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Obviously, people are different. Some people prefer to work from an office (like me) just because you get to spend time with people (I live alone). Me and my te

Obviously, people are different. Some people prefer to work from an office (like me) just because you get to spend time with people (I live alone). Me and my teammates also become more efficient when we work together in the same physical space than remotely (we've tried bunch of things like perpetual video calls, among other things). We all live in the same city, the longest commute in our team is ~30 minutes, but we all feel like it's worth it to go to the same physical space and work together instead. Unless you live outside big cities, I'm not sure if 2 hours of commute is that common (at least with my South West European perspective, maybe is different in the US/elsewhere?).

softfalcon 5y ago
I don’t live outside a big city. I live in a Canadian city of only 1 million people. Thanks to the incredibly bad city planning (which is common all across North America) and complete joke of local transit options (also common in NA), you regularly see folks with 45 minute to 2 hour commutes one way. Folks are losing as much as 4 hours out of their day even though they live in a small city that should be easier to commute but isn’t due to corruption and laziness of the city. To be clear, we’re not talking Seattle or Portland, we’re talking obscure cities like Ogden, Calgary, Edmonton, etc. North America is a massive turd compared to practically anything in Europe. Some of your far flung towns have better transit than some of our metropolises. tldr; it is drastically worse for commutes in any non-major American cities. You have no idea how good you have it in Europe.
starfallg 5y ago
Well for a one hour commute, you lose 2 hours of your day. That's massive and equals around 1/8 to 1/9 of your time awake depending on your sleeping habits.
- capableweb 5y ago
  I guess the same can be said about doing laundry, sitting and watching the machine while it does its job would lose you an hour or two. Luckily both of these activities can be done while doing other things like reading/listening to audio books or catching up on other things.
  - bart_spoon 5y ago
    The same thing can't be said about doing laundry. If they are doing the laundry at home like they said, you are sitting and watching the machine, you are starting it and letting it do its thing. And besides that, laundry is going to have to be done regardless, so its not like they would be saving time by commuting to work instead. The laundry will still be waiting when they get home.
    - capableweb 5y ago
      > If they are doing the laundry at home like they said, you are sitting and watching the machine, you are starting it and letting it do its thing You can do the same way with commuting, enter the bus/subway/train and then do other thing while there, you don't have to wait until you arrive to start doing other things. > And besides that, laundry is going to have to be done regardless, so its not like they would be saving time by commuting to work instead. The laundry will still be waiting when they get home. You could have someone else do the laundry for you. Maybe it was a bad example. I wanted to compare activities that we usually do where you can perform multiple things at the same time. Commuting is generally a passive activity while we wait to arrive to our destination, just like laundry is a passive activity until the machine is done.
      - adregan 5y ago
        > You can do the same way with commuting, enter the bus/subway/train and then do other thing while there, you don't have to wait until you arrive to start doing other things. In my pre-covid life, I often couldn't even hold a book on the subway as it was too crowded for that. There were times (near daily) I couldn't even reach into my pocket to take my phone out to put on a podcast due to the crush of people (and oh my god the stress when your headphone's cord would get hooked on an exiting passenger). My commute, while long enough to do something useful, was never useful. Crowded platforms, crowded trains, and transfers down long crowded corridors made it impossible to do anything else. And I'll be damned if I'm going to do more work on the way to and from work!
      - barbazoo 5y ago
- rmah 5y ago
  It's only 1/8th of your awake time if you don't count weekends. If you count weekends, you have 5 * 8 + 2 * 16 = 72 hours of "free time". so 5 hrs commute / 32 hrs = 6.94% or 1/14.4 of your time awake.
  - starfallg 5y ago
    Yes, I was referring to awake time on weekdays. Also, I'm not following your calculations. If we establish that your 'free time' is 72 hours per week (8h/weekday and 16h/weekends), and the commute time per week is 10h (2h round trip x 5), it would be 10/72 or roughly 13.9%.
- sepin4 5y ago
  I used to read books during commute. No time was wasted. In fact, now I seem to have a lot less time for reading, because there is always something more pressing at home.
- bdefore 5y ago
  8 hours of sleep plus 8 hours of work leaves 8 voluntary hours. You could make a case then that 2 hours of commute is giving up on a fourth of your weekday free time. Factor in the prep for commute or time needed afterwards to decompress and perhaps a third is more accurate.
GuardianCaveman 5y ago
I live in a big city not the suburbs. No traffic it’s twenty minutes to the office but during 7-1030 am and 2-7 pm it’s 45 minutes to an hour and 5. I listen to a lot of podcasts and happen to be learning Italian as well. Podcasts are not popular at all in Italy and I can only assume it’s becUse of what you describe with the lack of commute. I’m glad to be fully remote now.
- Swizec 5y ago
  I live in a big city and while I don’t have a car, I’ve stopped using Uber/Lyft during rush hour because walking or bicycling is faster. Boosted Boards (et al) offer similar gains. Your top speed is less and your average speed is more. Cars never seem to get past 15mph in that kind of traffic. Motorcycles are nice too. Good top speed, lane filtering to avoid traffic, plus real brakes, rear-view mirrors etc. Feels a lot safer than my electric skateboard used to.
- bart_spoon 5y ago
  I used to listen to a bunch of podcasts on my commute to and from work, and thought I was a big podcast person. As soon as we went to remote work, I stopped listening because I realized that I only "like" podcasts when there is literally nothing else to do while sitting in my car. I would listen to at least 1 podcast episode a day pre-pandemic to not having listened to a full podcast episode once in the last year.
  - egypturnash 5y ago
    Now I'm wondering how many people who do podcasts for a living have seen their numbers drop due to the lack of commuters over the past year.
    - frumper 5y ago
      I used to listen to a mix of audiobooks and podcasts on my drive to work, but not 1 podcast since last spring. I still have listened to a few audiobooks though.
a3n 5y ago
Subjectively, commutes are bad in the US and getting worse, because housing is getting more expensive relative to wages. On top of that, we live in a car culture, and it's much easier to build more freeways and housing developments than figure out how people can sustainably work and live in employment centers. The pandemic has done some of that figuring out for us.
- splithalf 5y ago
  That little kid that was shot due to road rage recently. That’s how bad commutes are. People who insist we go back to the office have blood on their hands.
  - sanitycheck 5y ago
    I don't disagree about commuting being bad, but I think you're missing a more direct way to reduce shootings.
  - IMTDb 5y ago
    That wife that was shot due to domestic violence recently. That’s how bad working from home is. People who insist we stay home have blood on their hands. Yep, that sounds as ridiculous as your statement.
- alexgmcm 5y ago
  Housing is a huge issue in Europe as well, yeah we have shorter commutes, but that comes at the cost of higher population densities which often means living in high/medium-rise flats. These flats would be considered tiny by American standards and you have a lot less privacy/independence from your neighbours.
slumdev 5y ago
> Me and my teammates also become more efficient when we work together in the same physical space than remotely (we've tried bunch of things like perpetual video calls, among other things) What do you do? Constant talk and interruption are not conducive to the work of a software engineer.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  > Constant talk and interruption are not conducive to the work of a software engineer. During the times you are coding, yes. But a software engineer is more than a coder, so there are times when collaboration is very useful.
  - slumdev 5y ago
    There are times when collaboration is useful. But nothing distinguishes a junior and a senior more than the ability to work independently.
    - recursive 5y ago
      If you're really working totally independently, then you're running a 1-person company. As soon as you get two "seniors" on the same project, if they're working independently, then you're just going to two different, unrelated outputs, by your definition.
      - TeMPOraL 5y ago
        Isn't this why microservices are a thing? :). More seriously though, it's part of skilled project management to organize work in such a way that seniors don't need to constantly collaborate to stay in sync.
        sidlls 5y ago
        Your “skilled project management” is my “unnecessarily complex process.” There’s a reason collaboration of this sort is used in real engineering disciplines: it’s because it’s more efficient than having some middleman (and/or process) mediating all the communication.
hourislate 5y ago
This seems to be the general consensus for folks like yourself where work is the primary focus in their lives. It's understandable, people are lonely and work is the only social interaction for many. If I didn't have a family and lived alone, I would definitely want to return the office. I'm curious if you're the minority or majority? Most people I talk to never want to return to the office. My company (major corp) basically had a revolt during a company wide all hands meeting. It was so bad that they basically said people will be only required to come in 1 day a week and they can pick the day.
- capableweb 5y ago
  > This seems to be the general consensus for folks like yourself where work is the primary focus in their lives. Big incorrect assumption here, my primary focus is not my work but my hobbies, family and friends. I don't like working in the office mainly because it's social but because we all are more productive. I like to be efficient at my job, even though I don't think it's my primary focus in life.
  - hourislate 5y ago
    So you're choosing work productivity/efficiency over hobbies, family and friends and feel work isn't the primary focus in your life?
  - belval 5y ago
    > Some people prefer to work from an office (like me) just because you get to spend time with people (I live alone). You can't just write something like that and then accuse someone of a "big incorrect assumption". Work is work, I work to do my job, if you want to go to the office to be with people because otherwise you live alone that's okay, but you can't just turn around an say "I have plenty of friends, it's about being more productive".
  - barbazoo 5y ago
    I've found that too, I'm more efficient working in an office, but you know what, I don't care as much anymore. Being at home, in my community, with my family more often and for longer time throughout the day, taking breaks to do whatever around the house of go for a walk. That's what matters now. If I'm less productive, I think that's fine because my overall happiness increases. Companies should just factor that in from now on and many do.
Frost1x 5y ago
>Me and my teammates also become more efficient when we work together in the same physical space than remotely (we've tried bunch of things like perpetual video calls, among other things). I tend to agree with this, and I've worked remote (hybrid) for over 12 years now. For me, a hybrid is the best. Most tasks and problems can be solved well asynchronously and for those, give me a WFH option. It's great for all the reasons this thread creator mentioned and time cannot be understated. The commute alone typically requires a vehicle and the much of maintenence time I spend in my free time comes from wear and tear of commute driving as do expenses to expedite repairs for necessity of a car for work. This stuff all adds up. Once every now and then, in person meetings and problem solving synchronously is good where virtual just fails. Usually this involved external clients and so forth or some physical, hardware related aspect of work. Software alone I can typically do fully remote as it's assumed everyone is competent and can easily share needed information and visuals with one another. >Unless you live outside big cities, I'm not sure if 2 hours of commute is that common (at least with my South West European perspective, maybe is different in the US/elsewhere?). I lived in rural US and my experience is that commutes tend to be longer, both in distance and time, in rural areas. While traffic related commute times tend to melt away, with less density, people tend to drive further for better employment opportunities. Sometimes this involves living near but not in a large metro area and driving hours daily to pull in high income with low COL at the sacrifice of great commute times. I know a surgeon in Texas who commutes around 4-6 hours each trip (nearly doubles his income), someone near NY/NJ who commutes 6 hours daily to drive in, and people in small areas that would drive 2-hours to a nearby plant that pays more. One of my peers used to work 3 positions and one required driving an hour each way to. One of my older directors actually lived 2 hours away and purchased a condo near his job where he worked and stayed throughout the week then returned home on weekends. I presume his wife who didn't work would sometimes stay at his condo but never felt comfortable breaching that discussion. For them, the time they lose can't be spent working elsewhere and average out to the same higher rates and they're willing to sacrifice that time to pull more in and provide for their families. This is ultimately because good paying opportunities are often few and far between in low COL areas and highly competitive as well. For me, living in a metro area makes more sense these days. You pay more for property but recover that in terms of commute time and TC. You also have more security depending on the area by there being more opportunities to transfer to should you want/need, without changing commute times too drastically. If you live in a rural area and the diamond in the rough position you found disappears, you have to consider significant lifestyle changes for you and your family or even consider uprooting and moving. There are trade-offs either way you go.
dspillett 5y ago
> Some people prefer to work from an office (like me) just because you get to spend time with people (I live alone). And/or (like me) you like work being somewhere different to home, and don't have room for a dedicated home office. In fact even if I have the room I'd prefer for work to not be in the house. Being able to work from home is useful to me on occasion, for both work and personal reasons, but I did not like it nor feel myself to be productive when I was there all the time. If I had no choice but to work remotely I'd probably rent an office space and have to factor that into my costs and benefits analysis of the job. Then again I currently work a 15 minute slow-ish walk from home (or less than a 10 minute run back) if I take the most direct route, and can get home to entertain the cat at lunch many days, so the commute isn't a significant factor like it will be for many.
htrp 5y ago
Was the last year difficult for you because of lockdowns forcing remote work?
nineplay 5y ago
> Me and my teammates also become more efficient when we work together in the same physical space I've found it the complete opposite in software. Zoom screen sharing is so much easier than peering over someone's shoulder at their dark-mode IDE. Copy-and-pasting a command in the chat window - what an improvement! How many times have I said this to someone? > "s c p space s v 0 1 colon forward-slash t m p" Ug. Design meetings are so much easier when I can see the UI on my screen, instead of halfway across the conference room. We also do a lot of work with a team at another location and again - when we are all on zoom together now we can all see each other, we can all interreact when each other. It used to be 6 of us on one conference room and six of them in another conference room trying to talk to each other over a tinny speaker. I hope I never have to go through any of that ever again.
- jagger27 5y ago
  All of those things are also possible in person. Of course I just send an instant message to my coworker across the hall. And I don’t clutter Slack when I want to make lunch plans.
  - nineplay 5y ago
    I don't know what "all those things are possible" means aside from "all those things are possible as long as we zoom together while in the office". You can screen-share in the office - as long as you are both on zoom ( or equivalent ) at which point why is it better to be at the office? It would be harder in the office - too many people talking over each other in separate meetings. I can't imagine. So we all end up fighting for few conference rooms, or we squeeze once again into each others cubicles, losing the advantage of multiple screens and trying not to talk to loud and disturbing everyone around us. I've spend decades developing in offices with other engineers, collaboration is always difficult when what you are collaborating on is always tiny text on a small screen. Zoom is better.
    - jagger27 5y ago
      The places I’ve worked had lots of elegant and obvious solutions to shoulder surfing. Mirroring to a big TV was something we did all the time. I find Zoom in particular to be a crude place to get this type of work done. Why do I have to send a huge video stream that roasts my laptop just to share a few kilobytes of text? I can’t scroll around or select text to point something out. If the streamer’s text is too small, I’m shit out of luck there too. Visual Studio Code has great collaborative coding tools that I have found work really well in a local network setting sitting near coworkers. Zoom is a total cudgel in comparison for this task.
rorykoehler 5y ago
Ideally it should be a choice.
acituan 5y ago
> Some people prefer to work from an office (like me) just because you get to spend time with people (I live alone). I live alone too and I hate for me when people at the office became an erzats social circle. It is not. It is not a social circle but a workgroup you have little control over; you might end up with really difficult people, great teammates you love might leave, project might get cancelled and that group might get disbanded altogether. Even if you had the best workgroup, most of the time those people will not be in your life for long or deep. They won't help you move, drive you to and from an outpatient procedure, won't play with your kids or even be by your deathbed. And you do need people who would do those things in your life. For this reason, I liked the social lack WFH created because it was closer to the state of reality, and forced me to invest in my real, non-workplace relationships. To be clear, I am not saying you can't make lifelong friends in a workplace, I am saying you shouldn't satisfice your social needs with a workplace. Just like hunger is a signal to point you towards nutrition, loneliness is a signal to point you towards nourishing allies. And workplaces are not places to procure that.
- Grimm1 5y ago
  I only have superficial social needs for the most part, anything more is somewhat exhausting, I think the work place interactions fit that quite well. Any deep social needs are satisfied by my long time close friends who I see every few months or my partner if I'm dating. I don't think you can make that call what someone should and shouldn't do to satisfy their social needs because everyone has very widely ranging needs in the first place. I feel perfectly topped off just by being in the room at a coffee shop with people for a few hours for instance.
  - acituan 5y ago
    > I don't think you can make that call what someone should and shouldn't do to satisfy their social needs because everyone has very widely ranging needs in the first place. That is why I said satisfice. Good on you that you know exactly what you need. I thought I did too, and it took a burnout and extended time off work to realize how I was mostly deceiving myself. Most people are not that transparent to themselves, that is why they have to be careful with the stimuli that seem to fulfill a need in the short term but create serious deficiencies in the long run. A bag of potato chips will curb your hunger but you'd be severely malnourished if it was the only thing you ate for a year. Cocaine, amphetamines even caffeine will give you an elevated sense of agency but you'll quickly spiral down to addiction with little corresponding real-world, long-term gains. A workplace, a coffee shop or even binging netflix alone might create a sense of a peopled life, but none will be real allies that can have your back in a time of need.

softfalcon 5y ago

I don’t live outside a big city. I live in a Canadian city of only 1 million people. Thanks to the incredibly bad city planning (which is common all across North America) and complete joke of local transit options (also common in NA), you regularly see folks with 45 minute to 2 hour commutes one way. Folks are losing as much as 4 hours out of their day even though they live in a small city that should be easier to commute but isn’t due to corruption and laziness of the city. To be clear, we’re not talking Seattle or Portland, we’re talking obscure cities like Ogden, Calgary, Edmonton, etc. North America is a massive turd compared to practically anything in Europe. Some of your far flung towns have better transit than some of our metropolises. tldr; it is drastically worse for commutes in any non-major American cities. You have no idea how good you have it in Europe.

starfallg 5y ago

Well for a one hour commute, you lose 2 hours of your day. That's massive and equals around 1/8 to 1/9 of your time awake depending on your sleeping habits.

capableweb 5y ago
I guess the same can be said about doing laundry, sitting and watching the machine while it does its job would lose you an hour or two. Luckily both of these activities can be done while doing other things like reading/listening to audio books or catching up on other things.
- bart_spoon 5y ago
  The same thing can't be said about doing laundry. If they are doing the laundry at home like they said, you are sitting and watching the machine, you are starting it and letting it do its thing. And besides that, laundry is going to have to be done regardless, so its not like they would be saving time by commuting to work instead. The laundry will still be waiting when they get home.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    > If they are doing the laundry at home like they said, you are sitting and watching the machine, you are starting it and letting it do its thing You can do the same way with commuting, enter the bus/subway/train and then do other thing while there, you don't have to wait until you arrive to start doing other things. > And besides that, laundry is going to have to be done regardless, so its not like they would be saving time by commuting to work instead. The laundry will still be waiting when they get home. You could have someone else do the laundry for you. Maybe it was a bad example. I wanted to compare activities that we usually do where you can perform multiple things at the same time. Commuting is generally a passive activity while we wait to arrive to our destination, just like laundry is a passive activity until the machine is done.
    - adregan 5y ago
      > You can do the same way with commuting, enter the bus/subway/train and then do other thing while there, you don't have to wait until you arrive to start doing other things. In my pre-covid life, I often couldn't even hold a book on the subway as it was too crowded for that. There were times (near daily) I couldn't even reach into my pocket to take my phone out to put on a podcast due to the crush of people (and oh my god the stress when your headphone's cord would get hooked on an exiting passenger). My commute, while long enough to do something useful, was never useful. Crowded platforms, crowded trains, and transfers down long crowded corridors made it impossible to do anything else. And I'll be damned if I'm going to do more work on the way to and from work!
    - barbazoo 5y ago
rmah 5y ago
It's only 1/8th of your awake time if you don't count weekends. If you count weekends, you have 5 * 8 + 2 * 16 = 72 hours of "free time". so 5 hrs commute / 32 hrs = 6.94% or 1/14.4 of your time awake.
- starfallg 5y ago
  Yes, I was referring to awake time on weekdays. Also, I'm not following your calculations. If we establish that your 'free time' is 72 hours per week (8h/weekday and 16h/weekends), and the commute time per week is 10h (2h round trip x 5), it would be 10/72 or roughly 13.9%.
sepin4 5y ago
I used to read books during commute. No time was wasted. In fact, now I seem to have a lot less time for reading, because there is always something more pressing at home.
bdefore 5y ago
8 hours of sleep plus 8 hours of work leaves 8 voluntary hours. You could make a case then that 2 hours of commute is giving up on a fourth of your weekday free time. Factor in the prep for commute or time needed afterwards to decompress and perhaps a third is more accurate.

GuardianCaveman 5y ago

I live in a big city not the suburbs. No traffic it’s twenty minutes to the office but during 7-1030 am and 2-7 pm it’s 45 minutes to an hour and 5. I listen to a lot of podcasts and happen to be learning Italian as well. Podcasts are not popular at all in Italy and I can only assume it’s becUse of what you describe with the lack of commute. I’m glad to be fully remote now.

Swizec 5y ago
I live in a big city and while I don’t have a car, I’ve stopped using Uber/Lyft during rush hour because walking or bicycling is faster. Boosted Boards (et al) offer similar gains. Your top speed is less and your average speed is more. Cars never seem to get past 15mph in that kind of traffic. Motorcycles are nice too. Good top speed, lane filtering to avoid traffic, plus real brakes, rear-view mirrors etc. Feels a lot safer than my electric skateboard used to.
bart_spoon 5y ago
I used to listen to a bunch of podcasts on my commute to and from work, and thought I was a big podcast person. As soon as we went to remote work, I stopped listening because I realized that I only "like" podcasts when there is literally nothing else to do while sitting in my car. I would listen to at least 1 podcast episode a day pre-pandemic to not having listened to a full podcast episode once in the last year.
- egypturnash 5y ago
  Now I'm wondering how many people who do podcasts for a living have seen their numbers drop due to the lack of commuters over the past year.
  - frumper 5y ago
    I used to listen to a mix of audiobooks and podcasts on my drive to work, but not 1 podcast since last spring. I still have listened to a few audiobooks though.

a3n 5y ago

Subjectively, commutes are bad in the US and getting worse, because housing is getting more expensive relative to wages. On top of that, we live in a car culture, and it's much easier to build more freeways and housing developments than figure out how people can sustainably work and live in employment centers. The pandemic has done some of that figuring out for us.

splithalf 5y ago
That little kid that was shot due to road rage recently. That’s how bad commutes are. People who insist we go back to the office have blood on their hands.
- sanitycheck 5y ago
  I don't disagree about commuting being bad, but I think you're missing a more direct way to reduce shootings.
- IMTDb 5y ago
  That wife that was shot due to domestic violence recently. That’s how bad working from home is. People who insist we stay home have blood on their hands. Yep, that sounds as ridiculous as your statement.
alexgmcm 5y ago
Housing is a huge issue in Europe as well, yeah we have shorter commutes, but that comes at the cost of higher population densities which often means living in high/medium-rise flats. These flats would be considered tiny by American standards and you have a lot less privacy/independence from your neighbours.

slumdev 5y ago

rootusrootus 5y ago
> Constant talk and interruption are not conducive to the work of a software engineer. During the times you are coding, yes. But a software engineer is more than a coder, so there are times when collaboration is very useful.
- slumdev 5y ago
  There are times when collaboration is useful. But nothing distinguishes a junior and a senior more than the ability to work independently.
  - recursive 5y ago
    If you're really working totally independently, then you're running a 1-person company. As soon as you get two "seniors" on the same project, if they're working independently, then you're just going to two different, unrelated outputs, by your definition.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      Isn't this why microservices are a thing? :). More seriously though, it's part of skilled project management to organize work in such a way that seniors don't need to constantly collaborate to stay in sync.
      - sidlls 5y ago
        Your “skilled project management” is my “unnecessarily complex process.” There’s a reason collaboration of this sort is used in real engineering disciplines: it’s because it’s more efficient than having some middleman (and/or process) mediating all the communication.

hourislate 5y ago

This seems to be the general consensus for folks like yourself where work is the primary focus in their lives. It's understandable, people are lonely and work is the only social interaction for many. If I didn't have a family and lived alone, I would definitely want to return the office. I'm curious if you're the minority or majority? Most people I talk to never want to return to the office. My company (major corp) basically had a revolt during a company wide all hands meeting. It was so bad that they basically said people will be only required to come in 1 day a week and they can pick the day.

capableweb 5y ago
> This seems to be the general consensus for folks like yourself where work is the primary focus in their lives. Big incorrect assumption here, my primary focus is not my work but my hobbies, family and friends. I don't like working in the office mainly because it's social but because we all are more productive. I like to be efficient at my job, even though I don't think it's my primary focus in life.
- hourislate 5y ago
  So you're choosing work productivity/efficiency over hobbies, family and friends and feel work isn't the primary focus in your life?
- belval 5y ago
  > Some people prefer to work from an office (like me) just because you get to spend time with people (I live alone). You can't just write something like that and then accuse someone of a "big incorrect assumption". Work is work, I work to do my job, if you want to go to the office to be with people because otherwise you live alone that's okay, but you can't just turn around an say "I have plenty of friends, it's about being more productive".
- barbazoo 5y ago
  I've found that too, I'm more efficient working in an office, but you know what, I don't care as much anymore. Being at home, in my community, with my family more often and for longer time throughout the day, taking breaks to do whatever around the house of go for a walk. That's what matters now. If I'm less productive, I think that's fine because my overall happiness increases. Companies should just factor that in from now on and many do.

Frost1x 5y ago

>Me and my teammates also become more efficient when we work together in the same physical space than remotely (we've tried bunch of things like perpetual video calls, among other things). I tend to agree with this, and I've worked remote (hybrid) for over 12 years now. For me, a hybrid is the best. Most tasks and problems can be solved well asynchronously and for those, give me a WFH option. It's great for all the reasons this thread creator mentioned and time cannot be understated. The commute alone typically requires a vehicle and the much of maintenence time I spend in my free time comes from wear and tear of commute driving as do expenses to expedite repairs for necessity of a car for work. This stuff all adds up. Once every now and then, in person meetings and problem solving synchronously is good where virtual just fails. Usually this involved external clients and so forth or some physical, hardware related aspect of work. Software alone I can typically do fully remote as it's assumed everyone is competent and can easily share needed information and visuals with one another. >Unless you live outside big cities, I'm not sure if 2 hours of commute is that common (at least with my South West European perspective, maybe is different in the US/elsewhere?). I lived in rural US and my experience is that commutes tend to be longer, both in distance and time, in rural areas. While traffic related commute times tend to melt away, with less density, people tend to drive further for better employment opportunities. Sometimes this involves living near but not in a large metro area and driving hours daily to pull in high income with low COL at the sacrifice of great commute times. I know a surgeon in Texas who commutes around 4-6 hours each trip (nearly doubles his income), someone near NY/NJ who commutes 6 hours daily to drive in, and people in small areas that would drive 2-hours to a nearby plant that pays more. One of my peers used to work 3 positions and one required driving an hour each way to. One of my older directors actually lived 2 hours away and purchased a condo near his job where he worked and stayed throughout the week then returned home on weekends. I presume his wife who didn't work would sometimes stay at his condo but never felt comfortable breaching that discussion. For them, the time they lose can't be spent working elsewhere and average out to the same higher rates and they're willing to sacrifice that time to pull more in and provide for their families. This is ultimately because good paying opportunities are often few and far between in low COL areas and highly competitive as well. For me, living in a metro area makes more sense these days. You pay more for property but recover that in terms of commute time and TC. You also have more security depending on the area by there being more opportunities to transfer to should you want/need, without changing commute times too drastically. If you live in a rural area and the diamond in the rough position you found disappears, you have to consider significant lifestyle changes for you and your family or even consider uprooting and moving. There are trade-offs either way you go.

dspillett 5y ago

> Some people prefer to work from an office (like me) just because you get to spend time with people (I live alone). And/or (like me) you like work being somewhere different to home, and don't have room for a dedicated home office. In fact even if I have the room I'd prefer for work to not be in the house. Being able to work from home is useful to me on occasion, for both work and personal reasons, but I did not like it nor feel myself to be productive when I was there all the time. If I had no choice but to work remotely I'd probably rent an office space and have to factor that into my costs and benefits analysis of the job. Then again I currently work a 15 minute slow-ish walk from home (or less than a 10 minute run back) if I take the most direct route, and can get home to entertain the cat at lunch many days, so the commute isn't a significant factor like it will be for many.

htrp 5y ago

Was the last year difficult for you because of lockdowns forcing remote work?

nineplay 5y ago

> Me and my teammates also become more efficient when we work together in the same physical space I've found it the complete opposite in software. Zoom screen sharing is so much easier than peering over someone's shoulder at their dark-mode IDE. Copy-and-pasting a command in the chat window - what an improvement! How many times have I said this to someone? > "s c p space s v 0 1 colon forward-slash t m p" Ug. Design meetings are so much easier when I can see the UI on my screen, instead of halfway across the conference room. We also do a lot of work with a team at another location and again - when we are all on zoom together now we can all see each other, we can all interreact when each other. It used to be 6 of us on one conference room and six of them in another conference room trying to talk to each other over a tinny speaker. I hope I never have to go through any of that ever again.

jagger27 5y ago
All of those things are also possible in person. Of course I just send an instant message to my coworker across the hall. And I don’t clutter Slack when I want to make lunch plans.
- nineplay 5y ago
  I don't know what "all those things are possible" means aside from "all those things are possible as long as we zoom together while in the office". You can screen-share in the office - as long as you are both on zoom ( or equivalent ) at which point why is it better to be at the office? It would be harder in the office - too many people talking over each other in separate meetings. I can't imagine. So we all end up fighting for few conference rooms, or we squeeze once again into each others cubicles, losing the advantage of multiple screens and trying not to talk to loud and disturbing everyone around us. I've spend decades developing in offices with other engineers, collaboration is always difficult when what you are collaborating on is always tiny text on a small screen. Zoom is better.
  - jagger27 5y ago
    The places I’ve worked had lots of elegant and obvious solutions to shoulder surfing. Mirroring to a big TV was something we did all the time. I find Zoom in particular to be a crude place to get this type of work done. Why do I have to send a huge video stream that roasts my laptop just to share a few kilobytes of text? I can’t scroll around or select text to point something out. If the streamer’s text is too small, I’m shit out of luck there too. Visual Studio Code has great collaborative coding tools that I have found work really well in a local network setting sitting near coworkers. Zoom is a total cudgel in comparison for this task.

rorykoehler 5y ago

Ideally it should be a choice.

acituan 5y ago

> Some people prefer to work from an office (like me) just because you get to spend time with people (I live alone). I live alone too and I hate for me when people at the office became an erzats social circle. It is not. It is not a social circle but a workgroup you have little control over; you might end up with really difficult people, great teammates you love might leave, project might get cancelled and that group might get disbanded altogether. Even if you had the best workgroup, most of the time those people will not be in your life for long or deep. They won't help you move, drive you to and from an outpatient procedure, won't play with your kids or even be by your deathbed. And you do need people who would do those things in your life. For this reason, I liked the social lack WFH created because it was closer to the state of reality, and forced me to invest in my real, non-workplace relationships. To be clear, I am not saying you can't make lifelong friends in a workplace, I am saying you shouldn't satisfice your social needs with a workplace. Just like hunger is a signal to point you towards nutrition, loneliness is a signal to point you towards nourishing allies. And workplaces are not places to procure that.

Grimm1 5y ago
I only have superficial social needs for the most part, anything more is somewhat exhausting, I think the work place interactions fit that quite well. Any deep social needs are satisfied by my long time close friends who I see every few months or my partner if I'm dating. I don't think you can make that call what someone should and shouldn't do to satisfy their social needs because everyone has very widely ranging needs in the first place. I feel perfectly topped off just by being in the room at a coffee shop with people for a few hours for instance.
- acituan 5y ago
  > I don't think you can make that call what someone should and shouldn't do to satisfy their social needs because everyone has very widely ranging needs in the first place. That is why I said satisfice. Good on you that you know exactly what you need. I thought I did too, and it took a burnout and extended time off work to realize how I was mostly deceiving myself. Most people are not that transparent to themselves, that is why they have to be careful with the stimuli that seem to fulfill a need in the short term but create serious deficiencies in the long run. A bag of potato chips will curb your hunger but you'd be severely malnourished if it was the only thing you ate for a year. Cocaine, amphetamines even caffeine will give you an elevated sense of agency but you'll quickly spiral down to addiction with little corresponding real-world, long-term gains. A workplace, a coffee shop or even binging netflix alone might create a sense of a peopled life, but none will be real allies that can have your back in a time of need.