workplace, to be on site in the office as needed, occasionally (we work in hardware). We've learned to do most everything from home, with a few on site activities as needed.
- InertBrake 6y ago
  Many of the comments on discussions such as these give me the impression that people are not considering this when they write, or at the very least omitting it. I'm a college student graduating next year, and I just finished my first substantial internship ever in a remote arrangement. The past twelve weeks were my first real experience in my professional environment of interest, but I'm not even sure if I can call it that. I did the best I could and completed three of four of my projects, one of which was a competition where my team placed. But this was despite reassignment from my preferred original projects (in a physical lab), productivity, and general morale suffering immensely from pretty much every restriction COVID and the California wildfires have wrought on us. I'm a young guy in the process of building myself in nearly every way. I have more "potential" than I do domain knowledge and wisdom. I'm less disciplined. I feel a huge need to get out into the world and see people in places to develop my career and every type of relationship. These have all been harder to work on in the current climate. So when I see people extolling anecdotal virtues of no commute or not having to bother with seeing their coworker's faces in response to comments explaining why people may like the office, I get annoyed. I've literally never seen a single colleague of mine in real life or had a chance to get bored of my commute, and it was not a choice for me. Yes, adapting as things come is important. That doesn't change the assertion my demographic will have likely been more impacted by this when the smoke clears. I haven't had nearly as much opportunity as these people may have taken for granted in situating themselves so they can presently bank on their know-how and established relationships until we are out of this crisis. I hope my experiences in this regard will not be as bad as I go for full-time after I finish school in June.
  - andrejserafim 6y ago
    InertBrake - well done on your internship :) As someone who's been through internships and many years of in office work this is worrying me too. Our junior colleagues coming in without the little things they would get from sitting in a room with everyone else. Without team lunches and social events. Because it's not direct impact this is hard to reason about and create artificially. I chose to work remotely full time 4 years ago and I have to rely on my past years of experience quite a lot. What I do see is that excellent mentors and senior colleagues still find a way to mentor less experienced colleagues. It just takes conscious effort from both sides and we need to support both sides more in this. I'm very keen to study this in my teams and use the learnt experience to raise the base level.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    I feel absolutely terrible for all of our interns and new-grad hires this year, as they -- like you -- are getting a bizarre experience that we're not at all prepared to do properly, as we've just never done it this way before. As someone who's later in his career, I'm totally fine and happy working from home (and was doing that most of the time pre-pandemic anyway), but if I look back to my early-/mid-20s and think about all the in-person mentorship I'd gotten, and how much I learned just by physically being in the presence of other people with more experience than I... I'm really worried about how we're going to effectively mentor a new generation of colleagues if we have to keep up this reduced amount of interaction. Now, we do need to be careful to not equate the current situation with what "minimum office" might look like outside a pandemic situation. If we were all working from home but didn't have to isolate and socially distance ourselves, we'd still greet our interns and new employees with lunches and other outings, and we'd have plenty of random get-togethers in parks and bars. And I'd expect we'd come up with ways to get more-senior folks in the same room with the newcomers on a regular basis during the work day, whether in a co-working space or just a sparsely-populated office. So really, it just sucks right now, but won't always. I know that's little consolation for you and those like you, who are entering into this mess before we've figured out how to do it right. I do expect things to be a bit better next summer after you graduate, but I'm sure there will be plenty of rough edges.
    - 6y ago
syshum 6y ago
While everything you listed is a factor, My experience it normally comes down to if you have a actual home office or not. People that have the luxury of a dedicated office at home, an actual room that is just used as an office, not a corner of the kitchen or living room that has the "family desk" that everyone shares, is more apt for WFH I know many people that do not have this space, and do not have the ability to create this space in their home. For them WFH is a challenge. On the other hand, people like myself that do have a dedicated office space that is in many ways better than the office space at the commercial office find WFH to be great and prefer it, even when factoring in your list. In my office I would say it was about 60-70% of people that preferred working in the office and did not want to work from home primarily because they did not have a dedicated working space nor could easily create one.
- formercoder 6y ago
  That’s not the only factor. I have a home office and can’t wait to get back. I work in an industry that’s all about relationships and those are hard to build remotely. I just started a new role and there’s no way I could ever progress upward in this state.
  - syshum 6y ago
    I am definitely not the person to address building relationships, I suck at it, that is why I work with computers not people... that said I think you can build in remotely, even the people I am in the same office with 70-80% of our communications is over Chat, Phone, or Email anyway. Why walk 10 feet to the persons office when I can just message them on slack or teams?
    - frutiger 6y ago
      Because hearing you laugh when I make a joke makes me far happier than seeing you react with :joy:.
      - EForEndeavour 6y ago
sriku 6y ago
Most of these are what one might call "first order effects" - i.e. factors immediately associatable with work location. For prolonged situation, higher order effects are going to become more important. Here are some candidates - 1. Improvement in city air quality due to reduced commute - road and flight. 2. Erosion of "social credits" over time due to lower bandwidth interactions when remote. 3. Cumulative impact of serendipitous but significant learning arising from in-person interactions. 4. Impact on the body - prolonged unmoderated sitting in bad postures, eye strain due to constant staring into the screen, bad eating habits, etc. 5. Reduction in sense of belonging / identity / cohesiveness as the "molecules" that make up a cell can move more freely through the "cell boundary". 6. Impact on cognitive development during early childhood - due to school-from-home and lack of social interactions. Joint family homes are great to counter this! 7. Eroding knowledge and awareness of local geography due to reduced travel. Reduced attachment here can lead to apathy when local environs get trashed.
- ink_13 6y ago
  > Impact on the body - prolonged unmoderated sitting in bad postures Hey, this is me! I developed tendonitis in the shoulders from sitting in a lounge chair all day, and now I work with a physiotherapist who gave me funny looking exercises I do twice a day to retrain my body to get my hands behind my back (and other forms of shoulder mobility). Ergo is not a joke, friends.
  - Izikiel43 6y ago
    Can confirm, after 9 months in my job I switched from regular keyboard and mouse to ergo versions as my right hand was killing me. Now I’m getting an ergo trackball too.
  - cik 6y ago
    For years, everyone I know has made fun of me for the extreme ergo choices I've made in my workspaces, based on my needs. I've had a standing desk for over a decade, and I never sit down - purely because that works for me. I know someone else with the same setup, because at 4'11, she finally gets a desk she can lower to the proper height. I've been using the right keyboard/pointer combination for me since 2000, and I'll always continue to do so. Much like offices, there's no one size fits all - we really need to drop this idea.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
some bosses have an instinctive feeling that people working in the office are more productive some bosses themselves work best in the office with people around.
pjc50 6y ago
There's lots of reasons why individuals themselves might want or not want to go back in the office. What is more complicated is why they want to take everyone else with them. My own employer is letting some people come back in the office but not insisting on it. And all of this in the context of the trilemma: try for zero virus, accept total spread with associated medical costs, time off, deaths, and potential long term complications, or delay until the vaccines are ready and being deployed.
- ghaff 6y ago
  >What is more complicated is why they want to take everyone else with them. Probably because what other people do affects them. If everyone else on their team comes back to the office and they choose not to, that's probably not an ideal situation. Conversely, if they come back to the office and most of the people they work with don't, they're now effectively in a co-working situation where the office is just a physical space and they'll still be on video meetings all the time.
Philip-J-Fry 6y ago
One of the things I would struggle with is progression. In my current job I'm progressing quickly and have built good relationships with my colleagues. We can take a break and just turn around and chat for 10 minutes about random stuff. When everyone is working from home it's not like I could just call someone and chat to them because I don't know if they're busy or not. I can't build the same sort of relationships as I can in person. I'm quite introverted in a way that I find it hard to go out of my way and make friends. But the longer I spend with people in person, the easier it is and I find that I'm able to get along with almost everyone I meet. And as with most things, it's not really what you know, it's who you know. And knowing someone IRL is much better than knowing someone remote.
- fyfy18 6y ago
  > When everyone is working from home it's not like I could just call someone and chat to them because I don't know if they're busy or not I don't really see what the issue is. In my company if we want to chat we simply ask on Slack "can we have a call?", and the other person either says 'ok' or 'call me later'. Most conversations happen over async chat, which is great if you are waiting for something to compile (Scala...). How do you do it in an office setting? Would you go over to a person wearing headphones and starting telling them about your weekend?
m-p-3 6y ago
> Some people have long commutes and wfh is great This is exactly my situation, it takes me two hours of commute per day to get in the office, and the housing is prohibitively expensive the closer you get to it. My quality of life is significantly improved by WFH, which leaves me with more quality time with my kids and to cook.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  The office model is based on the factory model, which was constrained by the need to have people, machinery, and raw materials in the same location. Offices don't require that. All the soft benefits - water cooler chats, and so on - are balanced by disbenefits of expensive commutes and even more expensive real estate. So the experience becomes a lot more individual. Some people are happy, others aren't. Since most corps care more about productivity and costs than happiness, the final decision will be made by the cost savings. If productivity drops by (maybe) 20% while costs drop by (maybe) 50%, it's likely wfh will become much more of a thing. Some corps are already giving up on centralised office space - either permanently, or in the hope they can run remote for a year or two and renegotiate much lower rents and/or ownerships costs then. Of course this assumes the (maybe) 20% productivity costs won't be cumulative. But given the insane costs of office space, I suspect we'll see a lot of corps trying the experiment and attempting to make the best of it. So IMO anyone who is expecting things to go back to "normal" soon is going to be waiting at least a couple of years, and possibly forever - and should make plans accordingly. This applies equally to everyone, from CEOs to interns to freelancers.
nswest23 6y ago
sorry nuance like this doesn't fit in a headline this just won't work /s
rocketpastsix 6y ago
>Cities are nervous that business districts are devastated since no one buys coffee, lunches or walks home and steps into a shoe store or tailor, or to a bar for drinks with colleagues. I think this is more true than a lot of people think/or care to make known. I know the business district in my city, Nashville, is hurting right now.
- Terretta 6y ago
  > business district There’s the problem. Turns out, when city is of a type of mixed use and walkability such that you live above (or a trolly ride away from) where you work, working at work or working at home don’t meaningfully change city viability.
dominotw 6y ago
I just want to take a nap in the afternoon.
soc14lism00 6y ago
Why not present them in black and white ways? Greyness comes with crafting a collage of black and white? Why must my personal position take into account a composite greyness if it means being put into an office setting I am not productive in? Why bend myself to an arbitrary greyness? Our social laws should acknowledge the greyness and avoid empowering a uni-culture that leans towards one choice? Efficiency != resiliency. Rather than commit to the one size fits all dragged in the direction of currency holders. Complete lack of acceptance a nations currency is propped up by the greyness in opinions I don’t care who has memorized what facts. The fact remains they’re not a god
giancarlostoro 6y ago
> Some people are dissatisfied with the online interactions and prefer to talk to humans and not text strings from humans they can't see or hear I think this is easily resolved by audio / video calls. All of my coworkers are significantly older than me and have no issue communicating this way. I dont mind commuting but I dont want to commute as often. I think my sweet spot would be to commute around noon once traffics no longer crazy and go back home after traffic dies down but the more I think about that the more I feel like driving altogether is a waste. I prefer to only commute when we all decide to be onsite to discuss something and work through it.
- naavis 6y ago
  Video calls are not remotely (no pun intended) the same as meeting face to face. In the office I can casually joke with the person sitting next to me, and it is usually visually evident when they are busy and I shouldn't bother them. If we both need a break, we can take a short walk, go for a lunch together or something. Video calls are limited, akward and uncomfortable compared to that. Video calls have their place but they are not the same thing.
  - LdSGSgvupDV 6y ago
    Try VR. It would be super cool to have a VR Chat version of slack/discord for working.
  - giancarlostoro 6y ago
    We mostly do audio calls and get to the meat of what we need, sometimes I get informal and nothing is wrong with that, you can still gauge if someone is busy by how they respond or if they seem distracted. Every office is differently but we've always had two or three people working remotely so the transition is nothing special for most of us. On another note we've had lunch calls on Wednesdays as a more informal setting so everyone can talk about general things and keep the social aspect going. Course some people don't feel the need to partake (I sometimes am too busy) so it's quite different from call to call.
etripe 6y ago
I agree things are presented in emotive ways, but I find most business decisions are made the same way. I believe remote work is a temporary phase, with businesses going back to the "old normal" as soon as COVID no longer presents much of a threat. My first reason for thinking this is I've found inertia is the most powerful force in the office environment. When given the option to adopt a different way of working, the aggregate whole will resist the attempt unless there is no alternative. This conservative nature is the reason why Agile fails to take hold, why compliance rituals will remain long after they're relevant and so on. The second is extravert culture dominates the office. Most people are extraverted (about 60% IIRC), with even higher concentrations in general and C-level management. This can be observed in the performative nature of the hiring process, the belief in open plan offices, in companies thinking of meetings as productive rather than waste to be minimised and believing in things like brainstorming sessions leading to better results despite research indicating the opposite. An extraverted manager needs to interact with someone on a personal level because they need the stimulation and social contact, and because it's more efficient for them. An introvert has no such leanings. Third, I believe we're in a leadership crisis, where companies believe "command and control" is more important than improving employee efficiency. In order to control, you need pants in seats. When adopting that stance, you're less likely to want to delegate in the true sense: offer employees autonomy over their tasks, trusting they'll get the job done. Working from home is counter to the control scheme. As I see it, the voices arguing for a return to the office are the representatives of the conservative, extraverted, control-oriented voices in the business community.

iancmceachern 6y ago

And further complicated by the fact the the same person may want different things at different stages in their life. Ive evolved, like many in my workplace, to be on site in the office as needed, occasionally (we work in hardware). We've learned to do most everything from home, with a few on site activities as needed.

InertBrake 6y ago
Many of the comments on discussions such as these give me the impression that people are not considering this when they write, or at the very least omitting it. I'm a college student graduating next year, and I just finished my first substantial internship ever in a remote arrangement. The past twelve weeks were my first real experience in my professional environment of interest, but I'm not even sure if I can call it that. I did the best I could and completed three of four of my projects, one of which was a competition where my team placed. But this was despite reassignment from my preferred original projects (in a physical lab), productivity, and general morale suffering immensely from pretty much every restriction COVID and the California wildfires have wrought on us. I'm a young guy in the process of building myself in nearly every way. I have more "potential" than I do domain knowledge and wisdom. I'm less disciplined. I feel a huge need to get out into the world and see people in places to develop my career and every type of relationship. These have all been harder to work on in the current climate. So when I see people extolling anecdotal virtues of no commute or not having to bother with seeing their coworker's faces in response to comments explaining why people may like the office, I get annoyed. I've literally never seen a single colleague of mine in real life or had a chance to get bored of my commute, and it was not a choice for me. Yes, adapting as things come is important. That doesn't change the assertion my demographic will have likely been more impacted by this when the smoke clears. I haven't had nearly as much opportunity as these people may have taken for granted in situating themselves so they can presently bank on their know-how and established relationships until we are out of this crisis. I hope my experiences in this regard will not be as bad as I go for full-time after I finish school in June.
- andrejserafim 6y ago
  InertBrake - well done on your internship :) As someone who's been through internships and many years of in office work this is worrying me too. Our junior colleagues coming in without the little things they would get from sitting in a room with everyone else. Without team lunches and social events. Because it's not direct impact this is hard to reason about and create artificially. I chose to work remotely full time 4 years ago and I have to rely on my past years of experience quite a lot. What I do see is that excellent mentors and senior colleagues still find a way to mentor less experienced colleagues. It just takes conscious effort from both sides and we need to support both sides more in this. I'm very keen to study this in my teams and use the learnt experience to raise the base level.
- kelnos 6y ago
  I feel absolutely terrible for all of our interns and new-grad hires this year, as they -- like you -- are getting a bizarre experience that we're not at all prepared to do properly, as we've just never done it this way before. As someone who's later in his career, I'm totally fine and happy working from home (and was doing that most of the time pre-pandemic anyway), but if I look back to my early-/mid-20s and think about all the in-person mentorship I'd gotten, and how much I learned just by physically being in the presence of other people with more experience than I... I'm really worried about how we're going to effectively mentor a new generation of colleagues if we have to keep up this reduced amount of interaction. Now, we do need to be careful to not equate the current situation with what "minimum office" might look like outside a pandemic situation. If we were all working from home but didn't have to isolate and socially distance ourselves, we'd still greet our interns and new employees with lunches and other outings, and we'd have plenty of random get-togethers in parks and bars. And I'd expect we'd come up with ways to get more-senior folks in the same room with the newcomers on a regular basis during the work day, whether in a co-working space or just a sparsely-populated office. So really, it just sucks right now, but won't always. I know that's little consolation for you and those like you, who are entering into this mess before we've figured out how to do it right. I do expect things to be a bit better next summer after you graduate, but I'm sure there will be plenty of rough edges.
  - 6y ago

syshum 6y ago

While everything you listed is a factor, My experience it normally comes down to if you have a actual home office or not. People that have the luxury of a dedicated office at home, an actual room that is just used as an office, not a corner of the kitchen or living room that has the "family desk" that everyone shares, is more apt for WFH I know many people that do not have this space, and do not have the ability to create this space in their home. For them WFH is a challenge. On the other hand, people like myself that do have a dedicated office space that is in many ways better than the office space at the commercial office find WFH to be great and prefer it, even when factoring in your list. In my office I would say it was about 60-70% of people that preferred working in the office and did not want to work from home primarily because they did not have a dedicated working space nor could easily create one.

formercoder 6y ago
That’s not the only factor. I have a home office and can’t wait to get back. I work in an industry that’s all about relationships and those are hard to build remotely. I just started a new role and there’s no way I could ever progress upward in this state.
- syshum 6y ago
  I am definitely not the person to address building relationships, I suck at it, that is why I work with computers not people... that said I think you can build in remotely, even the people I am in the same office with 70-80% of our communications is over Chat, Phone, or Email anyway. Why walk 10 feet to the persons office when I can just message them on slack or teams?
  - frutiger 6y ago
    Because hearing you laugh when I make a joke makes me far happier than seeing you react with :joy:.
    - EForEndeavour 6y ago

sriku 6y ago

Most of these are what one might call "first order effects" - i.e. factors immediately associatable with work location. For prolonged situation, higher order effects are going to become more important. Here are some candidates - 1. Improvement in city air quality due to reduced commute - road and flight. 2. Erosion of "social credits" over time due to lower bandwidth interactions when remote. 3. Cumulative impact of serendipitous but significant learning arising from in-person interactions. 4. Impact on the body - prolonged unmoderated sitting in bad postures, eye strain due to constant staring into the screen, bad eating habits, etc. 5. Reduction in sense of belonging / identity / cohesiveness as the "molecules" that make up a cell can move more freely through the "cell boundary". 6. Impact on cognitive development during early childhood - due to school-from-home and lack of social interactions. Joint family homes are great to counter this! 7. Eroding knowledge and awareness of local geography due to reduced travel. Reduced attachment here can lead to apathy when local environs get trashed.

ink_13 6y ago
> Impact on the body - prolonged unmoderated sitting in bad postures Hey, this is me! I developed tendonitis in the shoulders from sitting in a lounge chair all day, and now I work with a physiotherapist who gave me funny looking exercises I do twice a day to retrain my body to get my hands behind my back (and other forms of shoulder mobility). Ergo is not a joke, friends.
- Izikiel43 6y ago
  Can confirm, after 9 months in my job I switched from regular keyboard and mouse to ergo versions as my right hand was killing me. Now I’m getting an ergo trackball too.
- cik 6y ago
  For years, everyone I know has made fun of me for the extreme ergo choices I've made in my workspaces, based on my needs. I've had a standing desk for over a decade, and I never sit down - purely because that works for me. I know someone else with the same setup, because at 4'11, she finally gets a desk she can lower to the proper height. I've been using the right keyboard/pointer combination for me since 2000, and I'll always continue to do so. Much like offices, there's no one size fits all - we really need to drop this idea.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

some bosses have an instinctive feeling that people working in the office are more productive some bosses themselves work best in the office with people around.

pjc50 6y ago

There's lots of reasons why individuals themselves might want or not want to go back in the office. What is more complicated is why they want to take everyone else with them. My own employer is letting some people come back in the office but not insisting on it. And all of this in the context of the trilemma: try for zero virus, accept total spread with associated medical costs, time off, deaths, and potential long term complications, or delay until the vaccines are ready and being deployed.

ghaff 6y ago
>What is more complicated is why they want to take everyone else with them. Probably because what other people do affects them. If everyone else on their team comes back to the office and they choose not to, that's probably not an ideal situation. Conversely, if they come back to the office and most of the people they work with don't, they're now effectively in a co-working situation where the office is just a physical space and they'll still be on video meetings all the time.

Philip-J-Fry 6y ago

One of the things I would struggle with is progression. In my current job I'm progressing quickly and have built good relationships with my colleagues. We can take a break and just turn around and chat for 10 minutes about random stuff. When everyone is working from home it's not like I could just call someone and chat to them because I don't know if they're busy or not. I can't build the same sort of relationships as I can in person. I'm quite introverted in a way that I find it hard to go out of my way and make friends. But the longer I spend with people in person, the easier it is and I find that I'm able to get along with almost everyone I meet. And as with most things, it's not really what you know, it's who you know. And knowing someone IRL is much better than knowing someone remote.

fyfy18 6y ago
> When everyone is working from home it's not like I could just call someone and chat to them because I don't know if they're busy or not I don't really see what the issue is. In my company if we want to chat we simply ask on Slack "can we have a call?", and the other person either says 'ok' or 'call me later'. Most conversations happen over async chat, which is great if you are waiting for something to compile (Scala...). How do you do it in an office setting? Would you go over to a person wearing headphones and starting telling them about your weekend?

m-p-3 6y ago

> Some people have long commutes and wfh is great This is exactly my situation, it takes me two hours of commute per day to get in the office, and the housing is prohibitively expensive the closer you get to it. My quality of life is significantly improved by WFH, which leaves me with more quality time with my kids and to cook.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
The office model is based on the factory model, which was constrained by the need to have people, machinery, and raw materials in the same location. Offices don't require that. All the soft benefits - water cooler chats, and so on - are balanced by disbenefits of expensive commutes and even more expensive real estate. So the experience becomes a lot more individual. Some people are happy, others aren't. Since most corps care more about productivity and costs than happiness, the final decision will be made by the cost savings. If productivity drops by (maybe) 20% while costs drop by (maybe) 50%, it's likely wfh will become much more of a thing. Some corps are already giving up on centralised office space - either permanently, or in the hope they can run remote for a year or two and renegotiate much lower rents and/or ownerships costs then. Of course this assumes the (maybe) 20% productivity costs won't be cumulative. But given the insane costs of office space, I suspect we'll see a lot of corps trying the experiment and attempting to make the best of it. So IMO anyone who is expecting things to go back to "normal" soon is going to be waiting at least a couple of years, and possibly forever - and should make plans accordingly. This applies equally to everyone, from CEOs to interns to freelancers.

nswest23 6y ago

sorry nuance like this doesn't fit in a headline this just won't work /s

rocketpastsix 6y ago

>Cities are nervous that business districts are devastated since no one buys coffee, lunches or walks home and steps into a shoe store or tailor, or to a bar for drinks with colleagues. I think this is more true than a lot of people think/or care to make known. I know the business district in my city, Nashville, is hurting right now.

Terretta 6y ago
> business district There’s the problem. Turns out, when city is of a type of mixed use and walkability such that you live above (or a trolly ride away from) where you work, working at work or working at home don’t meaningfully change city viability.

dominotw 6y ago

I just want to take a nap in the afternoon.

soc14lism00 6y ago

Why not present them in black and white ways? Greyness comes with crafting a collage of black and white? Why must my personal position take into account a composite greyness if it means being put into an office setting I am not productive in? Why bend myself to an arbitrary greyness? Our social laws should acknowledge the greyness and avoid empowering a uni-culture that leans towards one choice? Efficiency != resiliency. Rather than commit to the one size fits all dragged in the direction of currency holders. Complete lack of acceptance a nations currency is propped up by the greyness in opinions I don’t care who has memorized what facts. The fact remains they’re not a god

giancarlostoro 6y ago

> Some people are dissatisfied with the online interactions and prefer to talk to humans and not text strings from humans they can't see or hear I think this is easily resolved by audio / video calls. All of my coworkers are significantly older than me and have no issue communicating this way. I dont mind commuting but I dont want to commute as often. I think my sweet spot would be to commute around noon once traffics no longer crazy and go back home after traffic dies down but the more I think about that the more I feel like driving altogether is a waste. I prefer to only commute when we all decide to be onsite to discuss something and work through it.

naavis 6y ago
Video calls are not remotely (no pun intended) the same as meeting face to face. In the office I can casually joke with the person sitting next to me, and it is usually visually evident when they are busy and I shouldn't bother them. If we both need a break, we can take a short walk, go for a lunch together or something. Video calls are limited, akward and uncomfortable compared to that. Video calls have their place but they are not the same thing.
- LdSGSgvupDV 6y ago
  Try VR. It would be super cool to have a VR Chat version of slack/discord for working.
- giancarlostoro 6y ago
  We mostly do audio calls and get to the meat of what we need, sometimes I get informal and nothing is wrong with that, you can still gauge if someone is busy by how they respond or if they seem distracted. Every office is differently but we've always had two or three people working remotely so the transition is nothing special for most of us. On another note we've had lunch calls on Wednesdays as a more informal setting so everyone can talk about general things and keep the social aspect going. Course some people don't feel the need to partake (I sometimes am too busy) so it's quite different from call to call.

etripe 6y ago

I agree things are presented in emotive ways, but I find most business decisions are made the same way. I believe remote work is a temporary phase, with businesses going back to the "old normal" as soon as COVID no longer presents much of a threat. My first reason for thinking this is I've found inertia is the most powerful force in the office environment. When given the option to adopt a different way of working, the aggregate whole will resist the attempt unless there is no alternative. This conservative nature is the reason why Agile fails to take hold, why compliance rituals will remain long after they're relevant and so on. The second is extravert culture dominates the office. Most people are extraverted (about 60% IIRC), with even higher concentrations in general and C-level management. This can be observed in the performative nature of the hiring process, the belief in open plan offices, in companies thinking of meetings as productive rather than waste to be minimised and believing in things like brainstorming sessions leading to better results despite research indicating the opposite. An extraverted manager needs to interact with someone on a personal level because they need the stimulation and social contact, and because it's more efficient for them. An introvert has no such leanings. Third, I believe we're in a leadership crisis, where companies believe "command and control" is more important than improving employee efficiency. In order to control, you need pants in seats. When adopting that stance, you're less likely to want to delegate in the true sense: offer employees autonomy over their tasks, trusting they'll get the job done. Working from home is counter to the control scheme. As I see it, the voices arguing for a return to the office are the representatives of the conservative, extraverted, control-oriented voices in the business community.