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I am really curious to see where we'll be in a year, two, three down the line wrt remote/office/hybrid work at major companies. This forced experiment has had

I am really curious to see where we'll be in a year, two, three down the line wrt remote/office/hybrid work at major companies. This forced experiment has had some surprising outcomes about the effectiveness of remote workplaces, but working from home for only a year, in pandemic conditions, is clearly not the same as indefinitely in normal times. But there's reason to think that may go even better, not worse; I am really curious to see how it plays out and glad more companies are continuing to let people work remotely.

admissionsguy 5y ago
> has had some surprising outcomes about the effectiveness of remote workplaces Curious, what are the outcomes?
- foxpurple 5y ago
  Replacing predictions with experienced reality. Seeing things continue as normal and at full pace while working from home which many expected was not possible. Our company was quite restrictive of working from home previously but after last year seeing that we had our most productive year ever, things loosened up a lot.
  - ludamad 5y ago
    Does anyone have a convincing break-down of the overall economic effect? Remote has meant I sleep more (compared to a long commute). As well, my home has advantages - there's a dog here, patio access, etc. I think communication can be hard to do right, but I'm not sure if this resulted in more faults
- magneticnorth 5y ago
  I was mostly just referring to the fact that team/org/company productivity does not seem reduced compared to pre-pandemic times. As far as I know, no major tech company is dealing with more outages/incidents or slower product launches than they typically saw, unless their business model was directly impacted by spending pattern changes. I think most companies expected lower output from forced-all-remote teams but don't seem to be seeing it.
  - ribosometronome 5y ago
    Wasn't the video game industry fairly impacted by the transition?
    - munk-a 5y ago
      The video game industry noticeably rolled back a number of release dates but I don't know if it's fair to attribute that to team productivity or just a combination of supply line issues (big name games tend to launch with merch and physical perks that definitely would be impacted) along with the cost and stress of dealing with the pandemic. We've got some confounded variables here so it's hard to tell.
      - jeremyjh 5y ago
        Delays in video game releases are highly visible. Many companies had regular schedules that were clearly and obviously disrupted. It would be far less visible in many other software sectors, at least in the short-term. How would I know if AWS launched 18 new services instead of 27 last year? Often new product features/releases are not announced until they are ready to ship.
      - resonious 5y ago
        I'm under the impression that video games are always crunching anyway, so maybe the pandemic was just a good excuse to delay and finally get the time they needed.
    - 55555 5y ago
      Investment banks have also been hurt by this, although many would argue this has been a good thing. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-13/fraud-is-no-fun-without-friends https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-13/fraud-... But you can begin to see some limits of remote work. Obviously military units shouldn't be training remotely. The bonding is too important.
      - admissionsguy 5y ago
varispeed 5y ago
I can see that many people who worked in cafes before the event, will retrain to work as therapists and will be helping people to adjust to normal life, in the sense, for example, teaching how to find friends outside of work, how to meet with local people for lunch and so on. There will be a lot of opportunity to teach people how to cook and do other tasks that they couldn't do because of commuting, no time outside of work etc. I think this will lift us out of depression and improve economy in many ways. The gravy train for property speculators, chain tax dodging cafes and "restaurants" is over.
- 908087 5y ago
  What?
- munk-a 5y ago
  That last sentence has me baffled so I'm just going to ignore it - the rest of your post is interesting. I've always thought that work and life were far too closely bound together - I neither want to pick up nor be picked up at work and while I have occasionally made a really good friend at work most of my friends come from pursuing interests (i.e. board games and RPGs) so I'd be extremely happy if workplace relationships got comparatively less important in people's lives. The ability to engage in additional interests is a really interesting point but I'm afraid we're going to lose it without really strong push-back. The trend of employment since the seventies has seemed to be - whenever an employee isn't working isn't it a shame? During the pandemic companies have mostly (from my observation) been pretty chill about pushing extra workloads due to the generally high natural level of stress everyone is feeling. I'm interested to see if companies treat the extra hour or two we'll all be saving from the commute as a nice bonus for employee moral or time that should rightfully be spent working. I think your scenario is a very interesting and quite realistic outcome, but my pessimism still has me in the "Wait until everything gets terrible again" camp.
throwaway6734 5y ago
My biggest question right now about sustained wfh is how much of the current productivity is the result of relationships that were built in the office. A year ago, I remotely onboarded for a new position and recently I can head back into the office, and there's a massive difference for me between the virtual relationships I built and the in-person ones. I learned more about people that I had spent months zooming/emailing with over the past few weeks talking to them face to face. Also having a dedicated workspace and a mental break between home & work has increased my productivity.
- munk-a 5y ago
  One thing that I've expressed to my company and coworkers is that I'd like to see full remote become more of a norm but I'd also love to see team building events remain as well. If there are a few times a year where everyone congregates in one location (probably at less expense than actually keeping an office set aside for them for the year mind you) and has a picnic or hackday that sounds awesome to me. The pandemic made in person social interaction impossible (mostly, at least really difficult and uncomfortable) but that will pass. We can be full time remote but still occasionally grab a coffee with coworkers if that's convenient for folks. I'm a bit behind most of you (Canada is still mostly shut down thankfully) but I suspect that daily social interactions will start to increase rapidly as second doses start rolling out. Very few people actually want to be locked away at home all day, I think most folks just hate the idea of commuting and being a butt-in-chair again.
  - losteric 5y ago
    > We can be full time remote but still occasionally grab a coffee with coworkers if that's convenient for folks. +1 this sentence; personally, I'm not interested in the fully distributed model espoused by some evangelists. I still desire physical proximity, with just-enough/just-in-time physical interactions as determined by myself (and relevant coworkers). I would love working for a business that offers something like an internal WeWork - reservable low-density dedicated workspaces, near social venues and transportation.
    - 5y ago
dheera 5y ago
A big problem with hybrid is that you're forced to live in the same locality as the office, and most companies aren't subsidizing rent, but at the same time you need a decent office setup at home to be effective and that isn't cheap. I moved apartments (from a studio to a 1-bedroom) at the start of COVID because it was basically impossible to work out of my bay area studio for a full day. I didn't even have a desk, because prior to COVID I basically only used it to sleep and rest, not work. I got a good rent price on the 1-bedroom because of COVID, but rental prices are going back up already.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  My worry is: let’s say my employer finally gives in and lets me work full time remote. Great! I can finally move to the Nevada desert or somewhere with low cost of living. I will likely take a modest salary reduction. Still wonderful! What happens 3 years later when there is new leadership or something and they pull a Marissa Mayer and declare remote work “bad” again, and recalls everyone to the headquarters? Now I’m fucked. I need to move back to the Bay Area after 3 years of housing price inflation! It’ll never work out. I fear once I leave I’m never coming back if the company changes it’s mind about remote work.
  - dheera 5y ago
    Get the job from the bay area and then move. Once you have the job, you're a black box that takes inputs and spits out work outputs in return for a monthly payment, and the company doesn't need to care where you actually are doing the work, as long as the black box works to specs (the JD).
    - steelframe 5y ago
      > Get the job from the bay area and then move. What’s to keep you from getting a job that’s ostensibly in Washington state and then moving to California? I believe that’s called, “tax evasion.”
      - parafactual 5y ago
FartyMcFarter 5y ago
In particular I'm curious on the impact to junior employees. Some people think that junior people are having trouble learning things when WFH.
- munk-a 5y ago
  I think that's an interesting point - most of us more senior folks either have an innate work ethic or have been trained for years to fear a boss looking over our shoulder when we're checking facebook or whatever... Training good work ethic into people who have never worked in an office is an interesting question society will face - but do bear in mind that there are plenty of jobs that are pretty much unsupervised from day one. While a super market might look really open and visible stockers can wander off for a bit without anyone noticing and a lot of the contractor-employee jobs (uber, lyft, roofing) have never had much on site oversight.
  - prmejc 5y ago
    That is why facebook can do full wfh. They don't care if you look at facebook all day.
    - lamontcg 5y ago
      Businesses need to stop caring about if you're on facebook 8 hours a day. If you're getting your work done at the end of the week that's all that really matters. The idea that the business owns your ass for a minimum of precisely 40 hours a week where you must be solely focused on the outcome of the business is both toxic and nonproductive.
      - munk-a 5y ago
        I think that would be a great - but we also employ by the hour not by the task which I also think is great. Sometimes I get tickets marked with three story points and think "Ha, let me just push up a quick patch" and other times I discover a dark dark hole at the bottom of assumptions that eats away at days. It's really hard to generally evaluate employees on productivity - especially in CS - and so our compromise is that we all lie a bit and say "We're paying you for 40 hours a week" and we reply "Yes - my compensation is tied purely to the fact that I am here for forty hours". I think it's a much longer road to better employee respect.
TrispusAttucks 5y ago
Hope it's here to stay for everyone. I've been remote most of my professional life. The only hang up was meetings where half team was in office other half was remote. It created an odd "legs in two boats / chasing two rabbits and catching none" vibe. Now with everyone Zooming together it's smooth sailing. When the pandemic is over. Kids are full time in school. Restaurants, bars, stores, and life is normal... It will be even smoother. I am concerned for real estate because those values could plummet in traditionally high cost of living areas which may put pressure on companies to bring employees back inhouse to keep land value high.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  I have also been working remotely for the past around 7 years. After my initial experiences I have decided that remote only works under certain conditions and the most important is that all meetings are from your personal (office or home) PC. It doesn't work when the team has meetings on site but don't bother to invite the odd one remote guy. It likewise doesn't work when people sit together in a conference room but you are one of the few calling in. Bad audio both ways, problems phoning in, people just plain deciding to not bother setting it up... ugh. I am happy there is now no shortage of remote options.
- dboreham 5y ago
  Similar experience. Pandemic made everyone work the same way I do. That said, I worked in 100% remote teams the previous decade so the Pandemic just opened up the rest of the industry as a potential place to contribute.
spamizbad 5y ago
I do think many of the WFH productivity gains seen can probably be attributed to 2 things: 1) Many workers (but certainly not ALL workers) had a much more quiet and focused work environment at home, compared to their buzzing open-plan desk in the office, making them more productive. 2) COVID severely limited socializing, so some people poured that time into work out of boredom. #1 is constant, and might get better for some when schools and daycares fully reopen. #2 is starting to go away and will be gone by next year.
- fbggthro 5y ago
  >compared to their buzzing open-plan desk in the office, making them more productive. I think this point gets really overblown by people who put too much of a tech lens on things. I've been in many, many different offices (I'm a consultant) and open plan offices are very rare outside of tech, and on top of that, most non-tech workers do not see "more quiet and focused" as a good thing. Most of my non-tech clients have constant back-and-forth dialog in the office, and removing that has, at least in my experience with these companies, made them less productive.
- calvinmorrison 5y ago
  I've got a shitty window AC, a houseful of pets, an out of work partner and a 6x10 office next to a house under construction. Of course managers want to "wfh" taking calls by their pool and outdoor bar
Dylovell 5y ago
this is very non substantial, but it feels like we are starting the changing of the guard.
jvanderbot 5y ago
My employer walked back all their remote work promises. In fact, the new policy is more restrictive than the old one, which allowed at least some flexibility in work arrangements between supervisors and their direct reports.
- KKKKkkkk1 5y ago
  Yep. One of the FAANGs recently published a 2-weeks/year remote-working policy as part of going back to the office, whereas before the pandemic you could just ask your manager for permission and there was no 2 week limit. Kind of like the ever-increasing chocolate rations in 1984.
gerdesj 5y ago
"but working from home for only a year, in pandemic conditions" About 18 months here (UK.) I'm a business owner (IT services) and I now do see the value of WFH. I really, really know the upsides and the downsides. My staff don't go off the boil when they are at home - they lose it and drift off when they don't feel ... loved. Call it what you will but when you are sat in a room at home which may not be very comfortable or large enough. Your internets are shit and you only have a small laptop screen. I have forked out on a shit load of screens, wireless keyboards and mice. You want a docking station - OK. Whatever you want. Yes I have sent the phone and yes just plug it in ... the VPN adds a bit of latency, just slow down a bit when you talk. I am not just quite good with deploying VPNs, I'm a fucking ... OK, I can make VPNs work quite well. I've seen a few use cases recently.
- doublerabbit 5y ago
  > My staff don't go off the boil when they are at home - they lose it and drift off when they don't feel ... loved. I just want my own personal home space back. Powering down the laptop for the weekend and hiding it is not the same as leaving it locked up at the office. With WFH and my single bedroom apartment, I feel I've lost privacy, personal space that I had once earned. And it's driving my depression insane knowing my work and personal are all in the same room. WFH works if you can separate yourself from your person quarters but when you can't it really bites.
  - seoaeu 5y ago
    Yeah, the "I spend 20+ hours a day in the same room" realization hits hard.
  - gerdesj 5y ago
    Sorry, its taken me a while to respond. "And it's driving my depression insane knowing my work and personal are all in the same room. WFH works if you can separate yourself from your person quarters but when you can't it really bites." I'm an old git now and have space but back in the day I ... didn't. I'm not trying to say I understand your particular situation but I do sympathise and I hope it doesn't sound trite. I wish you all the best and that's why I'm responding to a comment made two days ago. Take care.
tayo42 5y ago
I wish society learned that there are things more important then corporate efficiency. Maybe optimizing for our quality of life should take precedence over squeezing out that last 10% of work effectiveness. I recently read Russel Bertrand's essay "In praise of idleness", he made this observation that work efficiency dropped during the world war but life still went on. This was from switching to production for the world war over consumer stuff. His overall point was we should have kept the same amount of consumer work we were doing but get rid of the war production and just kind of chill and enjoy life. I think there's a parallel to the pandemic, where we made this big adjustment, maybe we were less productive, but with wfh quality of life went up in a way. Maybe we are OK with less effectiveness. The world as we can see didn't end, despite a decent effort.
- 1270018080 5y ago
  Europe seemed to have realized this a long time ago. Many Americans still make work much of their identity, and worshiping The Line (the stock market) is in direct conflict with labor rights.
  - tayo42 5y ago
    I'm hoping the pandemic is a trigger for a cultural shift. There still seems to be a bit of "get back to work" attitude though.
- Mauricebranagh 5y ago
  A lot of consumer production was halted or radically slowed during ww2. I suspect a University Don was insulated from a lot of those shortages
thefourthchime 5y ago
i’ve worked remote full-time for eight years. The first year she was pretty weird, was a good employee? yes. But managing my home life and my work life was something I was still figuring out. Am I better am I a better employee now? I think I am, because I can always make time for work if I have to, and I know how to make time for my family if I have to. I think I would work better at home than I would at the office at this point
takeda 5y ago
We would basically get few people that will abuse it and slowly we will get back where we were. Worked in a company that was flexible about WFH but they had to change these policies because of those people. Also people in managerial positions absolutely like being in office, so they will also add more pressure for going back.
rcpt 5y ago
The people who show up will be winning turf wars and getting all the good projects.
ergocoder 5y ago
To be honest, once a person next to them cough. All these millionaires will immediately realize that the vaccine that is 99.999% is still not worth their kids' lives. No matter how low known risk is, it's not worth it. Cough and whisper "why can't I taste anything?" Then, everyone will get to work from home. Nobody will get an advantage of being at the office. Keep coughing.
- steveBK123 5y ago
  It's such a joke too. My firm is letting us know they will be so benevolent as to give us 20% time WFH "hybrid" once we return but "you can't just all take Fridays" and "we will set the WFH schedule for you initially". Well the CTO & half of his reports were already doing Friday WFH before the pandemic, so.. clearly some people can all take Fridays off, and 20% is nothing new for some people..
xiphias2 5y ago
I care much more about personal relationships than work relationships. For me, as a person who was already working from home my dating and socializing options got much better now that people don't have to work in the office. I can travel together with my significant other much easier as well.
DrBazza 5y ago
The whole 'matrix' of people vs productivity is interesting. I thought that I'd be more productive working from home, and initially I was. But now I'm interrupted more by my family than I probably was in the office. I'd assume that people living alone are 'interruption free', but that doesn't necessarily equate to better productivity. I never thought I'd be back in the office and more productive than being at home, but, well, here we are a year on.
elevenoh 5y ago
On this topic: Are people.. better humans when spending more time in solitude & less around others where cognitively-draining politics is inevitable?
bluishgreen 5y ago
There is a right number of days per month where you have to meet people and socialize. It wasn't 22. It is not 0 either. But I believe it is closer to 0 than 22. Personally I feel about 5 days a month would be the right amount to trigger all the benefits of in person knowing.

admissionsguy 5y ago

> has had some surprising outcomes about the effectiveness of remote workplaces Curious, what are the outcomes?

foxpurple 5y ago
Replacing predictions with experienced reality. Seeing things continue as normal and at full pace while working from home which many expected was not possible. Our company was quite restrictive of working from home previously but after last year seeing that we had our most productive year ever, things loosened up a lot.
- ludamad 5y ago
  Does anyone have a convincing break-down of the overall economic effect? Remote has meant I sleep more (compared to a long commute). As well, my home has advantages - there's a dog here, patio access, etc. I think communication can be hard to do right, but I'm not sure if this resulted in more faults
magneticnorth 5y ago
I was mostly just referring to the fact that team/org/company productivity does not seem reduced compared to pre-pandemic times. As far as I know, no major tech company is dealing with more outages/incidents or slower product launches than they typically saw, unless their business model was directly impacted by spending pattern changes. I think most companies expected lower output from forced-all-remote teams but don't seem to be seeing it.
- ribosometronome 5y ago
  Wasn't the video game industry fairly impacted by the transition?
  - munk-a 5y ago
    The video game industry noticeably rolled back a number of release dates but I don't know if it's fair to attribute that to team productivity or just a combination of supply line issues (big name games tend to launch with merch and physical perks that definitely would be impacted) along with the cost and stress of dealing with the pandemic. We've got some confounded variables here so it's hard to tell.
    - jeremyjh 5y ago
      Delays in video game releases are highly visible. Many companies had regular schedules that were clearly and obviously disrupted. It would be far less visible in many other software sectors, at least in the short-term. How would I know if AWS launched 18 new services instead of 27 last year? Often new product features/releases are not announced until they are ready to ship.
    - resonious 5y ago
      I'm under the impression that video games are always crunching anyway, so maybe the pandemic was just a good excuse to delay and finally get the time they needed.
  - 55555 5y ago
    Investment banks have also been hurt by this, although many would argue this has been a good thing. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-13/fraud-is-no-fun-without-friends https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-13/fraud-... But you can begin to see some limits of remote work. Obviously military units shouldn't be training remotely. The bonding is too important.
    - admissionsguy 5y ago

varispeed 5y ago

I can see that many people who worked in cafes before the event, will retrain to work as therapists and will be helping people to adjust to normal life, in the sense, for example, teaching how to find friends outside of work, how to meet with local people for lunch and so on. There will be a lot of opportunity to teach people how to cook and do other tasks that they couldn't do because of commuting, no time outside of work etc. I think this will lift us out of depression and improve economy in many ways. The gravy train for property speculators, chain tax dodging cafes and "restaurants" is over.

908087 5y ago
What?
munk-a 5y ago
That last sentence has me baffled so I'm just going to ignore it - the rest of your post is interesting. I've always thought that work and life were far too closely bound together - I neither want to pick up nor be picked up at work and while I have occasionally made a really good friend at work most of my friends come from pursuing interests (i.e. board games and RPGs) so I'd be extremely happy if workplace relationships got comparatively less important in people's lives. The ability to engage in additional interests is a really interesting point but I'm afraid we're going to lose it without really strong push-back. The trend of employment since the seventies has seemed to be - whenever an employee isn't working isn't it a shame? During the pandemic companies have mostly (from my observation) been pretty chill about pushing extra workloads due to the generally high natural level of stress everyone is feeling. I'm interested to see if companies treat the extra hour or two we'll all be saving from the commute as a nice bonus for employee moral or time that should rightfully be spent working. I think your scenario is a very interesting and quite realistic outcome, but my pessimism still has me in the "Wait until everything gets terrible again" camp.

throwaway6734 5y ago

My biggest question right now about sustained wfh is how much of the current productivity is the result of relationships that were built in the office. A year ago, I remotely onboarded for a new position and recently I can head back into the office, and there's a massive difference for me between the virtual relationships I built and the in-person ones. I learned more about people that I had spent months zooming/emailing with over the past few weeks talking to them face to face. Also having a dedicated workspace and a mental break between home & work has increased my productivity.

munk-a 5y ago
One thing that I've expressed to my company and coworkers is that I'd like to see full remote become more of a norm but I'd also love to see team building events remain as well. If there are a few times a year where everyone congregates in one location (probably at less expense than actually keeping an office set aside for them for the year mind you) and has a picnic or hackday that sounds awesome to me. The pandemic made in person social interaction impossible (mostly, at least really difficult and uncomfortable) but that will pass. We can be full time remote but still occasionally grab a coffee with coworkers if that's convenient for folks. I'm a bit behind most of you (Canada is still mostly shut down thankfully) but I suspect that daily social interactions will start to increase rapidly as second doses start rolling out. Very few people actually want to be locked away at home all day, I think most folks just hate the idea of commuting and being a butt-in-chair again.
- losteric 5y ago
  > We can be full time remote but still occasionally grab a coffee with coworkers if that's convenient for folks. +1 this sentence; personally, I'm not interested in the fully distributed model espoused by some evangelists. I still desire physical proximity, with just-enough/just-in-time physical interactions as determined by myself (and relevant coworkers). I would love working for a business that offers something like an internal WeWork - reservable low-density dedicated workspaces, near social venues and transportation.
  - 5y ago

dheera 5y ago

A big problem with hybrid is that you're forced to live in the same locality as the office, and most companies aren't subsidizing rent, but at the same time you need a decent office setup at home to be effective and that isn't cheap. I moved apartments (from a studio to a 1-bedroom) at the start of COVID because it was basically impossible to work out of my bay area studio for a full day. I didn't even have a desk, because prior to COVID I basically only used it to sleep and rest, not work. I got a good rent price on the 1-bedroom because of COVID, but rental prices are going back up already.

ryandrake 5y ago
My worry is: let’s say my employer finally gives in and lets me work full time remote. Great! I can finally move to the Nevada desert or somewhere with low cost of living. I will likely take a modest salary reduction. Still wonderful! What happens 3 years later when there is new leadership or something and they pull a Marissa Mayer and declare remote work “bad” again, and recalls everyone to the headquarters? Now I’m fucked. I need to move back to the Bay Area after 3 years of housing price inflation! It’ll never work out. I fear once I leave I’m never coming back if the company changes it’s mind about remote work.
- dheera 5y ago
  Get the job from the bay area and then move. Once you have the job, you're a black box that takes inputs and spits out work outputs in return for a monthly payment, and the company doesn't need to care where you actually are doing the work, as long as the black box works to specs (the JD).
  - steelframe 5y ago
    > Get the job from the bay area and then move. What’s to keep you from getting a job that’s ostensibly in Washington state and then moving to California? I believe that’s called, “tax evasion.”
    - parafactual 5y ago

FartyMcFarter 5y ago

In particular I'm curious on the impact to junior employees. Some people think that junior people are having trouble learning things when WFH.

munk-a 5y ago
I think that's an interesting point - most of us more senior folks either have an innate work ethic or have been trained for years to fear a boss looking over our shoulder when we're checking facebook or whatever... Training good work ethic into people who have never worked in an office is an interesting question society will face - but do bear in mind that there are plenty of jobs that are pretty much unsupervised from day one. While a super market might look really open and visible stockers can wander off for a bit without anyone noticing and a lot of the contractor-employee jobs (uber, lyft, roofing) have never had much on site oversight.
- prmejc 5y ago
  That is why facebook can do full wfh. They don't care if you look at facebook all day.
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    Businesses need to stop caring about if you're on facebook 8 hours a day. If you're getting your work done at the end of the week that's all that really matters. The idea that the business owns your ass for a minimum of precisely 40 hours a week where you must be solely focused on the outcome of the business is both toxic and nonproductive.
    - munk-a 5y ago
      I think that would be a great - but we also employ by the hour not by the task which I also think is great. Sometimes I get tickets marked with three story points and think "Ha, let me just push up a quick patch" and other times I discover a dark dark hole at the bottom of assumptions that eats away at days. It's really hard to generally evaluate employees on productivity - especially in CS - and so our compromise is that we all lie a bit and say "We're paying you for 40 hours a week" and we reply "Yes - my compensation is tied purely to the fact that I am here for forty hours". I think it's a much longer road to better employee respect.

TrispusAttucks 5y ago

Hope it's here to stay for everyone. I've been remote most of my professional life. The only hang up was meetings where half team was in office other half was remote. It created an odd "legs in two boats / chasing two rabbits and catching none" vibe. Now with everyone Zooming together it's smooth sailing. When the pandemic is over. Kids are full time in school. Restaurants, bars, stores, and life is normal... It will be even smoother. I am concerned for real estate because those values could plummet in traditionally high cost of living areas which may put pressure on companies to bring employees back inhouse to keep land value high.

lmilcin 5y ago
I have also been working remotely for the past around 7 years. After my initial experiences I have decided that remote only works under certain conditions and the most important is that all meetings are from your personal (office or home) PC. It doesn't work when the team has meetings on site but don't bother to invite the odd one remote guy. It likewise doesn't work when people sit together in a conference room but you are one of the few calling in. Bad audio both ways, problems phoning in, people just plain deciding to not bother setting it up... ugh. I am happy there is now no shortage of remote options.
dboreham 5y ago
Similar experience. Pandemic made everyone work the same way I do. That said, I worked in 100% remote teams the previous decade so the Pandemic just opened up the rest of the industry as a potential place to contribute.

spamizbad 5y ago

I do think many of the WFH productivity gains seen can probably be attributed to 2 things: 1) Many workers (but certainly not ALL workers) had a much more quiet and focused work environment at home, compared to their buzzing open-plan desk in the office, making them more productive. 2) COVID severely limited socializing, so some people poured that time into work out of boredom. #1 is constant, and might get better for some when schools and daycares fully reopen. #2 is starting to go away and will be gone by next year.

fbggthro 5y ago
>compared to their buzzing open-plan desk in the office, making them more productive. I think this point gets really overblown by people who put too much of a tech lens on things. I've been in many, many different offices (I'm a consultant) and open plan offices are very rare outside of tech, and on top of that, most non-tech workers do not see "more quiet and focused" as a good thing. Most of my non-tech clients have constant back-and-forth dialog in the office, and removing that has, at least in my experience with these companies, made them less productive.
calvinmorrison 5y ago
I've got a shitty window AC, a houseful of pets, an out of work partner and a 6x10 office next to a house under construction. Of course managers want to "wfh" taking calls by their pool and outdoor bar

Dylovell 5y ago

this is very non substantial, but it feels like we are starting the changing of the guard.

jvanderbot 5y ago

My employer walked back all their remote work promises. In fact, the new policy is more restrictive than the old one, which allowed at least some flexibility in work arrangements between supervisors and their direct reports.

KKKKkkkk1 5y ago
Yep. One of the FAANGs recently published a 2-weeks/year remote-working policy as part of going back to the office, whereas before the pandemic you could just ask your manager for permission and there was no 2 week limit. Kind of like the ever-increasing chocolate rations in 1984.

gerdesj 5y ago

"but working from home for only a year, in pandemic conditions" About 18 months here (UK.) I'm a business owner (IT services) and I now do see the value of WFH. I really, really know the upsides and the downsides. My staff don't go off the boil when they are at home - they lose it and drift off when they don't feel ... loved. Call it what you will but when you are sat in a room at home which may not be very comfortable or large enough. Your internets are shit and you only have a small laptop screen. I have forked out on a shit load of screens, wireless keyboards and mice. You want a docking station - OK. Whatever you want. Yes I have sent the phone and yes just plug it in ... the VPN adds a bit of latency, just slow down a bit when you talk. I am not just quite good with deploying VPNs, I'm a fucking ... OK, I can make VPNs work quite well. I've seen a few use cases recently.

doublerabbit 5y ago
> My staff don't go off the boil when they are at home - they lose it and drift off when they don't feel ... loved. I just want my own personal home space back. Powering down the laptop for the weekend and hiding it is not the same as leaving it locked up at the office. With WFH and my single bedroom apartment, I feel I've lost privacy, personal space that I had once earned. And it's driving my depression insane knowing my work and personal are all in the same room. WFH works if you can separate yourself from your person quarters but when you can't it really bites.
- seoaeu 5y ago
  Yeah, the "I spend 20+ hours a day in the same room" realization hits hard.
- gerdesj 5y ago
  Sorry, its taken me a while to respond. "And it's driving my depression insane knowing my work and personal are all in the same room. WFH works if you can separate yourself from your person quarters but when you can't it really bites." I'm an old git now and have space but back in the day I ... didn't. I'm not trying to say I understand your particular situation but I do sympathise and I hope it doesn't sound trite. I wish you all the best and that's why I'm responding to a comment made two days ago. Take care.

tayo42 5y ago

I wish society learned that there are things more important then corporate efficiency. Maybe optimizing for our quality of life should take precedence over squeezing out that last 10% of work effectiveness. I recently read Russel Bertrand's essay "In praise of idleness", he made this observation that work efficiency dropped during the world war but life still went on. This was from switching to production for the world war over consumer stuff. His overall point was we should have kept the same amount of consumer work we were doing but get rid of the war production and just kind of chill and enjoy life. I think there's a parallel to the pandemic, where we made this big adjustment, maybe we were less productive, but with wfh quality of life went up in a way. Maybe we are OK with less effectiveness. The world as we can see didn't end, despite a decent effort.

1270018080 5y ago
Europe seemed to have realized this a long time ago. Many Americans still make work much of their identity, and worshiping The Line (the stock market) is in direct conflict with labor rights.
- tayo42 5y ago
  I'm hoping the pandemic is a trigger for a cultural shift. There still seems to be a bit of "get back to work" attitude though.
Mauricebranagh 5y ago
A lot of consumer production was halted or radically slowed during ww2. I suspect a University Don was insulated from a lot of those shortages

thefourthchime 5y ago

i’ve worked remote full-time for eight years. The first year she was pretty weird, was a good employee? yes. But managing my home life and my work life was something I was still figuring out. Am I better am I a better employee now? I think I am, because I can always make time for work if I have to, and I know how to make time for my family if I have to. I think I would work better at home than I would at the office at this point

takeda 5y ago

We would basically get few people that will abuse it and slowly we will get back where we were. Worked in a company that was flexible about WFH but they had to change these policies because of those people. Also people in managerial positions absolutely like being in office, so they will also add more pressure for going back.

rcpt 5y ago

The people who show up will be winning turf wars and getting all the good projects.

ergocoder 5y ago

To be honest, once a person next to them cough. All these millionaires will immediately realize that the vaccine that is 99.999% is still not worth their kids' lives. No matter how low known risk is, it's not worth it. Cough and whisper "why can't I taste anything?" Then, everyone will get to work from home. Nobody will get an advantage of being at the office. Keep coughing.

steveBK123 5y ago
It's such a joke too. My firm is letting us know they will be so benevolent as to give us 20% time WFH "hybrid" once we return but "you can't just all take Fridays" and "we will set the WFH schedule for you initially". Well the CTO & half of his reports were already doing Friday WFH before the pandemic, so.. clearly some people can all take Fridays off, and 20% is nothing new for some people..

xiphias2 5y ago

I care much more about personal relationships than work relationships. For me, as a person who was already working from home my dating and socializing options got much better now that people don't have to work in the office. I can travel together with my significant other much easier as well.

DrBazza 5y ago

The whole 'matrix' of people vs productivity is interesting. I thought that I'd be more productive working from home, and initially I was. But now I'm interrupted more by my family than I probably was in the office. I'd assume that people living alone are 'interruption free', but that doesn't necessarily equate to better productivity. I never thought I'd be back in the office and more productive than being at home, but, well, here we are a year on.

elevenoh 5y ago

On this topic: Are people.. better humans when spending more time in solitude & less around others where cognitively-draining politics is inevitable?

bluishgreen 5y ago

There is a right number of days per month where you have to meet people and socialize. It wasn't 22. It is not 0 either. But I believe it is closer to 0 than 22. Personally I feel about 5 days a month would be the right amount to trigger all the benefits of in person knowing.