6 ms·

I get that some people just _need_ direct human interaction, and they can tolerate some amount of isolation. But there are also those of us with exactly the op

by blunte 6y ago

I get that some people just _need_ direct human interaction, and they can tolerate some amount of isolation. But there are also those of us with exactly the opposite needs. Until this current health crisis forced remote work on a large scale, those of us who thrive in solitude were forced to work harder to do our jobs well despite the extra social demands. Now many of us can breathe and are more productive, more balanced, and happier. Let the extroverts have smaller offices, and let us introverts work remotely. I can be quite social, I can perform music on stage, and I can genuinely interact with other humans face to face and leave everyone feeling enriched. But after all those things, I'm exhausted and need low stimulus recovery. I may be in the minority, but I believe it is a larger minority than people might expect. Frankly, I'm tired of hearing one-sided stories of how "everyone wants to come back to work!" No, we do not all want to come back to the office. In fact, I will going forward only accept remote positions. There will thankfully be more of them as companies are recognizing that remote can work and that reduced office costs are good for the bottom line.

cstross 6y ago
It's the introvert/extrovert split. Introverts find face-to-face social interactions draining; extroverts find them energizing: and work-from-home chops that element out of the workday.
- jessaustin 6y ago
  This evokes a divide between vampires and other, non-vampire people. "Ve have to go back to ze office! Vhere else can ve suck ze blood?" b^)
- avalys 6y ago
  I’m an introvert, and I find social interaction draining. I am only truly happy and relaxed when I’m alone. But I also recognize that social interaction is necessary to get work done, and I don’t expect to be truly happy and relaxed at work in the first place. I can’t wait to get back to the office.
- xur17 6y ago
  As an introvert, I've found it to be more complicated than that. There's a minimum level of interaction I need in my life (covid has challenged this at times), and interacting within small groups, especially with people I know well is a lot less draining. I started working remotely a few years ago, and actually started seeking out social activities, something I rarely did when I worked in the office. In normal times, working from home allows you to choose where to spend your "social" energy rather than burning it all on work.
pavel_lishin 6y ago
I'm in the same boat, but there's a spectrum here as there is in all things. I don't want full remote - I'd like to come into the office one day a week to build a better rapport with my coworkers. But yes, going forward, I'll be expecting a much more liberal work from home policy from my current and any future employers. In fact, we should all push for this, for all employees whose jobs can be done remotely - most people on this board can walk and get a better paying job fairly easily, but that's not the case for every job in an organization, and we should support our coworkers who don't have our privileges.
drstewart 6y ago
>Frankly, I'm tired of hearing one-sided stories of how "everyone wants to come back to work!" Which articles are those?
- brmgb 6y ago
  It's funny because as someone who is extremely extroverted I have the exact opposite sensation. I have the impression that every article I have been reading for the past six months was explaining how insanely awesome working from home was supposed to be and how the office was supposedly dead while I find the situation nothing short of hellish.
  - blunte 6y ago
    There probably have been many introvert-leaning articles on WFH lately because many people have discovered how much they love it (having never had the option, in some cases). But there are still articles and essays that pop up lately, generalizing that "most people" or "everyone" wants to get back to the office. Perhaps the desire here is that we recognize the differences in people and try to make some compromises to accommodate an even greater percentage of workers. You can't make everyone happy, but certainly the pre-covid environment favored the office lovers far more than the home-workers.
MarcScott 6y ago
I agree with you 100%. I never want to give up remote work. It suits my personality perfectly. Remote meetings are great. They tend to be shorter, get to the point, and if they begin to ramble and I don't need to engage, I can open up another tab and browse HN. However, I do appreciate how lucky I am. My entire family are out of the house during my working hours. I have the luxury of a dedicated study in which I can work. I have multiple laptops and screens. I have a good webcam, microphone and speakers. I have an enormous desk for it all to sit on, and probably most importantly a fast and reliable broadband connection. I also have a dog to keep my company. If working from home meant balancing a laptop on my knees while I sat on the edge of my bed, and tethered through my phone, I doubt I'd find it so pleasurable.
- random42_ 6y ago
  > Remote meetings are great. They tend to be shorter, get to the point My team loves meetings. Every question asked was an excuse to gather a bunch of people around a desk and talk for almost an hour. Precious hours wasted in useless meetings. The best thing that happened with remote work was that my team realized that a single message or email was more than enough 99% of the time and now we don’t waste so many hours in those useless meetings anymore.
- blunte 6y ago
  Yes, working remotely does require proper space separation from other family members. I could not have done it 15 years ago with small children. For those in dense cities with small living spaces and multiple flatmates or family, I can understand the need to go back to the office as a better alternative. But if we were able to setup a proper home working environment (as offices tend to make reasonable effort to be proper work environments), then I bet a lot of people would choose remote first.
racl101 6y ago
It's almost as if ... extremes, of any kind, are bad.
- jmcqk6 6y ago
  More like, it's almost as if expecting humans to be uniform is a really bad expectation.
lexapro 6y ago
I'm an introvert and miss face to face interactions with my (small) team precisely because of that. I liked having meetings in person, eating lunch together and the occasional chats. All of that is now gone. Sitting by myself all day at home is soul-crushing. But maybe it's because I like the people in my team and have known them for a long time. What I don't miss is the company events or meeting random people on the hallway...
- drivingmenuts 6y ago
  I’m also an introvert, but I don’t miss any of that, at all. I do miss seeing my friends outside of work, but I don’t have work friends, rather than associates.
jcadam 6y ago
Yes. After years of dreaming about it, I finally have a remote job and it was everything I hoped it could be. I have a den set up as an office with a standing desk, white board, and a DOOR THAT SHUTS. I love it. My employer keeps throwing out tentative dates for "return to work." There are going to be a lot of unhappy people when we're forced back into our open office environment.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  DOOR THAT SHUTS. That door used to be the default. As a student working a summer job I had a door.
libraryatnight 6y ago
A few years ago when I was going through a bout of bad depression the therapist I was talking to responded, after I told her about how social gatherings for me are exhausting (sometimes they're nice, but they're always exhausting), that her extrovert patients describe the same feeling but when they feel isolated too long. So I agree with you, we all have different needs and thresholds. Pre-covid I'd found a nice balance going in just once or twice a week when it made sense to do so. I do need some socialization, but I won't seek it out usually, so work is a great way to remember that I do need people in small doses and force myself to get those small doses.
schrute 6y ago
Very succinct. I agree 100% and wish more people had this line of thought.
Barrin92 6y ago
>Frankly, I'm tired of hearing one-sided stories of how "everyone wants to come back to work!" No, we do not all want to come back to the office. I'm all for accommodating people who prefer remote work as long as they do good work, but honestly the kind of people who aren't tired of sitting in their homes is not exactly zero but it's very small. An overwhelming amount of people doesn't just want to go work, but accepts extreme risks to even get out during the pandemic. Stats on depression and so on are through the roof. For virtually everyone, including me personally, this is pure torture.
- fyfy18 6y ago
  How would things be if you had a home more suitable for working at home? I currently live in a 1br apartment, with a 15 month old and my wife, and yes it is hard when I work from home. Fortunately in my country the pandemic has been handled well, and I am still able to go to my office (25 desks, usually no more than 5 are occupied now). I imagine if we lived in a house, with a garden, enough bedrooms that my work desk isn't 2m from my bed, it would be a completely different story. If you don't need to go to the office very often then living further out the city would not be that big a deal. In my area a 3br home with a garden is around the same price as a 1br apartment in the city.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    To be honest I actually have a pretty good environment at home. Relatively spacious apartment and single, but it's not helping much. When I work from home I don't even feel like it makes a difference if I shower or not and put pants on, kind of depressing in itself after a while. I guess I'm also at the other end of the spectrum though. I generally enjoy open plan offices, just sitting down having lunch with folks at work, going for drinks afterwards. Being holed up at home or stuck with family over long periods of time I always feel like I'm going to turn into Jack Nicholson in the Shining or something
52-6F-62 6y ago
I’m much the same as you. I’ve already spoken with my employer about staying remote and even moving a little further away to save on rent going forward.
tracker1 6y ago
For me, it's been a bit odd... in the past when I've worked from home, I haven't really gotten much done. These past few months, I've been really active, getting a lot done, but burning out, because I'm less time distracted and don't snap out of work mode. Later in the afternoon, I'll hit a flow and don't really break out of it until my fiance is yelling at me because it's 9pm and I'm still at my desk. I've hit a few points where I'm completely unable to focus, and last month did about 4 weeks in a row where I put in over 70 hours. I need some level of interaction, or I just never break out of work mode. And I don't have all the distractions at home I once would have.
- blunte 6y ago
  I've had discussions about productivity off and on with other developers and managers for my entire career, and it seems that most of us have cycles of productivity. It will depend somewhat on what type of work you do, but it can be quite reasonable to have periods of significant creativity and productivity, and then periods of cooling where not much gets done (but perhaps the brain is busy sorting and clearing connections, leading to the next breakthrough and productive phase). Perhaps at a big company with a long lived product where you're just doing enhancement and maintenance (especially where tasks are doled out in tickets), it could be possible to be "productive" most of the time. But that's hopefully not a scenario most people find themselves in unless they only write software for money and otherwise have no interest.
shard 6y ago
I agree with you and feel WFH is very liberating mentally. My biggest concern is career progression. In the office, it's easy to jump into conversations where you form connections with your coworkers, and find out who are the decision makers, gurus, and informal sources of information. I joined my company after the lockdown started, so have not met any of my coworkers face-to-face, and I feel that not being able to tap into those threads of information is going to leave me out of the loop.
- blunte 6y ago
  Career progression process depends a lot on the type of company you're in. If it's a company that goes to the trouble to define career progression paths and have managers periodically discuss them with subordinates, then you should have a roadmap already. I haven't encountered these places much in my career, however. If your department uses some team chat system, check to see what channels are available. There might be channels for topics of interest to you where you could join and gradually become interactive, thereby making yourself known. This can be especially valuable if you start writing a tech blog or occasionally making some tech demo projects on github - you can share those with your department (perhaps in the guise of requesting feedback), and it will help raise your visibility.
m463 6y ago
I agree. I think that introverts sort of self-select out of management and decision-making roles - in person. This is probably why open-seating decisions come about, which is hell on an introvert. Maybe with remote work introverts will have a better chance to take on roles for these kinds of things or at least construct a better environment for themselves. By the way, I read somewhere that like 85% of top athletes are introverts.

by blunte 6y ago

cstross 6y ago

It's the introvert/extrovert split. Introverts find face-to-face social interactions draining; extroverts find them energizing: and work-from-home chops that element out of the workday.

jessaustin 6y ago
This evokes a divide between vampires and other, non-vampire people. "Ve have to go back to ze office! Vhere else can ve suck ze blood?" b^)
avalys 6y ago
I’m an introvert, and I find social interaction draining. I am only truly happy and relaxed when I’m alone. But I also recognize that social interaction is necessary to get work done, and I don’t expect to be truly happy and relaxed at work in the first place. I can’t wait to get back to the office.
xur17 6y ago
As an introvert, I've found it to be more complicated than that. There's a minimum level of interaction I need in my life (covid has challenged this at times), and interacting within small groups, especially with people I know well is a lot less draining. I started working remotely a few years ago, and actually started seeking out social activities, something I rarely did when I worked in the office. In normal times, working from home allows you to choose where to spend your "social" energy rather than burning it all on work.

pavel_lishin 6y ago

I'm in the same boat, but there's a spectrum here as there is in all things. I don't want full remote - I'd like to come into the office one day a week to build a better rapport with my coworkers. But yes, going forward, I'll be expecting a much more liberal work from home policy from my current and any future employers. In fact, we should all push for this, for all employees whose jobs can be done remotely - most people on this board can walk and get a better paying job fairly easily, but that's not the case for every job in an organization, and we should support our coworkers who don't have our privileges.

drstewart 6y ago

>Frankly, I'm tired of hearing one-sided stories of how "everyone wants to come back to work!" Which articles are those?

brmgb 6y ago
It's funny because as someone who is extremely extroverted I have the exact opposite sensation. I have the impression that every article I have been reading for the past six months was explaining how insanely awesome working from home was supposed to be and how the office was supposedly dead while I find the situation nothing short of hellish.
- blunte 6y ago
  There probably have been many introvert-leaning articles on WFH lately because many people have discovered how much they love it (having never had the option, in some cases). But there are still articles and essays that pop up lately, generalizing that "most people" or "everyone" wants to get back to the office. Perhaps the desire here is that we recognize the differences in people and try to make some compromises to accommodate an even greater percentage of workers. You can't make everyone happy, but certainly the pre-covid environment favored the office lovers far more than the home-workers.

MarcScott 6y ago

I agree with you 100%. I never want to give up remote work. It suits my personality perfectly. Remote meetings are great. They tend to be shorter, get to the point, and if they begin to ramble and I don't need to engage, I can open up another tab and browse HN. However, I do appreciate how lucky I am. My entire family are out of the house during my working hours. I have the luxury of a dedicated study in which I can work. I have multiple laptops and screens. I have a good webcam, microphone and speakers. I have an enormous desk for it all to sit on, and probably most importantly a fast and reliable broadband connection. I also have a dog to keep my company. If working from home meant balancing a laptop on my knees while I sat on the edge of my bed, and tethered through my phone, I doubt I'd find it so pleasurable.

random42_ 6y ago
> Remote meetings are great. They tend to be shorter, get to the point My team loves meetings. Every question asked was an excuse to gather a bunch of people around a desk and talk for almost an hour. Precious hours wasted in useless meetings. The best thing that happened with remote work was that my team realized that a single message or email was more than enough 99% of the time and now we don’t waste so many hours in those useless meetings anymore.
blunte 6y ago
Yes, working remotely does require proper space separation from other family members. I could not have done it 15 years ago with small children. For those in dense cities with small living spaces and multiple flatmates or family, I can understand the need to go back to the office as a better alternative. But if we were able to setup a proper home working environment (as offices tend to make reasonable effort to be proper work environments), then I bet a lot of people would choose remote first.

racl101 6y ago

It's almost as if ... extremes, of any kind, are bad.

jmcqk6 6y ago
More like, it's almost as if expecting humans to be uniform is a really bad expectation.

lexapro 6y ago

I'm an introvert and miss face to face interactions with my (small) team precisely because of that. I liked having meetings in person, eating lunch together and the occasional chats. All of that is now gone. Sitting by myself all day at home is soul-crushing. But maybe it's because I like the people in my team and have known them for a long time. What I don't miss is the company events or meeting random people on the hallway...

drivingmenuts 6y ago
I’m also an introvert, but I don’t miss any of that, at all. I do miss seeing my friends outside of work, but I don’t have work friends, rather than associates.

jcadam 6y ago

Yes. After years of dreaming about it, I finally have a remote job and it was everything I hoped it could be. I have a den set up as an office with a standing desk, white board, and a DOOR THAT SHUTS. I love it. My employer keeps throwing out tentative dates for "return to work." There are going to be a lot of unhappy people when we're forced back into our open office environment.

082349872349872 6y ago
DOOR THAT SHUTS. That door used to be the default. As a student working a summer job I had a door.

libraryatnight 6y ago

A few years ago when I was going through a bout of bad depression the therapist I was talking to responded, after I told her about how social gatherings for me are exhausting (sometimes they're nice, but they're always exhausting), that her extrovert patients describe the same feeling but when they feel isolated too long. So I agree with you, we all have different needs and thresholds. Pre-covid I'd found a nice balance going in just once or twice a week when it made sense to do so. I do need some socialization, but I won't seek it out usually, so work is a great way to remember that I do need people in small doses and force myself to get those small doses.

schrute 6y ago

Very succinct. I agree 100% and wish more people had this line of thought.

Barrin92 6y ago

>Frankly, I'm tired of hearing one-sided stories of how "everyone wants to come back to work!" No, we do not all want to come back to the office. I'm all for accommodating people who prefer remote work as long as they do good work, but honestly the kind of people who aren't tired of sitting in their homes is not exactly zero but it's very small. An overwhelming amount of people doesn't just want to go work, but accepts extreme risks to even get out during the pandemic. Stats on depression and so on are through the roof. For virtually everyone, including me personally, this is pure torture.

fyfy18 6y ago
How would things be if you had a home more suitable for working at home? I currently live in a 1br apartment, with a 15 month old and my wife, and yes it is hard when I work from home. Fortunately in my country the pandemic has been handled well, and I am still able to go to my office (25 desks, usually no more than 5 are occupied now). I imagine if we lived in a house, with a garden, enough bedrooms that my work desk isn't 2m from my bed, it would be a completely different story. If you don't need to go to the office very often then living further out the city would not be that big a deal. In my area a 3br home with a garden is around the same price as a 1br apartment in the city.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  To be honest I actually have a pretty good environment at home. Relatively spacious apartment and single, but it's not helping much. When I work from home I don't even feel like it makes a difference if I shower or not and put pants on, kind of depressing in itself after a while. I guess I'm also at the other end of the spectrum though. I generally enjoy open plan offices, just sitting down having lunch with folks at work, going for drinks afterwards. Being holed up at home or stuck with family over long periods of time I always feel like I'm going to turn into Jack Nicholson in the Shining or something

52-6F-62 6y ago

I’m much the same as you. I’ve already spoken with my employer about staying remote and even moving a little further away to save on rent going forward.

tracker1 6y ago

For me, it's been a bit odd... in the past when I've worked from home, I haven't really gotten much done. These past few months, I've been really active, getting a lot done, but burning out, because I'm less time distracted and don't snap out of work mode. Later in the afternoon, I'll hit a flow and don't really break out of it until my fiance is yelling at me because it's 9pm and I'm still at my desk. I've hit a few points where I'm completely unable to focus, and last month did about 4 weeks in a row where I put in over 70 hours. I need some level of interaction, or I just never break out of work mode. And I don't have all the distractions at home I once would have.

blunte 6y ago
I've had discussions about productivity off and on with other developers and managers for my entire career, and it seems that most of us have cycles of productivity. It will depend somewhat on what type of work you do, but it can be quite reasonable to have periods of significant creativity and productivity, and then periods of cooling where not much gets done (but perhaps the brain is busy sorting and clearing connections, leading to the next breakthrough and productive phase). Perhaps at a big company with a long lived product where you're just doing enhancement and maintenance (especially where tasks are doled out in tickets), it could be possible to be "productive" most of the time. But that's hopefully not a scenario most people find themselves in unless they only write software for money and otherwise have no interest.

shard 6y ago

I agree with you and feel WFH is very liberating mentally. My biggest concern is career progression. In the office, it's easy to jump into conversations where you form connections with your coworkers, and find out who are the decision makers, gurus, and informal sources of information. I joined my company after the lockdown started, so have not met any of my coworkers face-to-face, and I feel that not being able to tap into those threads of information is going to leave me out of the loop.

blunte 6y ago
Career progression process depends a lot on the type of company you're in. If it's a company that goes to the trouble to define career progression paths and have managers periodically discuss them with subordinates, then you should have a roadmap already. I haven't encountered these places much in my career, however. If your department uses some team chat system, check to see what channels are available. There might be channels for topics of interest to you where you could join and gradually become interactive, thereby making yourself known. This can be especially valuable if you start writing a tech blog or occasionally making some tech demo projects on github - you can share those with your department (perhaps in the guise of requesting feedback), and it will help raise your visibility.

m463 6y ago

I agree. I think that introverts sort of self-select out of management and decision-making roles - in person. This is probably why open-seating decisions come about, which is hell on an introvert. Maybe with remote work introverts will have a better chance to take on roles for these kinds of things or at least construct a better environment for themselves. By the way, I read somewhere that like 85% of top athletes are introverts.