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I’m gonna go against the HN grain here and, despite having been fully for remote work for the first year or so of the pandemic, come out and say that life has r

I’m gonna go against the HN grain here and, despite having been fully for remote work for the first year or so of the pandemic, come out and say that life has really gotten a lot more repetitive and frankly disappointing since covid and the death of the office. I kind of miss meeting people in the office. I was in the unfortunate position of having moved to a new city for a new tech job where I knew nobody just seven months before the pandemic began and everything was shut down. I was making many friends both inside and outside the office before that time, but during and since the lockdowns I just feel like socializing has become so much harder and my days are just blurred together computer screens. I guess at this point I’m an extroverted introvert, whereas most of HN is very introverted or has pre-existing families/friends to socialize with. My company is hybrid at the moment and I’m actually writing this from the very empty office. Things just aren’t the same.

malandrew 5y ago
You need social hobbies on the weekend. I just wish weekends were three days so I got two days for hobbies and one day break for rest, errands and other life necessities.
- 09bjb 5y ago
  Cramming most socializing into whatever bits of free time are left after hobbies seems unlikely to work for most people.
- bradlys 5y ago
  Living for the weekend is an extremely draining way to live. I fucking hate it. As it stands - I live for 2-3 hours on Sundays if the weather is good because everything is closed and will be closed for another 6 fucking months. It's fucking horrific. I have to spend the rest of my week grinding away at meaningless drivel. Imagine actually spending 40+ hours/week around people and enjoying a significant amount of your interactions.
  - ThunderSizzle 5y ago
    Move to a place where things don't arbitrarily close for 6 months at a time if you don't like that?
jedberg 5y ago
Isn't that more an effect of your local social scene being shut down though, and not lack of commuting to an office? If all the local bars/clubs/libraries/whatever you like to do were open, wouldn't that solve the problem?
- jrockway 5y ago
  I always enjoyed the after-work drinking events. Lots of people there that I would never call up and ask "hey want to go to the bar?" but still enjoyed hanging out with. I guess it's not work's job to be your social life, and these after-work events exclude people with families or that don't like alcohol from valuable interactions... but ignoring the global effect, I personally enjoyed them. Now that everyone is remote, they don't happen, and you just have to put "fun" events on the team calendar. That's more fair, and almost as good, but I get why people miss that part of office culture.
  - jedberg 5y ago
    I did too. But I always felt bad when we made a work decision at the bar and then the folks who didn't come out with us didn't get a say and had an uphill battle if they didn't agree.
    - jrockway 5y ago
      Yup. I think that it probably falls on the side of "not good for the company", so it's not necessarily a bad thing that we can't do it anymore. Honestly, I think we mostly spent our time shit-talking people that weren't there, which isn't super healthy.
      - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
        > Honestly, I think we mostly spent our time shit-talking people that weren't there, which isn't super healthy. Honestly, I often feel like that shit-talking helps to keep people bonded over what can be pretty awful situations. I know that in my current job (to which I've given notice), I'd have loved to have a bunch of people from the office to talk to about it, and it might have lead to me staying longer. Hard to know for sure though.
ladyattis 5y ago
I must be odd because I prefer work from home despite feeling lonely at times. It's really hard to get people to focus on an issue when I talk to them because often they're making idle talk and I'm just not the kind of person for that. So in-office interactions for me are quite stressful when I'm trying to get work done.
nappy-doo 5y ago
How much of this is fixable though if you could have a normal social calendar? I don't think current circumstances offer a fair comparison.
- Ancalagon 5y ago
  true but I mean its been a year and a half since the first lockdowns...this kind of seems like it is the new normal, right?
  - chrismcb 5y ago
    No. It isn't. It will take another six months or a year but things will return to much like they were before. With the exception of the office. I don't think the office will ever be the same
  - munificent 5y ago
    The Spanish Flu was about three years, but it did end. We're not going to be like this forever.
- closeparen 5y ago
  A normal social calendar provides a few hours of interaction per week. That's important and healthy, but it's still a lot less than 40 hours of ambient presence. I think only sharing a household can substitute for that.
- tomtheelder 5y ago
  My social calendar is almost back to normal. I see friends most nights, I do all of my favorite hobbies again. The only things I don't do that I used to really are going to large events (concerts/sports events) and I travel less frequently on planes. WFH is still incredibly isolating for me. I feel disconnected from my work and from my peers. I was remote once before the pandemic and felt exactly the same way. I think most people would describe me as highly extroverted. I just don't get enough/diverse enough person to person contact to be happy when I'm at home working all day.
- pvarangot 5y ago
chrismcb 5y ago
Working from home during the pandemic is different than working from home during normal times
- tjr225 5y ago
  I had the same feelings working from home full time prior to the pandemic. The all-company meet ups were the best part about the job(other than the pay I guess). I actually took a job back with my prior employer with the hopes I could return to an office in some capacity, but we are all remote now. Boo!
  - nuerow 5y ago
    > The all-company meet ups were the best part about the job(other than the pay I guess). To each his own, but all-company meetups are the most god-awful type of event there is. The feigned enthusiasm about company stuff, self-promotions, office politics, elevator pitches, people patting their own backs, etc etc etc. All in all, a colosal waste of time and resources.
    - tjr225 5y ago
      Right, I typically hate them. But in the context of a fully remote job it is the only opportunity I have to spend time with my colleagues in the flesh. It is also the only opportunity I have to spend time with them _outside of my home_.
- jdavis703 5y ago
  I had a remote gig about a year before the pandemic. In some regards it was easier. But I always found remote work isolating and cross-team collaboration lacking. The isolation was semi-fixable with a WeWork. But there’s not really a good solution a line-level worker can do to improve collaboration if other folks don’t also want it. EDIT: I suppose the lack of collaboration could’ve also been company culture. Be cautious when the sample size is small.
jstx1 5y ago
Very similar situation here and I absolutely agree with you. Remote has been tough. My ideal set-up is fully in office with a walkable commute but I don't think it's happening quite yet.
- jlgray 5y ago
  This is the thing for me. If your company has a fully-stocked kitchen, quality chairs, monitors, adjustable desk, and noise cancelling headphones, it might be a comparable to a good home office setup in terms of comfort. What kills me though is commuting. All told, I spend 3-4 extra hours on days I go to the office, and that time comes out of my free time, effectively turning a 40 hour job into a 60 hour job.
rationalfaith 5y ago
Hey! Same here! Moved teams in same company and I feel so alone it's crazy! Many engineers are introverted and/or already have relationships they've built before covid hit. No matter how hard a i try to connect through the chat window, in just don't get the same reciprocation as I get from face to face. I've been coming to office to run into more ppl but alas, no one comes. So just as you, it's very lonely here and it's hard to get attached to work when you haven't met anyone face to face.
LudwigNagasena 5y ago
I think people like you need a new app, something like Tinder for lunch. I personally have no will to move to a high cost of life area and spend 1+ hour on commune just because my coworkers can’t find friends.
- torben-friis 5y ago
  Isn't meetup.com a thing worldwide? Also, the dating app Bumble has an option for friendships, and in a pinch tinder itself works if you're super clear about your goals
- Ancalagon 5y ago
  I fully understand this perspective and agree remote work should be the de facto norm. Remote works benefits on a productivity and environmental level do seem to outweigh the social benefits. I guess I was just commenting how much I miss organic interaction with like-minded smart people in the office, and how much duller my days have gotten without that.
  - auntienomen 5y ago
    Coworking is pretty good for this, and going to be amazing post-pandemic.
- samjbobb 5y ago
  I’ve been thinking about exactly this! I really miss the ‘low effort’ social interactions that in-office work provides. “Want to get lunch?” is one of those. Question: does this app already exist? Can I facilitate this in my life without building the app (easy part) and building a significant user base (hard part)?
  - cvhashim 5y ago
    Yeah I think bumble has a feature like that. Just for finding friends and such.
- Agingcoder 5y ago
taurath 5y ago
I think you're correct, but one thing that is really missing nowadays, especially with phones and the internet, is active communities that exist in real life outside of work. Stuff like the elks lodge, rotary, bowling leagues, etc are just not as common anymore as I believe they used to be. Certainly there are many things that exist, but in a way societally it seems like they don't have very much cache, even as far as for people to opine "only very lonely people go to those". I tend to think its a good thing for people to have a bit more distance from work, but if we don't figure out ways to fill in that social need, societally, people will find themselves feeling even more isolated than they have been.
- ironman1478 5y ago
  There is a book on this topic called "bowling alone" if you are interested. These observations are ones people were making pre-covid.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    I was going to recommend that as well. Am in the process of reading it, after a previous recommendation on HN. Or as the previous commenter quipped to a similar question 'Yes, Robert Putnam identified all these trends by the 80s and 90s, but nobody liked how gloomy he was about it.' Link: https://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Community/dp/0743203046 https://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Commu... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Putnam https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Putnam
    - randycupertino 5y ago
      Does Bowling Alone have any suggestions on how to create a "third space" for ourselves? Or is it more just identifying the phenomena?
      - null_shift 5y ago
        i am also very interested to know this as well. the absence of “irl” community is something i have thought a lot about over the years. seems nowadays most people hang out with either: 1. existing friends/family 2. coworkers 3. go online with wfh, you lose #2. if you are a transplant, or never had #1, that doesn’t leave you with any options. it seems inevitable that the future of socialization will be online and niche. and there will be a small minority that reject that trend and go “off the grid” to connect with nature. i’m interested to research these topics/themes more thoroughly, if anyone can recommend further reading.
eecc 5y ago
Well, I think one shouldn’t compare the sudden curfew/lockdown situation determined by COVID with the mores of a finely tuned social machine such as the office. Given enough time, people would start developing routines and habits around diffused WFH, invest and fine-tune in facilities and services to cater for such a customer base. Right now we have a lot of stakeholders that just held their breath hoping for a quick return to “normality”. Indeed, a different organization of our urban spaces would drastic reduce CO2 emissions and land consumption. We should think of it in terms of a sudden opportunity to overcome a local minimum we were stuck in, and search for a new optimum.
long_time_gone 5y ago
I fear it's another example of "optimizing" away something that made us more human (in this case, more in-person interaction).
- Ancalagon 5y ago
  Yeah this is another fear I have as well. Lots of the social interactions that made life better (albeit more difficult in some ways), were kind of automated away: dating, irl friends, etc.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  It is optimizing away time and resources wasted commuting. If people wanted to interact in person, they can do things in their community outside of work.
- nuerow 5y ago
  > I fear it's another example of "optimizing" away something that made us more human (in this case, more in-person interaction). I disagree. If anything, WFH optimizes away unhealthy work/life imbalances that force people to become mindless company drones whose personal life is eaten away by a corporation. Our life is not the long commute, the social order imposed by a company hierarchy, the petty office politics, the optional-in-name-only-but-actually-mandatory professional events which maskerade as company social get-togethers, etc etc. That's something people are forced to endure because they are imposed by the circumstances of office life. If anything, WFH forces a healthy separation and distancing from inane and outright unhealthy aspects of office life, and it's sad to see how the amount of life and personal time and the opportunity to pursuit your own interests that it eats away is somehow being depicted as a negative tradeoff. You are your own person, not a mindless company drone. Your life is not dictated by the context of your professional life. Mixing both is terribly unhealthy. Much like alcoholism, just because people use it as an excuse to fill in voids in their life that does not make it any healthier or even desirable.
  - long_time_gone 5y ago
    > You are your own person, not a mindless company drone. Your life is not dictated by the context of your professional life. Mixing both is terribly unhealthy. Much like alcoholism, just because people use it as an excuse to fill in voids in their life that does not make it any healthier or even desirable. Seems like my simple suggestion struck a nerve. The idea that while WFH can be beneficial to global society, but still represent a decrease in human socialization isn't really groundbreaking or controversial. Right now, we have the highest rates of WFH in history and also historical levels of loneliness and depression. All three of these trends were happening pre-COVID. We don't have to make sweeping comparisons to completely unrelated illnesses (alcoholism) to see that people are generally not replacing the socialization found in the office with socialization at home. When I was in the office socializing with my co-workers/friends, I didn't consider it being a "mindless company drone", I thought of it as being a human with historically human social interactions. You clearly don't (or didn't) like those interactions, but you aren't everyone. One size doesn't fit all.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Your perspective is actually very common: Working from home isn't for everyone and we should stop pretending like it's the only way to work. A lot of people dislike remote work. Many people like remote work but can't handle it for various reasons. Internet forums like HN will always overrepresent preferences for remote work because they're biased toward people who enjoy socializing over the internet. Most people don't go online and engage in random discussions. They do it in person, and they like it that way. A random sampling of active HN commenters is going to be much more enthusiastic about remote work than, say, your average junior who relies heavily on organic interactions to grow in an organization.
- true_religion 5y ago
  I don’t think there is any need to defend in person work. Until very recently it was the only socially accepted form of work. As the default, we all have a little experience in it.
  - snek_case 5y ago
    > I don’t think there is any need to defend in person work. There is a need to defend it though. I've already seen several businesses claim that remote work is "the future". Personally, I feel that remote work has been very detrimental to my mental health and I hate it. I don't want that future. It feels very unhealthy.
    - andrei_says_ 5y ago
      For me, the isolation of the pandemic was detrimental to mental health but the remote work has been incredibly positive. Is it possible that these two circumstances are overlapping in your case? Do you miss the commute and sitting in an office (on-location work) or do you miss speaking with people (socialization)?
      - snek_case 5y ago
        I had structured my life so that I could walk to work every day, so the short commute was actually some very welcome exercise. I miss having lunch with coworkers the most. There's some natural bonding and trust building that happened over lunch, talking about random things, both work and not work related. This is very hard and possibly impossible to replicate with remote work. With remote work, meetings are scheduled for a reason. Meeting just to "hang out" feels weird. Multi-user meetings with more than a few people also feel off because everyone is interrupting each other, you can't have multiple threads of conversation. Talking on slack, you usually can't tell how the person is feeling. The tone is lost. I've found communication is generally much poorer.
eunoia 5y ago
Very similar situation, relocated to the Bay for work a few months before the first shelter in place. It’s been rough. Don’t have any real advice, but at least know you’re not alone. Edit: I think it’s important to focus on where we go from here. And at least to me that actually means more remote. I would rather be able to work remotely from amongst my existing support network than attempt to roll back the clock to a pre-COVID style of office work. To each their own.
outworlder 5y ago
> I’m gonna go against the HN grain here and, despite having been fully for remote work for the first year or so of the pandemic, come out and say that life has really gotten a lot more repetitive and frankly disappointing since covid and the death of the office. I kind of miss meeting people in the office. There's a big difference between 'remote work' and 'forced to work from home due to a global pandemic'.
pineconebutt 5y ago
I agree with you. I worked remotely for two years pre-pandemic. Never again.
ravenstine 5y ago
Have you wondered why your life on its own is repetitive and disappointing? Would you be making the same positive statement about working in an office if you didn't have the option of working remote?
- Ancalagon 5y ago
  Yes, I have. I have started to question whether its maybe a personality flaw of my own, or a real lack of interest in my career choice. All I do know is it feels less fulfilling now than it did before the lockdowns.
mint2 5y ago
Wfh really disrupted the days cues that indicate time and serve as reminders and habit triggers. Wfh is great for some people, but I also find it monotonous and reduces daily variety amongst a number of other not great attributes more work related. My ideal is a 2-3 day in the office. Different options work better for different people.
agumonkey 5y ago
I think this is gonna be a good re-evaluation of what work / office is. commuting is horrendous for some, workplace social life can be too but for some it's fine and needed I think it can lead to a rebalancing effect.
foobiekr 5y ago
I went to the office to work the other day for the first time since February 20th, 2020. It was great. So quiet, open, well lit, great and comfortable desk and chair, .. Obviously, I could improve my home office, but in reality my home office is taking space that I otherwise was using before 2/20 and now there's a whole space in my home that is allocated to being a work station instead of what it was before. A few other people came in, and it was great to talk in person in front of a giant whiteboard.
- dboreham 5y ago
  I can't think of a single job I've had where the lighting, desk and chair were remotely as good as I have at home.
  - ketzo 5y ago
    That’s fair, but I think you have to acknowledge that the total opposite will be true for many, probably most, people. There’s a reason that “stop working at the kitchen counter” is, like, its own cottage industry of online writing. People mostly have really bad wfh setups, even people in tech.
    - mikro2nd 5y ago
      Not sure... It seems likely to me that people who've been forced to work from home during the Covid pandemic tend to have crap office-space because it's only temporary. In contrast, people who have made a conscious decision/choice to work from home (as I've done for over 25 years, now) proceed by setting up a proper work space. (Along with developing good work-hygiene like keeping office hours sharply separate from personal time, keeping work in the office and not letting it spill over into the lounge, kitchen, etc.) Main point: there's a marked (mental, emotional) difference between "this is a temporary emergency" and "this is the way I work (forever)".
  - faangthrowawa 5y ago
    I used to flat share in London with some other people in tech. Pandemic WFH setup was the taking turns on the one couch (and floor) for a long time.
pimterry 5y ago
Coworking is a really great solution to this. You can have all the human contact and "it's 6pm - want to go for a beer?" easy socializing that you get from being in a busy office, but simultaneously keep almost all the flexibility and the lack-of-constraints of working from home (...almost - there's usually an expectation that you wear clothes). In many ways it's even better than office social contact: it decouples that socializing from your job. Want to change company, but keep hanging out with the same people every day? Want to switch offices and meet a whole new social circle without changing jobs? Want to go out from the office for a drink after work with your 'colleagues' with no need to avoid personal topics or keep things professional with your boss? It does require leaving the house, but for almost everybody there is a coworking space that's significantly quicker to get to you than your current office would be. If you're in a major urban center, you probably have 10s or 100s to choose from. For me, it's a dramatic improvement on both the alternatives.
- benhurmarcel 5y ago
  It’s way too expensive for most people though.
- mmmpop 5y ago
  Agreed 100%. My job is 1000 miles away but I have a cohort of folks at the coworking space that keep me sane. This is probably more like the "future of work" especially in my small mountain town.
- stef25 5y ago
  > Coworking It's not cheap but I do love it. Nicest offices I've ever worked in, never obliged to talk to anyone.
- stevage 5y ago
  I have tried this but struggled to find people in coworking spaces that I wanted to socialise with. The one time it has worked was when friends who worked in the same niche sector would sometimes all cowork at a cafe for a day. Maybe once a month. That was incredible. We were expected to be in our offices most of the time though.
onion2k 5y ago
... has pre-existing families/friends to socialize with. It's easy to believe the people you work with are friends to socialize with, but the reality is that most people cut ties with their coworkers as soon as they change job, especially early in your career when you're hopping from one job to another every few years. Those people are temporary friends at best. I recommend doing everything you can to cultivate friendships outside of work.
- smoe 5y ago
  I'm in regular contact with people from almost every job I had in the last 15 years. Turns out, coworkers are humans and can have the same outside work interest as me. Be that music, board games, cooking, reading, hiking, etc. Sure, most people from previous work I don't have any contact with. Same is true for most people I met outside work. Friends can come from everywhere, I don't see a reason to pre-filter.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gwright 5y ago
  > but the reality is that most people cut ties with their coworkers I dislike this type of comment as it presumes that one person's personal experience is "reality" or a reasonable representation of what everyone else has experienced. It assumes that something as complicated as personal relationships can be can be distilled down into some sort of "average" or "normal" protocol and that if your experience doesn't align, then you are an outlier, not-average, not-normal. I don't think the concept of "average" or "normal" is particularly useful for something as multi-dimensional as establishing personal relationships. Some of my longest and best friends are people I met in my first job after college.
  - nuerow 5y ago
    > I dislike this type of comment as it presumes that one person's personal experience is "reality" or a reasonable representation of what everyone else has experienced. GP is spot on, though, and there is absolutely no way around it. Relationships with most coworkers is motivated and defined by work circumstances. The only reason you found yourselves sharing a space and a schedule and experiences is the fact that someone pays you to be there, but otherwise you would be doing something else somewhere else with someone else. More importantly, if any of you switches jobs, your time and focus and sometimes even city or country will change. Even though professional relationships can flourish into personal relationships, the vast majority and the norm is that the only reason you're even aware you exist is that you want that paycheck and consequently you have to deal with each other.
nobodyandproud 5y ago
I’m an introvert with a family and I still miss the office. No, it’s not about getting away from the family. I never want to fall into a 5 times a week schedule again, but I miss the background discussions; commute; and energy that is involved in getting ready for work.
odiroot 5y ago
> remote work for the first year or so of the pandemic, come out and say that life has really gotten a lot more repetitive and frankly disappointing since covid I'm not surprised, because not only offices "died", but everything else did too. Many people used to work remotely before that. But we always could jump out for a lunch with our friends in a restaurant. Or take a break and go to the gym. Or meet in board games cafe after work, go to the cinema, a swimming pool or wine tasting. Now, corona made it all go away. It was never about the office itself but the whole life as we knew it.
crandycodes 5y ago
For me, I never really made friends in the office, but I did make friends from the office and my profession from outside of the office activities. Conferences, education, meetups, big morale events. These things have stopped, for me, since the pandemic, so I've not made any new friends this way. I'm full-time remote now, and moved away from the west coast, but I expect I'll still do conferences and the big morale events. I've not explored the meetup scene here, but I am hoping to also make some friends doing non-tech activities finally, since my new area is less tech focused.
cwp 5y ago
As others have noted, we're in a pandemic, so everything is off. Even in places that don't have lockdowns or mandates, people are going to be cautious about socializing. I'm convinced, though, that when the pandemic fades away, we'll see a bifurcation of working styles. The office offers in-person relationships, high-bandwidth communication, and a well-understood management paradigm, at the cost of forcing everybody to live near the office and spend a lot of time commuting. Full-remote offers the ability to live anywhere and no commutes, but shallower relationships and not-very-well understood modes of communication and collaboration. Hybrid offers... not much, as far as I can tell. It's the downsides of in-office and remote. The best you can say about it is that you get to see people in person sometimes and can avoid commuting sometimes. :-/ So we'll see a grand sorting where people that want to be remote find the companies that will let them do that, and the people that want things to go back to normal find the companies that also want that. Then the remote companies spend the next 50 years learning how to really do distributed work, rather than just "like an office, but on Slack and Zoom".
Gibbon1 5y ago
I actually like working in my office. However. My commute to the office is 10 minutes. We have actual offices with doors. So the whole experience is civilized and low stress. My theory is what wrong with offices today has everything to do with managers need to exert power and feel in control. And things being run for the convenience of upper managers. They all live close to work, have offices with doors. None of this actually considers the companies bottom line. Seriously you pay an code monkey a shitload of money then have him work under the worst work environment short of running heavy machinery next to them.
Aaargh20318 5y ago
> life has really gotten a lot more repetitive (…) since covid and the death of the office. I agree, and it’s awesome.
SergeAx 5y ago
Funny that I am a strong pro-office, but I think that maybe you miss people per se, and not particular coworkers. Also lack of environment variety, combined with inability to travel.
kemiller 5y ago
I think everyone agrees that being in the office, all things being equal, is better for collaborative work. It's just all the not-equal externalities (especially commuting and high real estate prices near good jobs) that make it suck.
- jamesfinlayson 5y ago
  Yeah I've been working from home for a couple of weeks after being back at work three days a week for a long while now - I've found myself missing the office and getting frustrated with phone calls or chats being poor substitutes for face to face conversations. Working from home part of the week is nice but doing it all week becomes a drag.
xwdv 5y ago
Great, so not only does work provide you with money and healthcare, it also has to provide a social circle? Pretty soon will we look toward companies to provide us with a suitable life partner too? And housing? The point of remote work is to make your work hours very efficient so you have more time away from work to live your actual life.
lamontcg 5y ago
Sounds like the problem is that our social involvement outside of work is totally broken and we make our lives revolve around our work, and think that's entirely normal.
- cbtacy 5y ago
  mic drop
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- nine_zeros 5y ago
  This is the truth. We are asking our work life to substitute for our lack of family of social life. Younger generations are losing their social skills faster than they realize.
void_mint 5y ago
> I’m gonna go against the HN grain here and, despite having been fully for remote work for the first year or so of the pandemic, come out and say that life has really gotten a lot more repetitive and frankly disappointing since covid and the death of the office. I kind of miss meeting people in the office. I'm sorry you're having a tough time with it. That sounds really unpleasant. > My company is hybrid at the moment and I’m actually writing this from the very empty office. Things just aren’t the same. Ignoring the pandemic, it sounds like the people at your company just don't agree that in-person work is necessary for them to get what they need out of their employment. The issue is either side attempting to force its preferred working conditions on the other. aka the solution isn't to make all of those people that don't want to be in an office come in again, but instead for you to find companies/circles that have people with similar interests as you. Being around people that don't want to be around you is unpleasant for both sides.
cbtacy 5y ago
It's clearly very hard for folks who have come to rely upon their workplace as their venue for social interaction, and their co-worker pool as their source for social relationships. But to be clear, once upon a time (back in the long long ago), it was seen as unhealthy to mix your work relationships and your personal friendships. So it's possible for all of us to learn how to develop relationships and friendships that don't rely upon the forced proximity of an office. Things like shared activities, social organizations, etc are a good starting point.
knappe 5y ago
This is not a failure of remote work. :) When you work remotely you have to be very deliberate with socialization as well, since you don't get that for free when you're not in the office. I've been remote for 10+ years and I can assure you that this side of things is harder and you have to take deliberate steps to build socialization into your schedule. I do this with tech meetups, board games and cycling specifically using Meetup to attend events.
lkrubner 5y ago
I've said this before on Hacker News, and now I wish to repeat, if you live in New York City, I host a once-a-month party, mostly for tech people. Very informal. You can get the vibe from the photos here: http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/everyone-was-amazing-and-youre-awesome http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/everyone-was-amazing-... It's simply meant to give people a chance to meet other like minded people. Especially in this era of working-from-home it is too easy to end up feeling isolated, so hosting a regular party like this is, I think, a non-stressful way for people to connect. I mentioned this 78 days ago and 6 people from Hacker News have been attending the most recent 3 parties: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27952414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27952414 You can text me at 434 825 7694
- coded 5y ago
  This is great on so many levels. That’s a great model that would work well in almost any town. I’d definitely go if I was in New York. Well done!
- d3nj4l 5y ago
  Just out of concern for your mobile, you should put a challenge for your phone number at least. There's a ton of scrapers out there that pick up phone numbers and automatically add you to spam call lists and the like. As for the invitation, unfortunately not in New York (or the States), but if I'm ever around I'd probably love to join.
  - lkrubner 5y ago
    My cell phone number hasn't changed since March of 2001 and I've had it listed on my personal weblog since April of 2001. I also list it in my Twitter bio: https://twitter.com/krubner https://twitter.com/krubner In 20 years I've never had a problem. If you ever visit NYC, please reach out.
- vecinu 5y ago
  Very cool, would have loved for this to happen around LA/San Diego. Thanks for setting this up!
- 5y ago
soylentnewsorg 5y ago
Here's the thing though: you should not socialize with anyone at the office. The healthiest thing anyone can do for their career is to not mix work and friends. Once you're friends, you're sharing political opinions, life stories, and religious views. People pick up on that, and while you might be pleasing one guy, you're pissing off someone else. No matter your stance on something, you're going to be pissing off someone. Work is for work - not a social life. Yes, it's easy to make friends at work because like in middle school, you're forced together and don't need to break the ice. Very tempting - very bad for the career. What is good for both the career and getting friends is maintaining contact with compatible people from the office once you're out of there, and becoming friends with those people. That works. Now, as far as missing simple human contact while you're at the office - I fully understand that. The problem is, you're forced into that human contact. That's probably healthy, but here's what I do: take a trip for groceries every other day and buy things fresh. Walk around, look for deals, take a full hour. Believe it or not, that alone is enough, as long as you keep doing it. The best part of being remote is you can do that smack in the middle of the day, take a little break from work and break that day up into two smaller parts - not when you're tired after a workday. I do live with my wife though, so maybe don't need as much human contact. But using work for socializing in the office - ugh.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  I think this made more sense in the past when people were holding onto a job for 15 years or maybe jobs in which you won't be able to find an alternative. Nowadays, jobs in tech rarely last more than 4 years and the worst that can happen is that you get a salary increase and change job. I wouldn't skip on work socialisation just out of fear. It's a nice perk to have.
  - soylentnewsorg 5y ago
    lol "worst that can happen from socializing with coworkers is you'll have to get a different job" right. the worst that can happen if I take a nice fat dump into my dinner plate is I'll have to get a new dinner plate. it's not fear. it's being at work to do work and get paid being the number one reason to even bother working. and if you're not there to work, why not be at a rock concert instead. with some friends.
jader201 5y ago
Be sure you don’t mix work from home and COVID. I see many people try and combine these, saying that the current state sucks, therefore WFH sucks. I’m not saying WFH wouldn’t otherwise suck for you/others, but it’s really hard to separate these two to figure out how different WFH would be without COVID, unless in your particular area, they’ve gone back to business as usual (which I don’t think anywhere truly has, yet). But in a world where more companies are WFH, and COVID has much less of an impact on everyday life, I think WFH will look a lot different. Again, my point isn’t that WFH is the greatest thing for everyone and every company, just saying that people that are just now WFH due to COVID should wait until COVID is mostly uneventful before declaring WFH a failure.
felipellrocha 5y ago
The groundhog effect. I tried working remotely almost a decade ago and realized I hated it because of that. As soon as covid started I knew I was going to hate it. Not sure everyone else is feeling the same, and it scares me.
Sophistifunk 5y ago
The answer isn't to force people to come into the fishbowl to be watched, the answer is to judge employees by output and for us to build alternative places to socialise.
andrei_says_ 5y ago
To me this is more about work eating life and less about office vs wfh. I just visited Europe this fall and people hang out together practically all the time. Every evening. Families with kids get together and effortlessly spend time while the kids entertain each other. This is the norm. The sense that I don't get enough socialization via work is a serious symptom that I need to nurture real friendships and communities in life.
- nuerow 5y ago
  > The sense that I don't get enough socialization via work is a serious symptom that I need to nurture real friendships and communities in life. This is precisely the take I get from all the comments on how WFH supposedly causes social isolation. WFH causes nothing of the sort: people simply seem to be socially isolated by default but relied on work and office life to fill in their personal socialization void. I've noticed the same thing regarding health and sedentarism: if you rely on your commute to the office to do any form of physical exercise then you already have a major problem, and what your blaming WFH for is just a problem that was already there to begin with. People have personal needs, and it's simply not healthy to fool ourselves into believing that office life is the solution to meeting each and all of those personal needs.
29athrowaway 5y ago
Your office friends will forget you from the very moment either of you switch jobs.
Dumblydorr 5y ago
You moved to NYC right before the lockdowns, before the huge initial outbreak, it's safe to say that living in a tiny NYC apartment is supposed to have compensation in the lifestyle of NYC. I'd be depressed if my location's main attraction got destroyed by the pandemic.
wisty 5y ago
People seem to be completely ignorant of the theory of the firm - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm It's a bit of a straw man I'm making, but a lot of people seem to say "I do fantastic work, my company doesn't need to control me, just recognise the fantastic work I do! Let me just work from home and keep up my fantastic work!" It's already well discussed in the "theory of the firm" in economics. Why do firms hire employees, rather than just contractors? Why do workers not want to all be freelancers? A lot of the arguments about "presenteeism" seem to veer into acting like their company wants to essentially have all the overhead of managing freelancers, and to have employees jump through all the hoops freelancing involves, which is obviously not what (most) people want in the first place.
qwerty456127 5y ago
Going to the office is a broken way of making friends. There should be better places for this.
basisword 5y ago
You've been remote during a global pandemic. That is not normal remote working. Nobody has enjoyed it or found it easy. It sounds like it came at a bad time for you too after moving - that must have been difficult. I find almost all arguments against remote working seem to based on bad experiences in the last year that are potentially conflating remote work with the pandemic. Sure, some people may truly hate remote work. However, I have quite a few friends who despised it and now that we're back to normal (in the UK) have actually decided they don't want to go back to the office. The commute time + cost of commute is just not worth it. It's equivalent to a sudden pay cut to have to commute again and a pretty significant one at that. Getting your regular social life back makes a huge difference to quality of life when remote working. For most places this hasn't happened yet. As another anecdotal example there were a loud minority crying out for us to get back to the office at my company. They wanted to be allowed in before all the equipment was back they were so desperate. One person is back full time. About 2-5 others come in once a week on the day the company has started buying lunch. I think a lot of people did want to come back but as the office opened up with the rest of society they've found they don't actually need it for a social life. I bet that in 12 months the company moves to buying a hot desk in a co-working space for the 1-5 people who want to come in and I would bet that within 24 months there's a greater than 50% chance nobody is coming in anymore because the social life they wanted through the office is gone.
wsc981 5y ago
Life is what you make of it. Also, I guess working remotely doesn't fit everyone's personality. But I've been working remotely 4 years now and there's no way I will ever be going back into the office. As a matter of fact, I plan to buy a condo near the beach maybe end of this year or start of next year. This condo will eventually be my office, but now it will just be for holidays. It will have a nice olympic size swimming pool and a nice assortment of restaurants next to a beach road. The beach road will be nice to walk daily one or two times (at night seeing the sun go down into the sea). The swimming pool will be nice for a little break and exercise in the afternoon. For me this setup will be perfect. My current setup is not perfect since I work from home and still have distractions from my girlfriend (e.g. cleaning the room, calling out for food and small shopping chores, etc...). I thrive when I am in a space with zero distractions and I hope to have this space in the future in the form of my very own condo office :)

malandrew 5y ago

You need social hobbies on the weekend. I just wish weekends were three days so I got two days for hobbies and one day break for rest, errands and other life necessities.

09bjb 5y ago
Cramming most socializing into whatever bits of free time are left after hobbies seems unlikely to work for most people.
bradlys 5y ago
Living for the weekend is an extremely draining way to live. I fucking hate it. As it stands - I live for 2-3 hours on Sundays if the weather is good because everything is closed and will be closed for another 6 fucking months. It's fucking horrific. I have to spend the rest of my week grinding away at meaningless drivel. Imagine actually spending 40+ hours/week around people and enjoying a significant amount of your interactions.
- ThunderSizzle 5y ago
  Move to a place where things don't arbitrarily close for 6 months at a time if you don't like that?

jedberg 5y ago

Isn't that more an effect of your local social scene being shut down though, and not lack of commuting to an office? If all the local bars/clubs/libraries/whatever you like to do were open, wouldn't that solve the problem?

jrockway 5y ago
I always enjoyed the after-work drinking events. Lots of people there that I would never call up and ask "hey want to go to the bar?" but still enjoyed hanging out with. I guess it's not work's job to be your social life, and these after-work events exclude people with families or that don't like alcohol from valuable interactions... but ignoring the global effect, I personally enjoyed them. Now that everyone is remote, they don't happen, and you just have to put "fun" events on the team calendar. That's more fair, and almost as good, but I get why people miss that part of office culture.
- jedberg 5y ago
  I did too. But I always felt bad when we made a work decision at the bar and then the folks who didn't come out with us didn't get a say and had an uphill battle if they didn't agree.
  - jrockway 5y ago
    Yup. I think that it probably falls on the side of "not good for the company", so it's not necessarily a bad thing that we can't do it anymore. Honestly, I think we mostly spent our time shit-talking people that weren't there, which isn't super healthy.
    - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
      > Honestly, I think we mostly spent our time shit-talking people that weren't there, which isn't super healthy. Honestly, I often feel like that shit-talking helps to keep people bonded over what can be pretty awful situations. I know that in my current job (to which I've given notice), I'd have loved to have a bunch of people from the office to talk to about it, and it might have lead to me staying longer. Hard to know for sure though.

ladyattis 5y ago

I must be odd because I prefer work from home despite feeling lonely at times. It's really hard to get people to focus on an issue when I talk to them because often they're making idle talk and I'm just not the kind of person for that. So in-office interactions for me are quite stressful when I'm trying to get work done.

nappy-doo 5y ago

How much of this is fixable though if you could have a normal social calendar? I don't think current circumstances offer a fair comparison.

Ancalagon 5y ago
true but I mean its been a year and a half since the first lockdowns...this kind of seems like it is the new normal, right?
- chrismcb 5y ago
  No. It isn't. It will take another six months or a year but things will return to much like they were before. With the exception of the office. I don't think the office will ever be the same
- munificent 5y ago
  The Spanish Flu was about three years, but it did end. We're not going to be like this forever.
closeparen 5y ago
A normal social calendar provides a few hours of interaction per week. That's important and healthy, but it's still a lot less than 40 hours of ambient presence. I think only sharing a household can substitute for that.
tomtheelder 5y ago
My social calendar is almost back to normal. I see friends most nights, I do all of my favorite hobbies again. The only things I don't do that I used to really are going to large events (concerts/sports events) and I travel less frequently on planes. WFH is still incredibly isolating for me. I feel disconnected from my work and from my peers. I was remote once before the pandemic and felt exactly the same way. I think most people would describe me as highly extroverted. I just don't get enough/diverse enough person to person contact to be happy when I'm at home working all day.
pvarangot 5y ago

chrismcb 5y ago

Working from home during the pandemic is different than working from home during normal times

tjr225 5y ago
I had the same feelings working from home full time prior to the pandemic. The all-company meet ups were the best part about the job(other than the pay I guess). I actually took a job back with my prior employer with the hopes I could return to an office in some capacity, but we are all remote now. Boo!
- nuerow 5y ago
  > The all-company meet ups were the best part about the job(other than the pay I guess). To each his own, but all-company meetups are the most god-awful type of event there is. The feigned enthusiasm about company stuff, self-promotions, office politics, elevator pitches, people patting their own backs, etc etc etc. All in all, a colosal waste of time and resources.
  - tjr225 5y ago
    Right, I typically hate them. But in the context of a fully remote job it is the only opportunity I have to spend time with my colleagues in the flesh. It is also the only opportunity I have to spend time with them _outside of my home_.
jdavis703 5y ago
I had a remote gig about a year before the pandemic. In some regards it was easier. But I always found remote work isolating and cross-team collaboration lacking. The isolation was semi-fixable with a WeWork. But there’s not really a good solution a line-level worker can do to improve collaboration if other folks don’t also want it. EDIT: I suppose the lack of collaboration could’ve also been company culture. Be cautious when the sample size is small.

jstx1 5y ago

Very similar situation here and I absolutely agree with you. Remote has been tough. My ideal set-up is fully in office with a walkable commute but I don't think it's happening quite yet.

jlgray 5y ago
This is the thing for me. If your company has a fully-stocked kitchen, quality chairs, monitors, adjustable desk, and noise cancelling headphones, it might be a comparable to a good home office setup in terms of comfort. What kills me though is commuting. All told, I spend 3-4 extra hours on days I go to the office, and that time comes out of my free time, effectively turning a 40 hour job into a 60 hour job.

rationalfaith 5y ago

Hey! Same here! Moved teams in same company and I feel so alone it's crazy! Many engineers are introverted and/or already have relationships they've built before covid hit. No matter how hard a i try to connect through the chat window, in just don't get the same reciprocation as I get from face to face. I've been coming to office to run into more ppl but alas, no one comes. So just as you, it's very lonely here and it's hard to get attached to work when you haven't met anyone face to face.

LudwigNagasena 5y ago

I think people like you need a new app, something like Tinder for lunch. I personally have no will to move to a high cost of life area and spend 1+ hour on commune just because my coworkers can’t find friends.

torben-friis 5y ago
Isn't meetup.com a thing worldwide? Also, the dating app Bumble has an option for friendships, and in a pinch tinder itself works if you're super clear about your goals
Ancalagon 5y ago
I fully understand this perspective and agree remote work should be the de facto norm. Remote works benefits on a productivity and environmental level do seem to outweigh the social benefits. I guess I was just commenting how much I miss organic interaction with like-minded smart people in the office, and how much duller my days have gotten without that.
- auntienomen 5y ago
  Coworking is pretty good for this, and going to be amazing post-pandemic.
samjbobb 5y ago
I’ve been thinking about exactly this! I really miss the ‘low effort’ social interactions that in-office work provides. “Want to get lunch?” is one of those. Question: does this app already exist? Can I facilitate this in my life without building the app (easy part) and building a significant user base (hard part)?
- cvhashim 5y ago
  Yeah I think bumble has a feature like that. Just for finding friends and such.
Agingcoder 5y ago

taurath 5y ago

I think you're correct, but one thing that is really missing nowadays, especially with phones and the internet, is active communities that exist in real life outside of work. Stuff like the elks lodge, rotary, bowling leagues, etc are just not as common anymore as I believe they used to be. Certainly there are many things that exist, but in a way societally it seems like they don't have very much cache, even as far as for people to opine "only very lonely people go to those". I tend to think its a good thing for people to have a bit more distance from work, but if we don't figure out ways to fill in that social need, societally, people will find themselves feeling even more isolated than they have been.

ironman1478 5y ago
There is a book on this topic called "bowling alone" if you are interested. These observations are ones people were making pre-covid.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  I was going to recommend that as well. Am in the process of reading it, after a previous recommendation on HN. Or as the previous commenter quipped to a similar question 'Yes, Robert Putnam identified all these trends by the 80s and 90s, but nobody liked how gloomy he was about it.' Link: https://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Community/dp/0743203046 https://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Commu... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Putnam https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Putnam
  - randycupertino 5y ago
    Does Bowling Alone have any suggestions on how to create a "third space" for ourselves? Or is it more just identifying the phenomena?
    - null_shift 5y ago
      i am also very interested to know this as well. the absence of “irl” community is something i have thought a lot about over the years. seems nowadays most people hang out with either: 1. existing friends/family 2. coworkers 3. go online with wfh, you lose #2. if you are a transplant, or never had #1, that doesn’t leave you with any options. it seems inevitable that the future of socialization will be online and niche. and there will be a small minority that reject that trend and go “off the grid” to connect with nature. i’m interested to research these topics/themes more thoroughly, if anyone can recommend further reading.

eecc 5y ago

Well, I think one shouldn’t compare the sudden curfew/lockdown situation determined by COVID with the mores of a finely tuned social machine such as the office. Given enough time, people would start developing routines and habits around diffused WFH, invest and fine-tune in facilities and services to cater for such a customer base. Right now we have a lot of stakeholders that just held their breath hoping for a quick return to “normality”. Indeed, a different organization of our urban spaces would drastic reduce CO2 emissions and land consumption. We should think of it in terms of a sudden opportunity to overcome a local minimum we were stuck in, and search for a new optimum.

long_time_gone 5y ago

I fear it's another example of "optimizing" away something that made us more human (in this case, more in-person interaction).

Ancalagon 5y ago
Yeah this is another fear I have as well. Lots of the social interactions that made life better (albeit more difficult in some ways), were kind of automated away: dating, irl friends, etc.
lotsofpulp 5y ago
It is optimizing away time and resources wasted commuting. If people wanted to interact in person, they can do things in their community outside of work.
nuerow 5y ago
> I fear it's another example of "optimizing" away something that made us more human (in this case, more in-person interaction). I disagree. If anything, WFH optimizes away unhealthy work/life imbalances that force people to become mindless company drones whose personal life is eaten away by a corporation. Our life is not the long commute, the social order imposed by a company hierarchy, the petty office politics, the optional-in-name-only-but-actually-mandatory professional events which maskerade as company social get-togethers, etc etc. That's something people are forced to endure because they are imposed by the circumstances of office life. If anything, WFH forces a healthy separation and distancing from inane and outright unhealthy aspects of office life, and it's sad to see how the amount of life and personal time and the opportunity to pursuit your own interests that it eats away is somehow being depicted as a negative tradeoff. You are your own person, not a mindless company drone. Your life is not dictated by the context of your professional life. Mixing both is terribly unhealthy. Much like alcoholism, just because people use it as an excuse to fill in voids in their life that does not make it any healthier or even desirable.
- long_time_gone 5y ago
  > You are your own person, not a mindless company drone. Your life is not dictated by the context of your professional life. Mixing both is terribly unhealthy. Much like alcoholism, just because people use it as an excuse to fill in voids in their life that does not make it any healthier or even desirable. Seems like my simple suggestion struck a nerve. The idea that while WFH can be beneficial to global society, but still represent a decrease in human socialization isn't really groundbreaking or controversial. Right now, we have the highest rates of WFH in history and also historical levels of loneliness and depression. All three of these trends were happening pre-COVID. We don't have to make sweeping comparisons to completely unrelated illnesses (alcoholism) to see that people are generally not replacing the socialization found in the office with socialization at home. When I was in the office socializing with my co-workers/friends, I didn't consider it being a "mindless company drone", I thought of it as being a human with historically human social interactions. You clearly don't (or didn't) like those interactions, but you aren't everyone. One size doesn't fit all.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

Your perspective is actually very common: Working from home isn't for everyone and we should stop pretending like it's the only way to work. A lot of people dislike remote work. Many people like remote work but can't handle it for various reasons. Internet forums like HN will always overrepresent preferences for remote work because they're biased toward people who enjoy socializing over the internet. Most people don't go online and engage in random discussions. They do it in person, and they like it that way. A random sampling of active HN commenters is going to be much more enthusiastic about remote work than, say, your average junior who relies heavily on organic interactions to grow in an organization.

true_religion 5y ago
I don’t think there is any need to defend in person work. Until very recently it was the only socially accepted form of work. As the default, we all have a little experience in it.
- snek_case 5y ago
  > I don’t think there is any need to defend in person work. There is a need to defend it though. I've already seen several businesses claim that remote work is "the future". Personally, I feel that remote work has been very detrimental to my mental health and I hate it. I don't want that future. It feels very unhealthy.
  - andrei_says_ 5y ago
    For me, the isolation of the pandemic was detrimental to mental health but the remote work has been incredibly positive. Is it possible that these two circumstances are overlapping in your case? Do you miss the commute and sitting in an office (on-location work) or do you miss speaking with people (socialization)?
    - snek_case 5y ago
      I had structured my life so that I could walk to work every day, so the short commute was actually some very welcome exercise. I miss having lunch with coworkers the most. There's some natural bonding and trust building that happened over lunch, talking about random things, both work and not work related. This is very hard and possibly impossible to replicate with remote work. With remote work, meetings are scheduled for a reason. Meeting just to "hang out" feels weird. Multi-user meetings with more than a few people also feel off because everyone is interrupting each other, you can't have multiple threads of conversation. Talking on slack, you usually can't tell how the person is feeling. The tone is lost. I've found communication is generally much poorer.

eunoia 5y ago

Very similar situation, relocated to the Bay for work a few months before the first shelter in place. It’s been rough. Don’t have any real advice, but at least know you’re not alone. Edit: I think it’s important to focus on where we go from here. And at least to me that actually means more remote. I would rather be able to work remotely from amongst my existing support network than attempt to roll back the clock to a pre-COVID style of office work. To each their own.

outworlder 5y ago

pineconebutt 5y ago

I agree with you. I worked remotely for two years pre-pandemic. Never again.

ravenstine 5y ago

Have you wondered why your life on its own is repetitive and disappointing? Would you be making the same positive statement about working in an office if you didn't have the option of working remote?

Ancalagon 5y ago
Yes, I have. I have started to question whether its maybe a personality flaw of my own, or a real lack of interest in my career choice. All I do know is it feels less fulfilling now than it did before the lockdowns.

mint2 5y ago

Wfh really disrupted the days cues that indicate time and serve as reminders and habit triggers. Wfh is great for some people, but I also find it monotonous and reduces daily variety amongst a number of other not great attributes more work related. My ideal is a 2-3 day in the office. Different options work better for different people.

agumonkey 5y ago

I think this is gonna be a good re-evaluation of what work / office is. commuting is horrendous for some, workplace social life can be too but for some it's fine and needed I think it can lead to a rebalancing effect.

foobiekr 5y ago

I went to the office to work the other day for the first time since February 20th, 2020. It was great. So quiet, open, well lit, great and comfortable desk and chair, .. Obviously, I could improve my home office, but in reality my home office is taking space that I otherwise was using before 2/20 and now there's a whole space in my home that is allocated to being a work station instead of what it was before. A few other people came in, and it was great to talk in person in front of a giant whiteboard.

dboreham 5y ago
I can't think of a single job I've had where the lighting, desk and chair were remotely as good as I have at home.
- ketzo 5y ago
  That’s fair, but I think you have to acknowledge that the total opposite will be true for many, probably most, people. There’s a reason that “stop working at the kitchen counter” is, like, its own cottage industry of online writing. People mostly have really bad wfh setups, even people in tech.
  - mikro2nd 5y ago
    Not sure... It seems likely to me that people who've been forced to work from home during the Covid pandemic tend to have crap office-space because it's only temporary. In contrast, people who have made a conscious decision/choice to work from home (as I've done for over 25 years, now) proceed by setting up a proper work space. (Along with developing good work-hygiene like keeping office hours sharply separate from personal time, keeping work in the office and not letting it spill over into the lounge, kitchen, etc.) Main point: there's a marked (mental, emotional) difference between "this is a temporary emergency" and "this is the way I work (forever)".
- faangthrowawa 5y ago
  I used to flat share in London with some other people in tech. Pandemic WFH setup was the taking turns on the one couch (and floor) for a long time.

pimterry 5y ago

Coworking is a really great solution to this. You can have all the human contact and "it's 6pm - want to go for a beer?" easy socializing that you get from being in a busy office, but simultaneously keep almost all the flexibility and the lack-of-constraints of working from home (...almost - there's usually an expectation that you wear clothes). In many ways it's even better than office social contact: it decouples that socializing from your job. Want to change company, but keep hanging out with the same people every day? Want to switch offices and meet a whole new social circle without changing jobs? Want to go out from the office for a drink after work with your 'colleagues' with no need to avoid personal topics or keep things professional with your boss? It does require leaving the house, but for almost everybody there is a coworking space that's significantly quicker to get to you than your current office would be. If you're in a major urban center, you probably have 10s or 100s to choose from. For me, it's a dramatic improvement on both the alternatives.

benhurmarcel 5y ago
It’s way too expensive for most people though.
mmmpop 5y ago
Agreed 100%. My job is 1000 miles away but I have a cohort of folks at the coworking space that keep me sane. This is probably more like the "future of work" especially in my small mountain town.
stef25 5y ago
> Coworking It's not cheap but I do love it. Nicest offices I've ever worked in, never obliged to talk to anyone.
stevage 5y ago
I have tried this but struggled to find people in coworking spaces that I wanted to socialise with. The one time it has worked was when friends who worked in the same niche sector would sometimes all cowork at a cafe for a day. Maybe once a month. That was incredible. We were expected to be in our offices most of the time though.

onion2k 5y ago

... has pre-existing families/friends to socialize with. It's easy to believe the people you work with are friends to socialize with, but the reality is that most people cut ties with their coworkers as soon as they change job, especially early in your career when you're hopping from one job to another every few years. Those people are temporary friends at best. I recommend doing everything you can to cultivate friendships outside of work.

smoe 5y ago
I'm in regular contact with people from almost every job I had in the last 15 years. Turns out, coworkers are humans and can have the same outside work interest as me. Be that music, board games, cooking, reading, hiking, etc. Sure, most people from previous work I don't have any contact with. Same is true for most people I met outside work. Friends can come from everywhere, I don't see a reason to pre-filter.
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gwright 5y ago
> but the reality is that most people cut ties with their coworkers I dislike this type of comment as it presumes that one person's personal experience is "reality" or a reasonable representation of what everyone else has experienced. It assumes that something as complicated as personal relationships can be can be distilled down into some sort of "average" or "normal" protocol and that if your experience doesn't align, then you are an outlier, not-average, not-normal. I don't think the concept of "average" or "normal" is particularly useful for something as multi-dimensional as establishing personal relationships. Some of my longest and best friends are people I met in my first job after college.
- nuerow 5y ago
  > I dislike this type of comment as it presumes that one person's personal experience is "reality" or a reasonable representation of what everyone else has experienced. GP is spot on, though, and there is absolutely no way around it. Relationships with most coworkers is motivated and defined by work circumstances. The only reason you found yourselves sharing a space and a schedule and experiences is the fact that someone pays you to be there, but otherwise you would be doing something else somewhere else with someone else. More importantly, if any of you switches jobs, your time and focus and sometimes even city or country will change. Even though professional relationships can flourish into personal relationships, the vast majority and the norm is that the only reason you're even aware you exist is that you want that paycheck and consequently you have to deal with each other.

nobodyandproud 5y ago

I’m an introvert with a family and I still miss the office. No, it’s not about getting away from the family. I never want to fall into a 5 times a week schedule again, but I miss the background discussions; commute; and energy that is involved in getting ready for work.

odiroot 5y ago

> remote work for the first year or so of the pandemic, come out and say that life has really gotten a lot more repetitive and frankly disappointing since covid I'm not surprised, because not only offices "died", but everything else did too. Many people used to work remotely before that. But we always could jump out for a lunch with our friends in a restaurant. Or take a break and go to the gym. Or meet in board games cafe after work, go to the cinema, a swimming pool or wine tasting. Now, corona made it all go away. It was never about the office itself but the whole life as we knew it.

crandycodes 5y ago

For me, I never really made friends in the office, but I did make friends from the office and my profession from outside of the office activities. Conferences, education, meetups, big morale events. These things have stopped, for me, since the pandemic, so I've not made any new friends this way. I'm full-time remote now, and moved away from the west coast, but I expect I'll still do conferences and the big morale events. I've not explored the meetup scene here, but I am hoping to also make some friends doing non-tech activities finally, since my new area is less tech focused.

cwp 5y ago

As others have noted, we're in a pandemic, so everything is off. Even in places that don't have lockdowns or mandates, people are going to be cautious about socializing. I'm convinced, though, that when the pandemic fades away, we'll see a bifurcation of working styles. The office offers in-person relationships, high-bandwidth communication, and a well-understood management paradigm, at the cost of forcing everybody to live near the office and spend a lot of time commuting. Full-remote offers the ability to live anywhere and no commutes, but shallower relationships and not-very-well understood modes of communication and collaboration. Hybrid offers... not much, as far as I can tell. It's the downsides of in-office and remote. The best you can say about it is that you get to see people in person sometimes and can avoid commuting sometimes. :-/ So we'll see a grand sorting where people that want to be remote find the companies that will let them do that, and the people that want things to go back to normal find the companies that also want that. Then the remote companies spend the next 50 years learning how to really do distributed work, rather than just "like an office, but on Slack and Zoom".

Gibbon1 5y ago

I actually like working in my office. However. My commute to the office is 10 minutes. We have actual offices with doors. So the whole experience is civilized and low stress. My theory is what wrong with offices today has everything to do with managers need to exert power and feel in control. And things being run for the convenience of upper managers. They all live close to work, have offices with doors. None of this actually considers the companies bottom line. Seriously you pay an code monkey a shitload of money then have him work under the worst work environment short of running heavy machinery next to them.

Aaargh20318 5y ago

> life has really gotten a lot more repetitive (…) since covid and the death of the office. I agree, and it’s awesome.

SergeAx 5y ago

Funny that I am a strong pro-office, but I think that maybe you miss people per se, and not particular coworkers. Also lack of environment variety, combined with inability to travel.

kemiller 5y ago

I think everyone agrees that being in the office, all things being equal, is better for collaborative work. It's just all the not-equal externalities (especially commuting and high real estate prices near good jobs) that make it suck.

jamesfinlayson 5y ago
Yeah I've been working from home for a couple of weeks after being back at work three days a week for a long while now - I've found myself missing the office and getting frustrated with phone calls or chats being poor substitutes for face to face conversations. Working from home part of the week is nice but doing it all week becomes a drag.

xwdv 5y ago

Great, so not only does work provide you with money and healthcare, it also has to provide a social circle? Pretty soon will we look toward companies to provide us with a suitable life partner too? And housing? The point of remote work is to make your work hours very efficient so you have more time away from work to live your actual life.

lamontcg 5y ago

Sounds like the problem is that our social involvement outside of work is totally broken and we make our lives revolve around our work, and think that's entirely normal.

cbtacy 5y ago
mic drop
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nine_zeros 5y ago
This is the truth. We are asking our work life to substitute for our lack of family of social life. Younger generations are losing their social skills faster than they realize.

void_mint 5y ago

> I’m gonna go against the HN grain here and, despite having been fully for remote work for the first year or so of the pandemic, come out and say that life has really gotten a lot more repetitive and frankly disappointing since covid and the death of the office. I kind of miss meeting people in the office. I'm sorry you're having a tough time with it. That sounds really unpleasant. > My company is hybrid at the moment and I’m actually writing this from the very empty office. Things just aren’t the same. Ignoring the pandemic, it sounds like the people at your company just don't agree that in-person work is necessary for them to get what they need out of their employment. The issue is either side attempting to force its preferred working conditions on the other. aka the solution isn't to make all of those people that don't want to be in an office come in again, but instead for you to find companies/circles that have people with similar interests as you. Being around people that don't want to be around you is unpleasant for both sides.

cbtacy 5y ago

It's clearly very hard for folks who have come to rely upon their workplace as their venue for social interaction, and their co-worker pool as their source for social relationships. But to be clear, once upon a time (back in the long long ago), it was seen as unhealthy to mix your work relationships and your personal friendships. So it's possible for all of us to learn how to develop relationships and friendships that don't rely upon the forced proximity of an office. Things like shared activities, social organizations, etc are a good starting point.

knappe 5y ago

This is not a failure of remote work. :) When you work remotely you have to be very deliberate with socialization as well, since you don't get that for free when you're not in the office. I've been remote for 10+ years and I can assure you that this side of things is harder and you have to take deliberate steps to build socialization into your schedule. I do this with tech meetups, board games and cycling specifically using Meetup to attend events.

lkrubner 5y ago

I've said this before on Hacker News, and now I wish to repeat, if you live in New York City, I host a once-a-month party, mostly for tech people. Very informal. You can get the vibe from the photos here: http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/everyone-was-amazing-and-youre-awesome http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/everyone-was-amazing-... It's simply meant to give people a chance to meet other like minded people. Especially in this era of working-from-home it is too easy to end up feeling isolated, so hosting a regular party like this is, I think, a non-stressful way for people to connect. I mentioned this 78 days ago and 6 people from Hacker News have been attending the most recent 3 parties: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27952414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27952414 You can text me at 434 825 7694

coded 5y ago
This is great on so many levels. That’s a great model that would work well in almost any town. I’d definitely go if I was in New York. Well done!
d3nj4l 5y ago
Just out of concern for your mobile, you should put a challenge for your phone number at least. There's a ton of scrapers out there that pick up phone numbers and automatically add you to spam call lists and the like. As for the invitation, unfortunately not in New York (or the States), but if I'm ever around I'd probably love to join.
- lkrubner 5y ago
  My cell phone number hasn't changed since March of 2001 and I've had it listed on my personal weblog since April of 2001. I also list it in my Twitter bio: https://twitter.com/krubner https://twitter.com/krubner In 20 years I've never had a problem. If you ever visit NYC, please reach out.
vecinu 5y ago
Very cool, would have loved for this to happen around LA/San Diego. Thanks for setting this up!
5y ago

soylentnewsorg 5y ago

Here's the thing though: you should not socialize with anyone at the office. The healthiest thing anyone can do for their career is to not mix work and friends. Once you're friends, you're sharing political opinions, life stories, and religious views. People pick up on that, and while you might be pleasing one guy, you're pissing off someone else. No matter your stance on something, you're going to be pissing off someone. Work is for work - not a social life. Yes, it's easy to make friends at work because like in middle school, you're forced together and don't need to break the ice. Very tempting - very bad for the career. What is good for both the career and getting friends is maintaining contact with compatible people from the office once you're out of there, and becoming friends with those people. That works. Now, as far as missing simple human contact while you're at the office - I fully understand that. The problem is, you're forced into that human contact. That's probably healthy, but here's what I do: take a trip for groceries every other day and buy things fresh. Walk around, look for deals, take a full hour. Believe it or not, that alone is enough, as long as you keep doing it. The best part of being remote is you can do that smack in the middle of the day, take a little break from work and break that day up into two smaller parts - not when you're tired after a workday. I do live with my wife though, so maybe don't need as much human contact. But using work for socializing in the office - ugh.

jokethrowaway 5y ago
I think this made more sense in the past when people were holding onto a job for 15 years or maybe jobs in which you won't be able to find an alternative. Nowadays, jobs in tech rarely last more than 4 years and the worst that can happen is that you get a salary increase and change job. I wouldn't skip on work socialisation just out of fear. It's a nice perk to have.
- soylentnewsorg 5y ago
  lol "worst that can happen from socializing with coworkers is you'll have to get a different job" right. the worst that can happen if I take a nice fat dump into my dinner plate is I'll have to get a new dinner plate. it's not fear. it's being at work to do work and get paid being the number one reason to even bother working. and if you're not there to work, why not be at a rock concert instead. with some friends.

jader201 5y ago

Be sure you don’t mix work from home and COVID. I see many people try and combine these, saying that the current state sucks, therefore WFH sucks. I’m not saying WFH wouldn’t otherwise suck for you/others, but it’s really hard to separate these two to figure out how different WFH would be without COVID, unless in your particular area, they’ve gone back to business as usual (which I don’t think anywhere truly has, yet). But in a world where more companies are WFH, and COVID has much less of an impact on everyday life, I think WFH will look a lot different. Again, my point isn’t that WFH is the greatest thing for everyone and every company, just saying that people that are just now WFH due to COVID should wait until COVID is mostly uneventful before declaring WFH a failure.

felipellrocha 5y ago

The groundhog effect. I tried working remotely almost a decade ago and realized I hated it because of that. As soon as covid started I knew I was going to hate it. Not sure everyone else is feeling the same, and it scares me.

Sophistifunk 5y ago

The answer isn't to force people to come into the fishbowl to be watched, the answer is to judge employees by output and for us to build alternative places to socialise.

andrei_says_ 5y ago

To me this is more about work eating life and less about office vs wfh. I just visited Europe this fall and people hang out together practically all the time. Every evening. Families with kids get together and effortlessly spend time while the kids entertain each other. This is the norm. The sense that I don't get enough socialization via work is a serious symptom that I need to nurture real friendships and communities in life.

nuerow 5y ago
> The sense that I don't get enough socialization via work is a serious symptom that I need to nurture real friendships and communities in life. This is precisely the take I get from all the comments on how WFH supposedly causes social isolation. WFH causes nothing of the sort: people simply seem to be socially isolated by default but relied on work and office life to fill in their personal socialization void. I've noticed the same thing regarding health and sedentarism: if you rely on your commute to the office to do any form of physical exercise then you already have a major problem, and what your blaming WFH for is just a problem that was already there to begin with. People have personal needs, and it's simply not healthy to fool ourselves into believing that office life is the solution to meeting each and all of those personal needs.

29athrowaway 5y ago

Your office friends will forget you from the very moment either of you switch jobs.

Dumblydorr 5y ago

You moved to NYC right before the lockdowns, before the huge initial outbreak, it's safe to say that living in a tiny NYC apartment is supposed to have compensation in the lifestyle of NYC. I'd be depressed if my location's main attraction got destroyed by the pandemic.

wisty 5y ago

People seem to be completely ignorant of the theory of the firm - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm It's a bit of a straw man I'm making, but a lot of people seem to say "I do fantastic work, my company doesn't need to control me, just recognise the fantastic work I do! Let me just work from home and keep up my fantastic work!" It's already well discussed in the "theory of the firm" in economics. Why do firms hire employees, rather than just contractors? Why do workers not want to all be freelancers? A lot of the arguments about "presenteeism" seem to veer into acting like their company wants to essentially have all the overhead of managing freelancers, and to have employees jump through all the hoops freelancing involves, which is obviously not what (most) people want in the first place.

qwerty456127 5y ago

Going to the office is a broken way of making friends. There should be better places for this.

basisword 5y ago

You've been remote during a global pandemic. That is not normal remote working. Nobody has enjoyed it or found it easy. It sounds like it came at a bad time for you too after moving - that must have been difficult. I find almost all arguments against remote working seem to based on bad experiences in the last year that are potentially conflating remote work with the pandemic. Sure, some people may truly hate remote work. However, I have quite a few friends who despised it and now that we're back to normal (in the UK) have actually decided they don't want to go back to the office. The commute time + cost of commute is just not worth it. It's equivalent to a sudden pay cut to have to commute again and a pretty significant one at that. Getting your regular social life back makes a huge difference to quality of life when remote working. For most places this hasn't happened yet. As another anecdotal example there were a loud minority crying out for us to get back to the office at my company. They wanted to be allowed in before all the equipment was back they were so desperate. One person is back full time. About 2-5 others come in once a week on the day the company has started buying lunch. I think a lot of people did want to come back but as the office opened up with the rest of society they've found they don't actually need it for a social life. I bet that in 12 months the company moves to buying a hot desk in a co-working space for the 1-5 people who want to come in and I would bet that within 24 months there's a greater than 50% chance nobody is coming in anymore because the social life they wanted through the office is gone.

wsc981 5y ago

Life is what you make of it. Also, I guess working remotely doesn't fit everyone's personality. But I've been working remotely 4 years now and there's no way I will ever be going back into the office. As a matter of fact, I plan to buy a condo near the beach maybe end of this year or start of next year. This condo will eventually be my office, but now it will just be for holidays. It will have a nice olympic size swimming pool and a nice assortment of restaurants next to a beach road. The beach road will be nice to walk daily one or two times (at night seeing the sun go down into the sea). The swimming pool will be nice for a little break and exercise in the afternoon. For me this setup will be perfect. My current setup is not perfect since I work from home and still have distractions from my girlfriend (e.g. cleaning the room, calling out for food and small shopping chores, etc...). I thrive when I am in a space with zero distractions and I hope to have this space in the future in the form of my very own condo office :)