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I actually liked working in the office. But maybe I was lucky having nice colleagues. During the COVID-19 home office year I initially hated working from home.

I actually liked working in the office. But maybe I was lucky having nice colleagues. During the COVID-19 home office year I initially hated working from home. I kind of got used to it over time and it is working better than expected. However: 1) I am definitely feel less productive and I find myself getting stressed out easily when something unexpected happens at work (live bugs for example). 2) I hate teams meetings. I mean the whole microphone/camera not working mess got much better. But I find these meetings less focused and less communicative. Nobody feels obliged to bring a meeting to a productive end (less than ordinarily). 3) I definitely experience a lack of communication across teams. I have no idea really what my colleagues are doing outside my team. Four to five people quit during the year and, personally, I have no idea what happened making them so dissatisfied. 4) I gained some weight due to the lack of commute and decreased mobility. During the warmer months I enjoyed my bicycle ride to/fro the office. 5) The commute also helped me to shut off my thoughts about work issues. Now, I carry them with me all the time and sometimes I return to work at night because I feel the need to finish something. I try to add breaks during the day to distance myself from working at home. All in all, I don’t see why techies are so eager to isolate themselves at home. While my colleagues are certainly not good friends (which I don’t have much) but I always enjoyed lunch time with them, chatting with them over a cup of coffee or enjoyed a team event outside the office. Living with and loving my family for many years it feels good from time to time to be a separate person with a separate realm from home.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Your experience matches what I see in offline contexts. I think comment sections online online have a disproportionately large number of people who prefer to get their social activity online. It's natural that people who spend a lot of time on forums, HN, Twitter, and social media would want their workplaces to also go remote. I take a lot of the remote-work perspective on HN with a grain of salt. It's easy to forget that HN is still a bubble online that doesn't necessarily represent the norms in the real world.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
Interesting. Myself: 1) I am definitely more productive than in an office, almost by an order of magnitude. That is in a large part because of my specific personality idiosyncrasies (I get anxious in shared working environmens), so it doesn't generalize. 2) Meetings I'm in are exactly the opposite - they're much more focused and productive. Probably because everyone has more interesting things to do than waste time on chit-chat over a videocall, so there's this constant pressure to either do something useful, or cancel the meeting. 3) This one matches my experience too. With no ability to just bump into people or notice they're there, I do feel as if my team is the entire company. 4) No change. 5) Sort of the same, except I consider it to be a feature more than a draw. > All in all, I don’t see why techies are so eager to isolate themselves at home. To this, the answer is simple: autonomy. You get to choose your own environment, your own pace; you can protect your personal space. And, you reclaim the time you wasted on commute, which you get to spend on what you want. In my case, I'm getting 2 hours of my life back every day. Some people are getting more.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

Your experience matches what I see in offline contexts. I think comment sections online online have a disproportionately large number of people who prefer to get their social activity online. It's natural that people who spend a lot of time on forums, HN, Twitter, and social media would want their workplaces to also go remote. I take a lot of the remote-work perspective on HN with a grain of salt. It's easy to forget that HN is still a bubble online that doesn't necessarily represent the norms in the real world.

TeMPOraL 5y ago

Interesting. Myself: 1) I am definitely more productive than in an office, almost by an order of magnitude. That is in a large part because of my specific personality idiosyncrasies (I get anxious in shared working environmens), so it doesn't generalize. 2) Meetings I'm in are exactly the opposite - they're much more focused and productive. Probably because everyone has more interesting things to do than waste time on chit-chat over a videocall, so there's this constant pressure to either do something useful, or cancel the meeting. 3) This one matches my experience too. With no ability to just bump into people or notice they're there, I do feel as if my team is the entire company. 4) No change. 5) Sort of the same, except I consider it to be a feature more than a draw. > All in all, I don’t see why techies are so eager to isolate themselves at home. To this, the answer is simple: autonomy. You get to choose your own environment, your own pace; you can protect your personal space. And, you reclaim the time you wasted on commute, which you get to spend on what you want. In my case, I'm getting 2 hours of my life back every day. Some people are getting more.