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> Relying on your employer for these items seems unwise. Why? Work is where you spend one third (or more) of your time during your adult life. Why the hell wou

> Relying on your employer for these items seems unwise. Why? Work is where you spend one third (or more) of your time during your adult life. Why the hell would I not want such a significant portion of my life to not also provide great benefits like opportunities to make friends, meet people, eat great food, and have fun? If you scoff at people who want to make their workplaces more welcoming and happier, no shit the workplace is going to turn into anti-social, work-only hellholes that nobody wants to go back to. This attitude is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and a root of the problem.

stemlord 5y ago
But part of the value of WFH is the ability to lower work-time to something even less than one third. I've always found it extremely difficult to foster worthwhile relationships and have truly fulfilling fun in a corporate PC environment anyway.
- rytcio 5y ago
  Well, that's the other side of it. If a company is paying you for 40hrs a week, they want to make sure they're getting their moneys worth. Of course you can argue about how employees, despite being "in the office" are only productive for 2 or maybe 3 hours of their 8 hour shifts. But that's now how management sees it. Having a person visibly in a chair makes management feel like they are getting their money's worth. I also don't get how people expect to get paid a full living salary for working less.
  - Matticus_Rex 5y ago
    Ultimately, at the market level pay rates are tied to productive value. We have a theoretical assumption of 40h/week, but almost everyone understands that it's fictional (and more people are learning that). Most people who are going home and getting the same work done in 2-3 hours aren't working less -- they're working more efficiently, or doing fewer other things (e.g. chatting at the water cooler). For many types of thought work, 3-4 hours is pushing it anyway; the default assumption of 8 hours doesn't make sense with the heterogeneity of what different types of work actually entail.
- weakfish 5y ago
  PC environment?
barbazoo 5y ago
> Work is where you spend one third (or more) of your time during your adult life. I surely hope this is rare. Even a 40h work week is less than a quarter of work per week and that doesn't account for holidays, vacation etc.
- triceratops 5y ago
  Not if you take out 56h/week for sleeping.
  - lowercased 5y ago
    and commute. even a 'quick' commute (and attendant 'getting started for the day') is going to put you closer to 50h/week. Then another... ~50h/week for sleeping, as you say. The 'commute to an office' is closer to a 1/3rd of you week, and ~1/2 of your waking life for many folks.
MisterBastahrd 5y ago
Why? Because if you live in a great place, all those things are available to you without discontinuity regardless of WHO you work for. The reason that there's such a disconnect between 20-somethings and everyone else on this issue is because everyone else has been through it already. Sure, there's a possibility that you will remain friends with people at your former place of work after you leave. There's also a VERY strong possibility that the people who are at that workplace are socializing with the people AT that workplace. The longer you stay away, the more people you DON'T know, and the less you fit into their social crowd.
- awsthro00945 5y ago
  >Because if you live in a great place, all those things are available to you without discontinuity regardless of WHO you work for. And how is this an argument for not also getting those things through work? I have many hobbies outside work. I live in a great place where I am able to spend my free time meeting people and doing things outside work. I still want those things from my workplace, too.
  - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
    Because you have a limited amount of time to invest in certain things in life, and it's better to invest that time independently of your work environment. Not saying that you can't ever have it, just that some day will be your last day at wherever you are, and those relationships don't always follow you to your next job.
    - awsthro00945 5y ago
      The fact that I have a limited amount of time to invest in things is exactly why those things are necessary to have at the workplace. I like having fun, and I like making friends. Being limited on time, I want to maximize the percentage of time in my life that I spend having fun and I want to maximize the amount of opportunity I get to make friends. It's great that I have personal free time where I can do that, but why would I not also want 8 more hours per day at work where I can also have fun and make friends? It would be silly not to, that almost doubles the amount of opportunity I have to have fun/make friends! >and those relationships don't always follow you to your next job. See my other comment in this thread. I haven't found this to be the case. Sure, not every relationship follows you, but that doesn't mean I'm going to forgo the opportunity to cultivate relationships that will follow me to my next job, or even for the rest of my life.
sanderjd 5y ago
Because you might get fired or laid off or burnt out and leave and only then discover that you have invested too much of yourself into this faceless entity that does not care a whit about you. This is one of those things where peoples' warnings to the young come from hard won experience, but where it doesn't sound right to people who have not themselves yet gained the experience. So we fail to impart the lessons and each generation is forced to relearn them on their own. It can be maddening to know something is correct but unable to convince someone who must experience it themselves in order to see. But it's just life and humanity, it just works that way.
- awsthro00945 5y ago
  >This is one of those things where peoples' warnings to the young come from hard won experience, but where it doesn't sound right to people who have not themselves yet gained the experience. Speak for yourself. I am very experienced. I have worked at many companies, some of which I left abruptly, and others where my close friends were fired/laid off. But guess what? None of that matters. Just because a friendship starts at a workplace doesn't mean it ends when the employment ends. Some of my best, life-long friends are people I met at work. My current SO, who I will marry, is someone I met at at a past employer. My wedding party is going to be half-filled with people who I met at work, even though I no longer work with them. I currently mentor (and am mentored by) people from past jobs, one of which was actually fired. This is also a self-fulfilling prophecy that I see in these conversations. People begrudgingly make nice with people at work, and restrict those relationships to only happen at work... and then are surprised when those relationships end when employment ends. If you only interact with your "friends" at your employer, then no shit those interactions will stop when your employment ends. But they don't have to, and for many people, they don't. It's not any different than any other part of life. I'm no longer in college, but I'm still close friends with people I met in college, and I don't regret at all the fun activities I did during college. I no longer go to my old gym (I switched to a new gym), but I still keep in touch with someone I met at the old gym and I still benefit from the exercises I did there. I no longer live in my old apartment, but I still keep in touch with my friend who lived across the hall from me. Why should my workplace be any different?
ItsMonkk 5y ago
We've learned in this pandemic that for knowledge work the workplace is no longer a requirement for productivity. Work should be what you spend one third of your time doing, but it should not be where. During college I did my homework in the computer labs where other students were doing their work and we chatted and built a rapport despite working on different tasks. I look forward to working out of the office and out of my home and building relationships with people that are not contractually obligated to be with me. I expect to treat my co-workers with respect, but that is no different than what Open Source projects have done for decades.
nklop 5y ago
Friends are friends and workmates are workmates. A lot of people confuse these groups and think they are somehow the same. Workmates might become friends but more likely they are work colleagues that vanish after a contract ends, especially if they didn't mesh with your network. In my circles we as a group often get work at a company. At least do referrals etc. We also leave together to find new opportunities when the place goes feral. This is partly why we think office work is less than good a lot of times. I'd argue most offices devolve into hellholes as management forget about people and treat them as things.
drclau 5y ago
Let me be the devil's (to be read corporate) advocate for a moment here. You say: > Why? Work is where you spend one third (or more) of your time during your adult life. Why the hell would I not want such a significant portion of my life to not also provide great benefits like opportunities to make friends, meet people, eat great food, and have fun? I say: aren't you supposed to, you know, work while you are at work? The office is not a social club! Jokes aside, I always wondered how much time people actually do proper, productive work while in office, in software engineering. My view is rather restricted to my own experience (personal + people around me). I'm asking because if it's, say, 4h a day, I'd rather just spend 4h a day in office, and spend the other 4h however I choose to (alone, with family, or with colleagues, friends etc.), instead of watching YouTube or listen to conversations I don't want to (thanks open plan office!), or whatever people do when they are not productive. Maybe one day we'll collectively figure out the right amount of time we are actually productive, and get back the rest of the time.
pawelduda 5y ago
The root of the problem you descibe are incentives for why workplaces exist. They exist so employees can go there and work. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as it's an explicit contract between employer and employees that both sides agree on. Some employers will be very happy with blurring work/personal life boundaries: employees make friends (but the real quality of friendships will only surface after you've changed jobs, unless you plan to stick to a single job forever), eat great food (because maybe it's cheaper than simply paying the employees more) and have fun (enough to make impression of a laid-back place but not too much, because it would hurt company's performance). It's because all these 'perks' are built on completely different goal. I used to think they're mandatory for me to feel satisfied with the job - looking back they now seem artificial. That's why I personally love WFH - it let's me focus on the essence of working which to me is providing value for my client. For everything else, there's time outside of job.
spfzero 5y ago
Your employer is not really motivated to provide those things for you. They have a different motivation, which is to get you to work productively on a job they think needs doing. They may provide some of those either explicitly as an incentive, or as a side-effect of putting a bunch of people in close proximity, and that's great. But when profits are looking iffy, I don't think you can rely on it. It makes more sense to be less dependent on your job, which might go away, and to build those social experiences outside of work so you still have them to fall back on if you change jobs.
ducharmdev 5y ago
Totally agree - often it seems people take a transactional approach to work as a way to insulate themselves from social or economic harm, but then proceed to complain about the transactional nature of work that they assist in perpetuating. But there's plenty of room to be critical of companies without sacrificing the positive things you've listed above.

stemlord 5y ago

But part of the value of WFH is the ability to lower work-time to something even less than one third. I've always found it extremely difficult to foster worthwhile relationships and have truly fulfilling fun in a corporate PC environment anyway.

rytcio 5y ago
Well, that's the other side of it. If a company is paying you for 40hrs a week, they want to make sure they're getting their moneys worth. Of course you can argue about how employees, despite being "in the office" are only productive for 2 or maybe 3 hours of their 8 hour shifts. But that's now how management sees it. Having a person visibly in a chair makes management feel like they are getting their money's worth. I also don't get how people expect to get paid a full living salary for working less.
- Matticus_Rex 5y ago
  Ultimately, at the market level pay rates are tied to productive value. We have a theoretical assumption of 40h/week, but almost everyone understands that it's fictional (and more people are learning that). Most people who are going home and getting the same work done in 2-3 hours aren't working less -- they're working more efficiently, or doing fewer other things (e.g. chatting at the water cooler). For many types of thought work, 3-4 hours is pushing it anyway; the default assumption of 8 hours doesn't make sense with the heterogeneity of what different types of work actually entail.
weakfish 5y ago
PC environment?

barbazoo 5y ago

> Work is where you spend one third (or more) of your time during your adult life. I surely hope this is rare. Even a 40h work week is less than a quarter of work per week and that doesn't account for holidays, vacation etc.

triceratops 5y ago
Not if you take out 56h/week for sleeping.
- lowercased 5y ago
  and commute. even a 'quick' commute (and attendant 'getting started for the day') is going to put you closer to 50h/week. Then another... ~50h/week for sleeping, as you say. The 'commute to an office' is closer to a 1/3rd of you week, and ~1/2 of your waking life for many folks.

MisterBastahrd 5y ago

Why? Because if you live in a great place, all those things are available to you without discontinuity regardless of WHO you work for. The reason that there's such a disconnect between 20-somethings and everyone else on this issue is because everyone else has been through it already. Sure, there's a possibility that you will remain friends with people at your former place of work after you leave. There's also a VERY strong possibility that the people who are at that workplace are socializing with the people AT that workplace. The longer you stay away, the more people you DON'T know, and the less you fit into their social crowd.

awsthro00945 5y ago
>Because if you live in a great place, all those things are available to you without discontinuity regardless of WHO you work for. And how is this an argument for not also getting those things through work? I have many hobbies outside work. I live in a great place where I am able to spend my free time meeting people and doing things outside work. I still want those things from my workplace, too.
- MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  Because you have a limited amount of time to invest in certain things in life, and it's better to invest that time independently of your work environment. Not saying that you can't ever have it, just that some day will be your last day at wherever you are, and those relationships don't always follow you to your next job.
  - awsthro00945 5y ago
    The fact that I have a limited amount of time to invest in things is exactly why those things are necessary to have at the workplace. I like having fun, and I like making friends. Being limited on time, I want to maximize the percentage of time in my life that I spend having fun and I want to maximize the amount of opportunity I get to make friends. It's great that I have personal free time where I can do that, but why would I not also want 8 more hours per day at work where I can also have fun and make friends? It would be silly not to, that almost doubles the amount of opportunity I have to have fun/make friends! >and those relationships don't always follow you to your next job. See my other comment in this thread. I haven't found this to be the case. Sure, not every relationship follows you, but that doesn't mean I'm going to forgo the opportunity to cultivate relationships that will follow me to my next job, or even for the rest of my life.

sanderjd 5y ago

Because you might get fired or laid off or burnt out and leave and only then discover that you have invested too much of yourself into this faceless entity that does not care a whit about you. This is one of those things where peoples' warnings to the young come from hard won experience, but where it doesn't sound right to people who have not themselves yet gained the experience. So we fail to impart the lessons and each generation is forced to relearn them on their own. It can be maddening to know something is correct but unable to convince someone who must experience it themselves in order to see. But it's just life and humanity, it just works that way.

awsthro00945 5y ago
>This is one of those things where peoples' warnings to the young come from hard won experience, but where it doesn't sound right to people who have not themselves yet gained the experience. Speak for yourself. I am very experienced. I have worked at many companies, some of which I left abruptly, and others where my close friends were fired/laid off. But guess what? None of that matters. Just because a friendship starts at a workplace doesn't mean it ends when the employment ends. Some of my best, life-long friends are people I met at work. My current SO, who I will marry, is someone I met at at a past employer. My wedding party is going to be half-filled with people who I met at work, even though I no longer work with them. I currently mentor (and am mentored by) people from past jobs, one of which was actually fired. This is also a self-fulfilling prophecy that I see in these conversations. People begrudgingly make nice with people at work, and restrict those relationships to only happen at work... and then are surprised when those relationships end when employment ends. If you only interact with your "friends" at your employer, then no shit those interactions will stop when your employment ends. But they don't have to, and for many people, they don't. It's not any different than any other part of life. I'm no longer in college, but I'm still close friends with people I met in college, and I don't regret at all the fun activities I did during college. I no longer go to my old gym (I switched to a new gym), but I still keep in touch with someone I met at the old gym and I still benefit from the exercises I did there. I no longer live in my old apartment, but I still keep in touch with my friend who lived across the hall from me. Why should my workplace be any different?

ItsMonkk 5y ago

We've learned in this pandemic that for knowledge work the workplace is no longer a requirement for productivity. Work should be what you spend one third of your time doing, but it should not be where. During college I did my homework in the computer labs where other students were doing their work and we chatted and built a rapport despite working on different tasks. I look forward to working out of the office and out of my home and building relationships with people that are not contractually obligated to be with me. I expect to treat my co-workers with respect, but that is no different than what Open Source projects have done for decades.

nklop 5y ago

Friends are friends and workmates are workmates. A lot of people confuse these groups and think they are somehow the same. Workmates might become friends but more likely they are work colleagues that vanish after a contract ends, especially if they didn't mesh with your network. In my circles we as a group often get work at a company. At least do referrals etc. We also leave together to find new opportunities when the place goes feral. This is partly why we think office work is less than good a lot of times. I'd argue most offices devolve into hellholes as management forget about people and treat them as things.

drclau 5y ago

Let me be the devil's (to be read corporate) advocate for a moment here. You say: > Why? Work is where you spend one third (or more) of your time during your adult life. Why the hell would I not want such a significant portion of my life to not also provide great benefits like opportunities to make friends, meet people, eat great food, and have fun? I say: aren't you supposed to, you know, work while you are at work? The office is not a social club! Jokes aside, I always wondered how much time people actually do proper, productive work while in office, in software engineering. My view is rather restricted to my own experience (personal + people around me). I'm asking because if it's, say, 4h a day, I'd rather just spend 4h a day in office, and spend the other 4h however I choose to (alone, with family, or with colleagues, friends etc.), instead of watching YouTube or listen to conversations I don't want to (thanks open plan office!), or whatever people do when they are not productive. Maybe one day we'll collectively figure out the right amount of time we are actually productive, and get back the rest of the time.

pawelduda 5y ago

The root of the problem you descibe are incentives for why workplaces exist. They exist so employees can go there and work. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as it's an explicit contract between employer and employees that both sides agree on. Some employers will be very happy with blurring work/personal life boundaries: employees make friends (but the real quality of friendships will only surface after you've changed jobs, unless you plan to stick to a single job forever), eat great food (because maybe it's cheaper than simply paying the employees more) and have fun (enough to make impression of a laid-back place but not too much, because it would hurt company's performance). It's because all these 'perks' are built on completely different goal. I used to think they're mandatory for me to feel satisfied with the job - looking back they now seem artificial. That's why I personally love WFH - it let's me focus on the essence of working which to me is providing value for my client. For everything else, there's time outside of job.

spfzero 5y ago

Your employer is not really motivated to provide those things for you. They have a different motivation, which is to get you to work productively on a job they think needs doing. They may provide some of those either explicitly as an incentive, or as a side-effect of putting a bunch of people in close proximity, and that's great. But when profits are looking iffy, I don't think you can rely on it. It makes more sense to be less dependent on your job, which might go away, and to build those social experiences outside of work so you still have them to fall back on if you change jobs.

ducharmdev 5y ago

Totally agree - often it seems people take a transactional approach to work as a way to insulate themselves from social or economic harm, but then proceed to complain about the transactional nature of work that they assist in perpetuating. But there's plenty of room to be critical of companies without sacrificing the positive things you've listed above.