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I'm the opposite. I used to think working from home would be great, and that the office was fairly irrelevant given all my work was on a computer anyway. Six m

• arkitaip 6y ago
  What made it miserable, if you don't mind me asking?
  • username90 6y ago
    Working at an office is free social interactions. If you live alone and can't muster the energy to organize meeting people at least you still get to meet your colleagues every day. If instead you work from home it is pretty easy to get into a downward spiral where you don't socialize, get even more miserable making it even harder to socialize until you get depressed.
    • slx26 6y ago
      Which should also put us on alert that we might be doing social spaces wrong.
      • mschuster91 6y ago
        The problem is corona - our social spaces are not "wrong" per se, they are rather unsafe to visit in times where about half the US population and a sizable chunk of every other country's population except Spain and Italy claim that mask mandates are restricting their freedom.
        • libraryatnight 6y ago
          We're inundated by corrupt men and their duped idiot hoards.
        • birdyrooster 6y ago
          These anti-maskers are ruining our livelihood. How many months or years until we take justice into our own hands? I don't want to live like this forever. I'm ready to get some spikey 6 foot poles to start poking people with.
        • scarface74 6y ago
          Exactly. I would feel much more comfortable going out, eating at restaurants outside, etc if people would be responsible.
        • srtjstjsj 6y ago
          Not really. Even without corona it's hard to socialize when WFH. Suburban sprawl causes this, but if you try to solve that by going urban, then you lose the home office.
    • johnghanks 6y ago
      I see "free social interactions" as neither a benefit nor something that can only be obtained on-site. These "free social interactions" are often just distractions - taking you out of your context, making it difficult for you to be productive. That's why I love remote + Slack. Slack is async. I can finish what I'm doing before addressing messages there. On-site, people rarely if ever warn of their intention to come talk to you - they just walk up and start talking.
      • username90 6y ago
        Lack of social interactions makes most people miserable, lack of productivity is irritating but you can live with it. And although you can fix social interactions without an office it demands effort, so isn't free unless you live with people like spouse or kids. At work they pay you to talk with people, so social interactions there are free since trading effort for money is the purpose of work and the social is just a side effect.
      • chrledntsurf 6y ago
        On Slack or Zoom you can't take a walk around the office to clear your head/take a brief breather and inadvertently bump into a person who asks a question about your t-shirt or new Apple watch, which then leads to a longer convo, which leads to grabbing coffee in the kitchen, which leads to you hanging out with that person and their group of friends over the a weekend.
        • wolco2 6y ago
          You could if you setup your remote office in second life.
    • playcache 6y ago
      I can understand this. For me its' very different as I have my family, so I really love WFH. I can get up early, go run, come back have breakfast with my kids, drop them off at school and sit down at my desk for 9am. Sometimes, I will take a few hours out of the day to my own thing (go trail running) and I just work a little later into the evening (which is no big deal as there is no commute). However it would be quite different if I was just on my own the whole time.
    • dougmwne 6y ago
      It is dangerous to rely on office relationships for your social needs. When you move on to your next role, those relationships go up in smoke. This should be a signal to cultivate stronger ties to friends and family.
      • rakejake 6y ago
        Office does not provide for social needs but provides a baseline level of social activity 5 days a week. I don't expect to make any friends in office but I am certain to talk to a few colleagues, have lunch in a group and make small talk every day of the week. There is not much friction in all this since you know you are going to leave this behind at the end of the day. My interactions with close friends, although longer and much more meaningful, are also very bursty. The "mid-range socializing" (regular and frequent but not very serious) that office provides, that WFH is mostly unable to replicate in my experience, is something I am missing and I think it makes all the difference.
      • scarface74 6y ago
        I have a few friends that I made at work that I still keep in touch with and we tried to schedule meetups every month or so - pre-Covid.
      • srtjstjsj 6y ago
        It's even more dangerous to have weak family/friend ties and not even have an office as a backstop.
      • ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
        Some of y’all need to stop extrapolating from your personal experiences. “I’m not good at making friends therefore no one is” Co-workers often make good friends since they have a lot in common. Some of them will be acquaintances, some will be good friends. It’s normal
        • bart_spoon 6y ago
          > “I’m not good at making friends therefore no one is” I think you have it backwards. People who are "good at making friends" can also make friends outside of work, and so aren't left without social ties when everyone is working from home. If the only people you are making friends with are people who you both are compelled/paid to be around each other for 8+ hours a day, you might not be that good at making friends.
    • scarface74 6y ago
      I’m trying to get out of my downward spiral. I’m married with one 18 year old son at home. I put 11 gallons of gas in my car early July and still had half a tank mid September. I realized that I only leave the house every two weeks to get a haircut. My older son who doesn’t live with us needed a car and I just gave it to him. I didn’t need it. I had former coworkers/friends who I would meet up for lunch. But none of them are comfortable even eating outside. The married friends that we had, we don’t get together with anymore. Working out? I had started going to spin class at the gym pre-Covid and was planning to maybe start back teaching fitness classes once or twice a week like a did almost a decade ago, but that’s cut. We have a gym at home that I use and my wife turned another room into a studio where she teaches online fitness classes. I’ve really become a hermit. We are going to venture outside to eat out for the first time since March next week. Of course we are going to eat outdoors. We use to have date night at least every other week - dinner, movies, live music, etc. We are still trying to figure out a nice, safe, drivable getaway.
      • bart_spoon 6y ago
        > But none of them are comfortable even eating outside They have good reason to be. A recent study from the CDC found that eating out, even if outdoors, was one of the largest risk factors for infection of the disease. They found that people with Covid were over twice as likely to have gone to a restaurant than the average for those without Covid.
  • podgib 6y ago
    For me it's mostly about ease of collaboration. I love hashing out math/design problems on a whiteboard. Even with good tools there's nothing that allows the same sort of natural, dynamic conversation. Meetings turn into a series of loosely connected speeches, especially when there's large numbers. I also find that simple conversations take way longer, especially when there's disagreement. Thirdly video calls are super draining. It's also really difficult to get separation between work and life. I find myself doing home chores doing the day intertwined with work. Unlike some commenter, the social aspect isn't that important to me, but there's definitely some camaraderie missing. In the office, I feel like part of a team that's working together to achieve something. At home I feel like one of a swarm of drones that occasionally communicate for information exchange. It's not very fulfilling.
    • randycupertino 6y ago
      > I find myself doing home chores doing the day intertwined with work. This has been a HUGE PLUS for me! Just the ability to run a load of laundry while on a 90 minute call or water the plants when I have a gap between meetings has been a major quality of life increase. Now I can manage the house during the week and weekends are true relaxing and enjoyable weekends, no longer chorefests.
• seanhandley 6y ago
  I'm noticing at our company those who are married and/or have kids seem to prefer remote working and those who miss the office tend to live alone. There are obviously many factors that can affect a person's happiness and it's always good to hear people's perspectives. Why do you find it miserable?
  • civilized 6y ago
    This 100%. If you're married with children, you most likely have less than zero need for an office-based social life.
    • seibelj 6y ago
      When I was younger I would have been less happy, but I was lucky enough to grow up near Boston, went to school in Boston, and have a software career in Boston, so all of my friends and family live around here and I never needed work to have a social life. TBQH I think a lot of young people no longer know how to make friends outside of the rigid structures of school and work. All of the old structures of church and community fell without something to take its place, and for whatever reason it's progressive to discount prioritizing traditional values like family over career. If I hadn't grown up in Boston I probably would have stuck around where ever my family was located. I think the pandemic is forcing people to analyze their own lives and many are discovering things they don't like about themselves and their choices. Hanging out on social media all day is unhealthy and is not a replacement for true friends and family.
      • klipt 6y ago
        > All of the old structures of church and community fell without something to take its place, and for whatever reason it's progressive to discount prioritizing traditional values like family over career. The economy grows faster when people sacrifice their personal lives for work. Not saying I like it, but it seems obvious why incentives are aligned that way.
        • 6y ago
• blocked_again 6y ago
  Remote job during pandemic and remote job are not the same things.
  • slx26 6y ago
    Yeah, we have to account for the transition being forced, which in most cases caught companies completely unprepared.
  • username90 6y ago
    To a lot of people it is the same thing. If you didn't have an active social life before then not much changed in your life except that you now work from home, and those are the ones the most hurt by being unable to go to an office.
    • wolco2 6y ago
      Those are the ones hurt the least. Didn't socially interact before and now everyone is forced to do it. Feels like they have been traininng their lives for this.
• devmunchies 6y ago
  same. I started a remote job in 2018 and was just looking to go back to onsite when covid hit. I'm a very enthusiastic engineer and love bouncing ideas off others, whether they are in sales, marketing, or other engineers. Remote has made "connecting" much less natural and makes it difficult to progress in my career. If you're the type of engineer who likes to be given requirements and sit in your home office and code all day in silence then power to you. Not for me.
  • randycupertino 6y ago
    > I'm a very enthusiastic engineer and love bouncing ideas off others, whether they are in sales, marketing, or other engineers. Remote has made "connecting" much less natural and makes it difficult to progress in my career. What's your strategy to counteract this if the people who you enjoy bouncing ideas off of prefer to and/or end up all staying remote?
• johnghanks 6y ago
  Why is it miserable?
• spacedcowboy 6y ago
  God I’m the opposite. I’m loving it.
• Consultant32452 6y ago
  It's worth noting that this is NOT what remote working is really like. During regular times you can more easily go work in your local cafe for a few hours, more easily hang out with your friends after work to get socialization. If you're a social person this is a double-whammy, you lost socializing at work and socializing with friends at the same time. I'm not suggesting you would ever like normal remote work, I have no idea. I just wanted to say this isn't what remote work is really like.
  • mastazi 6y ago
    Strange, I had the opposite experience - hated working remote in the past but been mostly OK with WFH during COVID - I think the main reason is that during COVID everyone else was also working from home, not just me. So the company had to come up with procedures that suit well remote workers, and I never felt "out of the loop" compared to others.
    • Consultant32452 6y ago
      I find being "out of the loop" to be one of the best parts of being remote. Whatever small amount of useful things I'm out of the loop on is dwarfed by the benefit of being out of the loop on all the political/personal drama. Of course this is a very individual experience so everyone's mileage will vary greatly.
      • mastazi 6y ago
        Yeah I think it depends on you personal disposition and on the environment aka company culture
  • sdoering 6y ago
    I have a mixed bag of feelings regarding WFH. I realize that the current situation at my employer is not comparable to a real remote (and asynchronously organized) setup. Way too many people try to emulate the office, while at home. I have meeting in meeting staring at a screen not getting any meaningful work done during the regular hours most people are active. To be able to deliver on deadlines I needed time in the very early mornings and late in the evenings. This led to massive overtime and also to the situation that my significant other and I weren't seeing each other nearly as much as before Corona while both working from home without a daily 1.5 - 2 hour commute. Some small project teams got it right and reduced meetings and replaced them with asynchronous communication. This was a great experience. But sadly I got pushed into projects were this just wasn't the case. So probably your experience is more of a Covid-19 experience than remote work.
• snarf21 6y ago
  I'm on your perspective but we are all too binary, black/white about this. It is a preference. Some people prefer home. Some people prefer in office around co-workers. Neither is wrong. Can we start discussing this as a preference instead of a fact?