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I think that what isn't discussed enough is the variance in quality of your office environment and of your home office and how that quality affects your prefere

• namelosw 6y ago
  I believe serious remote workers should optimize their home working environment. It is an investment. But the problem is most people was forced to working remotely without any preparation and motivation - people end up complaining remote working while working with laptop in the couch. I have a chair which is suits me perfectly, a big standing desk which is not wobbling at all, and 3 monitors with premium stands which are tuned just for me. It's much easier for a remote worker to setup everything that suits you, and it's much harder to adjust workplaces to make everybody happy.
• homodeus007 6y ago
  There is and always will be variance in the quality of your work space, whether that is at an office or within your own home. When people say "I enjoy working from home", most attribute to the being able to focus in your comfortable area, lack of noise, no need to commute during rush hour, and many other widely common cons that is associated with working at an office. The consensus of wfh vs office should take place with the following question: given ideal situation for both scenario which one would you choose? Because, having a loud roommate in your house does not represent the general public and is actually what I would consider an "outlier" in this particular consensus.
• michaelcampbell 6y ago
  > Your office can be place where you still have the option to work uninterrupted but also get the benefits of face-to-face interaction, casual exposure to work ideas, better meetings, having all the equipment you need, separating work and personal life. It /can/ be, if your company isn't in the "Because Google Did It", cost savings masquerading and spun as "collaborative" open office plan cult. I like being at an office for face to face things, but as a developer I need uninterrupted time and the "new fad" offices don't provide it. But your point is well taken; I'm fortunate enough that my job can afford me a house that's too big for me to live in, (mind, I have also decided to live not "in the city", where things are actually affordable) so I have a complete room as a home-office, with a restroom, and whatever supplies I need. But that's also by choice; I CHOSE to give up being near a lot of restaurants and offices and short commutes, so that I could have this.
• RegularHacker 6y ago
  One interesting point that stood out for me was that within an office, almost all workers have access to similar resources. In that the work place acts as a level-playing field regardless of if you're a fresh graduate or someone who has family and kids.
• satyrnein 6y ago
  Also, oftentimes your work-office experience and home-office experience are inversely correlated. Before the pandemic, the tradeoff was to live in the city in a cramped space to be close to the office (and other amenities), or to live further away with a lot more space, but have to deal with a commute. The people who chose proximity are still paying high rent, but have lost the benefits, and are now trying to make do with laptops on their couches. The people who chose space have big desks, two monitors, comfortable chairs, and now don't have a soul crushing commute anymore. The change in circumstances hits very differently based on what (perfectly valid) choices you made earlier.
• dandellion 6y ago
  That's a very good point, I'm really enjoying working from home and I attributed it mostly to not having to do the one hour commute each way, but there's so many more things that add up: - At home I have the most comfortable chair I could find on the market that fits me perfectly. At work there are very basic adjustable chairs and they use some slippery fabric. - At home I have an ergonomic mechanical keyboard vs. a cheap rubber dome keyboard that kept running out of batteries at work. - An ergonomic mouse, vs. a tiny mouse that doesn't even have a back button. - Two 27" 4k monitors, vs. a single 24" monitor. - Always a nice room temperature, vs. often being too hot or too cold. - Bathroom always available, vs. sometimes having to wait to use the bathroom. - No interruptions, vs. occasional interruptions. - Working in silence, vs. having to use noise cancelling headphone and listening to music when I don't want to. To me the only drawbacks are that Zoom meetings are worse than in-person and not being able to have hallway discussions, but the many gains in quality of life easily make up for that. But the situation could easily reverse for someone who only has a tiny laptop and no room for a home office.
  • michaelcampbell 6y ago
    I always bring in my own KB and mouse. Life's too short to be dicking with supplied sub-par operating equipment.
  • diarrhea 6y ago
    Your work just sounds very subpar. Crippling developers with that sort of equipment and environment is a poor move and also an awful trade-off, business-wise.
    • ensiferum 6y ago
      Common at businesses where devs work at a "cost center" and not everyone gets to work at a FAANG shop unfortunately.
      • throwaway99283 6y ago
        Even at FAANGs you get to work on cramped desks in a noisy environment, trust me.
• hemloc_io 6y ago
  I'd propose adding another axis which is the amount of experience you have in a company or in your industry in general. My+other new hires onboarding has been very difficult. Outside of scheduling specific times to do deep dives on certain pieces of the stack it's very difficult to pickup new things because everyone is relatively bubbled. (This is compounded by the fact that everything is a microservice lol) If you're a senior engineer and you already have a solid workstream I can definitely see the productivity increase from WFH, but for people just starting out it's a nightmare sometimes.
• DrBazza 6y ago
  That's a well reasoned comment. I'm 'of that age' where I have a large-ish house, and hence a large, well equipped study. I don't much like my work office. It's on the top end of 'good': spacious, well equipped, light, modern, free snacks, etc. But... and it's a big but, it's open plan. And noisy. With people eating at their desks, talking, interrupting you and so on. But I still miss it. The last nine months has taught me that whilst I work fine from home, I thought I'd be completely happy like that, but I'm not. And I'm surprised by that. I want to go back to the office, but not for 9-5, 5 days a week. Once a week will be fine.
  • sbuk 6y ago
    This comment really resonates with me. The difference for me is that we have an amazing office space, comfortable chairs, big desks and monitors and ample space. But, it's open plan and extremely noisy, with interruptions being frequent. It's not a space that allows deep work. I feel that 1 or 2 days in the office would make for a healthy harmony between work and life. We also really need to rethink working hours.
    • tartoran 6y ago
      I completely share the sentiment. But I don’t see a world where companies keep on paying for their office spaces only to have their employees go there once or twice a week.
      • plif 6y ago
        I do. I think something like this could become a competitive differentiator (smoother collaboration when you need it) and recruiting tool.
      • kuzimoto 6y ago
        I was thinking about this, and I could see it working if they downgrade to a smaller office without permanent seating. Try to figure out roughly what percent of total employees would come in on average.
• blablabla123 6y ago
  Sure, I was once working at a job and had the perfect office. Awesome setup, one room for me, fun colleagues, good eating options. Unfortunately in the middle of nowhere and career progression counted in decades not years. It's all about tradeoffs. The likelihood to get it all is quite low though, also considering real estate prices.
• polote 6y ago
  I think you have the wrong understanding. There are plenty of reasons one can prefer to work at the office instead of remotely. It is not because you like it, that anyone is liking it. We are all humans we are different. This article is an opinion piece, and judging by how many people are upvoting it, it seems like it resonate with a lot of people. The same way a remote post blog will also attract tons of upvote. There are no best setup for everyone, there is a different best setup for each one of us.
• wolco2 6y ago
  You can't have uninterrupted but also get the benefits of face-to-face interaction. Those face to face interactions or the hallway discussions are the thing that prevents the first.
• plif 6y ago
  I moved during the pandemic and went from an awful to pretty great home office setup. It's much better, don't get me wrong, but I'm surprised at how much I still miss the office. It's all about the people for me. I had no idea how much energy I got from the team and being together in the same space, even as a fairly introverted technologist. Remote communication technology is nowhere close to being able to replicate that. It's one of those things you don't realize is missing until it's gone. I'm hoping to be able to continue with some hybrid of WFH and in-office post pandemic. However, if I had to pick one, I'd choose in-office no doubt -- even with my fancy home office.
• dkdk8283 6y ago
  I built a proper home office with a built in desk and electric chroma key roller shade. My drive for socialization has been pushed to friends and family. No more work talk off the clock. To say my qualify of life has increased by a order of magnitude is an understatement Full disclosure: I have misophonia and also detest office smells.
• treespace89 6y ago
  I just wanted to add an another perspective. I had a great private office with a door that closed, and a quiet work environment. My home office is also a nice dedicated room and well equipped. Even in the quietest office noises would get to me. I would always have to fight to focus on work. At the end of the day I was spent. Working from home full time, even with my family here 24/7 has been incredibly relaxing. I really, really don't want to ever go back.
• pedrocr 6y ago
  Those dimensions are also far from fixed. We've optimised our lives with these tradeoffs in mind. If the office we work at is very good maybe we've selected a smaller appartment in a trendier area with more things to do at night. If there's now nothing to do at night because of lockdowns and the same appartment makes for a poor office during the day, misery ensues. As companies make remote work a bigger possibility we'll optimize differently and a lot of people will be better off after adjusting. This situation has also disproportionately benefited those that already leaned towards that way and left the others hanging. But that's a shorter term issue.
• Grimm1 6y ago
  I'm in a studio apartment with every distraction I could possibly imagine (most of my own design since before this I'd just come here just to rest and recharge) the first few months were rough and overall I really prefer the office. The only thing working from home has done for me in terms of work is give me some more flexibility and prepared me for how to block out the distractions for when I move on to my own thing full time next week but I can count on my hand the number of times I've been in flow since the pandemic and work from home started and that is significantly less frequent then in an environment where work is the primary objective. It's really very jarring and I've resulted to some newer/crazier things to get it back. For instance I work in VR often now and that blocking out the distractions/tricking my brain in to "being in" a work place is really great. I also have a different seat for when I'm working on the day job versus my startup vs relaxing. Finally I stopped listening to music recently as I've read it actually can hurt focus and that's been working too. The thing is at least with my current job the office space was really comfortable, I'd move around often between couches and private spaces as needed people wouldn't interrupt too often and I would go out for lunch to give myself a mental break. Still figuring out the mental break part again.
  • zmmmmm 6y ago
    Curious about your "work in VR" comment - what is your setup? I have been trying to do this with my Oculus Quest 1 but the resolution just seems to low / rendering quality too poor. I can see the potential for the future though and am very curious if a Quest 2 gets over a significant hump in terms of these problems.
    • Grimm1 6y ago
      I'm using the Quest2 with ImmersedVR -- I find that it's more than enough for me and I can work for a few hours before I feel like I need to take a VR break. The headset is light enough that I don't super notice the weight and I find the text quality is pretty good.
• Der_Einzige 6y ago
  For the two weeks before I had to WFH at my current job (I joined in February), I had my own office in an extremely beautiful tech HQ building. That office was hella nice, but I'm still far happier at home. I don't think my home office is all that nice, but I simply value the freedom given to me from WFH far more than the "benefits" of the office.
• ashtonkem 6y ago
  You’re absolutely right, and the interesting thing is going to be how many people recognize their own personal preferences past their current circumstances, and make changes to optimize that. In my case, I had a small apartment within walking distance of $WORK. The office at $WORK was ... ok. Not as bland as the finance office I used to work at in Chicago, but a bit cramped and poorly provisioned on things like coffee. On the immediate benefits front, working from the office would be an obvious choice for me, even if it’s not the best office I’ve ever worked from. But we decided that we loved WFH so much that we left the city and bought a good sized house in a less populated area. We each now have our own office that we can customize to our hearts desire. Oh, and our COL dropped, a lot. The other bit that you didn’t mention, and that is intimately connect to my story is the factor of cities. As of last year (who knows how this will change) most software jobs were in large cities. If you happen to enjoy living in cities, this is really good news for you, but for everyone else this creates a tough series of trade offs between preferred living arrangements and career needs. In retrospect it’s fairly clear that we lived in Cities purely for the career advancement reasons; we didn’t enjoy the noise nor did we take advantage of the culture opportunities (food, drink, etc.) that cities offered. All we got in exchange was higher wages, smaller and more expensive housing, and longer commutes to the activities we preferred to do. This new arrangement suits us much better in retrospect, even if we didn’t come to that conclusion in say 2019.
  • ghaff 6y ago
    >most software jobs were in large cities I'm not true that is necessarily true. Most software jobs were in large metros. But, in the Boston area for example, I suspect most software jobs are still outside the city. (They were essentially 100% outside the city 20 years ago.) The same is almost certainly true of the Bay Area; most of the software jobs are not in SF proper.
    • ashtonkem 6y ago
      That’s a fair point, although I’ll point out that the legal definition of a city and what is commonly considered the city tend to vary a lot. LA is legally much smaller than what most people would call LA. That being said, this doesn’t change my argument much for two reasons. First, “you have to live within commuting distance of downtown” isn’t that much different from “you have to live within commuting distance of this suburb”. The nearby suburbs of some of these metro areas are still pretty darned expensive and congested compared to the rest of America. Second, the zone of reasonable commutes is much smaller still if you have a spouse who works in another area, or if you’re liable to change jobs in the next few years. And of course the housing centers with reasonable commutes to all possible job centers tend to be expensive.
• monkeydust 6y ago
  Very True. I've seen a huge spread in quality from my colleagues which definatley impacts opinions on WFH. For me we built an office in our garden around 5 years ago. Good size, ethernet connected from the house. Kids came along around 3 years ago and I was hardly using it (wife wouldn't let me escape so easy!) now it's been a lifesaver since March, by far one of the best investments I have made. Having said all this I do miss the office, I just don't need to be there 5 days a week.
• redisman 6y ago
  Working from home has been great for me but I still miss going to the office sometimes to get a little change in my day and get lunch with coworkers. And I definitely miss the workday being over when I walk out of there. I’ve been better about that lately but it was such a clear separation to walk and take transport back versus now I’ll move a few feet. We were already half remote where we go in a couple of days a week and I liked that mix
• seangrogg 6y ago
  I can agree with this. Previously (at Google, Sunnyvale) I was paying $1,700 for my share of a 2x2 apartment with a one-way commute of 20 minutes during odd hours to over an hour during peak hours. This gave me a desk in an open floor plan with nominally disruptive neighbors while still fielding messages on chat and meetings I would have to walk to that could be in other buildings (or, albeit rarely, campuses). Free food and drink, a gym I was too weary to use, a pool that was often too cold to use, and the view of construction that was going up faster than my code thanks to constant changes from different levels of management. Now, at a remote company, I'm paying $1,700 for a 2x2 to myself, a dedicated room for work, dedicated setup, no commute, the only distraction is occasionally my upstairs neighbor, a heated pool, a gym I'm able to use after one of my very few meetings, and non-free food but a full kitchen to work with during work hours. I do miss my coworkers and some of the fun face-to-face interactions, don't get me wrong, but not enough to give up the relative paradise I've gotten in exchange. While it can get lonely at times I do also get to spend many (many, many) hours online with friends playing games; if not for covid I'd be going out or having friends over often as well. All this to say that despite all this, I still respect that others don't share a similar set of options and/or circumstances. Those who have geographic ties, others living with them, space constraints, amenities that are hard to replicate, or just straight miss their peers, and many other variables I haven't considered. My personal paradise may be their hell and I respect that, and hopefully they can return to their normal while I can also keep what I have.
• kelnos 6y ago
  Yup, exactly. And to make the waters even more muddy, some of it just boils down to personal preference. My office was open-plan, but my section of it was always relatively quiet, so it usually wasn't difficult to focus and get work done, even without headphones. It was nice to see my teammates and do 1-on-1 meetings actually face to face, in person, and to run into other colleagues and have an impromptu chat, either about work or non-work topics. I had a 30-minute walk to/from the office that helped me clear my head and get ready to start the day, or wind down and end my day. Even then, pre-pandemic, I preferred to work from home most of the time, even though I didn't have a desk at home. Turns out I just like being home during the day, and like being able to take little short breaks here and there, without feeling weird about it at an office. And even though our office wasn't too bad with random interruptions, I liked having essentially zero interruptions at home. Fortunately we (coincidentally) moved into a larger space a few days before SF's shelter-in-place order back in March, and now have a dedicated office room with an adjustable desk and monitor (a big thanks to my employer for providing reimbursement for some home-office expenses this year). Pre-pandemic, my partner did go into the office most of the time, and I don't think the two of us would have been comfortable in the old place (a loft with no doors and walls), working and taking Zoom meetings every workday. (But I easily recognize that if we had kids, neither space would have been great for permanent working from home.) Sometimes it's hard to recognize that everyone's situation really is different (as you point out), and that even people with similar situations can just have different preferences and attitudes that can make them productive and happy with some setups, and unfocused and uneasy with others. I think we also need to remember that this is not a standard shift to working from home. We're doing this as part of a global pandemic that has nerves frayed and has put a lot of other restrictions on our day-to-day lives. I expect that many people who are having issues working from home due to social/collaboration reasons would have fewer complaints if there was no pandemic and they could get their social interaction from hanging out with friends at their houses or in public places. And many who previously worked at an office 5 days a week, every week, and miss the office, might be happy in normal times working from home anywhere from 1-4 days a week, getting their "office fix" on the other day(s).
• Florin_Andrei 6y ago
  > Your office can be place where you still have the option to work uninterrupted That used to be the case many, many years ago, before the "open floor plan" debacle. It's not the case anymore.
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